The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [85]
The first CIA team was on the ground in Afghanistan just two weeks after 9/11, armed with not only their weapons but $3 million in $100 bills. “Money,” Schroen has wearily noted, “is the lubricant that makes things happen in Afghanistan.” The cash, lugged around in duffel bags, was used mostly to grease the palms of anti-Taliban warlords. For a mission that targeted the Taliban as much as bin Laden, buying their loyalty was essential. Brilliant American management of the warlords and their forces, combined with devastating use of airpower, would defeat and decimate the Taliban soldiers—though they were often valiant fighters—in little more than two months. Getting Osama bin Laden was another matter altogether.
He had continued to address the world as he had for years, by videotape. On October 7, the day of the first U.S. airstrikes, the terrorist leader was all defiance—and lauding the 9/11 attacks. “God has struck America at its Achilles’ heel and destroyed its greatest buildings,” he said. “What America is tasting today is but a fraction of what we [Arabs] have tasted for decades.… So when God Almighty granted success to one of the vanguard groups of Islam, He opened the way.… I pray to God Almighty to lift them up to the highest Paradise.”
A few days earlier, in a letter to Taliban leader Mullah Omar that was to be retrieved later, bin Laden forecast that the coming U.S. campaign in Afghanistan would cause “great long-term economic burdens … force America to resort to the former Soviet Union’s only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Two weeks on, with the bombing continuing, the Taliban’s military commander—a longtime bin Laden ally—claimed his soldiers were holding their ground. Bin Laden was “safe and sound … in good spirits.”
Thus far, the CIA team had only poor intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts. There were attempts to persuade them that he had left the country soon after 9/11. Other reports put him either in the capital, Kabul, or at Jalalabad, nearer to the border with Pakistan. He was indeed in Kabul, or was there in early November, when he gave the first of his two post-9/11 interviews. Bin Laden was still talking tough, but his situation had clearly changed. He was in the capital that day to pay tribute to two comrades who had been killed, one of them his military chief—and close friend—Mohammed Atef. Enemy forces were closing on Kabul, and would take the city within the week.
Bin Laden did now head for Jalalabad, some ninety miles to the east. He and a large group of fighters were seen arriving in a convoy of white Toyota trucks. American bombs were already falling on the city, and their stay was brief. Dressed in the camouflage jacket familiar to Western television viewers, their leader appeared at the Saudi-funded Institute for Islamic Studies and addressed those brave enough to come to listen. “God is with us, and we shall win the war,” he reportedly said. “Your Arab brothers will lead the way.… May God grant me the opportunity to see you and meet you again.”
Bin Laden, said to have been upset, apparently spoke of wanting to stay and fight. He was dissuaded. The convoy left soon afterward, a Jalalabad witness later told the BBC, and it now consisted of as many as three hundred vehicles filled with tall, thin Saudis, muscular men who said they were from Egypt, and blacks who may have been from Sudan. They were, he said, “good Muslims, carrying the Qur’an in one hand and their Kalashnikov in the other.” Bin Laden and his close companions, seated in the third vehicle, had covered their faces. At least one of those in the group said they were on their way “to their base at Tora Bora.”
Tora Bora, which translates as “Black Widow,” lies almost sixteen thousand feet above sea level on Towr Ghar—the “Black Dust”—a series of rocky ridges