Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (25 page)

Obama did not get into the tactical details of where the Chinook helicopters carrying the backup force should be located, nor how many extra SEALs needed to be added to the attacking force; he just told McRaven the force had to be able to fight its way out. “
That was a huge fundamental shift, because Bill McRaven thought he was bringing what people wanted, which was a ‘don’t piss off the Paks’ approach,” says a senior administration official. McRaven
went back to the drawing board and returned with a variety of ways he could protect the assault team, particularly having a
quick reaction force that was deployed deep into Pakistan, rather than on helicopters stationed at the Afghan-Pakistan border, as previously planned. Mullen says, “Obama is the one that put in the Chinook-47s. He is the one that said, ‘There is not enough backup.’ ”

Mullen, who had visited Pakistan twenty-seven times when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had repeatedly told his counterpart, General Kayani, “
If we know we can find Number One or Number Two we are going to get them. Period. And we are going to get them unilaterally. Period.”

On April 11, Panetta met at CIA headquarters with Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, ISI. Pasha, who had
forged a personal relationship with Panetta—calling him by his first name, Leon, and inviting him to his home for dinner with his wife when Panetta had visited Pakistan—complained vociferously about the amount of CIA activity going on in Pakistan, which the Raymond Davis affair had underlined. Pasha said, “
You have too many CIA agents in this country, and I don’t care if they’re security officers or case officers or analysts. There are too many of them.” Pasha termed the meeting a “
shouting match.” Panetta described it in gentler terms, but it strengthened his determination to keep the Pakistanis out of the loop on the bin Laden raid, and it increased the pressure on the Agency to act quickly, since it was obvious that ISI was now going to start cracking down on CIA activities in Pakistan.

While the White House continued to debate the various COAs
over the course of five days in early April, the SEAL team from DevGru’s Red Squadron began its rehearsals on full-scale models of the compound in a secret facility deep in the forests of North Carolina. They practiced on a one-acre replica of the Abbottabad
compound, fast-roping down from Black Hawks onto the courtyard of the compound and the roof of its main building.
These rehearsals were observed by the overall commander of Special Operations, Admiral Eric Olson, a thoughtful Arabic speaker and former Navy SEAL, and by Mike Vickers from the Pentagon, Admiral McRaven, and Jeremy Bash of the CIA. The rehearsals took place in daytime and didn’t include a practice run of the helicopter ride into Abbottabad, focusing only on what the SEAL team would do “on target.”

The raid would employ the “stealth” helicopters Cartwright had suggested using, rendering them more or less invisible to Pakistani radar. One of the main downsides of the raid, however, was how soon the inhabitants of the compound might get tipped off by the sound of the approaching choppers. Even with noise-suppression devices on the stealth Black Hawks, they still made a very loud sound once they were flying in the immediate vicinity. Using stopwatches, the observers found that they could hear the “
audio signature” of the helicopters when the aircraft were about a minute away from the target. McRaven had advertised it could be more like two minutes, because wind conditions would affect how the sound traveled.

During the rehearsals, the two helicopters flew toward the compound replica, dropped the SEAL teams in ninety seconds, and were quickly gone. Methodically, the SEALs practiced sweeping the compound and, as they were finishing, around ten minutes later, the helicopters swept in again to pick them up.

In the decade since 9/11, the SEALs had done many hundreds of building “take-downs” in hostile environments and
had encountered pretty much every type of surprise possible: armed women, people with suicide jackets hidden under their pajamas, insurgents hiding in “spider holes,” and even buildings entirely rigged with explosives. The SEALs had to assume they might encounter any one of these types of threats at the Abbottabad compound. As a result,
what became known as the “McRaven option” was constantly “red-teamed,” a formal process by the SEALs to identify potential flaws in the plan. “
McRaven had a backup for every possible failure, and a backup to the failure of the backup, and a backup to the failure of the backup of the backup. It was a multilayered set of plans,” recalls Michèle Flournoy.

When the SEALs on the strike team were finally informed who their target was,
a great cheer went up; there was no ambiguity about the purpose of their mission, or about the commitment of the men who were undertaking it.

The SEAL teams rehearsed again for a week in mid-April, in the high deserts in Nevada, which
replicated the likely heat conditions and the elevation of Abbottabad, which sits at four thousand feet. This time they rehearsed the entire mission from nighttime takeoff to the return to base more than three hours later. Again, Olson, McRaven, Vickers, and Bash observed the rehearsal,
this time joined by Admiral Mullen. The observers were taken into a hangar, where the SEALs walked them through a “
rehearsal of concept” drill using a cardboard model of the compound. The SEAL teams then flew off in their helicopters for about an hour. When they returned, the outside observers, now wearing night vision goggles, watched them as they assaulted the compound. During this rehearsal, wind conditions forced the helicopters to arrive at the target from an unexpected direction. This reminded the observers that no matter how many times the assault was rehearsed, there were still going to be some “game-time” decisions to make. The rehearsals also showed that
the whole operation on the ground could be conducted in under thirty minutes—the amount of time the Pentagon had determined that the SEALs would have before they were interrupted by the arrival of Pakistani security forces.

Mullen had a great deal of faith in McRaven, whom he had
known since the younger officer was a navy captain a decade earlier. At that time, McRaven had received rave reviews about his work in the Bush White House. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mullen had made it a point on his frequent trips to Afghanistan to
drop in at the JSOC operations center at Bagram Air Base, outside Kabul, typically around midnight, when the SEAL missions were in full swing. As a result, Mullen had a high degree of confidence in the skills of the SEALs, which was reaffirmed when he observed their rehearsal of the Abbottabad raid. “
If I am going to send somebody in to die,” Mullen explains, “I want to know as much about it as I possibly can. I also had the opportunity to look the men in the eye. Every single one of them. Personally. I also felt an obligation to understand as much as I could. So when you are sitting around the table with the president I could say, ‘I have confidence and here’s why. Here is what I watched. Here are the details.’ ”

Following the rehearsals, McRaven went to the White House to give Obama and his top national security advisors his assessment of the plausibility of the mission. Tony Blinken says of McRaven, “
First of all, it helps that he’s from central casting. He looks and sounds the part, so he inspires confidence, but you also got the very strong impression that this was not a guy who was going to be blustering or bragging. This was a guy who was going to give his very honest assessment, and so when he did, he had a lot of credibility, and it also created a tremendous amount of reassurance. And basically what McRaven told us was after they modeled this, and gamed it, and rehearsed it, he said, ‘We can do this.’ ”

At one point, when he was outlining the Abbottabad helicopter raid to Obama and his war cabinet, McRaven said, “
In terms of difficulty, compared to what we’re doing on a nightly basis in Afghanistan, what we’re doing in Iraq, this is not among the most difficult missions technically. The difficult part was the sovereignty issue
with Pakistan and flying for a long stretch of time over Pakistani airspace.”

As the raid planning began to gel, White House officials had to think through what would happen if bin Laden was captured. Since bin Laden had repeatedly said he would rather die a “martyr” than end up in American captivity, this scenario was regarded as quite unlikely. In 2004, bin Laden’s former bodyguard Abu Jandal had told
Al-Quds Al-Arabi
newspaper, “Sheikh Osama gave me a pistol.… The pistol had only two bullets, for me to kill Sheikh Osama with in case we were surrounded or he was about to fall into the enemy’s hands so that he would not be caught alive.… He would become a martyr, not a captive, and his blood would become a beacon that would arouse the zeal and determination of his followers.” In a tape posted to Islamist websites two years later, bin Laden confirmed his
willingness to be martyred: “I have sworn to only live free. Even if I find bitter the taste of death, I don’t want to die humiliated or deceived.” Still, if bin Laden were to conspicuously surrender, the
rules of engagement the SEALs adhered to meant that he would have to be taken into custody.

In case that happened, arrangements were made to have a high-value-detainee interrogation group,
consisting of lawyers, interpreters, and experienced interrogators, standing by at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Together with bin Laden, this group
would fly to the aircraft carrier USS
Carl Vinson
, which would be cruising off the coast of Pakistan in the Arabian Sea, where al-Qaeda’s leader would then be interrogated for some unspecified length of time.

The principals met again with the president on April 12 and 19. Panetta told Obama that the intelligence community had reached a
point of diminishing returns with regard to what it could learn about the compound. They were seeing “the pacer” almost every day but could not say definitively it was bin Laden. But to try to achieve
greater certainty by using a human spy close to the compound would greatly increase the risk of detection. Tony Blinken says, “
There was always the tension between wanting to be more certain about bin Laden’s presence and the danger that pushing the envelope on trying to establish his presence beyond a reasonable doubt would compromise what we were doing.” At the April 19 meeting, President
Obama gave a provisional go-ahead for the SEAL raid. The president asked McRaven how much notice he would need to set the operation in motion. McRaven replied, “I’ll need four hours.” Obama said, “I’ll give you twenty-four.” Some senior administration officials took this as a sign that Obama was now leaning toward doing the raid.

At the White House, intense secrecy continued to surround the planning for Abbottabad; no more than a dozen officials knew about it. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s strategic communications advisor, had noticed that over the past months there had been a series of meetings in the Situation Room, the topics of which were not listed on the manifest, and that the cameras that were usually on in the room had been turned off. “I wasn’t the only one who noticed this set of meetings, but nobody wanted to talk about that, right, because you don’t want to talk about the meeting you are
not invited to,” Rhodes recalls. Over the course of many months there were twenty-four interagency meetings to discuss the ripening intelligence picture at the Abbottabad compound. These discussions were described on attendees’ calendars as “non-meetings.” No “seconds” could attend and no “read-ahead” memos were prepared, even though they are customary for meetings of the president’s national security staff.

By mid-April, in order to develop and rehearse the various COAs, the universe of people who were being read into the bin Laden operation was growing, although the intelligence was highly compartmentalized and many who worked on the operation were apprised
of few details. John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism aide and the former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, started planning for the possibility that the bin Laden intelligence might leak, which meant bringing Rhodes into the secret. Rhodes would be able to run interference with the press if that became necessary. Rhodes recalls, “
In the past I have had to engage newspaper editors and say, ‘Please don’t run this, and here’s why.’ And Brennan wanted somebody who knew how to do that in case it leaked.”

On 9/11, Rhodes, then in his early twenties, had been working in Brooklyn and had an unobstructed view of the World Trade Center towers coming down. He remembers the moment when Brennan briefed him about bin Laden: “
I felt the enormous weight of the information I’d been told. When you’re in this job, you learn a lot of secrets, but this was different. It’s Osama bin Laden, after all, and you’re anxious about it, you’re excited about it, you’re nervous about it. The inclination is to want to discuss that with people, but you really had to be in the utmost vigilance about protecting this information.”

Brennan, Rasmussen, of the NSC staff, and McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, had developed a “
playbook” for the various scenarios that might happen during and after the raid. They started compiling it weeks before the president had made a final decision about what to do in Abbottabad, because all along he had guided them by saying, “Keep preparing. I haven’t made a decision, but keep all the options moving forward. And have them fully developed.” They were aware that once the Abbottabad operation was under way, they would have to be
able to flip a switch immediately and have well-thought-out options ready for all the diplomatic maneuvers and public statements for any one of the multiple scenarios that might happen at Abbottabad. They asked Rhodes to
help them to think about the strategic messaging that would follow each one of those scenarios.

The first was that the SEALs went into the compound and the operation was relatively clean and they got bin Laden. The messaging for that eventuality wasn’t too complicated.

The second scenario was that the SEALs went in, bin Laden wasn’t there, and they left cleanly. In this case, there would be no messaging at all, as the Obama administration stance would be to say nothing, and the hope was that the Pakistanis wouldn’t say anything either.