Manhunt

by Peter L. Bergen

  As the Obama national security team left the Situation Room and the president was making some final edits to his remarks, TV screens in the White House were tuned to the regularly scheduled programming that the bin Laden announcement would soon interrupt. Tony Blinken noticed that on NBC, the show that was going to be interrupted was Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice. “You can’t write this stuff,” says Blinken.

  Just before the president made his speech, Mike Vickers, who had worked marathon hours during the planning of the bin Laden operation, called his wife. “Turn on the TV. This is why I’ve been gone all weekend and what I’ve been so preoccupied with for months.”

  Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was one of the officials who walked from the Situation Room to the East Room with Obama in the minutes before he addressed the nation. On the walk over, Clapper heard the sounds of the cheering crowds that had started to gather in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, brought there by the news that bin Laden might have been killed. “I knew this meant a lot to the country but I didn’t know how powerful the reaction would be. I remember walking out and hearing, ‘USA! USA! USA!’ from Lafayette Park. And it was at that moment it hit me. This was huge,” says Clapper.

  At 11:35 p.m., Obama walked down the high-ceilinged formal corridor to the East Room and up to a lectern. Dressed in a dark suit and red tie, the president made brief and sober remarks: “Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” Obama was careful to offer some praise to the Pakistanis: “It’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people.” Despite the late hour on a Sunday night, the speech drew more viewers than any other in Obama’s presidency; some fifty-five million Americans tuned in to hear that bin Laden had been killed.

  After the president’s speech, as Panetta left the White House in his heavily armored vehicle with tinted windows, some in the crowds that had gathered in Lafayette Park were chanting, “CIA! CIA! CIA!” Mullen was struck by “the young people that were out there. The twenty-one-year-olds who had been ten or eleven when 9/11 occurred, and they were out there cheering.” Walking out of the White House, Flournoy recalls hearing a familiar song and thinking, “What is that? And I realized that it was a crowd of American citizens who had spontaneously gathered in Lafayette Park, singing the national anthem, and at that point I welled up and I was actually crying walking out to my car. I had not expected that, and it was an overwhelming moment.”

  Half a world away, bin Laden’s corpse was being prepared for burial. Considerable thought had gone into the disposal of the body of al-Qaeda’s leader. Obama officials wanted to ensure that there would be no grave that could become a shrine. (Similarly, the Soviets went to great lengths to ensure that after Hitler committed suicide at the end of World War II, the location of his remains was kept a closely guarded secret.) Obama’s national security team consulted with Islamic experts, who explained that the most important obligations for a proper Muslim burial were wrapping the washed body in a white cloth, having specific prayers recited over it by a Muslim man, and performing the burial within twenty-four hours. A sea burial might be permissible in certain circumstances, for instance, if a person died at sea and there was no way to get to land immediately.

  Obama’s counterterrorism advisors had had something of a dress rehearsal for the burial of bin Laden two years earlier with Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader of al-Qaeda in Africa, who was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in a helicopter raid on September 14, 2009, as he was driving south of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The SEALs landed briefly to pick up Nabhan’s body, and after they had confirmed his identity through DNA samples, he was buried at sea.

  John Brennan, the former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, called Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the powerful Saudi deputy minister of interior, telling him that the CIA had pretty much confirmed that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden in Pakistan. Brennan asked whether the Saudis wanted bin Laden’s body returned to his homeland. If not, he said, the plan was to bury him at sea. Nayef offered his congratulations—al-Qaeda had tried to assassinate him more than once—and said he would inform King Abdullah. Brennan explained that if the king had any different ideas they’d need to know in a few minutes. Nayef told Brennan to go ahead with his plan.

  A V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft transported bin Laden’s body from Bagram Air Base in central Afghanistan to the USS Carl Vinson, which was cruising off the coast of Pakistan. Once the corpse was on board, procedures for a Muslim burial were followed. In a ceremony that took a little under an hour, bin Laden’s body was washed and wrapped in a white winding sheet. The body was then placed in a bag with weights, and an officer read some religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic. Bin Laden’s corpse was then deposited on a flat board, which was tipped up so that the body dropped into the sea. On May 2, at 11:00 a.m.—at 2:00 a.m. back in Washington—bin Laden was consigned to a watery unmarked grave in the vast Arabian Sea, a burial witnessed by only a small group on the flight deck of the great American warship. Al-Qaeda’s leader was fifty-four.

  Leading Islamic scholars quickly protested, among them Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, the Harvard of Sunni Islamic learning, who said, “Bin Laden’s burial at sea runs contrary to the principles of Islamic laws, religious values, and humanitarian customs.” Iraqi religious scholar Abdul-Sattar al-Janabi also opined, “It is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea. The body of bin Laden should have been handed over to his family to look for a country or land to bury him.”

  Omar bin Laden, one of bin Laden’s older sons, released a written statement on behalf of his siblings decrying his father’s “sudden and unwitnessed burial at sea [which] has deprived the family of performing religious rights [sic] of a Muslim man.”

  One of the two DNA samples taken from bin Laden was analyzed at Bagram Air Base, and the information derived from that sample was sent electronically to Washington, while another sample was hand-carried to Washington for additional analysis. Using DNA material obtained from relatives of bin Laden, intelligence officials now determined with complete certainty that the corpse that had sunk down into the deep was indeed that of al-Qaeda’s leader.

  John Brennan, Obama’s main counterterrorism advisor, gave a press conference the same day that bin Laden’s body was buried at sea, in which he made a number of assertions about what had happened at the Abbottabad compound: that bin Laden had used a woman as a human shield, that he had reached for his weapons, and that he had died in a firefight with the SEALs. The White House quickly retracted all those statements, attributing them to the confusion and fog of a battle that had been fought at night on the other side of the world less than twenty-four hours earlier.

  The administration also fumbled its initial announcement about the release of photos of the dead bin Laden. The day after al-Qaeda’s leader was killed, Panetta told NBC News that soon images proving the death of bin Laden “would be presented to the public.” But quickly the White House clarified that this wasn’t the case. Obama, Gates, and Clinton all agreed that the gruesome pictures of bin Laden would be used by al-Qaeda to incite harm against Americans, while conspiracy theorists—people who might believe that somehow, somewhere, bin Laden was still alive, and that the official story was all a ruse—wouldn’t be persuaded by the photographic proof anyway. It was “important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence, as a propaganda tool,” explained Obama. For those who doubted that al-Qaeda’s leader was dead, Obama had a simple message: “Th
e fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again.”

  During the president’s daily intelligence briefing a couple of days after the raid, there was discussion of the fact that the SEALs seemed to have planned for everything, except for bringing a tape measure to measure bin Laden’s dead body. “You ought to give McRaven a gold-plated tape measure,” suggested Tony Blinken. Obama said, “That’s a great idea.” Four days after the raid, when McRaven walked into the Oval Office to meet with the president, Obama said, “Hey, I’ve got something for you,” and presented him with a tape measure mounted on a plaque.

  The mass of materials picked up by the SEALs at the bin Laden compound was quickly transported back to Washington, where a task force of 125 people worked 24/7 quickly to triage anything related to al-Qaeda attack planning that could be found. Every available Arabic speaker in the intelligence community was “surged” to work on what became known as the “treasure trove” and to start churning out reports to law enforcement and the intelligence community about any threat information that needed to be flagged. Reviewing the trove, what struck James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, were the effects of years of self-imposed isolation on bin Laden. Clapper found bin Laden’s musings about mass casualty attacks on the American transportation system or oil tankers in the Indian Ocean to be a mix of the serious and the nutty. “Some of it was operational, a lot of it was aspirational, and I thought quite a bit of it was delusional. It kind of reminded me of Hitler in the later stages of World War II; he’s moving all these army groups around that didn’t exist.”

  On May 3, Panetta told Time magazine what White House officials had discussed in their private deliberations: “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.” This statement added considerable salt to open wounds in Pakistan. The first reaction of the Pakistani military to the bin Laden operation had been shock. Al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan had repeatedly targeted the Pakistani army, so that shock was also leavened with a certain amount of satisfaction at the senior levels of the military. Later on the day that bin Laden was killed, Generals Kayani and Pasha met with Marc Grossman, Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter. Both Pakistani generals offered their congratulations to the American diplomats on the death of bin Laden.

  But the good feelings did not last. The shock of bin Laden’s death soon gave way to anger as the Pakistanis realized that the promised strategic partnership with the United States had brought, first, a dramatically increased number of drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal region, which were enormously unpopular, and second, the Raymond Davis affair, during which the military had expended considerable political capital to get Davis released from jail after he killed the two Pakistanis in Lahore. The unilateral American raid to kill bin Laden in the heartland of Pakistan now capped these developments. As the full implications of the bin Laden operation sank in, General Kayani asked himself, “How could my good friend Admiral Mullen not have told me about the raid?” Kayani and Mullen have rarely spoken since.

  The raid was horribly embarrassing for the Pakistani military, which likes to regard itself—with some justification—as the most capable institution in Pakistan. If the Navy SEALs could waltz into the heart of Pakistan without the Pakistani military noticing or doing anything about it, what did this say about the army’s ability to protect its crown jewels, its nuclear weapons, from seizure by Indian forces, or even the American military?

  Popular anger toward the army was high in Pakistan, in particular toward General Kayani, who had been trying to build bridges to the Americans. Criticism of the army from all quarters, generally unthinkable in Pakistan, was rampant in the days after the raid. Kayani’s and Pasha’s jobs seemed to hang in the balance, as they were losing support both inside the army and from Pakistanis in general. Kayani worried that the army’s image could shatter, and he told his closest colleagues that this was the worst week of his life.

  In the past, General Pasha, the Pakistani intelligence chief, had requested of his American counterpart, Panetta, that if the CIA didn’t trust the Pakistani government or military with some matter of great import, to tell at least him or Kayani or President Zardari, so that the Pakistanis would be able to save face by truthfully saying they had been informed. A soft-spoken, mild-mannered man of five foot seven, with deep black circles around his eyes, reflecting many sleepless nights, Pasha had played a key role in getting the CIA contractor Raymond Davis released from prison, negotiating directly with the victims’ families so that they would accept the “blood money” for Davis’s release. After the bin Laden raid, Pasha felt that the relationship with the United States was broken beyond repair.

  This sentiment was shared in the U.S. Congress, where there was widespread outrage that bin Laden had been hiding in Pakistan, a country that had received billions of dollars in U.S. aid since 9/11 (never mind that most of this “aid” was in fact compensation to the Pakistan military for mounting military operations the U.S. had demanded it undertake against the Taliban along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border). Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who chaired the House Intelligence Committee, said publicly, “I believe that there are elements of both the [Pakistani] military and intelligence service who in some way, both prior and maybe even current, provided some level of assistance to Osama bin Laden.” Rogers offered no proof for this assertion, and the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment within weeks of the Abbottabad operation was that there was, in fact, no official Pakistani complicity in bin Laden’s sojourn in Abbottabad and that nothing in the treasure trove recovered from his compound provided any proof that bin Laden had support from Pakistani officials. Still, Rogers’s view that the Pakistanis had helped shelter al-Qaeda’s leader was commonplace both in the halls of Congress and in the U.S. media.

  As was expected, on May 6, just days after bin Laden’s death, al-Qaeda officially confirmed the death of its leader in a message posted to jihadist Internet forums where the group’s media arm had regularly posted its propaganda in the past. The message promised revenge for bin Laden’s “martyrdom.” Al-Qaeda asserted that bin Laden’s blood was “more precious to us and to every Muslim than to be wasted in vain.… We call upon our Muslim people in Pakistan, on whose land Sheikh Osama was killed, to rise up and revolt … to cleanse their country from the filth of the Americans who spread corruption in it.” Very few people, including Pakistanis, paid any attention to this call. Indeed, the protests in Pakistan that followed bin Laden’s death were minor, numbering at most a few hundred people.

  The same day that al-Qaeda confirmed bin Laden’s death, Obama and members of his national security team traveled to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, home to the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment that had flown the choppers on the bin Laden mission. Over the course of half an hour, in a small classroom on the base, the president was briefed by the men who had carried out the operation.

  First to speak was the helicopter pilot who had flown the Black Hawk that went down. “These types of things have happened before,” he said. “You can never account for exactly what the environment’s going to be.”

  “Did the weather play a role?” Obama asked.

  “The weather can impact the flight plan, and the weather was a little warmer than anticipated,” said the pilot.

  The SEAL team ground commander used a model of the compound and a red laser pointer to explain what had gone right and what had gone wrong on the mission from start to finish. The biggest problem was not correctly matching the wall that surrounded the compound in the life-size mock-ups they had used for rehearsals. The solid walls of the actual compound had caused turbulent aerodynamics for the first Black Hawk when it hovered to drop the SEALs into the courtyard, and had necessitated the chopper’s “hard landing.”

  The SEAL commander said, “We’re alive today because of what the
helicopter pilot did. An incredibly difficult thing to do, to deal with this machine and get everybody out safely.” He went on to say, “This is the end result of a ten-year effort. We’ve been at this for a decade, and we’ve gotten better over the course of ten years at doing this. We’ve done it in Afghanistan, we’ve done it in Iraq.” The SEAL commander then reeled off a list of forward operating bases in Afghanistan that had been named after SEAL team operators who had died in the past decade. Then he turned to the Abbottabad operation, describing everyone’s role, including that of the interpreter, who yelled at neighbors in Pashto and Urdu to stay back: “If it weren’t for that guy, who knows what could’ve happened.” The commander went on to say, “If you took one person out of the puzzle, we wouldn’t have the competence to do the job we did; everybody’s vital. It’s not about the guy who pulled the trigger to kill bin Laden, it’s about what we all did together.”

  The president didn’t ask any of the SEALs who had taken the shot that had killed bin Laden, and no one volunteered the information. He simply said, “This small group of people in this room is the finest fighting force in the history of the world.”

  The president asked to see Cairo, the dog that had accompanied the SEALs on the raid. The SEAL team commander warned the commander in chief, “Well, sir, I strongly advise you to have a treat, because this is a tough dog, you know.” Cairo was presented to Obama, although a presidential petting was discouraged and the dog was wearing a muzzle.

  To patch up matters with the Pakistanis, Senator John Kerry, one of the few American politicians with any credibility in Pakistan because of his role in pushing for aid for civilian projects in the country, traveled to Islamabad in mid-May. During a several-hour conversation with Generals Kayani and Pasha, Kerry discussed all the areas of tension between the two countries: Pakistan’s support for elements of the Taliban, CIA operations in Pakistan, and the raid in Abbottabad. Kayani and Pasha demanded a halt to the CIA drone program in Pakistan. Kayani also told Kerry of the deep sense of betrayal he had felt over the Abbottabad operation and the enormous risks he had taken in embracing the Americans. Kerry told them that an end to the drone program was not in the cards and that no president in his right mind would have outsourced the bin Laden operation to another country after the failure to capture al-Qaeda’s leader at Tora Bora.