by Leon Panetta
Jeremy and Mike Morell stayed behind after that session. As my temper cooled, I asked them whether the time had come to replace Gary, who it seemed to me had grown discouraged. Jeremy urged me to wait and see what the group produced in response to my demand for fresh ideas. Meanwhile, he met with Gary and the rest of the group and made it clear to them that their jobs were on the line. Just dismissing ideas as impractical was not enough. He prodded them to suggest anything, no matter how outlandish, in order to get their thinking going and to reassure me that they weren’t out of gas. “This is like math class,” he told them, as he later reported to me. “You need to show your work.” I’d asked for ten ideas; he pressed them to come up with twenty-five.
When we met next, they had thirty-eight, and it was clear that they’d been energized by the effort. Some of the ideas were impractical or risked tipping our hand—one proposed throwing a stink bomb into the compound and photographing the residents as they exited; another was to put listening devices in the grocery packages that were delivered to the compound; a third, particularly amusing one, was to broadcast a booming voice over a loudspeaker proclaiming that Allah wanted them to leave the house. But wild ideas are far better than no ideas. We were being creative, and I could feel the energy surging back into the group. I kept Gary in place, and was glad I did.
These meetings, it almost goes without saying, were held in the utmost secrecy. We deliberately kept the circle of those involved in the bin Laden case extraordinarily small, even within the CIA. The only participant in those sessions who lacked a top security clearance was my dog, Bravo. It tickled me to watch these tough, intense CIA officers debate the most secret mission of our agency, then pause to scratch Bravo’s head. Bravo heard a lot in those months, and never leaked a word of it.
But some people had to be told. As we devoted more and more resources to this operation, we needed the support of Congress, which had to authorize a “reprogramming” of funds to continue our surveillance that was supplying our only real insight into the compound. That meant taking the risky step of briefing the relevant congressional leaders. The White House was petrified that news of the operation might leak, but I saw no choice. I had promised to keep Congress abreast of our operations, and I needed congressional support to pay for this increasingly complicated and costly undertaking. Accordingly, I briefed the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence and defense appropriations committees, as well as the congressional leaders, in December. A few weeks later, when Republicans took over the House of Representatives, I invited Michigan congressman Mike Rogers, the new chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and the committee’s new staff director, Michael Allen, to join me for dinner at Langley. We met in my office, the dark woods and quiet Potomac beneath my window, and I personally explained to them our suspicions about the house in Abbottabad and our efforts to discern who was there. They listened in respectful, slightly amazed silence. We had dinner afterward, an unusually subdued meal in my private dining room.
When the White House learned of those conversations, the president’s staff was incensed. The White House demanded a list of everyone I had briefed, and warned me that I had endangered this vital operation. I did as I was told, but had no regrets. The leadership was entitled by law to know, and as a political matter it was better for them to own it than to be able to distance themselves from it later if something went wrong. Despite the apprehension at the White House, not one word of those briefings trickled out, proof that Congress actually can be trusted, even with what was probably the biggest secret we had.
By the end of 2010, we were so convinced that the house in Abbottabad harbored a valuable target that we began to fashion a plan for taking it. Up to this point the entire effort had been run by the CIA, and the first option naturally was that CIA officers would conduct a ground raid—perhaps by working their way gradually into position near the compound, then raiding it late at night and secreting bin Laden back out of the country. Institutionally, that was appealing—it was our hunt, and we would finish it. But John Bennett, a veteran CIA official and the head of the Clandestine Service, advised me that he did not believe CIA officers, acting alone, could take the compound and capture its occupants. An operation of this size and complexity, well within the borders of Pakistan, would require the specialized skills of the military’s special operations forces. Mike Morell strongly agreed.
That raised a host of logistical and diplomatic difficulties—invading a sovereign country is hardly something to do casually. Thankfully, the chief of the Joint Special Operations Command, which would supply the military personnel for any such undertaking, was Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, whom I knew from our meetings with the military in Florida and who was widely regarded as one of the most capable leaders anywhere in our armed services. At my request, Mike Morell asked McRaven to come to the agency in late January.
In the office next door to mine, Morell told him what we’d found, and who we believed might be inside. McRaven listened with rapt attention. When Morell concluded, the admiral nodded appreciatively. “Congratulations,” he said. “This is an incredible piece of work.” More important, he expressed complete confidence that his forces could carry out the mission being discussed—flying into a village, dropping from a helicopter, capturing or killing the inhabitants, and returning to safety. That was reassuring, of course, but also underscored the special complexity of this operation: It would not be in Afghanistan but rather in Pakistan. If something went wrong, our special operations forces would be far inside a country where they had no right to be. Getting out might prove harder than getting in. McRaven did not flinch at the danger. He proposed a navy captain to oversee the planning and named a commander whom he believed was well suited to conduct the operation itself. We left the option of a CIA raid on the table, but now we added a special operations forces alternative as well.
The risk to our forces could of course be vastly reduced if we conducted this as a joint operation with Pakistan. With that in mind, we thoroughly discussed whether to involve Pakistani authorities. But the ISI’s reputation for leaks and divided loyalties—many ISI agents had ties to the Taliban—made it difficult to trust others with this information.
One day, we received information that a helicopter had flown directly over the house. That reminded us that this compound was in plain sight, less than two miles from Pakistan’s main military academy and nestled within a residential neighborhood. If Pakistani authorities were genuinely curious, they could have found this compound as easily as we had. It could mean that our intelligence was simply better than theirs; it could mean that we were wrong about who might be in the house; or it could mean that they lacked the desire to get bin Laden. Additionally it showed that this was an area where helicopters did occasionally operate, so an incoming helicopter would not necessarily be so unusual as to cause residents to immediately sense an alarm. Soon enough, we would come to appreciate the significance of that.
• • •
The Abbottabad compound was the consuming focus of my work in those months, but the rest of the world did not do us the favor of standing still. On December 17, 2010, a street vendor in Tunis, angered that authorities had confiscated his vegetable cart and worn down by a lifetime’s worth of petty insults inflicted by a corrupt regime, set himself on fire. Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi died three weeks later, on January 4. His dramatic act ignited repressed fury across the Middle East.
On January 1, 2011, a bombing in an Egyptian Coptic church killed more than twenty people and set off protests that pitted Christians and Muslims in conflict; President Hosni Mubarak pledged to “cut off the hands of terrorists,” and Egypt descended into political and sectarian violence. Protests soon spread to Algeria and then Libya, and the Arab Spring was under way.
The uprisings that convulsed so much of the Arab world beginning at the end of 2010 represented in one sense a fulfillment of American intelligence and in another sense a failure. For ye
ars, CIA analysts had warned of the building pressures across the Middle East and North Africa—increasing numbers of young people unable to find work; rising income disparities; deepening anger at corruption; alienation from ossified regimes. Those were the underpinnings of the Arab Spring, and the CIA, true to its mission to provide policy makers with insights into the world, identified them as sources of pressure long before they blew.
At the same time, we did not anticipate the flash points or the speed with which events might unfold. On January 14, 2011, less than a month after Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, Ben Ali ended his more than two decades’ rule in Tunisia and fled for the safety of Saudi Arabia. That marked the first successful uprising of the spring, and fueled further action across the region. We scrambled to keep up.
• • •
By the end of 2010, the combination of rapidly unfolding world events and the pressure and secrecy of the bin Laden case was wearing on me. I was looking forward to a brief respite. I traveled home to Monterey to spend the holidays with my family—painfully recalling that it was at this time the year before that the Christmas bomber and Khost attack had brutally interceded. This year was more restful. I chopped some wood and tended to the walnut grove, and celebrated New Year’s Eve with Sylvia and old friends in Monterey.
There, one of my oldest friends and the owner of one of Monterey’s best restaurants, Ted Balestreri, welcomed the new year with an extravagant suggestion. He showed off an 1870 bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild—the finest in the cellar of the Sardine Factory—and announced, “If Leon catches Osama bin Laden, we’ll open that bottle!”
“You’re on!” I answered.
There’s no question I had some inside information on that bet.
• • •
One of my first trips as CIA director included a stop in Egypt, where I met with President Hosni Mubarak in 2009. We already were acquainted. During Clinton’s presidency, Mubarak was at the White House for the final stages of a peace negotiation between Israel and the PLO over the West Bank, and during a last-minute snag, Clinton asked me to keep Mubarak entertained in the Oval Office while he shuttled between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.
That was fourteen years earlier. In my conversation with Mubarak this time, he was stern and serious, arguing that he was now America’s essential ally in the region, the person best poised to keep the peace—his government was stable, his relations with Israel solid, his credibility among other Arab leaders strong as well. I didn’t argue with any of that, though I did note some worrisome signs. Mubarak was protected by legions of security guards—the approach to his office was cleared for blocks, emphasizing the distance between Egypt’s president and his people.
Once events in Tunisia took hold at the end of 2010 and began to inspire other young, disaffected people across the region, Mubarak’s confidence suddenly seemed misplaced. Ben Ali’s decision to flee Tunisia changed the calculus not just in that country but across the region, as dissidents smelled the possibility of reform, and even actual regime change. That possibility, underappreciated by the CIA’s intelligence from the region, now moved to the center of events.
What’s more, our insights into those events—particularly into the protest groups—deteriorated as quickly as the demonstrations accelerated. That’s because in many cases we relied on the intelligence services of the government for our understanding of the events and actors inside those countries. The Arab Spring was blooming quickly, and our view of it was narrowing fast.
On January 25, a gigantic, coordinated protest brought thousands of Egyptian demonstrators into violent confrontations with the police and military. Not content to ask for reform, these protesters explicitly demanded that Mubarak step down. That placed the United States in a precarious position: Mubarak was an old ally and abandoning him would not only turn our back on decades of cooperation but would also signal to other Middle Eastern regimes that we were abandoning them to dissidents. Moreover, there was always the question of who would come next: It’s one thing to deplore Mubarak, another to feel confident that his successor would be an improvement. On the other hand, Mubarak was a fairly ruthless leader and those protesting his government had a strong moral basis for their complaints—and certainly felt entitled to be understood and supported by the United States, which was born amid similar dissatisfactions not so long ago, at least in historical terms.
Attempting to find some way to ease Mubarak from power without nudging Egypt toward chaos, we reached out through intermediaries. The White House directed my deputy, Mike Morell, to reach out through intelligence channels and deliver to Omar Suleiman, the head of Egypt’s intelligence service, a stark message: that Mubarak’s attempts to hold on to power were becoming self-destructive. We proposed some talking points that might guide Mubarak toward relinquishing authority without simply fleeing the country. Suleiman agreed to communicate those points to Mubarak, and when the Egyptian president announced plans to address the nation on the evening of January 28, we were optimistic that our message had been received.
On the afternoon of January 28, I joined my colleagues in the White House Situation Room to listen as Mubarak delivered a much-anticipated address to his people. Mubarak spoke late at night in Egypt, and those of us in Washington anxiously hoped he would announce his intention to step aside and turn over power to a successor. He did not. He adopted half-measures, sacking his cabinet and offering not to run again for president but continuing to hold on. In the Situation Room, the mood was bleak. Even from thousands of miles away, it was obvious that this would not placate the demonstrators. The following day, Mubarak named Suleiman as his vice president, suggesting a transition. Again, however, it was too little at that late hour. By February, President Obama sided firmly with the protestors, and on February 11, Suleiman announced that Mubarak had stepped down. It had taken less than six weeks from the first major protest for one of the Middle East’s most stable governments to fall. The Mubarak I had first met more than a decade earlier in the Oval Office of the White House was sent off to jail.
• • •
As the situation in Egypt careened toward its conclusion, the United States confronted yet another challenge. In the city of Lahore, long regarded as the cultural and intellectual capital of Pakistan, a young American named Ray Davis pulled into a jammed traffic intersection on January 27 and was accosted by two men on a black motorcycle. They had guns, and one jumped off the bike and pointed his weapon at Davis, who was stuck at a traffic light behind the wheel of a Honda Civic. Davis drew and fired a Glock 17 nine-millimeter pistol and shot them both. He then pulled out a camera, photographed the man with the weapon as he lay in the street, and called the local American consulate. A crowd gathered and surrounded Davis, preventing him from leaving. Making matters worse, a car rushing from the consulate struck a pedestrian, killing that person as well.
Before any help could make it to Davis, police came on the scene and took him into custody. When they searched his car, they found the pistol, five magazines, and seventy-five rounds of ammunition, as well as a GPS device, a Motorola radio, a cell phone, a digital camera, a first aid kit, batteries, a passport, and $125 in U.S. currency.
Davis was in the country on a diplomatic passport and assigned to the embassy in Islamabad. The Pakistanis concluded that he was a CIA officer and assumed the worst—that we had officers crawling all over the country and that they had just happened to stumble upon this one. Davis was a security officer, assigned to protect American officials. He was not collecting intelligence. He was, however, well trained and had followed that training when confronted by armed gunmen. The question was: What to do with him? The Pakistani public, egged on by extremist elements in that country, clamored for Davis to be executed, ignoring that the men he killed had been involved in thefts before and had provoked the incident. The United States demanded Davis’s release under diplomatic immunity, which the Pakistanis rejected. The crisis ste
adily grew.
President Obama directed that various members of his cabinet reach out to our counterparts in Pakistan as we searched for levers that might spring Davis from prison. In my case, that meant appealing to Pasha and imposing on our already fragile relationship. I both presumed on Pasha and broadly hinted to him when I emphatically warned him that I would hold him personally responsible for Davis’s safety.
As the senior officials in the U.S. government considered various options, we knew there was an ancient Islamic tradition of restitution in cases of serious crimes, even murder. If the families of the men killed by Davis would accept a payment for the loss of their loved ones, perhaps the courts could be persuaded to accept that as a just conclusion of the affair. The diplomatic efforts that followed focused on determining whether the families might accept such a settlement. As the president’s senior advisers became more focused on the bin Laden hunt, rescuing Davis became more urgent. We did not want him in Pakistan on the night that U.S. special operations forces were going to be raiding that country.
• • •
Friday, February 25, was a balmy day in Washington, warm and windy, a whiff of spring in the air. It had been just over a year since we at the CIA had lost our colleagues at Khost. Memories of the president’s mournful visit the previous February weren’t fresh, but they lingered, as did the urgency to deliver justice. That evening, after most of the government had closed for the weekend and even our building was largely quiet, the senior ranks of the U.S. military, led by James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quietly paid a visit to the CIA, where we met in a conference room down the hall from my office. McRaven attended, as did Mike Vickers, Defense’s undersecretary for intelligence and a former CIA operative whose gentle, owlish look belied his fierce commitment to the destruction of Al Qaeda. There, for the first time, we shared with them the entire sum of our knowledge about the Abbottabad compound. Our analysts had built a scale model of the compound, and we placed it on the table. Throughout the briefing and discussion, we circled the model, imagining what was inside, contemplating what it would take to breach its walls and confront its occupants. By the end of the evening, top officials of the American defense and military establishment were transfixed by a three-story home at the end of a dead-end street in a small town nine time zones away.