Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (30 page)

Up in his top-floor bedroom, bin Laden had become a victim of his own security arrangements. The few windows ensured that no one could look in to see him, but now it was impossible for him to see what was going on outside the small room he shared with his beloved Amal. Dressed in tan
shalwar kameez
robes, the leader of al-Qaeda just waited in the dark in silence
for about fifteen minutes, seemingly mentally paralyzed as the Americans stormed his last refuge. With no moon and the electricity out, it was pitch black, which must have added to his confusion.
Sewn into his clothing were several hundred euros and two phone numbers, one for a cell phone in Pakistan and another for a call center in Pakistan’s tribal regions. This was the extent of bin Laden’s escape plan, and it wasn’t going to be of much help to him now.

Three SEALs went from the Kuwaiti’s one-story building through
a metal gate in a wall inside the compound and found themselves in a grassy courtyard in front of the main house. The SEALs entered the ground floor. On their left was a bedroom where they
shot Abrar, the Kuwaiti’s brother, and his wife, Bushra, killing them both. They were unarmed. At this point, the officials at the White House could no longer see what was going on, as the drone flying high above the compound was feeding back video only of the exterior of the bin Laden residence. Obama remembers, “
We were really in a blackout situation and it was hard for us to know what exactly was taking place. We knew that gunshots were taking place, and we knew some explosions were taking place.”

The SEAL team had
no idea what the layout of the floors inside bin Laden’s house might be. As they moved deeper inside, they passed a kitchen and two large storage rooms. Near the back of the house, which had a bunker-like feel, was a stairwell. Blocking their way to the upper two floors was a massive, locked metal gate. The SEALs blasted their way through this gate with the breaching materials they were carrying.

Leiter says that he was concerned that the house might be booby-trapped with bombs, a technique al-Qaeda had perfected in Iraq: “
I kept waiting for some big explosion from the house that just made everything sink.” Brennan was also anxious: “
Might there be a quick reaction force that bin Laden may have had, security that we didn’t know about?”

As the SEALs ran up to the second floor, they encountered bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, whom they shot on the staircase. He appears to have been unarmed.
Knots of children were now gathering on the stairs and landings of the bin Laden residence.

On a shelf in his bedroom were the
AK-47 and Makarov machine pistol that were bin Laden’s constant companions, but he didn’t reach for them. Instead, he opened a metal gate, which blocked all
access to his room and could be opened only from the inside, and quickly poked his head out to see what the commotion was. He was immediately spotted by the SEALs, who bounded up the next flight of stairs. At this point,
unless bin Laden walked out of his bedroom with his hands up and said, “I surrender,” there was no chance that he would be taken alive. Retreating inside, bin Laden made the fatal error of not locking this gate behind him, allowing the SEALs to run past it into a short hallway. They then turned right into his bedroom.

Hearing the sounds of strange men rushing into their room, Amal
screamed something in Arabic and threw herself in front of her husband. The first SEAL who charged into the room
shoved her aside, concerned she might be wearing a suicide bomb vest. Amal was then shot in the calf by another of the SEALs and collapsed unconscious onto the simple double mattress she shared with bin Laden. Bin Laden was offering no resistance when he was dispatched with a “double tap” of shots to the chest and his left eye. It was a grisly scene: his
brains spattered on the ceiling above him and poured out of his eye socket. The floor near the bed was smeared with bin Laden’s blood.

For all his bluster that he would go down fighting and his bodyguards would shoot him if he were ever found by the Americans, when the moment finally came, bin Laden went out not with a bang but with a whimper. The fifty-four-year-old bin Laden may have grown complacent or tired during his decade on the run; he had no real escape plan, and there was no secret passageway out of his house. Perhaps he
expected some kind of warning that never came. Or perhaps he knew that a firefight inside the enclosed spaces of his house would likely end up killing some of his wives and children. After all, the SEALs shot to kill or to wound most of the adults they encountered in the compound, killing four men and one woman and wounding two other women. Of the eleven adults in the compound
that ni
ght—which included three of bin Laden’s older children: Khalid, Maryam, and Sumaiya—a total of seven were shot in the space of a quarter of an hour.

On the audio feed, McRaven heard the SEAL team give the code word
Geronimo
. Each step of the operation had been labeled with a letter of the alphabet, and
G
meant that bin Laden was “secured.” McRaven relayed the word
Geronimo
to the White House. But this was ambiguous: Was bin Laden captured or dead? So McRaven asked the SEAL ground force commander, “Is he EKIA [Enemy Killed in Action]?” A few seconds later, the answer came back: “Roger, Geronimo EKIA.” Then McRaven announced to the White House, “Geronimo EKIA.”

There were gasps in the Situation Room, but
no whoops or high fives. The president quietly said, “We got him, we got him.”

It was still the middle of the night in Pakistan, and the SEALs were able to see only through the murky, pixilated green light of night vision goggles. McRaven came on the line again to say, “Look, I’ve got a Geronimo call, but I need to tell you it’s a first call. This is not a confirmation. Please keep your expectations managed a little here. Most operators when they are on a mission their adrenaline is sky high. Yes, they are professional, but let’s not count on anything until they get back and we have some evidence.” McRaven also pointed out, “We’ve got SEALs on the ground without a ride.”

The SEALs’ next task was to
blow up the downed helicopter crammed with secret avionics and clad in stealth technology. Then they had to get out of Pakistan without encountering Pakistani forces on the ground or in the air. Everyone following the operation knew that there was much that could still go wrong. Obama says, “All of us, I think, took pause, not wanting to get too excited: Number one because they’re operating in pitch darkness and identification could not be certain. Number two, our guys still weren’t out of there.”

Leiter says, “
We were just amazed by the lack of a Pakistani response. It was, even by Pakistani standards, remarkably slow.” Belatedly, the Pakistanis did scramble two F-16s. Leiter, who had logged hundreds of hours of flight time in attack jets, was not especially concerned, knowing that Pakistani pilots didn’t have much nighttime flying capability. “I had some appreciation for the Pakistanis’ ability to find two helicopters flying near the ground at night with no airborne command and control,” Leiter says. “An American F-16 couldn’t have found them in the time they needed to. It was just a non-risk. Some people were more nervous than I was.” Leiter was, however, concerned that the Pakistan military might interpret the mysterious choppers flying around Abbottabad as an incursion by the Indian air force and was relieved when the Pakistani F-16s started flying away from the Indian border.

The SEALs grabbed bin Laden’s body and dragged it down the stairs of his residence, leaving a trail of bloody skid marks, all under the watchful eyes of Safia, bin Laden’s twelve-year-old daughter. The bodies of the three other men killed by the SEALs, the courier and his brother and Khalid bin Laden, lay scattered around the compound, blood
oozing from their noses, ears, and mouths. Next to her husband was Bushra, the wife of the courier’s brother, also dead.

Outside the compound, the
interpreter waved off curious neighbors who had started to gather, telling them in the local language that a security operation was going on and they should go home. In the twenty-three minutes after they killed bin Laden, some SEALs wired the disabled chopper with explosives, while others gathered up the many computers, cell phones, and thumb drives that littered bin Laden’s residence, which might shed light on the inner workings of al-Qaeda and its plans for future terrorist attacks. The SEALs also rounded up the more than a dozen women and children, who
were distraught and wailing, and moved them out of the way so that they could safely blow up the downed helicopter.

The SEALs had expected they might find twenty-one-year-old Hamza bin Laden, one of the older sons of al-Qaeda’s leader, at the compound. They were carrying the cards that had detailed information about the adults they might encounter at the bin Laden residence, including Hamza, who had appeared in al-Qaeda propaganda videos while he was a child and had spent much of the decade after 9/11 in Iran. Hamza was known to have returned to Pakistan in the summer of 2010. Could he have escaped during the raid? That seems implausible, given the presence of twenty-three SEALs at the compound, four of whom were patrolling the perimeter with a dog trained to apprehend anyone escaping, while high overhead a U.S. drone monitored the raid. More likely, Hamza had never made it to Abbottabad and was living instead in Pakistan’s tribal regions with other al-Qaeda members.

One of the SEAL operators took a photo of bin Laden’s face and uploaded the picture to a server. It was sent on to Washington, where two separate teams of facial recognition experts were standing by to compare the picture of the dead bin Laden to existing photographs of him and provide a relatively quick, though not completely foolproof, confirmation that it was al-Qaeda’s leader. DNA testing was the only way to identify him with complete certainty, but that would take longer. SEALs extracted samples of tissue from bin Laden’s body and
placed them in vials for DNA analysis. One set of vials would go with bin Laden’s body on the backup Chinook that had just arrived at the compound, and another set would go on the working Black Hawk for the flight back to Afghanistan.

The Chinook picked up the dozen men from the disabled bird, and all
the material seized from the compound—about one hundred thumb drives, DVDs, and computer disks, plus computer hard
drives, five computers, and a number of cell phones. Bin Laden’s body was also loaded onto the Chinook. The decision had already been made that his wives and children would be left behind.

In Washington, the officials watching the video feed from the stealth drone could see the two distinctive large rotors of a Chinook helicopter coming into the frame. That was the Chinook carrying the QRF arriving at the compound. The officials could also now see the SEAL teams on the ground gathering outside the wall of the compound waiting to board the chopper for the flight back to base. The video feed then showed a massive fireball as the downed helicopter was blown up. It was “like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie,” says one official, who watched in awe. Then the Chinook took off from the Abbottabad compound and flew out of the drone’s field of vision. At the CIA command center there were
high fives all around and fist bumping.

Obama said later that the time the SEALs spent at the compound “was the longest forty minutes of my life, with the possible exception of when [my daughter] Sasha got meningitis when she was three months old, and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right.”

On the way out of Abbottabad, the
Chinook and the
Black Hawk separated, making them harder to detect as they headed toward Afghanistan. Both flew more direct routes than they had on the way into Pakistan, since speed rather than stealth was now of the essence, and the Black Hawk still needed to take on fuel at the refueling point inside Pakistan. Obama told his national security team, “Inform me as soon as our helicopters are out of Pakistani airspace.”

At about 2:00 a.m. local time, 6:30 p.m. back in Washington, the Chinook landed back at the base in Jalalabad; the entire operation had taken a little over three hours. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, a leading bin Laden analyst, and Admiral McRaven all
quickly
inspected bin Laden’s corpse. They stretched the body out to its full length but didn’t have a tape measure to confirm that the corpse measured six feet four, the height of the al-Qaeda leader, so a SEAL of roughly the same height lay down next to the body. The height was a match.

When McRaven spoke to Obama, he jokingly apologized for the downed stealth helicopter, saying, “
Well, sir, I guess I owe you sixty million dollars.”

“Let me get this straight, Bill. I just left a sixty-million-dollar helicopter in Pakistan and you don’t have a buck ninety-nine for a tape measure?” Obama shot back.

Obama remembers, “It wasn’t really until Bill McRaven personally saw the body that we confirmed that it was bin Laden.” Shortly after this confirmation, the CIA’s director for science and technology called into the Situation Room, reaching CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash. “
I have the results of the eight-point facial analysis on bin Laden,” he said. The CIA official walked Bash through the basis of his analysts’ confidence that the photo was a good match for bin Laden: “The length of his nose, the distance between his upper eyelid and his lower eyebrow, the shape of the ear, cartilage—they all match.” Bash scribbled notes furiously and handed them to Panetta. Panetta began reading them out to Obama, saying, “We’ve gotten the facial analysis, and it matches. We believe it’s bin Laden with ninety-five percent confidence.”
Cheers went up in the CIA conference room, and champagne bottles were soon discreetly uncorked in a number of Agency offices.

Should the president go out and announce bin Laden’s death publicly that night? After all, there was still a 5 percent chance that it wasn’t bin Laden. Obama’s initial reaction was, “That’s not good enough for me. I’m not going out to the American public with one chance in twenty of being wrong.” Some of Obama’s top cabinet officials
urged that a public statement be delayed until the DNA testing was completed, in a day or so. Others said, “Mr. President, this isn’t going to hold. It’s going to leak. You have to make a statement.” Obama said, “No, no, there’s no news until I say so. People can leak all they want. But it’s not news until I say something.”