Through our Enemies’ Eyes

"I first met Michael Scheuer almost a decade ago, when I started to try to understand the phenomenon of Al-Qaeda post 9/11. Before I met him, I remember getting hold of his book and reading it on a beach in Greece. And again, it was well written. He has written several books since then, he has just done a new one on Bin Laden. But as head of the Bin Laden unit, which was set up before the [1998] East African embassy bombings, the crucial thing about this first book is that he viewed Al-Qaeda in a different way. Just like me, he was trying to understand the nature of the organisation, the kind of people involved, their background and motivation, and critically why they were doing what they were doing. When I read this book I thought it was a really, really important book, because it challenges many of the myths and stereotypes about terrorism in general, and Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden in particular. I am just writing this at the moment for the paperback, and I am doing a pretty detailed account of the operation, how it was carried out, the background to it, but also the repercussions of it. Yes, and I am not categorical in my prognosis. I always thought that one day I would wake up and hear on the news that they had got Bin Laden, if he hadn’t died of natural causes. Well, I wasn’t surprised it was in Pakistan because it was always thought he was in the tribal areas of Pakistan, hiding away in a cave somewhere in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But I was, like everybody else, utterly amazed that he was living about 80 miles from Islamabad in a compound with up to 18-foot-high walls, only a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s leading military academy in effectively a garrison town, not unlike a cross between Sandhurst and Aldershot. Everybody was utterly amazed at that, and I am sure the CIA equally so. Whether certain elements of the ISI [Pakistan’s intelligence agency] knew about it is the key question. I find it virtually inconceivable that Bin Laden had been living there for five years and there was no inkling of who he was or who was living in that compound. It was unfortunate. Inevitably, conspiracy theories are going to arise because the world is full of conspiracy theories about Al-Qaeda and 9/11 and [the] 7/7 [attacks on the London transport system in 2005]. I think what was surprising is that the same meticulous planning and care that went into the operation appears not to have been applied to the publication and dissemination of it. So you start off with statements from the White House implying that he went down with all guns blazing, using his wife as a human shield. Then the White House have to counter this by saying he was unarmed at the time, his wife wasn’t being used as a human shield – in other words that he was killed as an unarmed person. And that raises whole questions about what the orders were. Was it a kill or capture mission? Was it ever likely that he was going to be captured and brought back to trial? Highly unlikely, I think. I think perhaps because they simply didn’t know. They assumed that he would be armed and they assumed that he would have resisted. I had always thought that Bin Laden was in a cave surrounded by bodyguards, who would be protecting him 24/7 and anybody who tried to kill him would have to kill all the bodyguards first. It could not have been more different. He had no bodyguards. The only person who resisted the Navy Seals was the person who appears to have been the courier, who opened up on them with an AK-47 and was shot dead. Bin Laden’s son was unarmed and so were the others who were killed. And I think the assumption from the White House, fed back by the Navy Seals, was he did resist or he would have resisted. It was all slightly unclear. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But I can understand that once the Seals were out in their helicopters, leaving the crashed one behind, Obama and the White House were just keen to get the news out, and perhaps they were a little over-hasty in giving an account that was proven not to be true. Maybe it was an adrenaline rush that they had, but the fact that they had to revise the story fuelled all the conspiracy theories. Well, it still exists. It doesn’t have a charismatic head like Bin Laden, but just because Bin Laden has gone it doesn’t mean to say that Al-Qaeda is dead and buried. Al-Qaeda has an organisational structure and it appears that Bin Laden was still very much involved in it whilst he was in the compound, but all its various affiliates are still going strong. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and in Yemen were much more directly involved with Bin Laden in Pakistan than we ever thought they were. Many of the most dangerous attacks recently have been carried out not by Al-Qaeda central and Bin Laden, but in particular by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The fight against Al-Qaeda isn’t over, and anyone who thinks it is because Bin Laden is dead is living in cloud-cuckoo-land."