Jack Murphy and Sean D. Naylor
The village of Drosh with the Hindu Kush mountains in the background. (Credit: Zahijee, via Wikimedia Commons)
In September 2005, in a remote valley in Pakistan, a CIA contractor locked eyes with a man he was sure was Osama bin Laden and caught the moment on camera.
The images of that encounter (see below) caused the small Joint Special Operations Command task force in Afghanistan to prepare for a possible cross-border mission, according to the contractor, before Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which the CIA’s Islamabad station chief had controversially informed about the sighting, persuaded the agency that it was a case of mistaken identity.
The episode, almost six years before a JSOC raid killed bin Laden in Pakistan, underscored the divide in the CIA over how much their Pakistani counterparts could be trusted and the febrile nature of the hunt for bin Laden after the trail of the al-Qaida leader had gone cold following the December 2001 battle of Tora Bora.
In early July 2005, according to an account written by the former contractor and obtained by The High Side, the U.S. consul general in Peshawar, a bustling city in what was then Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (since renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), was invited to meet with the head of the Kalash people, a community of about 3,000 centered in a few remote valleys in Chitral, the most northwesterly region of Pakistan.
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