9/11 terror attacks not a Qaeda plot: Adrian Levy

British authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are here again, this time with an extraordinary account of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the years following the 9/11 attacks. In an exclusive interview, Levy discusses his forthcoming book The Exile with Iftikhar Gilani and reveals interesting details, hitherto unknown to the world. Here are excerpts of the interview:

Q: Your book reveals that LeT had nearly triggered a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, to open a passage for Osama out of the besieged mountains. But the Indian intelligence has been telling us that the attack was launched by JeM. Why this difference?

When the Taliban rout began in November and December 2001, and as the first bombs landed on Afghanistan, the U.S. paid for the Pakistan army to assist in closing the back door out of Tora Bora – a plan devised by Bob Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad. The U.S. bought the assistance of IX Corp, approximately 6,000 soldiers, that were ordered by Lt Gen. Ali Jan Aurakzai into the high mountains, closing off the back door out of Afghanistan, pledging to remain there. Only a war or war like state could have seen these six battalions redeployed.

Simultaneously, an alliance of jihad fronts, including LeT and JeM, as well as other more sectarian groups, were exhorted to come together by their handlers in the ISI, which managed these sensitive relations through S-Wing, its semiautonomous department. Others involved were Al Qaeda couriers in Pakistan, as well as non AlQaeda logistic handlers like Abu Zubaydah, who opposed 9/11 but supported the Islamic Emirate of the Taliban.

The Pakistan jihad groups like LeT and JeM initially acted as catchers and guides, working together with tribal warlords like Nek Mohammed, picking up Al Qaeda fighters, and Osama’s family, as they crossed over from Afghanistan and into Pakistan, and then made their way to Karachi. But they also lent a network of safe houses, ultimately controlled by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 architect, whose men safeguarded the Al Qaeda fighters’ identity documents and issued them with counterfeit ones. Khalid  met with Hafiz Saeed. His communications with LeT and its leader were later seized by the US when it captured him and Ramzi bin al Shibh in Pakistan. This led the CIA to conclude that the ISI also knew intimate details about Al Qaeda, as LeT could not have had dealings with that outfit without passing them along.

Osama had delayed the Tora Bora final onslaught by offering a surrender deal to the U.S. on December 11 via Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, a Libyan commander who had been with him from the start.

When the complex secret negotiations between Al Qaida  and the US, were on  JeM, supported by LeT, made a highly visible and symbolic attack at the Indian parliament on December 13 , designed to humiliate and inflame Indian sensibilities, and create a warlike situation. It did, with Indian troops massing on the Pakistan border. A  standoff that saw Pakistan redeploying the battalions loaned to the US from Tora Bora to its border. So some officers in the ISI, and the jihad fronts themselves, were prepared to risk a regional conflagration, with a nuclear dimension, to ensure Osama and the leadership escaped.

The White House knew the whereabouts of  Laden's family and Al Qaeda's military and religious leaders, but rejected opportunities to capture them.  Instead pursued war in the Persian Gulf. Did you find any reasons?

Many countries (inside and outside the sub continent) benefit from enabling insurgencies far more than they do by quashing them. Pakistan and the US prefer certain wars to run long. India too. There is a war dividend. The Bush administration could have seized Al Qaeda’s religious shura, and part of its military council, and held almost all of Osama’s much loved family, potentially forcing the Al Qaeda emir out into the open, as far back as 2002.Instead, even though they knew all of them were being sheltered by Iran,  Bush accused Iraq of aiding Al Qaeda (and possessing WMD) to justify a long held agenda to topple Saddam. In the same way, although smaller in scope, the Kashmiri kidnappings of 1995 were allowed to drag, as every day of bad news that saw Westerner held by Pakistan backed insurgents, was a black day for Pakistan, and a great day for Indian diplomacy in conveying the message that its neighbor backed terror.  

Why intelligence agencies all over world could not get a whiff of plans of 9/11 as you reveal it was discussed at Al Qaida Shoura and infact was opposed also by few?

The critical issue is the formation of the 9/11 conspiracy, which is ‘mis-described’ as an Al Qaeda plot. It was hatched outside of Al Qaeda circles, with the outfit’s ruling military council and religious shura kept in the dark and at arm’s length. Both bodies disliked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who drew up the plan and who had not sworn an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden, and refrained from joining Al Qaeda. When the Planes Operation (as he called it)- which was planned and run by men who were not in Al Qaeda -was finally brought to the attention of the shura – many (most) voted against it, and the head of the religious committee, Mahfouzib El Waleed, a powerful voice respected by everyone, resigned in protest.

All those who opposed 9/11 argued that it would bring about the destruction of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and destroy the Taliban. They also warned that unjustifiable civilian casualties would alienate support while triggering a war they could not win.

Khalid assumed control of Al Qaeda from his bolt hole in Karachi, and ran the outfit he refused to join, pushing it into increasingly pathological acts, especially the murder of Daniel Pearl, which triggered a backlash that disrupted virtually all of the outfit’s safe house network and jeopardized Osama’s family – who left was forced to leave Karachi for Iran.

Why despite spending billions and military actions West has been unable to root out Al Qaeda and its dreaded offshoot ISIS?

Al Qaeda’s leadership was sheltered by Iran, along with the senior members of the military council. A trove of interviews, letters and communiqués from Al Qaeda, as well as first hand interviews with members of its leadership council and Osama bin Ladin’s own family, reveals the proximity of Shia Iran to Sunni Al Qaeda – however unlikely that sounds.

Al Qaeda’s arrangement goes back to the weeks immediately after 9/11 when American missiles were falling on Afghanistan and Osama’s personal spiritual adviser, a Mauritanian religious scholar, Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, was dispatched to find a new home for a desperate Al Qaeda. His choices were limited. Pakistan was siding with the U.S. “war on terror.” However, Iran shared common borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. “It offered a protective bubble that roving U.S. forces dared not penetrate,” Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed said. Strategic, Shia Iran was renowned for backing Sunni causes it did not personally endorse but that antagonized its enemies.

Mahfouz headed for the Iranian border on 19 December 2001. His point of contact was Major General Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, an influential officer, close to Iran’s supreme leader, who handled Tehran’s covert foreign policy interests. Suleimani enabled the exodus to begin in March 2002, when Quds Force agents set up a desert refugee camp on the Afghan border to where hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters, leaders and their families arrived. From there they were escorted to Tehran, where women and children were put up at the four-star Howeyzeh Hotel on Tehran’s Taleqani Street, just down from the former U.S. embassy, and husbands and unmarried brothers stayed across the road at the Amir Hotel. In the lobbies, the Quds Force set up information points, issuing papers that presented the Arab fighters and their families as Iraqi Shia refugees from the Iran-Iraq War. They escorted them onto flights that left for Muslim majority states in Southeast Asia, and to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Osama’s family and several high-ranking Al Qaeda leaders, including Saif al-Adel, the military chief, by then on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, arrived in Iran that year. Saif and two men who travelled with him had plotted the 1998 U.S. embassy attacks in East Africa and they now set about reforming the outfit’s leadership council in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city. Their letters show how they established a funding pipeline through Iran and began plotting new attacks, including the Riyadh compound suicide bombings of 2003 in which 39 were killed.

Many of Al Qaeda’s leaders remained in Iran until the summer of 2015, when four of them were secretly flown to Damascus. 

In 2016, after 13 years in Iran, military chief Saif al-Adel was quietly flown to Syria, where he remains. The co-operation did not end there. Evidence has recently emerged that Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s leader, may have also shifted to Iran. The country continues to protect Hamzah bin Laden’s in-laws. Last week he issued his latest pronouncement, encouraging lone-wolf-style attacks against the West in a campaign entitled: “We Are All Osama”.

Former ISI DG, General Hamid Gul, kept in occasional touch with Osama and in frequent touch with other Al Qaeda leaders and allies like Fazlur Rehman Khalil.

With Osama “killed off,” Gul would use his deep contacts within the spy directorate to make sure that no one came sniffing around Bilal Town. All other arms of intelligence and security, from the regular police to the Special Branch, Military Intelligence, the Intelligence Bureau, and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA; Pakistan’s equivalent of the FBI), would be kept away. Any intelligence that related to Arabs or the search for Al Qaeda wouldbe funneled through the ISI’s S-Wing, to which Gul had direct access.

Tangible proof of this deal came almost right away, with the FIA’s director general warned to “not touch any case involving Arabs.”

You have done  research on ISI and its involvement. You have mentioned about a secret report it commissioned, but then buried it. Can you just elaborate about this report and the acts of Pakistan’s spy agency?

The ISI produced several reports. The first was a commissioned book Operation Geronimo: The Betrayal and Execution of Osama bin Laden and Its Aftermath, by Shaukat Qadir, a retired Brigadier. The second report the ISI commissioned was the official inquiry where four dignitaries were appointed. Three did nothing but one ,Ashraf  Jehangir Qazi, took the job seriously. Qazi was a well-respected former ambassador to some of Pakistan’s most challenging posts including the United States, Russia,China, and India. When the ISI tried to fob off Qazi with an edited summary of bin Laden family interrogations, he insisted on meeting the wives, captured at Abbottabad, face-to-face. For weeks, the ISI resisted, hiding behind a tangle of legalistic and diplomatic discussions about travel documents and to what countries they might be deported once the official case against them had been heard.

To waste more time, the women were moved to different heavily guarded villas around Islamabad, during which times they would be inaccessible to the commission for a requisite “settling in” period.

But Qazi, who had battled with the State Department under George W. Bush’s first administration and served as special representative to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Sudan, was relentless.

The ISI apparently had Osama’s diaries but they, too, were withheld from the commission as were the twenty stacked boxes of files that U.S. SEAL Team Six operator Matthew Bissonnette had spotted on the second-floor landing but had nothad time to take. These were now in the hands of the ISI and presumably contained a large collection of hugely valuable letters and documents fromOsama bin Laden.

As a result, the Pakistan file “was closed on him.” The ISI had “neither briefed the government leadership on the status of its information on Laden nor was it asked to do so.”

You have hinted that Taliban chief or even Laden’s Mauritian religious guide was not supportive of 9/11 attacks. But then the US went after them and attacked Afghanistan.

In 1999, CIA station chief Bob Grenier working with the ISI secured the tentative blessing of Mullah Omar to allow a military force to abduct Osama from Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar made it clear that he would not stand in the way if the ISI deployed ninety retired Pakistani commandos to seize Osama at Tarnak Qila.

However, in October 1999, shortly before the plan could be put in operation, civilian government of Pakistan was toppled by army chief General Pervez Musharraf. The ISI chief General Khawaja Ziaudin was removed and replaced by zealot General Mahmud Ahmed.

Finally, as 9/11 was being plotted, most of the religious shura, and some of the military council, including its most powerful leaders, opposed the plans, as they were being plotted outside the oufit, and by men who were not allied to it, or even trusted.

There is an interesting story of Abu Zubaydah in your book. He had an Indian connection that he stayed in Mysore. How important was he in rank and file of Al Qaeda?

 Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian. His family was given refugee status in Saudi but he was unhappy there and fled to Mysore to study, starting a relationship with a Christian woman. He fled her and India, enticed by the stories of jihad in Pakistan, only to be injured by a shell, stretchered out of the war. He never joined AL Qaeda, and never swore the bayat for Bin laden. He operated a honey business as a cover out of Board Bizaaarin Peshawar, and ran guest houses fotr those heading for Jihad. He was a contact for LeT and JeM, and used those contacts to help the fighters fleeing the US war.