Osama bin Laden’s hideout? A little bird told them

A rare species of game bird brought the CIA within striking distance of Osama bin Laden, two years before the 9/11 attacks. One of the great missed opportunities in US espionage is now under the microscope.

Osama bin Laden.

It was a rare species of game bird, known as the houbara bustard, that brought the CIA within striking distance of Osama bin Laden, almost two years before the September 11 attacks.

The al-Qaeda leader was a wanted fugitive and had already grown accustomed to a transient life, slipping from one remote hide-out to another. But in February 1999, he made a serious miscalculation. While Bin Laden had long kept to hiding in one location for no more than 24 hours, on this occasion he broke with protocol. US intelligence sources had tracked him to the hunting camp, in western Afghanistan, but crucially decided against taking him out in a missile strike, fearing the Arab sheik hosting the hunt would also be killed. Rued as one of the great missed opportunities in US espionage, the strategic manoeuvrings behind finding and eliminating Bin Laden are set out in the compelling podcast, True Spies: Espionage, which draws on former intelligence advisers and journalists to tell the story “from the ground”.

Hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center and explodes at 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001 in New York City.

It’s difficult to grasp the wild cross-currents that turned Bin Laden – the son of a Yemeni billionaire who made his fortune in building projects across the Arabian Peninsula – into a fanatical jihadist and one of the world’s most reviled terrorists. But the three-part series paints a vivid and accessible portrait of the young demagogue, tracing the impact of the Soviet invasion, the influence of the Gulf War and the slow burn of radicalisation that impelled Bin Laden to establish al-Qaeda and mastermind the September 11 attacks.

The link between Anglo-US espionage is a dominant thread that runs through the True Spies podcast, with a series of episodes devoted to the so-called “special relationship” during World War II and the Cold War. But it’s the episodes that fall outside the world of James Bond and George Smiley that offer the most improbable and compelling accounts of the Atlantic spy partnership.

Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.

In an earlier episode on the legendary 1917 Zimmermann Telegram – which secretly proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico should the US enter the war – listeners are introduced to the remarkable British codebreaker Nigel de Gray and the enigmatic naval intelligence boss, William “Blinker” Hall. At the direction of Hall, the Royal Navy began dredging and cutting German telegraph cables running through the English Channel, forcing the enemy to use neutral American cables to transmit their messages. The interception of the Zimmermann Telegram – named after the Kaiser’s foreign minister – came when German high command sent its encrypted proposal from Berlin via Copenhagen to Washington and then on to Mexico. What the Germans and US did not know, however, was that all messages were being captured by Hall and his codebreakers at the Admiralty in London. Deciphering the Zimmermann Telegram proved decisive in the development of the Anglo-US alliance, and eventually set in motion a chain of events that drew the US into the conflict on the Western Front.

Then US President Barack Obama (2nd L) and Vice President Joe Biden (L), US Secretray of Defense Robert Gates (R) and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2nd R) along with members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House on May 1, 2011.

In True Spies, episodes such as the Bin Laden files and the Zimmermann Telegram, benefit from the voices of former intelligence officials and agents who explain the job, interpret past operations and set the scene for those of us who’ve come in from the cold.