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

discuss the possibility of al-Qaeda developing a nuclear device. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, says thatsix weeks after 9/11, Bush told a meeting of his National Security Council that bin Laden “may have a nucleardevice” big enough to destroy half of Washington. In fact, al-Qaeda had nothing of the sort, but in the panicked aftermath of 9/11, such a threat could not be easily discounted.
    Famously, President Bush kept a list in adrawer of his desk of the most-wanted al-Qaeda leaders. The list wasin the form of a pyramid, with bin Laden at the top. As al-Qaeda leaders were captured or killed, Bush would cross them off the list. For about a year after the fall of the Taliban regime, Bush believed that the leader of al-Qaeda might already be dead. After all, throughout much of 2002 nothing was heard from bin Laden that established “proof of life.” “The president thought maybe we got him already. He’s dead, and we don’t know it. [Killed at] Tora Bora or somewhere else,” recalls Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer.
    The uncertainty about bin Laden’s status would begin to change at 10:00 p.m. on November 12, 2002, when Ahmad Zaidan, the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan, received acall on his cell phone from a strange number. A man with a Pakistani accent said in English, “I have something interesting and a scoop for you. Meet me at Melody Market, behind the Islamabad hotel.” Zaidan drove through a heavy rainstorm and parked his car at the market, usually crowded with hawkers and shoppers, but now deserted because of the bad weather and late hour. As soon as he got out of the car, a man with his face wrapped in a scarf approached him and handed him an audiotape, saying, “This is from Osama bin Laden.”
    Zaidan demanded “Hold on,” but bin Laden’s messenger vanished as quickly as he had materialized. Zaidan shoved the audiocassette in the tape player of his car and recognized immediately that it was bin Laden’s voice, and that what al-Qaeda’s leader was saying on the tape was definitive proof that he had survived the Tora Bora battle. It was quite a scoop for Al Jazeera.
    Back at his office, Zaidan started feeding the bin Laden audiotape to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar. The news soon flashed around the world: “Bin Laden Alive.”On the tape bin Laden celebrated a string of recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by his followers: the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia, the attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, and the suicide bombings at two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed two hundred mostly young Western tourists. This was a comprehensive “proof of life,” and any faint hopes that bin Laden might have succumbed to the wounds he sustained at Tora Bora had been dashed. The night the tape surfaced, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called President Bush in his residential quarters at the White House to tell him the bad news that bin Laden was alive and well.
    Bin Laden was alive, but where was he? The consensus in the U.S. government for the first few years after 9/11 was that he was hiding in or around Pakistan’s tribal areas, where al-Qaeda had started to rebuild itself after the Battle of Tora Bora. Some intelligence officials also thought he might be living in the far north of Pakistan, in the sparsely populated mountains of Chitral. This analysis was based in part on trees native to the region that could be seen in a 2003 video of bin Laden, and on thelength of time it seemed to take for audiotapes from bin Laden to make their way to outlets such as Al Jazeera. When bin Laden commented on important news events, it usually took about three weeks for the tapes to make their way to the public. But even that pattern was sometimes upended. After al-Qaeda’s Saudi wing attacked the U.S. consulate in Jeddah in early December 2004, killing five employees, bin Laden released an audiotape crowing over this victory