The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [209]
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was involved in operations on the ground in Pakistan during the relevant period, told the authors that this statement by Musharraf was “generally accurate.” He said, however: “The truth is, we allowed the Pakistanis to believe they were taking the lead. Certainly they were the first through the door, but on those high-profile captures we never told them who the target was. We were afraid they would leak the information to al Qaeda and the target would escape. The information leading to the captures was a hundred percent CIA information. The Pakistanis had no role in the intelligence.”
The biggest name of all, of course, long eluded pursuit. Last on the list of Washington’s post-9/11 demands, as Musharraf recalled it, had been to help “destroy bin Laden.” “We have done everything possible to track down Osama bin Laden,” Musharraf wrote in 2006, “but he has evaded us.”
No one, according to Musharraf, had been more anxious than the Pakistanis to resolve the mystery of bin Laden’s whereabouts. As the months and years passed, however, there were those who believed otherwise.
FROM THE TIME America routed al Qaeda after 9/11, information indicated that the ISI continued to remain in touch with bin Laden or aware of his location. ISI officials, former special envoy Tomsen told the 9/11 Commission, were “still visiting OBL [bin Laden] as late as December 2001”—and continued to know his location thereafter. In 2007 Kathleen McFarland, a former senior Defense Department official, spoke of bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan as a fact. “I’m convinced,” military historian Stephen Tanner told CNN in 2010, “that he is protected by the ISI. I just think it’s impossible after all this time to not know where he is.”
Why would the ISI have allowed bin Laden to enjoy safe haven in Pakistan? The ISI, Tanner thought, would see him as a trump card—leverage over the United States in the power play involved in Pakistan’s ongoing dispute with India.
It went deeper, and further back than that. “You in the West,” the veteran London Sunday Times reporter Christina Lamb has recalled former ISI head General Gul telling her twenty years ago, “think you can use these fundamentalists and abandon them, but it will come back to haunt you.” It was clear to Lamb that “For Gul and his ilk, support for the fundamentalist Afghan groups, and later the Taliban, was not just policy but also ideology.” In spite of the vast sums in U.S. aid doled out to Pakistan, a 2010 poll suggested that a majority of Pakistanis viewed the United States as an enemy.
There was special suspicion of the S Section of the ISI, which is made up of personnel who are officially retired but front for certain ISI operations. S Section, The New York Times has quoted former CIA officials as saying, has been “seen as particularly close to militants.”
In Washington, trust in the Pakistanis had long since plummeted. “They were very hot on the ISI,” said a member of a Pakistani delegation that visited the White House toward the end of the Bush presidency. “When we asked them for more information, Bush laughed and said, ‘When we share information with you guys, the bad guys always run away.’ ”
The lack of trust notwithstanding, policy on Pakistan did not appear to change. Better to do nothing and have some cooperation, the thinking in the new Obama administration seemed to be, than come down hard and get none. In early 2011, on Fox News, former government officials called on the administration to take a tougher line with Pakistan.
Obama had vowed during his campaign for the presidency, “We will kill bin Laden.… That has to be our biggest national security priority.” In office, he made no such public statements. The hunt for bin Laden, meanwhile, seemed to be getting nowhere—and not to be a high