How Ayman al-Zawahiri was found after 21 years

The secret operation to target Ayman al-Zawahiri took 21 years after 9/11 before credible intelligence revealed a startling piece of information: the 71-year-old deputy and then successor to Osama bin Laden was standing on a balcony of a house in the heart of Afghanistan’s capital city. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were key architects of the worst terrorist attack in the US, responsible for killing nearly 3,000 people. After the body of bin Laden, shrouded in a white sheet and placed in a weighted bag, was slipped into the waters of the Arabian Sea from the aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson, in May, 2011, the CIA team dedicated to hunting down terrorists had focused much of their attention on finding al-Zawahiri. It took another 11 years and was one of the longest manhunts in the history of America’s prime intelligence agency. The breakthrough came in early February. The CIA terrorist hunters received a tip-off that members of al-Zawahiri’s family had arrived in Kabul and were staying in a house in the exclusive Sherpur district of the capital where western diplomatic embassies were once located. The wife, daughter and grandchildren had clearly been schooled in the art of counter-intelligence tradecraft because they used evasive methods to try and avoid being followed. Proof that al-Zawahiri himself had finally joined his family came several weeks later when the familiar figure with his thick gray beard and scowling face appeared on the balcony of the house. But no move was made to target him on his first or subsequent appearances on the balcony. When it was first suspected that bin Laden was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan, the CIA, backed by the signals intelligence capabilities of the National Security Agency, spent months attempting to shorten the odds that the tall man walking each day within the compound walls was the founder of al-Qaeda. He never looked upwards to give US satellites the convincing dentification the CIA was seeking. In the end, President Obama gave the go ahead to launch a Navy Seal commando operation against the Abbottabad compound in May, 2011, even though the identification process had only reached a 60 per cent certainty. The intelligence about al-Zawahiri was more firmly based. After minute examination of surveillance images of the man who regularly stood on the balcony of the house in Kabul, the CIA trackers knew for certain the bearded individual was bin Laden’s 71-year-old successor with a $25 million bounty on his head. The decision by President Biden to target al-Zawahiri was made easier by the CIA’s positive identification. The operational method to carry out the kill was left to the CIA. The US Air Force Reaper drone sent to kill al-Zawahiri took off from a Gulf state, probably Qatar. It was armed with two R9X Hellfire missiles fitted with long slicing blades to kill the al-Qaeda leader without requiring explosives which would have destroyed the house. Both Hellfire missiles with the ninja-style whirring cutting blades were fired from the Reaper drone at 6.18am on Sunday, Kabul time – 9.48pm on Saturday in Washington. Until the intelligence breakthrough, the CIA hunters had focused their efforts in the remote border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan where al-Zawahiri was thought to be living among fiercely loyal tribal families. His bodyguards even married into local tribes to help cement the protection around him. At least four attempts were made to target him but he proved elusive. Some officials believed al-Zawahiri might even have lived at one point in Karachi, one of Pakistan’s most populated cities. Whenever al-Zawahiri sent out video messages to al-Qaeda members he used so-called “chroma keying”, a visual effects process which involved digitally placing a green backdrop to obscure the location. The CIA was given no clues as to his whereabouts. The arrival in Kabul of al-Zawahiri’s wife, daughter and grandchildren more than yfive months ago convinced the CIA hunters that he would eventually join them. Bin Laden had his family with him in the Abbottabad compound. The CIA had built up a network of agents during the 20 years of America’s military involvement in Afghanistan, but the agency had limited assets in the Afghan capital. It was not long, however, before reliable sources tipped off the CIA that al-Zawahiri was also present in the house. It was early April. Once there he never left the building but, fatally for him, he liked to sit or stand on the balcony during the day. Al-Zawahiri’s pattern of daily life was monitored for weeks via satellite images watched by the CIA back in Langley, Virginia. It gave the CIA time to construct a mock-up of the house which was subsequently shown to Biden to help make his decision whether it was safe to target al-Zawahiri on the balcony without killing any members of his family. The same process was used in the planned targeting of bin Laden in 2011. A mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad was built and US Navy Seal Team Six commandos rehearsed the assault over a period of months. The decision to go ahead with the assassination took weeks of secret briefings at the White House. Initially the intelligence of al-Zawahiri’s whereabouts was kept to a restricted number of officials. Biden was briefed on the proposed drone strike in the White House situation room on July 1. Three key officials present were William Burns, CIA director, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Jake Sullivan, national security adviser. Biden gave authorisation for the kill on July 25.