MANHUNT: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad

Peter L Bergen

Crown Publishers

$26

When members of the Navy?s elite SEAL Team 6 stormed Osama bin Laden?s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a year ago and took out the leader of Al Qaeda with two precision shots, they ended an unprecedented decade-long manhunt for the terrorist. That manhunt is the subject of Peter L Bergen?s fourth book about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Some of the more illuminating sections concern the efforts of intelligence analysts to piece together a ?working theory? about Bin Laden?s whereabouts following his escape from Tora Bora in December 2001 (after the CIA?s request for more troops, which might have trapped him, was turned down by Gen Tommy Franks). Also fascinating are the descriptions of internal debates within the Obama administration about whether?and how?to strike the Abbottabad compound, given estimates varying between 40% and 80% that the Qaeda leader was living there.

As has been reported, the director of central intelligence at the time, Leon E Panetta, argued for going through with the raid, Vice President Joseph R Biden Jr advised against it; and Robert M Gates, then the secretary of defense, was worried that evidence that Bin Laden was even in the compound was circumstantial. But whereas Biden has been reported as saying that all in the room hedged their bets besides himself and Panetta, Bergen writes that?based on interviews with senior administration officials?secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton followed ?a long, lawyerly presentation that examined both the upsides and downsides of the raid option? with this summary: ?It?s a very close call, but I would say: Do the raid.?

Bin Laden?s last words were to his youngest wife, Amal: ?Don?t turn on the light.? It was a pointless admonition since ?Someone?it is still not clear exactly who?had taken the sensible precaution of turning off the electricity feeding the neighbourhood, thus giving the SEALs a large advantage on that moonless night.? As Bergen tells it, the Qaeda leader ?just waited in the dark in silence for about 15 minutes, seemingly mentally paralysed as the Americans stormed his last refuge?; when he opened a metal gate blocking access to his room and poked his head out to see what the commotion was downstairs, he ?made the fatal error of not locking this gate behind him? when he retreated, allowing the SEALs to run past it and into his bedroom.

As Bergen has argued before, he believes that Bin Laden seriously misjudged the consequences of the 9/11 attack: instead of driving the US from the Arab world, Al Qaeda witnessed an enormous buildup of American forces in the region. The terrorist organisation lost its base in Afghanistan and many of its operatives to bombing campaigns and drone attacks.

Bergen draws a picture of an ageing leader of a troubled organisation who at one point became convinced that Al Qaeda was suffering from a branding problem that could be solved by changing its name to ?the Monotheism and Jihad Group? or ?the Restoration of the Caliphate Group?. Of a 2007 videotape in which Bin Laden condemned the extermination of American Indians, the toxic influence of American corporations and the US?s poor record on climate change, Bergen acerbically writes, ?these seemed more the musings of an elderly reader of The Nation than the leader of global jihad?.

Fancying himself something of a poet, Bin Laden once wrote grandly of himself, ?Let my grave be an eagle?s belly, its resting place in the sky?s atmosphere amongst perched eagles.? But instead, ?Bin Laden died surrounded by his wives in a squalid suburban compound awash in broken glass and scattered children?s toys and medicine bottles?testament to the ferocity of the SEALs? assault on his final hiding place.?