The Rest Is Classified - 55. Bin Laden vs the CIA: The Hunt for the World's Most Wanted (Ep 5)

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

A decade after 9/11, Osama bin Laden remained at large, a constant "running sore" for the US government. But how did a fleeting glimpse of a tall guy with a beard and the interrogation of a high-value detainee finally set the CIA on the right path? And what was the decision that President Obama had to make, knowing the risks and the history of missed opportunities? In this episode, we detail the relentless pursuit of Osama bin Laden, focusing on the critical intelligence trail that went from a vague alias to a specific car. Discover how the complex US-Pakistani relationship, characterised by mistrust and double game allegations, complicated any direct action. And, learn about the elaborate surveillance of the compound in Abbottabad, perhaps the last place the CIA expected bin Laden to be. Join David and Gordon in this penultimate episode in their investigation into the life and death of Osama bin Laden. ------------------- To sign up to The Declassified Club, go to www.therestisclassified.com or click this ⁠⁠⁠link⁠⁠⁠. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restisclassified It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee  Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to https://incogni.com/restisclassified ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oh son, suffice to say that I am full of grief and sighs. What can I say if we are living in a world of laziness and discontent? What can I say to a world that is blind in both sight and perception? Pardon me, my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains. It is a world of crimes in which children

are slaughtered like cows. For how long will real men be in short supply? Action must somehow be done to ward off harm. I have sworn by God Almighty to fight the infidel. Well welcome to The Rest is Classified, I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was Osama bin Laden writing in verse to one of his sons, sometime around 2002, about life on the run. And that is where we are picking up the story of Osama bin Laden and the CIA this time, with the aftermath of those terrible attacks

on September 11, 2001. The opportunity perhaps to kill or capture Osama bin Laden at last at Tora Bora, missed, and him escaping over the border. And then David, he basically disappears, doesn't he? I mean, it's crazy, but he's just gone. And I mean, there were glimpses of him in various places we might come to, but it's gonna turn into a manhunt, more like a detective novel really, rather like a detective novel, really, rather than a counter-terrorist mission, trying to find a killer who's disappeared and where the case is cold. Listeners for this episode in particular should think about this as paralleling exactly a sort of detective's hunt for a serial killer along a trail that's gone

totally cold, right? Because that is what this becomes. We have gone from the Osama bin Laden of the late 90s declaring war on the United States, the CIA coming up with a variety of sometimes quite audacious plans to try to kidnap him, cruise missile strikes, 9-11, and then all of a sudden he is just after this massive bombardment and battle at Tora Bora, he is just kind of poof, vanished. And we should say also, note that listeners who are wondering how we have obtained such intimate verse from Osama bin Laden should go and check out Peter Bergen's great book, The Osama bin Laden I know, which has a sort of oral history and testimonies of people who knew bin Laden, talking about him, which is why I'm able

to subject Gordon to reading such terrible prose. I think also, Gordon listeners will, of course, be aware that the story now takes us into the world of Zero Dark Thirty, that sort of Oscar winning movie where half of the movie is the raid. But the part we're going to talk about today is almost 10 years of just absolutely painstaking and backbreaking work that went into actually finding where Osama bin Laden was hiding. So let's go to Tora Bora though, in the immediate aftermath where we left off last time. Al-Qaeda is badly damaged as an organization,

as it sort of limps away from this fight in the caves at Tora Bora. Its sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone, its operatives are scattered. There are actually internal Al-Qaeda estimates around this point that suggest maybe 1,600 of its 1,900 gone. Its operatives are scattered. There are actually internal al-Qaeda estimates around this point that suggest maybe 1,600 of its 1,900 or so fighters in Afghanistan were either killed or captured, which is a massive blow to the organization. Some flee to Iran, some

go to the unsettled areas of Pakistan and the tribal areas, some hide in its cities, places like Karachi. But al-Qaeda is alive and it is surviving both as an idea and as this now very clandestine terrorist organization, in part because its leader, Salman Laden, seems to have evaded the US and remains not only its figurehead, I think this was assumed for some time, but a micromanager of al-Qaeda through impersonal means. That's right. So al-Qaeda becomes an idea, doesn't it, at this point? It kind of metasizes and you get franchises and people adhering to the ideology of al-Qaeda

and swearing allegiance to it who have very little contact. But you do still have this core, which remains and a few go into Iran, I think, and actually kind of under a form of house arrest in Iran, but the bulk seem to go into the tribal areas of Pakistan, which is a wild place. I've flown over it and been in it briefly, go to the Pakistani military at various moments, but the Pakistani state itself has very little control over this territory, which borders along Afghanistan and where tribal loyalties are paramount, really, rather than loyalty to the state, where the state in the Pakistani state has very little kind of presence and reach, and where it's frankly very difficult to find anyone.

And so al-Qaeda operatives are, in some cases, they're in the cities and some of them will be found in the cities, but also some, it's thought, are in these tribal areas. And the CIA is now suddenly growing and building up, isn't it, to try and take on this group and to try and track every lead after having missed those opportunities beforehand. It's now massively mushrooming in size. And yet the pickings are pretty slim in terms of finding bin Laden and the al-Qaeda senior leadership.

It is worth a note just to contrast how much the CIA's Tanner Terrorism Center changes in these first few years relative to what it was in the mid 90s, because CTC probably grows by five to 10 times in the first few years after 9-11 from a staffing standpoint. I mean, I had friends who were pulled off other targets, right, who had been targeting Russians their entire career. I had one colleague who had spent basically his entire CIA career in kind of central and Eastern Europe who said, you know, I was a Russian hunter and then boom, next day I'm

hunting a booger eater in the mountains. And so you have a whole bunch of people who just get shoved over to counterterrorism stuff. CDC becomes the place to be for prestige and promotions inside CIA in those years. Again, stark contrast to the 1990s, right? A complete about face. And the CIA starts to get a lot better

at what I would call a targeting mission. So there's now software in this period that helps to map connections between members of a network to show these linkages between phones, between IP addresses. There's actually a new job title created at CIA called Targeter, a role that is going to be essential in this hunt for Osama Bin Laden. And these are kind of analysts who basically vacuum up every shred of available digital dust on somebody like Osama Bin Laden or al Qaeda senior leadership pings on phone towers, bank transactions, like, how do you in this case, find somebody? How

do you find people who don't want to be found? And there are some early successes against al-Qaeda in the kind of first few years after 9-11, linking together cooperation in some cases with the Pakistanis, with these new ways of targeting people. And eventually, I think you have a lot of al-Qaeda leaders who are faced with a trade-off,

which is, do you stay in the cities where you can plan attacks and communicate and eventually probably get captured by the CIA? Or do you go totally off the grid and just disconnect from anything digital that the CIA might use to eventually hunt you down? Yeah. And so Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the kind of mastermind, as he's often described of 9-11, he gets captured, doesn't he, in one of

the cities. And the assumption is that Salman bin Laden is in a cave somewhere. That's what people think. Yeah, that's what everyone assumes that he must be somewhere in a cave in the mountains, completely off the grid, unlike these others. And that's the reason why he's not being found. And you get $25 million reward, the hope is that might lead to something. And there's all these tiny sightings and bits and pieces, but nothing really substantial for years.

Well, and we should note that the cave idea is not something that anyone at the CIA puts any stock in at all, much after Tora Bora. I mean, he's running Al-Qaeda. This will be a theme of this period is that Osama bin Laden, he is a micromanager, okay? And he is involved in plotting, he is involved in running the organization. He's not kind of sitting back and letting others do this. So he's not in a cave, but there also aren't any leads

to really suggest where he might be. And you mentioned the $25 million reward, right, Gordon? So that obviously creates incredible incentive in an intelligence collection environment where fabricators, fantasists, right, anyone's going to want to put information into that system in the deranged hopes that they might get 25 mil out of the deal. Yeah, you're reminding me that I once interviewed someone who pitched up in Pakistan, an American convinced that he was going to find bin Laden and he pitched up with a sword and like a pair of

binoculars. And that's it. And I was like, well, you know, do you know, CIA, US government? He's like, I'm gonna go below the radar. Smart. It was smart. Yeah. With a sword. But you know, it was full of kind of, there was that element of people kind of fantasists,

as you say, and you know, kind of false leads. And I mean, they were called where's Waldo missions, weren't they? Because there'd be a tiny sighting, like tall guy with a beard might be Bin Laden, chase it down. And you'd have like the entire resources of the CIA kind of descend for a moment on chasing

some tall guy with a beard who'd of course turn out not to be bin Laden. Well, and you have to run everything down in this environment too, right? And so the CIA folks who were involved in the hunt, start to call these Elvis sightings, which then lead to Where's Waldo missions. There's a great story on this, which comes out of a city in Pakistan where one of our people there is driving.

They're taking some video from the back of the vehicle and they're not hunting for bin Laden, but they pan over and they actually get some video of a guy in another car who looks like Osama bin Laden and they can't be sure it's not him. And so they write up the cable and send it in. And eventually the deputy chief of station in Islamabad actually ends up, we've got to look into this, right?

Then somebody in DC tells the chief of ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, about this lead. And then the Pakistanis in about a couple of days figure out that this guy is actually a lumber cutter with a business in Afghanistan, right? And the Pakistanis take pictures of him, send it to DC and headquarters is like, okay, well maybe it's a body double, right?

I mean, so then you kind of multiply that by hundreds, if not thousands, right? Where you end up going down this rabbit hole to try to disconfirm that this isn't bin Laden or to confirm that this crazy lead you got from a guy who's parked up in a lawn chair with a sword, that it's actually crazy. I remember it so well, because the idea that this one man could

evade the entire US military and intelligence community for years does start to become a kind of running sore. I mean, it becomes a really awkward question for the US, really kind of difficult, I think, to say this guy has inflicted this terrible attack and you cannot find him. It's a question which will come up again and again to US officials. Why have you not got him? The reality, of course, is if you really know what you're doing, it is possible to hide, particularly in a country like Pakistan.

But the trail does go cold. So it is interesting to try and understand what you do if you're in that situation, if you're the CIA. I mean, how do you find someone who wants to stay hidden? I mean, it's not easy if someone is capable and smart and also is living in a kind of place where they understand the territory and they potentially have sympathetic people around them. It is not easy, but it still feels like it took a long time. It's probably worth setting up a bit the unit that's leading the hunt for Bin Laden. The name, as with any good

bureaucracy, changes constantly. It does sit inside the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. It's full of analysts, targetters, again, similar to the Mike Scheuer, Manson family of the 1990s. There are lots of women involved. It is a bureaucratic effort, but I think the number of people who are really doing the hunting, it's actually not that large, right? Maybe a few dozen that are really focused on Osama bin Laden. It is a tight-knit, very focused group inside the Counterterrorism Center.

And they put together assessments in the first couple of years after September the 11th to really try to help the CIA come up with a way to dismiss those Elvis sightings and build a collection plan to get us closer to finding Osama bin Laden. And there is an understanding, I think, inside the CIA, at least at the working level, the people doing the hunt, that there's not going to be a magic

bullet. There's not going to be a detainee who's going to point to a specific location. The Pakistanis are not going to give us the keys to the kingdom. Osama bin Laden is not speaking on phones. He is not using computers. There is not going to be SIGINT, signals intelligence, that allows us to geolocate him. So it not going to be signals intelligence that allows us to geolocate him. So it is going to be a painstaking and slow process. And one of the things this team does is they study other manhunts. And the learning here I think is really interesting because you look at Adolf Eichmann Nazi fugitive, yeah. Nazi fugitive, captured by the Israelis in Argentina. That was a 15-year hunt. He's eventually betrayed by his son, who's bragging to his girlfriend's dad about

his own dad's Nazi past, right? The CIA's lesson from this, it can take a long time, and family members can sometimes be key. Pablo Escobar. The CIA and the Colombians knew he was in Medellin, but it still took two years. He's given away by talking on the phone for 16 minutes with his son, and then he's geolocated. The Unabomber, the hunt for the Unabomber took 17 years. The Atlanta Olympic Games bomber, Eric Rudolph, it took five years, and he was in the States.

And so I think from these kind of learnings, the CIA figures, look, family and close associates are key. Osama Bin Laden's probably not on the phone and actually he hasn't been. We talked in one of our earlier episodes about him ditching his satellite phone, right? He probably hasn't been talking much on the phone since the late nineties.

And this is gonna take a very long time. So one weakness that comes out of this analysis or one kind of vector into bin Laden is his family, right? And of course, as I have been talking about extensively on this podcast. Now I understand why you always want to talk about his wives and children. Now at last it becomes clear. He's a big family man. Osama bin Laden loves terrorism, the outdoors, and his family. And he's got maybe two wives with him at this point. But the family connections don't really lead anywhere.

Another way in the CIA figures might be his communications with other senior leaders in al-Qaeda. But again, the CIA is watching these really, really closely, so closely in fact that the kind of number three kind of chief operator in al-Qaeda, that position turns over like every six months because the CIA starts killing them. Because they are the people who are actually interfacing with the outside world to carry out plans. So it was always a famous thing that you have bin Laden and Zawahiri is number

two. And the number three was the kind of operational guy who was obviously, because he's the operational guy, contacting terrorists around the world. And for that reason, he gets killed. They're constantly getting killed because they are the ones who are in contact with people. But Bin Laden isn't. I remember another one was the media, wasn't it? Because Bin Laden just occasionally would pop up and do videos.

And I remember having to report on these and they were big news at the time. I mean, they were big news because you would have heard nothing from Bin Laden for a year or two years or something. And then there would be either his voice on a tape or sometimes an actual video of him in which he was seen walking somewhere in the mountains or apparently in a cave and issuing some kind of blood curdling threat. We in the media would analyze them endlessly. We'd get people to analyze them and kind of go, well, can you tell what kind of mountains they are? I'm guessing at the CIA they probably did that 10 times more to try and see if there are any clues from those

appearances. There's anything you can get from them. There are these great stories of the agency calling in, in one case, a German ornithologist. There's a bird that's heard chirping in the background of one of these videos. And so this ornithologist gets called in to determine what species of bird it is and where does that bird live. They call in geologists to analyze rocks that might appear behind him. And it's fair to say that no useful leads came out of any of the video or propaganda analysis in those years. But you think about the videos, right? One thing about them is that if he's recording them, there has to be a way of getting those videos out, right?

And it might go through a daisy chain of individuals passing it off until it gets down to zero or something like that. But they're moving from where he is to an endpoint. And you know, we mentioned that he's a micromanager, right? He's not as involved in the day to day of the organization as that number three, that kind of war and operational chief who's getting killed every few months. But he still wants to run al-Qaeda. He can't let go, can he? Ben Fisk No, no. I mean, he's trying to control the plotting. He's trying to control the organization from afar. And in these years, he's also dealing with these kind of rowdy al-Qaeda affiliates, like the really murderous franchise that pops up after the US invasion of Iraq. He's trying to keep them in line. And if he's doing all of this, he has to have a way to get in touch with people. And since he's not doing the communications himself, and he's not on phones or computers, he must be using a courier. And the courier is going to be the one path that the CIA will walk down that will actually bear fruit. Now, we should note,

looking back on this, it seems maybe obvious or clear that you can have some certainty that this path will lead you to Osama bin Laden, but nobody back then had any clue that this was going to be productive at all. So you should think about the work that these targetters are doing in their cubicles at Langley day in and day out for years as being absolutely tedious, painstaking work. I mean, really it is. It's like a detective looking over the same information, probably over and over again,

trying to put a new light on it or sort of polish something up to kind of give a new perspective on the same stuff over and over again, trying to put a new light on it, or sort of polish something up to kind of give a new perspective on the same stuff over and over again, if they're working on kind of a cold case, right? Yeah. And I do think, though, that this is the point of this story where the hunt for bin Laden really intersects, I mean, this extremely controversial topic of enhanced interrogation or torture. Yeah, because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who we mentioned, the mastermind 9-11, he gets captured, and he is one of those who's subjected to waterboarding, simulated drowning, torture. And one of the questions that's always been raised is how far that contributed or was needed to get some of the intelligence about the couriers.

Because certainly some of the intelligence does come from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the way it was always described to me as a kind of mosaic of different parts, those who are defending the use of waterboarding will always say, well, he was waterboarded, he gave some vital information, therefore, it had to be done and it was vital. Whereas of course the critics will say, A, you shouldn't do it anyway,

and B, got the information anyway, without having to do the waterboarding. So I think we should acknowledge here that it is a very, very controversial subject of which it is hard actually, I think, to get a definitive answer about whether it was needed to happen. But certainly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded,

provided some of the clues. And it wasn't, as you said, you know, it wasn't like he suddenly goes, yeah, here's the name of the courier. It's about placing together different fragments, isn't it? Yeah. And it's probably worth just walking through exactly what happened here. So one of the insights that I think really leads these targeters down the path of trying to find this courier or set of couriers, is they start to think about, okay, Osama Bin Laden has fallen off of the CIA's collection radar

since Toribora. Are there other members of Al-Qaeda, senior trusted associates, who have also fallen off of the radar, right? Just like Bin Laden. And in 2002 or 2003, the CIA interrogates a number of al-Qaeda detainees. One is a guy who actually almost participated in the 9-11 plot, and he tells the CIA,

while he's being interrogated, that KSM, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, had introduced him to a man known as Abu Ahmed, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who had instructed him in secret communications. And this Kuwaiti is described as a courier, trusted courier for bin Laden. Now during those interrogations, the al-Qaeda detainee is often continuously exposed to low temperatures. He's made to stand.

He's given sharp blasts of Christina Aguilera music. Really? Christina Aguilera? Yeah. Soon thereafter, KSM himself is caught in Pakistan. He's water-bordered. He's kept up for days straight. He's shackled at a secret CIA prison in Poland, and he is asked about Abu Ahmed and about the importance

of this Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed says, oh, he's retired and not actually that important. But then Khalid Sheikh Mohammed goes back to his cell, is taken back to his cell, and there are apparently other detainees in there with him. And I guess Khalid-Jay Muhammad did not assume that the entire cell was wired up, or maybe he was just so destroyed from the physical punishment that he had taken. But he begins to tell other detainees, look, don't talk about the courier. And that is a red flag, isn't it?

That's a big ringing bell going, this guy's interesting. Now granted Abu Ahmed is one name among hundreds of names of Al-Qaeda members and associates that we're interested in. So we shouldn't be like this is getting raised up to George Tenet on the seventh floor is some aha moment, right? But at this point, CTC, the people going after bin Laden know that this Abu Ahmed is of interest, right? He had been with bin Laden and he's important enough that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is lying under extreme pressure about the

Kuwaiti. Now in January of 2004, another al-Qaeda courier adds to this mix. He's captured in Northern Iraq carrying a letter from the Iraq franchise to Osama bin Laden himself. This courier is taken to a black site, CIA site in Eastern Europe, where he is also treated quite poorly. And at some point he confesses that Abu Ahmed is Osama bin Laden's courier and a trusted associate.

Now, what is interesting is that similar to bin Laden, this courier has dropped off the map completely. So at this point, by 2004, 2005, the name of this courier is now very interesting to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. There is a belief that this could be a path toward Bin Laden. But to put a bow on the thorny subject of enhanced interrogation slash torture, I think what I would say is this.

I would say that number one, the interrogations in which enhanced interrogation techniques were used were critical to building the map of Al-Qaeda that was used to determine the importance of the courier and ultimately to find bin Laden. These interrogations did give a wealth of valuable information, but it's impossible to know, I think, if they would have provided the same information without the coercion, right? It's like an unanswerable question. So what is factually true is that a lot of the people who provided important clues to help the CIA determine the identity of this courier were also subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques and torture. Which is why I think in the kind of the histories that have been written of this hunt, and in a lot of the memoirs,

you can end up with very different opinions. Yeah, it's a very contentious subject. So we've got this name, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, but just that name doesn't get you there, does it? Because it's an alias, it's not his real name. Do you say alias? Alias, sorry. I was wondering if that was a British name like privacy and privacy. No, I think it was just me.

Okay, I think you'd say either. An alias or an alias, but that's what it is. So they don't know quite who he is. I think there's even some information that he might have died at some point from one detainee in Toribora. They've got potentially, although they don't know it yet, what could be a vital clue, but the question is how they're going to turn that into a functioning lead, which is going to give them the breakthrough. So let's take a break there and after the break, we'll come back and see how they work

that lead into the key intelligence trail to lead them to Bin Laden. This episode is sponsored by NordVPN, which Gordon, frankly, is essential if you'd rather not have your online life monitored like some cold war embassy. Who wants that? Well these days there are eyes and ears everywhere across the internet. Ad companies, data harvesters, parties unknown. NordVPN blocks all of it.

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The CIA is on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The trail had been cold, but they've got this one clue, haven't they, David? The use of couriers and particularly this name, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and the idea he might be important. Well, that's right. And the CIA at this point, I mean, doesn't know much about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, other than he is important, or was important. The CIA knows that he'd been a member of kind of al-Qaeda bin Laden inner circle before 9-11, but he is

vanished from collection since. And to your point, I mean, they don't even know his his true name. So this courier is hugely important. And yet there's just almost nothing on him. And maybe he's dead, he could be gone. So the heat though is on the CIA, I think bureaucratically at this point. I mean, this is an era where the CIA director is getting three or four times a week CT counter-terrorism updates, right?

So targeting Abu Ahmed becomes a critical priority for the team hunting bin Laden. Now, the most important developments in this hunt are also, and maybe unsurprisingly to listeners of The Rest is Classified, the ones that continue to be most shrouded in mystery. But by 2007, the CIA has Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's true name, which I think is gleaned through some really patient targeting work done by that bin Laden unit, maybe also some helpful foreign partners. Yeah, I wonder if a foreign partner might have played a key role in that,

but we don't know who do we. Right. And by 2010, I mean, you think about, I also, I mean, this is years. I'm doing here, right? I mean, like, so we're talking the CIA probably by 2010. I mean, you think about I also I mean, this is years. Yeah, I'm doing here. I mean, like, this is so we're talking the CIA probably by 2005. knows that Abu Ahmed al Qaidi is important, right? Yeah, it's a couple years later, before we have a true name. And then another three years before you

get a phone number for before you get a phone number. And you can imagine how much more important the phone number is than the real name. So you get the phone number. Now Michael Morell, who by 2010 is the deputy director of the CIA, he had been Bush's PDB briefer on 9-11. Morell wrote, it took us several years to learn Abu Ahmed's true name and several more years to find his general location. He offers no specifics. Morel has publicly said that you could write a book about how the CIA found all

this out, but it's not in his book and that book is certainly not written yet. Now there is the fun scene in Zero Dark Thirty, Gordon, where a CIA officer flies out to the Gulf and basically hands over a piece of paper that has a name on it, I believe, and then tells this Kuwaiti or Emirati they're in a Lamborghini dealership. And he basically says, pick out whatever you want. And so there's this great Hollywood twist on how the CIA worked from alias or alias to true name to phone number. But we don't think that's how it happened with the Lamborghini in real life, do we? No, no, no, no. In fact, I'm positive that's not how it happened. Okay.

But what did happen is once we got the true name for the courier, which by the way, it's Ibrahim Said Ahmed, we get the phone number of his family. And his value to Osama bin Laden is immediately apparent because Ibrahim Sayyid Ahmed Abu Ahmed, well, he's a Pakistani from the northwest part of the country whose father had emigrated to Kuwait decades earlier. So he speaks Arabic and Pashto. So you can think about the worlds that Osama bin Laden is straddling. That's really useful. He has sworn bayat loyalty to Osama

bin Laden. And he's got a pre 911 connection to bin Laden. So they go they go way back. And what happens is the CIA and NSA are watching the family phones. And those phones are talking to phones in Pakistan. And you remember we talked about the CIA's analysis on manhunts, love for family, connection to family being a weakness when it comes to manhunts in general. And so even though there isn't anything particularly interesting or operational happening on these calls between family in Kuwait and Pakistan, the phone in Pakistan behaves really strangely.

The phone is mostly off and it gets flipped on in Peshawar or Rawalpindi weeks or months apart. So this phone is being flipped on in settled areas and cities and then will otherwise be off. And right at this point, I mean, you could have the theory that this guy's retired. You know, he's just living somewhere else, kind of off the grid and not involved with al-Qaeda.

And there's a critical phone call which is intercepted and there's an approximation of it which appears in the film Zero Dark Thirty which is close enough and which I'll read here, which the CIA is listening to. And it's our friend Abu Ahmed speaking to one of his friends. And his friend says, we've missed you. Where have you been? And there's kind of this pause and this the friend apparently before this is kind of pushed and pushed and pushed, because he's trying to understand what in the world the Kuwaiti is up to. And Abu Ahmed

says, I'm back with the people I was with before. Now that's telling, isn't it? That's very telling. And there's this kind of tense pause in the conversation, the friend kind of understands what he said. And he says, I think, you know, go with God or something like that, and then hangs up. Because obviously, if you know, he's had a past with al-Qaeda, then that suggests he could be back with them. I mean, that's

not an absolute certainty, but it is very telling, isn't it? And so suddenly, that is a big clue to suggest this is a person and a phone that's worth really studying to try and understand how to get to him. That's right. Because you you start thinking at this point, if you're one of the CIA targetters, okay, I know that I have a very senior guy who had been a courier and a trusted member of bin Laden's inner circle prior to 911, who is also off the grid, like bin Laden, and who is basically said that he is still working with Al Qaeda.

And so he might be the courier for the number two, Zawah, or some other important figure, but you know that this is a intelligence target of real value, right? But you know, this Kuwaiti is practicing really rigorous operational security. He's not bringing the phone with the battery in, the SIM card in, to wherever he's going. It's being turned on in a city where he can sort of blend in briefly for conversations and then it's being turned off. So the CIA needs to figure out where in the world he's going. And so how do you do that in Pakistan? That's the question. And you can't do that remotely. The NSA can't do that by just waiting for the phone to come on and then geolocating it at that moment, it sounds like.

It sounds like it's not as simple as in the movies, where a phone flashes up. Yeah. I mean, I think if he's turning the phone off and taking the battery out- Yeah, you can't track it. You're not tracking that because the phone's not communicating with a tower, it's not communicating with other sensors. There's certainly no direct implant that the CIA or NSA has on that particular phone. And so you're just losing it, I think, when it disappears. And so the very tedious thing that the CIA does is they figure out, okay, well, we're going to send and this is a part of Zero Dark 30, I think, just quite accurate, or these scenes where these geolocational teams are basically out on the

streets, right? In Pakistan. In Pakistan, right? In these places where we know that he's popped up before. Waiting for him to pop up, basically. Waiting for him to pop up. And then hoping what? Hoping you're near enough to be able to locate him. To be able to see the car. To see where he is. Yeah. And so what happens is, eventually, we get lucky. And the scenes in

Zero Dark 30 make this all seem like really exciting. And I'm sure it was just absolutely awful for the people who are out there. But finally in 2010, there's a hit in Peshawar in Pakistan and the CIA is able to get the make and model of the Kuwaiti's white Suzuki Podohar, which is kind of white little SUV with a rhinoceros logo. Now, incidentally, many of the, some of the Latin hunters at the agency will have t-shirts made with that logo after the raid, but then you have a car. So we've gone from alias to true name to phone number to car, right?

And then you're basically running picket line surveillance, because this is the other thing is you have to be so careful, right? Because if you spook him, it's done potentially, right, you've lost the lead. And so there's very careful surveillance done for a period of time in Pakistan after that to track that Suzuki Potahar to a compound. And they follow that car to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And that is a very interesting place for it to be, isn't it? Because Abbottabad is not a cave in the middle of nowhere in the tribal areas. It's a big town.

I mean, it's a few miles from Pakistan's top military academy. It is not the kind of incredibly remote spot that people had expected. I mean, it's a compound in a town. Wasn't the town name for a Brit, Gordon? Yeah, I think that's right. Gen. Was it Abbott? I can't remember. But yeah, that's right. Yeah. Oh, man, I stumped Gordon on some something British history. Yeah, we'll have to get the rest of history guys to have a history of who he was. He's probably some great hero of theirs.

But it is definitely not where you would presume or maybe where the popular picture of Bin Laden hiding. It's not this. It's a 38,000 square foot compound in a badabat. Yeah, but it is interesting, isn't it? Because it is not a normal compound. I think that's the one thing to say. It is a compound, but it's got windows coated with reflective material, so you can't see in kind of high walls, lots of gates. I think some really interesting things like you know, no phone or internet service from local providers, a lot of things which just suggest this is someone who is living there who is a bit different, and who is maybe worried about their privacy or privacy, for anyone who might be interested. The wall on the balcony is particularly weird too, right? Because Abbottabad is actually picturesque in many respects. It's got views of the mountains. And you would think if you're building a big compound, that you would want to take in those views, right, from your balcony in the morning or the evening.

And the third floor balcony, which would be like the primo spot, has a seven foot high wall on it. So you can't even use the balcony to look out. Multiple layers of gates, 12 foot high walls, one section is 18 foot high walls, right? I mean, it is, it's a bizarre place. They burn their garbage, don't they? You know, rather than a fire pit, again, rather than let it be picked up by anyone else. Just all these little interesting things, which suggested something different.

The CIA analysts who are doing this, I mean, to their credit had actually done some work prior to the discovery of this to try to imagine what bin Laden's hiding place would be like. And they weren't that far off. In part because of course, your favorite topic of this series Gordon, the families, you know, bin Laden being a family man, there was this assumption, which proved to be right, that he would have a significant number of people

with him that he wouldn't just be alone. And as the CIA watch this compound, there are a couple of families that never leave. There are two families there that do, right? And where the kids go to school, and they have cars, and they leave, and he drives out in his Suzuki Boudoir. But there are a couple of families that just, you know, the kids don't leave the compound, period. Now, all of this is suspicious, but it's not conclusive, is it? You know, none of it actually is the same as being able to prove that Bin Laden is there. I mean, it could be drug dealer or some

kind of lower level al-Qaeda operative who the courier is doing work for. So, you know, the next challenge is, how do you prove something like that? And that is going to be one of the interesting challenges, isn't it? Because they're trying to come up with ways of working out who is inside a compound who does not want to be found and does not want to come out. And Leon Panetta, who is the head of the CIA at this point in time, he really starts to push the team for creative ideas. And

I overlapped with Panetta when I was there. And I should say he's a very interesting guy. He's a walnut farmer and former congressman, I believe, from California who'd been Clinton's chief of staff, an absolute bureaucratic knife fighter, has come to be quite beloved by the CIA, and who also, by the way, played basketball, intramural basketball at the CIA wearing very high white gym socks. I remember, remember seeing that. So he pushes the team for, you know, let's get creative and see if we can get some insight on what's going on in this compound. So he's in,

can we get into the sewage lines? Can we put telescopes up on the mountains a few kilometers away? Can you put camera on the tree in the compound? Unfortunately, apparently the Kuwaiti chopped the tree down shortly after Panetta suggested that idea. He had an idea about throwing stink bombs into the compound, flush people out. There was one particularly controversial idea though, wasn't there? Oh, you want to talk about the controversial idea?

Yeah, you've got some other ideas first you want to do, but I think there is a, the one, the controversial one is a fake vaccine program where the CIA is going to use a local doctor to go door to door in a bat of air to say that they're doing vaccines for people while actually trying to secretly collect DNA samples from people which they're then hoping they can match to bin Laden's DNA because they've collected that from other of his you know, the midline and family members. I mean, that didn't work.

But it's very controversial, isn't it? Because I mean, the doctor ends up in prison, I think. And it kind of undermines vaccination rates in Pakistan, because everyone thinks the vaccination campaigns are run by the CIA. So I find that one a morally questionable one. I kind of completely get the desire to get intelligence on Bin Laden in any way. But the kind of fallout of that one is a bit tricky, isn't it? And it doesn't work. And it doesn't work. So all of this, and they've still just got a circumstantial case, haven't they? Rather than any actual proof that he's there.

Although, I mean, one of the compelling pieces of circumstantial evidence is that as the CIA watches and watches the compound, they do determine that this other family, the one that doesn't leave the compound, they actually look at the number of articles of clothing in some cases that are drying on the clotheslines out in the yard. They determine it consists of it's three women, a young man, at least nine children and maybe some grandchildren as well. And again, it's not confirmation that Osama bin Laden is there, but the composition of the family is consistent with what was known about Osama bin Laden's immediate family. And so that is a compelling piece of the circumstantial picture.

But there's a bunch of overhead imagery in this period. The satellites can never really get a clear picture of this man who appears to be the head of this family, but there is somebody, this guy who starts taking walks every day, almost like he's in a prison yard around this vegetable garden. He's walking in these kind of tight circles. He's beneath a tarp, right? Which seems to have been set up so satellites can't see him. CIA nicknames him the Pacer. They try to check his height against Bin Laden's, but the best, apparently, the agency could come up with was that he was between five foot five and six eight,

which is a pretty wide range. You get to this point, I think, where you say, are we going to get better Intel, right? Or is this the best that we're going to get? Because you've had kind of Panetta has been hitting the targetters and analysts with the rock to get more ideas. Nothing has really, there hasn't been a breakthrough, right? And you get this kind of famous scene in Zero Dark 30

where everyone's kind of giving confidence assessments in how likely is it that Bin Laden is here and you get these ranges 90% on down to 60% and one analyst who had this personality and the Jessica Chastain character in Zero Dark 30 is based off of her says, you know, a hundred percent. Nothing's a hundred percent. Nothing is a hundred percent. Michael Morrell famously says that the Intel case that Bin Laden is in the house is weaker than the Iraq WMD case.

Which of course was proved wrong. Which was proved wrong, but in that case is that you had intelligence in the affirmative, which was wrong, suggesting that Saddam had WMD, where in this case, there is no actual intelligence to say that Bin Laden is there. But of course, the percentages are a bit bogus, right? Because he's either there or he isn't. And I will say one of my former colleagues has said, look, even if it's not Bin Laden, the presence of the Kuwaiti and the Kuwaiti's admission that he's working with the people he was working with before means that either Bin Laden is there or like a key to him is there, right?

There's an important al-Qaeda member or connection to this compound in Abbottabad. But at some point, you can't get any further. You've got this possibility no more. And I guess you've got to go to the president because ultimately this is a decision for a president to make, isn't it? Based on that level of confidence and the risks involved in carrying out some kind of operation. It goes to Obama and his call really about what he wants to do and what the options are. Obama tells Panetta to come up with ideas, options, to do something against the compound. A process is stood up to basically come up with these ideas and approve them.

The NSC meetings, the National Security Council meetings go on the calendar as Mickey Mouse meetings in the West Wing. Morrell says it's the most tightly held and compartmented process that he had seen in his time in government. And essentially, the options are this. So you could drop a few 2000 pound bombs on the target with a B2 bomber, but you'd have absolutely no guarantees that you get bin Laden, you're in a big city. You're going to kill a lot of people around. Kill a lot of people. The Pentagon thought they would probably need 32 2000 pound bombs to obliterate the compound. And if you obliterate it, you won't even know for sure whether he was there.

Yeah, you probably won't know that he's there, right? You could do a drone strike on the site, or you could do a special ops raid, right? You could actually put people in and go and kill him. And of course, then you have the terrible Pakistani angle, Gordon, which is hung over the series in so many different ways, going back to the 90s. And it rears its head again, when planning for the raid to get bin Laden. Yeah, because US Pakistani relations are, as they say, complex. They've been allies for many years.

You know, they're allies in the 80s in fighting the Soviets and backing the Mujahideen. But there are people in the Pakistani military and intelligence services, it is alleged or suspected who are more sympathetic to the jihadist worldview. That's always been the allegation. Pakistan plays a kind of complicated, what some people call a double game, backing some groups in Afghanistan in relations with the Taliban, also while the US is fighting them. It's the Pakistani kind of strategic policy. It's an insecure country.

It's got a big neighbor, India, as we saw recently, who can nearly go to war with. It's worried about what happens in Afghanistan. So there's both ideology and kind of pragmatism, which means basically the US and Pakistan don't entirely trust each other, do they? At this point, also a CIA contractor has just shot two Pakistanis dead in self-defense. So relations are not so great. And it's fair to say that dropping 32,000-pound bombs on a country which is notionally your ally could sour its towns. It's not good for relations. I think it's not normally the thing that's done, which goes back to the civilian casualties,

collateral damage, how sure are you, what are the consequences, what's going to be the fallout? You don't want to tell them about your suspicions because, as we heard previously, there is a risk that if they sympathise, they'll tip off Bidlart and he's going to be out of there. Which has already happened once in the 90s. You have many of the same people who are making this decision were in government then. right? So there's a great anecdote, which I think shows the depth of the analysis being done on this compound. When this group was discussing this option of, you know, do we use maybe smaller

bombs, a question comes up as to whether there might be a tunnel to help Bin Laden get out. And NGA, the National Geospatial Agency, which does a lot of the overhead imagery, actually did an analysis of the water table around a bottom bed to conclude it was high and said it would be almost impossible to dig a tunnel. So you can imagine how many dozens, about hundreds of these very specific questions came up in this process. And as they look at these options, Gordon, you're right. I mean, there's a kind of a pro and con to each, right? I mean, how likely is it to succeed? Well, you know, it's actually him. What's the risk to the operators? But there's no additional intelligence coming in, right?

And so the Mickey Mouse meeting group at the White House essentially spins on all of this stuff for a bit, right? And there are a number of histories written of this process that get the sense of just, they get stuck, right? There's no new information coming in and they just kind of continue to meet in the spring of 2011. So by early April, the White House is still debating options. Now, operators from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, which is DevGru's Red Squadron, also known as SEAL Team Six,

begin practicing on a full-scale model of the compound out in, I believe, the forest of North Carolina and in the Nevada desert to kind of mimic the heat and altitude of Abbottabad, right? So they actually start to work on a full-scale mock-up of the Abbottabad compound. And there are 24 Gordon Mickey Mouse meetings in total that spring. And as this process goes and goes, and as the rate is planned, no one is sure of course, that it's Osama Bin Laden. But ultimately you've got to make the call, haven't you? I mean, at some point the risk is something will change, something will leak.

So at some point they're going to have to make that call and make a decision. That's right. And the team at the agency concludes that even though it's not for sure, it's the most likely hypothesis is that Samuel Bin Laden is there. And there's a final Mickey Mouse meeting on the 28th of April, 2011 to make the call. And Obama basically goes around the room to see who is in favor of what. Famously, Joe Biden is not in favor. Quite cautious, isn't he, about lots of things. Bob Gates, the defense secretary, says no, but then actually later that day changes his vote to a yes. There's one advisor who is still pushing to use a kind of tactical, precision-guided munition. They don't do that, of course.

Hillary Clinton, secretary of state at the time says yes. John Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser says yes. Pineda says yes. And I mean, it is, you know, it's, it's important. I mean, what would you have done had you been the decider in the spring of 2011? If I'd been President Obama, I mean, look, it's really easy, isn't it, to go, well, of course, it's the right thing to do in brave Brave because you know how it's going to turn out. I mean, the consequences of getting it wrong are significant with an ally like Pakistan to basically launch either a raid or a bombing mission on a close ally which kills people. I mean, in other places, that would be an act of war, but that is going to have pretty significant consequences.

But equally, you know it's been a decade of looking for Bin Laden, a decade since 9-11. And this is the best, the closest you've ever got to a lead on where he might be. And this goes back, I guess, to the whole theme of our series, missed opportunities. People didn't take these kind of opportunities in the late 90s, did they? They were presented with things which possibly had maybe similar odds, some of those kind of crazy missions in the late 90s, and they didn't do it. But now you're in the kind of post-911 world, 911's happened, and you've not seen him for 10 years. And suddenly you feel, even though the odds might be the same, you suddenly feel actually, you may not get another chance if you don't take it. So there I am trying to say I'd be brave and take it. But I don't know.

I'm sure we both like to think we would have approved it. And I just keep coming back to this idea that this is the best lead you've had in a decade. Yeah. And you cannot be sure it will ever get this good again. There's a part of me that can kind of understand why some of the advisors would say no, no, don't, don't take the risk. Um, and in particular, after someone like Michael Morrell, who's kind of, you know, lived all this for the past 15 years says it's a worse case than a rock WMD. I mean, that's kind of the whole process, right? But it is the best swing you're going to get. You know, if you're Obama, you're probably thinking, well, if word gets out that I

didn't take this swing and he was there, that's potentially worse than potentially losing some operators on the raid. And so, as we know, President Obama is going to give the go ahead. And so David, let's stop there and next time we'll come back and look in detail at that amazing operation to go after Osama bin Laden full of kind of risk and danger and tension as the final chapter of this long struggle between the CIA and Osama bin Laden is played out. Well, that's right, Gordon. And if dear listeners, squirrels don't want to wait, you don't have to.

So if you don't wanna wait and you wanna download that last episode right now, get access to a bunch of other wonderful bonus content, join our declassified club at therestisclassified.com and stream it all right now. But until then, we will see you next time. See you next time. See you next time. See you next time.

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