The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

by Mark Bowden

  Two weeks later, at the end of March, he was back in the Situation Room with a full plan. McRaven now told the president that he was completely confident that his men could execute the raid. His air planners had worked out entering Pakistan’s airspace without being seen by means of two stealth Black Hawks, secret aircraft specially designed to fly silently and avoid radar detection, followed by two big MH-47E Chinooks carrying fuel and a backup force, which would set down in Kala Dhaka, fifty miles northwest of Abbottabad. The Black Hawks would deliver the “operators” to the compound and, when they had finished taking it down, fly them out to the Chinooks and refuel before flying back to Afghanistan. He said it was likely they could do this without tripping any alarms. McRaven said that if his men could get on and off the compound within thirty minutes, there was a good chance that they would encounter no organized Pakistani defense. There was always a possibility that a small armed police unit—a couple of guys armed with AK-47s—might stumble on them. It was even possible that the compound had its own nearby defenders. But forces that small would not pose a serious threat to his men.

  If it happened this way, then the obstacles were minimal. But what if the Pakistanis were more alert than they imagined? What if something significantly delayed them at the compound? The admiral was grilled hard at this second meeting. Many in the room were skeptical of the response time he projected for the Pakistanis. Didn’t he realize how close the compound was to the military academy? Less than a mile. That there was an army facility and an Inter-Services Intelligence compound nearby? McRaven was aware. He explained that proximity in this case did not guarantee a speedy reaction. Even if some low-level soldier or cop or agent was awakened or alerted to something fishy going on at the compound, it would still take time for any kind of coordinated response. The Pakistani forces adhered to a rigid command structure, with lower-ranking men rarely acting without permission. It was a command philosophy the U.S. military discouraged but was typical of many militaries around the world. Most young officers would prefer to get in trouble for doing nothing than for doing something wrong. That calculation was built into the thirty-minute estimate. That was about as fast as they could do it, the admiral said. But what if he was wrong? What if the Pakistani forces responded faster than he imagined they could? What if something happened on the compound that slowed his men down?

  McRaven explained that if a significant Pakistani force showed up before his men could get out, then there was going to be a gunfight. He didn’t want to get into that gunfight. His men would win it, but in the process lose the war. That scenario would give the Pakistanis the high moral ground. There were big political ramifications whenever American forces killed a single Pakistani soldier or policeman. They didn’t know for sure that bin Laden was there, after all. As soon as the admiral had brought more of his planning team in, he had told them that rule one was they were going to do everything conceivable to avoid killing Pakistanis. It had been a priority at every point in the planning. If they got in and out fast, there would be no problem, but he could readily imagine a scenario that might delay them. If they got on target and were not able to find bin Laden, but they thought he was there hiding from them, behind a false door or false wall—something they had encountered often—then what would they do? Did they just hop on the helicopters and leave? Suppose they had his wives and other key people who confirmed that bin Laden was there somewhere? The answer was no, they would not leave. They had come too far and were too close at that point to give up. At that point, they had to be prepared to strongpoint the compound and start tearing things apart until they found him. Which would mean overstaying their limit. There was a strong potential for that, perhaps even a likelihood, and every extra minute upped the chances of a confrontation with Pakistani troops.

  “So at what point in time do you stop trying to find him?” McRaven asked hypothetically. “And now you are surrounded by Pakistanis, what do you do?”

  The admiral’s answer was surprising. He recommended that if it came to that, his men would just hunker in and wait for Washington to work things out with Pakistan’s leaders.

  “You go to them and say, ‘Okay, guys, this was the one we’ve been telling you about for umpteen years, that if he was there we were coming. Well he’s here. We haven’t killed anybody. We’re holed up. Let’s talk about this.’”

  That, McRaven thought, might buy them thirty more minutes. After that, he wouldn’t be dealing with a local response, but with the entire Pakistani chain of command.

  Here’s where the thinking of an admiral differed from the thinking of a president. As far as McRaven was concerned, his men could fight their way out of anything. There was a Quick Reaction Force nearby in case things got unexpectedly hairy. So they could fight their way off the compound. But then you had the rendezvous in Kala Dhaka, and then four American choppers flying out of Pakistani airspace, which was patrolled by F-16 fighters. Protecting the helicopters would now involve facing down the Pakistani air force. Again, this was something the U.S. Air Force could handle, with its superior fighters and air-to-ground capability, but . . . well, the fight would now be very sporty, indeed. The admiral thought this was a scenario to be avoided at all cost. After two years in Afghanistan, where the bulk of his force had moved from Iraq, he was acutely sensitive to the delicacy of the Pakistani relationship. It would not likely withstand a trail of dead Pakistanis and downed fighters and burning ground-to-air stations. So at the point where the raiding force inside the compound found itself surrounded, he suggested they should decline the fight. They would strongpoint the compound, hole up, and wait for Washington to work things out with Islamabad. They were, after all, American soldiers on a mission that Pakistan, ostensibly, supported . . . apprehending the world’s most wanted terrorist. Someone in the White House or at the State Department would then get on the phone with General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistani army chief of staff, or President Asif Zardari, and explain the situation. Ask, How do we extract ourselves from this without killing a lot of people? We don’t want dead guys; you don’t want dead guys. This is how McRaven imagined the conversation might proceed. The very fact that they preferred standing down to getting into a gunfight demonstrated that they intended no harm to Pakistanis and posed no threat to that nation.

  The president saw it differently than the admiral. He was not going to have any such conversation with Pakistani authorities. Counterterrorism adviser Nick Rasmussen would later describe the president’s response to McRaven’s suggestion as “visceral.”

  “I thought the possibilities of them being held, being subject to politics inside of Pakistan, were going to be very, very difficult,” the president explained to me. “I did not want to put them in a position of that kind of vulnerability.”

  If he were going to deal with an outraged Pakistan, which he would have to do in almost any event, he would do it without a force of brave Americans in the middle.

  Just days earlier, Obama had finally brought to a close the difficult wrangling over CIA contractor Davis, who had been released only after the United States agreed to pay $2.4 million to the families of the men he had killed. The incident had stirred up a small furor in Pakistan, where much of the public and the leadership was already fed up with American intrusions on their sovereignty—publicly, at least. Unofficially, the country’s top leadership was a lot more flexible, but there was only so far you could push them.

  Where this mission was concerned, Obama wasn’t going to count on Pakistani goodwill, because there appeared to be little to spare. Like many countries in that part of the world, Pakistan’s leadership was less a coherent hierarchy than a collage of overlapping interests. Part of the art of managing that relationship was in balancing those interests. It was an important relationship. Most of the supplies and fuel for the American war effort in Afghanistan flowed across Pakistan’s border. Even though al Qaeda terrorists had taken refuge in the country’s northwestern territories and had the tacit sympathy of powerful factions
in its leadership, the United States depended upon the government’s silent support to continue its drone campaign. And Pakistan was a nuclear power, a thing never to be forgotten. Its stability was vital to the security of not just the region but the world. With tempers in Islamabad already hot, imagine handing the Pakistanis a small force of elite American soldiers. Imagine trying to negotiate their exit with them trapped inside a compound with hostages or dead bodies, one of them quite possibly Osama bin Laden. The SEALs could all end up dead or held hostage. It wasn’t hard to imagine.

  “And I also had confidence, based on my subsequent conversations with McRaven, that they could get out of there without engaging the Pakistani military,” the president explained. “There was a good enough chance of them being able to get in and get out, even if something went wrong, even if it wasn’t bin Laden, that they could hold off the Pakistani military, which we anticipated couldn’t respond faster than a certain period of time, so that the likelihood of a firefight erupting between the United States and Pakistani military was very slim. And in that situation, I just wanted to get them out of there, and then we would deal with the fallout knowing that those guys were back here safe.”

  So Obama told McRaven that if his SEALs went in, they were coming out. Bin Laden was an imperative that outweighed the relationship. If the Pakistanis sounded an alarm and responded faster than they anticipated, so be it. There would have to be a confrontation. He told the admiral to be fully prepared to fight his way out.

  But the president had not decided on the raid yet. The air force came back with a plan for smaller bombs and smaller blast circles. They could hit the compound without harming people living in homes outside its walls, but the lesser assault meant that they could not guarantee taking out anything underground. There would still be a lot of bodies, women and children included, and no way to tell if one of the dead was bin Laden.

  But there was another air option, one that appealed especially to Cartwright, one of Obama’s favorite generals. It had been Cartwright who had come up with a middle path the year before when Obama was caught between launching a large counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan and essentially pulling the plug on the American mission. Cartwright had proposed sending a much smaller force than the Pentagon was requesting, one capable of conducting counterterror operations, but not large enough for the nation-building exercise contemplated.

  Cartwright’s new proposal for Abbottabad was to target the Pacer alone. Wait for the tall man dressed in shalwar kameez and prayer cap to emerge for his daily exercise around the vegetable garden and shoot him down with a small missile fired from a drone. It would require great precision, but the air force could do it with the equivalent of a sniper drone. There would be no smoking hole in the center of Abbottabad, no dead wives and children, little collateral damage, if any, and there would be no potential dead or wounded SEALs, no chance of a sticky standoff against Pakistan’s armed forces at the compound.

  It felt too good to be true. The guys who operated these things felt pretty good, but there was a strong whiff of testing stage about it. And what if it worked and you dropped the Pacer in his tracks? What then? How would you know that you had killed Osama bin Laden? And what if you hadn’t? What if you had dropped some cheating sheik from Dubai? How would you know? It meant that the uncertainty that surrounded this mission would live on, and that in some sense bin Laden would live on, even if it had been him. And it was strictly a one-shot deal. If you missed, the Pacer and his entourage would vanish.

  There was one strong clue that Obama had already made up his mind. McRaven had said that his team would be ready to conduct the raid by the first week of May, when the moon would vanish for a few days over Abbottabad and the nights would be black—the way JSOC liked them. No one said anything, but that window seemed to impose a hard deadline. The drone option had no urgency. It was a daylight opportunity, and the Pacer walked every day. You could take the shot whenever you wished. So why did everyone feel that the moon’s cycle was so important?

  Obama told McRaven to start full-dress rehearsals and to be ready to go when the nights turned black. He also told Cartwright to get ready to attempt the drone strike. He wanted both options kept alive until he made a decision.

  But to those who knew him, there was little doubt which way he was leaning.

  7

  “Adhering to These Precautions”

  April 2011

  In what would prove to be the final weeks of his life, events had overtaken the Sheik. There were popular uprisings throughout the Middle East. The tectonic shifts of what would be called the Arab Spring were remaking his world, country by country, but the revolutions bore little resemblance to his visions or his methods. The insignificance of al Qaeda in these events was widely noted. This worried him.

  He had much to worry him that April, and he spelled it all out in another of his long letters, dated April 26 but likely begun well before then, again to “Mahmoud,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. The letter would never be sent. This was his sixth spring confined in Abbottabad. His caliphate had shrunk to the confines of his high compound walls, to the cramped and crowded space of the house’s upper two floors. On the upper floor, when he stood with his prayer cap on, his head was just inches from the ceiling. His days and nights followed very familiar routines, rarely broken: meals, his seven daily prayer sessions, his readings, his brisk daily walk around the vegetable garden, teaching poetry to his children and grandchildren, and the regular sermons and lectures to his three wives.

  Much of the rest of the day, he was in front of his TV, absorbing the startling news by satellite from all over the world. Tyrants had been overthrown or were besieged in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. There were rumblings elsewhere. It was a groundswell of Arab pride, Islamic fervor, and passion for democracy that no one had foreseen, and that certainly he had not foreseen. Bin Laden felt sidelined, felt it like some kind of punishment, and was troubled. The great awakening he had longed for and predicted was happening without him.

  “I protest to God so much about my isolation and being alone,” he had written in a different letter, “that I worry people will tire of me and [my ideas] will become old and worn out to them! But I protest only to God.”

  He worried. His vision for the Middle East was a return to a model many centuries old, the ancient caliphate, where all true believers would be united in a single holy nation, a strict Islamist state run according to principles of the Koran as interpreted by Qutb, by himself, and by other like-minded religious scholars. His methods, the suicide attacks on infidels designed to spread fear and confusion, had been superseded by popular, mostly nonviolent, mass movements, crowds of joyous, angry, brave protesters singing and chanting defiantly, demanding freedom and change. He had a lot to say about all of this, tapping at his computer keyboard with his long, thin fingers in his tiny third-floor office alongside a crude wooden bookshelf, or pacing and dictating. He had recently dyed his beard and donned more elegant robes to record a new video statement that would go out with this packet of letters. In one to al-Rahman he raced to catch up with the Arab Spring, to interpret the events in light of his own immutable beliefs, and to instruct his followers on how to think about the changes and what posture to take toward them. He saw the revolutions as a partial fulfillment of his prophesies—he dubbed them “half solutions”—but potentially hazardous to the ultimate goal, insofar as much of the popular support came from young Arabs “tainted” with softer notions of Islam, or, even worse, Western secular views of tolerance, human rights, and democracy. He still spoke of “the Nation” as his vision of a unified Muslim empire.

  “To start, I want to talk about this most important point in our modern history, the launching of the Nation’s revolution against the tyrants, which I ask Allah to make the impetus for a revival of the dignity of the religion and its glory. What we are witnessing in these days of consecutive revolutions is a great and glorious event, and it is most probable, according to reality
and history, that it will encompass the majority of the Islamic world . . .”

  The influence and control of the United States was being cast out.

  “And the Americans worry about that, which is great; the secretary of state indicated in her visit to Yemen that, ‘We worry that the region will fall into the hands of the armed Islamists.’ . . . the fall of the remaining tyrants in the region became certain, with the will of Allah, and it was the beginning of a new era for the whole nation. These events are the most important events that the Nation has witnessed for centuries . . . and it is known that comprehensive popular movements inevitably change conditions, so if we redouble the efforts to direct and educate the Muslim people and caution them from half solutions, while taking care in providing good advice to them, the oncoming stage will be for Islam, Allah willing.”

  The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for instance, troubled him, because the organization was not, as he saw it, purely devoted to his brand of strict and violent jihad. He was hopeful that the group was coming around, noting news reports of growing militancy within it, especially among the young. “So the return of the Brotherhood and those like them to the true Islam is a matter of time, with the will of Allah. The more attention paid to explaining Islamic understanding, the sooner their return is, so preserving the Muslim movements today and adjusting their direction requires effort and attention, keeping in mind the necessity of being kindly to the sons of the Nation who fell under misguidance for long decades.”

  The role of al Qaeda now, he explained, would be “the duty of guidance and advice, which is connected to the fate of the Nation.”

  The Sheik complained that his recommendation years earlier to establish “a number of scholars and wise men” to guide the emergence of the caliphate had been ignored, and that this now helped explain why the Arab Spring was progressing along improper paths. Now, at this “pivotal moment,” he wrote, “it is incumbent on us, the mujahidin, to fulfill that duty and to plug that gap as much as we can, which became one of the utmost duties after faith, so that the Nation is liberated with the will of Allah and the religion regains its glory. There is no doubt that the duties of the mujahidin are numerous, except that this great duty should take the main share of our efforts so that we do not shortchange it, and expose the Nation’s shake-up today to what the revolutions against Western occupation got exposed to in the past.”