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Manhunt: From 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen – review

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A detailed survey of Osama bin Laden's demise from the Washington-based journalist who once interviewed him for CNN

It was the most asymmetric conflict in history. The mightiest military power the world has ever known went to war against a single man, Osama bin Laden. Last year the US finally killed the Saudi-born fugitive in a raid on his Pakistani villa, but only after a decade-long pursuit that cost a trillion dollars. George Bush called it a "war on terror", but even some of his own top officials questioned what it meant to go into battle against a concept. Bush got closer to the nub of the issue when, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, he summoned up the spirit of the wild west and declared that Bin Laden was: "Wanted: dead or alive."

As the years went by and the leads went cold, Bush would affect insouciance over Bin Laden's fate and suggest the struggle was over bigger issues against a networked enemy, but when he asked the CIA director, Michael Hayden "How're we doing?" at each Thursday morning briefing, there was no doubt as to what and who he was talking about. As soon as he arrived in the Oval Office, Barack Obama told Hayden's successor, Leon Panetta, "to redouble our efforts in hunting Bin Laden down".

Bin Laden was just as single-minded, exhorting al-Qaida's far-flung subsidiaries to set aside local conflicts and refocus on attacking America. The computer files and correspondence captured by the US special forces team that killed him in Abbottabad revealed that he was far more involved in al-Qaida's operational planning than had been imagined, even if his plots ranged from far-fetched to the plain delusional.

The battle of wits between the man and the superpower is grippingly narrated by Peter Bergen, a Washington-based journalist and author who has interviewed Bin Laden face to face. It was in that 1997 interview (for CNN in an Afghan mud hut), that Bin Laden made his first public declaration of war on America to a western audience. The attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania came a year later, followed by the suicide strike on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. But arguably, it only became total war after September 11, 2001.

From that initial encounter Bergen stuck to his subject, and even US intelligence professionals concede that he recognised the seriousness of Bin Laden's intent before they did. After it was all over, and Bin Laden had been shot, identified and buried at sea by American servicemen, Bergen was the only independent western observer allowed by Pakistani security into the Abbottabad compound. He also got an early look at the trove of captured computer files and the transcripts of interrogations of Bin Laden's wives, from which he reconstructs the isolation and squalor of his last years, and final minutes. In Abbottabad he was still living with three of those wives, apparently with the help of Avena syrup, which Bergen describes "as a sort of natural Viagra made from wild oats", found at the house after Bin Laden's death, along with the Just for Men black hair dye he used for his beard.

By the end of his decade on the run, the flow of money from the Gulf had dried up entirely, and even Bin Laden's closest lieutenants were being paid little more than $100 a month. The fugitive, his wives and a dozen children and grandchildren slept on beds made of wooden boards nailed together. The third-storey apartment he shared with his youngest wife, Amal, was low-ceilinged and cramped for a man of 6ft 4in. A tarpaulin had been stretched over part of the garden to allow him to walk in tight circles. As the CIA closed in, American satellite pictures revealed the shadow of this restless soul whom the image analysts back in Langley named "the pacer", but until the very last moment they could not prove it was the man they were looking for.

Bergen clearly gained extraordinary access to the core US intelligence team whose job it was to track Bin Laden down, and his book succeeds first and foremost as a sort of CIA procedural, a real-life Homeland, complete with its shockingly violent denouement.

That side of Manhunt is particularly absorbing in its many telling details. It turns out that (just as in Homeland) it was women who provided much of the inspiration and intellect to fuel the pursuit. In 2005, when the CIA manhunt was at its lowest ebb, an analyst Bergen calls Rebecca wrote a paper that laid out a road map for the pursuit, suggesting four possible routes to Bin Laden: through his courier network, contact with his family, communications with his lieutenants and the distribution of his propaganda videos. It was the first path which ultimately led to Bin Laden. In 2010, the hunters picked up the scent of a courier called Ibrahim Saeed Hamid, known as the Kuwaiti, in Peshawar and tracked his white Suzuki jeep to a fortress-style three-storey villa with 18ft-high walls in Abbottabad. A good chunk of Manhunt describes the CIA's maddening uncertainty about whether Bin Laden was really inside. In the end, Obama gave the green light for the raid believing it to be no better than a 50:50 call, but those odds were at least superior to any lead since Bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains.

Bergen argues that suspicions of connivance by Pakistan's notorious intelligence service (ISI) in hiding Bin Laden are groundless, and here arguably he lets Islamabad off lightly. The Abbottabad house was nestled among the retirement homes of Pakistani officers and close by the premier military academy. Locals referred to it as the "Arab house" and in 2010, Bin Laden's eldest wife, Khairiah, somehow made her way from Iran to the Abbottabad compound without the ISI picking up her trail.

On the other hand, even the Kuwaiti's wife, living full-time in the compound, did not know who the tall Arab was on the third floor.

Even more astounding than Bin Laden's sudden demise has been the rapid decline of his reputation and influence. After a flurry of martyrdom rhetoric, his name faded away from global jihadist broadcasts and websites. Al-Qaida was conspicuous by its absence from the events of the Arab spring. The Islamists who have emerged amid the wreckage of the Arab dictatorships owe nothing to Bin Laden and his anti-American jihad. Washington, meanwhile, has moved on to new perceived threats, from a recalcitrant Iran to a rising China. The story is not entirely over, however. Al-Qaida still has a stronghold in Yemen, and its affiliates are becoming more ferocious in west Africa. It is not beyond the realm of imagination that these still glowing embers could ignite once more. There is clearly still plenty to write about, but Manhunt already has the feel of a definitive work.


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