A Reporter’s Quest for Osama bin Laden, the Unholy Grail

At the back, in a corner, sat a tall, straggly-bearded man in his early 30s, silent, taut-faced, and plainly, by his body language, deeply upset by a reporter’s intrusion. His name, I learned later from an officer of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, was Osama bin Laden. I never spoke to him that day, on what proved to be the only firsthand sighting I would have of the man whose terrorist murderousness — and success for so long in eluding history’s biggest manhunt — was to recast the story of our time.

For me, as for many foreign correspondents of my generation, Bin Laden was to become an obsessive figure, a sort of unholy grail, just as he was for the American commandos who finally tracked him down. A handful of reporters succeeded in interviewing him in the decade after my own encounter, always under cloak-and-dagger conditions, always at one of his hideaways in Afghanistan. But none were to meet him after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he became a figure to be seen only in the smuggled videotapes that became his sermons — and now his epitaph — for the world.

Still, even unseen, the man and his cause were revealed in all manner of ways to those who pursued him. My own journey included a eureka moment in the old bazaar in the Yemeni capital, Sana, in August 2001, when a visit to a video shop specializing in jihadi best-sellers produced, from beneath the counter, a set of fresh-from-the-courier tapes that included hours of Bin Laden addressing Qaeda loyalists in Afghanistan. From the excitement in the eyes of the wizened old man who sold me the tapes, I judged that they might contain something unusual.

After spending days poring over the tapes with an Arab-speaking scholar in a London garret, I came across a scene from early 2001 in which the Qaeda leader, apparently somewhere near Kandahar, framed against an azure sky in the flowing white robes of an ancient prophet, spoke to a gathering that seemed to include would-be suicide bombers, hailing a reckoning that lay ahead for America, and for them. I included that anecdote in an article I wrote in the days before 9/11, when its imminent significance was not apparent. The article was on the pending list at The Times’s foreign desk when the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and it did not appear in the paper.

The following year, my haphazard pursuit took me on a trek into the mountains at Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, where American military might came closer to killing Bin Laden in December 2001 than at any time until the raid last week in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Frustrated by conflicting accounts as to whether Bin Laden had died in the American bombing at Tora Bora or had fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan along the frontier with Afghanistan, Times editors assigned me that spring to sort truth from fiction.

Starting at Bin Laden’s devastated hideout in the foothills, littered with paper fragments in Arabic and the detritus from a clinic that appeared to have been used for the kidney dialysis he was rumored to need, I set out along the path he would have taken up the mountain to the 14,000-foot saddle leading on to Pakistan.

All along the way, I met villagers who swore they knew the “sheik,” meaning Bin Laden, and several who said they had seen him, on horseback, riding up the rocky pathway with several other horsemen, and on into the Pakistan tribal area of Waziristan. The villagers appeared to have liked him, worshiped him even, a portent of how fraught the attempt to track him down over the following years would prove to be.

A few weeks earlier, I had another virtual encounter with the evanescent sheik, in a rented house on the prosperous outskirts of Faisalabad, a city that lies, like Abbottabad, a few hours’ drive from Pakistan’s tribal frontier. Forty-eight hours earlier, the house had been the target of a raid led by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that captured Abu Zubaydah, the fourth-highest-ranking Qaeda leader — after Bin Laden, his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11.