Secret intelligence documents disclosed by Edward Snowden provide new context for evaluating the various accounts of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011.
The U.S. has long maintained that the raid was conducted without the knowledge of the Pakistani government, and that the critical intelligence that led to bin Laden’s location came from a years-long effort by U.S. analysts and operatives to trace the path of an Al Qaeda courier.
A new report by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, published last week in the London Review of Books, calls that story a lie.
Hersh reports that bin Laden had been in Pakistani custody since 2006, and the tip-off to his location came from a former Pakistani intelligence official in August 2010. Senior Pakistani military officers knew of the U.S. raid ahead of time, and the courier story was created to cover the role of the Pakistani informant, Hersh alleges; his account relies on a former U.S. intelligence official, two Special Operations Command consultants, and mostly unnamed sources within Pakistan. While the White House has vehemently denied Hersh’s account, other reports have supported the existence of a Pakistani walk-in informant.
The Intercept is publishing a number of documents from the Snowden archive related to the Abbottabad raid and the hunt for bin Laden, which neither explicitly prove nor disprove any aspect of Hersh’s account. However, the documents reference a number of things that are relevant to the debate, including the tracking of Al Qaeda couriers in Pakistan and the existence of intelligence gathered from the Abbottabad compound, as well as the impact of the raid on U.S.- Pakistani counterterrorism partnerships.
The files provided by Snowden by no means represent the totality of intelligence community documents from that time period. The archive, sourced from the NSA’s computer systems, offers only a partial window into the intelligence community’s CIA-led efforts to find bin Laden.
The documents The Intercept identified that are related to bin Laden offer few specific details, and often use boastful language designed to justify budgets and boost career accomplishments.
Moreover, given how vast the intelligence community is — and its compartmentalization and secrecy — its members may be unaware of what other agencies, or even units within their own agency, are doing.
The British intelligence service GCHQ declined to comment on these documents, and the NSA did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiries.
The Courier
The White House has maintained that the key to finding bin Laden came when the CIA identified Al Qaeda courier Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed (alias Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti) and tracked him to Abbottabad. Yet this apparent intelligence coup surfaces rarely in the internal NSA documents reviewed by The Intercept.
The intelligence community budget justification (or “Black Budget”) sent to Congress in 2012 reports the “identification of the courier and compound” as a highlight of the previous year and a “model of integrated [intelligence community] support.” The budget justification – designed to convince Congress to fund intelligence programs – states that “NSA analysts tracked the use of ‘infrequent’ numbers by persons of interest, and the use of Tailored Access Operations implants allowed for sustained collection access against these targets.”
It was CIA analysts who tracked the location of one of those numbers to the compound, the budget states.
According to the black budget, the CIA also conducted “pattern of life analysis” on “a collection of assets in Pakistan to identify any potential linkages, as well as digital footprints.” This analysis, the budget continues, “paired with other technical tests, increased confidence in each asset’s authenticity, reliability, and freedom from hostile control and directly contributed information leading to the successful mission on UBL’s compound.”
Ahmed’s true name does not appear in the archive files The Intercept reviewed. The one concrete reference to him is in a list of top terror suspects, updated in 2008, which identifies him only by various pseudonyms. The document states that he is still at large, believed to be in the Zabul province of Afghanistan, and that he may have location information for bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Click for Full Text!