Last Sunday afternoon, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani
territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the Situation Room
of the White House to monitor the operation as it unfolded. PHOTO /
AFP
For years, the agonising search for Osama bin Laden kept coming
up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the
bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s
number plate.
The man in the car was Bin Laden’s most
trusted courier, and over the next month CIA operatives would track him
throughout central Pakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said,
he led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and
surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles from the
Pakistani capital.
On a moonless night eight months
later, 79 American commandos in four helicopters descended on the
compound, the officials said. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and
would not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their
allies in Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed
to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation.
Of
the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a
bullet in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped his picture with a
camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial recognition
programme.
And, just like that, history’s most
expansive, expensive and exasperating manhunt was over. The inert frame
of Osama bin Laden, America’s enemy No. 1, was placed in a helicopter
for burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again.
A
nation that spent a decade tormented by its failure to catch the man
responsible for nearly 3,000 fiery deaths in New York, outside
Washington and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, at long last had its
sense of finality, at least in this one difficult chapter.
For an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism
for a string of intelligence failures over the past decade, Bin Laden’s
killing brought a measure of redemption.
For a
military that has slogged through two, and now three vexing wars in
Muslim countries, it provided an unalloyed success. And for a president
whose national security leadership has come under question, it proved an
affirming moment that will enter the history books.
The
raid was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work,
including the interrogation of CIA detainees in secret prisons in
eastern Europe, where sometimes what was not said was as useful as what
was.
Intelligence agencies eavesdropped on telephone
calls and emails of the courier’s Arab family in a Persian Gulf state
and pored over satellite images of the compound in Abbottabad to
determine a “pattern of life” that might decide whether the operation
would be worth the risk.
As more than a dozen White
House, intelligence and Pentagon officials described the operation on
Monday, the past few weeks were a nerve-racking amalgamation of what-ifs
and negative scenarios.
“There wasn’t a meeting when
someone didn’t mention ‘Black Hawk Down,’” a senior administration
official said, referring to the disastrous 1993 battle in Somalia in
which two American helicopters were shot down and some of their crew
killed in action. The failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980
also loomed large.
Administration officials split over
whether to launch the operation, whether to wait and continue monitoring
until they were more sure that Bin Laden was really there, or whether
to go for a less risky bombing assault.
In the end,
President Obama opted against a bombing that could do so much damage it
might be uncertain whether Bin Laden was really hit and chose to send in
commandos. A “fight your way out” option was built into the plan, with
two helicopters following the two main assault copters as backup in case
of trouble.
On Sunday afternoon, as the helicopters
raced over Pakistani territory, the president and his advisers gathered
in the Situation Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it
unfolded. Much of the time was spent in silence. Mr Obama looked “stone
faced,” one aide said.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr fingered his rosary beads.
“The minutes passed like days,” recalled John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief.
The
code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers
watched Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, on a video screen, narrating
from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was
happening in faraway Pakistan.
“They’ve reached the target,” he said.
Minutes passed.
“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.
A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.” Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room.
Finally, the president spoke up.
“We got him.”
Filling in the gaps
Years
before the Sept 11 attacks transformed Bin Laden into the world’s most
feared terrorist, the CIA had begun compiling a detailed dossier about
the major players inside his global terror network.
It
wasn’t until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up Qaeda
operatives — and subjecting them to hours of brutal interrogation
sessions in secret overseas prisons — that they finally began filling in
the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers and money men Bin Laden
relied on.
Prisoners in American custody told stories
of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past
two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept 11 attacks,
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and al-Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj
al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised
suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and
that the courier probably was an important figure.
As
the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on
other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass
destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and the intense criticism for
using waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods that critics
said amounted to torture.
By 2005, many inside the CIA
had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and
the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s
counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a
bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more CIA case officers on the
ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With more agents in
the field, the CIA finally got the courier’s family name. With that,
they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National
Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and email messages
between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got
his full name.
Last July, Pakistani agents working for
the CIA spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after
weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad,
American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big,
perhaps even Bin Laden himself.
It was hardly the
spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding
place. Rather, it was a three-story house ringed by 12-foot-high
concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and protected by two security
fences. He was, said Mr Brennan, the White House official, “hiding in
plain sight.”
Back
in Washington, Mr Panetta met with Mr Obama and his most senior
national security aides, including Mr Biden, Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton and Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was
considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the
topic in their alerts to each other.
That day, Mr Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his presumed hiding place.
“It
was electric,” an administration official who attended the meeting
said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And
all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.”
There
was guesswork about whether Bin Laden was indeed inside the house. What
followed was weeks of tense meetings between Mr Panetta and his
subordinates about what to do next.
While Mr Panetta
advocated an aggressive strategy to confirm Bin Laden’s presence, some
CIA clandestine officers worried that the most promising lead in years
might be blown if bodyguards suspected the compound was being watched
and spirited the Qaeda leader out of the area.
For
weeks last fall, spy satellites took detailed photographs, and the NSA
worked to scoop up any communications coming from the house. It wasn’t
easy: the compound had neither a phone line nor Internet access. Those
inside were so concerned about security that they burned their trash
rather than put it on the street for collection.
In
February, Mr Panetta called Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of
the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, to CIA headquarters in
Langley, Va., to give him details about the compound and to begin
planning a military strike.
Admiral McRaven, a veteran
of the covert world who had written a book on American Special
Operations, spent weeks working with the CIA on the operation, and came
up with three options: a helicopter assault using American commandos, a
strike with B-2 bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint
raid with Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told about the
mission hours before the launch.
Weighing options
On
March 14, Mr Panetta took the options to the White House. CIA officials
had been taking satellite photos, establishing what Mr Panetta
described as the habits of people living at the compound. By now
evidence was mounting that Bin Laden was there.
The
discussions about what to do took place as American relations with
Pakistan were severely strained over the arrest of Raymond A. Davis, the
CIA contractor imprisoned for shooting two Pakistanis on a crowded
street in Lahore in January. Some of Mr Obama’s top aides worried that
any military assault to capture or kill Bin Laden might provoke an angry
response from Pakistan’s government, and that Mr Davis could end up
dead in his jail cell. Mr Davis was ultimately released on March 16,
giving a freer hand to his colleagues.
On
March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinions on the
options. Mr Gates was sceptical about a helicopter assault, calling it
risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial bombardment
using smart bombs. But a few days later, the officials returned with
the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000 pounds each. And how
could the American officials be certain that they had killed Bin Laden?
“It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn’t have given us a body,” said one American intelligence official.
A
helicopter assault emerged as the favoured option. The Navy Seals team
that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at training facilities
on both American coasts, which were made up to resemble the compound.
But they were not told who their target might be until later.
Last
Thursday, the day after the president released his long-form birth
certificate — such “silliness,” he told reporters, was distracting the
country from more important things — Mr Obama met again with his top
national security officials.
Mr Panetta told the group
that the CIA had “red-teamed” the case — shared their intelligence with
other analysts who weren’t involved to see if they agreed that Bin Laden
was probably in Abbottabad. They did. It was time to decide.
Around
the table, the group went over and over the negative scenarios. There
were long periods of silence, one aide said. And then, finally, Mr Obama
spoke: “I’m not going to tell you what my decision is now — I’m going
to go back and think about it some more.” But he added, “I’m going to
make a decision soon.”
Sixteen hours later, he had made
up his mind. Early the next morning, four top aides were summoned to
the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could brief the president,
he cut them off. “It’s a go,” he said. The earliest the operation could
take place was Saturday, but officials cautioned that cloud cover in the
area meant that Sunday was much more likely.
The next
day, Mr Obama took a break from rehearsing for the White House
Correspondents Dinner that night to call Admiral McRaven, to wish him
luck.
On Sunday, White House officials cancelled all
West Wing tours so unsuspecting tourists and visiting celebrities
wouldn’t accidentally run into all the high-level national security
officials holed up in the Situation Room all afternoon monitoring the
feeds they were getting from Mr Panetta. A staffer went to Costco and
came back with a mix of provisions — turkey pita wraps, cold shrimp,
potato chips, soda.
At 2.05 p.m., Mr Panetta sketched
out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the CIA
director began his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed
into Pakistan,” he said.
Across the border
The
commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a base in
Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan. The goal was to get in
and get out before Pakistani authorities detected the breach of their
territory by what were to them unknown forces and reacted with possibly
violent results.
In Pakistan, it was just past midnight
on Monday morning, and the Americans were counting on the element of
surprise. As the first of the helicopters swooped in at low altitudes,
neighbours heard a loud blast and gunshots. A woman who lives two miles
away said she thought it was a terrorist attack on a Pakistani military
installation. Her husband said no one had any clue Bin Laden was hiding
in the quiet, affluent area. “It’s the closest you can be to Britain,”
he said of their neighbourhood.
The Seal team stormed
into the compound — the raid awakened the group inside, one American
intelligence official said — and a firefight broke out. One man held an
unidentified woman living there as a shield while firing at the
Americans. Both were killed. Two more men died as well, and two women
were wounded. American authorities later determined that one of the
slain men was Bin Laden’s son, Hamza, and the other two were the courier
and his brother.
The commandos found Bin Laden on the
third floor, wearing the local loose-fitting tunic and pants known as a
shalwar kameez, and officials said he resisted before he was shot above
the left eye near the end of the 40-minute raid. The American government
gave few details about his final moments.
“Whether or
not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” said Mr Brennan, the
White House counterterrorism chief. But a senior Pentagon official,
briefing on the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Bin Laden “was
killed by US bullets.”
American officials insisted
they would have taken Bin Laden into custody if he did not resist,
although they considered that likelihood remote.
“If
we had the opportunity to take Bin Laden alive, if he didn’t present any
threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that,” Mr
Brennan said.
One of Bin Laden’s wives identified his
body, American officials said. A picture taken by a Seals commando and
processed through facial recognition software suggested a 95 per cent
certainty that it was Bin Laden. Later, DNA tests comparing samples with
relatives found a 99.9 per cent match.
But the
Americans faced other problems. One of their helicopters stalled and
could not take off. Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, the
commandos moved the women and children to a secure area and blew up the
malfunctioning helicopter.
By that point, though, the Pakistani military was scrambling forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani territory.
“They
had no idea about who might have been on there,” Mr Brennan said.
“Thankfully, there was no engagement with Pakistani forces.”
As
they took off at 1.10 a.m. local time, taking a trove of documents and
computer hard drives from the house, the Americans left behind the women
and children. A Pakistani official said nine children, from two to 12
years old, are now in Pakistani custody.
The Obama
administration had already determined it would follow Islamic tradition
of burial within 24 hours to avoid offending devout Muslims, yet
concluded Bin Laden would have to be buried at sea, since no country
would be willing to take the body. Moreover, they did not want to create
a shrine for his followers.
So the Qaeda leader’s body
was washed and placed in a white sheet in keeping with tradition. On
the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, it was placed in a weighted bag as an
officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into
Arabic by a native speaker, according to the senior Pentagon official.
The
body then was placed on a prepared flat board and eased into the sea.
Only a small group of people watching from one of the large elevator
platforms that move aircraft up to the flight deck were witness to the
end of America’s most wanted fugitive.
Reporting
was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, Charlie Savage and Steven Lee
Myers from Washington, Adam Ellick from New York, and Ismail Khan from
Peshawar, Pakistan (New York Times)
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