Then came reports that not only galvanized the analysts in Tel Aviv but also those in every major intelligence service; Osama bin Laden could be among the dead. Informers had told their intelligence controllers that he had been seen in the devastated area. One report said his face looked thinner. Could that be an indication his kidney condition had worsened? In recent weeks, Mossad had discovered that bin Laden had received from China a portable kidney dialysis machine. Drones, unmanned aircraft launched by U.S. Special Forces to overfly the search area, reported that all power supplies had been destroyed. In Islamabad, President Pervez Musharraf agreed to a CIA request to keep rescue teams looking for earthquake survivors from entering the search area for bin Laden and Husin. In Washington bin Laden watchers joined the speculation. Bruce Hoffman at the RAND Corporation, a think tank with good connections in the U.S. intelligence community, said that if bin Laden had survived he could have made his way back into Afghanistan. Milt Beardman, a CIA officer with hands-on experience of the search area, added: “If bin Laden is dead the world will never know. We just have to wait until somebody drags out his body, does the DNA checks, and says ‘this is bin Laden.’ My bet is that it won’t happen.”
Nevertheless the speculation continued. Donald Rumsfeld, the feisty U.S. secretary of Defence, said it was now almost a year since bin Laden had made his last public appearance, and he could be dead; Nature’s justice. “No longer the face of al Qaeda,” Rumsfeld had mused. Certainly on the jihadist Web sites Mossad analysts noticed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq, was increasingly labeled as a prime mover in the dream of restoring the Islamic caliphate.
On one of the Web sites appeared a chilling document titled:
On October 18, a deep-cover Mossad agent in Tehran recorded a conversation between bin Laden’s oldest son, Saad, and his siblings Mohammed and Othman. The three men were living in secure compounds in the city suburbs from where they ran terrorist operations rather than languishing under house arrest as the Iran government claimed. In the conversation, Saad reported he had spoken that day to his father, who wanted his sons to know he was alive and well. The recording was made ten days after the earthquake had struck.
Shortly afterward came the first clue for Mossad analysts that there was a shift of power in the upper echelons of al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan the CIA had intercepted a letter to be hand-couriered from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-time deputy to bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s long-time strategist, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose ruthless bombing campaign in Iraq had brought a $25 million bounty on his head, posted by the United States. A copy of the letter was sent to Mossad to study. Its analysts were surprised: while the usual flowery Arabic remained, there was a sharpness to the tone over the deaths of many hundreds of Shias who had died in suicide bombings launched by al-Zarqawi. Zawahiri questioned “the wisdom of such a policy by you. Such action is not acceptable to our Shia supporters and will do nothing to achieve our aims. I have personally tasted the bitterness of American brutality when my family was killed in a bombing attack in Afghanistan. Despite that I say to you: we are in a battle and more than half of that battle is fought in the media. What you are doing is killing our Shia brothers and it will not help us win that battle.”
Days later al-Zarqawi delivered his response. On a cold night in Amman, his suicide bombers lit the sky over the Jordanian capital with massive explosions that seriously damaged three hotels and a nightclub, which in the tourist season would be filled with foreign visitors. But on that night, the majority of the ninety-six dead and scores of wounded were Arabs, including a number of Shia families who had traveled over the border from Iraq to holiday after Ramadan.
The atrocity was seen by Mossad analysts as evidence al-Zarqawi was making a grim presentation to the al-Qaeda membership that he was their leader in waiting.
