SEALs do not wear helmet cams—if they were to be issued, it is likely that they would become the most frequently malfunctioning equipment in the U.S. military. SEALs are many things, and they are not politically naïve. They know very well politicians would love nothing more than to ponder over video recordings of the split-second life-and-death decisions they make in combat. Days and weeks after the danger, their split-second life-and-death decisions would be picked apart by armchair commandos in Washington.
Had cameras been worn into the main house, it would have looked like the lobby of an elementary school. There were whiteboards and desks and books.
“Fire in the hole.”
Another explosion, this one high and sharp. A steel-cutting charge had blown open the metal grate that secured the ground floor from the floors above. Pieces of the gate banged off the marble floors and fragments found ground-floor windows to fly through. The smoke cleared, and Scott started up the stairs.
“We’re coming up! Hey, goddamn it, we’re coming up!”
“Panama!” was shouted by the men upstairs. It was the challenge and response—the way to tell friend from foe.
“Red,” came back the answer. Tonight’s challenge and response.
Scott Kerr came up the stairs to the third-floor landing, and saw a body.
“Whose is it?”
“We’re working on it, Skipper. It’s either Hamza or Khalid.”
A voice called from upstairs. “Here, Skipper. In here.”
“Six is moving. Be advised, Six actual is moving.”
No accidental shootings tonight.
Scott entered the third-floor hallway. A SEAL stood guard over Khairah, her face streaked with tears. The third-floor lights had been turned on, and she was surrounded by huge men with guns. She had no idea if she would live or die. Osama had told her that the Americans would murder her on sight. Scott Kerr looked at her face. He knew who she was.
“Number three,” said Frank.
“Yeah. We’re gonna keep her up here until we go. No point in spreading the news too far.” Frank wasn’t a squadron commander for nothing. Keeping the captures separated by location also prevented them from fabricating stories about atrocities. Even though the SEALs took precautions, several of the noncombatants would tell stories that Osama was captured alive and then murdered. The Pakistani press would spread this story, even though it was told by people who were not in the main house or on the third floor at the time of the assault.
Scott went into Bin Laden’s bedroom. Amal was leaning against a wall, her wounded leg thrust out in front of her. She, too, was sobbing.
Kerr did not recognize Amal’s face. But she was in pajamas, she was in Osama’s bedroom, and she was the right age for number four. He walked over to the bed.
Osama had been pulled off the mattress and laid face up. His photo was taken and the data chip was handed to the communicator. He put it into a reader attached to his satellite radio.
Kerr looked into the face of the man who had brought down the World Trade Center and started two wars that had lasted a decade. The Predator round had blown out the back of his head. Bin Laden was dead, but not one person on the Team thought this meant an end to Al Qaeda or to terror. Not by a goddamn long shot.
“It’s him,” said Frank Leslie.
“It is.” Kerr stood. “Get a DNA sample.” As soon as Kerr saw Bin Laden’s body, he communicated the news to Admiral McRaven in the Joint Operations Center. The SEALs’ intersquad radios were not monitored by higher command. It was up to Scott Kerr to communicate with the admiral back in Jalalabad, and it was Bill McRaven’s job to communicate with Washington.
Scott Kerr thought back to the day at JSOC headquarters when he was told about Neptune’s Spear. Until ten seconds ago he never really believed … He thought it was all going to be … He didn’t know what, but he didn’t think that four months later he would be standing in Pakistan, looking down at the corpse of Osama bin Laden.
Kerr turned to the Red Squadron leader. “What happened?”
“Easy day. We got onto the roof. No one heard us approach. In five seconds we were on the terrace. We were in the hallway in thirty. One was coming at us up the stairs. He got tagged, and the door opened. Crankshaft stuck his head out, saw us, and slammed the door. We kicked it in, and were on him.”
“What happened to number three?”
“She was on the end of the bed, both feet on the mattress, sort of squatting and holding up the covers. He jumped across the bed behind her. We shot. One miss. One went through her leg and two went into him as he was diving across the mattress.”
“What was he doing on the bed?”
“He was going for this.” The Red Squadron leader held up a short AK-74. It was the AKSU that Osama always posed with. The gun was as famous as he was. Scott Kerr looked over the weapon. It had been fitted with a special forty-round extended magazine. Kerr jacked back the receiver and a shell tinged onto the floor. It was loaded with armor-piercing ammunition.
“We got a Marakov 9 mil pistol, too. Behind the bed.”
Scott handed the AK back to Frank. “This is for Red Squadron.”
“Hoo yaa, Skipper.”
Frank was a squadron leader, an operator, but he, too, had a drop of the politician in him. “Maybe the admiral would like the pistol, sir. Compliments of the Red Men.”
Kerr smiled. Hell, he thought, I’d like to keep it myself.
While the communicator went to the terrace and set up the satcom, Kerr had a minute or two to look around the room. It was fairly neat, and someone had placed two cheap pictures on the wall—decorative art, abstracts sort of. Kerr was also aware of the stuffiness of the room. To him it smelled like boxes of clothing kept in a musty garage.
He soon had a satellite and established voice communication. Kerr got on the satcom and contacted the JOC. He was talking on encrypted voice, one of the least secure methods of communication, and he used the brevity codes that had been established for the operation. He knew that his words would be heard not only by his boss, Admiral McRaven, but in Washington as well.
Scott started with what he considered most important: “Apache okay.” No SEALs dead, wounded, or missing. He continued, “Tomahawk negative at this time.” They had not found the Strela missiles—if they had ever been here at all.
“Comanche, Chippewa, Echo. KIA.” Bin Laden’s courier, al Kuwaiti, and Arshad Khan, enemy, killed in action.
“Chappo, Echo. KIA.” Chappo was the war chief Geronimo’s son—and the code name given to Khalid bin Laden. The message meant that Khalid was dead.
“Cochise, Echo. Mike at this time.” Bin Laden’s second son, Hamza, had been given the code name Cochise. He had been thought to be in the compound. If he was, they hadn’t found him. If he had run away, then he was more invisible than a Stealth Hawk. The SEALs had established an airtight perimeter. Hamza was Echo, Mike. Enemy and missing.
Kerr got to what they were waiting for. He said slowly, “Geronimo, Echo. KIA.” Osama bin Laden was dead.
* * *
At CIA headquarters the director squinted through his glasses at the typed sheet that had been transmitted to him when the mission launched. It was the list of brevity codes. He’d listened to Scott Kerr’s voice as he went through his list, following along with a pencil a bit like a bingo player. Finally, he heard a word that really meant something. Geronimo.
Panetta was connected to the White house via General Webb’s laptop. He had been chirping in via a small video window of his own, adding what comments he could. All he had to go on was the feed from the Sentinel drone. It had showed only the outside of the building. It was an agonizing fifteen minutes before Scott Kerr confirmed that Osama was in the building and had been killed.
Panetta was delighted to pipe in, “Geronimo, E, enemy. Killed in action.”
The president said, “We got him.”
Later, pictures from the White House situation room would show several famous faces watching t
he target feed in rapt attention. Secretary Clinton would be shown with a hand over her mouth—looking horrified. Others would look stoic.
The photograph does not show President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Vice President Biden at the moment they learned Osama bin Laden’s fate. The picture was taken minutes later, when it looked like catastrophe had finally caught up with SEAL Team Six.
On the video feed a helicopter had just crashed.
Leon Panetta said nothing. He had no idea what was happening. And neither did anyone else.
* * *
Razor 1 was finally able to settle and land on the roof of the house. During the assault, it remained there, rotors turning, doors open. It was then ordered to lift off and land outside the compound so that the operators could be reembarked. The crew chief climbed aboard, the doors were closed, and the engines surged. The night sky above the compound was crowded.
In Earth’s orbit, four satellites were watching. Twenty thousand feet above Abbottabad, the Sentinel flew in a lazy circle, its cameras turned on the objective—it was streaming video to the Joint Operations Center in Jalalabad, and that video was being relayed in real time to Leon Panetta at CIA headquarters and the White House situation room.
At an altitude of three hundred feet, the Chinook helicopter designated as the Gun Platform was making slow quarter-mile turns around the compound, watching for troops or vehicles coming to the garrison stationed at the Kakul Military Academy less than a mile from Bin Laden’s front door.
Razor 2 was still on perch, hovering at fifty feet above the apex of the compound’s southern perimeter.
Departing from the roof of the main building, Razor 1 headed for a landing spot along the road one hundred yards west of the Command Bird. In the pitch-black darkness, the Stealth Hawk crossed over the narrow walled driveway bisecting the compound. Slowly, the helicopter started to drop. Losing altitude, Razor 1 canted sideways. It began to rotate clockwise, until its tail was pointed east and it was flying backward. An important component of the flight deck controls had failed. Called a “green unit,” this removable system controlled flight inputs and communications, and managed navigational problems. In spec ops it is often said that, “One is none, two is one.” The green unit in the Stealth Hawks was considered important enough to have a backup system. Razor 1 could fly perfectly well with just one functioning green unit, but it could not fly with both of them off-line. And both of them went out at the same time—a million-to-one shot. Almost gracefully the doomed Razor Hawk sank tail-first into the large, walled enclosure east of the main house.
The snipers and air crew aboard Razor 2 watched in horror as dust started to tornado up from the sprawling animal pen. The Stealth Hawk settled so gradually that a cow and two buffalos had time to amble out of the way. Then the helo’s landing gear thumped into the ground and the machine bucked upward and started to spin in a wrenching, high-speed circle. These were Razor 1’s out-of-control death throes. When it hit the ground a second time it was with such violence that the helicopter broke into two pieces.
For ten seconds the rotors flailed in the dirt and the fuselage flopped around like a fish thrown on a dock. Finally, mercifully, the rotors broke off, the engines flamed out and the pieces stopped. All of this started so moderately and ended so violently that it astounded everyone. Washington had no idea what had just happened. All the Joint Operations Center knew was that a helicopter, a Stealth Hawk, had just crashed.
Two operators had bagged Osama’s body and were taking it down out of the ground floor of the main house when they heard the sound of a high-pitched buzz … almost a shriek. Scott Kerr ran out of the main house and looked up. He had not seen the crash. Because of the high walls and the several tasks the SEALs were carrying out, very few of the assaulters knew what had happened, either.
“Razor 1 is down!”
On the ground, it had to be thought that the helicopter had been shot down. Operators and corpsmen rushed to the wreckage. The flight deck, one of the most reinforced parts of the helicopter, had survived almost intact. A SEAL corpsman found the flight crew shaken up and in shock, but all right.
The SEALs had been on target approximately twenty minutes. They had gathered an impressive haul of actionable intelligence from Bin Laden’s home. It filled a dozen garbage bags and more. Now they had to get out—on one less helicopter than they had come in on.
All of Kerr’s training came into play. The plan must survive the blunders of men. He loaded Bin Laden’s body onto the Command Bird. “Gather up the intel, bag it up, everything, and we are out of here in ten minutes. Wheels up, ten minutes!”
Kerr looked at the wreckage. It was too destroyed to fly and too intact to leave. The Stealth Hawk had to be destroyed. The pilots were still shaken up, but they helped to smash the avionics and other flight controls. The most highly classified pieces of equipment, including the two failed green units, were put onto the Command Bird. They’d be taken back to base and examined to find out what had gone wrong.
As this was happening, all of the noncombatants were questioned and photographed. DNA samples were taken from the three dead terrorists, and Amal’s wounds were dressed and she was given a tetanus shot. Kerr directed that the exfil begin. The trash bags containing the intel went aboard the Command Bird. During the operation, hundreds of pictures had been taken of the rooms, the bloodstains, the beds, the cupboards, the clothing, the weapons, the ammunition—pictures of everything except the missiles. They could not be found.
SEALs would carry away five hundred data systems, hard drives, computers, laptops, monitors, notebooks written in Arabic and English, papers, financial records, and wire diagrams of a new Al Qaeda that Osama was planning—one that did not include Zawahiri.
Osama had watched the news, too. He had considered now that Egypt had its revolution, Zawahiri’s principal qualification for being in the ranks of Al Qaeda’s leadership was gone. Bin Laden did not want attacks carried out against Egypt, and documents show that Zawahiri was planning a spectacular bombing in Tahrir Square. Ironically, intel analysts reading through Bin Laden’s papers would discover that Osama was planning a full break with Zawahiri. That move came too late to prevent Zawahiri from moving against him.
Even Al Qaeda has its local politics.
Demolition charges were set in the wreckage of Razor 1. Explosives were set on all the sensitive parts of the aircraft, especially the engines. Blocks of C4 were wired up with long strings of orange det cord that stretched across the barnyard to a detonator. As the SEALs got a head count and reloaded into the helicopter, Scott Kerr, the interpreter, and his bodyguard were the last Americans to leave the compound. They told the noncombatants to stay where they were, tucked safely behind the guesthouse wall. They obeyed.
In the street, Kerr told the head breacher to set a three-minute delay. The charges were set and the last four men walked into the Command Bird now turning its rotors in the field across the dirt road from the compound. They walked up the helicopter’s tail ramp and Scott gave a thumbs-up. The engines roared and the big Chinook shook itself and started to climb into the sky.
Scott Kerr stood on the tail ramp and looked down at the compound. He felt the helicopter’s deck throb through his boots and the smell of jet exhaust and JP-5 wiped away the smells of the house. He lifted his vision goggles—now he saw it the way Bin Laden had seen it. There were a few lights on. Kerr could see the bone-colored building in an odd-shaped triangle, the “embassy” Bin Laden had built for himself—two acres of sovereign Al Qaeda territory where he thought he was beyond the reach of the nation upon which he had declared war.
Osama had been wrong to think Abbottabad was a safe place.
Scott Kerr watched as the self-destruct charges ripped through what was left of Razor 1. The explosion thudded through the night, setting off car alarms, waking up babies, and rattling windows in Abbottabad. A fiery mushroom cloud lifted over the wreckage and flaming pieces came down around the compound.
In Abbo
ttabad, a dozen people sat at keyboards and tweeted exactly what Scott Kerr was thinking: Maybe Abbottabad wasn’t really a safe place after all.
Operation Neptune’s Spear, SEAL Team Six’s greatest triumph, had started with a whisper and ended with a night-shattering bang.
WHAT CAME AFTER
AT 11:30 P.M. ON SUNDAY, MAY 1, President Barack Obama appeared on television to make a short statement. He said that “a small team of Americans” had found the author of 9/11 in a compound in Pakistan. “After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” The president said, “No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties.”
Several versions of the mission began to make the rounds in Washington. Vice President Joe Biden, who’d watched the raid in the White House Situation Room, gave a speech three days after the operation: “Folks, I’d be remiss also if I didn’t say an extra word about the incredible events, extraordinary events, of this past Sunday. As vice president of the United States, as an American, I was in absolute awe of the capacity and dedication of the entire team, both the intelligence community, the CIA, the SEALs. It just was extraordinary.”
Joe Biden told the world that it was a SEAL Team operation.
But worse was to come. A “forty-five-minute firefight” story was bandied about, and then revealed to be an exaggeration. The White House floundered, and a series of conflicting statements managed to impart the impression that Osama had been unarmed. The press had a field day. The story evolved that Bin Laden had been killed at the end of an almost hour-long engagement where the SEALs fought their way up three flights of stairs, found Osama in his bedroom, and shot him in cold blood.
It was little wonder that the words “kill mission” tripped off the tongues of news anchors and pundits.
Facts were in short supply even to those at the top. In an interview given to PBS, Leon Panetta admitted, “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on.”
SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Page 24