Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  Obama and I seriously discussed the succession issue in an hour-long private meeting on October 1, 2010. He began by asking yet again whether there was any chance of my staying on longer. I simply said, “Please don’t.” I asked him, once more, if Petraeus was not a possiblity as chairman. Obama replied that pulling Petraeus out of Afghanistan would be a problem, especially with drawdowns set to begin in July 2011. I told Obama that Cartwright was willing to stay on either as national security adviser or as chairman. A big fan of Cartwright’s, I nevertheless felt obligated to share again with the president my concerns about Cartwright’s relationships with the other chiefs and his propensity to hold information close. Cartwright had told me he would prefer the national security adviser’s job as a new and different challenge. Obama said he needed “to talk to him,” and he would do so on several occasions. At the end of the meeting, I again urged the president to think about Panetta as my successor.

  The president was sold on Cartwright as the next chairman, and as so often, I was being difficult. I kept thinking about having assigned Dave McKiernan to a job that did not play to his strengths and worried about doing the same to Cartwright.

  On April 4, 2011, the president told me I could still change my mind about leaving. During our meeting he said that Hillary had told him the previous day, “You’re not leaning hard enough on Bob.” I told him, “I’m spent. I’m just out of gas.” I then recommended that he nominate Marty Dempsey as chairman. The previous fall, not knowing how the chairman’s succession would play out, I had recommended that the president nominate Dempsey to be the new chief of staff of the Army, and he had done so. I proposed he nominate Panetta as my successor and Petraeus to take his place at CIA. (Petraeus had surprised me shortly before by expressing his interest in the CIA job.) I told Obama I thought he could wait until mid-May to announce the military choices, but that I wanted to go public with my firm departure date by the end of April.

  Dempsey was sworn in as Army chief of staff on April 11. I called him to my office the next day to tell him I was recommending him to the president to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was flabbergasted. I shared with him the challenges I believed he would face, particularly with the budget, and said that he would need to lead the chiefs as a team, maintain their cohesion, and help the new secretary manage the relationship between the senior military and the president.

  On April 28, in the East Room of the White House (where Abigail Adams once hung the presidential laundry), the president announced that I would leave on June 30 and be replaced by Panetta. Panetta would be replaced at CIA by Petraeus, and Petraeus as commander in Afghanistan by Marine General John Allen. Eikenberry would be replaced as ambassador to Afghanistan by Ryan Crocker. We were all on the dais with the president, along with the vice president, Hillary, and Mullen. The president invited each of us involved in the changes to say a few words, and we were all quite disciplined. For my part, I thanked President Obama for “asking me to stay on—and on and on.”

  On Memorial Day, I stood with the president in the Rose Garden at the White House as he announced his intention to nominate Dempsey and Admiral Sandy Winnefeld as chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Ray Odierno as chief of staff of the Army. Two weeks later I announced that I would recommend Admiral Jon Greenert as the next chief of naval operations. He would be my last personnel recommendation to the president.

  When it was all done, I felt I had left the president with the strongest possible team of military leaders to face the daunting challenges ahead. It was a legacy that made me proud.

  THE BIN LADEN RAID

  During my first three and a half years as secretary of defense, the hunt for Osama bin Laden had been dormant as far as senior policy makers were concerned. While there was lip service to the priority of finding him, there were seemingly no new leads, and our focus in Afghanistan was on fighting the Taliban, not on finding Bin Laden. When Obama early in his presidency directed a more concentrated effort to get the world’s most notorious terrorist, I thought it was an empty gesture without new intelligence information on his whereabouts. In the summer and early fall of 2010, I did not know that a small cell of analysts at CIA had acquired a lead on a courier thought to be in contact with Bin Laden. In the end, he would be found not through the $25 million reward or a new agent with firm evidence of his location, and certainly not through any help from the Pakistanis. Bin Laden was found through old-fashioned detective work and long, painstaking analysis by CIA experts. There would be a lot of heroes in the Bin Laden raid and even more people in Washington who would take credit for it, but without those extraordinary analysts at CIA, there would have been no raid.

  The story of the raid by now has been told countless times. Here is my perspective. Sometime in December 2010, Panetta came to see me and privately informed me of his analysts’ belief they had found Bin Laden’s location. Leon would update me from time to time, and then in February 2011 he invited the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, to CIA headquarters to begin a collaborative effort to strike the suspect compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. McRaven’s special operators had been carrying out similar raids virtually every night for years inside Afghanistan to capture or kill Taliban commanders, and had the requisite skills and experience to carry out the strike successfully.

  The president and his seniormost national security team met multiple times in March and April to debate whether to strike the compound. Joe Biden and I were the two primary skeptics, although everyone was asking tough questions. Biden’s primary concern was the political consequences of failure. My highest priority was the war in Afghanistan, and so my greatest worry was that no matter what happened during the raid, as a result the Pakistanis might well shut down our vital supply line from Karachi to Afghanistan (carrying 50 percent of our fuel and 55 percent of our cargo), withdraw permission for us to overfly Pakistan, and take other steps that would have a dramatically negative impact on the war effort. A successful raid would be a humiliation of the worst kind for the Pakistani military. The Abbottabad compound was thirty-five miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, six miles from a nuclear missile facility, and within a couple of miles of the Pakistan Military Academy (their West Point), the boot camps and training centers for two storied Pakistani regiments, a Pakistani intelligence office, and a police station.

  I was also concerned that the case for Bin Laden being at the compound was entirely circumstantial. We did not have a single piece of hard evidence he was there. As we probed the analysts about how confident they were Bin Laden was in the Abbottabad house, the estimates ranged from 40 to 80 percent. As a former CIA analyst, I knew those numbers were based on nothing but gut instinct. As the president said at one point, “Look, it’s a fifty-fifty proposition no matter how you look at it.” From my vantage point, we were risking the war in Afghanistan on a crapshoot.

  Our discussion of the raid was influenced by the arrest in late January of a CIA security officer named Raymond Davis in Lahore, Pakistan. His car was full of weapons, spy gear, and pictures of Pakistani military installations when he was stopped by two motorcyclists who pointed guns at him. Davis shot and killed both. He was arrested at the scene. By mid-March, a deal had been struck, payments were made to the families of the two men Davis had shot, and Davis was released. But white-hot public anger in Pakistan at the United States had not abated. Another such infringement on Pakistani sovereignty would almost certainly get very ugly. And we were thinking about a beaut.

  There were three possibilities for a strike at Abbottabad—a special operations raid, bombs, and a limited, small-scale strike from a drone. The advantage of the last two options was that they posed the lowest risk of a Pakistani reaction. One big disadvantage was that we would not know if we had actually killed Bin Laden. The military planners initially proposed a massive air strike using thirty-two 2,000-pound bombs. Even though we persuaded them to scale that down, there was still a high likelihoo
d of civilian casualties in the surrounding residential neighborhood. The drone attack was attractive because any damage could be confined to the compound, but it still would require a high degree of accuracy and, importantly, the drone had not been fully tested. The special operations raid, the riskiest option, also offered the greatest chance of knowing for sure we had gotten Bin Laden and offered an opportunity for gathering up all the intelligence about al Qaeda operations he might have with him. I had total confidence in the ability of the SEAL team to carry out the mission. My reservations lay elsewhere.

  I laid out my concerns in detail at a meeting with the president on April 19. Succeed or fail, the raid would jeopardize an already fragile relationship with Pakistan and thus the fate of the war in Afghanistan. I said that while I had complete confidence in the raid plan, I was concerned that the case for Bin Laden’s presence in the compound was purely circumstantial. “It is a compelling case,” I said, “for what we want to do. I worry that it is compelling because we want to do it.” I worried that Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was aware of where Bin Laden was and that there might be rings of security around the compound that we knew nothing about or, at minimum, that ISI might have more eyes on the compound than we could know.

  The worst-case scenario was that the Pakistanis could get a number of troops to the compound quickly, prevent extraction of our team, and take them prisoner. When I asked Vice Admiral McRaven what he planned to do if the Pakistani military showed up during the operation, he said the team would just hunker down and wait for a “diplomatic extraction.” They would wait inside the compound and not shoot any Pakistanis. I then asked what they would do if the Pakistanis breached the walls: “Do you shoot or surrender?” I said that after the Davis episode, and given the high level of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, negotiating the release of the team could take months or much longer, and meanwhile we’d have the spectacle of U.S. special operators in Pakistani custody and perhaps even show trials. Our team couldn’t surrender, I said. If the Pakistani military showed up, our team needed to be prepared to do whatever was necessary to escape. After considerable discussion, there was broad agreement to this, and as a result, additional MH-47 helicopters and forces were assigned to the mission. McRaven later expressed his appreciation to me for raising the issue.

  I expressed caution about the operation based on personal experience and the historical record. I recalled the Son Tay raid in 1970 to rescue some 500 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam; despite a well-executed mission, the intelligence was flawed, and no U.S. prisoners were at the camp. I had been executive assistant to CIA director Stansfield Turner in the spring of 1980 when the attempt was made to rescue the hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. Operation Eagle Claw, a failure in the desert that left eight American servicemen dead, was aborted because of helicopter problems and then became a disaster when a helicopter crashed into a C-130 refueling aircraft on the ground. I had gone to the White House with Turner the night of the mission, and it was a searing memory. I remembered a cross-border mission into Pakistan by U.S. forces in the fall of 2008 that was supposed to be a quick and clean in-and-out, but the team ended up in an hours-long firefight and barely made it back across the border into Afghanistan. The Pakistani reaction had been so hostile that we had not undertaken another such operation since. In each case, a great plan, even when well executed, had led to national embarrassment and, in the case of Eagle Claw, a crushing humiliation that took years for our military to overcome.

  I believe Obama thought from early in his presidency that my long experience in the national security arena was an asset for him. Now I told him in front of the rest of the team that perhaps in this case my experience was doing him a disservice because it made me too cautious. He forcefully disagreed, saying my concerns were exactly what he needed to take into account as he weighed the decision.

  No one thought we should ask the Pakistanis for help or permission. In every instance when we had provided a heads-up to the Pakistani military or intelligence services, the target was forewarned and fled, or the Pakistanis went after the target unilaterally, prematurely, and unsuccessfully. We all knew we needed to act pretty quickly, whatever we did; everyone was scared to death of a leak. There was considerable discussion about whether to wait and see if CIA could get more proof that Bin Laden was at the compound, but the experts told us that was highly unlikely.

  Who should have overall authority for executing the raid was never in question. If it was carried out under Defense Department authority, the U.S. government could not deny our involvement; CIA, on the other hand, could. To preserve at least a fig leaf—granted, a very small leaf—of deniability, we all agreed that when the time came, the president would authorize Panetta to order the operation. Defense periodically would loan—“chop”—forces to CIA for operations, so this was a familiar practice.

  The final meeting was on April 28. The plan, if approved, was to launch the raid two days later. Most of us, including the president, were scheduled to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that night, one of Washington’s springtime rituals in which press, politicians, and officials all dress up and pretend to like one another for at least a few hours. Someone raised the question of how it would look if all of us rose from our tables and left at the same time because of something that had happened relating to the raid. The point was also made that yukking it up when our servicemen were risking their lives in a daring operation was not desirable. Hillary was forceful in saying there should be no change in the plan and those of us going to the dinner should do so. The president strongly agreed. (As it turned out, weather forced delay of the raid by a day, and we would all later get credit for our poker faces at the dinner.)

  Finally, the president went around the table and asked each person for his or her recommendation. Biden was against the operation. Cartwright and I supported the drone option. Panetta was in favor of the raid. Everyone else acknowledged it was a close call but also supported the raid. The president said he would make a decision within twenty-four hours.

  The next morning Undersecretaries Michèle Flournoy and Mike Vickers came to my office to try to persuade me to support the raid option. There were no two people whose judgment I trusted more, so I listened closely. After they left, I discussed the raid with Robert Rangel. I then shut the door to my office to think about everything the three of them had said. After a few minutes, I called Donilon and asked him to inform the president that I now supported the raid. The president had made the decision to go ahead an hour or so earlier.

  Midday on Sunday we gathered in the Situation Room. We were all tense, bantering nervously. The stakes involved were enormous, and yet at this point, we all knew we were just spectators. For such a sensitive operation, it seemed to me there were a lot of people in the room. Panetta remained at CIA to monitor the action. Across the hall, in a small conference room, Air Force Brigadier General Marshall Webb was monitoring a video feed of the Abbottabad compound, and an Army sergeant was keeping a detailed log of audio reports he was hearing over headphones. Someone had told the president about the video feed, and he crossed the hall to the small room, grabbed a chair, and sat in a corner, just to Webb’s right. As soon as the rest of us realized where he had gone, we joined him. Biden, Clinton, Denis McDonough, and I sat at the table, with Mullen, Donilon, Daley, John Brennan, Jim Clapper, and others standing around the edges.

  When early in the raid a helicopter went down, I cringed as I remembered the attempted Iranian rescue mission thirty years before. At first, we feared disaster, but the pilot skillfully managed the crash-landing, and all the SEALs aboard were okay; the mission continued. We could track every move until the team entered the house, and then in the most critical moments of the raid, we could see and hear nothing. After an unimaginably long fifteen or so minutes, we heard the message “Geronimo—EKIA,” enemy killed in action. McRaven had told us earlier that the only way Bin Laden would be taken alive was if he greeted the SEAL
s naked and with his hands up. Other than a shared sigh of relief, there was little reaction in the room. The SEAL team still had to get out of the compound and get back across the border to Afghanistan, which involved a helicopter-refueling stop in a dry streambed.

  After nearly forty minutes, the SEALs were headed out of the compound, some escorting women and children beyond the walls for safety as others took time to plant explosives and blow up the downed helicopter. It was a huge blast, and we could be confident not many Pakistanis anywhere close were now still asleep. And then the team was on its way, one helicopter carrying the remains of Bin Laden, another carrying the forensic evidence that proved who he was—and what turned out to be a mound of intelligence. Even after the helicopters had returned safely, there was no celebration, no high-fives. There was just a deep feeling of satisfaction—and closure—that all the Americans who had been killed by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and in the years before, had finally been avenged. I was very proud to work for a president who had made one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House.

  As on nearly all such dramatic occasions, there was a light moment. When the SEALs got Bin Laden to the base in Jalalabad, McRaven wanted to measure his height as part of making sure we had the right man. When no one had a tape measure, he had a six-foot-tall SEAL lie down beside the body. The president would later quip that McRaven had no problem blowing up a $60 million helicopter but couldn’t afford a tape measure. He would later present the admiral with one attached to a plaque.