Following the rehearsals, McRaven went to the White House to give Obama and his top national security advisors his assessment of the plausibility of the mission. Tony Blinken says of McRaven, “First of all, it helps that he’s from central casting. He looks and sounds the part, so he inspires confidence, but you also got the very strong impression that this was not a guy who was going to be blustering or bragging. This was a guy who was going to give his very honest assessment, and so when he did, he had a lot of credibility, and it also created a tremendous amount of reassurance. And basically what McRaven told us was after they modeled this, and gamed it, and rehearsed it, he said, ‘We can do this.’ ”
At one point, when he was outlining the Abbottabad helicopter raid to Obama and his war cabinet, McRaven said, “In terms of difficulty, compared to what we’re doing on a nightly basis in Afghanistan, what we’re doing in Iraq, this is not among the most difficult missions technically. The difficult part was the sovereignty issue with Pakistan and flying for a long stretch of time over Pakistani airspace.”
As the raid planning began to gel, White House officials had to think through what would happen if bin Laden was captured. Since bin Laden had repeatedly said he would rather die a “martyr” than end up in American captivity, this scenario was regarded as quite unlikely. In 2004, bin Laden’s former bodyguard Abu Jandal had told Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, “Sheikh Osama gave me a pistol.… The pistol had only two bullets, for me to kill Sheikh Osama with in case we were surrounded or he was about to fall into the enemy’s hands so that he would not be caught alive.… He would become a martyr, not a captive, and his blood would become a beacon that would arouse the zeal and determination of his followers.” In a tape posted to Islamist websites two years later, bin Laden confirmed his willingness to be martyred: “I have sworn to only live free. Even if I find bitter the taste of death, I don’t want to die humiliated or deceived.” Still, if bin Laden were to conspicuously surrender, the rules of engagement the SEALs adhered to meant that he would have to be taken into custody.
In case that happened, arrangements were made to have a high-value-detainee interrogation group, consisting of lawyers, interpreters, and experienced interrogators, standing by at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Together with bin Laden, this group would fly to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which would be cruising off the coast of Pakistan in the Arabian Sea, where al-Qaeda’s leader would then be interrogated for some unspecified length of time.
The principals met again with the president on April 12 and 19. Panetta told Obama that the intelligence community had reached a point of diminishing returns with regard to what it could learn about the compound. They were seeing “the pacer” almost every day but could not say definitively it was bin Laden. But to try to achieve greater certainty by using a human spy close to the compound would greatly increase the risk of detection. Tony Blinken says, “There was always the tension between wanting to be more certain about bin Laden’s presence and the danger that pushing the envelope on trying to establish his presence beyond a reasonable doubt would compromise what we were doing.” At the April 19 meeting, President Obama gave a provisional go-ahead for the SEAL raid. The president asked McRaven how much notice he would need to set the operation in motion. McRaven replied, “I’ll need four hours.” Obama said, “I’ll give you twenty-four.” Some senior administration officials took this as a sign that Obama was now leaning toward doing the raid.
At the White House, intense secrecy continued to surround the planning for Abbottabad; no more than a dozen officials knew about it. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s strategic communications advisor, had noticed that over the past months there had been a series of meetings in the Situation Room, the topics of which were not listed on the manifest, and that the cameras that were usually on in the room had been turned off. “I wasn’t the only one who noticed this set of meetings, but nobody wanted to talk about that, right, because you don’t want to talk about the meeting you are not invited to,” Rhodes recalls. Over the course of many months there were twenty-four interagency meetings to discuss the ripening intelligence picture at the Abbottabad compound. These discussions were described on attendees’ calendars as “non-meetings.” No “seconds” could attend and no “read-ahead” memos were prepared, even though they are customary for meetings of the president’s national security staff.
By mid-April, in order to develop and rehearse the various COAs, the universe of people who were being read into the bin Laden operation was growing, although the intelligence was highly compartmentalized and many who worked on the operation were apprised of few details. John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism aide and the former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, started planning for the possibility that the bin Laden intelligence might leak, which meant bringing Rhodes into the secret. Rhodes would be able to run interference with the press if that became necessary. Rhodes recalls, “In the past I have had to engage newspaper editors and say, ‘Please don’t run this, and here’s why.’ And Brennan wanted somebody who knew how to do that in case it leaked.”
On 9/11, Rhodes, then in his early twenties, had been working in Brooklyn and had an unobstructed view of the World Trade Center towers coming down. He remembers the moment when Brennan briefed him about bin Laden: “I felt the enormous weight of the information I’d been told. When you’re in this job, you learn a lot of secrets, but this was different. It’s Osama bin Laden, after all, and you’re anxious about it, you’re excited about it, you’re nervous about it. The inclination is to want to discuss that with people, but you really had to be in the utmost vigilance about protecting this information.”
Brennan, Rasmussen, of the NSC staff, and McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, had developed a “playbook” for the various scenarios that might happen during and after the raid. They started compiling it weeks before the president had made a final decision about what to do in Abbottabad, because all along he had guided them by saying, “Keep preparing. I haven’t made a decision, but keep all the options moving forward. And have them fully developed.” They were aware that once the Abbottabad operation was under way, they would have to be able to flip a switch immediately and have well-thought-out options ready for all the diplomatic maneuvers and public statements for any one of the multiple scenarios that might happen at Abbottabad. They asked Rhodes to help them to think about the strategic messaging that would follow each one of those scenarios.
The first was that the SEALs went into the compound and the operation was relatively clean and they got bin Laden. The messaging for that eventuality wasn’t too complicated.
The second scenario was that the SEALs went in, bin Laden wasn’t there, and they left cleanly. In this case, there would be no messaging at all, as the Obama administration stance would be to say nothing, and the hope was that the Pakistanis wouldn’t say anything either.
The third scenario was that the SEALs found bin Laden but got into a firefight with the Pakistani army, or that lots of civilians were killed. Or even worse, there was a firefight and civilian casualities and bin Laden wasn’t even there. This would cause outrage in the Muslim world and severe political backlash at home. Rhodes says, “So, for all the options that involved him not being there, where it wouldn’t be deniable, a lot of work was put into: How would we explain how we thought this was good enough to do? So we had to come up with a very public version of our intelligence case, because we would have to justify why we took this incredible risk even if he wasn’t there.”
Rhodes started working with CIA spokesman George Little, the only other “communicator” read into the Abbottabad intelligence, to prepare an unclassified version of the bin Laden case that could be made available to the media and the public should the Abbottabad operation no longer be covert. Little, a tall, bespectacled intelligence officer with a PhD in international relations, worked up a sixty-six-page document that included diagrams of the compound.
In mid-April, John Brennan called Mike Lei
ter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), on a secure video teleconference line from the White House and said, “Mike, we want someone to come out and brief you on the compound where we think bin Laden might be.”
“Who else can I tell?” Leiter asked Brennan, masking his irritation that he hadn’t been told about this development earlier.
“No one.”
“What are you looking for me to do, then?” Leiter asked.
“I mostly want you to think about threats to the homeland that could come out of a successful raid,” Brennan said.
Mike Leiter is a blunt, fast-talking former federal prosecutor and naval aviator. When he attended Harvard Law School, he was the president of the Harvard Law Review, a position Barack Obama had held a few years earlier. Before running the NCTC, Leiter had worked for the congressional commission that examined the intelligence debacle surrounding the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and had written much of its final report. The experience of delving into the intelligence failures that led to the Iraq War colored Leiter’s reaction to the bin Laden intelligence.
“I had seen enough failures in this world that I wasn’t going to get excited,” he says. He still remembered when Agency officials had told Obama how pumped they were to have a real lead on Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it turned out instead to be an al-Qaeda double agent/suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees.
After Leiter had been fully briefed, his gut told him that there was a decent chance bin Laden was living in the compound, but there were aspects of the case that bothered him. It was puzzling that there were no guards at the compound. And some of the women and children living there occasionally traveled for extended periods around Pakistan to visit family members. When the women and children traveled from Abbottabad, they carried their cell phones, which seemed a significant breach of bin Laden’s otherwise stringent operational security.
In Leiter’s mind, the bin Laden case was far from a “slam dunk.” Leiter was also not persuaded by the claimed regularity with which things occurred or didn’t occur at the compound. Some officials were saying that there was no phone communication in and out of the compound, but when you drilled into the details of the case, the NSA was finding new cell phones at the compound. And Leiter was also concerned by the gaps in the “coverage” of the compound. There were no eyes on the compound 24/7, either by the Pakistani agents on the ground or by the spy satellites high above it.
On Saturday, April 23, Leiter went to the White House to meet with Brennan, enumerated the gaps that he saw, and suggested that he put together a Red Team of analysts who would be tasked to come up with alternative explanations for the intelligence that had been gathered. Brennan pointed out that a Red Team of analysts from the CIA had already analyzed the data. Leiter countered that these analysts were too invested in the case to be completely dispassionate.
“I don’t think that is sufficient if this is successful or a failure,” he said to Brennan. “Certainly if this is a failure, John, you want a record that this was really done well. And even if it is successful, you still want to be able to stand up and say, ‘We did this really carefully.’ John, you don’t want to have a WMD commission come back and say, ‘You didn’t red-team this one.’ I wrote that chapter, John.”
Brennan agreed that the Red Team was a good idea, instructing Leiter, “Talk to Michael [Morell], and if you guys agree, great. If not, come talk to me.” Leiter then went to see Tom Donilon, the national security advisor, a disciplined and demanding lawyer who ran a tight ship for Obama at the National Security Council. Closing the door to his office, Donilon asked Leiter, “So, what do you think?” Leiter replied, “The thing you can’t predict is, you can always have some aircraft accident. I was an aviator. Flying at night in a new place—that is where you are going to have a problem.” Leiter then walked Donilon through the concerns he had about the intelligence case. Donilon was also puzzled by the women and children leaving the compound and was more dubious about the case than Brennan, who was by now convinced that bin Laden was living at the compound. If this operation went wrong, Donilon was ultimately going to have to take much of the heat for it; he was enthusiastic about the Red Team concept.
Leiter also stopped by the office of his friend Denis McDonough. McDonough, the deputy national security advisor, had worked as Obama’s foreign policy advisor back when Obama was the junior senator from Illinois. McDonough told Leiter that if Obama green-lighted the operation in Abbottabad, it was scheduled to go down the next weekend, on Saturday night. That happened to be the same night that Leiter was getting married to Alice Brown, in front of 250 guests at Meridian House, fifteen blocks north of the White House. “Denis, are you fucking kidding me?” exclaimed Leiter. “This weekend? This weekend!” McDonough, a taciturn Minnesotan, assured him he wasn’t kidding.
The ideal time to do the helicopter assault was when there was no illumination from the moon. That would help to ensure that the Night Stalkers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, who would fly the choppers over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border using night vision goggles (NVG), could do so without the Pakistanis noticing. A moonless night would also give the SEALs a considerable advantage, as they would be wearing NVGs as they stormed the compound. There would be no moon at all over Pakistan on the following Saturday, April 30. A Saturday night seemed ideal because it was the time of week when the CIA observed the lowest level of Pakistani military activity. The next moonless night would not be until June 1, and by then the weather would be significantly hotter, which might affect how well the choppers could fly. Even more pressingly, the longer they waited, the greater the possibility of a leak.
At 7:00 a.m. on Monday, April 25, Leiter talked to Michael Morell at the CIA. Before Leiter could even get to why they needed a Red Team, Morell said, “Absolutely, I think it’s a great idea. We need to do it.”
Leiter selected two analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center with deep knowledge of al-Qaeda: Richard (a pseudonym), who had more than two decades of counterterrorism work under his belt and was widely respected in the intelligence community, and Rose (a pseudonym), an in-the-weeds analyst in her mid-thirties. Two CIA analysts who had played no role in developing the bin Laden intelligence were also added to the group. Leiter told them they had forty-eight hours to come up with alternative hypotheses about who could be at the compound, supported by the best arguments they could come up with.
Leiter’s team explored three alternative hypotheses about the Abbottabad compound: First, it was associated with bin Laden, but he wasn’t there now. Second, the compound was the residence of a leader in al-Qaeda, but not bin Laden. Third, the Kuwaiti had long since left al-Qaeda and was now working for some unidentified criminal.
The analysts found that the first hypothesis was the most likely. The likelihood that the compound was home to a high-value target (HVT) in al-Qaeda other than bin Laden was significantly lower, because bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was not known to be living in this part of Pakistan, while the Kuwaiti had never had any connection to Zawahiri, nor did the number of wives and children in the compound match up with what was known about Zawahiri’s family. Could it be some other al-Qaeda HVT who was not known to the intelligence community? Leiter says this was considered unlikely. “We actually thought we had a pretty good handle on all the HVTs. This is what everyone was doing for ten years.” The possibility that it was a criminal unconnected to al-Qaeda living at the compound was also considered unlikely, given the historical connections that the Kuwaiti had to al-Qaeda’s leader.
At the end of this exercise, Richard was on the low end of the Red Team analysts, with only 40 percent confidence that bin Laden was living at the compound, while one of the CIA analysts was on the high end, with an estimate in the 60 percent range. Still, all the analysts concluded that none of the alternative hypotheses was as likely as the theory that it was bin Laden at the compound.
As the Red Team was finalizing its work
on Wednesday, April 27, the White House posted online the president’s long-form 1961 birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. So-called birthers, including the publicity-hungry billionaire Donald Trump, had made a political issue out of Obama’s citizenship, claiming that he was not actually born in the United States, which would make him ineligible to be president. Obama said he had released the document to try to end the “silliness” about his place of birth, which was distracting the country from more serious issues. The day before the release of Obama’s birth certificate, the SEAL teams had already left their base on the coast of Virginia to fly to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Michèle Flournoy and Mike Vickers decided to make a last-ditch effort to get Robert Gates to back the raid. In Gates’s office at the Pentagon, Flournoy and Vickers walked their boss through the raid and its risks and the measures that had been taken to mitigate those risks. Gates seemed to be persuaded, but after four and a half decades in government, he had long mastered how to play his cards close to the vest.
On the other side of the world, the CIA spies on the ground in Abbottabad contacted their bosses in Virginia with the news that the Kuwaiti’s wife, Mariam, as well as their four children, had just returned from one of their frequent trips around Pakistan to visit family, and they were all now back at the Abbottabad compound. Some intelligence officials continued to puzzle over this: If bin Laden was really there, why would he risk letting these folks visit their relatives?
12 THE DECISION
ON THURSDAY, APRIL 28, the day following the release of Obama’s birth certificate, Leiter presented the findings of the Red Team to the president and his war cabinet. “Bottom line is, the Red Team did not find anything or conclude anything revolutionary or new from what the previous team had,” Leiter told them.
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