by Mark Bowden
The very idea of “special ops” had long been regarded critically by the conventional military. The elite, secret units that conducted these operations sucked up enormous resources and key personnel for occasional acts of amazing derring-do. When such missions worked they seemed almost magical, as in the Entebbe raid, where Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles to Uganda, surprised a much larger force, and rescued 102 hostages, killing all of the Palestinian hijackers who had seized a commercial French airliner. When they failed, as in the rescue mission to Iran in 1980, they nearly always seemed harebrained in retrospect. They were daring by definition. The idea was to attempt something bolder than the enemy could reasonably anticipate. The men involved accepted great personal risk, and those in command gambled their reputations and careers on the outcome. And it was in the nature of the work that failures made a huge splash while successes, except in rare instance like Entebbe, were often, by design, unadvertised and unnoticed.
The debacle in the Iranian desert had prompted the creation of JSOC, which is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Much blame for the failure fell on the clumsiness of efforts to borrow from various service branches unused to working together. So the mission had navy helicopters flown by marine pilots carrying army special operators deep into Iran to link up with air force piloted planes and crews. This motley force had left behind a desert staging area littered with destroyed aircraft and incinerated American bodies. Though one of the most spectacular failures in American military annals, the effect was not to kill special ops but to expand it. JSOC was created to integrate elite units from every branch into a smooth fighting force, and to equip them with the kind of vehicles and weapons needed for small, unorthodox missions. It brought together the army’s Delta Force and 75th Ranger Regiment, the air force’s Special Tactics Squadron, and Navy SEAL teams. Since the Iran mission had broken down trying to deliver the force to the target, the Night Stalkers, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was stood up at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where special choppers were designed and tested, and where the military’s best helicopter pilots trained specifically for special ops missions.
McRaven’s thesis, which would become part of the curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School, set out the core concept of special ops: that a small, well-trained force can deliver a decisive blow against a much larger, well-defended one. He defined such a mission as one “conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative.” Refining the key elements to success for such missions, he prescribed, in a nutshell, “A simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly and realistically rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.”
President Bush’s two large wars, each requiring hundreds of thousands of conventional soldiers, gradually proved the point that special ops was the most useful tool against al Qaeda. The tremendous effort and innovation that went into finding and fixing a target relied on men capable of executing the third F in the acronym F3EAD, the finish. The model McRaven had developed in his thesis primarily dealt with assaults on larger, well-entrenched enemy positions, but the principles of the lightning raid—simple, secret, and well rehearsed, executed with surprise, speed, and purpose—would prove devastatingly effective against an enemy that hid itself in a civilian population, in large part because pinpoint raids, as opposed to aerial attacks or direct assaults by conventional forces, avoided killing and injuring innocent bystanders. It also allowed for onsite collection of intelligence, which was essentially for feeding the target engine. Over the next decade, McRaven would get a chance to refine his strategies and put his theories into practice at a pace he had never imagined.
His two years in Washington before returning to a field command enabled him to combine necessary physical rehab with some high-level career rehab, developing the kind of relationships that are necessary to achieve flag rank. Rank was not something McRaven actively sought—indeed, years earlier, even before his accident, he regarded himself as the last person in the navy likely to become an admiral. But in just a few years he was back on his feet, serving in Iraq as deputy to JSOC commander General McChrystal, admiring the fusion of rapid intel and shooters his commander had implemented, and occasionally accompanying his men on night raids—the kind where you could drive or walk to the target. No more jumping out of planes, roping out of helicopters, or long marches in full pack for McRaven. During those years, first under McChrystal and then commanding JSOC himself, the admiral would help forge this new capability into the nation’s premier war-fighting instrument. The JSOC force itself doubled in size, to nearly four thousand men and women. It became, in effect, a fifth branch of the U.S. military, an army within an army. It was global, operating in secret in more than a dozen countries, and had been freed from strict mission-by-mission oversight from Washington. The need for speed trumped the desire for close control, so commanders like McChrystal and McRaven were given the authority to launch at least routine strikes without seeking approval all the way up the chain.
Through the first decade of the century, McRaven and his men had carried out more special ops missions than any such unit in history. He estimated that by the time he was summoned to Langley in January 2011 to be officially briefed on the Abbottabad discovery, he had been personally involved, commanding either remotely or on the ground, in thousands of them.
By early 2011, the CIA had its own small armies in the field. After 9/11, the nation had recovered quickly from its misgivings about spying and covert action. Agency operators, most of them former military, had worked ever more closely with JSOC throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Panetta and Morell returned from the White House meeting with Obama in December, the one where he directed them to start thinking about taking action, the first units they considered were their own.
The two broad options were to bomb the compound or to send a raiding party in. The latter would be far more complicated. It would require planning and rehearsal, and involve a variety of special talents, so the instinct was to develop that option in-house. This had the advantage of keeping the now four-month-old secret contained. Outside the agency, those who knew about the compound, or who were supposed to know, could still be counted on two hands. There was the president, of course, and a few top members of his foreign policy staff, including Brennan and Donilon. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, had been told. At the Department of Defense there were only four people, Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen, Vice Chairman General James “Hoss” Cartwright, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers.
The CIA teams were excited about the mission and were ready to do it themselves . . . soon. But Panetta and Morell had time. The president had also told them to work harder on identifying the mystery man. Before committing themselves to using their own operators, they wanted to at least consult with McRaven.
All the JSOC commander knew before getting the call was that the CIA had a new lead on bin Laden. He had heard that before over the years, and in each case the lead had failed to pan out. Early in the war in Afghanistan his men had spent a lot of time chasing bin Laden’s ghost. This time he was told that the lead seemed better than most, but McRaven didn’t think much of it until he was summoned to Langley. That had not happened with any of the previous leads. At the conference table in the deputy director’s office, McRaven and one of his top aides met with Panetta, Morell, and the heads of the CIA’s own strike force. He was shown pictures of the compound. No one had glimpsed the inside of the buildings. Everything was heavily couched in maybes. Morell made it clear that they were not certain that bin Laden was really there, and they weren’t sure yet what course the president would decide to take, if any. But on that qualified basis, they launched into a tactical discussion. If you were going to hit that target, how would you do it?
The CIA men had had a head start. They sketc
hed five different options. That fact alone was telling. McRaven could see at a glance that there was really only one way to do it. He had ruled out a bombing option immediately. Whatever the advantages in simplicity and reduced American risk, his educated guess was that it would take upwards of fifty thousand pounds of ordinance to destroy a compound of that size and make sure bin Laden, if he was there, wouldn’t survive. You had to consider the possibility of tunnels or an underground bunker—like the one where Saddam had been hiding. That explosive power would kill everyone inside the compound and quite a few people nearby.
A ground raid, on the other hand, posed relatively few problems. His men had been hitting compounds like this every night for years, often a dozen or more a night. This one was unremarkable. It had a three-story residence, a smaller outbuilding, and high stone walls all around it. The layout and location of the compound clearly indicated to him the right way to assault—a small helicopter-borne force.
He kept this thinking to himself as the CIA unit commanders described the options they had worked up. When it was his turn to comment, McRaven congratulated Panetta and Morell on developing such a strong lead and proceeded to walk them through how JSOC would do it. You would need a team big enough to secure the compound once you were inside. The primary challenge was its location. Abbottabad was in a “denied” space 150 miles from friendly territory, which meant that delivering the force to the target and safely extracting it without triggering a shooting war with Pakistan would be the biggest problem. It was, as the admiral was fond of saying, “sporty,” but doable. It would increase the complexity of the mission, and complexity multiplied the number of things that could go wrong. But those problems aside, how to actually raid the compound and the buildings were old hat. The tactics McRaven’s teams had developed were built on years of trial and error, missions that had worked and those that didn’t. A lot of good men had died perfecting these skills. He ran through for the CIA men how his team would proceed, and why. He even suggested the right man for the mission, his SEAL Team Six commander, who had earned a legendary reputation—he had led the mission that had killed three Somali pirates in 2009, rescuing an American freighter captain. McRaven explained that the most valuable thing his team would bring to the mission was experience. No matter how well the operation in Abbottabad was planned, long experience taught that something would go wrong. Something always went wrong. What you needed were men who could think on their feet and make good decisions under pressure, men who had seen all manner of snafus and survived. No one in the world could rival JSOC’s seasoning. The SEAL team he had in mind had just rotated back to the United States and could get to work on the mission right away.
Morell and Panetta were impressed. Their guys were good, but McRaven’s men were the pros.
“If the president decides to do this on the ground,” Panetta told Morell, “then JSOC are the guys to do it.”
Panetta pushed the agency to come up with creative ways to get a better look inside the compound, without much luck. The agency team spent hours kicking around possibilities. No idea, no matter how outlandish, was rejected without serious discussion. Was there some way to flush the residents out of the compound? A fire? A stink bomb? A summons to emergency prayer? Panetta kept a chart, and every suggestion was logged on to it. A suggestion was not crossed off until it was either tried or seriously discussed.
Was there a way to position a camera closer, say on a tree that could peer down over the walls? What about one farther away on high ground but with better optics? How about sewage lines: could a listening device or a camera be threaded in that way? There was a tree inside the compound. Could they put a small camera or listening device up in it somehow? Some of these ideas were tried but yielded nothing of value. The tree inside the compound was chopped down before anyone could figure out a way to get at it—spooky, because it was as if someone inside the compound had seen the director’s chart. One by one, the schemes either fizzled or were discarded. They were extremely careful not to tip their hand. The compound had clearly been designed to hide the family inside, and designed well. It would not take much to spook them. Any hint that they were under surveillance would blow everything. Morell lived in fear of waking up one morning to discover that, overnight, the compound had emptied.
One creative idea may have grown out of the observation that the only time any member of the hidden family emerged from the compound was when a child was taken to the doctor. The agency got the idea of opening a free hepatitis B vaccination clinic for children nearby. Maybe they could draw some of the hidden children out that way. They found a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, whose passion was setting up such clinics all over the country. He would go door-to-door notifying residents and persuading them to bring their children in for shots. Agents approached Afridi and offered him a substantial sum—something in six figures worth of American dollars—enough to sustain his program for some time. All he would have to do in return was give them the needles he used. They never told him why they wanted the needles, but the plan was to recover DNA from them and analyze it. The CIA had DNA samples from close relatives of bin Laden. If genetic material from one of the hidden children closely resembled it, it would come very close to proof positive that the Sheik was the father. The clinic would be real, the inoculations completely legit. The children of Abbottabad would emerge healthier and the agency might get the confirmation it needed. The agents did not hide their affiliation from Afridi; he was told that the CIA was funding the program.
Over the next few months, as planning proceeded at Langley and in the White House, Afridi set up the clinic. He went door-to-door, inviting everyone to bring in children. He inoculated many. But when he knocked on the door to the big compound in Bilal Town, no one answered.
No one would ever answer.
Planning for either an air or a ground assault on the compound proceeded through February. Despite Panetta’s push for an answer, the CIA was no closer to the identity of the Pacer. McRaven’s man was drawing up detailed plans in an unmarked office on the first floor of the agency’s printing plant, and the air force was plotting out a B-2 mission to obliterate the compound in one blinding strike. All of this required enlarging the circle of knowledge. Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, was read in by her boss Mike Vickers, and she began working closely with General Cartwright. The various deputies were now meeting every week, usually at the White House but sometimes at the CIA, getting updates on the intelligence-collection efforts and discussing every possible permutation of a raid. These “deputies” meetings were usually attended by Cartwright, Morell, Vickers, Robert Cadillo, the deputy director of National Intelligence, and sometimes John Brennan and deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough. Toward the end of the month, McRaven sat in on a few of these sessions, prepping for a March 14 principals meeting with Obama, where they would formally present the president with recommendations.
As usual, the national security agenda was full. An earthquake and tsunami three days earlier had caused widespread death, destruction, and dislocation in Japan, and the U.S. military was mobilizing to deliver humanitarian assistance. There were sweeping popular protests in Egypt, as the “Arab Spring” spread across the Middle East—an inspiring but potentially treacherous period of change in a region whose stability had long been vital to U.S. interests. In mid-February, Obama had called for Egypt’s longtime president Hosni Mubarak to step down, and was now weighing options for some kind of limited intervention in Libya, where dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s long-standing regime was being pressured by increasingly violent protests. And in Pakistan itself, a CIA contractor working out of the Lahore consulate, Raymond Allen Davis, had shot and killed two armed men on the street when he said they had tried to rob him. He was under arrest and facing murder charges, and the United States was having the devil of a time trying to extract him. Local frustration over American policies in Pakistan had warped the incident into a standoff, with demonstrators and some pr
osecutors demanding that the CIA contractor be prosecuted and punished. So at the same time options were being prepared for various ways of violating Pakistani sovereignty with a raid on Abbottabad, the White House and State Department were engaged in delicate discussions over Davis.
It was in this context that Obama met with the National Security Council to formally consider the CIA’s case. It was time to start making the important decisions. Obama was acutely aware that the longer he delayed, the more people were read in on the secret—and greater became the likelihood that it would leak, or that something critical would change. The group met in the White House Situation Room, where much of the drama over the next two months would unfold.
The Situation Room is a few steps down from the ground floor of the West Wing, the largest in a complex of small meeting rooms, and is hardly what a set designer would imagine as the decision center for the world’s only superpower. Long ago nicknamed “the Woodshed,” it was installed by President Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis to create a secure command center fully wired for global telecommunications. It is windowless and cramped, much smaller than the dining room in most grand residences. Much of the mahogany paneling that gave the room its nickname was removed in a 2007 renovation to make it easier for electronic technicians to get at the cables and wiring. Now its beige walls are hung with flat video screens. The ceiling is low and lined with harsh recessed fluorescent lights. The room is all but filled by a long mahogany table at its center, polished to a high gloss. Around it are thirteen high-backed black leather chairs. The blue carpet beneath has a yellow border around the edges, on which are lined smaller black leather chairs for deputies and staff members. The president sits at the north end of the table beneath the circular presidential seal. There is no chair at the opposite end, which is open to afford a clear view of a video screen that reaches from tabletop to ceiling. There are leather desk pads at each place around the table for the secretaries of defense and state, the national security adviser, the vice president, the director of National Intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the president, and, for nearly all of these sessions, the CIA director and his deputy and various others. Until his work in the field took him away, Admiral McRaven was present.
