Find, Fix, Finish (36 page)
Authors: Aki Peritz,Eric Rosenbach
LEANING FORWARD
The White House began to consider more expansive options in South Asia in late 2006 and early 2007. President Bush was determined to capture or kill bin Laden before his term in office expired in January 2009. One result was a plan to rejuvenate the hunt for bin Laden by aggressively “flooding the zone” in Pakistan and Afghanistan with CIA personnel and resources, cultivating new human sources, and setting up new bases and further streamlining cooperation with the military.
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US forces would be authorized to cross over into Pakistan from Afghanistan when there was credible and actionable intelligence on al-Qaeda HVTs, without notification to Islamabad.
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This plan was known as Operation Cannonball.
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US forces would be authorized to cross over into Pakistan from Afghanistan when there was credible and actionable intelligence on al-Qaeda HVTs, without notification to Islamabad.
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This plan was known as Operation Cannonball.
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Part of the argument for the new strategy was that bin Laden would only be apprehended if America caught one of his senior lieutenants alive.
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Apparently the plan was approved in theory, but implementation was paralyzed as top Bush officials argued bitterly over the risk calculus for conducting ground raids inside Pakistan.
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Pursuing a parallel path, the Bush administration also backed a proposal to enhance, train, and supply Pakistan’s military and intelligence units, especially the ethnic Pashtun-dominated Frontier Corps, which would be largely responsible for combating the resulting insurgency in the tribal areas. Since 2006 or 2007, small teams of US Special Forces had been permitted to go inside Pakistan to work with their Pakistani counterparts on counterinsurgency tactics.
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Apparently the plan was approved in theory, but implementation was paralyzed as top Bush officials argued bitterly over the risk calculus for conducting ground raids inside Pakistan.
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Pursuing a parallel path, the Bush administration also backed a proposal to enhance, train, and supply Pakistan’s military and intelligence units, especially the ethnic Pashtun-dominated Frontier Corps, which would be largely responsible for combating the resulting insurgency in the tribal areas. Since 2006 or 2007, small teams of US Special Forces had been permitted to go inside Pakistan to work with their Pakistani counterparts on counterinsurgency tactics.
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In 2008, Pakistan agreed to expand the initiative to about a hundred American and British military trainers, and the Pentagon drafted plans to spend $75 million for new body armor, vehicles, radios, and surveillance equipment.
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Small military intelligence teams began working with Pakistani intelligence to share techniques on reading satellite imagery and responding to requests for more advanced technical equipment,
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while US-trained Pakistani commando units began carrying out missions in northern Pakistan.
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Officials hoped that they could eventually ramp up assistance and cooperation with Islamabad to the point of joint combat operations.
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Small military intelligence teams began working with Pakistani intelligence to share techniques on reading satellite imagery and responding to requests for more advanced technical equipment,
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while US-trained Pakistani commando units began carrying out missions in northern Pakistan.
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Officials hoped that they could eventually ramp up assistance and cooperation with Islamabad to the point of joint combat operations.
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Indicating some degree of cooperation at the frequent urging of Washington, Islamabad in late 2007 and 2008 launched a series of major offensives into South Waziristan to combat the increasing encroachment of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Pakistani forces killed hundreds of Mehsud’s forces, but ended their advance with a negotiated deal. In June 2008, the military started a similar offensive to blunt Taliban advances in the north. According to press reporting, however, there was no sign anywhere of the offensive and a local warlord, Haji Namdar, told a reporter it was for show: “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama—it is just to entertain . . . America.”
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The focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan intensified once the Obama administration took over. During his campaign, Barack Obama had vowed to shift resources away from the Iraq conflict and back to the fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As president, he moved quickly to fulfill that pledge. The Obama administration stepped up armed remote-piloted attacks, increased the budgets for operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and gave CIA license to redouble its efforts to hunt for bin Laden. At the same time, US policymakers vowed to boost development aid to Pakistan and threatened to cut off military aid unless more efforts went toward tracking down al-Qaeda.
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While bin Laden remained out of reach for much of the decade, these overall efforts began to narrow the gap between the hunted and the hunters.
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While bin Laden remained out of reach for much of the decade, these overall efforts began to narrow the gap between the hunted and the hunters.
The actual physical gap began to narrow as well. After learning about Abu Ahmed’s critical position within al-Qaeda, in August 2010 the CIA established a base in Abbottabad near the suspected compound. Officers there began to search for signs of life that would confirm bin Laden’s actual whereabouts. As one American official later put it, “The CIA’s job was to find and fix . . . the intelligence work was as complete as it was going to be, and it was the military’s turn to finish the target.”
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Evidently the CIA operated under the ISI’s collective noses, despite the fact that Americans deployed sensitive surveillance equipment like radar to search for subterranean escape tunnels, as well as less esoteric devices like cameras equipped with telephoto lenses.
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Despite the best efforts of the CIA team, however, it found no conclusive proof that bin Laden was actually there.
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Evidently the CIA operated under the ISI’s collective noses, despite the fact that Americans deployed sensitive surveillance equipment like radar to search for subterranean escape tunnels, as well as less esoteric devices like cameras equipped with telephoto lenses.
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Despite the best efforts of the CIA team, however, it found no conclusive proof that bin Laden was actually there.
Beyond the assistance provided by CIA case officers, analysts, and small armies of contractors working in forward operating bases in Afghanistan, and those plying their trade in offices scattered throughout South Asia, the responsibility fell to a small number of individuals to actually breach the compound and kill bin Laden. While Navy SEALs received the glory, it was the larger JSOC organization that fused the intelligence with the so-called trigger pullers. Although the war in Iraq had been a squalid, ill-conceived mess of an operation, costing lives, money, and political prestige, it was also a living laboratory for the evolving find-fix-finish paradigm.
The high tempo of operations fused with analysis—a bureaucratic evolution honed in Iraq and Afghanistan under General Stanley McChrystal and then under his successor, General William McRaven—allowed JSOC personnel to develop an impressive ability to take on terrorist adversaries. Still, JSOC troops operate in uniform, and committing to armed incursions inside a country that the US is not at war with (i.e., Pakistan or Somalia) posed certain complex Title 10 versus Title 50 legal conundrums. When it came to targeting bin Laden in Abbottabad, President Obama sidestepped this problem by authorizing JSOC operators to work under CIA direction, which under US law allowed them to pursue covert actions within Pakistan.
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As the intelligence began to coalesce around a particular compound, the individuals tapped for the mission prepared in duplicate buildings in California and North Carolina especially built for the takedown.
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Through meticulous planning and drilling, drilling and planning, JSOC officers readied themselves for all sorts of contingencies, such as what would happen if the helicopters developed problems in the thin mountain air or if the SEALs failed to successfully rappel from the ropes inside the compound.
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As the intelligence began to coalesce around a particular compound, the individuals tapped for the mission prepared in duplicate buildings in California and North Carolina especially built for the takedown.
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Through meticulous planning and drilling, drilling and planning, JSOC officers readied themselves for all sorts of contingencies, such as what would happen if the helicopters developed problems in the thin mountain air or if the SEALs failed to successfully rappel from the ropes inside the compound.
Both mishaps occurred. The tail on one of the Blackhawks clipped the twelve-foot outer wall, cracking the helicopter in two and forcing the pilot to ditch, nose first, inside the compound. The other landed outside the walls, obliging the troops to blast their way into bin Laden’s concrete fortress.
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Some forty minutes later, after engaging in firefights and disposing of the crippled helicopter, the team dragged bin Laden’s body to the remaining chopper and took off into the night sky.
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Some forty minutes later, after engaging in firefights and disposing of the crippled helicopter, the team dragged bin Laden’s body to the remaining chopper and took off into the night sky.
To neutralize bin Laden, a priority of the first order for President Obama, required cutting-edge technology and the US had such tools and technology in hand. Unmanned aircraft were generously utilized, although the drones might have been there to neutralize a different sort of adversary: the Pakistani military. The White House deployed the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel drone, a grayish aircraft that suspiciously looks like a mini B-2 bomber, to avoid radar detection and surveillance by Pakistan’s air force. Despite the tacit understanding between Washington and Islamabad that drones could operate in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, this new aircraft could penetrate deep into Pakistan itself, operating over extremely sensitive areas without being noticed by radar.
The helicopter used in the raid may have been a recent technological breakthrough. According to
Aviation Week
, the Blackhawks utilized various noise-muffling technologies, infrared suppression finishes as well as other modifications that were publicly unknown until then.
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Political considerations notwithstanding, US soldiers could now appear anywhere, at any moment, without the host country realizing its airspace had been penetrated.
Aviation Week
, the Blackhawks utilized various noise-muffling technologies, infrared suppression finishes as well as other modifications that were publicly unknown until then.
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Political considerations notwithstanding, US soldiers could now appear anywhere, at any moment, without the host country realizing its airspace had been penetrated.
But the helicopters and the drones would not have arrived over Abbottabad had it not been for a lethal slip-up: Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti decided to use the telephone. His phone call to another al-Qaeda–related individual sealed his fate when he uttered the words, “I’m back with the people I was with before.”
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US officials who had been monitoring the call from the other side realized they were listening to something important.
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Despite knowing that phone conversations could be compromised—a fact that bin Laden himself seems to have known since 1998—electronic communications within the group did not cease entirely. Al-Qaeda personnel, including Abu Ahmed, did their best to thwart eavesdropping and ensure basic operational security by traveling a long way away from their base before putting the batteries into the cell-or satellite phone before making the call.
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US officials who had been monitoring the call from the other side realized they were listening to something important.
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Despite knowing that phone conversations could be compromised—a fact that bin Laden himself seems to have known since 1998—electronic communications within the group did not cease entirely. Al-Qaeda personnel, including Abu Ahmed, did their best to thwart eavesdropping and ensure basic operational security by traveling a long way away from their base before putting the batteries into the cell-or satellite phone before making the call.
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Still, Abu Ahmed was human, and in August 2010 he wanted to touch base with an old friend. The recipient of the call was a known al-Qaeda comrade in arms, a fact, combined with painstaking analysis several years prior, that led US officials to believe that this might be their lucky break, almost ten years in the making. America’s powerful ability to track satellite phones and long-standing intelligence acquisition had finally penetrated bin Laden’s personal network. By following Abu Ahmed back to the Abbottabad compound, the US was able to fix his position and then position itself to finish the job.
Finally, as with much in life, the success of this operation depended on political leadership and chance. For all the tens of billions of dollars that the US has spent on intelligence, it is worthless if leaders are unwilling to act on it. As military historian John Keegan reflected in his book,
Intelligence in War
, “Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has it, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force.”
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Collecting, processing, and disseminating intelligence, despite the earnest efforts of its producers, is often a murky business, contradictory and sometimes just plain wrong. It is up to the leaders, often the commander in chief, to determine whether to act on this information and roll the dice on a risky operation.
Intelligence in War
, “Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has it, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force.”
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Collecting, processing, and disseminating intelligence, despite the earnest efforts of its producers, is often a murky business, contradictory and sometimes just plain wrong. It is up to the leaders, often the commander in chief, to determine whether to act on this information and roll the dice on a risky operation.
President Obama received conflicting advice whether to strike the Abbottabad compound. Some advisers were convinced that an attack would come at too great a cost and the political blowback would be intolerable. Others suggested a missile strike would accomplish the end goal and pose little risk to US personnel. The debate went back and forth.
What weighed on the president was the enormous political risk he was taking, not to mention the lethal dangers elite troops would face if the operation went poorly. The images of an enraged mob dragging American servicemen through the streets were almost overpowering; a week after the raid, he told the television program
60 Minutes
that “you think about Black Hawk Down. You think about what happened with the Iranian rescue . . . the day before, I was thinking about this quite a bit.”
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Complicating things was that, despite the evidence, it was all circumstantial: no American
had actually seen
Osama bin Laden at the compound. As the president later noted, “If it turns out that it’s a wealthy, you know, prince from Dubai who’s in this compound and, you know, we’ve sent Special Forces in, we’ve got problems.”
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60 Minutes
that “you think about Black Hawk Down. You think about what happened with the Iranian rescue . . . the day before, I was thinking about this quite a bit.”
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Complicating things was that, despite the evidence, it was all circumstantial: no American
had actually seen
Osama bin Laden at the compound. As the president later noted, “If it turns out that it’s a wealthy, you know, prince from Dubai who’s in this compound and, you know, we’ve sent Special Forces in, we’ve got problems.”
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But as his predecessor was wont to say about himself, President Obama at the time was “the decider,” and he authorized a ground assault on the compound. Relying on the best efforts of the intelligence community and the best troops on the planet, he took his chance on the wheel of fortune. The Pakistani government was left out of the loop, most likely because its discretion was, to put it charitably, questionable.
And thousands of lives and billions of dollars later, America finally got its man.
CHAPTER 12
TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE
D
uring the decade following the attacks on New York and Washington, Americans gradually returned to a pre-9/11 state of mind. Polling just prior to the November 2010 midterm elections showed that Americans ranked terrorism low on a laundry list of other concerns, including health care, the economy, and immigration.
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uring the decade following the attacks on New York and Washington, Americans gradually returned to a pre-9/11 state of mind. Polling just prior to the November 2010 midterm elections showed that Americans ranked terrorism low on a laundry list of other concerns, including health care, the economy, and immigration.
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But the threat of terrorism is now imprinted on the front of the US policymaking cerebral cortex. The American national security apparatus today is different from the one in place on September 11, 2001, and radically so. Brand-new bureaucracies now command sizable chunks of the federal budget; US military forces have been involved in continuous irregular warfare for a decade; dozens if not hundreds of individuals are held under strained international legal standards; and despite the death of al-Qaeda’s leader in Pakistan, the conflict against his organization grinds on. The US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on homeland defense, counterterrorism efforts, emergency response and other countermeasures, not to mention the invasion and occupation of that graveyard of empires, Afghanistan.
Despite its missteps and errors, the US has radically shifted its fighting doctrine to the new find-fix-finish model. It has evolved and adapted to meet the real needs of today’s geopolitical environment and take advantage of advances in technology. In the words of one former intelligence analyst, Cameron Middleton, the US has been generally “able to maintain an open society and safeguard civil liberties, even in the presence of a heightened security posture.”
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