Osama’s Compound in Abbottabad

The Floor That Didn’t Exist

The compound was a perfect place for a discreet yet comfortable retirement.

It was to the placid environs of Abbottabad that bin Laden, half a decade after his great victory on 9/11, decided to escape. By the spring of 2011, the terrorist mastermind was in his sixth year of hiding out in the city’s Bilal Town neighborhood (see the timeline of bin Laden’s post-Sept. 11 movements below). With its porticoed white villas interspersed with small shops selling fruits and vegetables, it is certainly a pleasant place to live. Sometime in 2005, bin Laden’s compound began rising from what had once been open fields. During construction, a third floor was added to the main building. No planning permission was sought for this addition (see the original compound blueprints), a common enough dodge in a part of the world where paying property taxes is regarded as a sucker’s game.

But there was a more compelling reason to keep this alteration as secret as possible: the unauthorized floor was for the exclusive use of bin Laden and Amal, the spirited Yemeni who was his newest and youngest wife (one of three living at the compound, along with a dozen of his children and grandchildren). The third floor was a little different from the others. It had windows on only one of its four sides, and they were opaque. Four of the five windows were just slits well above eye level. A small terrace leading off the floor was shielded from prying eyes by a 7-ft.-high wall designed to conceal even someone as tall as the 6-ft. 4-in. bin Laden. Habitually dressed in light-colored flowing robes, a dark vest and a prayer cap, bin Laden rarely left the second and third floors of the house during the more than five years he lived there. When he did, it was only to take a brief walk in the compound’s kitchen garden. A makeshift tarpaulin over a section of the garden was designed to keep even those walks a secret from the all-seeing U.S. satellites that traversed the skies overhead.

Inside its walls the compound was bare of paint, and in keeping with bin Laden’s orthodox beliefs, there were no pictures. It had no air-conditioning and only a few rudimentary gas heaters–in an area where summers can top 100F and winters mean snow. As a result, the electricity and gas bills were relatively minuscule, averaging $50 a month. Beds for the various family members were made from simple planks of plywood. It was as if the compound’s inhabitants were living at a makeshift but long-term campsite.

In his top-floor sanctuary, bin Laden whiled away the days with his wife Amal. The bedroom ceiling was low for a man as tall as bin Laden. A tiny bathroom off to the side had green tile on the walls but not on the floor, a rudimentary toilet that was no more than a hole in the ground, over which they had to squat, and a cheap plastic shower. In this bathroom, bin Laden regularly applied Just for Men dye to his hair and beard to try to maintain a youthful appearance now that he was midway through his sixth decade. Next to the bedroom was a kitchen the size of a large closet. Across the hall was bin Laden’s study, where he kept his books on crude wooden shelves and spent much of his time tapping away on his computer, composing lengthy missives that would be delivered by courier to key lieutenants.

ISI’s Secret Pakistan: BBC2 Documentary

ISI provides weapons and training to the Taliban fighting US and British troops in Afghanistan, despite official denials, a BBC documentary quotes some people it claims to be Taliban commanders as alleging.

A number of middle-ranking Taliban commanders, it said, revealed the extent of Pakistani support in interviews for the BBC Two documentary series, `Secret Pakistan` A former head of Afghan intelligence also told the programme that Afghanistan gave former president Gen Musharraf information in 2006 that Osama bin Laden was hiding in northern Pakistan close to where the Al Qaeda leader was eventually killed by US forces in May.

The BBC said Pakistan strongly denied the allegations.

One Taliban commander, Mullah Qaseem, told the BBC the important things for a fighter were supplies and a hiding place.
`Pakistan plays a significant role. First they support us by providing a place to hide which is really important.

`Secondly they provide us with weapons,` he said, according to excerpts provided by the BBC.

Other Taliban commanders described how they and their fighters were and are trained in a network of camps on Pakistani soil.
The BBC`s claim that they were Taliban fighters could not be independently verified.

According to a commander using the name Mullah Azizullah, the experts running the training are either members of the ISI or have close links to it.

`They are all the ISPs men. They are the ones who run the training. First they train us about bombs; then they give us practical guidance,` he said.

Talent spotting Another Taliban fighter, known as Commander Najib, said Al Qaeda trainers also operated in the camps, talent spotting possible suicide bombers.

`I was in the camp for a month … They were giving us practical training in whatever weapons we specialised in …Suicide bombers were taken to a different section and were kept apart from us.
Those who were taught to be suicide bombers were there, he said.
Amrullah Saleh, who headed Afghan intelligence from 2004 to 2010, said Syed Akbar, a Pakistani believed to be smuggling guns to the Taliban, told Afghan agents he had escorted Bin Laden from one location to another.

`The information we had was suggesting Mansehra was the town where Bin Laden was hiding … It happens after so many years that Bin Laden was (found) about 12 miles from that location, he said.
Mr Saleh and Afghan President Hamid Karzai took the evidence to Gen Musharraf who, according to Mr Saleh, reacted angrily.
`He (Musharraf) banged the table and looked at President Karzai and said, `Am I president of a banana republic? If not, then how can you tell me Bin Laden is hiding in a settled area of Pakistan. I said `Well, this is the information so you can go and check it`,` said Mr Saleh, who quit last year after differences with Mr Karzai over plans to talk to the Taliban.
The BBC said Pakistan strongly denied the allegations made in the programme.

Reuters

ISI Arrests Doctor Working for the CIA Who Took Osama’s Childrens’ DNA

The CIA organised a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad where it believed Osama Bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family.

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Osama in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the ISI for co-operating with American intelligence agents.

Relations betweenWashingtonandIslamabad, already severely strained by the Osama operation, have deteriorated considerably since then. The doctor’s arrest has exacerbated these tensions. TheUSis understood to be concerned for the doctor’s safety, and is thought to have intervened on his behalf.

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Osama’s Abbottabad compound last summer in 2010. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Osama was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

DNA from any of the Osama children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.

So agents approached Afridi, the health official in charge of Khyber, part of the tribal area that runs along the Afghan border.

The doctor went to Abbottabad in March 2011, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B. Bypassing the management of the Abbottabad health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers, who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Osama. Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Osama compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children.

Afridi had posters for the vaccination program put up around Abbottabad, featuring a vaccine made by Amson, a medicine manufacturer based on the outskirts ofIslamabad.

In March health workers administered the vaccine in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Abbottabad called Nawa Sher. The hepatitis B vaccine is usually given in three doses, the second a month after the first. But in April, instead of administering the second dose in Nawa Sher, the doctor returned to Abbottabad and moved the nurses on toBilalTown, the suburb where Osama lived.

It is not known exactly how the doctor hoped to get DNA from the vaccinations, although nurses could have been trained to withdraw some blood in the needle after administrating the drug.

“The whole thing was totally irregular,” said one Pakistani official. “BilalTownis a well-to-do area. Why would you choose that place to give free vaccines? And what is the official surgeon of Khyber doing working in Abbottabad?”

A nurse known as Bakhto, whose full name is Mukhtar Bibi, managed to gain entry to the Osama compound to administer the vaccines. According to several sources, the doctor, who waited outside, told her to take in a handbag that was fitted with an electronic device. It is not clear what the device was, or whether she left it behind. It is also not known whether the CIA managed to obtain any Osama DNA, although one source suggested the operation did not succeed.

Mukhtar Bibi, who was unaware of the real purpose of the vaccination campaign, would not comment on the programme.

Pakistani intelligence became aware of the doctor’s activities during the investigation into the USraid in which Osama was killed on the top floor of the Abbottabad house. Islamabadrefused to comment officially on Afridi’s arrest, but one senior official said: “Wouldn’t any country detain people for working for a foreign spy service?“

The doctor is one of several people suspected of helping the CIA to have been arrested by the ISI, but he is thought to be the only one still in custody.

Pakistan is furious over being kept in the dark about the raid, and theUS is angry that the Pakistani investigation appears more focused on finding out how the CIA was able to track down the al-Qaida leader than on how Osama was able to live in Abbottabad for five years.

The CIA refused to comment on the vaccination plot.

Harkatul Mujahedeen was Supporting Osama in Abbottabad

The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men inPakistan in May 2011, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset ofPakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say.

The discovery indicates that Osama used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Osama on behalf ofPakistan’s spy agency, given that it had mentored Harakat and allowed it to operate inPakistan for at least 20 years.

In tracing the calls on the cellphone, American analysts have determined that Harakat commanders had called Pakistani intelligence officials, the senior American officials said. One said they had met. The officials added that the contacts were not necessarily about Osama and his protection and that there was no “smoking gun” showing thatPakistan’s spy agency had protected Osama.

But the cellphone numbers provide one of the most intriguing leads yet in the hunt for the answer to an urgent and vexing question for Washington: How was it that Osama was able to live comfortably for years in Abbottabad, a town dominated by the Pakistani military and only a three-hour drive from Islamabad, the capital?

“It’s a serious lead,” said one American official. “It’s an avenue we’re investigating.”

The revelation also provides a potentially critical piece of the puzzle about Osama’s secret odyssey after he slipped away from American forces in the Tora Bora region ofAfghanistannearly 10 years ago. It may help answer how and why Osama or his protectors chose Abbottabad.

Harakat has especially deep roots in the area around Abbottabad, and the network provided by the group would have enhanced Osama’s ability to live and function in Pakistan. Its leaders have strong ties with both Al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence, and they can roam widely because they are Pakistanis, something the foreigners who make up Al Qaeda’s ranks cannot do.

Even today, the group’s leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, long one of Osama’s closest Pakistani associates, lives unbothered by Pakistani authorities on the outskirts ofIslamabad.

The senior American officials did not name the commanders whose numbers were in the courier’s cellphone but said that the militants were inSouth Waziristan, where Al Qaeda and other groups had been based for years. Harakat’s network would have allowed Osama to pass on instructions to Qaeda members there and in other parts ofPakistan’s tribal areas, to deliver messages and money or even to take care of personnel matters.

Wielding a Militant Tool

Harakat is one of a host of militant groups set up in the 1980s and early ’90s with the approval and assistance of ISI to fight as proxies inAfghanistan, initially against the Soviets, or againstIndiain the disputedterritoryofKashmir. Like many groups, it has splintered and renamed itself over the years, and because of their overlapping nature, other groups could have been involved in supporting Osama, too. But Harakat, they said, has been a favored tool of the ISI.

Harakat “is one of the oldest and closest allies of Al Qaeda, and they are very, very close to the ISI,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and the author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.”

“The question of ISI and Pakistani Army complicity in Osama’s hide-out now hangs like a dark cloud over the entire relationship” between Pakistan and the United States, Mr. Riedel added.

Indeed, suspicions abound that the ISI or parts of it sought to hide Osama, perhaps to keep him as an eventual bargaining chip, or to ensure that billions of dollars in American military aid would flow toPakistanas long as Osama was alive.

Both the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, said that they believed that some members of the ISI or the Pakistani Army, either retired or on active duty, were involved in harboring Osama.

Osama himself had a long history with the ISI, dating to the mujahedeen insurgency that the Americans and Pakistanis supported against the Soviets inAfghanistanin the 1980s.

Two former militant commanders and one senior fighter who have received support from the ISI for years said they were convinced that the ISI played a part in sheltering Osama. Because of their covert existence, they spoke on the condition that their names not be used.

In the spring of 2003, Bin Laden, accompanied by a personal guard unit of Arab and Chechen fighters, arrived unexpectedly at a gathering of 80 to 90 militants at a village in the Shawal mountain range of North Waziristan, inPakistan’s tribal areas, the former commander said. He met Bin Laden briefly inside a house; he said he knew it was him because they had met before, inAfghanistanbefore the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The encounter in North Waziristanoccurred before the American campaign of drone aircraft strikes, which began in 2004, made it unsafe for militants to gather in the area in large numbers. For about three years before the American drone campaign, Bin Laden was moving from place to place inPakistan’s mountainous tribal areas, the commander said.

TheUnited Stateshad small Special Operations units and C.I.A. operatives working with Pakistani security forces to track Qaeda members at that time. At some point Bin Laden went deeper underground. That is when the commander speculated that the Qaeda leader was moved to a safe house in a city, though he did not say he knew that Bin Laden had gone to Abbottabad.

He and the other commander, who spent 10 years with Harakat, offered no proof of their belief that Bin Laden was under Pakistani military protection. But their views were informed by their years of work with the ISI and their knowledge of how the spy agency routinely handled militant leaders it considered assets — placing them under protective custody in cities, often close to military installations.

The treatment amounts to a kind of house arrest, to ensure both the security of the asset and his low profile to avoid embarrassment to his protectors.

Art Keller, a former C.I.A. officer who worked inPakistanin 2006, said he had heard rumors after he leftPakistanin 2007 that Harakat was providing “background” assistance with logistics in moving and maintaining the Qaeda leader inPakistan. That did not necessarily mean that members of the group were aware of the role they played or knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, another American intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work.

It remains unclear how Bin Laden arrived in Abbottabad, where American officials say he and his family lived for five years, beginning in 2006. The city is home to one of the nation’s top military academies, which sits less than a mile from the compound where Bin Laden was killed.

It is also a transit point for militants moving betweenKashmirand the tribal areas. The region is the prime recruitment base of Harakat, whose training camps and other facilities still exist nearby in Mansehra.

Through the late 1990s, Harakat collaborated closely with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, sharing training camps and channeling foreign fighters to Qaeda camps inAfghanistan.

The group’s leader, Mr. Khalil, was a co-signer of Bin Laden’s 1998 edict ordering attacks againstAmerica. The group even organized press trips for journalists to see Bin Laden inAfghanistanbefore 9/11 and was used to pass messages to him, said Asad Munir, a retired brigadier and former intelligence official.

Such were the links between the groups that when theUnited Statesfired cruise missiles at Bin Laden’s camps inAfghanistan, after the 1998 American Embassy bombings inTanzaniaandKenya, 11 Harakat fighters were killed. Some of the group’s fighters were also killed in the bombings of one of Bin Laden’s bases inAfghanistanat the start of the American invasion in October 2001.

Driven Underground

Under strong American pressure, Harakat and similar groups were officially banned and driven underground by the government of Musharraf in 2002. Harakat just renamed itself and continued to run camps unencumbered by Pakistani authorities and to train militants, some of whom have been caught while fighting American and NATO forces inAfghanistan.

After 2007, many of its fighters left to join the Taliban, but its leadership and network have remained intact, if reduced, the commanders said. Indeed, Bin Laden’s courier appears to have used a camp in Mansehra that belonged to a Harakat splinter group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, as a transit stop, said an American government official familiar with the analysis of the Bin Laden material.

The Pakistani Army continued its links with the Harakat leadership, in particular Mr. Khalil, Pakistani officials and analysts said. In 2007, Mr. Khalil was used by the Musharraf government as a member of a group of clerics who tried to negotiate an end to a siege by militants at the Red Mosque inIslamabad.

“They can find him when they want him,” said Muhammad Amir Rana, the director of the Pak Institute of Peace Studies, who has written a book on militant groups.

What role if any Mr. Khalil may have played in helping Bin Laden in Abbottabad, or whether he even knew he was living there, is still not clear. It is also the case that hard-liners within the ranks of his organization may had become disillusioned with their ISI handlers over the years, broke from them and operated more independently.

Another Pakistani militant leader closely connected to Bin Laden is Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami. Mr. Akhtar stopped in South Waziristan on the way toAfghanistanjust months ago, a militant interviewed by phone said.

The presence in Waziristan of Mr. Akhtar — who is wanted in connection with the attack that killed Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, in 2007 — demonstrated that he could still move freely without ISI interference.

A report by the Pakistani Interior Ministry said that Mr. Akhtar had visited Bin Laden in August 2009 near the border withAfghanistanto discuss jihadist operations againstPakistan, according to an account that was published in the Pakistani newspaper The Daily Times in 2010.

It is the only recorded episode showing that Bin Laden’s presence insidePakistanwas known to Pakistani intelligence, until the American raid that killed him.