by Mark Bowden
After all that, his head spinning with possibilities, Rhodes sat down to begin drafting something. He planned to start with the best-case scenario, and got as far as the first line, but then stopped. I can’t, he thought. I might jinx this. If he wrote a speech about them getting bin Laden, and they didn’t, that was going to be an awful document. If he wrote one about not getting bin Laden… well, his heart wasn’t in it. If he had to do it, he would, but he wasn’t going to do it unless he had to. So he didn’t write anything. He gave up and got ready to attend the correspondents dinner.
There had been some conversation the evening before about the timing. The dinner was the major black-tie social gala of the year in Washington: televised, and attended by celebrities from Hollywood and the sports world, and by all of the most prominent government leaders and journalists. The main attraction was always the president of the United States, who typically delivered a stand-up comedy routine poking fun at himself and the press. If Obama chose the raid, it would likely take place at the same time as the dinner. How would it look for the president to be making jokes at a podium while the men were risking their lives? And what if something went wrong and everyone had to suddenly leave the party? Every journalist in Washington would realize something major was up. Then again, if they all decided simply not to go, it would alert every news organization in the world that something big was happening.
When someone floated the idea of asking McRaven to postpone the mission for a day, Clinton had heard enough.
“We are not going to let a White House correspondents’ dinner drive an operational decision,” she said.
That ended it. Obama told Donilon, “Tom, if it turns out that’s when we decide to go, you’ll just tell them I have a stomachache and I have to bow out.”
The question of what to do about the dinner became moot when McRaven’s weather experts predicted fog in the Abbottabad area for Saturday night. He decided to push the mission back one day. They would launch on Sunday night.
So in this tense moment, the most suspenseful of Obama’s presidency, he and his staff dressed for a formal party.
Rhodes was so nervous that at first he decided not to go, but then he changed his mind. He figured if he stayed home he would just pace and obsess. The dinner would be a distraction. But it was strange. There were maybe a dozen people among the many hundreds in attendance who shared the secret. They were all throwing themselves into the party in an effort to forget the strain for a few hours, and succeeding somewhat, except when they would see someone else who knew. When Michael Morell spotted Rhodes in the crowd he gave him a slight pained smile that made him laugh.
Obama lived up to his reputation for cool. If he was anxious about the next day’s mission, he didn’t show it, garnering laughs as he poked fun at the long-running dispute over his origins and his own sometimes messianic public image, offering a supposedly never-before-seen video of his live birth, which, he said, he himself had never seen. It turned out to be a clip from the Disney movie, The Lion King, showing the birth of the future king on the plains of Africa—the clouds part and a shaft of heavenly light beams down on the uplifted cub. “Back to square one,” Obama joked. Then he took pains to explain to the “Fox TV table” that the video was a joke, a “children’s cartoon,” he said. “If you don’t believe me, you can check with Disney, where they have the long-form version.” He skewered New York real estate magnate, publicity hound, reality TV star, and sometime presidential candidate Donald Trump, who for weeks had been loudly demanding proof of Obama’s citizenship. The president then gratuitously suggested that Representative Michele Bachmann, a vocal critic and Republican presidential aspirant, might have actually been born in Canada.
There was laughter.
“Yes, Michele,” he said. “This is how it starts.”
Great care was taken to preserve the appearance of normalcy on Sunday. President Obama left for his weekly golf outing at Andrews Air Force Base, but this time he would play only nine holes. Arrival times at the White House for all of the top staffers and cabinet members were staggered. The principals were instructed to keep their security details at a distance—a thick herd of black SUVs arriving at the gates always attracted attention. They were told not to park in their usual spaces. The West Wing tours normally booked for Sunday had been canceled, which raised the suspicion of ABC TV’s George Stephanopoulos, who understood the rhythms of White House life from his years on President Clinton’s staff. He got wind of the cancellations and asked Chief of Staff Bill Daley what was going on. He was told there was a “plumbing issue.” The Sunday tours were popular with the executive department staffers, who had a chance to show off their access by escorting family members and friends through the White House. Out-of-town guests sometimes planned visits around such perks, so the cancellations caused some disappointment. Obama’s personal secretary had planned one for that day, intending to show around the cast members of the hit movie The Hangover, who had come to town for the previous night’s gala. Rhodes got a phone call from her that morning.
“Can I just come in as an exception with these guys?” she asked.
“No,” said Rhodes. No exceptions.
The National Security Council staff convened at eight o’clock that morning. The deputies met at nine.
Halfway around the world, it was already late in the afternoon in Jalalabad. McRaven had timed the strike to hit the target in Abbottabad at one o’clock in the morning, Pakistani time, looking for the moment when things would be quietest at the compound and in Bilal Town, and when his men would have the longest stretch of darkness possible to finish up the work, fly north to Kala Dhaka for refueling, and get out of the country. That meant they would depart from the base in Afghanistan at about eleven o’clock at night, local time—the force would pick up a half hour on the clock flying east into Pakistan, so they would fly for an hour and a half and arrive at the targeted time. That meant the mission would launch at two-thirty p.m. Washington time and hit the compound at about four in the afternoon. McRaven kept an iPad in front of him throughout the night displaying multiple time zones just to help keep things straight.
So as the assault force readied, the White House pulled itself together. Some key Obama staffers were being called in and informed of the mission for the first time. Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, was on an outing with his children and didn’t notice the e-mail on his phone from Rhodes until an hour after it was sent. He forwarded the note to Dan Pfeiffer, the communications director.
“Do you know what this is about?” he asked.
Pfeiffer said that he had received the same summons, and, no, he didn’t know what was happening, either.
In the Situation Room and the complex of small meeting rooms around it, staffers worked on setting up the videoconferencing. Panetta, who would officially command the mission from his conference room at Langley, would be up on the big screen relaying the running commentary of McRaven, who would be at his post in Jalalabad. High over Abbottabad, much too high and too small to attract attention, was an RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealthy drone with a high-powered lens, which would provide a live video feed of the assault. In his blue uniform, Air Force General Marshall “Brad” Webb, a broad-faced man with a crew cut and a chest full of ribbons, was testing the video links to it and to Admiral McRaven in one of the small conference rooms. When Donilon learned that he planned to move himself and the feeds into the Situation Room, he put a stop to it. Donilon did not like the prospect of Obama communicating directly with McRaven and watching the mission live. It might appear that he was micromanaging the raid. Webb would have to confine these direct links to the smaller conference room.
The principals convened at noon for a final review of the plans and the president dropped in briefly, wearing his white golf shirt and blue Windbreaker. Each of the principals was given the plans for four possible outcomes, and each was tasked with making certain phone calls, depending on what happened.
Anticipating a long
day and night, the table in one of the smaller side conference rooms was covered and topped with a heaping Costco plate of sandwiches, chips, and baby carrots and a tub of sodas and bottled water on ice. The NSC staff spent most of the early afternoon reviewing their “playbook,” a large three-ring binder developed for an even broader range of possibilities. If something goes awry, who calls whom? How much of the intelligence case should be laid out after the fact, to explain why the action was taken? If trouble developed, which countries would they contact for support? Who would be the best person to reach out to, which Pakistani leader? Who had the best personal relationship? For instance, Admiral Mullen had a very good relationship with General Kayani. Who were the right people to leverage if the men on the raid found themselves in a bad spot? Did they want to put the president on the phone with the leader of a foreign country if this went badly? Whatever happened, there would be a lot of explaining to do with Pakistan: Here’s why we took the extraordinary step of not sharing this information with you. Here’s why we didn’t work with you.
Success scenarios were easier. There were many more pages devoted to failure.
The president returned at two-thirty p.m., still wearing the white golf shirt and blue Windbreaker.
In Kabul, General Petraeus paid a surprise visit to the JSOC situational awareness room.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked Colonel Bill Ostlund, who was JSOC’s liaison there.
“Yeah, we’ve got nine operations going on right now and a few more that I think will happen tonight,” said Ostlund. His center monitored operations being run out of task force headquarters in Jalalabad, in case problems developed that needed the attention of higher command—typically a helicopter accident or an issue involving civilian casualties. The activity he described was the normal nightly pace.
The colonel knew nothing about the bin Laden raid but had suspected for a few days that something big was in the offing. McRaven had come up from Jalalabad for a short visit and before stopping in to see the commanding general had asked the colonel when Petraeus’s office had last been swept for listening devices.
“Sir, I don’t know if it has ever been swept,” said Ostlund, and joked about the relative openness of the conventional army’s habits compared to their own. “General Petraeus will probably have his window open and an Afghani right outside the window.”
McRaven laughed and told Ostlund that he wanted him to stay outside while he met with the commander. This was unusual, since Ostlund had been in on every meeting with the admiral up until that point, even the most sensitive ones with the CIA station chief and Petraeus. So he knew something especially interesting was afoot, and since Petraeus rarely stopped by his ops center, he figured tonight must be the night.
“Why don’t you ask the rest of your folks to leave?” the general asked Ostlund. “And then we can talk.”
As the others filed out, Petraeus said, “They don’t need to come back for a while.”
When the others were gone, and they were sitting alone, Petraeus asked, “So, what do you think is going on?”
Ostlund guessed that either they were going to do a raid to try to free Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier taken captive by the Taliban almost two years earlier, or they were going after bin Laden. He wanted to add Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s Number Two, but he couldn’t remember how to pronounce the name.
“Yeah, it’s the latter,” said Petraeus.
They sat side by side in the large windowless room, at the head of a U-shaped table lined with now-empty computer stations, facing a wall with eight different plasma screens. They received no video feed from the bin Laden raid because the CIA was running it, but both men could monitor the live chat from JSOC headquarters, the CIA, and the White House.
Petraeus commandeered Ostlund’s keyboard and began tapping out questions to the various principals. At one point he directed a question to Admiral McRaven, calling him “Bill,” which alarmed Ostlund. Petraeus’s comments were being conveyed on the colonel’s line, and he was not used to addressing his commanders by their first names.
He asked, “Sir, could you let them know that this is coming from you?”
With a final order from Panetta—“Go in there and get bin Laden; and if he isn’t in there, get the hell out!”—McRaven launched the raid.
The two Stealth Black Hawks lifted off from the airfield at Jalalabad precisely at eleven p.m. local time. They were blacked out and both carried a full, minutely calculated load. Each of the SEALs was in full kit: desert camouflage, helmet, night-vision goggles, gloves (for fast roping), and hard knee pads (better for dropping to a knee for shooting). Each carried a booklet with photos of the people they expected to find in the compound. They were armed with various pistols and short-barreled automatic rifles outfitted with silencers. They carried only light arms because the compound was not heavily defended. While they might encounter armed men once on the ground, there would not be many. Attacking loud and fast in darkness, with finely choreographed moves, able to operate in the night as if it were day, the SEALs would have an overwhelming advantage.
About ten minutes into the flight the choppers rose above a series of rugged peaks and crossed into Pakistan. As soon as they did, the three big Chinooks lifted off from Jalalabad. One would set down just inside the border on the Afghan side. The other two would proceed to the staging area north of Abbottabad by a different route. The Black Hawks eased down into the wide Mardan Valley, flying well north of Peshawar, moving fast and hugging the terrain.
The special operators of JSOC like to see themselves as “the point of the spear,” and these two helicopters racing east in darkness were unquestionably that. Here was the final thrust of an enormous effort that stretched back over nine and a half years—further if you considered the whole modern history of special ops. The post–9/11 effort to find Osama bin Laden and his small band of zealous killers had engaged two presidential administrations and many thousands of people in America’s military and intelligence communities: the analysts working in shifts, the CIA officers rebuilding human spy networks, and the combined satellite and aerial and electronic surveillance efforts of an alphabetical jumble of agencies and branches, developing drones and secure live telecommunication links, creating computer software, and honing strategy and tactics. If a nation must learn how to fight each war anew, borrowing from its existing arsenal, adapting, and innovating to meet the threat, then the SEALs on these Black Hawks were, in effect, America’s response to the challenge of 9/11, closing in at last on the war’s ultimate target.
McRaven sat in a large rectangular windowless room with plywood walls, surrounded by manned computer stations and looking up at a wall of video monitors. One monitor would show video of the raid itself—the Sentinel feed—but there was nothing to watch there yet. Another had a graphic display showing the location of the choppers. There was some tension as the two smaller choppers crossed into Pakistan, followed about fifteen minutes later by the two Chinooks, but none of them tripped alarms at that country’s air defenses. With the full array of national security assets at his disposal, McRaven was able to monitor exactly what the Pakistanis were doing… and as the minutes went by it became clear that they were doing nothing. The task force had entered Pakistani airspace before, on covert missions into the tribal areas, so they had been confident they could slip in unnoticed, but it was nevertheless a relief when it had been done. The admiral had precalculated a point where, even if the Pakistanis woke up, the mission would proceed. Soon enough they had passed even that point. Now, as the blacked-out choppers moved toward Abbottabad, there was nothing to do for about an hour but wait.
At that point, McRaven knew he would have decisions to make only if something went wrong.
Up on the big screen in the White House Situation Room, Panetta read out occasional updates on the choppers’ progress. One of Obama’s aides said, “Mr. President, this is going to take a while, you might not want to sit here and watch the whole thing
unfold.”
“No, I think I’m going to go ahead and watch,” said Obama. In Chicago, nine and a half years earlier he had watched 9/11 unfold in a crowded basement room, now he would watch the final act of that drama from another.
Biden was typically restless, moving in and out of the room, and when he noticed that the live feed of McRaven and the Sentinel were up in the side room, he went in and sat down to watch there. Webb was hunched over his laptop at the head of the table.
In Jalalabad, McRaven’s sergeant major was sitting alongside the admiral, communicating on a chat line with Webb and others in the command loop. He looked up.
“Hey, sir,” he said. “General says the vice president just walked in.”
Secretary of Defense Gates was not far behind.
McRaven knew that the drumming chop of the approaching Black Hawks would be faintly audible about two minutes before they reached the target. The helicopters were stealthy, designed to avoid being spotted by radar, and quieter than standard models, but they still created racket when they were directly overhead. Approaching the compound from the northwest, the Black Hawks were now visible in the grainy overhead feed from the Sentinel.
After that, things happened very fast.
Everyone watched with shock as the first chopper, instead of hovering over the compound to drop the SEAL team from ropes and then moving off, as planned, abruptly wheeled, clipping the compound wall with its tail and hitting the ground. This clearly wasn’t good.