Hunting Bin Laden - Sunday Times Long, Long Article Some Might Like

Biggins

I post a long article that is very, very interesting as I think some here might find it so too.
I hope thats ok with the mods.

Madman, brave man or both?
I suspect myself its a bit of the two.

Hunting Bin Laden

It seemed beyond belief: an American ex-convict hunting for Osama Bin Laden in the Hindu Kush. But the story is even weirder than that.

When they found him, Gary Brooks Faulkner was practically a dead man. His temperature was spiking — it would eventually reach 104.4F. His kidneys were failing, his blood was toxic, an infection had taken hold in his catheter and he could barely speak because of the immense pressure in his lungs. “I felt like I was freezing to death,” he remembers. “Like I’d been thrown into the icy waters of the Potomac River. The intensity, the adrenaline — it had been more than my body could take because my kidneys just ain’t no good. I was all outta juice, man. I needed my dialysis or I was gonna die right there in Pakistan.”

It’s likely that Faulkner did, however, manage to utter one sentence to the blur of dusty, sun-beaten faces staring down with incredulity at him — a statement he has repeated many times since: “I know... where he is. . .” The “he” in question is Osama Bin Laden, Most Wanted Man on Earth.
It has taken until now, a month later, for Faulkner, a 50-year-old unemployed construction worker from Colorado, to tell his story.

In many ways the details are even more extraordinary than they first seemed when Pakistani police on the border with Afghanistan announced on June 15 that they had arrested a solitary white civilian in one of the world’s most hostile territories who had a long unkempt beard and was wearing tribal headgear and a mishmash of modern and traditional dress.

Found on him were a pistol, a sword, a “pig-sticker” knife, hashish, nightvision equipment and a Bible. When asked what he was doing, the detainee had eventually managed to state that he was planning single-handedly to locate and capture the Al-Qaeda leader — a task that has so far eluded the combined might of the American and British military in a campaign that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and lasted almost a decade.

Astonishingly, it now appears that this “lone wolf” might have actually come closer to Bin Laden than anyone since the infamous 2001 raid on Tora Bora, thanks to strict rules preventing US forces from crossing over the border from Afghanistan.

After a stampede of coverage on his return home — “Rocky Mountain Rambo!” puffed the headlines — Faulkner has spent much of the past month in hospital without telling his story publicly. Now, just a few days after his discharge, he has given an exclusive interview to The Sunday Times.
Questions about the man’s state of mind — not to mention the reliability of his recollections — are unavoidable. Yet much of his account of his exploits in Pakistan has been substantiated by official reports and personal photographs and there is a compelling and unflinching detail to the rest of his story.

In person he at times seems an entertaining, perhaps even admirable, obsessive. In other instances there is simply no other description for him than frightening; for example, when he describes with a high-pitched giggle how his disembowelling pig-sticker knife is “good for both the four-legged and two-legged variety”.

Faulkner insists his mission is still active but that he has never actually wanted to kill the man he derisively calls “Binny Boy”.

“That would make him a martyr,” he says. “All I want is to hold him long enough to alert the authorities who can bring him to justice in Pakistan — not here in America, because we’d just spend millions of dollars on lawyers and it would go on for years and years.
“Basically, I want to see happen to Binny Boy what happened to Saddam Hussein after they pulled him out of that rat hole. And the Pakistanis want it, too.

"They’re no different from the rest of the world. They just want to be able to make a living in peace. It’s hard enough without these Al-Qaeda idiots running around.”

Still looking like a cross between an Old Testament protagonist and Tom Hanks from Cast Away, Faulkner now walks with a pronounced limp, frequently clutches at the plastic catheter in his chest — into which he must regularly plug a dialysis machine — and can eat only according to the rules of a strict hospital-imposed diet.

Nevertheless, he remains convinced he’s the ideal man for the job of finding George W Bush’s bête noir who, ironically enough, reportedly suffers from the same kidney condition. “I’m old school,” he says. “I’m so old school, I’m medieval. And I’m a hunter and I’m a thief — just take a look at my rap sheet.”

He has confirmed that his trip to Pakistan last month was by no means his first: in fact Faulkner, an ex-convict, former LSD user and twice-a-day medicinal marijuana smoker, says it was his seventh in as many years, over which time he dramatically gained in confidence and established a network of tipsters from inside and outside the US military. He claims this intelligence has become increasingly more useful while the progress of the war in Afghanistan has become more disillusioning.

The US Department of State is offering a $25m bounty on Bin Laden’s head, supplemented with a $2m reward from the US Air Line Pilots Association and Air Transport Association. Faulkner, a devout Christian, claims this mountain of cash is of no interest to him. But with no current source of income he is seeking an urgent way to raise funds for what he promises will be a final and successful incursion into Al-Qaeda territory.

The fact that he almost certainly won’t be allowed into the country isn’t putting him off. After all, since launching his mission to find Bin Laden in 2003, he says, he has twice attempted to bypass international borders by sailing to Pakistan from southern California. On two other occasions, he adds, he tried to cross into Jordan from Israel using a home-made glider that he had packed into a ski bag and smuggled through customs.

As for his personal safety, Faulkner says he spent years buying and hiding various black market weapons in the mountains of Pakistan, including a Chinese-made pistol, which he kept under a rock in a doubleZiploc bag in the Bumboret valley near Afghanistan, where he was arrested last month. Weapons or no weapons, though, the potentially suicidal nature of his quest has never unduly concerned him.

“As long as Binny Boy went down at the same time I did, it wouldn’t bother me one single bit,” he says in an almost dementedly cheerful, sing-song tenor which occasionally veers into a Charles Manson-esque babble. “But I gotta be honest with you, I don’t think that would happen. The way I see it, somebody’s right here and somebody’s wrong... and I say my God is gonna protect me.”

Such wild confidence — if not the religious element of it — has always come naturally to Faulkner, who was born on August 15, 1959 in the capital of American grandeur and delusion: Hollywood. His father, a singer also named Gary — with two minor Top 40 hits to his name — had met his mother while doing a tedious day job at the American Bell Telephone Company. Eventually the couple moved out to Fort Collins, Colorado.
Faulkner Sr died at 45 from a heart attack, perhaps related to an undetected kidney disorder, but he lived long enough to leave an impression on his eldest son.

“My father would keep a fully loaded long-range rifle behind every door in the house,” marvels Faulkner, who has two younger brothers, Todd and Scotty, and a younger sister, Deanna. “So I’ve hunted since as long as I can remember. We were a pretty violent family, I suppose: always blowing ourselves up, rolling cars or just generally being very adventurous.”

The Faulkners were not brought up to be religious — there wasn’t even a Bible in the house — but in the early 1970s the kids were sent off to a Christian summer camp where they were introduced to New Testament teachings and “born again”. Faulkner got married not long afterwards, at the age of 20, to a girl named Maxine. Barely a year later they had a son, Robert. He’s now 30 and owns a car stereo installation business.
Faulkner’s lifestyle wasn’t suited to being a dad. “Acid, hash, meth, cocaine, opium, mushrooms, heroin — I experimented with everything available,” he says. “And that wasn’t the only trouble I got into. I was always being shot at by cops, criminals ... dope fiends. I built my own explosives. I did everything under the sun. Between jail, prison and probation I lost about 12 years. I was a very ‘active’ individual, as they used to say. Then I got another year for a totally bogus assault charge with my mother.”

The latter had involved him pulling a telephone off the wall (at the house which they were sharing at the time), followed by him throwing boxes around. In a separate incident he drop-kicked a man delivering a lawsuit to his sister. “I told him: if you come back here, I’ll blow your f****** head off,” he recalls with some pride.

By 2001 Faulkner’s marriage was over, he had lost his home to legal fees and was working — and living — on construction sites from Colorado to Wyoming. That was when Bin Laden’s hijacked commercial airliners destroyed the World Trade Center and a large section of the Pentagon, murdering thousands.

Faulkner’s brother Scott, who now practises internal medicine, remembers the time well: “In prison Gary got a lot of time to read the Bible. Then, when 9/11 happened and Osama Bin Laden stood up on television and praised his Allah for allowing him to bring this terrible devastation to America, that was it.

“Gary showed me a passage in Revelation [“But the cowardly, the unbelieving ... their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulphur”] and said, ‘Y’know, God hates a coward and I never want to be a coward and I never want to back down. Osama Bin Laden has insulted my country and he has insulted my God’.”

Instead of being the hunted — as it felt like to be an American in those terrible post-9/11 days — Faulkner would be the hunter. Someone had to do it, after all. “When the attack [on 9/11] took place, okay, it pissed me off and I was very sorry for the people who died, but what let me down the most was the failure of our government,” he says. “I mean, they want our taxes, they want this and they want that, but they couldn’t even protect our national security? And so as soon as I saw Binny Boy on television, I knew right away there was no way they’d be able to capture him.” Faulkner pledged to do the job himself.

Few, of course, took him seriously. But his brother knew better. “When Gary was young he would disappear for several days, then come home dragging some dead animal behind him,” Scott recalls. “He’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, I figured out where it went to eat, so I set up my tent at this spot up the mountain and I waited’. He would drive my mother nuts like that. Also, he always wanted to see how things worked, to break them apart, test them to the limit.”

It took Faulkner a couple of years after 9/11 to raise enough funds for his mission. By then he had saved up $10,000 and used it to buy a 21ft yacht named Pina Colada, which was on sale in his hometown of Greeley, Colorado. Living so far inland he didn’t have any experience at sea but planned to sail the boat to Pakistan — even though he didn’t know exactly where Pakistan was.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he says, “because I couldn’t get my weapons on a plane. I thought I’d just aim for anywhere west of the US — then once I hit the right continent, I’d walk, hitchhike or get a car.”
Unfortunately, no sooner had Faulkner loaded himself and his armoury — which at the time featured a Winchester rifle, a .44 Magnum and his selection of “blades” — onto the boat in San Diego, California, than a hurricane struck. He spent 22 days at sea, nearly drowning on several occasions, he says. The debacle ended with his being shipwrecked in Mexico.

Nevertheless, a second attempt followed, this time with a cheaper yacht, bought for $3,500, launched from a marina further north up the coast. Things didn’t go much better: before he could even set sail he managed to dislocate one of his arms, which was almost pulled out of its socket by a piece of rope.

This is where Faulkner’s story takes a turn for the even more surreal — and perhaps less plausible, although he recounts it with such minutiae it’s hard not to believe that at least some of it is true. Looking to the Bible for guidance, he became sure that what he needed for success was a traditional outfit of robes and headgear from the ancient city of Bozrah in Jordan. Now known as Buseirah, it has an important place in apocalyptic biblical tradition.

“The funny thing about the Bible is it’s like a safe or a vault — if you don’t get all the keys right, it won’t open up,” he says.
So he flew to Israel, only to discover that getting across the border to Bozrah was impossible — although it’s hard to say why, as American citizens do not require a visa.

Luckily, he says, he’d had the foresight to prepare for such a scenario by building a collapsible glider using leftover copper pipes from a construction job, along with some nylon sheeting and aluminium foil — all of which could fit into a 6ft ski bag which had been accepted by his airline.

So he went to his hotel room to fetch the contraption and proceeded to carry it up the tallest hill he could find with a view of the Dead Sea, with the idea that if his flying machine failed at least he would have a soft place to land. Alas, the glider proved to be a no more reliable form of transport than his two yachts had been. “It turned out the Dead Sea was much further away than it looked,” Faulkner says. “I didn’t just hit the rocks — I got dragged down them. I busted my ribs, fractured my wrist, re-dislocated my arm and smashed my brother’s watch. Fortunately, when I went back to my hotel I found a rib-wrap in my bag. I put it on instead of going to a doctor.”

Upon learning about such exploits on his return to the United States, some questioned his sanity. But not everyone.
“As a physician I think he is in his right mind,” says Scott. “In fact I know he’s in his right mind. It’s best to think of him like Abraham or Daniel in the Bible: an ordinary man called upon to do extraordinary things. If he was in uniform you wouldn’t say he was crazy, you’d say he was doing his duty to his country.

“I mean, of course, as his brother I get worried about him. But we’re all going to die at some point. The real tragedy is when you meet people who go through life without ever having risked anything at all. Gary chooses to live life to the full. That’s his calling.”

Amazingly, after a second and equally doomed attempt to glide into Jordan, Faulkner says, he charmed a border security guard at the foot crossing, jumped into a taxi, told the driver to go to Bozrah on the King’s Highway and ended up being able to buy the clothes he wanted. And thanks to the exchange rate, they cost him only a few dollars.

At last it was time for Faulkner to raise his game: so he bought a ticket to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, with money he had saved up on construction sites. It would be the first of seven trips. “I became very productive,” he says, “because of those garments.”

His first few visits to Pakistan, he concedes, were primarily educational and the second one was seriously disrupted by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.
“I let the spirit lead me,” says Faulkner, who initially ended up in the ancient city of Gilgit. “That was when I learnt that when they say a place is 60 miles north of Islamabad, it means it’ll take you all day — and by all day, they mean a full 24 hours — on a bus.
“Back then I knew only one word in Urdu and that was the word for ‘stop’, but I didn’t want to say anything at all. The biggest thing that gave me away was speaking and I knew there could be someone on that bus who might decide they want to take out an American. That’s why I strapped a machete and a sword to my chest.”

On a later trip he bought a Chinese pistol, which he describes as “the most unsafe gun I’ve ever had”. As time went on his confidence grew, with only the occasional disaster such as when his backpack fell down a ravine and he had to make an international call to his brother asking him to wire money.

“I started climbing certain mountains, checking things out off the beaten path,” Faulkner says. “There are tourist areas and there are tribal areas. I was going to the tribal ones. I soon worked out that the people who have goats in the lower areas have walkie-talkies and they radio up ahead to the top of the mountain when someone comes. They don’t need guns. There are also some pretty interesting strongholds. These people have lived there for thousands of years — it’s like the tunnels in Vietnam. I would have walked right past one of them if I hadn’t seen a guy wriggling down there.

“Then one night a shot rang out in front of the guesthouse where I was staying. I came out of my room with my sword held up and this guy, a hotel employee, is crouched down on the floor, rocking back and forth. And it turns out that Al-Qaeda has just shot the guard. His body’s out in front and there’s blood everywhere. Later that night they said, ‘They’re trying to warn you away’.”

If that was indeed the intention, it didn’t work. On Faulkner’s fifth or sixth visit he stayed at a remote establishment known as the Isphata inn in Chitral, near the Afghan border in the far north of Pakistan. Things began to get a lot more serious.

“Imagine it: I’m in total dress now,” he says. “I’ve got the gun under the rock in a Ziploc bag, I’ve got my sword and a pair of handcuffs hidden up on a shelf in the inn, I’ve got my night-vision, my pig-sticker and my Bible and, after talking to a few people on the lowdown, I have a local Jeep driver drop me off at a special spot.

“From there I trek for about a mile, real close to the border. That’s where I find these guys doing construction on a special cave. I don’t want to give myself away, so I’m not eating anything, I’m not drinking anything, I’m just walking around like I own the place. And I’m thinking, ‘Someone’s coming here, I can get ahead of them’.”

According to Faulkner he was told that the Bin Laden entourage was made up of only four people: the Dragon (a Saudi chief), the Lion (Bin Laden), the Young Lion (Bin Laden’s son) and the Snake (a bodyguard). All would have to be taken on at once. To the Rocky Mountain Rambo that seemed like reasonable odds.

Those with military experience in the area, however, are wary of this intelligence. One such sceptic is “Tiny”, a former US Navy Seal based in Washington — he doesn’t want to give his real name — who spent six years conducting special forces operations on the other side of the border.
“Bin Laden’s got a lot of people around him, including several gigantic African bodyguards who are ordered to kill him if he should ever be captured,” he counters. “And his position is surrounded by Taliban.”

In his opinion Faulkner is lucky to be alive: “I’m amazed he hasn’t shown up in an Al-Qaeda YouTube video yet. Probably the only reason he didn’t get killed was that they thought no white man on the planet would be stupid enough to go there, so they probably figured there were guns overhead, that he was some kind of CIA trap.”

At the same time Tiny hopes that Faulkner pulls it off: “I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 and it was really hard to get close to Bin Laden. There’s too much politics and bull****. We weren’t even allowed to cross over the border. We were playing nice and every time we chased those fcukers we always chased them back to Pakistan. So maybe it will take a career criminal to do it. Or just someone with a death wish.”

Faulkner was preparing for his most recent trip to Pakistan when he heard that a Greek tourist in Chitral — still relatively popular with a certain breed of western backpacker — had been kidnapped by the Taliban in a cross-border raid. Then another ominous development: during a mountain hike in Colorado to test some new high-altitude camping gear, he became dizzy and winded. “I wasn’t feeling too good,” he recalls. “And up there, with the bears and the mountain lions, if you ain’t feeling good you’d better get out, quick.”

When he got back to Greeley he checked himself into hospital. At first the doctors thought he was trying to scam drugs. Then they saw the results of his tests — Faulkner had severe kidney disease and needed immediate lifesaving dialysis. The condition had gone undiagnosed for years, perhaps decades.

Far from abandoning his ambition to return to Pakistan, he left on May 30, his brother driving him to the airport. “I figured that old Binny Boy had a [dialysis] machine and he had found a way to survive out there,” he says. The trip was an unmitigated disaster. The attitude of the locals in Chitral had become suddenly toxic, Faulkner says.

People who had once waved at him were now throwing stones. All visitors were required to check in at the police station, which assigned a private guard to prevent any more kidnappings (although by now the Greek had been released after six months in captivity).

No sooner had he checked in to the Isphata inn, he says, than a convoy of Al-Qaeda vehicles pulled up outside: “It was like the paparazzi. They were all photographing me. And they gave me a formal warning to stay away from the pastures.”

As the cars roared off back into the mountains, the inn’s manager warned him that they would return for him that night. A saner person might have fled. But Faulkner saw an opportunity: if they raided the inn they might leave their positions unguarded and he could take Bin Laden without any resistance.

So that night, he says, as his police assigned minder was lying on a makeshift bed, snoozing with an AK-47 strapped around his neck, Faulkner made a run for it, collecting his stash of weapons along the way. But by the time he reached the mountain where he believed Bin Laden had his lair, “it was getting light and all of a sudden I was out of juice. My blood was polluted, I was all messed up and I needed dialysis. So I found me a big rock and I crawled under there”.

An hour passed. The sun rose. Then two little girls approached him and pelted him with stones. That was where the police found him, too ill to move, barely able to speak. If it hadn’t been for a well-equipped kidney treatment centre in Peshawar, he would be dead.
“I want to make it clear, I was never asked to leave the country,” Faulkner says now. “They asked me if I wanted to go back up there to the mountain and finish the job. I said, ‘I can’t, man, my blood isn’t good’.”

That won’t stop him trying again in the future, even though his picture is now almost certainly pinned up on every Al-Qaeda official’s bedroom wall.
“I might land at the airport and get whacked right there,” he says.
“But remember, I’m going at it as a thief, not a military man. The military man plays by the rules. But my rules are: there ain’t no rules.”

© Chris Ayres 2010
Chris Ayres is a contributing editor of The Sunday Times Magazine and author of War Reporting for Cowards

Source: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/Review/article347439.ece#page-3

Sea Sharp

tl;dr,

So did they find him in the end?

Biggins

GaNjaHaN wrote: »

tl;dr,

So did they find him in the end?

You silly-billy, of course not - if they did, there would be no sequel to make.

(But the above cowboy apparently got closer than ever any American ever did in the last few years if true!)

Abrasax

Found on him were a pistol, a sword, a “pig-sticker” knife, hashish, nightvision equipment and a Bible.

Smoking hashish, looking for the ghost of Bin Laden.

What a buzz.

Biggins

Abrasax wrote: »

Smoking hashish, looking for the ghost of Bin Laden.

What a buzz.

He gives new meaning to "a good trip!" :pac:

SugarHigh

Biggins wrote: »

You silly-billy, of course not - if they did, there would be no sequel to make.

(But the above cowboy apparently got closer than ever any American ever did in the last few years if true!)

Ok I just read it all and I don't see how he got closer than everyone else. Wouldn't they need to know where Osama was to work how close this guy got.

This guy seems like a complete chancer.

WindSock

Far too l;dr. Thanked it anyway to make it look like I did.

Biggins

SugarHigh wrote: »

Ok I just read it all and I don't see how he got closer than everyone else. Wouldn't they need to know where Osama was to work how close this guy got.

This guy seems like a complete chancer.

You are more than right I suspect about him being a chancer.
I think he was not taking enough or the right drugs! :pac:

He did however somehow manage to get apparently into the right area where "Binny" was supposed to be and managed to get further across an invisible border where American soldiers are not supposed to go (but I suspect have done many a time).

Yakult

Im the dog, the big bad dog....

FlutterinBantam

What a load of cock cheese.

Someone tell me what this knob edam is all about?

mikom

Biggins wrote: »

It seemed beyond belief: an American ex-convict hunting for Osama Bin Laden in the Hindu Kush.

I zoned out salivating at Hindu Kush.

Shryke

Very good read. The ****ing balls on him. Inspiring really.

Pauleta

Good read cheers

: puts on conspiracy hat:

He is clearly a U.S special agent. Obviously the US have special forces in Pakistan but they are not allowed and if any of them were caught it would strain much needed relations with Pakistan. Pakistan know they have agents in the country but they cant prove it. I think he got sick and the US were not able to get him out of Pakistan. He already had the cover story of being an independent bounty hunter if he was caught and pushed that he was some mad man.