The Man Who Knew Bin Laden: A Biographical Sketch of Hassan Ghul

The Man Who Knew Bin Laden: A Biographical Sketch of Hassan Ghul

There is not much known about Hassan Ghul, the alleged conduit whose information led to the killing of former al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. The mysterious Hassan Ghul was an important al-Qaeda facilitator, financier and messenger of Pakistani descent with Saudi residency. Ghul mostly operated inside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also flew to Saudi Arabia to finance al-Qaeda operations.  He was very closely associated with the Palestinian Abu Zubaydah (a.k.a., Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, Tariq), and his network that operated separately from al-Qaeda until around late 2000. [1]

In 1999, Ghul and Zubaydah registered an import/export business in Islamabad, Pakistan which functioned as an al-Qaeda safe house. In addition, at Zubaydah’s request, Ghul also successfully raised money in Saudi Arabia for the Khaldan militant training camp in Afghanistan. In exchange for doing so, Zubaydah allegedly paid for Ghul’s travel to the Kingdom in order for him to renew his Saudi residency. [2] In December 2000, Abu Zubaydah sent Hassan Ghul back to Saudi Arabia to raise money for potential attacks against Israel. [3]

Hassan Ghul also met several al-Qaeda members in Pakistan and Afghanistan, who were later imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. It was they who provided more details about Ghul during their respective interrogations. One such man was Mohammed Abd al-Rahman al-Shumrant [4], who Ghul met in a guesthouse in 1999. Al-Shumrant went to Pakistan to travel to training camps in Afghanistan. He also assisted Mohammed Y al-Zayley [5] in traveling to Afghanistan from Pakistan and met Mansur al-Rimi in Jalalabad, Afghanistan after 9/11. Furthermore, Ghul saw Ahmed Aziz (a.k.a. Abu Jafar) multiple times in a guesthouse in Kandahar in late 2001 after 9/11 and in Karachi in 2002 [6] after the U.S. bombing campaigns in Afghanistan forced the majority of al-Qaeda operatives to flee. 

Ghul was also in contact with Ziyad Sa’id Faraj al-Jahdali [7] and Khalid Adullah Mushad al-Mutayri [8]. Hassan Ghul and Zubaydah furthermore helped Mushabib al-Hamlan [9] to cross the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Hamlan, a Saudi national, was one of the individuals selected personally by bin Laden to act on 9/11 but eventually did not participate [10]. Furthermore it was likely that Hassan Ghul knew Abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally, since the leaked Guantanamo file reveals Abu Bakr Mahjoub went with Zarqawi to Lahore, Pakistan to meet Hassan Ghul [11].

Abu Zubaydah eventually was placed on the U.S. sanctions list by way of an Executive Order on September 23, 2001 [12]. Zubaydah was then captured by Pakistani security forces in a raid assisted by the CIA and FBI on March 28, 2002 (AFP, March 31, 2002). On June 20, 2002, Abu Zubaydah, revealed his connections with Ghul [12]. 

After the capture of Abu Zubaydah, Ghul continued his work as money handler and courier. It was at this point he became one of bin Laden’s clandestine messengers, working directly under Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. His task was to transfer funds and letters from bin Laden and al-Qaeda to senior al-Qaeda officials based in South Asia and the Middle East (Kurdistani Nwe, May 10). Ghul’s past personal contacts with Zarqawi made him the perfect man to travel to Iraq and to improve communications and links with Jamaat al-Tawhid w’al-Jihad (Group for Monotheism and Holy War), which later morphed into al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

The CIA pressed Pakistan to arrest Ghul for years. After 9/11 they learned he was being protected by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) at safe houses in the Lahore area. But Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), refused to capture Ghul (AP, June 15). But when the CIA figured out that Ghul was traveling to meet with al-Qaeda operatives who had gone to Iraq after the 2003 invasion to fight the occupying powers, the agency decided to act and contact Iraqi Kurdistan’s indigenous intelligence apparatus.

Approximately six weeks after Saddam’s capture in 2004, the CIA gave the Sulaymaniyah-based Counter Terrorism Group (CTG), which is headed by Lahur Talabani, a nephew of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, intelligence about Hassan Ghul. The CTG was established with the purpose to help thwart the threat of Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamist militant group based around Halabja. The CTG was entrusted by the U.S. to carry out the operation. The Ansar al-Islam camps were destroyed after joint operations by the Peshmerga of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and American special forces in late March 2003 (Kurdistani Nwe, March 29, 2003).

Hassan Ghul planned to enter northern Iraq from Iran. Smugglers were tasked to ferry Ghul to Baghdad from Iran and hand him over to someone else, but they tipped off the security services. At this time Abu-Mus’ab al-Zarqawi was based around Baghdad and Fallujah (Kurdistani Nwe, May 10).  Several Al-Qaeda fighters and former members of Ansar al-Islam who fled to Iran sought to return to Iraq and to join the al-Qaeda militants lead by al-Zarqawi (Kurdistani Nwe, May 10).

Ghul was detained by Kurdish CTG agents on January 23 2004 at a checkpoint in Kalar, near the Iranian border. After the arrest, Kurdish security officials faxed a photograph of Ghul to their CIA counterparts to confirm his identity (Rudaw, May 9). The documents carried by Ghul gave the CIA insights into both the near term plots and long-range plans of al-Qaeda at the time. Ghul’s capture was cited by former President George W. Bush in 2004 in an attempt to re-justify the Iraq war as al-Qaeda’s presence mushroomed inside Iraq in the post-2003 chaos there. 

Recently, American officials suggested the information provided by Ghul was a key break in the hunt for in bin Laden’s personal courier, Shaykh Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti. “Hassan Ghul was the linchpin” in finding and killing Osama bin Laden, an official told the Associated Press (AP, May 3). 

The Kurdish security forces found an important letter on Ghul, which, according to the American security forces, belonged to Zarqawi, while the Kurdish security chief, Lahur Talabani, said the letter was from Osama Bin Laden. The CTG forces did not recognize the significance of the arrest of Hassan Ghul and handed them over to the Americans who allegedly rewarded the Kurdish security forces and the smuggler who helped them to capture Ghul [13].

Ghul was taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan but was later removed over questions about whether the transfer was legal according to former CIA officials (AP, June 15). Ghul was then taken to bin Laden’s most trusted courier, al-Kuwaiti. It is believed the information regarding al-Kuwaiti eventually played a role in the assassination of bin Laden. 

Ghul told Americans that Ahmad al-Kuwaiti was a Kuwait national of Pakistani origin, not unlike Ramzi Yusuf or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ghul was listed as a close aide of Mustafa al-‘Uzayti (a.k.a. Abu-Faraj al-Libi) and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad successor, who was arrested in Pakistan in May 2005. Al-Libi was, at the time, in charge of al-Qaeda global operations.  Based on the information, al-Kuwaiti was one of the close contacts of Abu-Faraj al-Libi and must have visited bin Laden on a daily basis (Kurdistani Nwe, May 10). Therefore the CIA focused its efforts on locating al-Kuwaiti, which eventually led to the killing of bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch listed Hassan Ghul as number 22 on a list of 26 “ghost prisoners’’ that researchers believed were secretly in U.S. custody. Heavily redacted CIA memos from 2005 state that a CIA interrogation team obtained permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on him. [15]

The pressure of human rights groups caused the U.S. to rethink the imprisonment of Hassan Ghul. Two U.S. officials told Reuters that at some point the CIA turned him over to authorities in Pakistan (Reuters, May 12). At an undisclosed location in Pakistan, Ghul talked with a British detainee named Rangzieb Ahmed who was held in an adjacent cell. Ghul told Ahmed that he had been held in a secret CIA location for 2 1/2 years and had also passed through Morocco (AP, June 15).

The officials said their understanding is that in 2007, Pakistani authorities released Hassan Ghul from custody, despite pledges to the CIA to the contrary. The officials said Washington now believes Ghul has once again become a frontline militant fighter (Reuters, May 12; AP, July 12). There is a possibility he reactivated his ties with LeT, which many believe still has at least some backing of elements within the ISI.

Notes

1. Author interview with former Western counterterrorism analyst, May 17, 2011.
2. The 9/11 Commission Report, 22 July 2004.
3. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Abu Zubaydah, November 11, 2008. Accessible via Wikileaks at: https://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/pdf/gz/us9gz-010016dp.pdf.
4. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Muhammad Abd al-Rahman al-Shumrant, 24 October 24, 2008. Accessible via Wikileaks at: https://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/pdf/sa/us9sa-000195dp.pdf.
5. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Mohammed Y Al Zayley, March 3, 2006. Accessible via Wikileaks at: https://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/pdf/sa/us9sa-000055dp.pdf.
6. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Ahmed Aziz, February 27, 2008. Accessible via Wikileaks at: https://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/pdf/ym/us9ym-000578dp.pdf.
7. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Ziyad Sa’id Faraj al-Jahdali, December 8, 2005. Accessible via Wikileaks at: https://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/pdf/sa/us9sa-000286dp.pdf.
8. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Khalid Adullah Mushad al-Mutayri, February 1, 2008. Accessible via Wikileaks at: https://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/pdf/ku/us9ku-000213dp.pdf.
9. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Mushabib al-Hamlan.
10. 9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, July 22, 2004, p.15.
11. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Abu Bakr Mahjoub, August 22, 2008. Available at: https://media.mcclatchydc.com/smedia/2011/04/27/19/us9ly-000695dp.source.prod_affiliate.91.pdf.
12. US Department of Treasury–List + Executive Order 13224.
13. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment Khalid Adullah Mushad al-Mutayri, February 1, 2008. Accessible via Wikileaks at: https://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/pdf/ku/us9ku-000213dp.pdf.
14. Author interview with former Kurdish security official, June 22, 2011.
15. See Human Rights Watch report, “List of Ghost Prisoners” Allegedly in CIA Custody,” November 30, 2005. Available online at https://www.hrw.org/en/news/2005/11/30/list-ghost-prisoners-possibly-cia-custody.