Countdown bin Laden

by Chris Wallace

  Three blocks down, Ferenczy stopped to call Dominguez. She got a signal, but it just kept on ringing. “Come on, pick up!” she said. Then a second plane hit the South Tower. Ferenczy called her police partner, woke him up. “Get your clothes on and head downtown!” she shouted into the phone. She started running again, into the chaos.

  Then, just as Ferenczy was ready to run into Tower One, a police lieutenant grabbed her by the arm. “Get back and help secure the courthouse,” he shouted. “Move the prisoners from the cells. No one knows if the city is under attack. We have to get them out of there.”

  Under orders, Ferenczy turned back.

  The lieutenant saved her life.

  Dominguez went to the World Trade Center immediately after the first airplane struck. He was last seen around the twentieth floor of Tower One. His voice was heard on radio dispatches, warning other police not to enter the building because it was unstable.

  When the buildings collapsed, Ferenczy knew he was gone. She felt it in her soul.

  The rest of the day, and the next few months, passed in a blur. She used up her sick leave and vacation time, but she just couldn’t handle the pain.

  A year later, she returned to work at the precinct. The first day, though, she had a panic attack when she and her partner headed into lower Manhattan. She had to stop the car and throw up outside the cruiser.

  After so many years of sweet and easy life, her world turned dark and difficult. She and Dominguez had been engaged, they’d lived together and bought a home together, but they were not married, so she had to fight to receive his benefits. She and a group of other survivors battled then Mayor Rudy Giuliani to increase funding for the Twin Towers Fund to help victims’ families.

  A year after 9/11, Ferenczy was in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral—not to marry Jerome Dominguez, but to lay him to rest. His parents insisted on the funeral service even though his body was never recovered.

  Ferenczy hated bin Laden. And the funeral only reminded her of everything she’d lost. It reminded her of everything others had lost that horrible day—husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children, friends. She wanted America to bring bin Laden to justice. Go after him, follow every lead, just like a relentless police detective on a murder case.

  But sitting inside Saint Patrick’s, she couldn’t dwell on that. She eventually received an insurance benefit and used part of it to buy the Adirondacks property. Life went on, years passed. She still had good friends on the force. But not a day went by where she didn’t mourn for her lost love.

  She turned to writing to help ease her pain. Every September 11, December 19 (their anniversary), and April 25 (Dominguez’s birthday), she wrote an online tribute on the “Legacy” web page that carried his obituary.

  So today—the ninth anniversary of the day she lost Jerome—on the quiet riverbank, she opened her notebook. She felt responsible for keeping his memory alive, but it seemed like she’d already said everything that needed saying. She wasn’t sure what to compose for his Legacy page. Then it all came flooding back, that first night, the stunning cold.

  Today I always try to think about the day we met, rather than the day you kissed me for the last time. I think about the crisp coldness of the air when I first saw you, the sound of the children’s laughter at the Christmas party going on inside. The smell of your leather jacket when you got off the bike. The warmth of your hand when you first held mine. Touching you that first time was… coming home.

  I was startled by the clarity of my thoughts, the certainty of my recognition of you. Though we had never met, I knew you. I tried to be funny, cover my surprise with a joke. So I breathed in the scent of you and said “Is this my Christmas present?” and without turning your head—or looking at me, you replied “Yes, I am” and you pulled me tighter to you.

  Some hours later, I told my partner that I had just met my husband.

  I love you now, as I loved you then… still after all this time, after all that has come to pass, all that has gone since

  I love you still, Beloved Boy.

  I miss you Husband.

  Until we are together again My Love.

  Always Your Wife,

  Jessie

  She smiled. God, how she wished he was there with her. She wanted to talk to him so badly. She’d have to make a decision soon, whether to keep working or retire early. She loved being a cop, but her heart just wasn’t in it anymore. She wanted time to build the cabins, to develop this land, to turn it into a place to honor his memory. She’d need more money to make that happen.

  But that was a decision for another day.

  COUNTDOWN: 205 DAYS

  October 8, 2010

  Langley, Virginia

  Michael Morell was always busy. The deputy director of the world’s largest intelligence agency was forever on the phone, answering emails, or poring over reports. But since Gary and Sam had told the president about the compound in Abbottabad, the volume of work—and the pressure—had picked up exponentially. It was almost more than one man could juggle.

  After all these years of dead ends, they were getting close. Morell could feel it. The hunt for bin Laden was nothing new for him. He’d already been tracking the terrorist for five years before the September 11 attacks.

  Morell didn’t draw attention to himself. Unlike Panetta, four-letter words didn’t roll off his tongue. He was quiet and reflective, medium height and thin, with short brown hair parted carefully on the side. His suits and button-down shirts were always neatly pressed, his ties conservative, his glasses oblong and owlish. He could’ve passed for a literature professor at an Ivy League school.

  In his early fifties, Morell had decades of experience in the CIA. He was the consummate insider, with the meticulous mind of an analyst. Morell was passionate about his work. He knew everything there was to know about Osama bin Laden. He respected the twisted genius behind his well-timed attacks and fierce ideology. But he despised bin Laden’s offhand dismissal of the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Morell knew that more would die unless the aging terrorist was caught.

  Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell with Leon Panetta.

  He had spent the weeks since the White House meeting with his case officers and analysts, stringing together as much new information as possible about the compound. They had ramped up intercepts of telephone calls, asked for more satellite photos, set more people on the ground in Abbottabad to discreetly collect information. Their efforts were starting to pay dividends.

  They knew now that a third family lived in the “fortress,” and none of them ever left the premises. The neighbors didn’t know there was another family living there. One way the CIA discovered it was by studying those satellite images, and looking at the amount of laundry on the clothesline. And there was another nugget: The brothers owned the house—at least on paper—but the invisible family lived on the top two floors, the best quarters.

  The new information didn’t prove bin Laden was there. But if he was, he had been hiding in plain sight. That challenged the CIA’s working hypothesis, the presumption that had guided them for years.

  The CIA analyst’s job was to pull together all the evidence and expertise on a given topic and provide an answer to a question a policymaker had asked or should ask. An analyst typically developed a working hypothesis based on intercepts, human intelligence operations, photographs and videos, and other streams of information. That hypothesis then drove further collection of information.

  With bin Laden, the questions were: How would he hide? Where? What security would he employ?

  For years, everyone assumed he was holed up in the tribal areas in western Pakistan, probably in a cave or a remote area, separated from his family and surrounded by well-armed guards. There was a good chance that his health was failing, and perhaps that he was hooked up to a makeshift kidney dialysis machine.

  He would never live in a compound with families. He wouldn’t live in a place with military helicopters flying overhead. He’d have
set up layers of defenses around his booby-trapped lair, posted guards, and created tunnels or other elaborate escape routes.

  The new lead ran counter to that entire narrative. It suggested that bin Laden was living in a villa in the suburbs with his wives, kids, and two families of retainers. He was residing in a sleepy, picturesque city in the shadow of the Himalaya Mountains. Named for James Abbott, a British officer and administrator, the city was a tourist hub with a military academy and medical school. The streets were filled with cadets, medical students, and retirees who enjoyed the temperate weather and the nature trails leading to the mountains. If bin Laden was living here, then the CIA had been wrong about almost everything, for an awfully long time.

  Morell shook his head. His gut told him that bin Laden was in the compound, but he needed more proof, and more time. He couldn’t move too fast. If bin Laden suspected anything, he would slip away like a viper.

  That’s why Morell was in his office so late, peering at paperwork. He’d learned early on that you had to keep pushing until you got it right.

  Morell grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a blue-collar community outside Cleveland. His father, Joseph, worked at a Chrysler plant, while his mother, Irene, stayed at home.

  His father was a perfectionist. He kept an elaborate carpentry shop, and tried to pass along the skill to his son. When young Morell presented his dad with his first birdhouse project, his father inspected it with a critical eye. “It’s not good enough,” he said.

  When the boy protested, his father took a hammer and smashed the birdhouse to pieces. “Start over again,” he said.

  The second time, when he finished, it was a “near perfect birdhouse.”

  That lesson stayed with Morell. When you do something, you do it right. No shortcuts. After high school graduation, Morell attended the University of Akron and majored in economics. He thought he’d go on to graduate school, earn a PhD, and teach economics. But one of his professors suggested he send a résumé to the CIA.

  “They hire economists there,” he said.

  Morell shrugged. Really? he thought. An economist could be a spy?

  “Economics is one of the few academic disciplines that teaches critical thinking,” the professor said. “That’s the top skill needed to be a successful intelligence analyst.”

  Morell wasn’t sold on the idea. He didn’t know much about the CIA, or what an economist would do there. He had never traveled overseas, or learned a foreign language, or even followed world events on the news. He would be a fish out of water.

  Still, he sent in his résumé. And to his surprise, he was invited for a visit. When Morell arrived, he was introduced to “a group of amazing, talented people who were dedicated to an important mission.”

  The year was 1980. U.S. embassy employees in Iran had been taken hostage. It seemed that was the lead story every night on the evening news. The Soviet military was in Afghanistan, trying to keep the pro-Moscow regime in power.

  When the recruiter asked if Morell wanted a job, he said he wasn’t sure, that he hoped to go to graduate school. The recruiter sealed the deal by agreeing that was a good idea.

  “Come to work here. Do a good job. We’ll eventually send you to graduate school on our dime,” the man said.

  That’s all Morell needed to hear. He joined the CIA in 1980. He earned $15,000 a year as an intelligence analyst, and the agency sent him to Georgetown University, where he got his master’s degree in economics.

  From the beginning, Morell was sharp and focused. He worked his way up in the agency, specializing in East Asian economics. It was a far cry from spy movies, but for Morell, it was satisfying work that had an impact on the world.

  By 1998, he was well respected in the agency. He married and started a family. When Mary Beth was in the hospital giving birth to their third child, the phone rang in the delivery room. It was for Morell.

  It was good news: The CIA’s new director, George Tenet, wanted Morell to be his executive assistant. Morell was stunned. “That’s interesting,” Morell said. “But I’m a little busy right now.” He didn’t let it show, but inside, he was thrilled. This would be a career-altering promotion.

  When Morell returned to work a few days after his son’s birth, Tenet called him into his office. The CIA chief congratulated him, opened a box, and handed Morell a cigar from his private stash.

  Tenet became Morell’s mentor. The son of Greek immigrants, Tenet had a way of making everyone around him feel comfortable—from the analysts to the janitors. He was known to burst into song, belting out Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and other soul hits. It wasn’t unusual to see him dribble a basketball in the CIA hallways.

  It helped ease the mood in a high-pressure workplace. Morell needed that. His job was incredibly stressful. He had to review every piece of information headed for Tenet’s desk and make a quick decision whether the director needed to see it immediately or if it could wait. It was a balancing act. If he passed along too many things, the director could get overwhelmed. If he kept something critical from Tenet, it could be disastrous.

  In his new job, it became clear to Morell that the threat of international terrorism had become the dominant issue, one that Tenet said kept him up at night. This was a change for Morell. He’d had little involvement in the agency’s counterterrorism efforts before. Morell soon got to know all the bad guys in the terrorist world.

  He learned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda—the name is Arabic for “the base.” Their roots dated back to 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up that nation’s Communist government.

  In the wake of the invasion, Muslim insurgents, known as the mujahideen, rallied to fight a jihad, or holy war, against the Soviets. One of their supporters was bin Laden, the seventeenth child of a Saudi Arabian construction magnate. At first, bin Laden provided the mujahideen with money, weapons, and fighters. But he decided he wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines. So he traveled to Afghanistan and fought alongside the insurgents in the rough mountainous terrain.

  When the Soviets were driven from Afghanistan a decade later, most of the nation was taken over by Islamic extremists known as the Taliban. Their leaders allowed bin Laden to set up training camps for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, bin Laden worked tirelessly to unite disparate militant groups, from Egypt to the Philippines, under the banner of Al Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam.

  While bin Laden waged jihad all over the world, the United States was his primary target. In the years before 9/11, Al Qaeda conducted a series of high-profile terrorist attacks against America. They included the August 7, 1998, bombings of two U.S. embassies—one in Tanzania, the other in Kenya—that killed more than two hundred people.

  Morell was in Tenet’s office two days after the attacks, when the CIA chief briefed President Bill Clinton and a cadre of security officials that an international terrorist named bin Laden was responsible.

  Preparing for that presidential phone call had been nerve-wracking for Morell. He’d lost patience with the analysts assembling “talking points” for the call.

  “What the hell are they doing down there?” he’d said.

  “Calm down,” Tenet told him. “They’re doing the best they can.”

  In a crisis situation, everyone works hard and there’s no need to push, Tenet told him. That’s counterproductive.

  Once they were certain bin Laden was behind the attacks, Clinton ordered missile strikes against Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons plant in Sudan.

  The embassy bombings changed the atmosphere at the agency.

  Before then, the CIA had been prohibited from using lethal force against the terrorist leader. Now, with White House approval, a memorandum of notification (MON) was drafted, which allowed the CIA, using its Afghan surrogates, to kill bin Laden during an operation if it was deemed “unfeasible” to capture him. It essentially allowed the CIA to execute Osama bin Laden.

  After the 2000 presid
ential election—and the controversial victory of George W. Bush—Morell’s telephone rang again, this time with a job offer from the White House. Morell was tapped to become the new president’s daily briefer. He would still work for the CIA. But every morning, he’d go to the White House to tell Bush about the day’s most pressing national security issues, and share the briefing in paper form with the president’s closest advisors.

  It was an important job. He had to make sure the commander in chief understood the key points in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which was written by intelligence analysts. But Morell was free to tell the president about information outside the report. If the president had any questions, Morell tried to answer them.

  As he contemplated the new role, Morell sought advice from Jami Miscik, a CIA official who had just spent a few days briefing Bush at the governor’s mansion in Texas.

  “You will really need to be prepared every day,” she said. “He will fire questions at you at a rapid pace, and he expects you to be able to answer most of them. He will test you to see how much you know, and he will test you to see if you are willing to say you don’t know when you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge.”

  She paused for a moment. “He doesn’t want you guessing or speculating if you don’t know. In short, get ready for a challenging assignment.”

  Morell accepted the job. But as he was leaving his office that day, he began having second thoughts. Was he up to the challenge? What would an early morning assignment do to his home life? He hadn’t told his wife yet.

  That night, he explained to Mary Beth what the job entailed. It was a major promotion. He would begin work in the middle of the night, but he would be home by noon.

  She encouraged him to take it. At the time, they had three children at home; the oldest was seven. The new hours meant he could help around the house, pick up the kids at school, and oversee their homework.