Thursday, 11 August 2016
By Seymour Hersh,
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37193-seymour-hersh-what-really-led-to-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden
The following excerpt from The
Killing of Osama Bin Laden introduces the reader to dramatically different
details than the official narrative disseminated by the White House, Pentagon
and CIA:
It's been four years since a
group of US Navy SEALS assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a
high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of
Obama's first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House
still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the
senior generals of Pakistan's army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI)
were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements
of the Obama administration's account. The White House's story might have been
written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt,
really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest
place to live and command al-Qaida's operations? He was hiding in the open. So
America said.
The most blatant lie was that
Pakistan's two most senior military leaders -- General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,
chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the
ISI -- were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House
position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one
by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of March 19, 2014. Gall, who
spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she'd been
told by a "Pakistani official" that Pasha had known before the raid
that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani
officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama
(2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security
Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he'd spoken to four undercover
intelligence officers who -- reflecting a widely held local view -- asserted
that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue
was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was
head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an Al Jazeera interviewer that it was
"quite possible" that the senior officers of the ISI did not know
where bin Laden had been hiding, "but it was more probable that they did
[know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be
revealed.
"And the right time would
have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo -- if you have someone
like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United
States." This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had
learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been
a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and
Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters
delivering the SEALS to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without
triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden's whereabouts by
tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from
a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in
return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while
Obama did order the raid and the SEAL team did carry it out, many other aspects
of the administration's account were false.
"When your version comes
out -- if you do it -- people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,"
Durrani told me. "For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes
out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative
political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and
what you've told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who
have been on a fact finding mission since this episode." As a former ISI
head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by "people in the
'strategic community' who would know" that there had been an informant who
had alerted the US to bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, and that after his
killing the US's betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed. The major US
source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence official
who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden's presence
in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the SEALS' training for the
raid and to the various after-action reports. Two other US sources, who had
access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the
Special Operations Command. I also received information from inside Pakistan
about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership -- echoed
later by Durrani -- over Obama's decision to go public immediately with news of
bin Laden's death. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
It began with a walk-in. In
August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan
Bank, then the CIA's station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered
to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that
Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be
unreliable, and the response from the agency's headquarters was to fly in a
polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. "So now we've got a lead on
bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it
is?" was the CIA's worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence
official told me.
The US initially kept what it
knew from the Pakistanis. "The fear was that if the existence of the
source was made known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to
another location. So only a very small number of people were read into the
source and his story," the retired official said. "The CIA's first
goal was to check out the quality of the informant's information." The
compound was put under satellite surveillance. The CIA rented a house in
Abbottabad to use as a forward observation base and staffed it with Pakistani
employees and foreign nationals. Later on, the base would serve as a contact
point with the ISI; it attracted little attention because Abbottabad is a
holiday spot full of houses rented on short leases. A psychological profile of
the informant was prepared.
(The informant and his family
were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a
consultant for the CIA.)
"By October the military
and intelligence community were discussing the possible military options. Do we
drop a bunker buster on the compound or take him out with a drone strike?
Perhaps send someone to kill him, single assassin style? But then we'd have no
proof of who he was," the retired official said. "We could see some
guy is walking around at night, but we have no intercepts because there's no
commo coming from the compound."
In October, Obama was briefed
on the intelligence. His response was cautious, the retired official said.
"It just made no sense that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was
just too crazy. The president's position was emphatic: 'Don't talk to me about
this any more unless you have proof that it really is bin Laden.' " The
immediate goal of the CIA leadership and the Joint Special Operations Command
was to get Obama's support. They believed they would get this if they got DNA
evidence and if they could assure him that a night assault of the compound
would carry no risk. The only way to accomplish both things, the retired
official said, "was to get the Pakistanis on board."
During the late autumn of 2010,
the US continued to keep quiet about the walk-in, and Kayani and Pasha
continued to insist to their American counterparts that they had no information
about bin Laden's whereabouts. "The next step was to figure out how to
ease Kayani and Pasha into it -- to tell them that we've got intelligence
showing that there is a high-value target in the ncompound, and to ask them
what they know about the target," the retired official said. "The
compound was not an armed enclave -- no machine guns around, because it was
under ISI control." The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived
undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu
Kush mountains, and that "the ISI got to him by paying some of the local
tribal people to betray him." (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere
in Pakistan during this period.) Bank was also told by the walk-in that bin
Laden was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI
had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move
nearby to provide treatment. "The truth is that bin Laden was an invalid,
but we cannot say that," the retired official said. " 'You mean you
guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?'
"It didn't take long to
get the cooperation we needed, because the Pakistanis wanted to ensure the
continued release of American military aid, a good percentage of which was
anti-terrorism funding that finances personal security, such as bullet-proof
limousines and security guards and housing for the ISI leadership," the
retired official said. He added that there were also under-the-table personal
"incentives" that were financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency
funds. "The intelligence community knew what the Pakistanis needed to
agree -- there was the carrot. And they chose the carrot. It was a win-win. We
also did a little blackmail. We told them we would leak the fact that you've
got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies" -- the
Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan -- "would not like
it."
A worrying factor at this
early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had
been financing bin Laden's upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis.
"The Saudis didn't want bin Laden's presence revealed to us because he was
a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The
Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden
start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And
they were dropping money -- lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned
that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The
fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would
break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden's imprisonment from a walk-in
was not the worst thing."
Despite their constant public
feuding, American and Pakistani military and intelligence services have worked
together closely for decades on counterterrorism in South Asia. Both services
often find it useful to engage in public feuds "to cover their
asses," as the retired official put it, but they continually share
intelligence used for drone attacks and cooperate on covert operations. At the
same time, it's understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that
maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is
essential to national security. The ISI's strategic aim is to balance Indian
influence in Kabul; the Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of
jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation
over Kashmir.
Adding to the tension was the
Pakistani nuclear arsenal, often depicted in the Western press as an
"Islamic bomb" that might be transferred by Pakistan to an embattled
nation in the Middle East in the event of a crisis with Israel. The US looked
the other way when Pakistan began building its weapons system in the 1970s, and
it's widely believed it now has more than a hundred nuclear warheads. It's
understood in Washington that US security depends on the maintenance of strong
military and intelligence ties to Pakistan. The belief is mirrored in Pakistan.
"The Pakistani army sees
itself as family," the retired official said. "Officers call soldiers
their sons and all officers are 'brothers.' The attitude is different in the
American military. The senior Pakistani officers believe they are the elite and
have got to look out for all of the people, as keepers of the flame against
Muslim fundamentalism. The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against
aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They
will never cut their person-to- person ties with us."
Like all CIA station chiefs,
Bank was working undercover, but that ended in early December 2010 when he was
publicly accused of murder in a criminal complaint filed in Islamabad by Karim
Khan, a Pakistani journalist whose son and brother, according to local news
reports, had been killed by a US drone strike. Allowing Bank to be named was a
violation of diplomatic protocol on the part of the Pakistani authorities, and
it brought a wave of unwanted publicity. Bank was ordered to leave Pakistan by
the CIA, whose officials subsequently told the Associated Press he was transferred
because of concerns for his safety. The New York Times reported that there was
"strong suspicion" the ISI had played a role in leaking Bank's name
to Khan. There was speculation that he was outed as payback for the publication
in a New York lawsuit a month earlier of the names of ISI chiefs in connection
with the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. But there was a collateral reason,
the retired official said, for the CIA's willingness to send Bank back to
America. The Pakistanis needed cover in case their cooperation with the
Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became known. The Pakistanis could say:
'You're talking about me? We just kicked out your station chief.'"
Seymour Hersh has written for
the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, as well as serving as a
Washington correspondent for the New York Times. He established himself at the
forefront of investigative journalism more than four decades ago with an exposé
of the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Since
then he has uncovered stories such as Kissinger's role in extending the Vietnam
War as well as the military torture regime at Abu Ghraib prison. He has won the
George Polk prize five times, the National Magazine Award for Public Interest
twice, the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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