Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (24 page)

After the meeting, which was a dress rehearsal for a detailed discussion with the president in about two weeks, Panetta, Michael Morell, and Jeremy Bash retired to Panetta’s office. Panetta was pumped up. Pouring them each a glass of scotch, he said, “
I think our folks have developed four really good options. None of them is perfect, they’re all really tough, but we’ve got to stay on this. We’ve got to really get more intelligence and we have really got to flesh out these options, because I can’t imagine at the end of the day, we’re not going to do something about this.”

O
N MARCH 14, 2011
, Obama’s war cabinet gathered at the White House to brief the president. The COAs presented to Obama orally and also in memo and graphic form included the bombing run by a B-2 bomber, a drone strike, the raid option, and some kind of bilateral operation with the Pakistanis.

The B-2 strike had some attractions. Anyone who was in the compound or in any possible tunnels underneath it would die, and no American forces would be at risk. But a B-2 raid also had significant downsides. To destroy the compound, which sprawled over one acre, would require a large payload of bombs. General Cartwright pointed out that the
force of the bombs would be like an earthquake in the area. Such blunt force would certainly incur civilian casualties, not only of the women and children known to be living at the compound but also people in neighboring homes. And of course
there would be no proof of bin Laden’s death, since all DNA evidence would vanish in the air strike, and with it any proof that he had been living there.

The B-2 bombing option sparked debate. According to Tony Blinken, “
Some people said, ‘The DNA evidence was not the most important thing. If bin Laden was there, and we knew that with certainty, and we could take him out, taking him definitively off the battlefield was what counted.’ But a number of people felt that half—if not more—of the success we would achieve would be the world knowing bin Laden was gone, and you had to be able to prove that, or at least have enough proof to dispel most doubts and conspiracy theories.”

One way to limit the number of civilian casualties would be to drop a small bomb directly on the compound, but a bomb with a small payload might not actually kill bin Laden. And because the CIA had no way to see inside the compound, there was also the possibility that bin Laden might shelter in a vault hidden inside the building, or even escape through a tunnel to live another day.
Using thermal imaging, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency concluded that the water table around the Abbottabad compound was quite high. Indeed,
large streams course through the neighborhood in which the compound sits. Given the high water table, analysts discounted the idea that bin Laden might escape through a tunnel, but they were concerned that he might have some kind of safe room or vault in his house.

Proponents of the raid option, who included Panetta, pointed out that as risky as it was to send in the SEALs, if they did raid the compound and bin Laden wasn’t found, there was still a pretty decent chance that
they could just leave and no one would ever know about the operation. And even if a handful of people in and around the compound did find out about it, the operation could simply be
denied. And, in any event,
whoever
was living in that compound wasn’t going to create a public stink, as he was clearly trying to keep a low profile. A Special Operations helicopter assault that didn’t net bin Laden wouldn’t violate Pakistan’s sovereignty because it would never be made public, while a bombing raid would be a very public event, so any chance of “plausible deniability” for the operation would go out the window.

Another option was to fly a Predator or Reaper drone over the suspected bin Laden residence and fire a small missile or drop a small bomb on the compound.
General Cartwright, Obama’s favorite general, was pushing this approach. The idea would be to use a very small munition to
hit the mysterious “pacer” whom American satellites were seeing as he took his daily walk. Such a strike
required a very high degree of precision, and there was the risk that the drone shot might simply miss its target, as other drone strikes aimed at high-value targets had done in the past, but the risk of civilian casualties was much lower, and the pushback from the Pakistanis would likely be lower than from a conventional air strike. There would still be the problem of proving bin Laden was dead, but there was likely to be subsequent “
chatter” about bin Laden’s “martyrdom” among the al-Qaeda leadership, which American satellites would be able to pick up. And al-Qaeda almost always eventually confirmed the death of its leaders in communiqués, because they were happy to announce the passing of one of their “martyrs.”

Admiral Mike Mullen, Obama’s top military advisor, was skeptical of using the small munition as soon as the subject came up. “From my perspective,” he says, “
it was a system that had not been tested. I think we have hung our hopes on sophisticated new technologies sometimes too soon that don’t work out.” Instead Mullen favored the raid.

Michèle Flournoy was also one of the proponents of the raid, because
“the circumstantial evidence at some point became almost overwhelming in that it was very hard to explain this compound and the presence of certain individuals absent the presence of bin Laden. It just didn’t make any sense. Second, I felt that from a symbolic and strategic point of view, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would have a very powerful effect on al-Qaeda on top of the losses they had already suffered. Third, we expected that there would be an intelligence trove that would help us further understand the network and create further opportunities to take action against the core leadership should we actually go in.”

At the March 14 meeting, Admiral McRaven laid out the raid option, telling Obama very directly, “
Mister President, we haven’t thoroughly tested this out yet and we don’t know if we can do it, but when we do, I’ll come back to you and I’ll tell you straight up.”

Obama asked, “How much time do you need?”

McRaven said he would need three weeks to rehearse the mission thoroughly.

Obama observed, “Then you’d better get moving.”

The officials in the meeting agreed that
a helicopter-borne assault team was a risky option. Would the helicopters be detected in Pakistani airspace? And what would the Pakistanis do if they detected them? There were also refueling issues, since the choppers couldn’t go to the target, hover, land, take off, and make it all the way back to Afghanistan. How likely was the refueling site to be detected? Once the Black Hawks were over the compound, what were the potential risks to the helicopters?

Cartwright mentioned an experimental, radar-evading stealth helicopter that would help to lower the possibility that the Pakistanis would detect the raid, but
his comments didn’t get much traction at the time. When the meeting broke up,
many of the participants believed that Obama was leaning toward bombing the compound with
a B-2 bomber. Hillary Clinton recalls, “
Everybody left those meetings totally drained because of the consequences and the stakes that we were dealing with.”

On March 16, Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who had killed the two Pakistanis two months earlier, was released from jail following an ingenious deal in which the U.S. government paid $2 million of Islam-sanctioned “blood money” to the families of the two victims. This was a significant development for the small group at the White House planning the Abbottabad operation, because there was a real concern that Davis, who was passionately hated in Pakistan,
might end up getting killed in his Pakistani prison cell following any kind of U.S. assault on Abbottabad. Now that Davis was a free man, there was one less impediment to taking some kind of military action against the compound.

By the time of the next “principals” meeting with Obama in the White House, on March 29, the B-2 bombing option had been largely discounted. When Pentagon planners assessed what it would take to destroy the one-acre compound, they found that
it would require dropping thirty-two 2,000-pound bombs. This not only would incinerate any DNA evidence but also would be a major air strike in a crowded city, obliterating the compound with its more than twenty inhabitants and destroying another building nearby.
Bombs might also fall short of the target, killing still more civilians. The president was concerned about the potential number of civilian casualties and lack of certainty about killing
bin Laden. There was also the furious Pakistani response that such an attack would assuredly provoke to consider, and there would be no “sensitive site exploitation,” which is CIA-speak for the forensic examination of computers, cell phones, and pocket litter that typically is performed following a raid to capture or kill a high-value target.

What remained on the table was a surgical strike by a “standoff”
weapon such as a drone, the helicopter-borne assault option, and a wait-and-see approach that boiled down to trying to gather more definitive intelligence. During this meeting,
Obama peppered McRaven with questions such as “What if there is a safe room in the compound?” “What if bin Laden isn’t there?” “How do you get bin Laden out of the compound, whether dead or alive?” “What if the helicopters have mechanical problems?” “What happens if we meet resistance at the compound?”

Throughout this planning process, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was consistently
one of the most skeptical of the president’s advisors. His was a voice that carried great weight, as he had worked for six American presidents; he was working for Nixon’s National Security Council when Obama was only thirteen. And Gates had enough experience from his tenure as director of the CIA to know that you could have a pretty strong circumstantial case and still be wrong. In the event of a ground attack on the Abbottabad compound, he was also concerned about the level of risk for U.S. forces and for the American relationship with Pakistan.

Above all, Gates was concerned about a replay of Operation Eagle Claw, the botched effort in 1979 to release the fifty-two American hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution. The failed rescue operation was a major factor in making Jimmy Carter a one-term president. Eagle Claw was something Gates had lived through in excruciating detail when he was working for then-CIA director Stansfield Turner as his executive assistant. As the disaster unfolded in Iran on November 4, 1979, Gates was with Turner the whole night, shuttling between the CIA and the White House. Gates recalled, “
We finally left the White House at about 1:30 in the morning.… I had a long, sad drive home.”

Now, more than three decades later, another Democratic president was considering putting his presidency on the line with a
helicopter assault on the other side of the world in a country that many in the White House considered, at best, a duplicitous ally. Gates repeatedly pressed in White House meetings as the planning continued, “
What if you have a helicopter crash?” “What if the Pakistanis respond faster than you think?” “What if guys get pinned down in the compound?” Flournoy says that Gates “didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He was constantly asking the hard questions.”

As the helicopter-borne assault by the SEALs became more plausible, Flournoy says that
any chance that the Pakistanis would be given a heads-up became increasingly remote: “Even though we both had very shared interests in getting bin Laden, their concerns about having the U.S. come across the border to do it with a raid, we felt that that could create enough ambivalence that we might not get the support we wanted. At the end of the day, this was such a critical objective, and there’s such a vital interest at stake, and the risk of Pakistanis either losing control of the information or choosing to oppose it because of sovereignty concerns—it was too great. And the decision was made to go unilaterally, but to tell them at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Now that the decision had been made not to bring the Pakistanis into any aspect of the operation, Obama and his team had to think through how best to deal with whatever their reaction might be, particularly on the ground in Abbottabad, should the president green-light the raid. A senior administration official explains: “
McRaven, in some of the earliest briefings, was very sensitive to the idea that we don’t want to create, for lack of a better word, a shit storm with the Pakistanis if we don’t need to. So if this can be accomplished in a way that did not result in dead Pakistanis, either civilians or security forces, that’s the optimal solution.”

McRaven initially came up with an assault plan that would have had the SEALs
avoiding any kind of firefight with the Pakistanis
unless it was absolutely necessary. If the Pakistanis did show up in force at the compound, McRaven’s proposal was that the SEALs set up a
defensive perimeter and hold them at bay. Meanwhile, senior U.S. officials would explain to their Pakistani counterparts the intelligence case on bin Laden and why the raid had taken place, in the hope that the SEALs would eventually be able to leave without further hindrance.

In the scenario in which the SEALs were surrounded in the Abbottabad compound by hostile Pakistani soldiers, Obama’s national security team discussed who would be the best person to make the call explaining the situation to the most powerful man in Pakistan, the chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. As this discussion went on without a clear resolution, it was plain that Obama was not at all comfortable with this scenario. “
The premium is on the protection of our force, not on keeping the Pakistanis happy,” he instructed McRaven. “I want you to plan against a scenario that you have to fight your way out. You have to be able to face active Pakistani opposition and still get out with all your men safe.” The shorthand for that approach became the “fight your way out” option.

The Raymond Davis incident helped to shape the thinking of those considering the raid option. What if instead of one American CIA contractor in jail, you
ended up having some two dozen Navy SEALs in Pakistani custody because they didn’t have the firepower to fight their way out?