Between them they fielded a force of around 2,000 men, but there were questions from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The warlords and their men distrusted each other, and all appeared to distrust their American allies. According to Hayatullah, head of a group called the Eastern Council whose cousin Rohatullah also had men there, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman each got $6 million, but then Haji Zahir said the Americans had so much money they hadn’t asked for enough, and should have demanded $100 million.10
Berntsen was certain bin Laden was at Tora Bora, because a second CIA team he sent in had a stroke of luck. One of the dead bodies they found was clutching a cheap Japanese walkie-talkie. Through it they could hear bin Laden exhorting his troops to keep fighting.
‘We were listening to bin Laden praying, talking and giving instructions for a couple of days,’ said Berntsen. ‘I had a guy called Jalal, the CIA’s number-one native Arabist, who’d been listening to bin Laden’s voice for five years, down here listening. Anyone who says he wasn’t there is a damn fool.’ Berntsen sent an urgent request to General Franks at Central Command in Florida for a battalion of six to eight hundred US Army Rangers to be dropped behind the al Qaeda positions to block their escape to Pakistan. ‘We need Rangers now!’ he radioed repeatedly. ‘The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!’ But the answer came back, no, it should be left to the Afghans. ‘The generals were afraid of casualties!’ said Berntsen, still incredulous. ‘Yet these guys had just killed 3,000 people in New York, and might do again. What kind of insanity is that, not sending troops?’
Only on 6 December, the eleventh day of the sixteen-day battle, did Delta Force arrive in Tora Bora and the military take control from the CIA. They set up base in an old schoolhouse, commanded by a major who uses the pseudonym ‘Dalton Fury’. Yet they numbered just forty – and to Berntsen’s wry amusement they had to pay bribes to their Afghan allies to be allowed through.
Because they were so few, the plan was to send the Afghan forces into the Tora Bora mountains to attack the al Qaeda positions from valleys on either side. The Americans would remain in observation posts, providing advice and air support, not lead the Afghans into battle or venture towards the forward lines.
For several days in early December, Fury’s troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias to set up observation posts. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range-finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. But the Delta Force units were unable to hold any high ground, because the Afghans insisted on retreating to their base at the bottom of the mountains each night, leaving the Americans alone inside al Qaeda territory. In a later official account the special forces said of Hazrat Ali’s forces, ‘[Their] fighting qualities proved remarkably poor.’11
Still, American aircraft were carrying out as many as a hundred airstrikes a day, and it was clear from what the US forces could see and what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that the relentless bombing was taking its toll. A couple of times Berntsen even thought they had got bin Laden. Through the walkie-talkie they knew the al Qaeda fighters were running short of food and water, so they let them be resupplied by some local Afghans. The Afghans were paid to carry a GPS and press a button whenever they saw men or weapons. ‘We delivered food and water to them so we could get a GPS on bin Laden’s position then [on December 9] we dropped a Blu 82, the size of a car, and killed a whole lot.’
The 15,000-pound bomb, known as a daisy-cutter, was the largest bomb in the US inventory short of nuclear weapons, and was so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane. It shook the mountains for miles. Before Afghanistan, the weapon had not been used since Vietnam, and to start with the Americans feared that it had made less impact than they expected. But then Fury heard al Qaeda fighters radioing for the ‘red truck to move wounded’, and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander, saying, ‘Cave too hot, can’t reach others.’12 A captured al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporised in what he called ‘a hideous explosion’.
Late afternoon the following day, 10 December, Hazrat Ali told the Americans that his men had bin Laden surrounded. But as the Americans set off up the mountain in six Toyotas, they came across Ali leaving in a convoy. He promised that he and his men would turn round at the bottom and return, but they never did. Frustrated, the Americans called in seventeen hours of continuous airstrikes.
Fury was astonished when next day Haji Zaman asked for a twelve-hour ceasefire, saying that al Qaeda wanted to come down from the mountains and surrender. Bin Laden was heard on the radio telling his men that he had let them down and it was OK to surrender. Fury hoped the battle was over as Zaman claimed, but he was suspicious. They agreed an overnight pause in bombing, but by the next day not one surrendering fighter had appeared. Fury would later believe the message was a ruse to allow al Qaeda fighters to slip out of Tora Bora for Pakistan. As many as eight hundred are thought to have left that night.
Yet bin Laden was still in Tora Bora, and it seems he expected to die there. A copy of his will was later found, written on 14 December 2001. ‘Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole,’ he wrote. ‘Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart … and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’ He instructed his wives not to remarry, and apologised to his children for devoting himself to jihad.
Berntsen kept warning everyone that they were losing the chance to get bin Laden, and needed to send troops to block off exits on the Pakistan side. But Major General Dailey said General Franks had refused, explaining that Rumsfeld wanted to keep the US presence to a ‘light footprint’, and he feared alienating their allies.
‘I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!’ Berntsen shouted. ‘I only care about eliminating al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!’ Dailey said the military’s position was firm, and Berntsen replied, ‘Screw that!’
Back in Washington, Berntsen’s boss Hank Crumpton, head of Afghan strategy for the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, went to see Bush at the White House and warned him, ‘We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.’ He recommended that Marines or other US troops be rushed to Tora Bora.
‘How bad off are these Afghani forces, really?’ asked Bush. ‘Are they up to the job?’
‘Definitely not, Mr President,’ Crumpton replied. ‘Definitely not.’
Yet still no more troops were forthcoming. Fury recommended sending his men to the Pakistan side of the border, but was given the thumbs down. So desperate was he that he even suggested dropping landmines to blow up the al Qaeda fighters as they came out of the tunnels.
What none of them knew was that General Franks was already busy on Iraq plans.
On 15 December Berntsen’s men heard bin Laden on the radio again. The following day the al Qaeda leader is believed to have split his men into two and left with one group of two hundred Saudi and Yemeni bodyguards over the mountains to Parachinar in Pakistan’s tribal area, a strip of lawless land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bin Laden had been helped by Pakistanis and Afghans he had paid, some of whom were also being paid by the Americans.
Fury finally managed to persuade Hazrat Ali to keep his men in the mountains, and for the next three days they went from valley to valley, but there was no more resistance. Al Qaeda had disappeared. They found 250 dead. By 17 December Hazrat Ali declared the battle over.
That same day Berntsen left Afghanistan, frustrated beyond words. Back home with his wife and two children for Christmas, he was horrified when he switched on his television to see the bearded face of his tormentor: ‘I just kept thinking we could have had him.’
The Pakistani military were angered at the widespread perception that they had let bin Laden and his men through.