The Triple Agent

It was even worse than the public knew. In the years since September 11, several U.S. officials suggested in interviews that the CIA knew roughly where Osama bin Laden was hiding. Those claims had been wishful thinking, at best. The last credible report of a bin Laden sighting came in 2002, shortly after the Saudi terrorist fled from his Tora Bora stronghold on the Afghanistan border into Pakistan. Since then there had been nothing: no near misses, no tangible leads, not even a single substantive tip. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a moment of candor, acknowledged in a 2009 television interview that “it has been years” since the bin Laden case had been active.

“We don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is,” Gates said. “If we did, we’d go get him.”

Occasionally, leads emerged that would revive interest in the hunt. One of the most promising involved an al-Qaeda courier reputed to deliver messages between the terrorist group’s operational commanders and bin Laden, who studiously avoided telephones and electronic messages. Nearly all the CIA’s targeters, including Jennifer Matthews and Elizabeth Hanson, had been caught up in the search for the courier in some way. After two years of hard work and lucky breaks, the agency finally deduced the man’s name in 2007; yet two years later, it had no idea where to find him, or whether he was even alive.

The failure to find bin Laden was the fly in the ointment, the big black asterisk that overshadowed what had been the greatest tactical success in the CIA’s history: the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban and the routing of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Even as New York’s twin towers still smoldered, the agency had led an offensive so overwhelming that only a few hundred foot soldiers and a handful of senior leaders managed to slip away, leaving thousands of others dead or in prison camps.

The Taliban’s defeat had been engineered by a small group of CIA officers who had been spoiling for a chance to go after bin Laden since long before he dispatched his teams of hijackers to crash airliners into buildings in New York and Washington. With their input, within hours of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA director George Tenet had a plan on President Bush’s desk that would allow the White House to immediately go on the attack against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, rather than wait for the Pentagon to organize a conventional military campaign. In a meeting with the president on September 13, J. Cofer Black, then the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, described how a force of CIA-led commando teams and friendly Afghan Northern Alliance fighters could defeat the planners of the September 11 attacks in a matter of weeks.

“When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black famously said.

Bush approved, and Operation Jawbreaker was launched. Just three months later, in December 2001, the Taliban government toppled, and the remnants of the Taliban army were being pursued through southern and eastern Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and a rump force of a few hundred loyalists attempted a last stand in the mountain fortress of Tora Bora on the Pakistani border.

Then, as Pentagon officials debated whether to send in American troops to finish the job, the terrorist leader escaped, reportedly after paying bribes to an Afghan warlord. He slipped through the lines of pro-U.S. Afghan fighters and sought refuge in Jalalabad and in villages in the eastern provinces of Kunar and Khost. He stayed briefly as a guest of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan warlord and former comrade from the civil war against the Soviets, before eventually disappearing again in the Pakistani hills.

Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader fled on horseback into Pakistan along a different route. In the coming years, occasional sightings of Ayman al-Zawahiri sparked furious activity and a failed attempt to capture or kill him. Bin Laden appeared only on video, his beard longer and grayer and his usual camouflage fatigues replaced by robes and an Arab-style kaffiyeh. Officially, the search for him continued, but in reality there were no clues or leads to chase.

The CIA’s Alec Station, which had been established initially to search for bin Laden, gradually lost its targeters to other units that were hunting for lesser al-Qaeda figures and Taliban warlords. In 2005 it was shut down for good.

Panetta’s new Predators would not arrive in Afghanistan until nearly the end of the year. In the meantime, the agency would send scores of new officers to the Kabul station, including some of its best targeters. One of them was Elizabeth Hanson.