The death of Osama bin Laden
Viewed backwards, from Osama bin Laden's hideout to the scraps of intelligence that led to it, the trail seems obvious. Tracing it from end to beginning obscures the level of difficulty: the years of frustration and patient effort, the technological innovation, the lives lost, the mistakes made, the money spent. The trail to Abbottabad represented a triumph of dot connecting. In this case, it began with a name. It was not even a real name, and the reference was to someone reported, falsely, to be dead.
The name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was first mentioned to authorities in Mauritania by an al-Qaida operative, Mohamedou Ould Salahi. It was obviously a pseudonym. The name meant "the Father of Ahmed from Kuwait". It was just one name among thousands that were daily being entered into what would become theTerrorism Information Awareness database.
The same pseudonym, and person, would be fleshed out in more detail by three more detainees. A fourth, Abu Faraj al-Libi, al-Qaida's number three, who was captured in May 2005, said he had never heard of him. That was interesting. Five different detainees had been asked about him. Four said they knew of him. Three placed him close to Bin Laden, one named him as a "courier" (although one of those three said he was dead) and one, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, also a senior figure, said he had left al-Qaida. Here's what the analysts gathered: their two most important captives either minimised the importance of the Kuwaiti or denied his existence altogether. This might mean that Ahmed the Kuwaiti was very important indeed. Add the fact that the Kuwaiti had dropped off the map… just like Bin Laden. For the first time, the CIA teams began to consider that the Kuwaiti was with "the Sheikh" even now.
In 2007, the agency learned that the Kuwaiti's real name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. He came from a large Pakistani family that had moved to Kuwait. He and his brothers had grown up speaking Pashto and Arabic. One of his brothers had been killed fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In June 2010, because of either some change in his cell phone or its service package, or some improvement in their own capability, the US was able to pinpoint Ahmed's phone's location when it was in use. This meant they could find the Kuwaiti, and watch him... Read more:
