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X—WHERE IS ZAWAHIRI?
As a man of science, Zawahiri was interested in the use of biological and chemical warfare. In a memo from April of 1999, he observed that "the destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons," and proposed that Islamic Jihad conduct research into biological and chemical agents. "Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply," he noted. He pored over medical journals to research the subject, and he met with an Egyptian scientist in Afghanistan, Medhat Mursi al-Sayed, whose Jihad name was Abu Khabab. C.I.A. officials believe that Khabab prepared the explosives for the bomb that hit the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. Khabab supervised elementary tests of nerve gas; satellite photos purportedly show corpses of dogs scattered about one of the camps near Tora Bora, and Al Qaeda training videos recently acquired by CNN show that poison gas had been tested on dogs. "We knew from hundreds of different sources that Al Qaeda was interested in biological and chemical weapons," says Richard A. Clarke, who was the Clinton Administration's national coördinator for counterterrorism in the National Security Council and is now in charge of cybersecurity for the N.S.C. Clarke told me that in one of the camps human volunteers, wearing protective clothing, were exposed to chemicals in tests similar to ones that the U.S. Army has conducted. During the invasion of Afghanistan, American forces discovered a factory under construction, near Kandahar, that intelligence officials say was to be used for the production of anthrax. A sample of anthrax powder was reportedly found in Zawahiri's house in Afghanistan. According to reports from Israel and Russia, bin Laden paid Chechen mobsters millions of dollars in cash and heroin to obtain radiological "suitcase" bombs left over from the Soviets. He declared in November, 2001, "We have chemical and nuclear weapons," and vowed to use them "if America used them against us."

According to a source in the C.I.A., American agents came close to apprehending Zawahiri a month before September 11th, when he travelled to Yemen for medical treatments. "The Egyptian intelligence service briefed us that he was in a hospital in Sanaa," the person told me. "We sent a few people over there, and they made a colossal screwup. While our guys were conducting a surveillance of the hospital, the guards caught them with their videocameras." The plan was compromised, and Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan.

On September 11th, Zawahiri, bin Laden, and their followers evacuated their quarters in Kandahar and fled into the mountains, where they listened to an Arabic radio station's news flashes about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. According to a C.I.A. report about the events of that morning, at 9:53 A.M., between the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon and the downing of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, a member of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was overheard saying that the attackers were following through on "the doctor's program."

On December 3rd, American bombers struck a heavily fortified complex of caves near Jalalabad. When the ground troops arrived, they discovered more than a hundred bodies, and they were able to identify eighteen of them as top Al Qaeda lieutenants. Zawahiri's wife, Azza, and their children were also said to have been killed, but, according to the F.B.I., there is no confirming evidence of this.

"I'll never forget the first time I saw Azza after a long absence when I went to visit her in Pakistan," Nabila Galal recalled when she heard the reports of her daughter's death. "She was waiting for me at the airport with her three little daughters wearing hijabs. They smiled at me, and I will never forget those little children's smiles. Could it be true they all died in the same instant? By the grace of God, we will be hastened."

I asked Azza's older brother, Essam, whether his mother has kept any letters from her daughter in Afghanistan. "Yes," he said, "but she is very ill and very upset and I don't want to cause her any more grief by bringing up this subject. She gets asthma attacks every time she thinks about what happened. I tell her that everything's going to be fine and that, inshallah, nothing happened to my sister."

A Northern Alliance commander announced that Zawahiri, too, had been killed in the American bombing, but there was no reliable evidence of his death, either. On December 16th, Zawahiri was quoted by a Cairo-based reporter for Al-Majallah. "We are not hiding in caves or avoiding confrontation," he said. "Suicide is a goal that we seek." Because Zawahiri's remarks were dictated to the reporter by an Al Qaeda middleman, it is not possible to know if they are genuine.

There is a videotape of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri which shows them sitting on a blanket beside a mountain stream—or, in the view of some intelligence analysts, an artificial backdrop—talking about the jihad operations of September 11th. (Their comments are interspersed with scenes from a martyrdom tape of a young man named Ahmed al-Haznawy, one of the hijackers, but the footage with bin Laden and Zawahiri is thought to have been shot sometime in December.) On the tape, a pallid bin Laden says little. Zawahiri is wearing a white galabeya, a black turban, and a vest. Although the black turban may be a sign that he is in mourning for the death of his family, he appears healthy and content. "This great victory was possible only by the grace of God," he says with quiet pride. "This was not just a human achievement—it was a holy act. These nineteen brave men who gave their lives for the cause of God will be well taken care of. God granted them the strength to do what they did. There's no comparison between the power of these nineteen men and the power of America, and there's no comparison between the destruction these nineteen men caused and the destruction America caused."

This may have been Zawahiri's last public statement. Some American intelligence officials believe that he was killed by Pakistani mercenaries as he was riding in an ambulance after being wounded by an American bomb. The killers allegedly buried him, along with other Al Qaeda fighters, in a snowbank, where he lay until spring, when Canadian troops dug up some of the remains. The skull of a corpse believed to be Zawahiri's was sent to a laboratory at F.B.I. headquarters, in Washington. Forensic technicians compared the DNA of the skull with that of Mohammed al-Zawahiri, which is contained in a vial that the Bureau obtained from Egyptian authorities. Tests showed that the skull was not Zawahiri's.

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Courtesy: The New Yorker

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