I always travel light, bringing only my Thuraya satellite phone, a change of clothes and a notebook. I don’t carry a bottle of mineral water or packaged biscuits–items that give you away as being “Western.” I also have to keep my Thuraya out of sight. To many, a satphone identifies you as a spy, because U.S. forces liberally handed out Thurayas to their allied warlords and agents. Others see a satphone as the sign of a Taliban operative. Once when I was traveling with a Taliban source near the border with Iran, we were stopped at a warlord’s checkpoint. If these gunmen had found me with a Thuraya, I would have been in big trouble. Luckily, we were able to shove the phone inside the taxi’s broken seat. And, of course, many other folks I run across simply want to take the phone for themselves. One night in a seedy hotel filled with smugglers, I desperately needed to make a phone call but was warned by the hotel’s owner that the traffickers would probably kill me and steal the phone if I displayed it. So I walked out the hotel’s back door and into the night to make the call. The owner warned me not to: “Land mines,” he said.
In reporting on the elusive bin Laden, I’ve fortunately been able to call on sources my family and I have known for years. Islamic religious students used to flock to my father’s bookshop where we lived in an Afghan refugee camp in northwestern Pakistan. Some of these men later became senior officials in the Taliban. So when I became a reporter in the mid-1990s, I used to call on these contacts in Kabul. Since the collapse of the Taliban in late 2001, I’ve remained in touch with many of these men largely via satellite phone. (Most senior sources in the Taliban and Al Qaeda have–and freely use–satphones even though U.S. intelligence claims that its electronic-eavesdropping equipment can pinpoint the location from which the calls originate.) These contacts have, in turn, introduced me to other Taliban and Qaeda operatives and to fighters on both sides of the border.
Of course, not everyone appreciates my reporting efforts. After I reported the NEWSWEEK story in September that pinpointed bin Laden’s hideout high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan’s Konar province near the Pakistan border, I received threats from a number of people accusing me of selling out the “sheik.” One senior Qaeda man even called NEWSWEEK “the most wicked magazine.” Hearing that, I decided it was time to move with my family to a more secure area.
