The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Moments later, Clinton and Obama saw the SEALs scrambling from both Black Hawks. “We will now be amending the mission,” McRaven explained calmly.

  Chalk One’s bird was down but the unit was improvising, knowing that they had only thirty minutes to pull it off. Chalk Two’s chopper had set down in a nearby field. Its operators were supposed to guard the perimeter. Now they would have to blast their way through the gate and lead the search for Osama from the ground up.

  May 2, 2011, Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan

  “We opened the doors, and I looked out,” said Robert O’Neill, who was in the chopper that landed in the field. Over the radio he had caught wind in the last few moments that something had gone wrong with Chalk One’s landing, but he needed to stay focused.

  As his feet hit the ground, O’Neill’s mind turned to George W. Bush’s words on 9/11: “Freedom will be defended.” He sprinted across the mud hoping that his teammates in the other chopper were unhurt.

  Behind him, Chalk Two’s Black Hawk took off again.

  “This is some serious Navy SEAL shit we’re going to do,” O’Neill said to himself. He liked to narrate his journey, his mind a camera. It was a great way to settle the nerves. “This is so badass.”9

  O’Neill’s team pounded across the mud toward the compound. There was no sign of the other chopper. “I looked to the left,” he said. “The mock-up had been dead-on. To actually be there and see the house with the three stories, the blacked-out windows, high walls, and barbed wire … just like the satellite photos. I was like, this is really cool I’m here.”

  Sohaib Athar, a coffee shop owner and IT consultant who lived a mile away from Bilal Town was working late at his computer. He had heard the sound of the arriving Black Hawks, too.

  “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 AM (is a rare event),” he tweeted as his handle, @ReallyVirtual.

  Chalk Two kept circling.

  Sohaib tweeted again. “Go away helicopter—before I take out my giant swatter :-/”10

  Inside the Waziristan Palace, up on the third floor, Hussein was crying. Amal went to turn on a light. “No,” commanded the Sheikh, grabbing her arm, unaware there was a power outage. He appeared disoriented. Fear made him hostile. This was not how Amal had imagined her hero behaving in a tight spot.

  “Come up!” Osama called out hoarsely for Khalid.

  From a second-floor window, Khalid and his mother, Seham, had seen the SEALs that made up Chalk Two piling out of their Black Hawk and sprinting across the field toward them.

  Osama’s son ran upstairs. “Americans are coming,” Khalid panted, clutching a loaded AK-47 but still dressed in his pajamas.11

  Amal recalled thinking that Osama had told her the last time Khalid had fired a weapon was at the age of thirteen. If the Americans got past Ibrahim and Abrar, he would be his father’s last line of defense.

  She shuddered.

  She and Seham went downstairs to comfort the children, who were crying in their bunk beds, terrified by the unprecedented commotion. Occasionally, their father had allowed them into his studio to play a bootlegged copy of Delta Force: Xtreme 2, a first-person shooter video game, but experiencing the real thing was an unknown.12 What should she say to them? Amal thought. They glanced fearfully toward Khairiah’s room, across the corridor. The door was firmly shut. Amal now felt certain she had been right. They had been betrayed by one of their own.

  A blast shook the house as the gate to the annex courtyard was blown open.

  @ReallyVirtual heard it, too: “OMG:S Bomb Blasts in Abbottabad. I hope everyone is fine :(.”

  Five minutes down: out in Khalid’s vegetable patch, the SEALs inside Chalk One had emerged unscathed from their damaged chopper and were improvising, their plans to rappel onto the roof of the main house now abandoned. After blasting through a gate into the main compound, they had fanned out, some heading for the main house while two of them approached the annex where Ibrahim and Maryam lived and that was labeled on the SSE charts as C1. Chalk One team member Matthew Bissonnette and another SEAL identified by the pseudonym Will crept toward the glass doors of C1, their boots crunching the gravel.

  Inside, Ibrahim and Maryam were sitting in the dark, having already been woken by the helicopter crash landing, a sound she later described as a “noise of a magnitude I had never heard before.”

  Just as Ibrahim went to fetch their daughter, Rehma, who was crying in her bed, his cell phone rang. He stifled it before answering. “Salaam?” When nobody spoke, Ibrahim guessed it was his brother. “Abrar? I cannot hear you. I’m coming,” he whispered, grabbing his AK-47 and heading for the door. He stopped short when he heard a sound.

  Someone was trying to open the door from the outside.

  “Is that you, Abrar?” he whispered, slipping the safety catch off his weapon.

  The door was locked from the inside.

  This is it, Maryam thought; the night she had long feared was unfolding. She wrapped herself around her eighteen-month-old son, Habib, as Ibrahim let off a volley of shots. The glass in the door shattered as his assault rifle arched through the air, the recoil catching him by surprise.

  From outside, a man speaking Arabic ordered Ibrahim to open up. “Ahmad al-Kuwaiti come out!” shouted Will as Bissonnette pumped rounds through the door toward his likely position.

  Inside, Maryam watched as Ibrahim fell backward, blood pooling on the cement floor around him. She stared at his twitching body and watched as her volatile husband bled out.

  Rounds whizzed around her, clattering across the kitchen, carving up bags of pasta and splitting the rice sack. Heating oil glugged all over the floor, filling the room with fumes.

  A burning feeling hit Maryam’s shoulder as a round struck her. A second bullet pierced her cheek.

  Judging by Rehma’s horrified expression, Maryam realized that she must be bleeding. “Mother, don’t die!” the girl cried, shielding her brothers Khalid, six, and Ahmed, three.

  “I’m not dying,” Maryam rasped, as a strange silence filled the darkened room. Boots sounded outside.

  Maryam crawled forward, in agony, trying not to show it. Desperate for the firing to stop, she cracked open the broken door and screamed in Arabic: “You have killed my husband and now only I and my children are in the room.”

  “We’ll blow the whole building if you don’t open up,” barked back Will from the other side, also speaking Arabic.

  Bissonnette was beside him, catching his breath, when he spied something through the night-vision goggles. He slid a finger over the trigger. “I could just make out the figure of a woman in the green glow,” he recalled. She had something in her arms. Bissonnette began applying pressure to the trigger. If he could discern the four and a half pounds of pressure needed to loose a round, and he thought he could, he was about a quarter of the way down. “I could see our lasers dancing around a head.”13

  He was ready to fire when he suddenly realized it was a woman holding a baby. He relaxed a gloved digit as three more children shuffled into view behind her.

  “He is dead!” Maryam screamed. “You shot him. He is dead. You killed him.”

  Will strode over and lay hands on her, searching for a suicide vest or concealed weapon. They had to be sure, after Camp Chapman. Everyone was a belligerent until proved otherwise.

  “Allahu Akbar Aleikum! [The great God is against you!],” Maryam screamed, as he touched her.

  Both SEALs held her down, stifling her cries, pushing aside the sobbing children. When she was still, they poked around the annex. It was slippery, the floor slicked with Ibrahim’s blood.14

  Maryam heard the second helicopter as her wrists were cuffed with nylon cord. Chalk Two’s Black Hawk was still circling.

  Eight minutes down: The family on the third floor gathered to pray, all eyes on Osama. “They want me, not you,” he said, his voice trembling as he told his wives to go downstairs with the children.

  Amal refused to move from his side, while Miriam a
nd Sumaiya hid out on the outside balcony with some of the children. Seham and Khalid obeyed and went down, bumping into Khairiah, who was watching through a window as silent silhouettes advanced on the house.

  Khalid, who was at her shoulder, urged her to move. “They’ll see you and shoot,” he said. She seemed unafraid.

  One floor below, Abrar, Bushra, and their three children sheltered behind their bedroom door, in the first room to the left of the entrance, unable to see anything clearly.

  Chalk One was clearing the ground-floor apartment first, before going upstairs. A C-4 charge went off and the south door cracked open. As SEALs poured inside, Abrar popped up to see what was going on, and the point-man took the shot.

  Abrar fell back onto a lilac and pink flowered bed sheet, arms raised. Bushra jumped forward through the darkness, shouting curses, hoping her husband had just been winged as more rounds spun toward her. She crumpled dead in the doorway.

  As operators shouted that the corridor was clear, they saw through the green glow what looked like a woman and several children huddled in the corner.15

  O’Neill was still outside. “I heard gunfire from two different places nearby,” he remembered. “One of our guys told me, ‘Jesus, these women are jumping in front of these guys. They’re trying to martyr themselves.’ ” He was crossing to the back of the house when he ran into another team member. “Hey, man, I just shot a woman,” the SEAL said, clearly surprised, recounting Bushra’s death.

  O’Neill told him to snap out of it. They could worry about the consequences later.

  When he entered the north door, O’Neill glimpsed Bushra’s daughter, Khadija, in the “first room on the right as we were going in.” He reached down, picked her up, and put her in the room on the left “with another woman,” so she was not on her own. “She seemed too out of it to be scared.”

  They had to keep on target: Osama, the Kuwaitis, Hamzah, Khalid—the names in Gina Bennett’s SSE booklet.

  Upstairs, Amal, Osama, and Hussein were alone, listening to the pings of rounds and pops of charges being detonated around the house.

  Osama was muttering prayers. After six years of total isolation, the children having constantly been berated for making the smallest noise or complaining, Amal realized with cold dread that Americans were swarming in their home, readying to kill them all, and there was no emergency procedure aside from the euros sewn into her husband’s underwear along with the numbers for Atiyah and Dr. al-Zawahiri. Since neither she nor her husband had a cell phone, what use were those numbers now?

  Their safe house was a death trap.

  Ten minutes down: Bissonnette was still outside, advancing on the main house. “Through my night vision I could see multiple lasers tracking along the windows and balconies … I didn’t see any movement.” The film on the windows made it impossible to see in.16

  Inside, O’Neill’s team prepared to go upstairs. “So we’re looking down the hallway at the door to the stairwell,” he said. “I figured this was the only door to get upstairs, which means the people upstairs can’t get down.”17

  The breacher had to blast it twice. Whoever was behind here was better protected. “We started rolling up,” said O’Neill.

  Bissonnette, now inside the building, was not far behind. “Nice and slow,” he recalled. No talking. No yelling. No running. “We have a saying, Don’t run to your death.”

  Khalid was hiding on the second landing. O’Neill was four men back in the stack when he saw the point-man hold up the line. A face had just popped up over the balcony before pulling back. O’Neill had seen the jack-in-the-box too, and he listened as the point-man whispered, “Khalid … come here …” in Arabic, then in Pashto. It was an old bushman’s trick. “That confused Khalid,” recalled O’Neill. “He’s probably thinking, ‘I just heard shitty Arabic and shitty Pashto. Who the fuck is this?’ ”

  O’Neill watched as Khalid leaned out just far enough for someone to take the shot. He fell back, out of sight to the advancing SEALs.

  Those in front of O’Neill peeled off to clear the second-floor rooms. Climbing over Khalid’s body, Bissonnette noticed his cold AK-47 on a step. “Glad he didn’t man up and use that thing,” he told himself.

  Up above, the point-man pushed on and up with another operator. “One hundred percent he’s on the third floor,” Gina Bennett had told them in Jalalabad. “So get to there if you can.”

  Thirteen minutes down: the advancing SEALs reached the third floor. O’Neill later claimed he was the second man in the stack. So did Matthew Bissonnette.

  Whoever was second turned to check his rear just as the point-man reached the top step and caught sight of a ghostly face peeking out from a doorway ten feet ahead and diagonally to the right: Osama bin Laden.

  He fired and the head jerked back, as if he’d been shot. Swinging around, the second SEAL put his hand on the point-man’s shoulder and squeezed, “Go.”

  The point-man and his number two strode across the top landing and clattered into two young screaming women. “Jesus!” It was Sumaiya and Miriam, lunging at the Americans through the darkness. The point-man grabbed one under each arm and propelled them backward against a wall. Everyone in the house was presumed to be strapped into vests, and in that moment he had to shield the rest of the team.

  It was the first time the girls had ever been touched by a man outside the family and they instantly became hysterical.

  “It was the most heroic thing I’ve ever seen,” said O’Neill, who claimed to still be number two in the stack and appreciated the point-man’s thinking.

  With the girls (and any explosives they might have been carrying) covered, O’Neill recalled the point-man turning to say to him, “These bitches is [sic] getting truculent,” before O’Neill rolled past him and on into the bedroom, where he came face-to-face with a very tall and very skinny Arab in a white prayer cap looking blindly through the darkness.

  According to O’Neill’s version, his $65,000 night-vision goggles gave him an extraordinary view of Osama bin Laden, who stood, uninjured, ten inches away, unable to see what was coming at him.

  “I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn’t seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.”

  Recovering his composure, O’Neill noticed there was someone in front of Osama—a woman—Amal. “He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion.” Before their marriage she had said she wanted to go down in history, but she had never expected it to end like this.

  For a split second, O’Neill wavered. Who posed the greater threat? The woman or Osama?

  “He’s moving forward. I don’t know if she’s got a vest and she’s being pushed to martyr them both and me.” The hundreds of hours of training kicked in. “He’s a threat. I need to get a head shot.”

  Amal saw O’Neill raise his weapon, and she instinctively rushed him.

  He shouted, “No! No!” and, zing.

  Amal felt the searing pain in her leg and collapsed onto the bed bleeding. The last thing she remembered before passing out was “a red beam of light but I heard no sound.”18

  O’Neill raised his weapon extra high to meet the main target’s head. “He’s going down,” he thought as he loosed off a round. “He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! Same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight.”

  The target’s tongue was lolling. O’Neill watched him suck in a last breath. “He died afraid, and he knew we were there to kill him. And that’s closure.”

  Matthew Bissonnette entered the room. He recalled it differently. Osama bin Laden had already been injured by the point-man’s shot and was lying prone with his daughters standing over him. “Both women were dressed in long gowns and their hair was a tangled mess like they had been sleeping,” he said.

  According to Bissonnette’s version, he and the second SEAL shot Osam
a “a handful of times,” without knowing who it was, reacting instinctively to a twitching body. “The bullets tore into him, slamming his body into the floor until he was motionless.”

  Bissonnette dropped down to take a closer look. “The man’s face was mangled from at least one bullet and covered in blood,” he recalled.

  More SEALs thumped up the stairs to take a look. A volley of muffled shots rang out as commemorative, vengeful rounds were pumped into the body, everyone wanting to take a shot.

  Amal came to and knew she needed to play dead on the bed. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing.

  O’Neill turned around to look at the bed and paused. He thought he heard or saw something moving.

  Amal remained as still as she could.

  O’Neill saw a young boy watching from the other side of the bed. It was Hussein, and he had witnessed everything. “I didn’t like it that he was scared,” O’Neill said. He picked him up, threw water from a CamelBak on his face, and put him down next to his mother. “He’s a kid, and had nothing to do with this.”19

  Bissonnette saw “at least three children huddled in the far corner” beside the sliding doors to the balcony. He pulled them all into the center of the room.

  “Get them out.”

  It was fifteen minutes into the operation but no one wanted to call it in—until they were sure.

  Amal, still motionless, listened horrified as the SEALs held Sumaiya and Miriam over their dead father. O’Neill towered above them, demanding they confirm the dead man’s identity. Bissonnette, who had put on latex gloves and was wiping blood from the corpse’s face using a blanket from the bed, compared the profile against pictures of Osama bin Laden in Gina Bennett’s laminated SSE booklet.

  He was still not convinced.

  The nose looked right but the face was “way younger” than expected, he said as he began to take photographs with a camera he had used on dozens of previous raids. He pulled the beard this way and that, turning the head to get a better look at the famous profile and noting that the beard was black not gray, and very short.20