Because CIA had anticipated this very moment, we had built a full-scale mock-up of the Abbottabad compound. There McRaven brought together the team of Navy SEALs that he would use on the mission and they were briefed, for the first time, on the potential target. Going into the session, most of them had thought that they were going to be asked to conduct a raid to go after Muammar Qadhafi, who at the time was on the run in Libya. It was at our mock-up of the Abbottabad compound that they learned the true identity of their target. There, standing in front of the SEALs, our lead operations officer said, “This is not about Libya. We have found Usama bin Ladin, and you guys are going to go get him.” Although trying not to show emotion, the SEALs were psyched. Following exercises at our facility and a full dress rehearsal at a DOD facility, the SEALs were ready to go.
Although the SEALs belonged to the US military, the president made clear that if there was going to be an operation it would be CIA’s to lead. That was because the president wanted the operation to be covert. On the off chance that Bin Ladin was not there and the raid was not detected by the Pakistanis, the United States would try to keep the whole thing quiet, as if it had never happened. That meant that the chain of command for the operation went from the president of the United States to the director of CIA to the commander of JSOC. The secretary of defense was not in the chain of command for the operation. The JSOC personnel would be operationally assigned to the Agency to carry out the operation.
The pace of the meetings with the president now accelerated. Three were held in April. Mid-month, McRaven walked the president through the results of his team’s exercises, concluding, “We can do this.” McRaven recommended, if the raid were to be conducted, that it go down on the night of April 30. It would be pitch-black, and anyone wearing night vision goggles would have a huge advantage.
But there was a problem with the thirtieth. Someone mentioned that Saturday, April 30, was the night of the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—where the president was expected to speak. How would it look, they asked, if the president was at a black-tie dinner joking around with a bunch of reporters in the beautiful Hilton Hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., while a group of Americans were dying on a failed mission in Pakistan? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shot down that concern with a well-placed response. “Fuck the White House Correspondents’ dinner,” she said. “Heaven help us if we ever make an important operational decision like this based on some political event.”
But there was also a new option on the table—one that the joint planning team had never looked at in any detail. This option was suggested by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine general Hoss Cartwright, and it had to do with someone at the compound whom we at CIA called “the Pacer.” We were able to determine that there was a lone male person who regularly walked a path in an outdoor grove adjacent to the compound’s main house. Everyone assumed it was Bin Ladin, but we were unable to get close enough to establish his identity or even his height. Panetta asked the experts for an estimate of the Pacer’s height—Bin Ladin was well over six feet—and the answer unfortunately was “somewhere between five and seven feet.” That analysis did not advance the ball.
At one meeting Cartwright took the position that the mysterious man pacing in the compound was most likely UBL, and that we could use an unmanned aerial vehicle to take him out. CIA had heard through the grapevine that Cartwright might raise this idea and we were opposed, and I took aim to shoot it down. I noted, if Bin Ladin was at the compound, then Cartwright was almost certainly right about the identity of the Pacer. But I also noted that the United States had had a great deal of experience with UAV targeting in recent years—and that the attacks were not always successful. It all depended on the physics of an explosion. If Bin Ladin was at Abbottabad, we would get only one crack at him, I argued. The chances of our missing altogether or of Bin Ladin’s walking away from a strike were just too high.
Another issue was the potential response of the Pakistanis to the incursion into their territory. If the Pakistanis detected the heliborne raid early, or were able to respond to it faster than anyone anticipated, McRaven’s plan was for his men to hunker down at the compound while senior officials negotiated a resolution. At the very end of one meeting, the president gave McRaven one more directive. He told McRaven that he did not like that idea of McRaven’s troops rotting in a Pakistani jail for months as we tried to work out a diplomatic solution. No, the president said. “If you get put into that situation, you will fight your way out.” I thought it was exactly the right decision, and by the look on his face, I know McRaven thought it was the right decision as well.
* * *
Throughout the meetings in April, one of the issues that we discussed at length was the probability that Bin Ladin was at the compound. For weeks this issue came up at meetings. The lead analyst said she was 95 percent certain that Bin Ladin was there. The senior analytic manager—the one who did the briefings for the president—said he was at 80 percent. The CTC analysts were certainly aware of CIA’s failure regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—where the Agency had made an enormous mistake by accepting another circumstantial case. But they kept going back over the intelligence again and again, asking themselves, “What other explanation could there be?” Taking lessons from Iraq, they outlined possible alternative explanations in their briefings. None of them were as compelling as the Bin Ladin explanation. The chief of CTC went even further. He put together a “red team”—a small group of smart Agency analysts whom he trusted but who were not involved in the operation or the analysis in any way. They were asked to review everything and tell him if we were missing something—if there were other plausible explanations for the mystery of AC1. They did so, and although not quite as convinced as the CTC analysts, they also came down on the side of saying that UBL was likely there. They were at somewhat less than 80 percent but definitely over 50 percent. I myself was at 60 percent.
With estimates all over the lot, it was no wonder that the president was perplexed, and he asked Panetta why there was such a disparity in the probabilities. Leon deftly turned to me and said, “Michael, why don’t you handle that one?”
After gathering my thoughts for a few seconds, I explained to the president that the differences in the judgments about probability did not reflect any difference in what information people had; I assured him that everyone was working on the same set of data. Rather, I told him that the differences in judgments reflected individual experiences. Those at the higher end of the probability scale tended to be in CTC, and they had a confidence in their judgments borne of success over the past several years—plot after plot disrupted, senior al Qa‘ida leader after senior al Qa‘ida leader taken off the streets. Those at the lower end of the scale—including me—had been through intelligence failures and therefore had less confidence in analytic judgments, particularly circumstantial ones. In my case the failure of CIA’s prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction weighed on my mind. Indeed, I told him, “Mr. President, I believe the circumstantial case that Iraq had WMD in 2002 was stronger than the circumstantial case that Bin Ladin is in the Abbottabad compound.” I added, “Even if we had a source inside the compound and that source told us that Bin Ladin was there, I would not be at 95 percent, because sources lie and get things wrong all the time.”
Mike Vickers told me later that you could hear a pin drop in the room as I said that the Iraq case had been stronger. For his part, the president listened intently and clearly understood what I was saying. He followed up by asking, “So, Michael, if you are only at 60 percent, would you not do the raid?” “No, Mr. President,” I said. “Even at 60 percent, I would do the raid. Given the importance of who this is, the case is strong enough.” The president would later tell people that he’d personally put the odds of Bin Ladin’s being there at fifty-fifty.
* * *
The question of whether to conduct a raid was hotly debated by the handful of
senior officials privy to the intelligence. Some people thought that the risks were too high. The vice president was unconvinced about the intelligence and concerned about what a failed mission would do to our relations with Pakistan. And Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, a career CIA officer and former CIA director, also said that he felt the intelligence was too weak and he thought the risks to US forces going in were too high. He noted that something almost always goes wrong in this kind of military operation. He repeatedly brought up the tragedy of “Desert One,” the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt during the Carter administration. He told us how he had sat around a conference table in that same Situation Room thirty years before as that tragedy played out. The secretary’s view was that if we took action, we should go the UAV route. Hoss Cartwright was also opposed to the raid, seeing the UAV option as a better choice as well.
Beyond those three, however, the national security team came down on the side of going ahead. But even as the consensus seemed to be building to conduct a strike, there was a school of thought that advocated waiting until we had more definitive intelligence. Panetta and I responded with three points: (1) there was no guarantee that more time would deliver more intelligence; (2) the number of people who were aware of the intelligence reporting and analysis was growing and a leak could happen at any moment, thereby tipping off Bin Ladin; and (3) even without receiving some warning, there was nothing to say that Bin Ladin might not decide it was time to pull up stakes and move somewhere else, as we did not know whether this was a long-term or a short-term residence for the al Qa‘ida leader. Without round-the-clock surveillance, which was simply not available, either of the latter two scenarios would force us to start all over again.
Panetta made perhaps the strongest argument—something that everyone knew but was unwilling to say. Stepping out of his role as a provider of intelligence only and not advocating policy, Panetta said at one meeting that “I’ve always operated by a simple test—what would the American people say?” He added, “There is no doubt in my mind that if they knew what we know—even with the range of confidence levels we have—that they would want us to go after the man responsible for all those deaths on 9/11.” It was a powerful argument.
There was a final Mickey Mouse meeting in the Situation Room, where the president polled the principals on whether they would recommend going ahead with the mission. The vice president and Bob Gates voted no; everyone else voted yes. But the next morning three of Gates’s top people—Admiral Mike Mullen, Mike Vickers, and Michèle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy—all came to Gates in an effort to convince him that he should support the raid. After the nearly hour-long meeting Gates called Tom Donilon and told him that he was changing his vote to yes. I have great admiration for Bob Gates for many reasons, and his willingness to be open-minded and to listen to what his subordinates are telling him is one of those reasons.
* * *
Throughout the entire process, two things were a constant—the attempt to get more intelligence and the questioning about the analysts’ confidence that Bin Ladin was there. Try as we might, we were unable to get much additional intelligence to help the president decide whether to take action against the Abbottabad compound or not.
On the analytic side, there would be one more red team before the final “go” decision. In April 2011, Brennan quite appropriately wanted to consider how al Qa‘ida might retaliate against us should we get Bin Ladin. To think through that problem he needed the help of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). In addition to focusing on the task at hand—possible retaliation—the organization’s head, Mike Leiter, suggested to Brennan that NCTC do a formal red team on the CIA analysts’ conclusion that Bin Ladin was at Abbottabad.
Brennan and Leiter both asked me what I thought. I was aware of the alternative analysis that the CTC itself had done and the red teaming that the director of CTC had ordered. And while I thought it was overkill, I said, “Why not?” For a decision of this magnitude you could not be too careful. So Leiter put together a team of two NCTC analysts and two CIA analysts on assignment to his unit to review the intelligence again. Those four analysts did not reach a consensus. They had a wide range of views. One of them put the probability at 60 percent that Bin Ladin was there (which was also my level of confidence). Two others came down at around 50 percent, and one gave it only a 40 percent chance, which I took to mean that he did not think Bin Ladin was there. Each analyst did think that the Bin Ladin theory was the best explanation for what we were seeing at the compound. Still, when Leiter briefed his team’s conclusions to the president, it was a replay of my earlier Iraq WMD comment—a sobering reminder of how thin the case was for Bin Ladin’s presence in Abbottabad.
* * *
On April 29, just one day after the final meeting with the president, the secure phone rang in Director Panetta’s office. It was National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. He informed us that the president had ordered the mission to proceed. Panetta, sensing that it was a historic moment, wrote out a memo for the record in longhand. It read:
Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1. The decision is to proceed with the assault. The timing, operational decision making, and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The direction is to go in and get Bin Ladin and if he is not there, to get out. These instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at 10:45 a.m.
It is impossible to fully convey the size of the knot you feel in your stomach when you are among the few people on the planet who know that such a major event is about to occur, and when the outcome is so uncertain. Just an hour or so before the raid, as we two were alone in his office, Panetta asked me what I thought in my heart of hearts: “Is he there?” “Sir,” I said, “I will not be surprised if we find him there—and I will not be surprised if we don’t.” Panetta simply answered, “Me too.” It was a roll of the dice.
After the raid was conducted, media commentators talked about the president’s “gutsy decision.” My view was that the decision to take action had not been the tough part. The case was strong enough to take action; in fact, the case was strong enough that the president had to take action. Had he not, and had it later become known that CIA had thought Bin Ladin was there, it would have been extraordinarily damaging to his presidency and to US credibility. No, to me, the gutsy part was the president’s decision about what kind of action to take. By putting US boots on the ground and placing American lives at risk, he made a difficult, but ultimately correct, decision. The easy way out would have been to obliterate the compound with munitions from a couple of B-2 bombers. As a result of his decision, we limited the collateral damage significantly, knew for certain that we had gotten Bin Ladin, and obtained a treasure trove of intelligence from the compound.
As it turned out, the debate about launching a raid on the night of the correspondents’ dinner was moot—the weather was bad in Pakistan and McRaven elected to postpone the operation for one day.
* * *
The CIA director’s wood-paneled conference room, across a narrow hallway from my office and that of Leon Panetta, had been turned into a makeshift command center. The long, polished table was stacked with computer terminals manned by CIA and JSOC personnel in constant touch with Admiral McRaven’s headquarters in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and monitoring various sensors around the region. A handful of senior CIA officials were there, but nowhere near all of them.
Many senior CIA personnel, all with the highest security clearances possible, were still unaware that we thought we had found Bin Ladin, unaware of the history that was about to be made. In keeping the information from Agency officials, cabinet officers and the like, we were not signaling any measure of distrust. It is simply that in a mission of this magnitude, every additional person briefed on the operation increases the possibility of an unintentional leak that might scuttle the operation. In the days that followed the raid, I would have to explain (if not apologize) to a lot of peo
ple who wished they had been clued into the operation in advance.
The extraordinary operational security had also given me some trouble much closer to home. A friend of mine had offered tickets to the Washington Capitals hockey play-off game against the Tampa Bay Lightning on May 1. And since the raid was called off on April 30, I thought there was a chance that bad weather would postpone it again the next day and that I would be able to go to the game. So I accepted the tickets.
By midmorning D.C. time on May 1, however, it was clear that the weather in Pakistan was cooperating and the mission would be a go. Not wanting the tickets to go to waste, I called Mary Beth and asked her to pick them up so someone else could put them to use. As the wife of the deputy director, Mary Beth had her own CIA pass and could normally drive onto the compound and come into the headquarters building without an escort. But if she came to my office on May 1 she would have seen the extraordinary beehive of activity in the adjoining conference room and would have figured out that something was up. She too was among the many who did not have a “need to know.” So I told my security detail to meet her “downstairs” and “under no circumstances should she be allowed upstairs.” But they went a step further than that and decided to meet her at the Agency’s front gate a quarter mile away from the main entrance to the building. They simply said, “Ma’am, here are the tickets,” with a tone and look that said, “This is as far as you go.” She already hadn’t been too happy with my working schedule over the past several months, and now the frosty reception from the security detail was a big push toward the edge.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 17