EPILOGUE
For all of its might—the reach of the military, the sophistication of the intelligence, the wizardry of the technology—the U.S. government didn’t know whether Osama bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound until Rob O’Neill walked into that dark bedroom on the third floor of the main house.
It was only then—in the middle of the night of May 1, 2011—that they knew for sure where bin Laden had been hiding.
But the government moved fast to exploit the tens of thousands of papers, the audio and video files, and bin Laden’s 228-page personal journal to solve the mystery of where the world’s most wanted terrorist had been and what he had been doing in the decade since Tora Bora.
The biggest surprise was how long he had been living in Abbottabad—since 2005. The first rule of operational security for any terrorist on the run is to keep moving—to sleep in a different location every night and never let anyone follow a trail to where you are. Not only did bin Laden stop moving, he set up a sprawling household in the compound. Two of his first four wives lived on the second floor. Then there was Amal, who at twenty-nine was a quarter century younger than her husband. She shared his bed on the third floor. There were also twelve children in the house, the youngest just age two.
John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor in the White House, told me: “He never should have been in that compound that long. I think he got a little bit too comfortable and confident that he was not going to be found out.”
Bin Laden boasted about how long he had been able to avoid detection. In an undated letter, apparently composed in the final year of his life, he wrote, “Here we are in the tenth year of the war, and America and its allies are still chasing a mirage, lost at sea without a beach.”
The second surprise was what bin Laden was doing in the compound. CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said, “Our pre-raid understanding of bin Laden’s role in the organization had been wrong. We’d thought that bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was running the organization on a day-to-day basis, essentially the CEO of Al Qaeda, while bin Laden was the group’s ideological leader, its chairman of the board…. Bin Laden himself had not only been managing the organization from Abbottabad. He had been micromanaging it.”
How much of a micromanager was he? The SEALs recovered a spreadsheet of expenses for the terror organization from April to December 2009. In 2010, bin Laden advised a deputy not to give advances to members of Al Qaeda on their monthly salaries. And there was an application recruits had to fill out. One of the questions: “Do you wish to execute a suicide operation?” along with space for contact information for the next of kin.
Through his courier—Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—he also tried to set strategy and maintain discipline inside Al Qaeda. Al-Kuwaiti carried letters and thumb drives that ended up with Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who acted as bin Laden’s chief of staff. The communications reflected his changing concerns over the years.
In 2005 to 2006, bin Laden worried about the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, in the civil war there. Al Qaeda (AQI) was slaughtering other Muslims, both Shia and Sunni. Bin Laden directed them to stop the attacks, which he feared were bad for the brand and would turn “the street” against Al Qaeda—shifting the focus away from the real enemy in the United States. Al-Zarqawi didn’t listen.
By 2011, bin Laden’s attention had turned to the Arab Spring sweeping across the Middle East. This wasn’t a “top down” global jihadist organization following orders. No, this was an organic, spontaneous movement that toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and threatened other dictators. Bin Laden hoped the Arab Spring would force the U.S. to withdraw from the region. But he feared the worst thing that could happen to a charismatic leader—becoming irrelevant.
Bin Laden did what he could to hold on to his platform. In 2007, he issued a half-hour-long video message, his first in three years. Concerned about his appearance, he dyed his hair and beard black. And he issued an average of five audiotapes a year.
One thing never changed: his obsession with striking the United States again. In 2011, coming up on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, he called for Al Qaeda affiliates to hit major American cities like New York and Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago, inflicting as many casualties as possible. He talked about assassinating President Obama as well as General David Petraeus, who had turned the tide in Iraq against al-Zarqawi and AQI. He continued to discuss attacking commercial airlines. He even suggested putting trees on railroad tracks to derail trains. But his lieutenants responded that Al Qaeda no longer had the finances or organization to carry out such attacks.
There was something else that came out of the Abbottabad raid—evidence of how bin Laden spent his time during his years in the compound. The SEALs found a stack of books ranging from the 9/11 Commission Report to Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars. But there were also fringe conspiracy tracts, like Bloodlines of the Illuminati and The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by a Holocaust denier.
He had tapes of Hollywood movies, kids’ cartoons (a favorite was Tom and Jerry), and an extensive collection of pornographic videos. Most memorable and devastating was a videotape of bin Laden watching clips of himself on television, hunched over, huddled in a blanket, wearing a knit cap, his beard gone gray, holding a TV remote control.
On April 26, 2011, bin Laden wrote a ten-page letter. He tried to latch on to the Arab Spring, writing, “What we are witnessing these days of consecutive revolutions is a great and glorious event.” He called for a media campaign to incite “the people who have not revolted yet, and encouraging them to rebel against the rulers.” He discussed whether and when to kill French hostages in Libya. And he issued guidance on operational security, stating, “It is proven the American technology and its modern systems cannot arrest a mujahid [a Muslim engaged in holy war] if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him.” Five days later, bin Laden would be shot dead inside his own compound.
So what did the U.S. military and intelligence do with what they described as the “single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever”? They engaged in a process known as F3EA—or Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, and Analyze. Within weeks, the Obama administration launched a new wave of attacks against senior Al Qaeda leadership. Three top operatives were taken out in the summer of 2011, along with three more in 2012 to 2013. One of the casualties was al-Rahman, the man who’d received bin Laden’s communications and served as his chief of staff.
The task force that reviewed the records issued more than four hundred intelligence reports over six weeks. They warned of Al Qaeda plots against U.S. targets, including trains. And the documents were used in the prosecution of Abid Naseer, who was found guilty in New York City of providing material support to Al Qaeda and conspiracy to use a destructive device.
But the most serious impact on Al Qaeda from the raid was something more subtle. Michael Morell said it forced the terror organization to focus on defense, not offense. “The decapitation strategy degrades a terrorist organization. And that happens for two reasons. One is you remove a senior leader. That person gets replaced by somebody, but it takes time for that person to learn his job. And so there is a period of time in which you have weakened the group.
“More important, the decapitation strategy forces a terrorist group to take extraordinary measures to protect themselves. It forces them to put security at the front of their mind. And when you force them to think about their own security, you don’t give them the opportunity to think about attacking you.”
In the years since Abbottabad, Al Qaeda has suffered a dramatic loss of reach and influence. There are still offshoots. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) continues to wage civil war in Yemen. In Somalia, the terror group Al Shabaab has close ties to Al Qaeda. There are branches in Northern and Central Africa, Syria and Pakistan and India. But what used to be known as Al Qaeda Central—a sprawling terror network directed from Afghanistan, and later Pakistan�
�has been rolled up.
There are several reasons for this. First, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s leader since Abbottabad, is no bin Laden and never was. He’s been dismissed as “pedantic” and lacking in charisma. Holed up somewhere in the mountainous tribal area in Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan, he has failed to inspire jihadists and new recruits.
Al Qaeda hasn’t given up. In December 2019, a military trainee inspired by AQAP shot and killed three U.S. sailors and wounded eight others at the naval air station in Pensacola, Florida. And in September 2014, Al Qaeda militants tried to hijack a Pakistani frigate at a naval base in Karachi and use it to attack and sink a U.S. Navy ship, sparking an international incident. The jihadists were stopped in an intense firefight.
But there are bigger factors in Al Qaeda’s decline. After President Obama pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq, a rival terror group emerged—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. At its height in 2015, ISIS held about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq, seizing the imagination of terrorists and jihadist wannabes across the Muslim world, and focusing the fears of the West. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, not al-Zawahiri, became the true successor to bin Laden.
And Al Qaeda not only lost its base in Iraq but also its original home in Afghanistan. That was where bin Laden and the mujahideen had fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. It was where Al Qaeda planned the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people. In 2000, Al Qaeda carried out a suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen American servicemen. And it was in Afghanistan where bin Laden planned and ordered the attacks of 9/11 that killed 2,977 people in New York City and the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
But Afghanistan has not been a safe haven for Al Qaeda since the U.S. launched its War on Terror in 2001. And now it may never be again. Since 2018, the Taliban has engaged in peace talks with the United States. In an agreement signed in February of 2020, the Taliban promised to sever ties with all terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda. Whether the Taliban will keep that promise is a question for the future.
In 2021, the United Nations released a counterterrorism analysis that amounted to a report on the State of Al Qaeda. It concluded, “Al-Qaida faces a new and pressing challenge concerning its leadership and strategic direction, following an exceptional period of attrition of its senior leaders in various locations.”
It noted the assassination of Abu Muhammad al-Masri along with his daughter, who was the widow of one of bin Laden’s sons. They were driving through the streets of Tehran when two gunmen on a motorcycle raced up to their car and took them out. The assassins were reportedly Israeli agents, acting on behalf of the U.S. Two things stood out. First, al-Masri was al-Zawahiri’s top deputy, and a mastermind of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa. Second, al-Masri was killed on August 7, 2020, the twenty-second anniversary of the embassy bombings.
The UN analysis also noted unconfirmed reports that al-Zawahiri died in October 2020. But the U.S. State Department website still offers a $25 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. The department notes that Al Qaeda’s “cohesiveness the past few years has diminished because of leadership losses from counterterrorism pressure in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the rise of other organizations such as ISIS that serve as an alternative for some disaffected extremists.”
In September 2020, on the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11, Al Qaeda released a long video recorded by al-Zawahiri. He attacked the late head of ISIS, al-Baghdadi, for breaking with Al Qaeda. He criticized the Arab television network Al Jazeera for broadcasting a report he said undermined the mujahideen. And he was especially angry that Al Qaeda “has been unjustly accused” of acting as an agent “of America, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia… and so on.” It was a long way from the charismatic message of the man the United States worked so long and hard to bring to justice.
In that same month of September 2020, Christopher Miller, who was then director of the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote an article for the Washington Post. “My assessment now is that Al Qaeda is in crisis,” he concluded. “The group’s leadership has been severely diminished by U.S. attacks…. Al Qaeda’s forces are similarly in disarray and focused simply on survival. They are on the verge of collapse.”
And yet it is premature to say the threat is gone. Michael Morell responded to Miller’s analysis, saying that while it’s true that core Al Qaeda is in crisis, “the jihadist extremist movement is now much bigger…. It now stretches from West Africa all the way to Southeast Asia,” and includes followers of ISIS. “So the number of jihadist extremists who are willing to use violence is magnitudes greater today than it was on September 10, 2001…. This threat remains significant.”
On April 14, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that he would pull all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by 9/11 of that year, the twentieth anniversary of the attack—ending America’s longest military engagement. In his speech, the president noted, “We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since.”
Biden explained that the terror threat in 2021 had changed dramatically from the threat of 2001. He said it “has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe…. With the terror threat now in many places, keeping thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country at a cost of billions each year makes little sense to me and to our leaders.”
The president concluded by talking about the raid on the compound. “Bin Laden is dead, and Al Qaeda is degraded in Iraq, in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war.”
It is testament to bin Laden’s terrible legacy that twenty years after 9/11—ten years after the daring mission that took him down—President Biden’s announcement still set off a fierce debate whether it was safe to withdraw from the country that served as his base of operations.
* * *
In the course of writing this book, I was fortunate to speak with most of the key players—political, intelligence, and military—in the effort to find and take out Osama bin Laden. At the end of interviews that went on for hours, sometimes over several days, I asked each one what they thought the biggest takeaways were from the effort.
Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security advisor, had been determined to conduct a rigorous policy review of how to respond to the Abbottabad lead, despite the fact that security was so tight and the discussions were so closely held, without normal staffing. “I’m a big believer in the old Dwight Eisenhower phrase that good process doesn’t guarantee you a good outcome. But bad process almost always guarantees a bad outcome. And indeed if you look at the biggest mistakes, if you look at the biggest strategic errors in national security this country has had in the last half century, many of them can be attributed to failed, undisciplined process.”
John Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor in the White House, who later became CIA director, said, “This type of work was the result of a decade of effort. The intelligence business is very tedious work that requires long-term focus. It just takes time. And there wasn’t one particular bit of intelligence that resulted in this. It was painstaking work over the course of many years.
“It wasn’t the sort of normal interagency process. But it was a process that was rigorous, was detailed and thorough. And there was a constant effort to try to get as much information and insight as possible, and with a very honest review of the options.”
Nick Rasmussen, NSC senior director for counterterrorism, said, “It sounds like I’m an Obama fanboy when I say it this way, but in effect he made up for whatever shortcomings the process had because of his ability to make a kind of reasoned judgment about the intelligence. I read him as not being troubled by the 40 percent versus 70 percent [likelihood bin Laden was in the compound] nearly as much as anybody else was, because he’d already made a judgment that it was either/or. It was probable enough that he had to consider the consequences of not acting, if it were tr
ue. And he had to consider the prospect and consequence of acting and having it not be true. So in a sense he was the smartest intelligence consumer. He didn’t get twisted around 40/70 nearly as much as others.”
Donilon said, “It really did underscore the capabilities that the U.S. has both in terms of intelligence, and also in terms of operational ability. It was a demonstration of a unique set of assets that the United States has. Hardly any other country has the ability to go anywhere in the world and protect our interests.”
Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, said, “The SEALs took the time to take the women and children from the house. They wouldn’t be injured by shrapnel. There wouldn’t be other damage done to the compound that could have injured or killed. When I thought about that, I was so touched that American warriors took the time to put themselves in continuing danger to save the lives of America’s enemies. And honestly, I thought that action by the SEALs spoke volumes about America’s values.”
Gary, the head of the CIA’s Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, was typically analytical, making three points. “You brought it to America. And America brought it back to you. We talk about ‘Where’s the battlefield?’ And when they move the battlefield to the United States, we’re not going to stop until it’s back there. He brought it to our homes and families, and we brought it to his home and family.
“Two, you remove the strategic head of Al Qaeda. He was the strategic leader, and we took that away from Al Qaeda. They can’t get it back, and I’ve read Zawahiri’s job evaluation. It’s not great.
“Finally, you close a book that opened on 9/11, dismantling the top leadership of the network that organized those attacks. Bin Laden played a unique and persistent role in directing the threat against the homeland. It was time to remove this threat. And the sooner you could do that, the better.”
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