On October 7, 2001, the U.S. air campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban began as bombers, strike aircraft, and cruise missiles pounded targets. Measurable progress was difficult to discern at first, but by November 10 the first major objective of the campaign – the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif – was taken, and within the next few days the Taliban’s hold on the country began to rapidly disintegrate in the face of U.S. precision guided munitions and the Northern Alliance’s ground assault.
Despite the quality and volume of intelligence the Northern Alliance procured for Team Jawbreaker, there was little reliable information on Osama bin Laden. On November 10, London’s Sunday Times reported that the Saudi was seen entering Jalalabad in a convoy of white Toyota trucks surrounded by 60 commandos in green battle fatigues, armed with shiny new Kalishnikovs. He addressed a gathering of about 1,000 Afghan and Pakistani tribal leaders at the Islamic Studies Institute, and the next day was spotted by Jalalabad residents standing outside a mosque, holding hands with the local Taliban governor. He barked orders to his bodyguards and left in a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Gary Berntsen, the new leader of Jawbreaker, received reports of bin Laden’s exodus shortly after Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul on November 12. Berntsen, a bear-sized man with a Long Island accent, learned two days later of a convoy of 200 Toyotas and Land Cruisers passing through the village of Agam two hours south of Kabul. A quick plotting of all the accounts received from Afghan agents indicated a steady movement south and east towards the Pakistan border.
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| Gary Berntsen, leader of the CIA's "Jawbreaker" team in November 2001. |
Bin Laden’s flight towards Afghanistan’s southeastern mountains made sense. His destination was Tora Bora (Pashto for “black dust”), a series of cave-filled valleys in the White Mountains whose ridgelines rose from wooded foothills to jagged, snow-covered peaks separated by deep ravines. The Tora Bora complex covered an area roughly six miles wide and six miles long, and during the 1980s had been the object of multiple Soviet offensives. The Red Army had attacked with thousands of infantrymen supported by helicopter gunships and MiGs, yet the fortifications were so solid that the Soviets were held off by a force of 130 Afghans.
Moreover, bin Laden was intimately familiar with the terrain at Tora Bora. In 1987 he used bulldozers from his family’s construction company to build a road through the mountains. Later, at the village of Jaji, bin Laden fought his first battle against the Soviets. During the years before September 11, bin Laden kept a house in a settlement near Tora Bora called Milawa. Tora Bora offered easy access to Parachinar, a region of Pakistan that juts into Afghanistan like a parrot’s beak on the southern slope of Tora Bora. Bin Laden’s son Omar recalled that his father would routinely hike from Tora Bora into Pakistan on excursions that could take from 7-14 hours. “My brothers and I all loathed those grueling treks,” Omar said, but they “seemed the most pleasant outings to our father.”
Locals reported scores of vehicles loaded with al Qaeda fighters and supplies moving towards Tora Bora. Estimates from Afghans who had traveled inside to meet with the Arabs put the number of fighters between 1,600-2,000. Villagers in the area said that bin Laden’s core bodyguard was supported by a 400-man force acting as pickets on the flanks as the terrorist leader moved back and forth between the Milewa Valley in the west and Tora Bora in the east. Another force of 400 Chechens – highly regarded for their alpine fighting skills – guarded the perimeter of the Tora Bora complex.
Thus, Tora Bora afforded bin Laden option of fighting or fleeing.
In addition to the formidable terrain, Berntsen faced another problem. The Northern Alliance, which had served as the proxy ground force thus far in the campaign, had neither the capacity nor the desire to push as far south as Jalalabad. Consequently, Berntsen was forced to turn to the local warlords of the “Eastern Alliance” who had not been fully vetted. Hazaret Ali was a Pashai tribal leader who despite being “physically small, quiet, and unassuming,” had distinguished himself as a field commander in the war against the Soviets. Although he seemed reliable, he led “a gang of skinny mountain boys in rags,” and because his translator only spoke limited English, communicating the complexities of a rapidly evolving battlefield would be difficult. Conversely, Haji Zaman was well-educated and spoke English. But he had only just returned from exile in France and commanded men who “could well have passed themselves off as a band of 18th-century cutthroats.”
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Hazeret Ali and Haji Zaman, the local warlords U.S. forces were
dependent upon as the hunt for bin Laden moved to Tora Bora. |
Berntsen’s sources continued to tell him bin Laden was in the area, so several days after arriving in Jalalabad Jawbreaker moved into a schoolhouse in the foothills near Tora Bora and established a command center. Because satellite imagery and photos from high-flying reconnaissance planes showed deep snow was stacking up in Tora Bora’s valleys and passes, it was concluded that with these passageways closed bin Laden would not be able to leave the mountains anytime soon. Radio intercepts further suggested that al Qaeda wanted a fight in the mountains where their prepared positions appeared to give them a tactical advantage. Finally, as the Delta Force commander noted, based on his constant praise over the years for the virtues of martyrdom, “We had no reason to doubt that bin Laden wouldn’t fight to the death.”
Consequently, the plan for Tora Bora closely resembled the operations that had broken the Taliban lines north of Kabul. CIA paramilitary operatives and U.S. Special Forces would infiltrate Tora Bora to identify targets for bombing, which would clear the way for the Afghan militias. Ali and Zaman, already fierce rivals, were given separate parallel axes of advance into the mountains: Ali’s forces would take the center of the range, Zaman’s men the western half of the base with both attacking south. U.S. forces would coordinate their movements and provide massive air support, while Pakistani forces would seal the border to the south and east.
While Special Forces units worked with the Afghans to prepare for the assault on Tora Bora, on November 18 Berntsen sent an eight-man team to pursue bin Laden. The battle for Tora Bora, and what appeared to the climax of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was about to begin.
