Wednesday 3 August 2022 06:48 AM How UK spies watched from Harrogate as the 9/11 Al-Qaeda chief was executed trends now

It was 6.18am on Sunday, more than an hour after dawn prayers, when the Supreme Leader of Al Qaeda appeared on the balcony of his safe house to enjoy a little sunshine and fresh air. 

For Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the masterminds of the 9/11 terror attacks, watching mornings unfold in the centre of the Afghan capital from his supposedly secure perch had become one of the few regular pleasures of his life in hiding. 

He wasn’t to know that his balcony was anything but safe and that Taliban spies in the pay of the Americans and the British had been monitoring him for months – their knowledge of his whereabouts so detailed that a scale model of his hideaway had sat on a table in President Biden’s White House office for weeks. 

And they were watching him again now, not only from Washington but also from a listening station in – of all places – Harrogate, North Yorkshire, after a Western-recruited intelligence source spotted him on the balcony. 

While Osama bin Laden was the charismatic figurehead of Al Qaeda, Zawahiri had been the cold-blooded brains of the outfit and, some experts believe, the real architect of the 2001 Twin Towers atrocity that claimed nearly 3,000 lives. 

Many Americans would no doubt have loved the 71-year- old Egyptian surgeon-turned-jihadist, who had a £20.5million bounty on his head, to have suffered a protracted punishment. But, as with Bin Laden, shot dead by US Navy Seals in a bedroom of his home in Pakistan in 2011, it wasn’t to be. 

A US Reaper drone circling tens of thousands of feet overhead launched two R9X Hellfire missiles, nicknamed the ‘ninja bomb’ due to the halo of six long sword-like blades that were deployed from inside the missile’s skin at the last moment to shred the target of the strike. 

Each reinforced metal warhead weighs 100lb and travels at 1,000mph, relying on the blunt force of the swirling blades rather than explosives to pulverise their target in an attempt to minimise harm to anyone else. Such was the speed of its approach that Zawahiri might well have heard nothing and his death would have been instantaneous. 

It was a triumphant end to an operation months in the planning.

Early April 2022 

It was in early April  that national security adviser Jake Sullivan first briefed President Biden that, after years of searching under four presidents, US intelligence was finally close to discovering Zawahiri. 

When he abruptly pulled the US out of Afghanistan in August last year – a widely-condemned move that led to the collapse of the Western-backed government and the return to power of the oppressive Taliban – Mr Biden did at least pledge that America would not allow the militant group to make the country once more a safe haven for terrorists. 

The Taliban had, of course, sheltered Al Qaeda when it carried out the 9/11 attacks and US intelligence, say officials, continued to watch the country for any signs of the terror group slipping back into the country once its old allies were back in power. 

According to a senior Taliban official, Zawahiri – who took over Al Qaeda after the US killed Osama bin Laden – had never left the country. After he became one of the world’s most wanted men in September 2001 and a US-led invasion expelled the Taliban that year, Zawahiri spent most of his time in the remote mountains of Musa Qala in the southern Helmand province. 

He kept a low profile, said the Taliban leader, although he crossed into Pakistan’s border regions several times. The founders of Islamic State reportedly sought an alliance with the destroyers of the World Trade Centre but, unimpressed by Zawahiri’s cautious leadership, changed their minds. 

According to intelligence insiders, just as Bin Laden’s whereabouts were revealed by following his courier, so Zawahiri’s family gave away his location. 

While Zawahiri had been obsessed with personal security, the return to power of the Taliban opened new possibilities. 

British security sources reportedly also became aware around April that Zawahiri’s family had moved from Helmand to Kabul. 

The terror leader married four times and had seven children, although at least four of them had died along with his first wife Azza. 

He was living with only one wife and a daughter when – under the protection of the Haqqani Network, a militant and ultra-violent faction considered to a semi-independent offshoot of the Taliban – he moved into a high-walled compound in Sherpur, a relatively affluent part of central Kabul. 

The house reportedly belongs to an aide to Haqqani leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s interior minister. Sherpur, once the diplomatic quarter, is now home to senior Taliban officials, who may have not been aware of his arrival. 

US intelligence insiders say they discovered the location and identified those inside through various sources, including – the Mail has learnt – personnel inside the Taliban recruited by British spies who provided significant elements of the information used to plan and execute the mission.

May-June

After British and US intelligence discovered that Zawahiri had arrived in Kabul, they launched a surveillance operation that put properties owned by the Haqqani under observation. 

After focusing on one house, intelligence and counter-terrorism officials worked to establish definitively that Zawahiri was indeed in the house and then establish the ‘pattern of life’ – the daily routine and movements – of those inside. 

It wouldn’t have been an easy task but, over time, US and British spies familiarised themselves with the behaviour of the house’s occupants, and, in particular, a woman they identified as Zawahiri’s wife. 

US intelligence noticed she was using established terrorist ‘tradecraft’ techniques to avoid leading anyone to her husband’s lair. Zawahiri, meanwhile, never left the compound although he occasionally appeared briefly, sitting on a balcony overlooking its walls. 

With Mr Biden distracted by Ukraine, a ‘very small and select’ group of officials put together a range of options for him.

July 1 

In the White House crisis command centre dubbed the Situation Room, Mr Biden, who had just returned after five days in Europe, was briefed on a proposed strike. 

The operation was complicated by the need to avoid a repeat of an action that ended in tragedy. Days before the US’s military withdrawal from Kabul, a drone strike had killed an aid worker and nine members of his family after they were wrongly identified as members of an IS-linked terror group. 

Mr Biden – who as vice-president opposed the 2011 mission to remove Osama bin Laden – was determined a case of mistaken identity wouldn’t happen again. 

At the meeting in the Situation Room, Mr Biden viewed the scale model of the safe house and grilled advisers, including CIA Director William Burns, that Zawahiri was hiding there. 

The President asked them to consider the potential consequences for Mark Frerichs, an American held by the Tailban for more than two years, as well as Afghans who had helped the US, who remain in Afghanistan.