The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

by Mark Bowden

  In the past, such revolutions had been co-opted by corrupt, Westernized, secularized dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, or had, as in Afghanistan, been toppled by Western intervention. Bin Laden argued that he and his followers were the ones with the right vision, with the God-inspired vision to lead the changes. Contrary to interpretations of the Arab Spring that claimed al Qaeda was irrelevant, the Sheik argued that it had been his efforts that prepared the way. It was al Qaeda that had “bled down the head of international apostasy”—that is, America—“and emboldened their Muslim brothers to rise up against the regimes it had propped up for much of the last century. The most important thing for now was to end conflict between Islamist factions, at least temporarily, and for every Muslim to join this great rising tide.

  “So we have to get into expanding the programmed and directed media, and our efforts in directing the Nation’s research and deciding on a specific plan that we all discuss, as the oncoming stage is important and very dangerous and does not tolerate the apparent differences in our directions,” he wrote. “Initially, I would see that one of the most important steps of the oncoming stage is inciting the people who have not revolted yet, and encouraging them against the rulers and their methods, indicating that it is a religious duty and a logical necessity, so the arrows are concentrated on toppling the rulers without discussing the differences in issues, while paying maximum attention to spreading awareness and correcting the understanding. We should tell the brothers in all the regions to pay attention to spreading the book Misunderstandings About Islam by Sheik Muhammad Qutb. Please inform Sheik Yahya [Abu Yahya al-Libi, who would be killed in a drone strike in little more than a year] and the other brothers who have expressive abilities . . . and inform me of their opinions without missing any of them, as every voice that can contribute in this stage should not be excluded.”

  Bin Laden now set down a list of “general points,” asking that a video statement he had recorded on a thumb drive about the Arab Spring, and which he would enclose, be given to Al Jazeera for broadcast, and seeking advice about an essay he had written on the same subject. As for the al Qaeda brothers in various countries undergoing dramatic change, he wrote, “It would be nice to remind [them] to be patient and deliberate, and warn them of entering into confrontations” with other Islamist factions. He foresaw, correctly, that the newly elected governments in most states would “belong to the Islamic parties and groups, like the Brotherhood and the like, and our duty at this stage is to pay attention to the call among Muslims and win over supporters and spread the correct understanding, as the current conditions have brought on unprecedented opportunities . . . The more time that passes and as the call increases, the more the supporters will be of the people [who agree with al Qaeda’s goals], and the more widespread will be the correct understanding among the coming generations of Islamic groups.”

  The Sheik had a lot to say in this letter. He moved from sweeping political commentary and advice to a host of detailed instructions for the far-flung branches of his organization. He had read or heard that some members of al Qaeda in Yemen were experimenting with the use of poison gases, which worried him. He advised that they proceed only with great care, alluding to his concern about tactics that killed Muslims as well as infidels. He expressed worry over “the political and media reaction against the mujahidin and their image in the eyes of the public.” He wondered why he had not heard anything from “the brothers in Iraq” and instructed those touting an al Qaeda affiliation in Somalia (whom he had opposed granting official status) to release a female hostage and some of the others they held, and then wait to kill the remainder until after the revolution in Libya had resolved itself, and until after national elections were held in France. He wanted the “brothers in Somalia” to concentrate more on economic development in that ravaged country, and to temper strict enforcement of the harsher measures prescribed by shariah law. Citing the Prophet, he said, “Use doubts to fend off the punishments.”

  The letter went on and on, offering guidance for safely moving specific members of the organization from country to country, about the travel of his twenty-year-old son, Hamza, and other things.

  And in this same letter the Sheik found time to hammer home some advice about staying hidden. After more than nine successful years on the run, he considered himself to be an expert on the subject.

  “It is proven that the American technology and its modern systems cannot arrest a mujahid if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him,” he wrote. “So adherence to security precautions makes their advanced technology a loss and a disappointment to them.”

  As troubled as he was by world developments, he personally felt safe, very confident in his security methods. But he knew that not everyone was capable of his discipline. There were those who could stay hidden and those who could not.

  “There is a percentage of people who cannot do that, and those need to be handled in a different manner than the others, and it may be better to provide them with an opportunity in the field,” he wrote. In other words, these people were disposable. “As for those whom you have observed as being disciplined and capable, you arrange homes for them on the outskirts of the city . . . and they will be with trusted companions, and the companions will have some work as cover, as if they lived from it, especially for those who live close by and have observing neighbors.”

  He was describing his own situation, his compound just outside Abbottabad, and his trusted followers the Ahmed brothers, who, under their assumed names, Arshad and Tareq Khan, said they worked in the transportation business. To evade the Americans, it was best to live exactly as he lived. There was, however, one constant problem. Children.

  “One of the most important security issues in the cities is controlling children, by not getting out of the house except for extreme necessity like medical care, and teaching them the local language; and that they do not get to the yard of the house without an adult who will control the volume of their voices, and we with the grace of Allah have been adhering to these precautions for nine years . . .”

  Nine years since 9/11.

  He had five more days to live.

  As the Sheik was writing this letter, his last, as he was boasting of his security prowess, adhering to his precautions—albeit with the problem posed by children and grandchildren—he was in the crosshairs of the United States. In the terms used by the American military, he had been “found and fixed.”

  For the finish, President Obama had ordered the two remaining options to be more fully developed and wanted both to be ready by the first week of May. The ground option was time sensitive. In addition to there being no moon in the first few days of May, it was also mid-spring, which meant nighttime temperatures at four thousand feet were still cool enough to avoid overheating the choppers. The Black Hawks would have to maneuver and hover over the target after having flown low and fast for an hour and a half en route from Jalalabad. They would arrive hot and heavy.

  Four choppers would make the trip into Pakistan: the two Black Hawks to deliver the twenty-four-man raiding party directly to Abbottabad and two much bigger MH-47E Chinooks to haul fuel bladders and a twenty-four-man Quick Reaction Force to a remote spot outside of the city. A fifth chopper carried a larger reserve force, Plan C, in case the forward troops needed more help—this force was even larger now that the president had ordered McRaven to be prepared to fight his way out. It would remain just inside the Afghan border ready to launch if needed. All of the choppers were outfitted with stealth and sound-damping technology. The loads had been finely calibrated to get the most performance at Abbottabad’s altitude and expected air temperature. Waiting a month would push the mission into early summer and warmer weather, which would up the stress on the aircraft and probably require changes—more choppers or fewer men. McRaven had moved this force into position in Jalalabad, and they would be ready to go on Obama’s command.

  The other alternative was called the “air
option,” and it had been reduced to Cartwright’s advocacy of a one-shot try—a single shot from a drone. That could be done whenever the Pacer showed himself and the order was given.

  It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this mission, not just to America—getting Osama bin Laden would be like closing an open wound—but to Obama’s presidency. He would formally announce his run for a second term in early April, and it was by no means a sure thing. A stubbornly sluggish economy had steadily eroded his popularity. His relationship with Congress, never good, had been at an impasse ever since the November elections had erased the Democratic majority in the House and substantially reduced it in the Senate. He had been labeled a big-spending, old-fashioned liberal, even a socialist, at a time when the United States had accumulated massive debts and Republicans were signing oaths to oppose any tax increases, promising to finally end the era of “big government.” Obama the bridge builder—what he’d said he hoped to be on taking office—had become a deeply polarizing figure.

  Much of the negative assessment was still grounded in the notion that he was somehow inauthentic. He was not really an American. For some, the suspicion was quite literal. They argued that his Hawaiian birth certificate had been faked. Or that he was not a Christian, as he professed and that his twenty years of churchgoing affirmed. No, he was secretly a Muslim. Most people didn’t buy these stories; there was overwhelming evidence they were false. But such beliefs colored or swayed the perceptions of even sensible voters, who suspected subtler shades of inauthenticity—who suspected that Obama, with his lefty, Harvard elitist, internationalist, interracial background, was not fully committed to bedrock national principles. He was less a believer in personal liberty than government power. That he was not a true believer in the American experiment, in the Constitution, but was more in the mold of European social democrats, who preferred a society and economy managed by government, by smart people like him. The president’s famously “cool” personal style still hurt him, too. His attempts to halt the 2008 financial collapse had unloosed a flood of federal spending, and although that approach had simply continued the policies of his Republican predecessor, and were believed by most experts to have at least partly worked, the economic recovery was slow, people were discouraged, and budget deficits were scarily large, with the president seemingly bent on making them larger still. His biggest legislative triumph, national health care, had seemed to hurt him politically more than it helped him. It had cemented the perception of Obama as a closet socialist, or at least a traditional big government, big spending, big taxing liberal. National health care added a whole new social program to the roster of those already bankrupting the country, his critics claimed. It was denounced as unconstitutional, proof of Obama’s secret, un-American agenda. His shrillest political opponents had created so much doubt over his unusual ancestry and upbringing that the president had found it necessary to release the complete 1961 file from the Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu in order to prove that he possessed the most basic qualification for the White House, citizenship by birth. It satisfied all but fringe critics that he was truly American, but it didn’t persuade many that he wasn’t engaged in a plot to turn America into a European-style state.

  Perhaps the most effective counter to this suspicion of inauthenticity was his performance as commander in chief. Obama had effectively and aggressively defended America. During the campaign he had skillfully associated his rise with that of another young, charismatic, tough-minded Democrat a half century earlier. He had cultivated the family of John F. Kennedy, winning the endorsement of Senator Ted Kennedy in the months before Kennedy’s death, even orchestrating a powerful endorsement from Caroline Kennedy, who compared him with her father. But now Obama was in danger of being too much in the model of JFK, a spellbinding orator and stylish young leader with only a callow grasp of national leadership. It had been President Lyndon Johnson, after all, who had come along after the assassination to shore up Camelot’s legacy; it had taken his hardheaded mastery of power, of Congress, to enact the signature legislation Kennedy himself had been unable to achieve. Killing bin Laden would be one accomplishment that even Obama’s worst critics would acknowledge. Here was the one arena where a president could decide and act without outside political interference, especially given the covert nature of the enterprise. Within that arena differences of opinion were strictly subject to his judgment and decision. The most significant criticism of his performance as commander in chief had come from his own former supporters. After promising to close the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, a symbol of the Bush administration’s presumed abuses of power, Obama had failed to overcome congressional opposition to transferring detainees to prisons in the United States. On the big issues he had kept his campaign promises. He had ramped down and would soon end America’s involvement in Iraq, and in this he had broad public support. While initially boosting American forces in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops, he had concluded that efforts to build a functioning central government there were unlikely ever to succeed and had quietly reversed direction. He was determined to end America’s large-scale military commitment there, too. He had been criticized for not decisively jumping into the Libyan revolution, and then for not doing so more directly, but the NATO–led intervention on behalf of the rebels—what Obama’s critics had termed “leading from behind”—was already starting to look like a smart strategy. In a country weary of two long wars, there was little or no opposition to Obama’s minimalist, pragmatic approach to using America’s military power. Even the Republican candidates already battling for the chance to unseat him in 2012, who missed no chance to fault Obama, rarely spoke of national security concerns.

  Getting bin Laden would be the capstone. It would be a milestone emotionally and strategically.

  “I thought it would be cathartic for the American people to know that we stay with something,” the president told me. “We don’t let it slip. I thought that was important. Once I got into office, we were making significant progress against high-value targets in al Qaeda below bin Laden—the lieutenants, the captains, the field generals, we were taking them out pretty systematically—so there was a sense that we understood that the organization was getting hollowed out, and that if we could get the guy at the top, then we might be in a position to strategically defeat the organization. As long as bin Laden was still out there, though, even if we were making a whole bunch of progress at the lower levels, their capacity to reconstitute itself, I thought, would still be pretty significant.”

  It would inevitably have political benefits, too. No one involved with Obama’s handling of the bin Laden effort saw the slightest hint that politics shaped his thinking, but there’s no question that success would help, and that a public failure would hurt. It was the thing that President Bush, for all his bluster, had been unable to do. Obama was a skilled politician. There was not a move he made that did not include a measure of calculation, even if only in understanding the stakes. No one understood the stakes better. Killing or capturing the author of 9/11 would register with every American, of every political stripe. It would be a thing that transcended politics in an age where very little else could. There were very few things he might accomplish as president that would compare. Getting bin Laden would not completely destroy al Qaeda or end the threat of terror attacks, but it would be a huge step in that direction. It would slam shut the door on a painful national trauma. It would feel . . . perfect. He had argued from the beginning that it was the correct military response. It was the thing he had promised to do if he got the chance. So while Obama had not yet officially made up his mind about the compound in Abbottabad, and had tipped his hand to no one, those close to him believed he would go for it. He was leaning that way, and because of his confidence in McRaven he was leaning toward doing it on the ground.

  Raiding the compound was the riskiest option. It posed a slew of hard questions that the air option did not. One of the most interest
ing was what to do if bin Laden was not killed but captured. The success of Obama’s drone war had meant that very few high-value targets ever found themselves in American custody any more. It had prompted speculation that this president was less interested in capturing al Qaeda figures than in killing them, or even that JSOC was under orders to avoid taking prisoners.

  “Our basic attitude was that, given his dedication to his cause, the likelihood of surrender was very low,” the president explained. “We also knew that there would always be the possibility of him strapping on explosives and trying to take out a team with him. So I think people’s general attitude was, if he’s going to surrender, he better be naked and on the ground. Had that occurred, then we would have arrested him and held him. I won’t go into all the details of what those various steps would have been, but ultimately, we would have brought him to justice. We would have brought him back here.”

  This, too, had to be thought through. Did they want a captured bin Laden? If they had him, what would they do with him?

  What to do with high-profile terrorists had been a hot political issue for years. Congress had done nothing to resolve the problem. Bush had locked most of them away—like Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah—at Guantánamo, and talked about military tribunals somewhere down the line. But some, like the shoe bomber Richard Reid and the would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad—the latter of whom had betrayed his citizenship oath, an idea that troubled the Sheik—had been arrested and tried in federal courts and were now serving life sentences. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announced intention to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan had generated so much political protest that the administration had been forced that very month to back down and announce that he would instead face a military tribunal at Guantánamo.