The White House portrait of a crumbling terror group is contradicted by documents seized in the bin Laden raid.
By Stephen F. Hayes And Thomas Joscelyn
March 5, 2015
In the early-morning hours of May 2, 2011, a small team of American
military and intelligence professionals landed inside the high white
walls of a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The team’s
mission, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, had two primary objectives:
capture or kill Osama bin Laden
and gather as much intelligence as possible about the al Qaeda leader
and his network. A bullet to bin Laden’s head accomplished the first;
the quick work of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team accomplished the
second.
It was quite a haul: 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives and a
dozen cellphones. There were DVDs, audio and video tapes, data cards,
reams of handwritten materials, newspapers and magazines. At a Pentagon
briefing days after the raid, a senior military intelligence official
described it as “the single largest collection of senior terrorist
materials ever.”
The United States had gotten its hands on al Qaeda’s playbook—its
recent history, its current operations, its future plans. An interagency
team led by the Central Intelligence Agency got the first look at the
cache. They performed a hasty scrub—a “triage”—on a small sliver of the
document collection, looking for actionable intelligence. According to
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the team produced more
than 400 separate reports based on information in the documents.
But it is what happened next that is truly stunning: nothing. The
analysis of the materials—the “document exploitation,” in the parlance
of intelligence professionals—came to an abrupt stop. According to five
senior U.S. intelligence officials, the documents sat largely untouched
for months—perhaps as long as a year.
In spring 2012, a year after the raid that killed bin Laden and six
months before the 2012 presidential election, the Obama administration
launched a concerted campaign to persuade the American people that the
long war with al Qaeda was ending. In a speech commemorating the
anniversary of the raid, John Brennan ,
Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and later his CIA director,
predicted the imminent demise of al Qaeda. The next day, on May 1, 2012,
Mr. Obama made a bold claim: “The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda
and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach.”
The White House provided 17 handpicked documents to the Combatting
Terror Center at the West Point military academy, where a team of
analysts reached the conclusion the Obama administration wanted. Bin
Laden, they found, had been isolated and relatively powerless, a sad and
lonely man sitting atop a crumbling terror network.
It was a reassuring portrayal. It was also wrong. And those
responsible for winning the war—as opposed to an election—couldn’t
afford to engage in such dangerous self-delusion.
“The leadership down at Central Command wanted to know what were we
learning from these documents,” says Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, the former
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the transcript
of an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier for a coming Fox News
Reporting special. “We were still facing a growing al Qaeda threat. And
it was not just Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq. But we saw it growing
in Yemen. We clearly saw it growing still in East Africa.” The threat
“wasn’t going away,” he adds, “and we wanted to know: What can we learn
from these documents?”
After a pitched bureaucratic battle, a small team of analysts from
the Defense Intelligence Agency and Centcom was given time-limited,
read-only access to the documents. The DIA team began producing analyses
reflecting what they were seeing in the documents.
At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent
death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were
seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt.
Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say
close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.”
This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the
administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA
officials to stop producing analyses based on them.
Even this limited glimpse into the broader set of documents
revealed the problems with the administration’s claims about al Qaeda.
Bin Laden had clear control of al Qaeda and was intimately involved in
day-to-day management. More important, given the dramatic growth of the
terror threat in the years since, the documents showed that bin Laden
had expansion plans. Lt. Gen. Flynn says bin Laden was giving direction
to “members of the wider al Qaeda leadership team, if you will, that
went all the way to places like West Africa where we see a problem today
with Boko Haram and [al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], all the way back
into the things that were going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Bin
Laden advised them on everything from specific operations in Europe to
the types of crops his minions should plant in East Africa.
To date, the public has seen only two dozen of the 1.5 million
documents captured in Abbottabad. “It’s a thimble-full,” says Derek
Harvey, a senior intelligence official who helped lead the DIA analysis
of the bin Laden collection.
And while it is impossible to paint a complete picture of al Qaeda
based on the small set of documents available to the public, documents
we are able to read, including those released last week in a Brooklyn
terror trial, reveal stunning new details.
According to one letter, dated July 2010, the brother of Nawaz
Sharif, Pakistan’s current prime minister, sought to strike a peace deal
with the jihadists. Bin Laden was informed that Shahbaz Sharif, who was
then the chief minister of Punjab, wanted to cut a deal with the
Pakistani Taliban, whose leadership was close to bin Laden. The
government “was ready to reestablish normal relations as long as [the
Pakistani Taliban] do not conduct operations in Punjab,” according to
the letter from Atiyah Abd al Rahman, one of bin Laden’s top deputies.
Attacks elsewhere in Pakistan were apparently acceptable under the terms
of the alleged proposal. Al Qaeda intended to guide the Pakistani
Taliban throughout the negotiations. The same letter reveals how al
Qaeda and its allies used the threat of terrorist attacks as a
negotiating tactic in its talks with the Pakistani military.
The letter also shows that Pakistani intelligence was willing to
negotiate with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda “leaked” word to the press that “big,
earth shaking operations” were planned in Pakistan, the letter says, but
bin Laden’s men and their allies would back off if the Pakistani army
eased up on its offensive against the jihadists in the north: “In the
aftermath” of the al Qaeda leak, “the intelligence people . . . started
reaching out to us through some of the Pakistani ‘jihadist’ groups, the
ones they approve of.” One of the Pakistani intelligence service’s
emissaries was Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil, a longtime bin Laden ally who
leads the Harakat-ul-Mujahideen. Khalil was an early booster of bin
Laden’s war against the West, having signed the al Qaeda master’s
infamous 1998 fatwa declaring jihad “against the Jews and the
Crusaders.” Another government intermediary was Hamid Gul, the one-time
head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Al Qaeda’s network in Iran is also described in bin Laden’s
letters. The Iranian regime held some senior al Qaeda leaders,
eventually releasing them. This led to disagreements between the two
sides. But the mullahs have also allowed al Qaeda to use Iranian soil as
a key transit hub, shuttling fighters and cash to and from South Asia.
One letter recounts a plan, devised by Yunis al Mauritani, one of bin
Laden’s senior lieutenants, to relocate to Iran. Once there, Mauritani
would dispatch terrorists to take part in operations around the world.
Mauritani was tasked by bin Laden with planning Mumbai-style
shootings in Europe in 2010. The plot was fortunately thwarted. But all
of the terrorists selected to take part transited Iran, according to
court proceedings in Germany, taking advantage of the Iranian regime’s
agreement with al Qaeda.
During the Arab uprisings in 2011, Obama administration officials
argued that al Qaeda had been “sidelined” by the peaceful protests. Just
weeks before he was killed, however, bin Laden’s men dispatched
operatives to Libya and elsewhere to take advantage of the upheaval.
“There has been an active Jihadist Islamic renaissance under way in
Eastern Libya (Benghazi, Derna, Bayda and that area) for some time, just
waiting for this kind of opportunity,” Atiyah Abd al Rahman wrote in
early April 2011. Rahman thought there was much “good” in the so-called
Arab Spring. And bin Laden believed that the upheaval presented al Qaeda
with “unprecedented opportunities” to spread its radical ideology.
The fight over the bin Laden documents continues. Mr. Harvey, the
senior DIA official, believes that the documents should be declassified
and released to the public as soon as possible, after taking precautions
to avoid compromising sources or methods. Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee, inserted language in the 2014
intelligence authorization bill requiring just that.
Making the documents public is long overdue. The information in
them is directly relevant to many of the challenges we face today—from a
nuclear deal with an Iranian regime that supports al Qaeda to the rise
of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria; from confidence-building measures meant to please the Afghan
Taliban to the trustworthiness of senior Pakistani officials.
Choosing ignorance shouldn’t be an option.
Mr. Hayes is a senior writer for the Weekly Standard. Mr.
Joscelyn is senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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