Countdown bin Laden

by Chris Wallace

  Panetta wasn’t used to this kind of frustration. He had succeeded in just about everything he tackled, and he wasn’t going to fail now. If it meant working longer, working harder, he’d do it. That drive came from his parents, devout Italian immigrants who instilled a sense of hard work and public service in their children. When it was time for college, Panetta joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) to help pay his tuition at Santa Clara University. After college, he went on to law school.

  Shortly after graduation, a friend set him up with Sylvia, a “dark-haired beauty” from a neighboring college. They were married in 1962, and in a year’s time Leon had a wife, a son, a law degree—and a draft notice.

  CIA Director Leon Panetta with Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash.

  Panetta was sent to the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, where he learned to step up and manage security in moments of crisis. As a lawyer, he also represented servicemen in courts-martial.

  He mustered out of the military in 1966 and had to decide what to do with his life. Panetta was intrigued by Washington, inspired by a charismatic young Catholic politician who was the first member of their religion to be elected president: John F. Kennedy.

  But Panetta had no political connections, so he took an unconventional step. He wrote a letter to Joseph Califano Jr., an attorney in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Panetta appealed to Califano as one ambitious young Italian to another. To his surprise, Califano answered. He said he’d introduce Panetta to people in Washington.

  As the young man made the rounds, going from one congressional office to another looking for work, he landed a staff job with Tom Kuchel, a Republican senator from California. Panetta’s career took off.

  In 1977, Panetta was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from California. He served until 1993, when he was appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget under new President Bill Clinton. A year later, with his administration in disarray, Clinton tapped Panetta as his White House chief of staff.

  Over the years, Panetta earned a reputation for hard work, competence, and honesty. In the wake of 9/11, the CIA’s reputation—and the intelligence community as a whole—had taken a hit. How could bin Laden have taken them so by surprise? It got even worse when no one could find “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq—the main reason President Bush cited for toppling Saddam Hussein.

  Panetta wasn’t tainted by the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. He had a strong reputation for his managerial skills, his bipartisan standing, and the foreign policy and budget experience he gained under Bill Clinton.

  Obama believed that Panetta was the right person at the right time to lead the CIA. And a few months into his presidency, he gave Panetta new marching orders—to make the hunt for Osama bin Laden a top priority. But now, just like his predecessors, he was bogged down in the search for the leader of Al Qaeda. The scrubby borderlands of Pakistan were a long, long way from the silk ties and marble corridors of Washington, D.C.

  Panetta thought he’d caught a break one day in late 2009. His agents had arranged to meet with a Jordanian doctor who claimed a connection to Al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  Humam al-Balawi had been detained by Jordanian authorities for posting opinion pieces on the internet that encouraged jihad—the violent struggle against the enemies of Islam. After his release, the doctor approached a highly respected Jordanian intelligence officer. Al-Balawi said he’d had a change of heart and wanted to infiltrate Al Qaeda, a mission he said would help him redeem his family name. So, in the summer of 2009, with his handler’s help, al-Balawi disappeared in Pakistan. When he returned a few months later, he said he had met al-Zawahiri—and knew details about the terrorist leader that were consistent with his personal and medical history.

  The development was such a big deal that Panetta briefed Obama. If he got that close to al-Zawahiri so quickly, maybe the doctor could eventually lead them to bin Laden. Panetta wanted his analysts to talk to al-Balawi to find out more, including how he was able to infiltrate the terrorist group.

  So they set up a big meeting at a CIA facility inside Forward Operating Base Chapman in the Khost Province of Afghanistan. Al-Balawi and his Jordanian handler came in a car with an Afghan driver. As they approached FOB Chapman, the vehicle was waved through several checkpoints until the driver reached a building where more than a dozen people were waiting outside for the important visitor. CIA station chief Jennifer Matthews, who had worked with Gary, was among those who greeted the informant. But moments after al-Balawi stepped out of the vehicle, he did the unthinkable. He detonated a suicide vest, killing Matthews, four CIA employees, two CIA security contractors as well as himself, his Jordanian handler, and the driver. Six other CIA officers were wounded.

  It was the most lethal attack against the CIA in more than a quarter century. It haunted Panetta. He tried to put it down as “another disappointment.” But he recognized it as a major intelligence failure. And he was forced to confront the possibility they might “never find that son of a bitch.”

  He met with the families of the seven dead officers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware when their bodies were returned to the United States. He attended the funerals, and was moved by the resolve of the stricken families. They knew no details of the CIA officers’ mission. They only knew what Panetta told them at Dover: They were working to prevent another 9/11 and bring Al Qaeda senior leadership to justice. Each of them relayed the same message to Panetta: Don’t give up. Keep going. Make this death mean something.

  The route to the cemetery at one Massachusetts funeral was lined with people holding American flags and signs that said: “Thank you for your service.”

  Panetta leaned over and whispered to another CIA officer, “We’re silent warriors. We don’t say much. We don’t say a lot about what we do. But here are ordinary Americans lining the streets to pay tribute to a CIA officer. We’re doing the right thing for the country.”

  It was critical to keep searching for that bastard.

  Panetta went back to Washington and pulled every file related to the bin Laden hunt. Years’ worth of tactical notes, videos, CIA organizational charts. He asked questions: Who was responsible for what part of the search? What were they doing today? How did all the pieces fit together? Panetta came to the stark conclusion: The CIA had to change its ways.

  From his experience, Panetta knew an organization’s structure and reporting chain had to reflect its priorities. Finding bin Laden was the president’s and Panetta’s top objective, but Panetta wasn’t receiving regular updates, and more important, there was no single person inside the CIA to turn to for information and operational updates. Panetta had a limited view of the bin Laden effort and only sporadic contact with the individuals who were chasing the Al Qaeda leader.

  After the Khost tragedy, he called a meeting of the agency’s top officers in the director’s conference room at CIA headquarters. When everyone was seated, Panetta got right to the point.

  “Who here is in charge of finding Osama bin Laden?” And just like Panetta had thought, everybody raised his hand.

  Panetta sighed. Four decades in management had taught him one lesson: “If everyone is in charge, nobody is.” There was no senior official solely devoted to the mission, no person accountable to Panetta who woke up every morning and went to bed every night working on the hunt for bin Laden. He knew it had to end right there.

  After some internal discussions, he put Gary and Sam in charge of the mission. Gary was a career case officer who had served in the field. He had been running the Counterterrorism Center’s PAD for years. To keep pressure on the team, and to signal that this effort was a top priority, Panetta assigned Gary to brief him every Tuesday afternoon, even if he had nothing new to report. As the months dragged on, Gary grew to dread Tuesdays.

  Sam was an analyst who was Gary’s deputy. They both oversaw counterterrorism missions along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Soon, the bin Lade
n hunt consumed their lives.

  And now maybe all of their hard work would finally pay dividends. Hell, it had led them to that fortress, right? Panetta just needed a little patience and a little luck. They were all trying hard. He had faith it would all come together. He took a deep breath, then reached for Bravo’s leash. Maybe a good walk with his dog would help Panetta unwind before he called it a day.

  Leon Panetta with Bravo.

  COUNTDOWN: 182 DAYS

  October 31, 2010

  Cleveland, Ohio

  On the last day of a four-state campaign tour, President Obama knew he faced an uphill battle. He was trying to prevent a Democratic Party meltdown. Midterm elections were only a few days away, and they had become a referendum on his presidency. The polls didn’t look good. Neither did the crowds at his rallies. The Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University held fourteen thousand people. But tonight, only eight thousand people were showing up to hear Obama. Not a good sign.

  Times were tough. Obama’s term had started out so full of promise, but slowly things had turned south. The optimism of his “Yes We Can” 2008 campaign had been ground down by economic recession. After two years on the job, the stress had turned his hair gray. He joked about it at campaign rallies, but it wasn’t really a laughing matter.

  Many voters had become disillusioned with Obama. And it led in part to the rise of a new conservative movement: the Tea Party. While members of the anti-Washington group endorsed traditional conservative causes—lower taxes and reduction of the national debt—some also embraced extreme conspiracy theories. They spread vicious rumors about Obama. They said he was a radical Muslim, an African carpetbagger born in Kenya—a bizarre claim pushed by Donald Trump, the New York City real estate magnate and star of The Apprentice, a glitzy reality TV show.

  If that wasn’t enough, U.S. troops were still bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite Obama’s campaign promise to end the wars. In fact, Obama had dramatically ramped up the American presence in Afghanistan from thirty thousand troops to more than one hundred thousand.

  Maybe the compound in Abbottabad would provide the good news Obama needed just now.

  After the meeting with Panetta and the CIA analysts back in September, Obama had tempered his expectations. What was the likelihood that bin Laden was really in Abbottabad? It didn’t seem plausible. But the outcome—whether bin Laden was captured, killed, or escaped—could determine whether he’d get another four years in the White House. How ironic would it be if the man responsible for bringing bin Laden to justice was a president that most Americans believed was a dove? If that happened, it wouldn’t be the first time Obama had confounded his critics.

  After two years on the job, Americans were still getting to know the president. For many, it was a miracle Obama had gotten this far. They liked to point to his election as a sign of just how far the United States had come since the Civil War.

  Obama’s father was black, a Kenyan scholarship student at the University of Hawaii. His mother was white, from Kansas. Their marriage didn’t last long, but their son, Barack Obama II, was born in 1961.

  He was raised by his grandparents in Hawaii and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in political science. Obama moved in 1985 to Chicago, where he worked on the South Side as a community organizer for low-income residents. Three years later, he entered Harvard Law School. He returned to Chicago to practice civil rights law. He taught constitutional law part-time at the University of Chicago Law School, first as a lecturer and then as a professor.

  Obama was restless. If he wanted to make a real impact, he’d have to get involved in politics. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996.

  In 2004, Obama ran for the U.S. Senate. That summer, he was invited to deliver the keynote speech in support of John Kerry at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Obama impressed the crowd—and the nation—with his youthful eloquence. His star was on the rise. His U.S. Senate bid in Illinois earned him 70 percent of the vote. He used that to catapult his run for the White House.

  The 2008 Democratic primary saw him locked in a tight battle with former first lady and then senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton. He defeated her, then picked Delaware Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate. Together, they defeated Republican lion John McCain.

  It hadn’t been easy.

  He was a black man with a funny name. Some on the right liked to focus on his middle name—Hussein—as if to say, “See, he’s not really American.” But Obama combined charisma, his big smile and baritone voice, his keen intellect, and a message of hope to overcome the doubters. He campaigned on an ambitious agenda of financial reform and reinventing health care and education.

  The night he won the election, a tidal wave of goodwill swept through large parts of the nation.

  Maybe he’d been too optimistic. The goodwill couldn’t last. He had inherited a global recession caused by the reckless behavior, deregulation, and bad loans by the big banks and insurance companies. The banking and housing collapse had plunged the United States into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

  After only nine months on the job, President Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.” Some questioned why this young politician was given a Peace Prize when the United States was still fighting two wars. What had Obama done to deserve it? The president himself said he was surprised and “deeply humbled.”

  At the awards ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, Obama sounded more like a hawk than a peacenik as he outlined his position on war. While he praised peacemakers of the past, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, he said sometimes wars were just. He was no pacifist.

  “I know there is nothing weak—nothing passive, nothing naïve—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.

  “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

  During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had said the United States would kill bin Laden, given the chance. Once in office, Obama authorized more deadly drone strikes against high-value targets than President Bush ever did. He also put pressure on Panetta to find bin Laden.

  Most of his antiterrorist actions happened in secret. If the public had known, it might have gone a long way to changing the narrative that Obama was too weak and cerebral to act. Maybe the narrative would change if the United States captured or killed bin Laden on the president’s watch. But Obama didn’t have time to think about that now. No, it was time to focus on his prepared speech. Maybe there was a chance he could still change a few voters’ minds before they headed to the polls.

  COUNTDOWN: 181 DAYS

  November 1, 2010

  Northern Virginia

  Gary rolled out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and padded to the kitchen. He filled a bowl with Raisin Nut Bran, splashed on some milk, and filled a glass with orange juice. He stared out the window as he ate, trying to look beyond his grizzled reflection into the dark backyard.

  Another early morning, another long day full of meetings and reports, telephone calls and emails. Abbottabad.

  He put the dishes in the sink and went to get dressed. His wife and kids would be stirring soon, getting ready for school and work. Gary hadn’t seen much of them recently. He was working longer hours, and that meant his wife was shouldering more of the household responsibilities. She hadn’t said much, but the tension was there.

  On his way out, Gary looked across the kitchen at the bowl and spoon standing in the sink, the m
ilk container still out on the counter. He stepped back to the sink, grabbed the sponge, and cleaned up after himself.

  He’d have to pick up some slack at home, even if his daily work happened to be the intelligence community’s top priority. Gary had been tracking bin Laden and his terrorist network for years. He still could not prove that bin Laden was in the compound, but he knew anyway. He just had to work harder, and soon a break would come along.

  His relentless work ethic had gotten him to this point—had guided him even when it looked like his career at the CIA was over. Gary was one of the leaders on a team in Baghdad that had warned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 that insurgents were behind an increase in violence in Iraq. Rumsfeld dreaded another Vietnam-like quagmire, with U.S. troops bogged down for years by an invisible enemy. He refused to listen to the agency. There was no insurgency in Iraq, Rumsfeld insisted, and the analysts who contradicted him paid the price. Gary, the team’s second-in-charge, was busted down to a desk job back at CIA headquarters in Langley. His brilliant career was “dropped in the shredder.”

  Now, years later, Gary could smile about it. He’d been sent to what he thought was a career-ending job, but like the mythical phoenix, he had risen from the ashes. He was now the team leader in the hunt for bin Laden. Funny how things worked out.

  He headed to his car for his predawn commute to CIA headquarters. With a deep knowledge of the Middle East, Gary was the head of the Counterterrorism Center’s Pakistan-Afghanistan Department. First thing this morning: a talk with Sam, his deputy, the agency’s leading expert on Al Qaeda. In reality, Sam and Gary were equals in this mission. They both were passionate and driven, consumed by the little pieces that helped complete the mosaic.