For those who were in favor of the raid, such as Michèle Flournoy and Mike Vickers, the Red Team findings didn’t alter their views. “It really didn’t change anything,” explains Vickers. “People’s estimates before this ranged from maybe sixty to eighty percent believing that bin Laden was there. And then the Red Team, a couple of them came back and said sixty percent, and one guy said forty percent, but he said his forty percent was better than any other explanation.”
Leiter addressed Obama directly, saying, “Even if you’re at the forty percent low end of this range, Mister President, that’s still about thirty-eight percent better than we’ve been for ten years.”
Still, that one estimate of 40 percent was discomfiting to some. John Brennan recalls, “Some of us thought, ‘Whoa! We thought the prospects were higher that he was in there.’ And the president recognized that when people were saying, ‘Well, there’s only 40 percent of a chance,’ that some people were going to get a little bit soft on this.”
Ben Rhodes says, “There was a deflation in the room, because what you’re looking for as you’re getting closer to the call is greater certainty, not less. So essentially it played into all the fears that people had about what could go wrong. Is it worth the risk?”
Similarly, Tony Blinken says, “I think, if anything, the Red Team actually brought down the level of certainty; the positive ID percentage was higher before the Red Team got done. So I think we went from maybe seventy/thirty or sixty-five/thirty-five to fifty-five/forty-five or even fifty/fifty.”
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had spent more than four decades in the intelligence business, says the discussion of exact percentages gave the impression of precision, but “in the end it was subjective. It didn’t matter whether the percentage of confidence was 40 percent or 80 percent. It seemed like the closer you were to working the problem, the in-the-trenches analysts who were really doing the legwork here, doing the grunt work, were very confident. And as you got concentric circles away from them, the confidence sort of went down.” Clapper personally felt “it was the most compelling case we had had in ten years. And sure, it would’ve been nice to have somebody inside the compound—the maid or the cook we could’ve recruited—someone who could say, ‘Yeah, that’s him and that’s who’s there.’ Well, we didn’t have that.”
For those who were inclined to oppose the raid, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Red Team analysis confirmed their doubts. Gates said, “I think this Red Team is really an outstanding piece of work, and I find it very persuasive.” Persuasive, in other words, that bin Laden might well not be living in the Abbottabad compound.
CIA director Leon Panetta spoke up, saying firmly, “When you put it all together, we have the best evidence since Tora Bora, and that makes it clear we have an obligation to act. If I thought delaying this could produce better intelligence, that would be one thing, but because of the nature of the security at the compound, we’re probably at the point where we have got the best intelligence we can get. It’s now time to make a decision not about whether or not we should do something about it, but what to do about it. We’ve come this far. There’s no turning back. We have enough information such that the American people would want us to act.”
At the conclusion of this lengthy discussion, Obama summed up the case: “All right, guys. In the end, it’s fifty-fifty that he’s there.”
Leiter had also been tasked to think through what kind of reaction an assault on the Abbottabad compound might cause overseas and at home. Overseas, the worst case was that the U.S. embassy in Pakistan, one of the largest in the world, would be overrun by protestors and that Pakistani security forces would do little to stop them—a replay of what had happened in 1979, when the embassy building in Islamabad was attacked by an angry mob and burned to the ground. Leiter and his team also looked at the possible threats from “homegrown” terrorists, who might attack U.S. military installations or government buildings when they heard the news of bin Laden’s death. Leiter briefed both these worst-case scenarios to everyone in the room.
Obama gave everyone ample opportunity to speak. Toward the end of the meeting, the president methodically went around the room and asked everyone, “Where are you on this? What do you think?” So many officials prefaced their comments with the words “Mister President, this is a very hard call” that the Situation Room began to fill with laughter, the only moments of levity in a tense two-hour meeting.
Joe Biden, who had been elected to the U.S. Senate when Obama was eleven, and had been chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before becoming vice president, was worried about the local fallout from the raid: a possible firefight with the Pakistanis or an incident at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. “We need greater certainty that bin Laden is there,” he advised. “The risks to the Pakistan relationship and its importance are such that we need to know more before acting.” Referring to the earlier discussion of percentages and close calls, Biden said, “You know, I didn’t know we had so many economists around the table.” Biden concluded, “We owe the man a direct answer. Mister President, my suggestion is: Don’t go.”
Robert Gates continued to be skittish about the raid, saying, “There is a degree of risk associated with the raid option that I am uncomfortable with. An option of some kind of precision strike, I would be more comfortable with that.” Gates again raised the Operation Eagle Claw and Black Hawk Down incidents, as he had repeatedly during earlier meetings with Obama. The secretary of defense reminded Obama’s war cabinet that he had been in the White House the night the Eagle Claw mission imploded.
Gates and Biden pointed out that a raid in Abbottabad would likely cause a permanent rupture in America’s relations with Pakistan, and that would mean the end of both the land and air corridors across Pakistan that were critical to the resupply of the 100,000 American soldiers in neighboring Afghanistan. It would also mean an end to the Pakistanis’ grudging acquiescence to the use of their territory to launch drone strikes—attacks that had proven devastating to the leadership of al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal regions.
With both Gates and Biden still leery of the largely circumstantial intelligence and the toll that a raid would place on the critical U.S.-Pakistani relationship, that made two out of the three most-senior officials in Obama’s cabinet against the SEAL helicopter assault.
Obama’s top military advisor, Admiral Mike Mullen, had never prepared a presentation for the president with as much care as the one he now delivered. Using a pack of a dozen slides with notes on them, Mullen walked Obama through the final brief of the raid plan. Mullen said he had attended the full-scale rehearsal of the raid and that “Bill’s [McRaven’s] team can do this.” Mullen’s strong advocacy of the raid was unusual, because Gates and he were usually in lockstep on key national security issues, as they had been about mounting a large-scale counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Now Obama’s secretary of defense and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs were advocating different courses of action.
General Cartwright was still in favor of deploying a tiny drone-fired munition to take out bin Laden, an option that remained on the table during the April 28 meeting. The smallest bomb commonly dropped by the U.S. Air Force was five hundred pounds. The kind of device Cartwright was advocating was minute by comparison, and was known as a small tactical munition. For the past three years, Raytheon had been developing such a weapon, a thirteen-pound “smart” bomb that was two feet long and steered by a GPS-guided system. But this tiny bomb came with a raft of potential problems. Such a weapon had never before been fired in combat, and because it was GPS-guided, it was a “fire and forget” device whose targeting could not be adjusted while it was in flight, as that of a laser-guided bomb could be. What if this experimental weapon failed to detonate? Or missed? Or took out the wrong guy on the compound? Or even exploded at the target but failed to kill him? Any of these scenarios would be a replay of the August 1998 cruise missile attacks Bill Clinton had ordere
d to kill bin Laden after al-Qaeda bombed the two U.S. embassies in Africa. The cruise missiles missed bin Laden and helped turn him into a global celebrity.
Hillary Clinton gave a long, lawyerly presentation that examined both the upsides and the downsides of the raid option. It wasn’t clear where she was going with it until she summarized it: “It’s a very close call, but I would say: Do the raid.” Clinton says, “I made a long presentation because the president is a very thoughtful, analytical decision maker, and he is more likely to listen to an argument that is not filled with passion and emotion. So I wanted to lay out in a very methodical way the pluses and the minuses as I understood them of the various options. And then to conclude that, given what was at stake, this was one of the moments that I thought called for a decision, despite the risk.”
When it was his turn to address Obama, Leiter said, “Mister President, my first choice would be that we wait and collect more [intelligence], but I am being told by the operators there is nothing more that can be collected without excessive risk. And I can’t second-guess them on that.” Leiter also endorsed the use of the drone-fired munition because he thought the political risks of such an attack were so much lower than those associated with the raid.
Leon Panetta, who had been Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and before that a nine-term congressman, knew a thing or two about the realities of politics. He delivered a persuasive political argument in favor of the raid and of doing it as soon as feasible. “I’ve always used the test, Mister President, as somebody that’s been in public office: What would the average American say if he or she knew what we were talking about? And I think if you told the average American—we have the best intelligence we’ve had since Tora Bora, we have the chance to get the number one terrorist in the world who attacked us on 9/11—I think that they would say ‘we gotta go.’ ” Hillary Clinton voiced a related point: enough people already knew about the bin Laden intelligence that it would eventually leak.
John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, urged a go on the raid. He had already told the president privately that the CIA officials who had developed the intelligence on Abbottabad were “the people that have been following bin Laden for fifteen years. This has been their life’s work, this has been their life’s journey, and they feel it very much in their gut that bin Laden is at that compound. I feel pretty good, if not certain, that bin Laden is at that compound.”
Denis McDonough, the deputy national security advisor, and his boss, Tom Donilon, were also supportive of the raid. Ben Rhodes, Michèle Flournoy, Tony Blinken, Mike Vickers, Robert Cardillo, and Nick Rasmussen all endorsed the raid, as did the director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper, who said, “It is the option most fraught with risk, but in my view the most important thing for this is that we have eyes and ears and brains on the ground.”
Obama listened to the counsel of his senior advisors intently, but kept his own views to himself. One of the officials in the room who had attended countless meetings with the president observes, “He’s very hard to read. He’s an introverted guy. He’s a thinker.” As the meeting wound up, at around 7:00 p.m., the president said, “This is a close call and not one that I’m ready to make now. I need to go think about this. I’m going to sleep on it. I’ll give an order in the morning.” Obama felt that those who had voiced doubts about the intelligence case and raid option had helped improve the operational planning for the raid, particularly the ability of the SEALs to fight their way out of Abbottabad, if it came to that.
Obama wrestled with the options, knowing that the burden of this decision was going to be on his shoulders for the rest of his life. He felt that “the most difficult part is always the fact that you’re sending guys into harm’s way. And there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I mean there’re a lot of moving parts here. So my biggest concern was, if I’m sending those guys in and Murphy’s Law applies and something happens, can we still get our guys out? So that’s point number one. Point number two, these guys are going in in the darkest of night. And they don’t know what they’re going to find there. They don’t know if the building is rigged. They don’t know if there are explosives that are triggered by a particular door opening. So huge risks that these guys are taking.” Despite those risks, Obama decided to forgo the drone option: “I thought it was important if we were going to go into a sovereign country, that we had to have some proof that in fact it was bin Laden, rather than just firing a missile into a compound.” Also, while this may have been a fifty-fifty intelligence case, Obama had 100 percent confidence in McRaven and the SEALs’ ability to execute the mission.
Obama knew the stakes were high: “Obviously I knew that if we were unsuccessful, there was the potential for not only loss of life—the incredibly brave SEALs who were going in—but also there would be huge geopolitical ramifications.” Obama couldn’t help wondering, “What if the mysterious pacer was a prince from Dubai just keeping a low profile?”
Obama has always been a risk taker, albeit a highly disciplined one. After all, he took on Hillary Clinton, a supposed shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for president, after he had served only two years in the Senate. In 2009, President Obama, previously the “antiwar” candidate, tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan over what President Bush had deployed there. When Egyptians rose up against their octogenarian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, in February 2011, Obama, against the advice of nearly his entire cabinet—who argued “better the devil you know”—called Mubarak and told him it was time to step down. In March 2011, as Moammar Gadhafi moved to exterminate the burgeoning opposition movement in Libya, Obama went within days to the United Nations and NATO and set in motion the military campaign that toppled the Libyan dictator, a campaign for which he was roundly criticized by both the Left and the Right. Both Gates and Biden had advised Obama against getting involved in Libya.
Despite Biden’s warnings about the irreparable damage to the U.S.-Pakistani relationship that a raid in Abbottabad might cause, Obama felt that whatever happened as a result of the raid, the American relationship with Pakistan could absorb the blow, particularly if efforts to repair the damage were made right away. And as for those who argued that the best approach was to wait and gather more certain intelligence, Obama had concluded by mid-April that the intelligence case was never going to be certain. Now that the circle of knowledge about Abbottabad had expanded, there was also the real risk that if they waited for the next favorable lunar cycle to mount the raid, word could trickle out about the Abbottabad compound, and there might not be another opportunity to find bin Laden.
Obama rolls the dice after considerable deliberation, but roll them he does. With Osama bin Laden as the prize, Obama was prepared to ignore the advice both of his vice president and his secretary of defense and roll the dice one more time. Obama says, “Even though I thought it was only fifty-fifty that bin Laden was there, I thought it was worth us taking a shot.… And the reason that I concluded it was worth it was that we have devoted enormous blood and treasure in fighting back against al-Qaeda, ever since 2001. And even before with the embassy bombing in Kenya. And so part of what was in my mind was all those young men that I visited who are still fighting in Afghanistan, and the families of victims of terrorism that I talk to. And I said to myself that if we have a good chance of not completely defeating, but badly disabling al-Qaeda, then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men.”
On Friday, April 29, at 8:20 a.m. in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Obama gathered Donilon, McDonough, Brennan, and Chief of Staff Bill Daley in a semicircle around him. “Is there anything new?” he asked. “Have you guys changed your mind about the raid?” The advisors all told him they believed it was the right thing to do and strongly recommended he go forward with it.
Obama said simply, “I’ve considered the decision: It’s a go. And the only thing that makes it not a go is if Bill McRaven and his folks believe that either weather or conditions on the ground
increase the risk to our forces.” Obama instructed Donilon to issue the orders that would set in motion the operation. Donilon says, “I’ve been in Washington a long time. This is the third president I have served. I first came to work in the White House in June of 1977, and those moments still really strike me, that we ask one person in our system to make these incredibly difficult calls on behalf of three hundred million Americans.”
Tony Blinken heard the news shortly afterward. “I thought, ‘Man, that is a gutsy call.’ First, we don’t know for sure bin Laden is there; the evidence is circumstantial. Second, most of his most senior advisors had recommended a different course of action. I remember when he left the meeting the previous day, I was not convinced he was going to do it. Leaving that meeting, I think a lot of people had visions of Jimmy Carter in their heads.”
Directly after giving the “go” order for Abbottabad, Obama boarded Marine One at 8:30 a.m. with his family for the short hop to Andrews Air Force Base, where they then took Air Force One down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, one of the cities hardest hit by a week of tornadoes that had touched down across eight states. “I’ve never seen devastation like this,” said Obama, standing in the rubble in Tuscaloosa.
Meanwhile, Donilon signed an official authorization for the Abbottabad operation. Around the same time, officials at the American consulate in the northwestern city of Peshawar—not far from the tribal areas where al-Qaeda and a number of Taliban groups were headquartered—were told to evacuate. This evacuation order was framed as having to do with recent kidnapping threats, but was actually because of the impending operation.
That afternoon, Obama flew to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where he met with Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was slowly recovering from being shot in the head by a deranged man. Obama was attending the launch of the space shuttle Endeavor, which was commanded by Giffords’s husband, Mark Kelly. That evening, Obama gave the commencement address at Miami Dade College, returning to the White House at 11:30 p.m.
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