Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (29 page)

At 1:22 p.m., Panetta ordered McRaven to perform the raid, telling him, “Go in there and get bin Laden, and if bin Laden isn’t in there, get the hell out!”

At 2:00 p.m., Obama returned from his golf game and went straight to the Sit Room for the final meeting with his national security team as Operation Neptune Spear commenced.
At 2:05 p.m., Leon Panetta began one more overview of the operation.

It was now just past 11:00 p.m. in Abbottabad, and the bin Laden household was in bed. And given the time difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it was just past 10:30 p.m. in Jalalabad, where the U.S. Navy SEAL team, consisting of
twenty-three “operators”
and an interpreter—a “terp,” in military parlance—were readying themselves to board two Black Hawk choppers. The helicopters would carry them more than 150 miles to the east, perhaps to confront the man responsible for the deadliest mass murder in American history. The men carried
small cards filled with photos and descriptions of bin Laden’s family and the members of his entourage who were believed to be living at the compound. Also along for the operation was a
combat dog named Cairo, wearing body armor just like his SEAL teammates.

Half an hour later,
at about 11:00 p.m. local time, the two Black Hawks took off from the Jalalabad airfield, heading east toward the Pakistani border, which they would cross in about fifteen minutes. The MH-60 choppers were modified so as to remain undetected by Pakistani radar stations, which were
in “peacetime” mode, unlike the radar facilities on the border Pakistan shared with its longtime enemy India, which were always on heightened alert. Painted with exotic emulsions designed to help them evade radar, the modified MH-60s also
gave off a low heat “signature” in flight, and their tail rotors had been designed to make them less noisy and less susceptible to radar identification. On top of that, the helicopters flew “nap-of-the-earth,” which means perilously low and very, very fast—only a few feet above the ground, driving around trees and hugging the riverbeds and valleys that penetrate the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range. This also made them harder to detect by radar. After crossing the Pakistani border, the choppers swung north of Peshawar and its millions of residents and eyeballs. The total
flight time to the target was about an hour and a half.

The secrecy surrounding the bin Laden raid was so intense that of the 150,000 American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, the only one who had been briefed about the operation was their overall commander, General David
Petraeus, who had received a heads-up
three days earlier. As on most nights in Afghanistan, there were some
dozen Special Forces operations launching that night to capture or kill militant commanders. The bin Laden raid was different not only because of the target but also because it was taking place in a country that the United States was nominally allied to but that had not been notified of the operation.

Shortly before midnight,
Petraeus strolled into the ops center in NATO headquarters and asked everyone except one officer to leave. He then opened up a classified chat room on a computer that allowed him to monitor the operation. If needed, Petraeus was ready to order U.S. aircraft in Afghanistan to respond to Pakistani jets trying to intercept or even attack the American helicopters now entering their airspace.

Once the two Black Hawks were inside Pakistan’s airspace,
three bus-size Chinook helicopters took off from the Jalalabad airfield. One landed just inside the Afghan border with Pakistan, and two
flew on to Kala Dhaka, in the mountainous region of Swat, about fifty miles northwest of Abbottabad, landing on a flat beachlike area on the banks of the broad Indus River. This part of northern Pakistan was barely populated and wasn’t controlled by either the Taliban or the Pakistani government. On these two Chinooks was the QRF, consisting of two dozen SEALs who would go forward if the SEALs on the Black Hawks encountered serious opposition when they landed at the compound. The Chinooks also carried bladders of fuel for the Black Hawks, which would need to be refueled on the flight back to Afghanistan.

A
DJOINING THE WHITE HOUSE
situation room, which can accommodate
more than a dozen senior officials at a large, highly polished wooden table and a couple dozen more staffers on the “backbencher”
seats around the walls, is a much smaller meeting room. Like the Sit Room, this conference room has secure video and phone communications, but it has only a small table and can comfortably accommodate only seven people. In this room was Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, a deputy commander of JSOC, dressed in a crisp blue air force uniform festooned with ribbons, monitoring the SEAL teams on the raid in real time on a laptop, together with another JSOC officer. On the video monitors of the small conference room, grainy video of the unfolding raid was fed in from a
bat-shaped RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone flying more than two miles above Abbottabad.

National Security Advisor Tom Donilon stopped by the small conference room and asked what the officers were doing. Told that they were getting ready to unplug their equipment and move it into the main Situation Room, Donilon said, “No, you’re not. Shut this off. I don’t want this going on.” Donilon didn’t want to leave anyone with the impression that the president was micromanaging a military mission for which he’d already approved the plan. The officers pointed out that if they shut down their equipment there would no longer be a way to communicate with McRaven. “Okay,” Donilon said, “you have to keep it all in this room.”

Next door, a debate was percolating in the Situation Room about whether the president should be monitoring the operation live as it happened. Leiter recalls, “
The White House, as only the White House can, had an endless debate about whether or not the president should monitor in real time. What if something went wrong and the president said something or did something? I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for the debate to be solved. I was going to watch the damn thing.”

Leiter went into the small conference room to watch the feed from the stealth drone, and was soon followed by members of
Obama’s cabinet. “
Slowly, onesies and twosies, they kept poking their head in,” Leiter recalls. Vice President Joe Biden drifted in, and then Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, and suddenly the room was full, with many of Obama’s top intelligence and counterterrorism officials jammed up against the wall or peering through the doorway to get a better look at the unfolding drama.

The debate about whether the president should be monitoring the operation was settled when Obama popped into the room and announced, “
I need to watch this,” and settled himself into a chair off to one side of the cramped room.
Dozens of other officials at the CIA and the Pentagon also were monitoring the same video feed.

The men and women in the room were updated about each key milestone along the way as the helicopters entered Pakistan’s airspace and headed toward Abbottabad. The tension was palpable. Leiter, who used to fly attack jets for the navy, says, “
The only thing I can compare it to is landing a plane on an aircraft carrier at night.” There was very little discussion, except every once in a while an official would ask for clarification of what was going on, such as “
Why is that helo there? What are they doing now?” If he could, Webb answered the question immediately; otherwise he made a quick call to find out what was happening.

The Black Hawks approached Abbottabad from the northwest. Once the helicopters reached their destination, the carefully planned operation began to unravel. As the first chopper tried to land in the largest courtyard in the compound, it suddenly lost altitude. The combination of the additional
weight of the stealth technology and the higher-than-expected temperatures in Abbottabad had degraded its performance, causing an aerodynamic phenomenon known as “
settling with power,” meaning an unexpectedly fast drop. When the SEALs had practiced the maneuver on a replica of the compound in the States, the compound’s
outer walls had been
represented by chain-link fencing, whereas the actual walls were made of concrete. The thick walls likely gave more energy to the Black Hawk’s rotor wash and contributed to the chopper’s instability. Because of that instability, the tail of the craft clipped one of the compound walls, breaking off the critical tail rotor. Now the pilot could no longer control the chopper. Relying on his training,
he avoided a potentially catastrophic crash by burying the helo’s nose in the dirt in the large yard where the compound occupants grew crops. Because of his quick thinking, the SEALs on the chopper did not sustain serious injuries and, after gathering their wits about them, were able to clamber out of the downed bird.

The plan had been for both Black Hawks to drop off the two dozen men, lingering for only a couple of minutes before flying out to a distant rendezvous point, where they would then wait for the signal to return for the SEAL team at the end of the mission. The
hope was that any curious locals would assume that the two choppers were visiting the nearby military academy. Now one Black Hawk was down and any chance that the mission might remain “deniable” to the media and public was gone. So was the element of surprise.

Obama grimly watched this all unfold on the grainy video feed being beamed back from the drone high above the compound. The feed clearly showed that the rotors of the first helicopter had stopped spinning. Then the second helicopter, instead of hovering and dropping some SEALs on the roof of the main compound building, simply disappeared out of the shot.

“
We could see that there were problems initially with one of the helicopters landing. So right off the top, everybody, I think, was holding their breath. That wasn’t in the script,” says Obama. “
And when our helicopter tail didn’t get over the wall into the yard there and we knew that it was lost, which meant you had to bring in the standby helicopter for the extraction, those were really intense moments,”
echoes Secretary Clinton. “This was like any episode of
24
or any movie you could ever imagine.”

General James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was an old friend of Robert Gates, who was sitting in front of him, also transfixed by the footage of the chopper going down. Clapper looked over at
Gates, who was ashen. “
I know his heart was in his throat then,” says Clapper. Clapper’s deputy Robert Cardillo says, “I could almost hear heartbeats in the room.” Vice President Biden fingered his rosary beads.

In Panetta’s conference room at the CIA, now packed with some two dozen officials from the Agency, Joint Special Operations Command, and other parts of the intelligence community, there was silence as the footage of the downed helicopter flickered on the screen. A female analyst who had worked on the bin Laden account for years
nervously piped up, “Is that good?”

In his Texas drawl, Admiral McRaven addressed Panetta without any discernible shift in tone, saying, “We will now be amending the mission.
Director, as you can see, we have a helicopter down in the courtyard. My men are prepared for this contingency and they will deal with it.” Within a matter of seconds, McRaven could see on his video feed of the operation that the SEAL team on the downed helicopter had made it out of the bird without any serious problems. About a minute later, McRaven said, “
I’m pushing the QRF to the objective,” meaning that the SEALs waiting in the Chinook about twenty minutes’ flying time to the north of the compound would now scramble to get to Abbottabad.

Despite the contingency plans, some of the officials observing the chopper crash were haunted by the knowledge that it was after just this kind of mishap that an operation could spiral badly out of control. The
deadliest battle in the history of the SEALs had taken place six years earlier, in Kunar, in eastern Afghanistan, where the
Taliban had ambushed a group of four SEALs, three of whom were killed. The mission that was launched to try to extricate the SEALs turned into a fiasco when one of the rescue helicopters went down, killing all eight SEALs and eight Special Operations aviators on board.

After the helicopter went down in the Abbottabad compound, Mullen’s biggest concern “was that someone at the White House would reach in and start micromanaging the mission. It is potentially the great disadvantage about technology that we have these days. And I was going to put my body in the way to try to stop that. Obviously, there was one person I couldn’t stop doing that, and that was the president.” Obama let the mission proceed.

A
T THE COMPOUND
,
three SEALs from the downed chopper ran across the small field where the Black Hawk had crashed and opened a door on one of the inside walls of the compound, leading to a self-contained annex area. There they found the simple garage where the Kuwaiti parked his jeep and van and the one-story building where he lived with his family. The Kuwaiti poked his head out from behind a metal gate in this building, and the SEALs shot him twice in the chin, killing him. They also wounded the Kuwaiti’s wife with a shot to her right shoulder. Their silenced weapons made little noise. (The courier’s AK-47 was later found by his bedside. It seems unlikely that he fired it, given its location and the fact that no casings from such a weapon were later found at the scene.)

Meanwhile, the second Black Hawk pilot had seen what happened to the first chopper and shifted gears. Plan A had been to hover above the roof of bin Laden’s bedroom so that a few SEALs could fast-rope down onto it and surprise bin Laden while he slept. Now the pilot opted for Plan B: the safer course of
settling the bird
down just outside the compound walls in a field of crops. A small group of SEALs jumped out, four of them to
secure the outside perimeter of the compound, together with the interpreter and Cairo, a Belgian Malinois, similar to a German shepherd. The dog would
track any “squirters,” or people trying to escape from the compound, and would discourage inquisitive neighbors from getting too close. Most Muslims consider dogs to be “unclean” and are wary of them, in particular attack dogs such as Cairo. Cairo had also been trained to hunt for any hidden chambers or vaults inside the compound that might be hiding bin Laden.
The remaining eight SEALs on the second chopper jumped out and set an explosive charge on a solid metal door on one of the compound’s exterior walls, but when the gate was blown off its hinges, they were greeted by the sight of a large brick wall—a dead end. Soon after that, their colleagues from the downed chopper let them in through the main gate of the compound, saving them the trouble of blowing through the massive, thick exterior wall.