Mugshots: Osama Bin Laden - Osama Dead: Without Mercy | Forensic Files

[Music] to the Muslim world He's a hero He's more than a hero He's superhuman There's a overt message which kill
Americans kill Westerners kill Jews There's never been any hidden messages He has declared war on America and he
has said many people will die He got a fatwa from a radical Saudi shake which authorized him to use
nuclear weapons in the United States It was almost a myth some bin Laden pulling something of a Houdini act even
when we think we have him cornered Washington knows where he is But then the question becomes what are we going
to do about it [Music] Brazen video messages prove that Osama bin Laden is alive
In Washington the CIA's top bin Laden hunter Michael Sher emerges from the shadows after exposing the failures of
the manhunt In London editors at the Times urge their war correspondent Janine D Giovani
to dig up new clues John Miller the last Western reporter to interview Bin Laden quits a lucrative
network television job to lead the LAPD anti-terror task force In New York Philip Smucker the war
correspondent who witnessed Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora has launched a new
probe into his escape route In Kabul terror expert Peter Bergen returns to where he first met Bin Laden hoping to
find signs of where he's hiding And from an outpost in the Mojave Desert Gene Wheaton a former US Defense Department
agent experienced in the escape routes of the Middle East says he knows how Bin Laden escaped and where he is now
What follows is the untold story of Bin Laden's escape Every image and word is based on eyewitness accounts and
official records [Music] I arrived a few days after September 11th I crossed into Afghanistan and
positioned myself waiting for the fall of Kapor Once Kabool fell there began to be
rumors that there was an operation called Torabora which was going to take place in some caves
way out past Jalalabad um which had been built by the US military during the days of the
Mujahadin and that this was where Osama was hiding Two days before uh leaving Jalalabad
uh Osama bin Laden gathered all the local warlords together brought them for this banquet Shortly after they started
to eat Osama bin Laden enters with an entourage of about a dozen guys He tells the local warlords "You've helped us
before We will defeat this enemy the same way we defeated the Soviets and we just need your assistance." And this was
uh couched in such a way uh to suggest that there was something in return In fact the return came at the end of the
banquet because there were envelopes handed out to all the warlords Uh and and these envelopes contained money
2 days later uh the al-Qaeda organization fanned out into the city to gather the forces together and move in
the direction of Torabora But there was some resistance within al-Qaeda There were members that wanted to draw the
Americans in to an urban type of setting to have a Moadishu type of confrontation
He eventually was able to persuade them to get in the cars and and drive out to uh Tora Mountain
[Music] Why did he go to Torbar Because Tora was where if you or I were trying to avoid
the US Army that's where we would go I mean this place was set up by the during the Soviet war in Afghanistan as a place
which would withstand very heavy bombing where you could hide out for you know days months Um it's got a lot of places
you can escape from into Pakistan So in the first days of December 2001 I drove out at that point quite a
dangerous road between Kabul and Jalalabad [Music] There had been some reporters who had
been killed on it I got out to Jalalabad started asking questions and then headed
out to Tora Once I got there and once I actually got inside the caves I realized why it was
strategically a place you would go if you were going to hide Well it was interesting how we got to Tora because
we hitched a ride with one of the leading warlords [ __ ] Muhammad Zaman Gamsharik was
returning to his fifom In fact uh we drove in in our car in front of the warlord and when we crossed the border
into Afghanistan he switched and jumped in our car because he was worried he was
going to get shot and he thought that being in a press vehicle he might arrive safely back in Jalalaba
That was on November 15th almost within two days of the departure of Osama bin Laden from Jalalabad going into Tora
Bora They'd left the city which is an urban center of 100,000 Uh and they'd taken the desert roads up into the
mountains which are actually south of the town The peaks were snowcapped at the time Uh they had left in the middle
of the night and uh when we got there we didn't know that they had actually just
been there There were small numbers of Green Beretss that came in late November and
they started to try to get to know the local warlords They didn't really know them They didn't know who they could
trust The problem was and I think I'll go out on a limb here to say this is that these Northern Alliance commanders
were pretty worthless They weren't trained well A lot of times they were quite devious They were taking
kickbacks There was a lot of clan tribal old grievances revenge hatreds They really didn't believe in this $25
million reward for Osama bin Laden For them that was pie in the sky They just wanted to do their regular business They
were renting out cards for $200 a day Uh they had a racket in the local hotels They were taking far more seriously the
money the $100 bills that were handed out by the individual journalists on the ground
These guys could be bought and sold for $50 And that was quite shocking to think
the Americans had put their trust into these kind of characters [Music] The all-out assault was very slow in
gathering speed It didn't start until December 5th And one of the warlords actually uh woke up that morning and
turned on CNN and and noticed that there was an offensive starting at Tora Bora and he didn't he hadn't been informed
himself So he called a couple hundred guys and he he got them together and they ran up the mountain And so it was
very unorganized if you can imagine And the problem was that the rear was never covered and there was never a plan to
cover it Bomb is pretty spectacular in a terrible sense And I remember jumping in the car
with one commander who was riding up The bombs were falling and we wanted to get
up into the caves And it was very difficult for journalists to operate at that point We were basically penned in
[Music] The bombing was intense It was wild We we actually were almost right beneath
some of the B-52s as they were bombing And interestingly enough uh a lot of the the the bombs that came in and and the
cruise missiles as well uh had little messages written on them from the American soldiers I remember finding
that rocket casing written by an American soldier I take this Ren Oama and shove it up your ass this is for
your goat's ass and this is you know this is where we're going to the the little messages to the enemy from men
who were fighting of course 10,000 ft o overhead or uh somewhere in the Arabian Sea The American bombardment they said
was very effective However the Americans on the ground weren't effective because there were very few of
them Everybody face a weapon Commander Muso was one of the frontline commanders He said there were
there were six Americans with him He commanded 600 men on the front lines Obviously six people aren't going to be
no matter how good they are are not going to be able to cordon off a you know dozen square mile uh area which was
what which is how big Torah borrow is It was almost uh a joke on this here They come from behind us right here then
Right The final uh assault on Tora Bora was so slow in the making It was so poorly
organized that they looked like stragglers going up and stragglers coming down The Americans talked about a siege but I
believe it was more of a civ In fact everybody who wanted to leave could leave at almost any time Individual
al-Qaeda members were getting on donkeys They were riding down into the hills And
this is just maybe a mile from the media setup where all the cameras were going And um there was a disastrous surrender
agreement that was negotiated on December 12th in which one of the Afghan warlords said if you surrender within a
certain amount of time we won't kill you Well during the the period of the surrender agreement which was overnight
anybody who wanted to escape to escaped So by December 13th most of the people in Tora had escaped I think it's pretty
clear that bin Laden himself had escaped earlier In fact uh we reported on the 12th that he had escaped 10 days earlier
but the Americans and the Afghans were still engaged in this offensive when all the media was focusing on Tora and those
those cave busting bombs and our special forces guys getting killed over there Uh Osama bin Laden was long gone when
Tora Bora started and that was just an exercise in in blowing things up and and making the world feel comfortable about
us doing something Among the reporters who were covering this battle uh I think there was a sense
that this was something very surreal It was it was a circus Uh it was bizarre to
have the world's most powerful military have this opportunity to close in on the
world's most wanted man and then have it turn into this fiasco where they didn't
cover their asses I certainly talked to people who were at the battle of Torbbor
who said British special forces were there and they were very frustrated that they weren't able to go and you know
basically take out bin Laden of course because America had been attacked and therefore they had to deliver Osama to
the American public to show that you know these lives lost in 9/11 were not lost in vain Wouldn't have looked right
if a Brit had taken out Osama It had to be an American I think there there is um
a willingness within the British military to acknowledge the fact that this was a great opportunity to capture
Osama bin Laden but the overall mission failed Uh there's never been a willingness uh within the American
military units that fought there to acknowledge that they failed in their mission
Osama bin Laden had traveled down south of Afghanistan through Baluchistan area of Pakistan down to the Indian Ocean
toward the straits of Hormos and was picked up by Dows these oceangoing junks wooden ships that fly the waters of the
Indian Ocean the Persian Gil Horn of Africa that he and an entourage went from there to off the coast of Yemen
Do you believe it's possible the US may never get Osama bin Oh you're trying to get me to do it again Well I'm just
trying to clear up the semantics Are you Well uh I think we're going to get him How's that
On December 16th the Pentagon still believed they were just about to take down Osama bin Laden and bring out their
prize In fact what was going on is they were just gathering around a few stragglers They were reigning them in
and capturing them and and and dragging them down the mountain And they dragged them down to display them in front of
the press Now these guys were lowlevel They were probably cooks and runners and you know
nothing serious Yes they were al-Qaeda and yes they were part of Osama's band but they were
humiliated and they were they were paraded in front of the reporters like animals in a circus But there was no
Osama bin Laden This is the first confirmation we had from the warlords 100% that there was no Osama
And they brought the one prisoner out This is Bin Laden Shef uh who was willing to talk to the media And he
turned out to be a very amusing chap We spoke to him for about three hours on three different occasions gathering
information about what had gone on inside Tora Bora and also his relationship with Osama bin Laden And
one of the little anecdotes uh he told us was that Osama bin Laden's favorite meal was stuffed quail and that some of
the quail uh that he he had had been shot in in the in in the hills but normally it came in overland from Iran
He had entered Tora with Assam Bin Laden been in a nearby cave One evening the bombing was so intense one of the bombs
fell at the foot of the base of one of the caves he was in and it blew two of his colleagues away killed immediately
And he was actually at the pot stewing and he was blown back about 15 ft And when he recovered consciousness he
decided enough was enough He was going to leave I think it's pretty clear that Bin Laden
himself had escaped earlier Osama could have been encircled and captured That was clear But it was a
missed opportunity because of all sorts of factors I think there were more American
journalists at the Battle of Tobo than there were American soldiers It was almost astounding that you had 6 to 700
foreign correspondents in the hills there and only two dozen green berets Tora just faded away It was a big
balloon and it was popped and then the reporters disappeared Osama was gone We didn't get him If you'd given every
every journalist a gun we probably would have taken down Osama bin Laden ourselves
[Music] [Applause] I think he had an exit strategy and you know Tora Bora was part of the exit
strategy He knew that was an excellent place to disappear from He actually had a kind of a farewell meeting with some
of his fighters on November 28th He had green tea with them in a cave and gave them a little pep talk And it was the
same kind of pep talk he usually gave the fighters He said "Look you know continue to fight Martyrdom is the way
to paradise." It was almost a repetition of what he'd said at the meeting earlier in Jalalabad
with the warlords But he then uh slipped out of sight He left with a very small entourage Usually
in the White Mountains he was traveling with about 60 men Uh he he cropped that down to about a dozen when he left Then
there were some fighters that would say to me "Well even if he did escape you know the road getting into the tribal
areas over the mountains is going to be an incredibly difficult journey He's a sick man He needs dialysis How is he
going to do it?" The all indications are that one of his arms was not moving well
because there was a video and it's believed that it it was made in the middle of December with uh Iman Zawehiri
in a field with some wild flowers And in this video his his shoulder appears to not be moving with ease And
the the suggestion there was that he had been injured in the fighting But we do know that he's an extraordinary horseman
and that he does have a tremendous amount of determination In fact uh there may have been a
sighting of bin Laden I believe it would have been very early December It was a brother of one of the warlords who said
that "Oh yes Osama bin Laden uh he's been in the m he's he's you know he's dashing over the snow drift on a horse."
I first heard this from village people They said that there was a very tall man tall thin man who they saw escaping
riding a white horse Now of course this all sounds you know too close to Arabian
nights to be real So none of us took it seriously really The bombing operation was still going on And when the caves
were finally liberated and we could get inside we believed that Osama was still somewhere higher up within the labyrinth
of of the caves which were extensive Well it was almost a myth in and of itself Osama bin Laden pulling something
of a Houdini act even when we think we have him cornered The stage was really set for the tragedy
once he got to Tora Bora Unless the Americans and the British were going to use our own forces to go in there and
capture him he was going to get away There was there was just no there was no question about that They
were going to take our money as Afghans always do and never do what we want them
to do Likewise as Afghans always do Tora Bora was a case of if it was going to get done if you were going to get Bin
Laden you had to do your own dirty work and we decided not to And so we lost him
He managed to uh we believe walk on foot uh out of uh Tora Bora over uh some of the steepest mountains in Afghanistan
And it must be said that there was snow already on the mountains Uh and the decision not to use a beast of burden
was probably because they knew very well that the Americans had heat seeeking sensors that could follow large animals
on the move Osama bin Laden would travel over there just like every other trader
or caravan has done since the beginning of time in the Middle East He would have
traveled probably horseback ride donkeys he would ride camels the from Afghanistan down through the Baluchasan
area of Pakistan assisted by Islamic people in the villages and migrating tribes from along the way Afghanistan
and Pakistan are two places where the population in both countries basically are supportive of Usama bin Laden He's
been one of the few men on earth who stood by the Afghans uh for the past quarter century since
the Soviets uh invaded in 1979 They're also co-religionists They're all Muslims It's very unlikely that any
Afghan or Pac uh Pakistani are going to turn Bin Laden over to the to the United
States As you can see there's $200 million worth of US reward money out there for Bin Laden in the third poorest
country on Earth And no one has come forward for it yet Bin Laden spent more time in Pakistan Afghanistan than he
spent probably anywhere else in his adult life Why would he go somewhere he doesn't know Fugitives often go to the
place that they have a support network The general consensus is that he's in Pakistan
Believing Osama bin Laden may be in the vicinity of Karachi Pakistan the United States government blanketed Pakistani
television with ads offering $25 million for his capture The ads yielded dozens of tips but not
bin Laden The one thing I would point out regarding the cities in in Pakistan is
that Karachi has been a place where we have captured a substantial number of al-Qaeda's people including some very
senior ones Now President Masharaf recently said that bin Laden was alive that he was in
Pakistan [Music] He is in fact alive Thank God that's true Do you have any information about
his whereabouts I have no information but I'm convinced he is alive [Music] Are you convinced or do you know it
You have to stick with what I just told you We're convinced that he's alive but he's not in Pakistan
If one of those clerics who know Bin Laden personally says he is alive but he doesn't know where he is and he smiles
and and gives you a knowing wink He has told you that he has pretty solid information that he knows he's alive and
he knows where he is [Music] In December 2001 there were several reports that Osama bin Laden had escaped
to Saudi Arabia by crossing the Arabian Sea Uh no There's a number on the bow We'll
go uh take a look We're going to pull alongside little There we come aboard Yes please Thank you sir
We're looking for you You seen him Yes Have you seen him Hey you see them No Okay Our task was uh MIO maritime
interdiction operations primarily uh uh hailing and inspecting uh merchant vessels We were looking for uh possible
al-Qaeda members who were trying to escape from Afghanistan through Pakistan uh and down
to the south down to to Africa And of course the number one uh would have been Osama bin Laden
You know it could have taken anything from a week to a month depending on how often he traveled whether it's traveling
day or night from Torabora down through Baluchistan get on a dal and be in Yemen
in a week traders smugglers fishermen That's how they do business in that part of the world
The ship left Canada the 5th of December and joined up with the with the NATO squadron in CIT in uh about the middle
of December of 01 The interdiction program uh of course should have begun in uh in November
Towards the middle of the end of January we went around into the uh Gulf of Oman
where we joined up with task force an area of several thousand square kilometers I would say
the inspections of these boats were very thorough and uh there's no doubt in my mind that uh had he been trying to cross
the Gulf of Oman uh from Pakistan or Iran there was a very very high probability that he would have been
found [Music] got in the boat There is no doubt that uh al-Qaeda members were fleeing and escaping into
Pakistan and so that would have made it absolutely essential to cover the rear and make sure that the boats uh leaving
in the direction of the Arabian Peninsula were checked thoroughly Uh so I wouldn't be surprised if uh there were
efforts made but it's like again finding a needle in a haystack Very difficult to
patrol that border It was uh February 14th in in 2002 And uh we were patrolling just off the coast of
Pakistan It's about uh four or five miles from us was a another Dow sitting off by itself So we headed down towards
this Dow and boarding party officer and uh couple of his guys scrambled on board
and he called back and said that in in the middle hatch middle hole there appeared to be about uh 80 or 90 of
these blue bags inside again as you see in the pack in the in the picture was a big block of
hash and you can see uh in the upper corner uh just by where the sailor's holding it there's a what appears to be
a gold stamp that said freedom for Afghanistan We had about 5,000 lb of hash 40 million
bucks worth of hash Later that day we we received uh orders to to head south to uh rendevous with uh an American cruiser
the USS Lady Golf After pounding with the 57 mm he closed in As you can tell from the picture was
like watching something out of an Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movie They put
a couple thousand rounds into this hasht and the sea was just boiling And there was no doubt in anybody's mind
that that this was uh was drugs being used by uh various uh terrorist organizations to fund uh to fund their
uh efforts And uh and we were uh extremely happy that we were able to make this small dent
Osama bin Laden could cross across there without any of those people knowing it Now I know if I can he can I was also an
anti-muggling advisor is one of my duties in Iran I've pied the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean on
Dows and with local tribesmen and loyalty from a religious standpoint combined with money Uh everybody over
there would protect him They love him He's he's a martyr He's a he's a prophet for them
and the people would do anything you ask them to do to capture Mr Bin Laden who would obviously stand out uh being 6'8
um I would have to say that if he had been in one of those small boats I would say with a fair degree of certainty that
he would be stopped bin Laden would not be above crawling down among a load of fish and sleeping
among them for a day or two to get from one place to another You know it's not like somebody wanting to live at the
Hilton Noel He's used to a rough life and he thinks living in luxury is a sin So the harsher it is the harder it is
for him to travel the more comfortable he is Every one of the boats that that uh we cighted we closed within uh 10 or
15 ft In fact we would normally uh put our uh boarding party away in our rip We would go and inspect these boats We
would check them for papers registrations Most of them were Pakistani and had Pakistani passports We were also looking
for clues or indicators that of something suspicious Obviously we're looking for weapons We were looking to
see if anyone was injured who we never found any weapons never found anyone injured
Uh he's an easily recognizable face Uh but there are people in that area that look similar to him I I saw many Afghans
in fact that were tall and lanky and and and had big noses and and uh he he if he
had disguised himself just a little bit uh he probably could have passed himself
off as a commoner uh and even gotten on a boat and and made it across the Arabian Sea
[Music] When I drove back to Kabul there was a lot of talk of "No you know Osama's here
He's he's staying with his third wife in a house here or no he's gone down to Gazny or no he's gone to Ha Bahoudin."
It it it kind of went on It got actually ridiculous And then I next heard that Osama could
possibly be in Somalia And so I flew about two hours into Mogadishu and one of the first things I
saw was a kid wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt There are very few people out there
wearing I love Mubarak t-shirts or uh bumper stickers that that favor the al-Saud family He's not only the only
leader and the only hero but in his um personal behavior and in his personal eloquence he's cut from the mold of
Islamic heroes and in history And then I went into a small bar and hanging over the bottles of dusty
bottles of old Coca-Cola was a photograph of Osama So he had disappeared But his disappearance
by eluding the American military machine he had become even bigger even more mythic even more grand even more heroic
To the Muslim world he's he's a hero He's more than a hero He's he's superhuman Bin Laden is an unusual man uh for the
United States and that we I think we have never had an enemy who has been more precise in uh outlining and
speaking about what he's mad at what he's going to do about it why he's going to do it and then doing it And over the
years really the best information there was about his intentions and his philosophy were his words his
discussions with Muslim journalists but also people like Peter Bergen and John Miller
They were tremendously useful uh interviews not only for the substance of them but
for the for the um atmospherics We met with him in early 97 And it was clear that he was involved in financing
Islamic extremist groups Uh but it wasn't clear that he was going to be you know the intellectual author of so much
may and catastrophe And even then he was very concerned about his security Similar to this interview we we were
doing a TV interview with him except that we weren't allowed to bring any of our own equipment We weren't even
allowed to bring our own watches Um they're very concerned about us secretreting some kind of tracking
device to find Osama bin Laden Of course you go into the hands of al-Qaeda They kind of dry clean you as they go
further and further from any ability to have any contact And you're met by his number two Iman Al- Zawahheri Uh his
number three his military chief Muhammad Aff and a number of their security people They went through our gear and we
were loaded into trucks Then we went through a series of security checkpoints You would be driving down the road and
men would jump out from the bushes with guns and confront your vehicle and then they would question the driver
When we got to the mountaintop it was like a movie set There were lights set up There was a big quanset hut at some
point around midnight with all of the troops from the base gathered there all with their weapons AK-47s shoulder
holsters pistols uh some in in their khakis most in the Shawar kamse and traditional Islamic garb and headgear Uh
a caravan of three uh Japanese SUV arrive Uh and as the doors open Bin Laden gets out and the first thing that
strikes me is how tall he is He's like 6'5 towering over a bunch of security men um carrying guns looking in each
direction At the same time everybody there on the mountaintop opens fire into the air with their guns
Bin Laden sat down on top of a kind of red blanket that had been laid across a bench and I sat on on a little stool
across from him and I started to go through my list of questions Mr Bin Laden you are a very rich man Mr
Bin Laden a man who comes from a background of wealth and comfort You fought on the front lines in Afghanistan
Clearly you didn't have to uh why did you do that And of course his answer would be my first real interchange with
him He spent a lot of time laying things out that night because he wanted a clear
message to go to the Americans One problem is he was looking at the translator So I was about to come back
with a 1-hour interview with a guy who was looking over here Uh so I I I caught his eye and I started
to nod as if I um had spontaneously learned to understand Arabic that night in the tent And I kept nodding and I
would I would I would turn to looks of great interest at certain parts and puzzlement at others But I I wanted to
make sure that Bin Laden and I stayed engaged so I could keep him facing the camera behind me And somewhere along the
interview between my gazing and nodding uh he said uh towards my last question I asked all the questions I wanted to
ask I wasn't sure what I had gotten because it wasn't being translated At the end of the interview I went to my
translator who was kept in the back and I said "Did we did he answer any of those questions Do we have a story
here?" And he said "Yes we have a very big story We must get the tapes and get out of here He has declared war on
America and he has said many people will die I was uh on the road for about a year
and a half uh running around Pakistan I was down in this area I call the Devil's
Triangle near Iran I was near a special forces fire base down in Zarange I picked up a lot of rumors about
al-Qaeda figures who had come out of Tora Bora traveled through southern Afghanistan through the desert and then
into Iran So I was following the trail and it went cold as it has for uh all of the rest of
us I've interviewed dozens of of officials in the US Afghan and Pakistani governments and I mean there basically
two things that they'll say One is they don't have a clue where Bin Laden is You
know they use words like mystery or the hunters hit a brick wall These kinds of things He probably is not where
we think he is in Western Pakistan I think he's more likely uh what I call the devil's triangle down near the
Iranian Afghan and Pakistani borders where they come together There's so many things that have been said about where
Bin Laden has gone most of which are total [ __ ] in my view I mean you know that he's in China or in Yemen or
there's no evidence of this And so it's very easy to kind of say these things but um you know there's very little
evidence for any of this So I just don't know It's the most logical thing in the world
for him to get out of the country and get into a safe haven And it it's the simplest way
in the world If you've traveled across the borders of the Middle East in the desert there's migrating tribes and
there's camels and horses and families that migrate constantly There's a civilization of migratory people in all
of those countries that are traveling from one country to the other And it would be simple
In fact it would be natural for him to travel that way within 3 months of 911 I was getting
opinions and tips and things from various people with Middle East backgrounds that he was long gone from Afghanistan
and it would not have been logical for him to stay there Everything I knew and everything I've
heard led me to believe that Osama bin Laden was being protected by Yemen tribesmen taking him into Mecca and that
that's where he planned on making his headquarters in the Grand Mosque in Mecca's Saudi Arabia I think it is quite
likely that he made it back if if he wanted to to the Arabian Peninsula and was able to lose himself in a crowd and
and and go to something like the Hajj uh and and and manage from there to move in
another direction So it's certainly not out of the uh realm of possibilities He's doing what what you or I would do
in his place which is basically deal with the people he knows in an area he knows not take any stupid risks whether
that's traveling to different countries or talking on a satphone or cell phone Um and um you know he's probably not
moving about very much If we look at this last video tape from him he's very well informed
about current events which suggests to me that he's not in some very isolated tribal area which has no electricity and
no internet no newspapers He's very well informed He is by reputation a news hound He is if you
will a junkie of international news He has always traveled with as far as we know a team of people whose duty is uh
to gather information on a daily basis and provide him not just uh printouts from the internet but actually a digest
of of what's happened in the world in some supporting analysis of what it means u in some ways not unlike uh the
materials that are prepared each morning for the president of the United States or the prime minister of of Great
Britain Osama bin Laden can spend the rest of his life in Mecca and run the worldwide Islamic anti-western movement
out of there That's his Pentagon or his White House or his number 10 Downing Street
He does never has to do anything He's got his food his medical and he can sit and
pray and and contemplate the universe and at the same time meet with every insider hodge player that comes to
Mecca to perform his pilgrimage each year If he was in Mecca I think it'd be a huge problem for the Saudi government
And their reaction probably would be to try not to let it be known If it was disclosed that Osama bin Laden was
living in Mecca it would probably cause the collapse of the Saudi royal family and a major
internal revolution supporting Bin Laden The Saudi intelligence service would probably raid the Grand Mosque
But that would that would increase the dangers of a nationwide revolution worldwide revolution It would cause
havoc in every Muslim country in the world Well I think Osama wants a revolution in
Saudi I think he wants to topple the house of Saud I think he wants to see really see uh a return to an even more
medieval way of Islam His word is going out from there That would explain the royal and and and Islamic clergy
hierarchy robes that he wore It would explain the fact that he didn't have any weapons around him and the fact that he
was talking more diplomatically which is probably one of the conditions for him to be protected in Mecca
[Music] The facts are that we don't know where he is I don't know where he is [Music]
It would be very very important to capture Osama bin Laden now And not least of which because the American
public is still demanding that he be caught because he's seen as the most diabolical of all the terrorists out
there But there's a great irony here And the irony is that if we' caught him at Tora
Bora it would have been like cutting the head off the snake Now you've got a multi-headed Medusa on your hands The
cancer has spread uh it's much more difficult to tackle this animal One of the reasons that they the Bush
administration doesn't mention Bin Laden is they don't want to inflate him into a
bigger figure than he is There's another reason which is a less good reason which
is they haven't got him and it's embarrassing We're spending hundreds of billions of
dollars a year in the war on terrorism We haven't found the guy who actually did 9/11
[Music] They've already released 27 tapes since 911 That's an average of one every six
weeks Why is it that we haven't been able to track these the chain of custody these audio tapes back It's not that
these it's not so complicated I mean obviously it is a little complicated It seems to me this is a a a shorefire
way of getting him but for some reason it doesn't seem to have got him yet We hear very little about Osama bin Laden
out of official Washington anymore because they pretty well know where he is Washington knows that he's in Mecca
but then the question becomes what are we going to do about it If we ask the Saudi intelligence service or the
military to go in and get him they would refuse because it would cause a worldwide massive bloody Islamic
revolution There have been a lot of famous guerilla leaders who have managed to elude very powerful armies George
Washington never won a battle in the first year of fighting the British but he escaped so many times that the
American public was more than willing to give their sons to fight in the revolution against the British And so by
escaping the world's most powerful military as Osama bin Laden has done a lot of Arab families are willing to give
their sons to this battle to fight the infidel Eventually he will probably be caught or killed It could be tomorrow or
it could be 10 years from now He'd be a martyr His ideas are already quite popular in a lot lot of parts of the
world Martyrdom is a very powerful kind of message to the people who believe in these ideas When we started to chase bin
Laden we were absolutely unique The unit we had within CIA because we had never chased a man before It's a very hard
task chasing one man Now because of the Iraq war because Bin Laden survived uh I think we're seeing al-Qaeda
transfer into al-Qaeda more into a movement than it is an organization And it's still important to kill Bin
Laden if we can It'd be a very very good victory for the United States But it's too late to end uh al-Qaeda Uh the
movement will continue someone will replace bin Laden and uh America will be facing this phenomenon for for the
foreseeable future The question bin Laden captured dead or alive uh comes up often and I've thought about it while I
think the ultimate answer to that question bin Laden dead or alive is entirely a matter of his own choosing
What will he do in that moment I think the triggering device is bin Laden's desire to attain his ultimate destiny
and honor in his mind which is to be a martyr So dead or alive right now my money's undead We'll see
In the spring of 2005 US special force commandos rushed into the Pakistani province of Balucan Bin Laden had been
cited Despite reliable information bin Laden eluded capture Today he remains at large
[Music] Heat Heat Oh [Music] heat [Music]

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Brief Summary

The episode reveals the failures of the U.S. military in capturing Osama bin Laden during the Tora Bora operation.

Key points

Osama's Fatwa. He received a fatwa from a radical Saudi, authorizing nuclear attacks on the U.S.
The Hunt for Bin Laden. CIA's top hunter exposes failures in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden.
The Tora Bora Operation. The chaotic and poorly organized assault on Tora Bora leads to missed opportunities.
The Aftermath of Tora Bora. The U.S. military's failure to capture Bin Laden leads to a surreal situation.
Bin Laden's Escape. Despite the siege, Bin Laden escapes from Tora Bora, eluding capture.
The Myth of Bin Laden. His disappearance has made him a mythic figure in the Muslim world.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He's superhuman.

0:13WatchJul 28, 2014

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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