The Finish

by Mark Bowden

  When McRaven returned to his command center, Obama asked him, “What do you think?”

  “Well, without DNA I can’t tell you I’m a hundred percent sure,” the admiral said. “But I’m pretty damn sure.” He said that the men were just beginning to be debriefed, but that there was some indication from the women interviewed at the compound that they had killed the right man. He reiterated, “Mr. President, I have fairly high confidence that we have killed bin Laden here.”

  Still, the president was inclined to be cautious. What would be worse than to announce that you had killed the founder and leader of al Qaeda only to be proved wrong? When Panetta, Morell, and “John,” the bin Laden team leader, arrived at the White House, Morell walked the president through the details of the agency’s facial analysis, which had concluded with 95 percent certainty that the dead man was bin Laden. The president asked about DNA analysis, which would be even more conclusive, but Morell told him that the earliest they would get those results would be Monday morning.

  Wouldn’t it be best then to wait? Why take chances? It was now early Sunday evening. From his command seat in the Situation Room, Obama asked if they should announce bin Laden’s death that evening or wait for the DNA results. Would the secret hold? Everyone agreed that the secret would not hold, not with Twitter and e-mail and the Internet and cable TV, not with the mini-conflagration and dead bodies at the compound in Abbottabad, with bin Laden’s wives and children in Pakistani custody, and with word now spreading happily from Jalalabad to Kabul and outward. If the White House said nothing, then who knew what version of the story would come out or what kind of conspiracy theories would take root.

  “It won’t really be true until we say it’s true,” said Obama. “So I’m not worried about it leaking out. We should confirm it when we are in a position to confirm it, but not feel pressured to do so.”

  No matter when the White House chose to make an announcement, it had to contact Pakistan and explain. No one knew how that country would react. The raid had been a clear violation of its sovereignty, and the fact that the United States, an ally, had not sought its help or consulted with it beforehand was deeply insulting. Still, as Obama explained to me later, “It would be easier for them to manage the fallout if it was definitive that it was bin Laden, as opposed to there being ambiguity out there for two or three days, in which case the whole issue of Pakistani sovereignty would be magnified.”

  So Admiral Mullen called General Kayani. The Pakistani army chief by then knew, of course, that there was a downed American helicopter in Abbottabad, but in those early hours of the morning in Islamabad, no one had yet sorted out what had happened. Mullen told him that the United States had conducted a mission and had killed Osama bin Laden.

  “Congratulations,” said Kayani.

  The conversation went downhill from there. There was going to be trouble ahead between the two countries, for sure, but the general immediately helped resolve the question over when to make the announcement.

  “Look, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “There are all these stories about American helicopters and a raid inside Pakistan, all without a good explanation. It would be very helpful if you would stand up and say what happened.”

  That decided the matter. They would make the statement that night. Rhodes went to work drafting the comments he had not been able to bring himself to write the day before. Other principals picked up the playbook for a successful raid, each assigned to telephone a different world leader. Obama got on the phone to inform former presidents Bush and Clinton, who had hunted bin Laden during their terms, and British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country had been America’s staunchest ally during the effort.

  Jay Carney went to work assembling the White House press corps for a special announcement. He and his staff started contacting reporters, mostly by e-mail. He told them, one after another, “Look, you’ll want to be here, but I can’t tell you why.” Most guessed that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed—one of the Libyan dictator’s sons had been killed the day before. No one guessed bin Laden.

  But the news did break out. Twitter users from Abbottabad had been buzzing for hours about helicopters and strange explosions. A Pakistani computer technician named Sohaib Athar filed a report just as the SEAL choppers arrived over the compound, writing “Helicopter is hovering over Abbottabad at 1 a.m. (is a rare event).” Minutes later he reported a loud bang that shook the windows where he was staying nearby. There were other reports like this, but no one knew exactly what had happened until Keith Urbahn, a former chief of staff to Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.” Urbahn quickly followed with, “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.” This was an hour before Obama appeared in the East Room to make the announcement, and the news was quickly everywhere.

  In the White House, Carney was alerted to ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast of a game between the Phillies and the Mets in Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park. The sellout crowd was chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” It was 10:45 p.m. The game announcers interrupted to deliver the news that there were reports that bin Laden had been killed.

  Still, as Obama had predicted, it would not be true until the United States confirmed it. So he sat behind his desk in the Oval Office making last-minute changes to the speech Rhodes had drafted, and then he walked over to the East Room to give it. There were already crowds across the street in Lafayette Square celebrating and chanting “USA! USA! USA!”

  It was 11:35 p.m. when the president appeared on television striding up the red carpet toward a podium, and began: “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 is responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”

  He spoke about the attacks on 9/11, which were, he said, “the worst attack on the American people in our history,” and which were “seared into our national memory.” He spoke of how long bin Laden had eluded American forces. The president felt proud of his own contribution to the effort, citing his instruction to Panetta soon after taking office to move the priority of the top al Qaeda leaders “to the front of the line.” He mentioned the national effort to oust the Taliban, but did not mention Iraq. He believed part of his own contribution had been to alter the misguided priorities of President Bush.

  “Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden,” he said. “It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

  “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

  He noted that the threat of attacks from this group had not ended, and pledged a continued effort against them, and he emphasized once more that the United States was not at war with Islam, pointing out that President Bush had also labored to make that clear. He accused bin Laden of the very thing the Sheik had worried about, his unwanted legacy: “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”

  The president thanked “the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who have worked tirel
essly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.

  “We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country. And they are part of a generation that has borne the heaviest share of the burden since that September day.”

  The president closed by invoking the spirit of unity that the nation experienced after the 9/11 attacks, and was reexperiencing briefly that night.

  “Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.”

  The night was not over for the White House. In Carney’s West Wing office, Michael Morell, Mike Vickers, and John Brennan held a group telephone conference with reporters. Morell, who had been with President Bush on the day of the attacks and at the center of efforts to catch bin Laden ever since, now declined to answer most of the detailed questions about the hunt, but he did offer a convoluted summary off the top of his head about finding Ahmed the Kuwaiti.

  “It was multiple detainees debriefed over a number of years,” he said. “And then it was a composite picture of the courier network and this particular courier that we were interested in—that led us to this compound, and that came out of a composite picture and then was developed further through other intelligence means.”

  Morell saluted the cooperation between CIA and the military.

  “You know, this CIA-U.S. military operation was obviously a major success, and it’s a sign of the tremendous partnership that has existed between the intelligence community and the military in the years since 9/11. And it is a testament that the CIA is immensely grateful to those in the military who participated in this operation… We understand that the fight against al Qaeda continues, and that fight continues even as we mark the death of Osama bin Laden.”

  It was very early in the morning when they were done. Morell left the White House at about half past midnight. He heard the large crowd across the street chanting “USA! USA! USA!” and then heard something that this lifelong agency man never thought he would hear. The crowd began chanting, “CIA! CIA! CIA!” He walked out to his car for the drive home to his family. For the last two months he had been working sixteen-hour days and he hadn’t been able to tell his wife why. Just that afternoon their daughter, who he had peeked in on at the end of that long day nine years earlier, had been in the last choral concert of her high school career. When he had left at six that Sunday morning, his wife had asked if he could make it.

  “I can’t come,” he’d told her.

  “It’s her last,” she said.

  “I just can’t,” he’d replied, unable to explain why. She had not been happy about it.

  Earlier that evening, when the president decided to make the announcement, he had phoned her at home, the concert long over.

  “Turn on the TV,” he’d told her. “You’ll understand why you haven’t seen me in the last two months.”

  Now he was eager to get home.

  Carney and Rhodes didn’t leave the White House until after two in the morning. The press secretary had some beers in the refrigerator in his office, and they had celebrated by drinking them. They heard the chants across the street, still going at that hour, and were surprised to learn that the crowds had grown so large that White House security at first would not let them drive out. So Rhodes walked home.

  It felt like New Year’s Eve. There were crowds of people dancing and chanting and singing. The streets were full of honking cars. Young women were standing up in the sunroofs waving their arms and cheering. It brought back all of his memories of 9/11, watching in horror from the Brooklyn waterfront as the towers fell. Most of the people celebrating on this night were of college age, in their late teens or early twenties, likely students from nearby Georgetown or George Washington University, which meant they had been children on the day of the attacks.

  Rhodes himself was now thirty-two. Al Qaeda and bin Laden had been a dark shadow over all their lives. Now the shadow was lifted. In his own way, he had been involved in that fight from the start. He was not a soldier. He had not risked his life in the battle as so many in his generation had. He was not a shooter like the brave SEALs who had executed the raid, but he had brought his own talents fully to the effort. He had redirected his life, from deciding to work for Lee Hamilton instead of writing fiction, to helping to write the 9/11 Commission Report, to going to work for Obama—working to shape and articulate his thinking about the war, about who was the right enemy, and why fighting them was not only critical to the nation’s safety but just and honorable. From that day in Brooklyn, to sketching out the president’s remarks that night about bin Laden’s death, the killing of bin Laden formed a full circle for Rhodes. It was the story of his own young life. And that night, walking home, he felt like he had won.

  9. Glitter

  Spring 2011

  Finding and killing Osama bin Laden was an extraordinary accomplishment. President Obama had ample reason to be proud. But whose accomplishment was it? In his speech that night, Obama credited the “countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals” who had labored over the past decade and more, spanning three presidential administrations. He also thanked the SEALs who had risked their lives in the raid, and who had pulled it off seamlessly. He also thanked allies who had cooperated for years in hunting down and interrogating al Qaeda figures, including, even with its violated sovereignty and the insult of not having been consulted, Pakistan. But the president reserved a large share of the credit for the accomplishment for himself.

  “And so, shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta…

  “I was briefed… I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed…

  “I determined… and authorized…

  “Today, at my direction…”

  And all of this was true. Obama did deserve credit for making the search for bin Laden a top priority of his administration, for cautiously laying the groundwork for a raid that avoided killing outright innocents and minimized disruption in Abbottabad, and for shouldering a big risk, not just to the men who carried out the mission, but to his own presidency and legacy. Perhaps it is only fair that having accepted the very large potential downside of a raid gone wrong, Obama should now fully reap the rewards for it having gone right.

  But his White House team soon began hyping and spinning a story that really did not need to be spun. They did what political professionals exist to do; they began working the story to their own benefit.

  Small falsities began to accrue around the story like splashes of glitter. It started almost immediately. Sitting on the couch in Carney’s office after the president’s remarks, John Brennan told reporters, “The American team engaged in a firefight… Osama bin Laden did resist.” He went on to say that the men in the compound “certainly had used women as human shields.” The next day he went further, saying that bin Laden himself had used his wife as a shield, as part of an effort to paint the al Qaeda leader as cowardly and hypocritical—“Here is Osama, living in a million-dollar compound, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. It speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years… he’s putting other people out there to wage jihad while he is secure in his luxury compound.”

  In future interviews, Obama’s oft-voiced conviction that al Qaeda was the appropriate enemy and his direction to his intelligence chiefs to move finding bin Laden to the “top of the list” would be portrayed as the impetus that led to finding him, after the previous years of futility. In conversations with me, a number of top administration officials used the expression “limited bandwidth” to describe how even high priorities within administrations can be pushed aside or eve
n forgotten—specifically, how Bush’s two wars had crowded out the bin Laden hunt. Obama had made similar comments in his speeches, particularly as a candidate in 2007 and 2008, when he argued that President Bush had “taken his eye off the ball.”

  Early on in the planning, Obama had insisted that the SEAL team be prepared to fight its way out of Pakistan rather than defend the compound and wait for the United States to negotiate its exit. This was a risky call, made for the right reasons. The president was placing the safety of American soldiers above concerns for preserving diplomatic ties with Pakistan. Approaching the mission this way, which had not been Admiral McRaven’s suggestion, might have meant leaving in its wake dead Pakistani soldiers and police and downed Pakistani fighters. Making that decision had altered the planning for the mission, requiring the addition of more backup forces and other options. Members of Obama’s staff, after the fact, would point to this decision as critical to rescuing the mission after the first Black Hawk crashed. Only because the president had insisted on a beefed-up backup plan, they argued, did McRaven have the ready recourse of a Chinook loaded with a Quick Reaction Force.

  In the weeks after the raid, analysis of the documents seized at the compound revealed, as CIA and administration officials presented it, that bin Laden had not been the isolated, irrelevant figure some said he had become, but, rather, had been actively steering his organization from his hiding place, hatching assassination plots against Obama and Petraeus, for example, and setting in motion further attacks on the U.S. homeland.

  Then there was Vice President Biden, with his special gift for the self-aggrandizing overstatement, now in the service of his boss, who would call the raid “the most audacious plan in five hundred years.” Biden said that Obama had made this gutsy call after being roundly advised not to, suggesting that only Leon Panetta had been clearly in favor of it. He said Obama had “a backbone like a ramrod.”