The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

by Mark Bowden

  In the unlikely event that bin Laden surrendered, Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial.

  “We worked through the sort of legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article Three,” the president told me. “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”

  Bin Laden in custody might give him the political capital he had lacked with Khalid Sheik Mohammed. It might be the very thing to end all the confusion over what to do with top-level terrorist detainees, and to end it in the right way. Obama believed that placing these terrorists before a judge and jury in a criminal court, affording them the full rights of criminal defendants, would showcase America’s commitment to justice for even the worst of the worst. It would present bin Laden to the world not as a heroic holy warrior but as the ill-informed fanatic and mass murderer he was. The president had to do more than just imagine these scenarios. It was one more outcome that needed to be thought through completely and planned for.

  Obama added, “I think it’s important to emphasize, having made those plans, our expectation was that if, in fact, he was there, that he would go down fighting.”

  McRaven’s men did their first rehearsal on April 7. They worked on an isolated acre deep inside the sprawling wooded grounds of Fort Bragg, where a faithful mock-up of the three-story Abbottabad house had been built. Chairman Mullen and Michael Vickers were among those who came down from the Pentagon and CIA to watch.

  For the first practice session, the SEALs rehearsed the critical piece of the mission: hitting the compound and target house at night. They approached aboard two Stealth Black Hawks. One unit roped down to the roof of the building and assaulted it from the top down. The other roped into the compound and assaulted from the ground floor up. This part of the operation took only about ninety seconds to complete. The delivery choppers moved off while the men did their work, and then swooped back in to pick them up. The speed and coordination were impressive. They did this twice.

  In part, McRaven was putting his men through this demonstration in order to impress. They had done this sort of thing so many times they could almost do it blindfolded. McRaven had handpicked shooters from SEAL Team Six. It was a Dream Team: men who, in the thousands of raids he had overseen, had shown they did not rattle, had shown they could handle themselves coolly and intelligently not just when things went according to plan, but when things went wrong. Those situations required quickly assessing the significance of the error or malfunction or whatever unexpected event had occurred, and then making the necessary adjustments to complete the mission. The core talent required was the ability to adapt, to think for yourself and make smart decisions. These were men who had proved it over and over in combat. They did not really need to rehearse, but rehearsals have other uses. McRaven wanted the assembled brass to see how good they were, how fast, how certain. He wanted them to witness the speed and coordination firsthand, to hear the sounds of the rotor blades and of the flash-bang explosions and of the weapons being fired, and to be able to imagine themselves on the receiving end of it. He wanted them to meet the men, touch their equipment and weapons, talk to them, get a sense of how professional, how experienced, and how confident they were, and then to carry that experience back to the White House—“Mr. President, they just did a rehearsal that will knock your socks off!”

  SEAL Team Six had rotated home not long before. The men on these elite special operations teams went to war in shifts. For most of the last ten years they had been regularly deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan for three to four months, where they maintained a very high tempo, going out on missions every night, sometimes two or three times a night. Each unit had its own embedded combat support, administrative staff, and logistical teams that traveled together, every one of them handpicked. When deployed they lived for the most part sequestered from conventional troops, either at their own forward operating bases or on a portion of a larger base that was sealed off. The work was deadly serious. The men would spend the day getting their rest, cleaning their weapons, working out, and getting ready to go back out. They had their own TV and Internet access, but under rules that were far more restrictive than for most soldiers. Their pace and discipline were severe. They would blow off steam for a few months at home and then go back. When they were deployed, it was all business.

  It was a demanding but extremely satisfying way of life. The men who achieved membership in these units tended to stay. Many found it hard to adjust to doing anything else. The skills required were not readily applicable to other kinds of work. And when you have been part of life-and-death operations for years—adrenaline-pumping missions where you risked your life, shot to kill, and where some of your good friends gave their lives—and when you believe that your work is vital to the security of your country, it is hard to find anything else that compares. When you work every day with people who are the very best at what they do, and when you enjoy the silent admiration of everyone you meet, even if they had only a vague idea of what you do—well, there is nothing quite like it.

  On average, the operators were a decade or more older than most soldiers. Most were in their early thirties, veterans of several tours in regular units or “vanilla” special forces teams, as opposed to “black ops.” Some were in their forties, which skewed the average age to thirty-four. Some of the men in these units would joke that their biggest worry wasn’t so much getting shot by the enemy as it was throwing their back out. They excelled at a lot of things, but particularly at doing exactly what would be called for in Abbottabad: hitting a target fast and hard, making correct split-second decisions about whether to shoot or not to shoot, and distinguishing between friend and foe, combatant and noncombatant. They usually did their work in the dark, wearing night-vision devices, but had in recent years been mixing it up with day raids, partly to vary the pattern and partly just because of the demand to move quickly on fresh intelligence—staying inside the information cycle of the enemy.

  Being called in like this to begin rehearsals after just rotating home was enough to tip them off that the mission was special. When they were told that they were going after bin Laden, the men cheered.

  They reassembled for a second week of rehearsals in Nevada, where the heat and altitude—about four thousand feet—were similar to Abbottabad’s. Again chairman Mullen and Vickers and the others came out to watch. This time the rehearsals were designed to duplicate the conditions they would be flying in. On the real mission the helicopters would have to fly ninety minutes before arriving over Abbottabad. They would be flying very low and very fast to avoid Pakistani radar. Mission planners had to test precisely what the choppers could do at that altitude and in the anticipated air temperatures. How much of a load could the choppers carry and still perform? Originally they had thought they might be able to make it there and back without refueling, but the margins were too close. The choppers would have been coming back on fumes. So the refueling area was necessary. In Nevada they went through the entire scenario. The mock-up of the compound was much cruder. They had already practiced storming it again and again at Fort Bragg. This time the buildings were just Conex containers, and instead of stone walls around the compound there was a chain-link fence. The purpose of this rehearsal was not to duplicate the storming of the compound. The purpose here was to simulate the stresses on the choppers. It came off smoothly. The Black Hawks handled the job well.

  Again, McRaven wanted Mullen and Vickers and the others to be impressed, because he wanted his own confidence in his men and the mission to be fully conveyed to the president. The best way to do that was not just to tell him about it. He understood that confidence was key if the SEALs were going to get th
e job.

  Because the alternative, the drone strike, was tempting. It was so much less risky. The air option offered a kind of magic bullet, in the form of a small guided munition that could be fired from a tiny drone. No one involved with planning the mission would discuss its particulars, but the weapon sounded very much like a newly designed Raytheon GPS-guided missile about the length and width of a strong man’s forearm. General Cartwright was its chief advocate in the White House. Designed to help reduce the collateral damage that had always been an inevitable consequence of air strikes, the missile could strike an individual or a single vehicle without damaging anything nearby. Called simply an STM (small tactical munition), it weighed just thirteen pounds, carried a five-pound warhead, and was fired from under the wing of a drone that itself was no larger than a model airplane, small enough to escape the notice of any country’s air defenses. It was a “fire-and-forget” missile, which meant you could not guide it once it was released. It would find and explode on the precise coordinates it had been given. Since the Pacer tended to walk in the same place every day, Cartwright believed the missile would kill him, and likely him alone. It placed no American forces at risk. If the missile missed, or if the Pacer turned out not to be bin Laden, well, then it would just be an unexplained explosion in Abbottabad. No one need be the wiser. And if the missile did kill bin Laden, any Pakistani anger over an unauthorized U.S. drone strike would likely be offset by the embarrassment of revealing that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living safely not just in Pakistan, but only a short drive from Islamabad and less than a mile away from its national military academy.

  The weapon had yet to be used in combat, although the technologies involved—drones and missiles—were hardly new. The only difference with this one was its size. Still . . . did you want to hinge such a critical opportunity on one shot, with a missile that had never been fired in anger? The drone option also robbed the strike of certainty. To his followers and to those who thought as he did, bin Laden still had tremendous influence, even though he had not been seen in years. If there was no proof he was dead, the organization could theoretically keep issuing statements and pronouncements to the faithful, raising contributions, urging and planning future attacks as if he were alive. And Obama would become the third U.S. president to have let him slip through his fingers. Arguments in favor of the drone kept coming back to these two things. What if the missile missed? And, if it killed bin Laden, how would you know for sure?

  It was clear that the only way to know for sure was to send in a team of operators and bring him out, dead or alive.

  But there were so many things that could go wrong. Recent history was littered with examples of how badly things could turn out. The failure of Desert One was an obvious caution. With its long insertion, desert refueling rendezvous point, and the target inside an urban area surrounded by potential enemies the situation was so similar it was eerie. The Iran disaster had shaken the military to its core, embarrassed the nation, and ended a presidency. And the long firefight that had followed the shooting down of two helicopters in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, had so rattled the Clinton administration that it had shied away from using military force for years afterward, with some disastrous consequences such as the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda in 1994. In Iran, the mission had been an abject public failure; in Mogadishu, the mission had actually been a success but had prompted a bloody eighteen-hour firefight that effectively pulled the plug on the American mission to Somalia. One or the other of these missions, or both, had come up at nearly every meeting to discuss options.

  There was only one “ground option” scenario that wouldn’t cause trouble. If bin Laden was not there, the SEALs might be able to exit without hurting anyone and without setting off any alarms. No one would be the wiser. All the other outcomes had a big downside. Even perfect success—killing or capturing bin Laden without mixing it up with Pakistani forces—would exact a price: it would certainly trigger outrage and poison relations between the two countries for the foreseeable future. The list of worse outcomes was scary: dead SEALs, dead Pakistanis, embarrassment, a propaganda triumph for bin Laden and al Qaeda, a blow to the reputation of the U.S. military and the CIA.

  So confidence was the key. If the president decided to go with McRaven, it would be because the admiral’s confidence was contagious.

  The final meeting was held in the Situation Room on the afternoon of Thursday, April 28. Popular accounts of this decisive session have portrayed Obama facing down a wall of opposition and doubt among his top advisers. In fact, there was overwhelming support for launching the raid.

  Filling the black leather chairs around the table were Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen, Vice Chairman James “Hoss” Cartwright, John Brennan, Thomas Donilon, DNI James Clapper, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Panetta’s deputy, Michael Morell. McRaven did not participate. He and the SEAL team had relocated to JSOC’s base in Jalalabad, to be ready to launch in two days. Throughout this series of meetings, the rule was that if you were not in town, you were not involved. Hooking up a satellite link for videoconferencing opened up the discussion to too many people. Technicians that could listen in would be involved on both ends, which compromised secrecy. Most of the president’s national security team—including Ben Rhodes, who had been informed weeks earlier—started considering how to announce the mission to the world. Top staffers of the principals ringed the room on the smaller leather chairs.

  All sensed that the secret had held about as long as it could. As the planning had progressed over the previous four months, the circle of knowledge had grown. There were now hundreds of people in on it. No secret survived numbers like that for long. It was inevitable that at least one of those hundreds would screw up, let something slip. Somebody was bound to confide in someone else untrustworthy, or might decide for their own reasons to leak it. If they missed the new moon this weekend, they would have to wait a month for another. So for the raid option it was time to decide.

  The week had been full for the Pentagon and the CIA. The day before Obama had announced, pending congressional review, that General David Petraeus, who had been commanding allied forces in Afghanistan since the previous July, would leave the army after thirty-seven years to head the CIA, and that Panetta, who had spearheaded this effort to find bin Laden, would become the new secretary of defense, replacing Bob Gates, who had announced months earlier that he would be stepping down. Petraeus had been read in on the bin Laden secret only recently, because the beefed-up rescue force Obama demanded required air and ground forces from his command. Weeks earlier—in fact the day before McRaven’s team performed its first rehearsal at Fort Bragg—the president had awarded the admiral his fourth star and promoted him to lead the Special Operations Command.

  The president was juggling the usual array of responsibilities. The U.S. military was still helping with massive relief operations in Japan, enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in cooperation with European allies, and monitoring various stages of revolution or protest in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and Jordan. That week the president had unsuccessfully lobbied India to award an $11 billion contract for fighter planes to American firms. An outbreak of tornadoes in the Midwest had torn through Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee, requiring federal disaster assistance. On the day before this meeting, the president had held a press conference to deal with what he called the “silliness” over the place of his birth, releasing that “long form” birth certificate.

  In the week before this session, Brennan had asked the Counterterrorism Center director, Mike Leiter, to assemble a team to perform one last “red teaming” of the intelligence on Abbottabad. So the final meeting began with Leiter’s findings, which were deflating. Leiter told the president that his group could arrive at only 40 percent certainty that bin Laden was in the compound. One of those on that red team, an experienc
ed analyst, had estimated the chances at only 10 percent, a number so far below any they had heard, and coming so late in the game, that it drew nervous laughter in the crowded room. “I think you guys are telling yourselves something you want to hear,” was that analyst’s opinion. Still, 40 percent, the team’s estimate, was “thirty-eight percent better than we’ve been for ten years,” said Leiter. This was hardly confidence boosting. Obama asked if the estimate was based on anything new or different. It was not. This team had looked at the same information as everyone else. The president asked Leiter to explain the disparity. Why was their confidence so much lower than, say, that of “John,” the leader of the CIA’s bin Laden team, whose confidence had been 95 percent all along? Leiter could not explain to the president’s satisfaction, and so this new assessment was effectively dismissed. As far as Obama was concerned, the level of certainty was the same as it had been all along, fifty-fifty. So other than dampening the mood, this last red teaming had little influence on the final deliberations.

  One by one, the principals around the room were asked to choose one of the three options: the raid, the missile strike, or doing nothing—and then to defend their choice. The president said that he would not make a decision himself at the meeting, but he wanted to hear everyone’s final judgment. Nearly everyone present favored the raid.