His father, Tom, lived nearby and spent as much time as he could with his children. The elementary school had an outside basketball hoop, and Rob spent hours there, shooting jump shots and free throws. His father encouraged his interest in the game. During basketball season, Tom picked up his son after school and took him to a sports club in downtown Butte, where he taught him to dribble, shoot, and pass. They did layup drills and played pickup games with other members. They always ended their on-court session with a free-throw contest.
No one could leave the gym until they hit a certain number of foul shots in a row. First it was 20 in a row. That was easy. Then they’d work their way up, until Rob set his record of 105 free throws in a row. After practice, father and son went out for steaks. Young Rob eventually won a spot on his high school basketball team.
Like many Montana dads, Tom O’Neill also took his boy hunting for deer and elk in the steep mountains surrounding Butte. On a hunting trip in 1994, just after Rob’s eighteenth birthday, his father introduced him to Jim, a Navy SEAL home on leave.
Rob was impressed by Jim’s quiet confidence. A friend that week had dropped Jim off in the mountains, and he’d spent three days out there, tracking deer and elk for the upcoming hunting season. He’d found a great spot, a “honey hole,” he said. Did Rob want to see the lookout?
The next morning, they drove in the pre-dawn dark up into the mountains and parked in a secluded area well off the road. “We’ll have to walk in from here,” Jim said. “It’s about a mile, uphill. You up for that?” Rob didn’t hesitate.
It was a sheer climb through heavy brush. Rob had to push hard to keep up. His lungs burned, but he wasn’t going to stop.
When they reached the peak, they spotted about forty elk. They didn’t shoot any. Rob tried not to wheeze.
“That was a helluva climb,” Jim said. “You ought to think about joining the SEALs, O’Neill.”
Rob smiled, flattered. But he wasn’t ready to join the military. Not yet.
When Rob graduated high school, he enrolled at Montana Technological University. After a couple of semesters, he realized he wanted something more. He took Jim’s advice and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He wanted to become a SEAL. But before he could even qualify for a tryout with the Navy’s special operators, he had to learn something. How to swim. Up until that point in his life, there had been no need to. He’d spent most of his time on land. It wasn’t like he lived by an ocean or a big lake.
He signed a deferred enrollment, which gave him six months to get into top physical shape before he reported to boot camp. Every morning, he’d swim laps at the community college pool. He struggled until he ran into a high school friend who’d won a swimming scholarship to the University of Notre Dame. The friend took O’Neill under his wing and showed him basic swimming techniques.
O’Neill quickly got into a routine. He’d swim, then strap on his joggers and run rings around Butte. At home, he practiced on a pull-up bar in a doorway. He’d crank up Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion to motivate himself, and he’d pull himself up, over and over. He felt himself getting stronger. His dad was proud of him, and his mother supported his decision.
The entire family gathered at Butte’s Bert Mooney Airport on a cold January night in 1996 to see him off on his boot-camp adventure. But O’Neill wondered if he could survive the SEAL training. He was a bundle of nerves by the time he arrived at Recruit Training Command Great Lakes in Chicago.
He knew all the steps he’d have to take to make it into and then graduate from the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, or BUD/S. First, O’Neill had to pass a punishing physical screening just to qualify. He was one of only a handful of recruits in his class who aced the screening. Then, O’Neill moved on to the twenty-six-week SEAL tryout. Nothing could have prepared him for the physical and mental hell that followed. The weeks passed in a blur of running, swimming, calisthenics, obstacle courses, classroom training, and high-decibel harangues from the instructors anytime he missed a beat.
There were times when he was so beaten down and tired that he felt like giving up. But something inside told him to go on, that quitting was out of the question. Not even Hell Week—a punishing 120 hours of nonstop chaos, when instructors pushed the recruits to the brink, twenty hours a day, no sleep. Instructors barked orders: push-ups in the sand; run; crawl through the dunes on your belly; jump headlong, fully clothed, into the surf. It went on and on and on. O’Neill was delirious, cold, wet, exhausted, always hurting.
But again, he made it. At the end of 1996, O’Neill graduated BUD/S as a special warfare operator. He joined SEAL Team 2 in Virginia Beach. He passed his final exams, pinned his gold Trident insignia on his lapel, and was deployed to Kosovo.
SEALs hadn’t seen any real action since the invasion of Panama in 1989. But that would change soon. O’Neill’s team was stationed in Germany. Early one afternoon, he was sitting in a GI bar, the television was tuned to CNN. There he watched as a plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. The room fell silent, stunned as another plane hit the other tower. “Osama bin Laden,” someone said. “This is Al Qaeda. We’re under attack.”
Rob O’Neill.
O’Neill felt his life shift in a moment—terrorism on American soil. He was itching to get into the fight. He prayed for the chance to find and bring bin Laden to justice. It would be years before he joined the battle. But he took steps along the way to ensure that when he did, he’d be in the thick of the action.
After Germany, O’Neill was deployed to the Mediterranean. No action there, but he applied for the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU)—better known as SEAL Team 6. They were the best of the best, the guys who went on the toughest and most dangerous missions.
When O’Neill returned to Virginia in 2004, he was invited to try out for the Green Team, the nine-month selection and training course that was the pipeline for SEAL Team 6. He knew if he could make it through the training, he’d be drafted by one of the team’s six squadrons.
All the candidates were seasoned SEALs. The instructors knew they could handle the physical aspect. So part of the training focused on whether they were “psychologically fit”—able to function at high levels under the harshest conditions. They wanted to know if you had what it takes to handle yourself, alone, trapped behind enemy lines, being chased by gun-toting insurgents. O’Neill also learned intricate and dangerous skydiving techniques, and trained for close-quarters battles, how to enter buildings occupied by armed and hostile enemies, often complicated by the presence of unarmed civilians. O’Neill thrived. After nine months, he made it. He was headed for Iraq, or maybe Afghanistan.
While O’Neill waited in Virginia for his orders, his younger sister Kelley called him up for counsel. She had just escaped a bad relationship and wanted to start over someplace far from Butte. O’Neill took a few days off, flew to Montana, fixed his sister’s car, and thirty-six hours later they were back in Virginia Beach.
Kelley moved into her brother’s spare room and found work at a local sports bar. When her brother stopped in at the pub to say hello, he spotted a cute blonde waitress named Amber. They were married a year and a half later, just before he was sent to Afghanistan in April 2005. It was O’Neill’s first deployment to a war zone, but it wouldn’t be his last. The United States was fighting wars in two nations, running short on troops, so as soon as O’Neill finished one tour of duty, he was assigned to another.
During multiple deployments, SEAL Team 6 was in the middle of the action. Over time, O’Neill went out on hundreds of missions, striking at the heart of suspected Al Qaeda terrorist positions. He learned to fight in the shadows, using his night-vision goggles to hunt the bad guys. O’Neill discovered that combat wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. He was able to keep his shit together and make critical decisions in the middle of firefights.
And that served him well in early June 2008, when he led a small team on a dangerous mission in a remote moun
tainous area near the Pakistan border. Intelligence reports showed that insurgents were crossing into Afghanistan and hitting targets near Asadabad, a flyspeck on the valley floor. The fighters were led by Zabit Jalil, a Taliban leader who had orchestrated a deadly ambush on a SEAL recon team in June 2005.
O’Neill carefully planned the mission: Helos would carry him, three other SEALs, and forty Afghan soldiers at night to an area at the base of a mountain. Then before dawn they’d hike to the top, where they’d have a clear view of the border. O’Neill hoped the insurgents would see them and attack. Once they did, his team would call in artillery and air support to take out the enemy.
But things didn’t go as planned. As soon as the sun came up, O’Neill could see activity near a makeshift checkpoint on the Pakistani side of the border, about a half mile from his position. As the morning went on, he glimpsed truckloads of men approaching the checkpoint. O’Neill shook his head in disbelief. He realized they were in the middle of an Al Qaeda and Taliban supply line. Then, without warning, hundreds of hostile troops attacked. O’Neill quickly discovered the insurgents were right on top of his squad. How close? He didn’t know the exact distance. But they were so close he could hear them shouting, “Allahu Akbar”—“God is great.”
Enemy rounds kicked up the dirt in front of him. At one point, he thought he was going to die. But O’Neill stayed calm and called in air strikes. When the bombs dropped, the insurgents fled back to the checkpoint. O’Neill knew they probably thought they were safe since they were inside Pakistan. But O’Neill was relentless. He ordered U.S. bombers to hit the area. When they did, everything around the checkpoint was destroyed.
The firing stopped, then two helicopters swooped in and extracted O’Neill’s team. He’d later find out that Jalil had been seriously wounded. It was the worst combat O’Neill had faced. He tried to push it out of his mind, but it was hard to forget.
When he returned to the United States, he was awarded the Silver Star. He flew his parents in for the ceremony. It was a proud moment. When he joined the navy, his mother worried about him being killed or wounded. He’d comfort her by saying, “Mom, stop worrying. I’m here to do something special.”
But at the ceremony, when she heard details of the mission, she was more worried than ever about his safety. He was in more danger than she could imagine. She was frantic about her son. So, to calm her down, he promised to stay out of harm’s way. “I’ll never get another Silver Star again. That’s the last time,” he whispered.
But tonight, in his living room, O’Neill knew it might be difficult to stay out of trouble. Almost a decade after a U.S.-led coalition invaded the country, Afghanistan was still a mess. The Taliban was resurgent in the south, and Al Qaeda fighters continued to cross into Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan. It was unlikely O’Neill would be in the field during his deployment, but he couldn’t rule it out, either. No, not when SEALs were still hunting high-value targets. O’Neill sighed. He wished he hadn’t made that promise to his mother.
COUNTDOWN: 233 DAYS
September 10, 2010
Washington, D.C.
President Obama waited for Panetta to arrive in the Oval Office. The CIA director had requested a meeting, saying he had an important new development in the search for Osama bin Laden. Obama wondered what Panetta wanted to share. Even with the best intelligence in the world—the most sophisticated tracking equipment—Obama knew the trail for bin Laden had gone cold.
Seven members of the president’s national security team, including deputy national security advisor Tom Donilon and White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan, waited with the president for the briefing in the newly redecorated Oval Office. Paperhangers had just finished putting up light beige striped wallpaper. Along with a pair of new caramel-colored couches with black and brown throw pillows, it gave the room more of an informal feel than it had had with Obama’s predecessor.
With portraits of presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington on the walls, the Oval Office was a comfortable place for Obama to hold detailed meetings with top advisors, to read, or to think about important issues. And bin Laden was one subject that was never far from the president’s mind—especially now, one day before the ninth anniversary of 9/11.
At a news conference earlier in the day in the East Room, Obama had wanted to focus on economic issues. Rows of newspaper and television reporters were ready as the president moved to a lectern with the presidential seal. Before taking questions, Obama said he wanted to “talk a little bit about our continuing efforts to dig ourselves out of this recession and to grow our economy.”
But as soon as he finished, the first questions were about bin Laden. A journalist reminded Obama that he had promised to “run a smarter war on terror” than Bush. “But you still haven’t captured him, and you don’t seem to know where he is,” the reporter said.
Obama tried to deflect the question, saying killing bin Laden “wouldn’t solve all our problems.” But he said it did remain “a high priority of this administration.”
“We have the best minds, the best intelligence officers, the best special forces, who are thinking about this day and night. And they will continue to think about it day and night as long as I’m president,” Obama said.
What the president didn’t disclose was that he had been pushing Panetta for more than a year to find bin Laden. The public didn’t know that bringing the terrorist leader to justice was one of Obama’s top priorities. For many, that would seem to run counter to his public image. So many people believed that Obama was a dove. He wasn’t. The misperception could be traced to a speech Obama made years earlier at an antiwar rally.
After the United States drove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from power in Afghanistan, President Bush began making the case for invading Iraq. But Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, decided to speak out. At an October 2002 protest in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, he made his position clear. “I don’t oppose all wars…. What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” He said the Iraq conflict was being pushed by “political hacks” to distract the nation from major problems. The text of the speech was circulated on the internet, where he came to the attention of Democratic Party strategists.
But people who believed that Obama was some kind of reflexive antiwar activist weren’t paying attention. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he had staked out a hard-line foreign policy position. In the Democratic presidential primaries, Obama said he’d be willing to attack inside Pakistan—with or without approval from the Pakistani government—to kill bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders. His main rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, labeled Obama naïve. After Obama landed his party’s nomination, the Clinton attack line was picked up by Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
But Obama didn’t back down. During a debate with McCain, Obama vowed once again to take out bin Laden if he ever appeared in America’s crosshairs, no matter where he was—Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Timbuktu.
“If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling” to do it, the United States would, Obama promised. But he wasn’t finished. No, Obama wanted to make it clear to the American people what he’d do: “We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our highest national security priority.”
That statement seemed to be more aligned with a military hawk than a candidate who had been running as an ambassador of hope and optimism. So, when Obama was elected, some wondered if he’d really follow through with his campaign promise to get bin Laden. His top advisors didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
After Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, he quickly discovered that no one had a clue where bin Laden was hiding. Yes, the intelligence community was still pursuing every lead it could find. But to Obama, it seemed that capturing bin Laden was no longer their top priority. So the new president wanted to give his team a push. After a national security briefing on May 26, 2009, Obama asked
four officials to meet with him: Panetta, Donilon, Rahm Emanuel (his White House chief of staff), and Michael Leiter (director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center). They followed the president up a flight of stairs from the Situation Room in the West Wing basement to the Oval Office.
Obama said he’d be quick. He’d been thinking about bin Laden, and now that he’d settled into the presidency, he wanted the intelligence community to reprioritize. It was time to root out the elusive terrorist.
“I want bin Laden to come to the front of the line. This has to be a top priority. I want regular reports on this. Starting in thirty days,” Obama said.
Obama knew there was no way the United States—even with its overwhelming military force—could truly defeat Al Qaeda as long as bin Laden was alive. He remained the terror group’s spiritual leader, a godlike figure. Just when everyone thought he must be dead, there he was in a new video, with a camouflage jacket over his flowing white robe, clutching his trusty AK-47 and spewing anti-American messages from behind a bushy salt-and-pepper beard. With every video he released, every time he thumbed his nose at America, he gained more followers.
To follow up, Obama sent a memo to Panetta, giving the CIA director thirty days to come up with a detailed plan to locate and target bin Laden. And Panetta started meeting with his bin Laden team at 4:30 every Tuesday afternoon, pressing for new leads. At the end of every national security meeting, Obama turned to him and asked, “Are we any closer?” But so far, Panetta never had anything new to report.
President Barack Obama in the Oval Office with White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and Director for Counterterrorism for the National Security Council Audrey Tomason.
Now that would change. Panetta walked into the Oval Office with Morell, Mike, Gary, and Sam. They sat down on the couches and greeted the others in the room. The CIA director was prepared. He had spent the last few days reviewing every relevant intelligence report and satellite photo. He’d discussed the information with his key people until they all were dreaming about that fortress at night.
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