The Operator

by ROBERT O'NEILL

  “No, this is good,” I said. “That’s a fake door. That means he’s in there.”

  We said we were going to blow the carport. The radio crackled to life.

  “No, don’t blow it, we’ll just open it.”

  What the … ?

  I thought, Okay, it doesn’t matter how they got in there. I’ll find out later. Let’s go.

  The door opened, and an upward thrusting thumb appeared, the universal signal that these were the good guys. As we entered, I looked to the left. We were walking down the carport, and it was all dawning on me: Holy shit, we’re here, that’s bin Laden’s house. This is so cool. We’re probably not going to live, but this is historic and I’m going to savor this.

  I could hear gunfire: the distinct sound of an automatic AK-47, and the suppressed semi-automatic 5.56 of the good guys. Some of the shots were closer than others but several of my guys were shooting. I came around the corner to see one of our guys in the aftermath of a gunfight in front of the main house. The fight had only lasted two seconds. He shot through a window, and a man and woman were down inside. He was still looking at them while clearing the room as best he could from the outside. I could see them lying dead together.

  He looked concerned. “I just killed one of the women, too,” he said. “She jumped in front of him right as I was shooting. Am I going to be in trouble?”

  “Let’s not worry about being in trouble,” I said. “Let’s finish this mission.”

  Okay, I thought. Now the women are martyring themselves. This is definitely the right place.

  I didn’t think the dead man looked like bin Laden, but I couldn’t linger. We still had an entire house to clear. We entered through the front door of the main building. A few of my guys were already ahead of us and were making their way down the hallway, clearing the rooms as they did. Some guys stayed back to search the two bodies. It was standard tactics and we were all experts. The floor was a long hallway with rooms off to the sides and a barricaded door on the far end. In a spot like this, you clear the rooms, in order, and spend the least possible amount of time in the hallway. Bad guys will “spray and pray” down hallways. Even though Allah isn’t always around to guide their bullets, they do get lucky sometimes. On all sides, we could hear women and children crying—we later learned that living with bin Laden in the compound were three of his four wives and seventeen children—but that level of habitation was no different than in many of our targets.

  There were four rooms. I entered the last one on the far right of the hallway. A little girl was in there, obviously terrified and alone. Even in this tensest possible situation, we couldn’t just ignore her. One of the guys took her arm and led her across the hall and into another room already filled with women and children where he handed her over to one of the women. We were in a fight and looking for the world’s most wanted man, and he was making sure a young girl was as safe as possible under the circumstances. He came back into my room, and we were looking down the hallway where two of our guys were breaching the barricaded door. After failing to make sufficient headway with a sledge, they stopped to put charges on it. The door obviously led to stairs up to the next level, so we had to just stand in the room and wait until they got it open. I heard the guy behind me say something about a helicopter crash. My immediate thought was that one of the Chinooks carrying the reserve squadron forty-five minutes behind us had been shot down, so I said, “What helicopter crashed? The reserve team?”

  “No, dude,” he said. “Our helicopter crashed in the front yard. You walked right past it.”

  I thought, Well, shit, now we’re never getting out of here because we only have one helicopter. We better get up there and kill him before they blow up the place. All along we’d been scanning the ceilings, looking for hanging bombs—which is how the bad guys set up a lot of their booby traps, intended to bring the entire house down. We were surprised we hadn’t seen any. Yet.

  The breachers blew the charges on the stairwell door and it split open. As we made our way up the stairs I was five or six guys back. The woman intel analyst had told us that when we got to a set of stairs we should expect Khalid bin Laden, Osama’s twenty-three-year-old son, to be there, armed and ready, his father’s last line of defense. “If you find Khalid,” she told us, “Osama’s on the next floor.”

  The stairwell was in total darkness, so unless Khalid or whoever was up there had night vision, they could hear us coming but not see us.

  We could see them, though. As we were moving up, a figure popped out just above us on the half landing between the first and second floor. We saw him for just an instant before he darted back behind a banister. He was armed with an AK-47. The point man stopped dead and pointed. I should have grabbed a couple of guys and pulled them back down the stairs to let the advance guys handle the situation in case whoever it was tossed a grenade down on us. The setup risked all of us dying at once. But it was such an awesome moment, I couldn’t obey my tactical instincts. Here were two grown men trying to kill each other, separated by ten inches and a nice thick banister. In that supercharged instant, it would have been easy to forget that we could see and he couldn’t. But the point man thought it through beautifully: Khalid knew somebody was nearby but he didn’t know we were Americans for sure. In no more than a whisper my guy uttered a phrase he’d learned before the mission began. He said it twice, in both of the languages bin Laden’s son spoke, Arabic and Urdu. “Khalid, come here.”

  Khalid, confused by hearing his name called, poked his head around the banister and said, “What?” That was his final word. The point man shot him in the face. The bullet entered above the chin and exited out the back of his head. Khalid dropped where he stood. Blood pooled around his head and soaked into his bright white blouse. The train started moving up the stairs to the second floor with me in the back. Each man stepped over Khalid on the way up, and everybody except the point man started clearing the rooms to the right and left on the second floor. The point man kept his gun trained on the top of the stairs to the third floor, which was right in front of him with a curtain hanging over the entryway. At some point before I got there, he took a shot at a tall figure behind the curtain, but couldn’t see the result. I moved up behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. There were only two of us left. This was it.

  The point man stared down the barrel of his gun, never letting his aim leave the curtain. My hand rested on his shoulder. I could halt him or tell him to advance with a touch.

  At this point, we were spread way too thin. It was just the two of us there. Whoever was on the third floor knew we were coming, and they were probably putting on suicide vests—as many other, lesser al-Qaeda leaders had done in the past—and barricading themselves in fighting positions with weapons. Our tactics said we should wait for more guys, or go down and get Cairo to run up ahead of us. But we didn’t have time. The occupants of the third floor were getting ready to make their stand, and we needed to get up there.

  The point man was aware of this, and he started to speak, only knowing one of his guys was behind him, not who it was.

  “Hey, we got to go, we got to go.”

  I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it, too: Okay, this is where the suicide bomber’s going to hit us.

  And then I had a thought so clear it was like a voice in my head. I’m tired of worrying about it, let’s just get it over. It wasn’t bravery, it was more like fatigue or impatience—I’m fucking done with waiting for it to happen.

  I squeezed his shoulder.

  We swiftly moved up the stairs to the curtain, and he pushed it aside. Two women stood there screaming at us. The point man lunged at them, assuming they had suicide vests, tackling both and landing on the floor on top of them. If they blew up, his body would absorb most of the blast, and I’d have a better chance of surviving and doing what we’d come there to do. I turned to the right and looked through a door into an adjoining room. Osama bin Laden stood near the entrance at the foot of the bed, ta
ller and thinner than I’d expected, his beard shorter and hair whiter. But it was the guy whose face I’d seen ten thousand, a hundred thousand times. He had a woman in front of him, his hands on her shoulders. In less than a second, I aimed above the woman’s right shoulder and pulled the trigger twice. Bin Laden’s head split open, and he dropped. I put another bullet in his head. Insurance.

  The woman, who turned out to be Amal, the youngest of bin Laden’s four wives, kind of fell on top of me. I carried her over to the bed. Her calf was bleeding. She’d seen the point man coming up the stairs, leveling his gun at her husband, and jumped in front just as the point man pulled the trigger. She didn’t seem to be seriously injured, but was almost catatonic. I don’t think we even cuffed her.

  For the first time, I noticed a little boy, bin Laden’s youngest son, a two-year-old, tottering on fat little legs in a corner of the room. He’d watched the whole thing, but it was so dark and he was so young, he didn’t know what was going on, except that it wasn’t good. He was crying. I thought, This poor kid had nothing to do with this. He’s just in the middle of a shit storm right now, poor guy.

  I picked him up and put him on the bed with the woman. Now other SEALs began making their way into the room. I stood there and, kind of frozen, watched my guys do the work I’d seen them do hundreds of times. One of the guys came up to me and asked, “Are you okay?”

  Was I? I felt blank. “Yeah,” I said. “What do we do now?”

  He laughed and said, “Now we go find the computers.”

  I said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m back. Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, you just killed Osama bin Laden.”

  We went downstairs and found what looked like some kind of hastily improvised office, with work stations in three different rooms. At that point, our guys were doing what they normally do, picking up the big computer towers and slamming them down. The hardware opens as if by magic and out comes the hard drive. We were stuffing everything that looked important into big net bags, filming everything.

  I bent down to look under a bed and saw some huge duffel bags. I pulled them out and opened them up. They were filled with what looked like freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed rib eye steaks.

  “Wow,” I said. “They were in for the long haul, they have all this food.” We kept finding more of these huge bags, all filled with freeze-dried meat. Then someone said, “Wait a minute, this isn’t beef, this is opium.”

  They had many hundreds of pounds of the drug squirreled away there.

  Not only had we just ended the life of bin Laden, we’d stumbled on what appeared to be al-Qaeda’s central bank as well as an intelligence jackpot. We were rushing now, trying to shovel as much of the intel haul as we could into the bags to hand off to the predesignated guys who’d carry it all back.

  By this point, we’d overstayed the thirty-minute window we thought was our limit for getting in and out without coming into conflict with some element of the Pakistani military. Admiral McRaven would later say that, at this juncture, he was starting to sweat. He knew that Pakistani MiG fighter jets had been scrambled and were hunting for us.

  When I went back upstairs, the one guy we’d brought along from the reserve squadron because he’d taught himself Arabic in Iraq was interrogating two of bin Laden’s daughters, asking who the man dead on the floor was. They lied at first, but eventually one said, “That’s him, that’s Sheikh Osama.”

  The point man and two other guys had put him in a body bag, but they hadn’t closed it yet. One was standing over the body with a camera—we wanted to take digital photos to confirm we’d gotten who we knew we had. Bin Laden’s head was a mess, split wide above his eyebrow like a melon dropped on a tile floor. I bent down and pressed the head back together, trying to restore the features to recognizable condition, and our guy with the camera snapped a lot of pictures. We needed to get them to the Ground Force Commander who, we hoped, could pass them to command in J-bad. Most urgently, though, we needed to tell him that we could confirm bin Laden was dead. Once he got the word, seventeen to eighteen minutes after our boots had first touched ground outside the compound, he radioed Admiral McRaven and said, “For God and country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo, EKIA.”

  Geronimo was the code word for finding bin Laden, and EKIA means Enemy Killed in Action. I thought “for God and country” was a bit much, but on the other hand, why not?

  We zipped up the bag, and all four of us carried al-Qaeda’s dead leader down the stairs and out the front door, where we took a right down to the carport. Jonny the sniper was there.

  “Hey, here’s your guy,” I said.

  Jonny just looked at me a minute.

  “You got to be shitting me.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s go home, man.”

  I ran back into the house. It didn’t need to be said, but I said it. “We have to go. Now. Forget about these women and children, forget about the interrogations, we’re leaving.”

  The interpreter told the women they needed to stay in the house until morning, or watching aircraft would fire missiles. A lie, but we knew the Pakistanis would be there before then. We hustled everybody out of the house, and sent the EOD guy and one of the breachers over to the downed helicopter to fix timed charges to blow it up. The pilot protested. He said he thought he could fly it out, but we weren’t taking chances. We called in the Chinooks.

  Dash 2, the helicopter I’d come in on, was already on the way back from a designated waiting area in the mountains to pick up the team from the downed bird, and the body bag. It was a bit delayed—just under twenty minutes—because it needed to refuel, but I assumed the brass wanted the “proof of death” transported in one of the special birds. Meanwhile, the rest of us had been assigned to wait for another Chinook in a field to the east of the outer wall. I turned to the guys who set the charge and said, “Hey, what’s that time fuse at?”

  “About thirty seconds.”

  Just then we heard the helicopter coming right for the compound, directly over the courtyard. The radio guy and I had a brief but intense conversation.

  “Abort! Abort! Abort!”

  The pilot pulled up sharply and circled away just in time. The timers clicked and the charges went off, creating an immense blast that would have taken down the incoming Chinook. Disaster avoided.

  Just then, I looked up at one of the neighboring homes and noticed a guy standing there, tapping something into his cell phone. Turns out, he was the guy who’d become famous around the world for live-tweeting the raid, blaming it on the Pakistani military.

  The chopper came back around, and we got on. I was sitting next to another SEAL who asked the question that every SEAL asked every other SEAL when they found out what had happened:

  “Who got him?”

  That’s when it started to sink in.

  “I did,” I said.

  He kind of straightened up and said, “On behalf of my family, thank you.”

  Jonny the sniper—the guy who took the shot that saved Captain Phillips from the pirates—was sitting on my other side, which was interesting, because of the seven billion people on the planet, he might have been the only one to even come close to understanding what I was feeling. He also remembered how, when he’d been struggling with the glare of the spotlight that came with what he’d done, I kept trying to calm him down with a plug of my Copenhagen.

  Now he returned the favor. His Copenhagen can appeared in front of my goggles. “Here, take one of mine,” he said. “Now you know what it’s like to be a fucking hero.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Ninety minutes would give us a shot at another fifty years of life.

  We weren’t in any stealth bird now, and we’d just raised holy hell in a less-than-optimum location. Abbottabad is the site of Pakistan’s elite military academy—essentially, their West Point. So none of us on that chopper would have placed odds on making it back to Afghanistan before the Pakistani air defense woke up and rained missiles on our victory parade.
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br />   Seventy minutes to go, still flying. I could see it in everyone’s eyes, but nobody was saying anything because they didn’t want to jinx it. It was like watching a perfect game being pitched in the seventh inning. I wasn’t saying a thing because the second anybody said anything we were getting blown up. I was trying not to even form the words in my head.

  Sixty minutes to go.

  Forty.

  Twenty.

  When I think of it now, it reminds me of when the super-underdog USA hockey team beat the Russians in 1980. In the old TV clips, you can see the tense crowd counting down the last minute, afraid of the hope rising in their hearts, afraid they want it too much and that their very desire will somehow guide a desperation slap shot past their goalie into the back of the net, a last-second thunderbolt that will kill their dream. But no Russian finds an opening. Ten seconds, and the USA fans start counting down, almost timidly at first, but louder and louder until they’re all screaming. Three … two … You can see what they’re thinking, which was pretty much what we were thinking on that chopper: This could happen. We might live.

  Five minutes.

  Those final three hundred seconds stretched out like Silly Putty until the very idea of a second wore itself out. The span didn’t so much end as screech to a halt with a voice popping up on the radio. “All right, gentlemen,” said one of the pilots. “For the first time in your lives, you’re going to be happy to hear this: Welcome to Afghanistan.”