Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (31 page)

A photo of the dead al-Qaeda leader was then passed around the Situation Room, and Obama looked it over carefully. Leiter and Brennan looked at each other and said, “It’s bin Laden.” General Clapper remembers, “
The pictures were kind of gruesome, but it was him. I was sure it was him.” A White House official recalls, “
There was a hole right around one of his eyes and it took off a chunk of his head, but it looked like Osama bin Laden, except for the fact that the beard was shorter and darker. It seemed like the beard had been dyed black and was a little shorter than the long gray beard in all the famous pictures of him walking around.” Leiter remembers thinking, “
I don’t need facial recognition. It’s bin Laden with a hole in his head—immediately recognizable. Holy shit! We just killed bin Laden!”

P
AKISTANI
SECURITY OFFICIALS
began arriving at the Abbottabad compound within a few minutes after the SEALs had left. The officials could hear the sound of helicopters fading into the distance. They found a chaotic scene. First, they saw the burning helicopter, which they reported to the military. Perhaps, they thought, this was a Pakistani training mission gone badly wrong. Then, making their way through the compound gate, the officials came across a wounded woman. She was the courier’s wife, Mariam. Speaking in Pashto, a local language, she said, “
I am from Swat. My husband has been killed. If you go inside, there are many Arabs who have been killed.”

Inside the main residence, the officials found several women screaming and shouting, and fourteen children, all handcuffed. They also found four dead bodies, two in the annex building and two on the ground floor of the main building. On the top floor bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal, lay unconscious on the bed, wearing an
abaya
(a loose black robe) as if she had been planning to go out. Shattered glass was everywhere. One of the older women told the
officials in English, “
They have killed and taken away Abu Hamza [the father of Hamza].” One of the officials asked, “Well, who is Abu Hamza?” She replied, “Osama bin Laden. They’ve killed the father of my son.”

Bin Laden’s twelve-year-old
daughter, Safia, also spoke, saying, “I am Saudi. Osama bin Laden is my father.” The Pakistanis took bin Laden’s three wives and his children into custody and placed them under house arrest while they were debriefed by Pakistani military intelligence investigators.

One of the first journalists to arrive at the compound was Ihsan Khan, the local correspondent for the Voice of America’s Pashto service. Khan, a dogged reporter in a part of the world where that can get you in trouble, had been dozing at home when he was
awakened by a quite unusual sound: a helicopter flying over the city at about 12:45 a.m. This was the backup Chinook flying in to replace the downed Black Hawk. The distinctive sound of a helicopter flying overhead at night was something Khan hadn’t heard once during the seven years he had lived in the city, even during the relief efforts in the region following the devastating 2005 earthquake that killed some seventy-five thousand people.

Khan called some buddies to see what was going on. They didn’t know. Then, about twenty minutes later, at 1:05 a.m., Khan heard a huge explosion. This was the sound of the downed chopper being blown up. Khan leapt out of bed and dialed the local police. The line was busy. He made further calls and was told that a helicopter had just crashed. He rushed outside his house and saw a large fireball that looked to be about a mile away.

Whatever was going on was clearly news. Nothing ever happened in Abbottabad! It was one of the most peaceful cities in Pakistan. Khan dashed off an e-mail to his editor at VOA in Washington:
“
A helicopter crashed down in sensitive area Kakul of Abbottabad. Before the incident heavy firing and blasts were heard by the locals. Officials have confirmed the heli crash but casualties and reasons haven’t been disclosed. I am gathering further details and will be ready for live report. Please call me before the morning bulletin, if possible.”

He then rushed to the location of the fireball, in the Bilal Town neighborhood. When he reached the compound, he found that the police had already cordoned it off. Locals told him that the electricity in the neighborhood had been switched off, and that this had not been a regularly scheduled “load shedding.” Neighbors also told Khan that just before one of the helicopters had landed at the compound—very likely the backup Chinook—someone on the ground had wielded a colored laser light, flashing it near the compound to guide the helicopter in to land.

Back at the White House, Obama’s team realized that, because of the helicopter crash, the bin Laden operation would
not remain secret for long. The officials monitoring the feed from the stealth drone could already
see people on the rooftops of buildings in Abbottabad talking on cell phones. And the NSA was already—within an hour of the raid—
picking up conversations by local officials in Abbottabad about what had just happened at the mysterious “Arab house.” Ben Rhodes was beginning to receive
reports that Pakistani media were at the compound filming the aftermath of the raid and interviewing neighbors. Some Pakistani journalists were already speculating that the helicopter that went down was from a “foreign power,” and soon the daytime news cycle in Pakistan would begin and Pakistan’s raucous and conspiracy-minded media would have a field day with the story. Rhodes says, “
Some of us were eager for the president to go out that night and speak to the world, because
we were concerned about the story kind of beginning to dribble out sideways.”

The debate that had percolated for months about how best to handle the Pakistanis bubbled up again in the Situation Room. Who should call the Pakistani leadership? And what should that person say? Pakistan is nominally controlled by its civilian government, but the military in fact controls all aspects of its national security policy. It would send the wrong signal for Obama to make the call to the most powerful man in Pakistan, chief of army staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Should Hillary Clinton call him, or should it be Admiral Mullen, who had put in more face time with Kayani than anyone in the White House? Mullen was pushing for a quick decision,
saying, “We gotta call!”

Kayani and Mullen had
developed a real friendship over the more than two dozen visits to Pakistan that Mullen had made during the past four years to try to shore up the ever-fragile Pakistani-American alliance. Kayani, an analytical thinker not given to bluster, had studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and while he was certainly a proud Pakistani nationalist, he was not reflexively anti-American. Indeed, he had led the effort on the Pakistani military side to cement a “strategic partnership” with the United States over the previous couple of years.

Mullen knew it was important to try to reach Kayani before his generals spoke with him, because it would give Kayani the opportunity to take some ownership of what had happened, rather than leaving him to say that he had had no idea what was going on. The Pakistanis might also think that the events in Abbottabad were part of an attack by their traditional enemy India, and the Obama administration had to make sure that they understood the truth of the matter as soon as possible to avoid any conflict between the two nuclear-armed states.

Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence service, was working in his study late at night when someone called to say, “Sorry to hear about the helicopter crash.” Pasha knew that Pakistani military helicopters didn’t have night vision capabilities, so it would be strange if it were a Pakistani chopper. “Has one of our helicopters crashed?” he asked his men in a series of phone calls. “
It was not ours,” he was told.

General
Kayani took a call from his director of military operations at about 1:00 a.m. The news was alarming: a helicopter had just crashed near a residential compound in Abbottabad in a region of the country that is thick with military installations and nuclear weapons facilities. Assuming that India might be trying to make a preemptive strike against Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, General Kayani phoned the head of the air force and ordered him to scramble jets to intercept anyone who might be flying that night. Two American-made F-16s were scrambled from their base five hundred miles to the southwest of Abbottabad. Pakistan is quite large—twice the size of California—and the jets couldn’t find the intruders.

Once the two helicopters carrying the SEALs and bin Laden’s body had safely exited Pakistani airspace, the
first person Obama called was his predecessor as president. George W. Bush was eating dinner at a restaurant in Dallas with his wife, Laura, when the Secret Service informed him that he would have a call coming in from the White House in twenty minutes. Bush went home quickly to take the call. When Obama told him the news, Bush congratulated him and the SEALs. Bush says, “
I didn’t feel any great sense of happiness or jubilation. I felt a sense of closure, and I felt a sense of gratitude that justice had been done.” Obama also called Bill Clinton, the first American president to have tried to kill bin Laden, with the cruise missile strikes on Afghanistan in 1998 that had followed the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa. And he phoned close
ally David Cameron, the British prime minister, whose country had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaeda, so that Cameron wouldn’t be surprised by the news the following morning.

Cameron Munter, the U.S. ambassador to
Pakistan, had known of the impending raid in advance but had discussed it with no one at his embassy. Now, in the wee hours of the morning, as he followed the progress of the raid, he stepped outside the embassy chancery in Islamabad and received an unexpected call on his cell phone.
It was a senior Pakistani official, who said, “We understand there has been a helicopter crash in Abbottabad. Do you know anything about this?” Munter told the man he would get back to him. He did not do so, believing the first set of calls to the Pakistani leadership was best handled by President Obama and Admiral Mullen. Based on the
bewildered reactions of Pakistani officials to the events of that night, it was obvious to Munter and the officials monitoring the situation in the White House that the Pakistanis had not had a clue about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Obama called Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, and told him the news. Zardari became emotional. His wife, Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, had been assassinated by the Taliban four years earlier.
Zardari told Obama, “I’m happy because these are the same types of people who killed my wife, and her people are my family, so I share in this.”

Admiral Mullen then got through to General Kayani, on a secure line. “
Congratulations,” Kayani immediately said upon hearing the news about bin Laden. The conversation
lasted a tense twenty minutes. Mullen told Kayani the outlines of what had happened in Abbottabad and said that the president was mulling over making a statement about the raid. Kayani said that he was concerned about the violation of Pakistani sovereignty and
urged that Obama go out
as soon as possible and explain what had happened. Soon it would be daylight in Pakistan, and there was a mysterious downed helicopter in the middle of Abbottabad that clearly didn’t belong to Pakistan; the local press would be all over the story. Kayani said, “
Our people need to understand what happened here. We’re not going to be able to manage the Pakistani media without you confirming this. You can explain it to them. They need to understand that this was bin Laden and not just some ordinary U.S. operation.”

Kayani, in effect, demanded that Obama publicly explain what had happened as soon as it was feasible to do so. Mullen walked back into the Situation Room and said, “Kayani has asked for us to go public,” which swayed Obama to go forward. At about 8:15 p.m. the White House informed the Washington press corps that the president would be making an important announcement in two hours. Earlier in the day, the White House press office had called a “lid,” meaning that the president was not going to do or say anything that would make news for the rest of the day and the White House press corps could go home, but now those same correspondents were told by administration officials, “
Just get in!” Biden and Clinton started working the phones from little booths in the Situation Room complex, calling key members of Congress and important allies to give them a heads-up before the president made his public announcement about bin Laden’s death. Gates, who had not supported the raid, was the first to leave the White House, at about 8:30 p.m. The rest of Obama’s national security team settled in for what would be a long night.

Network journalists and pundits took to the airwaves speculating about what a speech by the president late on a Sunday night could possibly concern. Initially, they wondered whether the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi might have been killed in the NATO
operation Obama had set in motion two months earlier. A day earlier, members of Gadhafi’s family had been killed in a NATO air strike in Libya.
Gradually the speculation became more informed as some reporters learned that the announcement had something to do with bin Laden.

Rhodes had sat down before the raid to write the “We got bin Laden” speech for the president, but he was only a few lines in before
he thought, “I can’t do this. It’d jinx it; it doesn’t feel right.” Instead, he had building blocks of a potential speech ready to go. The most ticklish aspect of the speech was how to describe Pakistan’s involvement. Rhodes explains, “
We decided not to sugarcoat it and say that they had played a role, but it was factually true that some of the intelligence collection that led us to the compound and was associated with the compound was based on Pakistani cooperation. It was unwitting; they didn’t know they were helping to find bin Laden, but they did share things with us that filled out our intelligence picture, so we felt confident saying Pakistani cooperation helped lead to this.”