Countdown bin Laden

by Chris Wallace

  The Pakistani air defense might easily shoot down the helicopters before they even reached the compound. Or the helos would be blown up as they hovered over the target, waiting while the men were inside. (After the SEALs were in the compound, the choppers would wait at a designated spot on the outskirts of the city.) At the most, they had thirty minutes to get in, get bin Laden, and get out. That’s it. The military academy was right down the street. They could be surrounded by Pakistani troops. If that happened, what would they do? Would they fight or surrender? What did the Pakistanis do to prisoners?

  O’Neill jokingly called his team the Martyrs’ Brigade, the most likely of all to die.

  SEALs usually never talk about the dangers of a mission or their own mortality. They keep that to themselves. But that night, one guy looked at O’Neill and said, “Once we go on this mission, we aren’t going to see our kids again, or kiss our wives.”

  The men let themselves consider that. The conversation became existential. Why were they doing this? Why were they willing to sacrifice their lives? For what?

  The questions finally petered out to silence.

  O’Neill spoke up. “We’re doing it for all those people who went to work in New York City that Tuesday morning, thinking they would come home, see their wife and children. But they didn’t. They were innocent. They had no way to defend themselves. Now we’re going to fight for all those people who died that day. We’re going to kill the guy who was responsible for all that.”

  The energy in the room shifted. The men stood up, stretched, smiled. They were fired up. If they could have gone into Abbottabad that night, they would have.

  Maybe they would defy the odds. It was a long-shot mission, true, but maybe everything would break their way and they’d all get home. Everybody’s got to die someday. At least they would go out doing something noble.

  COUNTDOWN: 16 DAYS

  April 15, 2011

  Langley, Virginia

  The SEALs had finished their rehearsals in North Carolina and were headed to Nevada for a full-dress rehearsal, where they’d simulate the entire raid from beginning to end. Mullen and other top leaders would be there. It would be taped so Obama could watch it during the next meeting in the Situation Room.

  Panetta was juggling the bin Laden mission and a hundred other issues. He had asked the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, an elite corps of secret mission experts, to evaluate the intelligence. They were skeptics, suspicious of any information that didn’t come from human beings. They’d argued that the U.S. needed to get “eyes inside the compound” before carrying out the raid, but Panetta had already tried everything he and his team could think of to confirm The Pacer was bin Laden.

  They had CIA agents in a safe house in Abbottabad who collected intelligence day and night. They had a doctor running a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, trying to collect DNA samples from the people living inside the fortress. But so far, nothing. None of the family members had been vaccinated. And with the tight deadline, who knew if that would even be possible.

  And Panetta was under pressure from other factors, too. A few days earlier, he’d met with Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence. Panetta and Pasha usually got along well. When Panetta visited Pakistan in 2009, Pasha had insisted that the CIA director stay at his house. But lately, the relationship between the CIA and the ISI had gone salty, thanks to the Raymond Davis incident and the ongoing fighting along the Afghan border. The CIA was all over Pakistan, and the country was getting fed up. The four-hour meeting in Panetta’s office illustrated just how complicated those issues were, and how much work it would take to repair the relationship.

  The U.S. drone campaign was targeting more Taliban positions on Pakistani soil. Pasha wanted more notice before the targets were hit, but that was unlikely to happen—the U.S. believed the ISI would tip off their targets in advance. Pasha also pushed Panetta to cut the number of CIA agents working inside Pakistan. The United States had several hundred CIA personnel—operators, contractors, and special operations forces—in the country. Too many, Pasha had told Panetta.

  Panetta pushed back. He said Pasha was doing too little to stop the Taliban fighters’ movements in Pakistan. At the end of the meeting, both sides issued a joint statement, saying they agreed to work closely “on our common fight against terrorist networks that threaten both countries.”

  The statement was all well and good, but sharp differences remained. And if the United States conducted the Abbottabad raid, Panetta didn’t know how long it would take to mend fences with Pakistan—or what the fallout would be. Pakistan might well retaliate by tossing all CIA personnel from the country. They could limit or end reliable supply routes the U.S. military used to move equipment to Afghanistan. Was one terrorist worth all that risk?

  Panetta couldn’t think about that now. His next meeting with Obama was coming up soon, and he wanted to hear from analysts and operators who had been watching the compound. He wanted their latest assessment about who lived in the house. How certain were they that bin Laden was inside? He would soon have to make a decision on what to recommend to the President: “Go or no go.”

  He waited at the director’s conference table on the seventh floor of the main CIA building, as Gary, Sam, Maya, and others pulled up chairs and sat down. Panetta closed the door and took his seat.

  There was a sense of urgency in his voice. He reminded everyone of how far they had come, but also of the shortfalls with the intelligence. It was time to make the decision, he said.

  Panetta said he knew they had been working hard for years to find bin Laden. But now they were at a critical point in the mission. And if they made the right decision, he said it would justify all the sacrifices they had made.

  “I need all of you to give your honest sense of whether you think there’s sufficient justification here to put people in danger and send a commando team into that compound,” he said.

  Then, one by one, Panetta started going around the table.

  “Sam, what do you think?” Panetta asked.

  Panetta had worked closely with Sam on the bin Laden operation and several other Al Qaeda cases. He knew Sam was cautious by nature, so he didn’t expect Sam’s answer. “I think there’s an 80 percent chance that he’s there,” Sam said.

  Panetta turned to Maya, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the bin Laden brief and the compound. She had been acting as the liaison between the SEALs and the agency, the go-to person, the one who could tell them what to expect inside and outside the compound.

  “What do you think the probability is that The Pacer is bin Laden?” Panetta asked.

  She didn’t hesitate: “Ninety-five percent.” She said she was “supremely confident,” and Panetta noticed that it took everyone aback. It was like she was saying, “I don’t know what all you weaklings are concerned about.”

  Panetta continued around the table. Most of the others weren’t as confident as Maya. But overall, the team believed they had a strong case. They believed that bin Laden was there.

  And so, when it was all said and done, Panetta knew he still didn’t have a clear picture. There was no mathematical equation, no algorithm to show bin Laden was there. Maybe that’s why he kept coming back to the same question—one that had been keeping him up at night: Without solid intelligence, was it worth the risk? Only by going ahead with the mission would they know for sure the answer to that question.

  COUNTDOWN: 13 DAYS

  April 18, 2011

  Somewhere in Nevada

  The aluminum bleachers filled from the top down, with the boots-on-the-ground men taking the top tiers and the higher-ranking operators and officers filing in and filling the gaps. A low buzz of voices echoed down from the rafters of the airplane hangar. The top brass took the places down front, where their view of the floor was not obstructed.

  It was show time at the secret air force base tucked away in the highly classified Area 51 in the
Nevada desert. Outside it was sunny and more than a hundred degrees. But everyone who mattered was inside the building. McRaven was here. So was Admiral Olson. The CIA guys filed in: Jeremy Bash, Gary and his team, a few other officials, looking nondescript.

  They all knew it was Mike Mullen’s voice that would carry the most weight. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had become Obama’s most trusted military advisor. His take on the mission—whether the SEALs could pull off such an audacious raid—would be critical.

  A hands-on commander, Mullen had flown out to the final dress rehearsal to show his support for the SEALs. More important, he wanted to see for himself if they were confident about the operation, something he’d only know by looking into their eyes.

  Mullen understood this could be the most important mission of his long career. He had been part of the military establishment for decades. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1968, he had worked his way up, earning a reputation among officers and sailors as a “tell it like it is” kind of guy.

  In 2007, George W. Bush nominated Mullen to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After he was confirmed, Mullen pushed for shorter combat tours, and stepped up treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in returning soldiers and sailors.

  Now here he was, inside the massive hangar. The noise died down. The rehearsal of concept, known as a ROC drill, commenced. The drill was an important part of any major mission. It was a walk-through of the battle plan. Everyone from the commanders to their subordinates had to know their roles and responsibilities—what they had to do and when they had to do it.

  A huge map of eastern Afghanistan was spread out across the floor, with “Operation Neptune’s Spear” lettered across the bottom. The tactical plan was there for all to see: the helicopter flight paths, a mock-up of the residential compound. A narrator opened the drill, reading from a script that detailed the mission.

  The helicopter pilots were scheduled to speak first. McRaven was a little worried about that because he hadn’t had time to tell Mullen about a change he’d made after his team discovered a potential problem while reviewing the flight plans.

  A day earlier, Colonel Thompson had approached McRaven with bad news. After his team calculated the weight of the men and the temperatures they expected on the night of the operation, they weren’t sure the Black Hawks could make it to the target and back without refueling. Stopping to refuel inside Pakistan could add another layer of danger to an already perilous mission.

  McRaven was stunned. All along, they’d planned to fly two Black Hawks to the target. After the SEALs fast-roped into the compound, the helos would fly to a designated spot near the fortress, where they’d wait for thirty minutes on the ground while the men looked for bin Laden. Then, the choppers would return to the compound to pick up the SEALs before heading back to Afghanistan. Every calculation showed they could do it without refueling. Now, right before the ROC drill, there was a wrench in the works.

  Refueling the Black Hawks meant bringing in an additional MH-47 Chinook with a forward air refueling pod (FARP), a spare gas tank. That meant another helo in Pakistani airspace. That meant finding an isolated area in Pakistan where the choppers could land and spend twenty minutes on the ground refueling. They’d have to do it without being detected. Mission impossible, right?

  Thompson apologized. But he said it was better to plan for this now than to risk running out of diesel in Taliban-controlled Pakistan.

  McRaven was frustrated—during earlier briefings with Mullen, Gates, and Obama, he had said they were going to do the mission without refueling. He had pushed Thompson and his planners hard to find an option that only deployed two helicopters to the compound. This was already an incredibly dangerous mission, and adding more helicopters would only increase the risk. Every new obstacle made it more likely that the president would nix the whole operation.

  But McRaven couldn’t blame Thompson. His team was the best in the world. He had been asking them all along to go over every little detail of the command-and-control part of the mission. Every possible problem had to be identified ahead of time. And that’s what they’d done.

  “I assume you guys have identified a secure FARP location,” McRaven said.

  “We have, sir,” Thompson said.

  “Let’s make sure the refueling is part of the rehearsal,” McRaven said.

  “We’ve already taken that into account, sir,” Thompson said.

  McRaven slapped Thompson on his back and smiled. “We’ll be fine, JT.”

  And he meant it. He knew how long and hard his men had worked on the plans and the practice sessions. He understood that was the key to a successful mission. Hell, that was a major part of his master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School. Every historical mission he had analyzed showed that when a particular part of an operation wasn’t rehearsed, that portion invariably failed. And he wasn’t going to let that happen with Operation Neptune’s Spear.

  The team had rehearsed every individual aspect of the mission multiple times, but they still hadn’t put together the entire production. This was why today was so important.

  One reason McRaven had picked this part of Nevada was because it looked and felt like eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. The flight path in Nevada included high mountains, vast valleys, and long stretches of desert. For the rehearsal, they wanted to reduce from ninety seconds to a minute the time it took the helicopters to reach the compound once they emerged from the mountains. Keeping it to a minute would give the sleeping inhabitants of the house little time to awake, react, and escape.

  Another reason for choosing Nevada was privacy. In North Carolina, they couldn’t fly two fully loaded Black Hawks 162 miles each way—the distance between Jalalabad and Abbottabad—without raising some suspicion. In Nevada, they wouldn’t bother the neighbors.

  McRaven wanted to see how many SEALs with all their equipment could actually fit in the helos. The seats had been removed to make each craft lighter, and there was more room inside than most of the SEALs were used to. Still, as McRaven said, he wanted his men to be “crammed in the back so they would get the experience of ‘where does my gear go?’ and ‘is my weapon OK?’ ”

  He wanted them to practice the refueling on the way back. Some men frowned on that. They told McRaven they knew how to refuel a helicopter.

  But McRaven was leaving nothing to chance. They were going to refuel. They were going to do every single thing in rehearsal just as they would on the mission.

  And sure enough, they discovered a problem. Because of the special configuration of the modified Black Hawk, they discovered that the nozzle from the Chinook’s FARP didn’t quite fit into the slots for the fuel tanks. They had to jerry-rig it. Better to find that out before the mission than during—especially if they were being chased by the Pakistani military.

  McRaven sat stone-faced in the hangar and listened as the pilots walked everyone through the flight path from Jalalabad to Abbottabad. They discussed how they would handle any possible scenario if something went wrong.

  Each assault team leader got up and described what they were responsible for during the operation. Chesney listened carefully, but he already knew the details by heart.

  A Black Hawk carrying his team and another would land outside the compound. His squad, which included Cairo, an interpreter, a couple of snipers, and a gunner, would get off first. They’d quickly move into position to provide perimeter security while the chopper dropped off the second group inside the compound.

  Chesney’s job was to hold security outside the fortress. They might encounter Al Qaeda fighters, or maybe Pakistani police or military. Curious locals might come to the scene to see what was going on. Either way, if units showed up and caused trouble, they would do everything to protect the assault teams inside. If the other teams didn’t find bin Laden in the house, Chesney would bring Cairo inside to do a more extensive search. For Chesney, it seemed plausible that if The Pacer really was
bin Laden, he’d have a few hiding spots worked out.

  After each team presented its plan, members of the audience asked questions. Most of them dealt with how the perimeter team would handle onlookers.

  “What is your plan if you’re confronted by local police or military?” one member asked a team leader.

  “Sir, we will de-escalate if at all possible,” he said. “First using the interpreter, and then using the dog. As a last resort we will use force.”

  Mullen paid close attention to all the details, then asked the SEAL chief petty officer a question: “How fast do we think the Pakistanis could react once they know we’re on the ground?”

  Without missing a beat, the man rattled off locations. There was a police station about one mile from the compound. An entire infantry battalion was stationed four miles from the target.

  “We assess that the police will arrive first, but that it would take at least thirty minutes before an armed element from the battalion arrived. Our bigger concern is the locals who live in houses just across this small ditch,” he said, pointing to the map on the floor. “With all the noise from the helos, it’s highly likely they will come out to see what’s going on.”

  He stepped over to Mohammad, the American interpreter who was sitting with the assault force. Mohammad was fluent in Urdu and Dari, the most common languages spoken in the area.

  “If a crowd develops, Mohammad will tell them it’s a Pakistani exercise, that they should go back to their homes,” he said. He paused for a moment and grimaced. He knew it wasn’t a great cover story. “It should buy us a few minutes,” he added, “and that’s all we really need.”

  Mullen was impressed by the plan. But it was more than that. He had been around a lot of Special Forces units, but this one stood out. It was a tough, athletic group, a seasoned unit with a “ridiculous amount of experience.”