Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (36 page)

That had to change. It happened first on the ground in Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, when small detachments of Army Special Forces soldiers, working closely with CIA officers, backed the Afghan Northern Alliance and a militia force loyal to Hamid Karzai in the south and routed Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This tactical cooperation grew over the years and was expanded and refined under General Stanley McChrystal, whose hunter-killer-exploitation teams in Iraq were supported by analysts from the CIA, DIA, NSA, and FBI. McChrystal employed the same strategy when he assumed command of the allied mission in Afghanistan in 2009. Within a year, the pace of intelligence-driven operations, the so-called night raids against the Taliban and other militants, skyrocketed. More than a dozen times each night, teams of American and allied Special Operations forces and Afghan troops, supported by CIA and DIA analysts, swooped in on houses or compounds across the country. The raids targeted Taliban shadow governors, midlevel insurgent commanders, and individuals who handled finances and logistics for the Taliban.

That kind of seamless operational cooperation became common on a smaller scale in Yemen, Pakistan, and other shadowy battlegrounds. “One of the things we have seen since 9/11 is an extraordinary coming together, particularly of CIA and the military, in working together and fusing intelligence and operations in a way that just, I think, is unique in anybody’s history,” Secretary Gates said five days after bin Laden was killed.

In Washington, however, the marriage of the military and intelligence worlds had faced a bumpier ride. Gates’s predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, was openly disdainful of the CIA’s abilities and worried that the agency’s relatively small cadre of case officers was unable to support major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rumsfeld set out to improve the Pentagon’s own human intelligence network, including dispatching small intelligence teams abroad. But sometimes the teams were sent in without the knowledge of the ambassadors and CIA station chiefs in various countries, causing turf battles. Rumsfeld’s departure in late 2006 and his replacement by Gates, a former CIA director, salved the bureaucratic wounds. President Obama’s decision in April 2011 to nominate Panetta to succeed Gates as defense secretary, and General David Petraeus to follow Panetta at the CIA, further reinforced the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad.

It was into this environment that Admiral McRaven began drawing up military options for capturing or killing bin Laden.

At the same time, a high-level team of administration officials headed by John Brennan and Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, began developing the Playbook, a mind-bending series of what-ifs and negative scenarios. The group marched through a range of issues to be worked out in advance of any presidential decision. What were the implications of military action on civilians in or near the compound? How would the U.S. government manage the backlash from the Muslim world if an attack failed? What would be the political blowback at home? The possible fate of bin Laden was debated almost endlessly. “It was looked at from the standpoint of if we captured him, what will we do with him? Where would he go? If he was killed, what will we do with him, and where would he go?” Brennan said.

The Playbook grew even thicker after Admiral McRaven presented his options to Panetta, who in turn presented them to the president on March 14. By then, evidence was growing that bin Laden was living in the compound in Abbottabad. Intelligence analysts had noticed a tall man strolling in the compound’s dirt courtyard for one or two hours a day. Increasingly, they became convinced that the “Pacer,” as they called him, was bin Laden. Intelligence officials were reluctant to get a closer look through informants or technical surveillance for fear of tipping off the Al Qaeda leader.

One option proposed by Admiral McRaven was to blast the “Pacer” with missiles from a CIA Predator drone while he was out for one of his daily walks. The agency had carried out about 240 drone attacks in Pakistan over the preceding seven years. But the strategists were concerned that the Predator might not pack enough punch to finish off bin Laden with certainty.

Gates directed military officials to examine the option of a massive aerial bombardment, much like the planned B-2 assault in August 2007 on the Tora Bora cave complex, where some intelligence analysts had believed bin Laden would join a war council of top Taliban and Al Qaeda commanders. For the Abbottabad mission, military officials estimated that striking bin Laden’s compound would require thirty-two bombs of two thousand pounds each. An airstrike that size would destroy the compound and anything in it, but another question arose: How could American officials be certain that bin Laden had been there if his remains were obliterated? White House officials worried that any strategic blow to Al Qaeda from the killing of its leader would be delayed, perhaps indefinitely, if bin Laden’s death could not be confirmed. And dropping that much ordnance in a well-to-do community of a nation with which America was not at war risked a high civilian death toll and severe diplomatic damage.

A joint raid with Pakistani operatives was briefly considered and then rejected, especially as concerns mounted about who within Pakistan’s military or security services may have known about bin Laden’s suspected hideaway. “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission,” Panetta said. “They might alert the targets.”

Another leading option was a helicopter assault. Just as they did in the planning for the possible raid in early 2002 against Al Qaeda leaders in Chalus, Iran, the Navy SEALs carried out mission rehearsals using mock-ups designed to resemble bin Laden’s compound. This time, however, the intelligence provided by the CIA safehouse in Abbottabad, as well as satellite photos and intercepted cell-phone calls, gave the SEAL team a much clearer picture of their target.

But, as with the proposed Iranian mission nearly a decade earlier, the bin Laden operation carried huge political and diplomatic risks for the military and for the White House. Admiral McRaven’s planning unfolded at the same time relations with Pakistan had soured dramatically over the arrest of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor imprisoned for shooting two Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore in January. Some administration officials feared that an American operation against the Abbottabad compound could trigger a backlash from Pakistan’s government, and Davis could wind up dead in his jail cell. Davis was ultimately freed on March 16, clearing away an obstacle for the military and intelligence planners. But President Obama directed McRaven to build a “fight your way out” option into the plan, with two helicopters following the two main assault copters as backup in case of trouble and attack aircraft standing by if needed.

On Thursday, April 28, at the fifth National Security Council meeting held on the mission planning since mid-March, three options remained on the table: the helicopter assault, the Predator strike, and a decision to wait for more intelligence to develop on the compound’s inhabitants. Obama ended the meeting and said he wanted to weigh the options. Sixteen hours later, the president had made up his mind. The helicopter assault would go forward. He summoned aides to the White House Diplomatic Room, told them the mission was “a go,” and directed them to start drafting the military orders.

“The president was trying to balance competing objectives,” said Nick Rasmussen, the White House’s deputy counterterrorism adviser. “On the one hand, he was trying to keep the U.S. military footprint small and to avoid a confrontation with the Pakistanis. But he also had to weigh how to remove bin Laden from the battlefield in a way that did not leave uncertainty, which could potentially undermine the impact of the entire mission.”

On Saturday, President Obama took a break from rehearsing for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner to speak to the mission commander one last time. He then called Admiral McRaven at his headquarters in Afghanistan to wish him luck.

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The parallel efforts to harvest intelligence on the Abbottabad compound and build options for a mission to get bin Laden were among the government’s most tightly compartmentalized secrets. “There were people inside the intelligence community witting of the effort to develop a picture on this target, and on who might be there, but they had no involvement up until the end on possible courses of action,” said one official involved from the start. Membership in the top-level group actively focused on plotting options for a raid was kept extremely small: fewer than two dozen people across the entire United States government. The number of those who were “read in” to the intelligence expanded substantially as the president made his decision, which came on Friday, April 29.

All those in the know were required to maintain a façade of business as usual. In private, it might be easy to mask one’s anticipation for a raid on the most wanted man in the world. But Saturday night was the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, broadcast live on C-SPAN. Among the guests were the president himself, who delivered the traditional comic monologue, as well as Secretary Gates and the Pentagon’s Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, whom Gates had designated as his point man for the operation. But their attendance that night at a gala dinner, wearing black tie and poker faces, was nothing compared to the social obligations facing Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He got married that Saturday night.

The imperative of operational security continued into Sunday morning as the principal players positioned themselves without public notice at CIA headquarters and in the White House Situation Room. All public tours of the West Wing were cancelled so that tourists would not see, and wonder at, the entire war council arriving at the White House on an otherwise quiet spring Sunday. Michael Vickers, whose tradecraft spanned decades as a Green Beret and CIA agent, knew that the simple act of calling in a driver or secretary would be a noticeable change in the battle rhythm of a day off. So he drove himself to the Pentagon to gather the files, folders, and background material required for a day that would see him crisscrossing Washington from the Pentagon to the White House to the CIA and back to the White House.

As Vickers left his office, his inner compass guided him on a brief detour. He walked a perimeter line toward the southwest edge of the Pentagon, arriving at a two-acre, gently landscaped park organized around 184 illuminated benches, each bearing the name and age of a victim of 9/11, the innocents who died aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and those who perished by force of blast and flame inside the Pentagon building. He stood quietly, alone, in the early morning light. Only then did he walk to his car and drive himself across the Potomac River for his first White House meeting on what would become a historic day.

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Their names may never be known, their faces may remain unseen, but the strike package that flew by helicopter out of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, for the bin Laden compound numbered seventy-nine: Navy SEALs, intelligence specialists, medical corpsmen, translators, and the bomb-sniffing dog. Little is known of the strike team commander, other than that he had scores of successful raids under his belt and that McRaven described him to White House officials as “absolutely the single guy I would choose for this mission.”

For the operation, bin Laden was assigned the code name Geronimo. Inside the White House Situation Room, the president and his war council followed the mission via video link narrated by Leon Panetta at CIA headquarters. Soon after Panetta announced, “They’ve reached the target,” one of the four helicopters carrying the assault team lost lift and descended faster than anticipated owing to unexpectedly warm temperatures. Its tail snapped off against a wall, but there were no injuries. The SEAL team commander adjusted his plans, and the unit executed its well-trained art of improvisation. A second helicopter, which had been tasked to hover over the main building while the commandos fast-roped onto the roof, instead landed on the ground inside the compound. A third flew in from reserve. The SEALs set explosive charges to blow open a door to the main house and a brick wall behind it, which some said was a false door disguised as a ruse. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the courier whose SUV had led American intelligence to the compound, began shooting at the strike team, which returned fire, killing him and his wife. A second man—al-Kuwaiti’s brother—was spotted and believed readying to shoot; he too was killed. As the commandos made their way up a stairwell, bin Laden’s son Khalid rushed toward them and he was killed as well. Smashing into the third-floor rooms atop the guest house, the commandos came face-to-face with bin Laden himself. “We have a visual on Geronimo,” Panetta told the officials gathered in the Situation Room. An AK-47 and a Russian-made Makarov 9-mm automatic pistol were said to be within the Al Qaeda leader’s reach. One of bin Laden’s wives charged at the strike team; she was shot in the leg but not killed. A few minutes later came the message, “Geronimo EKIA”—Enemy Killed in Action—with the trademark close-quarters sharpshooting of American Special Operations forces, the deadly efficient “double-tap.” One bullet to the head and one to the chest.

Only then did the president speak. “We got him,” he said.

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If it was said that the JSOC raid on the Iraqi border town of Sinjar in September 2007 had produced the Al Qaeda Rolodex, the strike on bin Laden’s safe house produced Al Qaeda’s data bank. Even bin Laden’s clothes gave up tantalizing pocket litter: several hundred euros—and two telephone numbers. “This collection represents the most significant amount of intelligence ever collected from a senior terrorist,” said one American official. “It includes digital, audio, and video files of varying sizes, printed materials, computer equipment, recording devices, and handwritten documents.” The cache was said to include documents, computer discs, DVDs, ten computer hard drives, and one hundred thumb drives.