1

Prologue

november ≤∂, ≤≠≠∞. around noon.

Checkpoints were common as potholes on the roads of Afghani-

stan. Salim Ahmed Salim Hamdan, driving north on Highway 4 in a

Toyota hatchback, was not surprised to be stopped by a group of

armed men as he approached the fortified town of Takht-e Pol.

Afghanistan was at war. It had been at war for decades. On

October 7, less than a month after terrorist attacks obliterated the

Twin Towers in New York and destroyed part of the Pentagon in

Washington, the United States had become the latest entrant in the

Afghan wars. American air strikes and Special Forces backed a loose

confederation of militias hostile to the ruling Taliban movement, but

here, in Kandahar province, the Taliban still dominated. The city of

Kandahar, according to legend founded by Alexander the Great, was

the home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, a half-blind cleric who led

the Taliban with the aid of Pakistani intelligence. Highway 4 ran

southeast from Kandahar to the frontier, into the Pakistani province

of Baluchistan and its capital, Quetta. In recent decades, Quetta had

been transformed by an influx of Afghan refugees and the elements

that inevitably accompanied them: arms dealers, drug smugglers,

factional cadre, intelligence agents. The city, which sat just outside the

war zone, was a haven for various parties with an interest in Afghani-

stan. As the American-led campaign turned toward Kandahar, more

Afghans would set out along Highway 4 seeking safety in Quetta.

But Hamdan was headed the other way: to Kandahar. And to his

apparent surprise, the fighters at the checkpoint weren’t Taliban but

part of the enemy Pashtun militia. Hours before, American air strikes

had blasted out Takht-e Pol’s Taliban defenders, allowing fighters

from the eight-hundred-man militia under the warlord Gul Sharzai

to enter the town without firing a shot.1 These fighters, nominally

2 prologue

loyal to the former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, were clandestinely

obliged to the Central Intelligence Agency.2

Sharzai’s men had set up highway roadblocks north and south

of Takht-e Pol, which would serve as a staging ground for a coming

assault on Kandahar, after another American-paid Pashtun militia—

this one headed by Hamid Karzai—arrived from the north. Tra≈c

had been slight. Earlier, a white van had tried to blow past the check-

point, prompting a shootout that left two Egyptian occupants dead

and a third man captured, a Moroccan whose name would turn out

to be Said Boujaadia.3

Hamdan was not so bold. He tried to flee, but the Afghans

nabbed him and immediately identified him as an Arab. He was being

dragged away to an uncertain fate when the American o≈cer manag-

ing the Sharzai operation, Major Hank Smith, showed up to see what

the shooting was about. The Pashtuns pointed to two SA-7 Grail

surface-to-air missiles in battered, olive-drab carrying tubes. They

said the missiles had been taken from the Arab’s car.

With barely a dozen Americans on hand—soldiers and CIA—

Smith hardly was equipped to deal with enemy prisoners of war. Still,

Afghan militias were even less inclined to take prisoners, and sum-

mary execution of captured enemies was not unknown as a local

tradition. Smith had his American soldiers take Hamdan and Bou-

jaadia, hooded and bound, to a nearby shack.

A search of the Toyota turned up two passports, Yemen Airways

tickets for Hamdan and a woman named Fatima, a handheld radio,

brevity codes—a form of radio shorthand—and a folder with news-

paper and magazine articles about al Qaeda. Plenty of cash was found

—$1,900, plus about $260 in Pakistani rupees. There was a passport

photo envelope from Razi’s Portrait Inn Studio and Express Lab,

located in Unit 44 of the Shalimar Shopping Center in Karachi, Paki-

stan. There were five photos of a baby girl. And there were letters.

One, handwritten in Arabic on a page ripped from a small spiral-

bound notebook, was addressed to ‘‘Brother Saqr.’’

‘‘I hope you and all the brothers with you are well,’’ it read. ‘‘If

prologue 3

possible, please send me 25 to 30 original Russian Pikka’’—a type of

machine gun—‘‘belts. Likewise, if you can find Pikka magazines. Most

of the Pikkas we have do not have them and we are in urgent need

of them. Even Grenav’’—another Soviet-made weapon—‘‘magazines

will work. We cut them o√ and adapt them for the Pikka in the

workshop. Please do whatever you can.

‘‘Your brother, Khallad.’’

P.S. ‘‘Can you find three military compasses for us? They said

there are a lot of them in Kabul.’’4

Major Smith looked at the SA-7s, now sitting on the tailgate of a

blue pickup. By themselves, they were inoperable. No launchers or

firing mechanisms had been found.

The Taliban had no air force. The only planes in the sky, the only

possible target for a surface-to-air missile—the sort of weapon that in

the 1980s, when supplied by Washington to the mujahideen, had

proved so devastating to the Soviet military—was the American-led

coalition air forces. After photographing the missiles to include in a

future report, Smith ordered them destroyed. Not so Hamdan’s car.

He a≈xed an orange insignia to the hood, the signal to coalition air

forces that the vehicle was friendly, and gave the car to one of his local

interpreters. Smith considered it a form of ‘‘recycling.’’5

Small and swarthy, Hamdan sat on the dirt floor of a mud hut,

his hands bound before him in flexicu√s. With a video camera run-

ning, a masked US Army interrogator questioned him in Arabic. An

armed guard stood behind the prisoner, remaining silent as the inter-

rogator struggled to make himself understood through his heavy

American accent.

Hamdan spoke rapidly, his eyes bright, his smile and occasional

nervous laugh suggesting he knew his number was up. He said he had

come to Afghanistan as a relief worker for al Wafa, an Islamic charity.

But with the recent fighting, he had borrowed a car to take his wife

and daughter to safety in Pakistan. The car wasn’t his—he had bor-

rowed it from somebody named Abu Yasser—and neither were most

of the items found in it. Sure, he knew there were SA-7s in the trunk,

4 prologue

he said, but they must have belonged to Abu Yasser. Yes, he had heard

of al Qaeda, but he knew little about it. ‘‘I heard that they train people

who come to Afghanistan for training,’’ he said. Perhaps he didn’t

expect ever to leave that hut. ‘‘I am not lying to you,’’ he said.

‘‘It’s all finished for me, why should I lie?’’

years later, from a cell at Guantanamo Bay, Hamdan re-

called the events somewhat di√erently. He had been working in Kabul

when the fighting began in October 2001, and feared for his wife and

daughter in Kandahar. So he asked his boss, Osama bin Laden, for

permission to go to them. ‘‘I decided to borrow a car to drive my

family to Pakistan,’’ he said.6 After depositing them near the border, ‘‘I

tried to return to Afghanistan to return the car to its owner,’’ and to

sell his belongings to raise enough money to get the family back

to Yemen. But he was stopped by Afghans ‘‘looking for Arabs to sell to

American forces. When they stopped me, they had already taken

another Arab who they shot and killed. I tried to flee, but I failed and

they captured me again. They tied my hands and feet behind me like

an animal with electrical wire . . . so tight that the wire cut me.’’

He was taken to a house and then moved to another, ‘‘for seven

days, where I was questioned by a man in a military uniform who

spoke Arabic and said he was an American. The Afghan soldiers told

me they had gotten $5,000 from the Americans for me,’’ Hamdan

said. He said he saw the money himself.

According to the account dictated from his jail cell in 2004,

Salim Hamdan was born in 1969, perhaps, in the rural village of

Khoreiba in the southeastern Yemeni region of Hadhramout. That

was two years after the British pulled out of the country, which they

had ruled as the protectorate of Aden. The newly independent state,

following then-fashionable ideological fads, proclaimed itself the

People’s Republic of South Yemen and later the People’s Democratic

Republic of Yemen, a minor satellite in the Soviet orbit. In contrast,

the adjacent Yemen Arab Republic, better known as North Yemen,

independent since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World

prologue 5

War I, tilted more toward the West, despite its squabbles with adja-

cent Saudi Arabia. The rival Yemens, among the poorest countries in

the Arab world, fought occasional battles that commanded little at-

tention outside the region, until in 1990, in an equally overlooked

event, the two states merged.

It was unclear what impact these political developments had on

Salim Hamdan. Orphaned as a child, educated perhaps to a fourth-

grade level, he spent the 1980s living with relatives in the port city of

Mukalla, working odd jobs. At age twenty, he drifted westward to the

newly unified Yemen’s capital, San’a, ‘‘to seek better employment

opportunities,’’ he said. He drove a dabbab, a type of jitney, but for-

tune passed him by until 1996, when he met a man seeking recruits

‘‘to aid Muslims struggling against the communists in Tajikistan,’’ he

said. That former Soviet republic, on Afghanistan’s northern border,

was the next target for the international Islamic fundamentalist

movement that had toppled the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul.

Traveling to Afghanistan via Pakistan, Hamdan proved less than

a relentless mujahid for the Tajik struggle. ‘‘I met with other Muslims

who were going to Tajikistan,’’ he recounted. ‘‘We traveled by plane,

then by car and then by foot until we got to Badashaw,’’ on the Tajik

border. But ‘‘the forces at Tajikistan wouldn’t allow us to go further,

and the weather in the mountains was bad.’’ Rather than battle the

elements or the border guards, ‘‘we turned around and left for Kabul.’’

Hamdan said he just wanted to go home to Yemen, but a comrade

named Muhammad reminded him there was no work to be found

there. Besides, there was a better opportunity. Muhammad had got-

ten a lead on a suitable job for Hamdan. ‘‘He took me to a farm in

Jalalabad, where I met Osama bin Laden,’’ Hamdan said. The emir

‘‘o√ered me a job as a driver on a farm he owned, bringing Afghan

workers from the local village to work and back again.’’ As the year

passed, Hamdan gained bin Laden’s confidence. He ‘‘began to have

me drive him to various places,’’ Hamdan said.

Bin Laden’s family also came from Hadhramout—his father

Mohammed was born there—which perhaps explains the austere ide-

6 prologue

ologue’s a≈nity toward his barely literate driver.7 Soon, bin Laden was

functioning as a surrogate father, even arranging for Hamdan’s mar-

riage. Bin Laden sent Hamdan and another courtier recruited from the

Tajik expedition, Nasser al-Bahri, to Yemen to marry sisters. Al-Bahri,

a Saudi who adopted the nom de guerre Abu Jandal, had become one

of bin Laden’s chief bodyguards. He now was also brother-in-law to

Hamdan, who would himself take an al Qaeda name of Saqr al Jed-

dawi, the Hawk of Jeddah.

hamdan’s resistance training proved somewhat deficient.

After capture at the checkpoint, Hamdan later recounted, ‘‘I helped

and cooperated with the Americans in every way,’’ even though—or

perhaps because—they ‘‘physically abused’’ him. ‘‘When I took them

to the places I had driven Osama bin Laden, they would threaten me

with death, torture or prison when I did not know the answers to

their questions. One of their methods to threaten was to put a pistol

on the table in front of me’’ and ask, ‘‘ ‘What do you think?’ ’’

Within weeks of September 11, the United States had orches-

trated regime change in Afghanistan. Directed by intelligence units

like the one Major Smith commanded and backed by coalition air

power, the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban militias pushed

out the black-turbaned Islamist foe. Prisoners, by the hundreds, were

a dividend of this surprisingly rapid success. With US forces o√ering

bounties for al Qaeda fighters, typically five thousand dollars or so,

Afghan tribesmen turned over hundreds more, assuring the Ameri-

cans that the prisoners were terrorists.

The US commander, General Tommy Franks, didn’t want the

small number of ground troops he had in Afghanistan tied up guard-

ing enemy prisoners. That suited the Bush administration. It had de-

veloped plans to build a special kind of detention center in the Pen-

tagon’s own time zone, at the US naval base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A

new enemy would face a special kind of reckoning, trial by military

commission, that could see prisoners prosecuted, convicted, and ex-

ecuted at President George W. Bush’s command. O≈cials called it

prologue 7

‘‘rough justice.’’ Guantanamo would be al Qaeda’s Nuremberg, the end

of the line for perpetrators of monstrous crimes.

Yet Guantanamo held no Mullah Omar, no Ayman al-Zawahiri,

no Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda’s high command somehow had evaded

the campaign the Pentagon called Operation Enduring Freedom.

A handful of real al Qaeda commanders would fall into Ameri-

can hands—Abdelrahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh, and the ter-

rorist entrepreneur who conceived the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed. The Bush White House, however, would decide that

these men were far too important to put on trial. They were sent

instead to years of secret detention and sometimes brutal interroga-

tion within a clandestine prison network the CIA operated overseas.

Despite pledging to bring the 9/11 conspirators to justice, President

Bush hid them from prosecutors and even the abbreviated trial pro-

cess he had prescribed for the alien enemy.

Pentagon prosecutors, ordered to create a justice system from

scratch, scoured their prisoner lists for suitable defendants. Bin Laden

had gotten away. But they had his driver.