Countdown bin Laden

by Chris Wallace

  Meanwhile, it was clear Chesney had to make some changes in his life. For Natalie, for the friends who stuck by him, and for Cairo. He went to a drug treatment program and got a handle on the drinking.

  He got his act together, but then the dog’s health began to fail. The vet said he didn’t have long to live. Heartbroken, Chesney and Natalie took Cairo on one last road trip, to New York City, to visit the 9/11 Memorial.

  Once home, Chesney knew Cairo was suffering. It was time to say goodbye.

  The dog’s last night in the house was March 31, 2015, Chesney’s thirty-first birthday. Cairo slept in his favorite bed. Chesney slept on the floor beside him.

  The next day, they went to the vet and picked up the euthanasia drugs. Chesney carried Cairo into the apartment in his arms, just like he had when the dog was wounded, just like he had inside bin Laden’s house, so he wouldn’t hurt his feet on broken glass. He gently placed him in his dog bed. Fighting back tears, Chesney injected the dog with Tramadol to make him feel more comfortable. And when he was relaxed, Chesney injected the drug that would kill his best friend. Cairo closed his eyes. Chesney lay there on the floor with him, whispering, “Everything is OK, buddy. I love you.”

  A few minutes later, it was over. Chesney and Natalie took Cairo’s body to a small crematorium. A few days later, they picked up his remains. The attendant gave them two urns with Cairo’s paw prints on the side. One held his ashes; the other, the hardware that had been inserted in his body to save his life years before.

  As he drove home, Chesney got to thinking. Cairo never knew how many human lives he had saved, or how he’d saved Chesney—how he’d helped him recover. Cairo knew how to make people happy.

  Chesney wrote a book about his time with Cairo: No Ordinary Dog: My Partner from the SEAL Teams to the Bin Laden Raid. It’s helped him deal with the emotional and physical pain. He knows he still has a rough road ahead. But whenever things get tough, he thinks of Cairo. And that’s helped him deal with all the challenges in his life.

  Admiral William McRaven

  After the raid, Bill McRaven’s legend continued to grow. After thirty-seven years in the military, he knew it was time to retire. He left the navy in 2015 and became the chancellor of the University of Texas. Two years later, he resigned that post, citing health concerns.

  Along the way, McRaven wrote several books and gave lectures on leadership, the quality he admired most in Leon Panetta and Barack Obama. They were leaders who built the team that gave McRaven “the latitude to do my job.”

  “Obama was the consummate team player…. He was the smartest man in the room every time we had one of these meetings,” McRaven said, adding that Obama made an “incredibly bold decision to do the mission.”

  In May 2020, McRaven gave a virtual commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he recalled his time in the SEALs and as a commander of the elite squad. But that day, McRaven really wanted to focus on the future—the big problems facing the world and how they could help solve them.

  As a boy in Texas, he’d always wanted to be Superman, “with his powers to fly, with his invulnerability, with his super strength. A hero who saved the world every day from some catastrophe.”

  But when he grew up and joined the military, he saw more than his share of war, death, and destruction. And that’s when he came to the hard truth: Superman and Captain America were not coming to the rescue. “If we are going to save the world from pandemics, war, climate change, poverty, racism, extremism, intolerance—then you, the brilliant minds of MIT—you are going to have to save the world. But, as remarkable as you are, your intellect and talent alone will not be sufficient,” McRaven said.

  No, to save the world, they and others like them would need courage, integrity, and compassion. McRaven might not have saved the world that day in May 2011, but his hard work, leadership skills, and grace under pressure paid off in a way the entire nation could appreciate.

  It was something understood by the men and officers who had served with him over the years. They showed how much they cared for him.

  On a wall leading to his second-floor office in Bagram, McRaven kept a poster tacked up with the words “Wanted: Dead or Alive” above bin Laden’s face. It had been there since before McRaven arrived in 2004, and it had served as a reminder to everybody in the building that getting bin Laden was the reason they were there.

  When McRaven walked into his office right after the raid, he noticed the poster was gone. He was pissed off. He thought, You’ve got to be kidding me. Somebody has already decided they’re going to steal the poster?

  He asked his officers Erik Kurilla and Tony Thomas what had happened to the poster. They smiled and lifted it from behind McRaven’s desk. They had framed it for him. McRaven had to hold back tears.

  The story didn’t end there. A few years later, in May 2016, McRaven put the poster up for auction to benefit the Texas Children’s Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. At the fund-raising event for the cancer center, that framed poster fetched $100,000.

  After the auction, the couple who bought the poster approached McRaven. The woman tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying because of all the background noise. Looking at her face, he could tell she had been crying.

  McRaven said he’d talk to her after the event. So after the three thousand people filed out, McRaven found the couple. Now, in the quiet of the banquet hall, the woman told him why she had placed the bid.

  On the morning of 9/11, she had been in one of the towers at the World Trade Center. She was nine months pregnant and left to go to a doctor’s appointment.

  “If I hadn’t gone to my ob-gyn appointment, I would have been in the building when the planes hit,” she said. “Who knows where it would have ended up?”

  She said they had a little girl. “So we named our child, Grace, by the grace of God.”

  McRaven was touched by their story. And he felt bad she had paid so much at the auction. “I would have given you the poster for nothing,” McRaven said.

  He knew the poster probably would have ended up in his garage. “But the fact that it meant so much to these people was just really important to me,” he said.

  The couple ended up donating the poster to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City, built on the site of Ground Zero. It’s a place where people can learn about what happened on that horrific day all those years ago.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There was only one way I was going to write another Countdown book. And that was if I could get the band back together. Fortunately, they all said yes. I hope you have enjoyed the result of a true team effort.

  I thought this was the perfect time to drill down into the bin Laden mission, and not just because this was the twentieth anniversary of that devastating day in September 2001. Of course, that was certainly part of it. But at a time when our nation is so divided—when we can’t agree about basic facts, about the truth of what happened—I thought it would be good to remind us all of this country at its best.

  And that’s what the bin Laden mission was—our nation’s leaders pulling together, putting aside partisan division and ego and turf—to bring the mastermind of 9/11 to justice. Our intelligence community refused to give up, and after nine long years of leads that went nowhere, finally followed a dead-end street in Abbottabad to a “fortress.”

  Our political leaders carefully considered all the evidence and then all the options and took a deeply-considered gamble on what was at best a fifty-fifty proposition.

  And then there was our great military that put together a meticulously planned mission that didn’t go as rehearsed and still achieved its objective.

  There was one problem in telling this story. The operation was so closely held—the principals were so focused on all they had to do—that no one kept a detailed record of exactly what happened. When I started my first interview with Bill McRaven, he made exactly that point. “If there is any disagreement about
when something happened, take the other person’s version over mine. I was too busy doing my job.”

  That presented a challenge in trying to write this story. But in hours of interviews, and still more time going over documents that are now declassified, we tried to get the timeline and details correct. And when we weren’t sure, we would go back to the key players and check with them again.

  In thanking people for making this book possible, I want to start with those public servants who played such a big role in the bin Laden mission and who were so generous to participate in long, detailed interviews. Some of them asked not to be acknowledged. So I will single out one: Gary, the dedicated CIA case officer who ran the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department. He has never told his story before and understood that by talking with us, he was putting himself in danger. We have done everything we could think of to protect his identity. But he was taking a risk, and I thank him for trusting us.

  Then there is the band that got back together: my esteemed cowriter Mitch Weiss and our treasured researcher Lori Crim. Mitch is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for the Associated Press. I was honored once again to share a historical foxhole with him. And there’s Lori, who has been my researcher on Fox News Sunday for more than a decade. I trust her to get the facts straight and keep me honest. And she always comes through.

  Then there are my two consiglieres in navigating the challenge of writing a book. My longtime manager Larry Kramer introduced me to Claudia Cross, of Folio Literary Management, before Countdown 1945. They took care of everything on the business side—took care of it beautifully—so we could focus on telling this story.

  And that brings me to our great publisher. Once again, we partnered with Avid Reader Press, led by editor and publisher Jofie Ferrari-Adler, and his boss, Jonathan Karp of Simon & Schuster. Every step of the way, we had the benefit of their wisdom, experience and support. And we had the backing of the great team they have assembled. I want to thank Ben Loehnen, Meredith Vilarello, Jordan Rodman, Alison Forner, Amanda Mulholland, Jessica Chin, Jonathan Evans, Ruth Lee-Mui, Brigid Black, Richard Ljoenes, Math Monahan, Julianna Haubner, Morgan Hoit, Carolyn Kelly, Elizabeth Hubbard, Gil Cruz, and Amy Guay.

  As hard as I worked on this book, I never forgot I had a day job. I thank the executives at Fox News who understood when I went missing for a day or two researching this book. I want to express my gratitude to Fox News Chief Executive Officer Suzanne Scott, President Jay Wallace, Senior Executive Vice President of Corporate Communications Irena Briganti, and Vice President Carly Shanahan, and my team at Fox News Sunday that occasionally had to pick up the slack, especially executive producer Jessica Loker and producer Andrea DeVito.

  Finally, Mitch and I again thank our families for their understanding while we spent so much time on this book, in addition to his work at AP and mine at Fox News. But after more than a year of sheltering at home during COVID, I suspect our families may have been grateful for some time without us.

  Once again, I want to conclude by expressing my gratitude to two members of my family. My daughter Catherine Wallace spent more than a decade in publishing before deciding to change careers. She has been so valuable in guiding me on what seems to be turning into a Countdown series.

  And then, there is my beloved wife, Lorraine. You put up with everything, including the day a lightning strike fried my computer. I love you and thank you more than I can express.

  More from this Series

  Countdown 1945

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  CHRIS WALLACE is the anchor of Fox News Sunday. In his eighteen years at Fox, Wallace has covered almost every key political event. Throughout his five decades in broadcasting, he has interviewed numerous U.S. and world leaders, including seven American presidents, and won every major broadcast news award for his reporting, including three Emmy Awards, the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and the Peabody Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World.

  MITCH WEISS is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist for the Associated Press, covering subjects ranging from military misconduct, government corruption, and white-collar crimes to the housing meltdown and unsafe medical devices. He is also the critically acclaimed author or coauthor of nine books.

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  NOTES

  COUNTDOWN: 247 DAYS

  “We need to see you alone”: Michael Morell, interview with author, October 29, 2020.

  “Can we go small?”: Gary, interview with author, February 9, 2021.

  “Why don’t we go back to my office”: Leon Panetta, interview with author, November 23, 2020.

  “We’ve found this guy named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti”: Morell, interview with author, October 29, 2020.

  from an unlikely source: Gary, interview with author, February 4, 2021.

  interrogators waterboarded him 183 times: Morell, interview with author, March 17, 2021.

  there was a chance he would lead them to bin Laden: Gary, interview with author, February 4, 2021.

  That’s when they intercepted a telephone conversation: Morell, interview with author, October 29, 2020.

  they placed people at key positions along the roads leading out of Peshawar: Ibid.

  “May Allah be with you”: Bowden, The Finish, p. 66.

  “It’s a fortress”: Gary, interview with author, February 4, 2021.

  Of all the things in the surveillance photos: Panetta, interview with author, November 17, 2020.

  “precise information”: Panetta, ABC News, This Week, June 27, 2010.

  “He is, as is obvious, in very deep hiding”: Ibid.

  “We need to know more”: Panetta, interview with author, November 17, 2020.

  COUNTDOWN: 236 DAYS

  O’Neill was a details guy: Robert O’Neill, interview with author, December 5, 2020.

  When he enlisted back: Ibid.

  when he led a small team on a dangerous mission: Ibid.

  “Mom, stop worrying”: O’Neill, interview with author, January 5, 2021.

  COUNTDOWN: 233 DAYS

  “talk a little bit about our continuing efforts”: Barack Obama, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov, September 10, 2010.

  “But you still haven’t captured him”: Reporter, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov, September 10, 2010.

  “wouldn’t solve all our problems”: Obama, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov, September 10, 2010.

  “I don’t oppose all wars”: Obama, National Public Radio, October 2, 2002.

  “If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights”: Obama, CNN, October 7, 2008.

  “I want bin Laden to come to the front”: Panetta, interview with author, November 17, 2020.

  “Are we any closer?”: Ibid.

  “If that’s the case, we’re hopeful”: Ibid.

  “Mr. President, it’s very preliminary”: Ibid.

  Tony Blinken, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, was skeptical: Bergen, Manhunt, p. 125.

  “quite careful”: Thomas Donilon, interview with author, January 19, 2021.

&
nbsp; “Number one, Leon, Michael”: Panetta, interview with author, November 17, 2020.

  COUNTDOWN: 232 DAYS

  “Hmmm… Is this my Christmas present?”: Jessica Ferenczy, interview with author, December 5, 2020.

  Frank suddenly fell into a seizure: Frank Dominguez, interview with author, December 10, 2020.

  “Today I always try to think”: Ferenczy, Legacy.com, September 11, 2010.

  COUNTDOWN: 205 DAYS

  Morell grew up in: Morell, interview with author, October 30, 2020.

  “It’s not good enough”: Morell, The Great War of Our Time, p. 346.

  “near perfect birdhouse”: Ibid., p. 346.

  “Economics is one of”: Ibid., p. 3.

  “Come to work here”: Ibid., p. 4.

  “That’s interesting…. But I’m a little busy”: Ibid., p. 6.

  “Calm down”: Ibid., p. 19.

  “You will really need”: Ibid., p. 29.

  “This is interesting”: Ibid., p. 31.

  “I want you to look”: Ibid., p. 41.

  “Michael, who did this?”: Ibid., p. 55.

  COUNTDOWN: 198 DAYS

  “Cairo! Come on, buddy!”: Will Chesney, interview with author, September 15, 2020.

  “Hang in there, boy”: Ibid.

  “Hey, buddy, how you been?”: Ibid.

  COUNTDOWN: 192 DAYS

  “If you want a friend”: Panetta, interview with author, November 23, 2020.

  “humanity in the world”: Ibid.

  “We’re silent warriors”: Ibid.

  “Who here is in charge”: Panetta, interview with author, November 17, 2020.