Free Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter L. Bergen

of bin Laden’s sons.Bin Laden went to say good-bye to Uthman, not knowing when, or if, he would see him again, saying, “My son, we are keeping our oath, fighting jihad in the path of Allah.”Accompanied by some of his guards, al-Qaeda’s leader fled with another of his sons, seventeen-year-old Muhammad.
    As bin Laden abandoned the battlefield at Tora Bora, he wrotea final testament warning his children away from his path in life: “Forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery … I advise you not to work with al-Qaeda.” To his wives, he said, “You knew that the road was full of thorns and mines. You left the comfort of your relatives and chose to share the same hardships with me. You renounced worldly pleasure with me; renounce them more after me. Do not think of remarrying and you need only to look after our children.”
    Bin Laden went to the house of Awad Gul, a trusted ally near Jalalabad,to rest. Before the battle, bin Laden had entrusted Gulwith $100,000. Soon after, bin Laden, an accomplished rider,went by horse to the northeast, to Kunar province, an ideal place to disappear. Its twelve-thousand-foot peaks, dense trees, and evergreen shrubs made detection of movement from the air difficult; it had a small population hostile to outsiders; and there was no central government to speak of.
    A couple of weeks after the Tora Bora battle had ended, a visibly agedbin Laden released a video in which he contemplated his own death. “I am just a poor slave of God,” he said. “If I live or die, the war will continue.” He did not move his left side during the half-hour videotape, which suggested that he had sustained some kind of serious injury. A few months later, on an al-Qaeda website, the ten-year-old Hamza bin Laden posted a poembemoaning the fate that had befallen him and his family: “Oh, Father! Why have they showered us with bombs like rain, having no mercy for a child?” On the same website, bin Laden replied, “Pardon me, my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security is gone, but danger remains.”
    On January 4, 2002, at President Bush’s vacation ranch in Texas, Michael Morell had the delicate task of informing Bush that it was the CIA’s assessment that bin Laden had fought at the Battle of Tora Bora and survived.Bush was incensed at this and became hostile, as if Morell himself were the culprit.
    Two and a half years later, during a close election race, Democratic nominee John Kerry made a campaign issue of whether bin Laden could have been finished off at Tora Bora. The notion that there had been a real opportunity to kill bin Laden at that point was a “wild claim,” Bush said, and Vice President Dick Cheney termed it “absolute garbage.” Nevertheless, from the totality of the availableaccounts, it is clear that when presented with an opportunity to kill or capture al-Qaeda’s top leadership just three months after September 11, the United States was instead outmaneuvered by bin Laden, who slipped away, disappeared from the American radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization.

3 AL-QAEDA IN THE WILDERNESS
     
    B IN LADEN RETREATED into the mountains of Kunar with his organization on life support. Al-Qaeda, “the base” in Arabic, had just lost the best base it ever had. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda had run something of a parallel state to that of the Taliban, conducting its own independent foreign policy by attacking American embassies, warships, and the centers of U.S. military and economic power, as well as churning out thousands of militant foot soldiers in its training camps.
    This pre-9/11 al-Qaeda was quite bureaucratic, with its various committees for media outreach, military planning, business affairs, and even