The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

by Mark Bowden

  The only major dissenters were Biden and Gates and, by the next morning, Gates had changed his mind.

  Biden was characteristically blunt. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go,” he said. “We have to do more things to see if he’s there.”

  The vice president was never shy about political calculations. He believed that if the president decided to choose either the air or the ground option, and if the effort failed in any of the many ways it could, Obama would lose his chance for a second term. Biden felt strongly about it, and never hesitated to disagree at meetings like this, something the president had encouraged him to do. In this case he even disagreed with his top adviser on such matters, Tony Blinken, who was not asked for an opinion at this meeting but who had earlier made it clear to the president that he strongly favored the raid.

  Gates spoke with quiet authority against it. He favored taking the shot from the drone. He acknowledged that it was a difficult call, and that striking from the air would leave them not knowing whether they had killed bin Laden, but he had been working at the CIA as an analyst in 1980 when the Desert One mission failed. He had, in fact, been in this very Situation Room when the chopper collided with the C-130 at the staging area in the desert and turned that effort into a gigantic fireball. It was an experience he did not want to revisit. He had visibly blanched the first time he had heard that McRaven was planning a helicopter-refueling stop in a remote area outside Abbottabad, similar to the one inside Tehran in 1980. The contours of this mission looked so much like the earlier failure that it rattled him. He had more of a personal sense for what another disaster like it would mean. He also mentioned the Black Hawk Down episode. He remembered how painful the loss of life and loss of face had been for the previous presidents Carter and Clinton, and he smelled the same potential here. As defense secretary, he also had a deeper appreciation than anyone else in the room for logistics, for the importance of sustaining the huge daily flow of fuel and matériel from Pakistan necessary to the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Blowing up the always dicey relationship with Pakistan would likely short-circuit that vital artery. There was so much to lose, he said, and the intelligence indicating bin Laden’s presence in the compound was still so flimsy—strictly circumstantial. Leiter’s presentation had driven that home for him. A raid gone wrong would have a huge downside: loss of the SEAL team or a potential hostage situation, a complete break with Pakistan, attacks on the U.S. embassy in Islamabad . . . So he told the president that he would choose the drone. If bin Laden was the Pacer, then they stood a very good chance of killing him. If not, if they missed or they were wrong, it would be disappointing, but the cost would not be so great. That was his advice, and it hung heavily in the room. It carried the weight of long experience and Gates’s own formidable reputation.

  Cartwright agreed with Gates, but that was expected. He had put the drone option on the table, and after further testing he was more confident than ever that the small missile would do the job. It was the simplest and least risky way to go. The missile also won the endorsement of Leiter. He had expressed relatively low confidence that the Pacer was bin Laden but endorsed taking a killing shot at the fellow anyway.

  Everyone else favored sending in the SEALs. At first it didn’t seem like Clinton would. She had famously faulted Obama years earlier for asserting that he would take a shot in Pakistan unilaterally if there was a good chance of getting bin Laden, and now, as secretary of state, she would bear the brunt of the diplomatic fallout if he did. Presenting a detailed assessment of pros and cons, she outlined the likely dire consequences for the U.S.-Pakistan relationship but wound up concluding that, because it was built more on mutual dependence than friendship and trust, it would likely survive. Someone pointed out that if going after bin Laden was enough to destroy the relationship, it was probably doomed anyway. Suspense built as Clinton worked her way around to her surprising bottom line. They could not ignore a chance to get Osama bin Laden. It was too important to the country. It outweighed the risks. Send in the SEALs.

  Admiral Mullen, the president’s top military adviser, gave a detailed PowerPoint presentation before delivering his verdict. McRaven’s rehearsals for him and the others had achieved the desired effect. Mullen said he had such high confidence in the SEAL team that he advocated launching the raid.

  Brennan, Donilon, Clapper, Panetta, and Morell all agreed. Brennan had long believed in his bones that it was bin Laden hiding in the compound, and if they indeed had found him, he argued, they had to go after him. The CIA director felt particularly strongly about it, which was not unexpected. This had been his project all along, and the analysts who worked for him were so eager to go in that they would have felt betrayed by their boss if he hadn’t supported them. The former congressman told Obama that he ought to ask himself, “What would the average American say if he knew we had the best chance of getting bin Laden since Tora Bora and we didn’t take a shot?” And going in on the ground would give them the proof they needed to make the mission worthwhile, or, possibly, gave them a chance of slipping out if bin Laden was not there.

  Not all of the advisers present were asked for their opinions during this meeting, but they had all made their feelings clear in the previous weeks. To a man and woman they favored the raid. And soon the man who had made the most convincing argument against the raid would reverse himself.

  At the Pentagon, when Gates’s undersecretaries Michael Vickers and Michèle Flournoy learned what he had recommended, they were distressed. No one knew yet what the president would decide, but they had every reason to believe that their boss’s opinion would weigh heavily. They briefly debated confronting him with how they felt, wondering if they would be overstepping, whether it would anger him, and they both decided it was their duty. So they went into his office first thing Friday morning, sat with him at a conference table, and went to work on him for a full hour.

  “Boss, we think you’re wrong,” said Flournoy.

  Like most of the other principals, she explained, he had been brought into the loop fairly late. She and Vickers had spent a lot more time working through the questions about the mission than he had. They believed he didn’t fully understand how well thought through McRaven’s plan was. They again outlined for him the raid’s plan, the backup plan, and the plan that backed up the backup plan, to demonstrate how carefully the mission had been designed. They sang McRaven’s praises. They had dealt with generals and admirals who rightly saw themselves as experts in their field, and who tended to bristle when a civilian bureaucrat second-guessed them, or expressed doubts about their well-laid plans. McRaven had approached this effort utterly without ego or emotion. He had understood from the start that the significance of this mission meant that he would have a lot of people at the Pentagon and White House and CIA looking over his shoulder asking questions, looking for flaws. Flournoy admired a quality in McRaven that was not always evident in the top brass: a willingness to admit that he didn’t know everything. He would sometimes respond to a good question with, “You know, I haven’t thought about that but I need to. Let me get back to you about it.” And he would. He was unusually open to suggestion, and had made substantial revisions to his plan based on the president’s concerns and those of everyone else involved. Flournoy and Vickers had also seen how carefully McRaven picked the members of his team, choosing men coming off fresh deployments who had honed their skills night after night for months. Gates had not, as Vickers had at the rehearsals, met those men and talked to them and obtained a sense of their maturity and experience. Gates had not been as close to any of this as they had, so he did not have their level of confidence.

  They also argued that he had not adequately considered the downsides of the drone strike, the alternative he advocated. They questioned the idea that this was a clean, virtually risk-free alternative. First of all, neither Flournoy nor Vickers bought Cartwright’s optimism about the small missile hitting the target. The target, after all, was moving. The missile could not be gu
ided. It had never been fired anywhere but on a testing range. You get one shot, they reminded Gates, and if you miss, that’s it. Bin Laden escapes again. Imagine the criticism that would follow: You got the chance of a lifetime and you blew it with something untried?

  At the end of the hour, Gates phoned Donilon at the White House and asked him to tell the president that he had changed his mind. Obama would not learn of Gates’s change of heart until after he had made the decision—but when he did hear, it strengthened his resolve. In the end every one of the president’s top advisers except Biden was in favor of taking immediate action. Two—Cartwright and Leiter—wanted to use the drone. Everyone else backed McRaven.

  The Thursday meeting ended early in the evening, and with the opinions of the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs still weighing heavily against those calling for the raid, the president’s choice seemed anything but certain.

  “You’ll have my decision in the morning,” Obama said.

  In truth, as the president told me, he had all but made up his mind when he left the Thursday meeting. He had been thinking about it for months. The advantages of the raid were obvious and, to his way of thinking, outweighed the risks. A missile might go astray and, unlike taking a shot from a drone, the raid offered certainty. If bin Laden was there, they would know it and they would bring him out, dead or alive. Getting him without being able to prove it—worse, without knowing it—would forfeit a big part of the accomplishment. Here was a chance to bring closure to the great tragedy of 9/11 and strike a mortal blow to al Qaeda. Add to that Obama’s trust in McRaven, and the near-unanimous support of his advisers, and the decision was clear.

  There was another compelling reason to send in the SEAL team. If this had been bin Laden’s hideout for years, it might hold a trove of valuable information, perhaps the kind that would enable the United States to further dismantle al Qaeda. Obama knew the logic behind F3EAD. The only way to exploit bin Laden’s personal data was to send in men who could collect it.

  No matter how compelling it was to attempt the raid, the risks were great for the men he ordered in, for the alliance with Pakistan, for the reputation of the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and for his own presidency.

  He reviewed the process over and over again in his mind Thursday night into Friday morning. Just as had been the case ten years ago, when he was a state senator in Illinois, his habit was to stay up much later than Michelle and his girls. They had turned in at ten o’clock. He was up another three hours pacing and thinking in the Treaty Room, the upstairs room that functioned as the family’s living room and also the president’s private office. The room displays Henry Ulke’s portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, Théobald Chartran’s large painting of William McKinley signing a peace treaty with Spain, and George P. A. Healy’s depiction of Abraham Lincoln conferring with his military advisers near the end of the Civil War. History bears down on you in a room like that.

  “It was a matter of taking one last breath and just making sure, asking is there something that I haven’t thought of?” Obama explained to me. “Is there something that we need to do?”

  The questions stayed with him even as he tried to sleep that night. He believed that waiting longer would not accomplish anything, and might risk everything. They were not likely to get better intelligence, that had been clear. In the end, it boiled down to his confidence in McRaven. He had met him first in 2008 when touring Iraq with several other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. David Petraeus had hosted a dinner in Baghdad and had invited the JSOC commander. He had dealt with him a lot more as president, particularly in these last four months.

  “I just felt as if I’d gotten to know McRaven,” Obama said. “I had gotten to know the SEALs. I had obviously been monitoring their capacity to carry out night raids consistently in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had mocked up the compound. We had experimented with it. They had run it . . . McRaven—he inspires confidence. And I had pressed him hard. And at that point my estimation was that we weren’t going to be able to do it better a month or two months or three months from now. We weren’t going to have better certainty about whether bin Laden was there, and so it was just a matter of pulling the trigger.”

  On Friday morning, before getting the phone call from Gates, before he walked out to the South Lawn to board a helicopter on a trip to the southern states to view tornado damage, he sent an e-mail to Donilon asking him to meet him in the Diplomatic Room at eight o’clock.

  Donilon, McDonough, and Chief of Staff Bill Daley were waiting in the large formal room when Obama entered, wearing a dark blue Windbreaker. The view from the room is one of the most dramatic in the White House, over the sloping back lawn, with the Washington Monument in the distance. They could see the waiting presidential helicopter.

  “It’s a go,” said Obama. “We’re going to do the raid. Prepare the directives.”

  8

  The Finish

  May 1–2, 2011

  McRaven’s men were in Jalalabad, poised. After the president’s order was conveyed Friday afternoon—Afghanistan is eight and a half hours ahead of Washington—they knew the earliest they would go would be early the following evening, Saturday, April 30.

  Most of the twenty-four handpicked team were members of Red Squadron of SEAL Team Six. In the more than a year that has elapsed, only one of the men has spoken publicly about it. None were interviewed by me. My account of the raid is based on interviews with the president; senior officials at CIA; sources at JSOC, the White House, and the Pentagon; on interviews with SEAL team members who did not participate directly, and on the account published by the former SEAL under the pseudonym “Mark Owen.”

  The SEALs were selected primarily because their commander was available, and the corresponding commander of the army’s Delta Force was not. With its expanding numbers, JSOC had been divvied up three years earlier by McRaven, with Delta assigned to continue operating in Iraq and the SEALs working from Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) throughout the most contentious regions of Afghanistan. Part of the reasoning for choosing the SEAL team, according to several top Pentagon officials, was that in recent years it had successfully conducted about a dozen secret missions inside Pakistan. They were used to conducting these raids with high-level commanders looking over their shoulders, linked by live audio and video—the men called it “General TV.” Sometimes their remote commanders got carried away, steering them around like figures in a video game—“Turn left! Turn right!”

  The actual commander, the man they would follow into the target compound, was a short, thickly built, brown-haired naval officer in his late thirties who had chiseled features—if Hollywood were looking for someone to play the role they would be hard-pressed to improve on the original. He had become something of a legend even in these elite ranks, with ten years of experience leading them into combat. It had become so routine for him that he spoke about the job the way an experienced foreman might talk about a construction project. He had a strictly deadpan way of talking; when he cracked a joke, which didn’t happen often, there was usually a delay before anyone noticed. Some of the men he commanded were older than him, but not many. Going in with them would be a Pashto translator and a highly trained dog—a Belgian Malinois named Cairo. The translator, a middle-aged man who had to learn how to rope out of a chopper for this mission, and the dog would help keep the curious away from the compound while the SEALs did their work. As they did before every mission, the men spent time readying their gear and weapons, oiling and cleaning and testing laser sights and night-vision devices, and adjusting straps on harnesses and helmets. The barracks at Jalalabad were familiar to all of them; it had been home away from home for years.

  The one thing that was not often in their conversation but always in their thoughts was danger. There were small FOBs all over Afghanistan named after team members who had been killed on raids, friends of these men who had gone about their work with the same skill
and care but who had been sent home in an aluminum box. Inside the FOBs there were memorials posted on walls or bulletin boards, displaying photos of the dead, and special operators were disproportionately represented. Their photos contrasted with the faces of the other fallen, the eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old regulars who had been killed by roadside bombs or in mortar attacks or on routine patrols. The special operators were older, and in the pictures they were often bearded and dressed in local civilian attire. Either that or they appeared in official portraits wearing uniforms decked with ribbons and stripes and medals. They were war-fighting professionals. For most it was their chosen career and, unlike younger men who tended to find reasons why this or that soldier had been hit and they had not—a poor decision, a perceived weakness, a fatal lapse in quickness . . . —these men knew better. You trained and practiced and then you performed with a team made up of men every bit as good as you were, and sometimes in spite of all of this you got killed. This mission, targeting Osama bin Laden, was one nearly everyone in the force had imagined being on since 9/11. It was the raid all of these men believed would someday come, and that they had hoped would include them.

  Behind this initial force were the men and choppers and planes that McRaven hoped he would not need. There were three MH-47E Chinooks, big as tractor trailers with flat rotors front and back. Also on alert were the fighters and combat-control aircraft that might be needed to fend off Pakistani fighters and ground-to-air defenses. If it came to that, command of the operation would shift from McRaven’s Joint Operating Center in Jalalabad to the theater command center in Kabul, where General Petraeus presided.

  Petraeus himself hadn’t known about the mission until just weeks earlier, when he had been informed about it in general terms by General Cartwright and by the CENTCOM commander. His resources would not be used at all unless the mission went badly, so he had not been fully briefed by McRaven until a few days earlier. No one on his staff knew about the raid. His history with bin Laden went back a dozen years, to when Petraeus had stood on the tarmac at Pope Air Force Base as the bodies of American servicemen killed in al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole were flown home. He had been in on the earlier discussions during the Clinton administration when it had decided to launch the cruise missiles at targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan. He would have a ringside seat for this raid, but if all went well he would have nothing to do but watch.