by Leon Panetta
If it was bin Laden, and if we got permission to go after him, how would we do it? That question was on all our minds, and it led to the development of what we called the “COAs,” courses of action. Initially there were five, or rather five and a half. COA 1 was a bomber strike that would wipe out the compound and all those inside; COA 2 was a helicopter assault by special operations forces, who would swoop in, raid the compound, and capture or kill our target, if he was there; COA 3 was a raid by CIA officers, an idea already viewed with some skepticism inside the CIA but on the table to consider; COA 4 was a joint raid with Pakistan; and COA 5 was to simply tell the Pakistanis what we knew about the compound and urge them to act. There was, in addition, what one might consider COA 4a: If word of our suspicions were suddenly to leak, we were prepared to alert the Pakistanis and scramble immediately toward the compound, presumably in conjunction with their forces. That was to be activated only in an emergency, but we worried throughout those weeks that we might have to act on a moment’s notice or risk losing bin Laden forever. Notably, we did not consider the use of an unmanned aircraft as a viable option at first, for reasons I’ll return to in a moment.
One week later, I delivered the same briefing for an even larger group, this time at the White House and headed by Donilon. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was present, as were Cartwright and Jim Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, who played an essential role through the operation keeping the process running. Once again, I laid out the evidence that we believed clearly identified the compound as housing a significant target, and once again, I conceded that we could not be entirely sure who the occupant was. Nevertheless, as I concluded that day, there was a real chance that this was bin Laden. And if it was, it was our first opportunity since Tora Bora to get him. We finished that meeting and returned to our offices. I was barely back at Langley when Donilon called to say that the president “believes we need to move very quickly.” He authorized me to develop an operation and asked how soon we could put one together. I told him I would start that minute and have him something as soon as the president was ready.
Working with McRaven, we refined the ideas that so far had been presented. In the first, a B-2 Stealth bomber would blow the compound to smithereens. In the second, special operations forces aboard helicopters would raid the compound, either with or without help from the Pakistanis. We also retained the alternative of using CIA officers to conduct a ground raid on the compound.
Options in hand, I returned to the White House Situation Room on March 14, this time to brief the president. Vice President Biden attended, as did the military leadership, including Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. I began with a review of what we knew about the compound:
Ibrahim had led us there, and we had intelligence that he had once worked for bin Laden. The house was fortified and shielded from view in a way that strongly suggested someone was hiding inside. “The Pacer” lived in the main house, came outside only for hurried laps around the yard, and never left the compound. All that pointed toward the possibility of bin Laden, but it was not, I acknowledged, conclusive. It could be that Ibrahim was protecting bin Laden’s family but not bin Laden himself; it could be another terrorist or criminal hiding behind those walls. The uncertainty of who was inside only made more serious the risks of any action. We could blow up this house and damage our relations with Pakistan, only to discover we had taken out a drug dealer. But there were risks to not acting as well. We could miss our best chance in a decade to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.
The president listened without interrupting, then asked a few questions and offered his thoughts. First, he said he did not believe we could afford to share this intelligence with any other nation, including Pakistan. There was too much danger of leakage from that country’s intelligence services, and Obama did not want to jeopardize a chance to snare bin Laden. Moreover, there was another problem with notifying Pakistan: What if we shared our evidence, and they declined to act? Would we go on our own over their objections? There was simply too much risk at stake to trust an untrustworthy partner. No matter what we decided to do, we would do it alone. That ruled out COA 4 and COA 5.
Once we had resolved that question, the president asked a number of questions about COA 2, the helicopter raid. He was especially focused on the issue of how much time the occupants of the house would have to escape once they heard the approaching helicopter. Would our teams get there only to find that the target was gone? We couldn’t answer that definitively, and Obama, understandably, instead turned to the airstrike alternative. As he noted, that seemed least likely to endanger American forces and most likely to destroy the target without warning or chance of escape.
The president did not reach a final decision that day, though his comments suggested to me that he was inclined to favor the bomber option. Before doing so, however, he wanted to know more about what a bombing raid would entail, and he asked to have the other options fully developed. Wrapping up, the president directed us to move “with haste.”
Events elsewhere also demanded attention. Japan was struck by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, and was still struggling to recover as we met that afternoon. Then, on March 16, two days after my meeting with the president, Ray Davis was hauled before a judge.
Davis appeared in court for a scheduled appearance and sat through a brief session at which he was confined inside a cage while the judge and lawyers discussed his case, all in Urdu and thus unintelligible to him. It appeared he would be bound over for trial, and the judge announced that he would soon take up pretrial matters such as Davis’s claim for diplomatic immunity. But then the same judge abruptly cleared the courtroom and brought in the victims’ families. The families were offered compensation for their loved ones. They accepted, and Davis was whisked away, first to an airfield, then into American hands, then home.
The release infuriated those Pakistanis who saw him as a CIA assassin, and my relations with Pasha entered a decidedly cooler phase. Some of my administration colleagues and many outsiders later questioned why the government had worked so hard for Davis’s return. The answer is simple: Davis was in Pakistan because America sent him there, doing a job his country asked him to do. He may not have done it perfectly, but the United States does not leave its people behind. It was his government’s responsibility to bring him home. On May 16, Davis returned to America.
Across the Middle East, meanwhile, the Arab Spring continued to accelerate, particularly in Libya, where a reasonably coherent group of insurgents sought Western aid in toppling Muammar Qaddafi, the aging and eccentric leader who had once been a major sponsor of international terrorism but who in recent years had directed his paranoia toward oppressing his own people. Qaddafi struggled to maintain power by unleashing violent attacks on his fellow Libyans, and America, along with our NATO allies, was compelled not to simply stand by. Troubled by what Qaddafi might do, President Obama knew that the only way to prevent a massacre was for the United States to play a role. Three days after Davis’s release, a NATO coalition including American forces launched Operation Odyssey Dawn with a fusillade of cruise missiles intended to cripple Qaddafi’s air defenses.
President Obama was in Brazil when that assault began, so his international relations calendar for April included summitry on one continent, war on another, riots and natural disaster on a third. It was, to say the least, a busy month. And it wasn’t over yet.
Those crises erupted and subsided, and we were back to peering down into the yard of that mysterious compound in Abbottabad, contemplating two questions: Who was inside, and, if we determined there was enough evidence to risk that person’s capture or killing, how would we do it?
I recognized the appeal of the bombing option and sympathized with President Obama’s inclination in that direction. I felt, though, that we needed to know more about exactly how it would play out, so I asked our
people to bring in the experts. Not long after, a group of airmen from the 509th Bomb Wing from Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City—we called them the “flyboys,” and they looked every bit the part, with leather jackets and crew cuts—came to my office to describe what they would need to do to eliminate “the Pacer.” Their mission would rely on two B-2 bombers. They would take off from Whiteman, fly halfway around the world, track the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, then “stealth up” and bank right. Minutes later, they’d be over the target.
To eliminate the compound, each bomber would release sixteen JDAMS (Joint Direct Attack Munitions), each one a two-thousand-pound bomb. Those thirty-two bombs would reduce the compound to dust and rubble. If Osama bin Laden were inside, he’d be killed, but so would many noncombatants, including all the women and children living inside the compound and possibly neighbors as well. The tentative casualty estimate was fifty to one hundred people, most of whom, of course, would be innocent civilians in a country with whom we were not at war. Moreover, the chances of our later proving that we had killed bin Laden would be remote. It would be hard to recover DNA evidence given the obliteration of the site, and because we would have just conducted an unannounced bombing raid of a nominal ally, it seemed unlikely that Pakistani officials would be eager to help us dig through the rubble for our proof.
I had my doubts, but the flyboys were eager to do the job, and I knew the president liked the idea in concept, so we took it to John Brennan and laid it out for him. He winced at the fallout from such a raid. “This,” he said, “sounds like a bad plan.”
But if we were to rule out the bomber option, that would leave the president with just one alternative to consider—the helicopter raid by special operations forces. It is never desirable to give the president only one course of action, so it was then that Cartwright proposed the possible use of an unmanned aircraft. The drone would target “the Pacer” during one of his exercise rounds, but those were fleeting trips around the courtyard. The weapon would have to be ready to fire at a moment’s notice, and it might miss. If “the Pacer” was shot at and missed, he would surely go into hiding elsewhere, and we would be back to the days following Tora Bora, chasing a wisp, encouraging his followers to believe in his invincibility. In addition, there was one of the same problems that bedeviled the bomber option: If a U.S. missile successfully hit bin Laden, there would be remains, but we would get only what the Pakistanis shared with us; given the state of our relations, we had no reason to believe they would go out of their way to reward us.
At our next meeting with the president, he reviewed the B-2 proposal and announced that he shared our reservations and those of Brennan. He took it off the table. At the same meeting, I made the case that this job was ill suited to a CIA ground raid, eliminating it from consideration. That left either the helicopter assault or the use of the drone.
Despite McRaven’s confidence and the undeniable skill of our special operations forces, the helicopter option was very dangerous. Abbottabad is more than one hundred miles from the Afghan border, so helicopters bearing the team would have to cross a large swath of terrain, conduct a loud and violent operation in a residential neighborhood, and then hustle back out of the country before Pakistan’s military could detect them and scramble their fighters. On the ground, there were the risks of resistance from the inhabitants of the house or from neighbors alarmed by the sight of foreign forces swarming their community. And of course there was always the possibility of equipment failures. No one involved in our operation needed to be reminded of the 1980 attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. That noble effort ended in the crash of a helicopter, the deaths of eight soldiers, and the release of not a single hostage. Bob Gates, who had participated in the planning for the 1980 attempt, was particularly determined not to repeat it. “It’s the unexpected you have to fear the most,” he said.
Nevertheless, we wanted to know what such a raid would look like. We brought in the SEALs for an initial briefing, telling the operators that they would be conducting a mission in Libya. Once there, Gary, our CIA team leader, stood before the group and announced, “This isn’t about Libya. We have found Osama bin Laden, and you guys are going to go get him.” Cool as ever, the SEALs absorbed that news without comment.
Working with CIA officers, the SEALs developed a detailed plan for raiding the compound, created two mockups of it, and drilled their assault relentlessly over a period of about four weeks. On April 7, the team was confident enough to conduct a rehearsal, this one in the eastern United States. That first rehearsal was conducted with helicopters on a mockup of the compound surrounded by a fence. The team was practicing ways to enter, but the observers were also focused on how much time would lapse between the first sound of the helicopters approaching and the entry of the team into the building—the question President Obama had raised a few weeks earlier. Jeremy attended the rehearsals on my behalf, and reported back that it appeared we would have about ninety seconds. Beyond that, he noted that the team seemed professional and capable and that McRaven pointedly deferred to the members to develop their own operation. This was not to be micromanaged, a clear statement of his confidence in his men.
Six days later, the assault force performed another drill, this time with the military command, including Mullen, in attendance and held out west at a high-altitude location that better simulated the conditions in Abbottabad. This was a full drill, with the team simulating the entire hundred-mile trip to the target and then the assault itself. Now it was under a minute—precious little time for a houseful of sleeping residents to awake, react, and escape. Gary and his team, along with Jeremy and CIA general counsel Stephen Preston, watched the rehearsal through night-vision goggles. Afterward, they reported to me that the operation was risky, but they were also convinced that it was feasible.
At this point I was briefing the president or his national security team every day, updating them on the planning and desperately hoping to produce definitive evidence of who was occupying the compound. Even as we edged toward launching a strike, we still could not say for sure who “the Pacer” was.
That was particularly worrisome to some members of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the agency’s espionage arm. They are instinctively skeptical of intelligence gleaned through technical sources, and inclined to give more weight to that from human intelligence. Several senior officers—some of the most experienced intelligence experts in our government—argued to me that we should not conduct the raid but rather should wait for more information. They developed a last-ditch plan to try to get eyes inside the compound, but that effort failed to provide the confirmation we sought
So when I gathered our principal bin Laden analysts and operators in mid-April to get their assessments of who lived in this much-studied house, I began by recognizing that we did not have proof, but I wanted to know what each member of our team thought of the evidence. I went around the table. Most rated the odds of its being bin Laden as greater than 50 percent, but conceded that it wasn’t rock-solid. Then Sam, one of the team’s two leaders, surprised me by declaring that he rated it at 80 percent. Sam was cautious by nature and I had relied on him daily as we intensified the fight against Al Qaeda, so his level of confidence impressed me greatly. And then another of our officers, whom I’ll call Maya, went even further. Maya had an encyclopedic knowledge of the bin Laden case and the compound. She was quick, incisive, and utterly dedicated to the mission, and she had the job of briefing the SEALs on what to expect inside the compound. When I called on her and asked what she rated the probability of bin Laden being “the Pacer,” she did not hesitate: “Ninety-five percent,” she answered.* The CIA team overall was less sure, but we had a strong case.
Internally, the circle of CIA officers and officials aware of the operation was gradually growing. I was eager to make sure we acted lawfully, of course, so I asked Stephen Preston, the agency’s exemplary general counsel, to review our operational
plans. Normally that would involve a number of lawyers working in consultation, but this operation required special treatment. Preston said afterward that it had been “not heavily lawyered but thoroughly lawyered.” Similarly, I knew that if we went ahead with this, it would be a matter of intense international interest, and the press would clamor for details—a complicated situation because we would want to be responsive but also to zealously protect against the release of information that might compromise any prosecutions (if we captured bin Laden) or future operations. I had great confidence in our lead communications person, George Little, so I brought him into the circle as well.
On April 19, the president reviewed the rehearsals. He was as impressed as the rest of us, but worried about what might happen if the teams were caught on the ground and had to fight their way out of the country. Based on those concerns, which Bob Gates echoed, the president suggested adding two backup helicopters to the mission. They were to cross the border with the strike teams and then land nearby, to be called upon only if something went wrong. We also prepared a special diplomatic team to stand by to intervene with Pakistani authorities in the event of a conflict on the ground.