The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

by Mark Bowden

  Three days after the raid, in an interview on 60 Minutes, the president said, “It was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for my presidency, but I think for the United States since I’ve been president. Obviously bin Laden had been not only a symbol of terrorism, but a mass murderer who had eluded justice for so long, and so many families who had been affected I think had given up hope. And for us to be able to definitively say, ‘We’ve got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who has been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world,’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of.”

  Killing bin Laden was not a feat of leadership comparable to launching armies across the English Channel or staring down Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War, but it was a clear military victory in an age that produces few of them. For Americans, it supplied the right hard ending to the story of 9/11, and will likely mark the symbolic end of al Qaeda, if not the real one. The organization itself was already reeling when its founder died, as much from the unfolding revolutions in the Arab world as the constant pounding of American drones and special operators, which is why bin Laden’s death, or martyrdom, did not act as a spur to recruitment. Whatever romantic appeal his cause once had, and it never had that much, has been superseded. The popular election of Islamist governments in Egypt and Tunisia may worry the West, but the ability to effect change through legitimate means has undercut the pull of violent extremism. Bin Laden himself was wrestling with this problem in the weeks before his death. The group’s methods had already alienated it from even like-minded Muslims. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s new leader, was still at large in mid-2012, but he exhibits little of the talent to inspire or organize.

  Almost a year later, the president told me, “I think, internationally, it reminded the world that the American military is head and shoulders above anybody else, and that we can do things really well that nobody else can do. I think it reminded the American people that there are at least aspects of our government that can do things really well, and that when we put our mind to something we can pull together and fulfill our commitments.

  “When I went up to New York for that small ceremony after bin Laden was killed, to talk to those guys at the fire station who had lost half their unit, and to meet with the children of those who had been killed in 9/11, and the widows and the widowers, and to just understand how fully they appreciated that America hadn’t forgotten about them and what happened, the feelings were profound. The mission created some difficulties for us. I think it strained our relations with Pakistan, and we already had strained relations there, and so laid bare this tension, the fact that there are still safe havens inside the country. And so managing that has been a challenge over the last year. But this is one of those times where you make a decision, you’re not sure that it’s going to work out and, in retrospect, you can say that it did work out.”

  America’s troubled relationship with Pakistan badly worsened for a time, and then worsened still more after a “friendly fire” incident in November 2011 killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. But the relationship, which, as Hillary Clinton noted, has long been based more on mutual need than on friendship and trust, has endured. In return for many U.S. dollars, Pakistan reopened supply routes to U.S. forces in Afghanistan in July 2012, and American drone strikes in Waziristan continued.

  Pakistan held bin Laden’s wives, children, and grandchildren for nearly a year and then deported them to Saudi Arabia. Under interrogation by intelligence agents there and by the CIA, the women revealed that bin Laden had been living in Pakistan for seven or eight years. He had moved four times before settling into the Abbottabad compound, and had fathered four children. If accounts from Pakistani authorities are to be believed, the al Qaeda founder’s domestic arrangements were less than blissful. The eldest of the three wives with him, Khairiah, especially resented the youngest wife, Amal—so much so that she was accused by Siham, the third wife at Abbottabad, of betraying their husband to the CIA. If so, I found no evidence to support it. None apparently had any useful information to disclose about al Qaeda’s surviving leadership. The compound was destroyed in February 2012.

  The Pakistani doctor who worked with the CIA in an effort to obtain a DNA sample from the bin Laden children, Shakil Afridi, was arrested and tried for treason. He is serving a thirty-three-year sentence. Pakistan claims the conviction was for charges unrelated to assisting the CIA, but the doctor’s imprisonment was roundly condemned by the United States and American authorities continue to work for his release.

  “This is the man’s passion, keeping children healthy,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official. “He sets up clinics throughout Pakistan to inoculate children. We offered him money to set up an inoculation clinic in Abbottabad, not a fake one, but a real inoculation clinic. The money we paid him was put back into his program. He had no idea why we were interested.”

  A Senate panel voted to cut $33 million in aid to Pakistan in retaliation, a million for every year of the doctor’s sentence. Senator John McCain called his work for the CIA “the furthest thing from treason.”

  On the Friday after the raid, Obama flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to meet with the SEAL team and chopper pilots. Initially, the president asked to meet with the SEALs, and McRaven suggested that if he traveled to Campbell he could also thank the Night Stalker pilots based there, whose unit had not received the same recognition as the mission’s shooters.

  “We can bring all the players to Fort Campbell,” the admiral told Donilon, and suggested that in addition the president could then also meet with the 101st Airborne Division, which had just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan. So Obama attended four events there that day, ending it with a speech to more than two thousand soldiers.

  The first event was with the SEAL team and pilots from the actual mission. They assembled in a drab classroom on the base. Obama was struck by how “ordinary” the group was. With only one or two exceptions, the men did not resemble the bulked-up heroes of Hollywood action films, but a group of fit-looking men who ranged in age from their late twenties to early forties. There were some with gray hair. Dressed differently, he thought, they could have been bankers or lawyers. It wasn’t their physical skills that distinguished them, he realized, it was their hard-earned experience and wisdom.

  In the front of the classroom was a model of the compound. McRaven had said they would walk the president through the mission in detail. They would tell him everything, except which of them had shot bin Laden. That secret would stay with the team. The president did not ask, and the team did not offer.

  Then the helicopter pilot who had so skillfully crashed his Black Hawk inside the compound stood up to speak. He was a tall, thin man with dark hair, who appeared unused to speaking before a group, especially one that included the president of the United States. He described exactly what had happened with his chopper, and how deliberate his crash had been. He explained that once he realized it was going down he maneuvered it to catch the tail on the wall so that it would land upright.

  “Was the weather a factor?” Obama asked.

  “Yes,” the pilot said. The air had been warmer and less dense than the mission plan had anticipated, and then he explained in detail the aerodynamics that brought the Black Hawk down.

  When he was finished the SEAL team commander spoke. He was dead serious and perfectly at ease addressing the group. He began by thanking the chopper pilot. “I am here today,” he said, “because of the amazing work that this guy did.” He then gave a long account of exactly how their successful mission had been “ten years in the making.” The capability he and the other men in the classroom represented had been honed over all those years of combat, he said. Their skills and tactics had been purchased with the lives of many men who had served with them. He mentioned the operating bases in Afghanistan that were named in honor of these men. Every one of them, along with everyone else the
y had served with over the years, was, in effect, a member of the team. Then he explained how the raid’s success had depended on every member of the team present in the room, and gave examples. He cited the skill of the pilot setting the falling chopper down upright. He cited the middle-aged translator who was able to turn away the curious people outside the compound.

  “I don’t know what we would have done if all those people had just started rushing the compound,” he said.

  He cited others. He even mentioned Cairo, the dog.

  “You had a dog?” the president asked, surprised.

  “Yes, sir, we always have a dog with us,” the commander said.

  “Well,” said Obama, “I would like to meet that dog.”

  “Well, Mr. President, then I would advise you to bring treats,” said the commander sternly.

  The men in the room laughed.

  The commander then walked the president through details of the raid. When he made reference to some of the errors and controversy in the press about the details, Obama dismissed them.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said the president. “That’s just Washington, that’s just media, that’s just noise.”

  Again, the men laughed.

  The commander described how going through the house and encountering bin Laden had happened quickly and without complication, from his perspective. He said he and the men had been surprised by how much potentially valuable material was upstairs, and how they had just begun rapidly stuffing it into bags. Perhaps the most complicated part of the mission, he said, had been herding the wives and children to a far corner of the compound while the downed chopper was rigged with explosives, making sure that no one was hurt when they blew it up.

  When the commander finished, the president stood and thanked them. He described how, among his advisers, there had been a wide range of estimates about whether bin Laden was in the compound.

  “But early on in this process I came to terms with the fact that there was always going to be a fifty-fifty case on the intelligence side,” he said. “I made the decision I did because I had one hundred percent confidence in your capability.” He called them “the finest small fighting force in the history of the world.”

  Rhodes looked around the room and thought that the claim, while extreme, might actually be true. Here was the cream of JSOC, handpicked for this mission. Given the previous ten years of constant fighting, it was not likely there had ever been such a group of experienced assaulters, at least not in modern times. The president had earlier presented McRaven with a gift, a gold-plated tape measure, because he had not had one the night he tried to measure bin Laden’s body. Now he presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation, the highest honor the nation bestows on an entire military group. He then shook every hand in the room. He was startled and moved when the team presented him with a gift, a flag they had taken on the mission and had framed, signed on the back by all the team members. He hung it in his residence on the second floor of the White House.

  When I spoke with the president in the Oval Office, he reflected on how drones represented the most remarkable new tool he had in fighting al Qaeda, and how the nature of drone warfare posed unique dangers for someone in his position.

  “I think creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and for my successors for some time to come—partly because that technology may evolve fairly rapidly for other countries as well, and there’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems.”

  But nearly as remarkable, he said, was the evolution of small, highly skilled teams of warriors like those SEALs.

  “I think with Special Forces, the dangers [of using them too liberally] are smaller because the human element is still there. Those are still somebody’s dad, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son. When you send them in, you know they may not come back. And for me at least, as commander in chief, I don’t think about that any more casually than I do when I’m sending some green kid off to Kandahar. I think there’s just a solemnity and caution that that instills in me that probably won’t go away. I do think that just from a broader military strategy perspective, that we can’t overstate what Special Forces can do. Special Forces are well designed to deal with very specific targets in difficult terrain and oftentimes can prevent us from making the bigger strategic mistakes of sending forces in, with big footprints and so forth. And so when you’re talking about dealing with terrorist networks in failed states, or states that don’t have capacity, you can see that as actually being less intrusive, less dangerous, less problematic for the country involved.

  “But ultimately, none of this stuff works if we’re not partnering effectively with other countries, if we’re not engaging in smart diplomacy, if we’re not trying to change our image in the Muslim world to reduce recruits [to extremism]. It’s not an end-all, be-all. I’m sure glad we have it, though.”

  Taken together, these capabilities, this weapon forged to fight the latest kind of war, has all but done the job. I asked what the impact of bin Laden’s death had been on al Qaeda.

  “It was what we anticipated,” he said. “They are without focus, without effective leadership. And when you combine that with the degradation of their operational personnel, they’re on the way to strategic defeat. But again, you can’t overstate the importance of these other elements of American power, because even before bin Laden was killed, we had already seen the operational capacity of al Qaeda shift to AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and Yemen. We had already seen al Qaeda metastasize into al Qaeda in Maghreb. And so the need for vigilance and stick-to-it-ness is critical.

  “And what we’ve also seen is the capacity of lone-wolf terrorists to do damage—not the kind of damage we saw on 9/11, but damage that is still obviously painful, and we’ve got to do something about. So it [killing bin Laden] didn’t solve all our problems, and we didn’t expect it to. But it was a big piece of business. And I’ll always be grateful for both the intelligence and the military personnel who were involved in it. They deserve all the credit.”

  In the days after the raid, an album of photographs was delivered to the White House, a series of shots of the dead bin Laden. There would be much discussion that week about whether these photos should be made public, as proof of death, but the president had firmly decided that they would not. The decision was made easier because no one disputed the fact of bin Laden’s death. America was not, the president said, going to “spike the football.”

  As the White House had worked that Sunday night to get the message out, stumbling on the presentation but basking in the country’s exhilarated response, Admiral McRaven’s men were, in the early hours of Monday morning, at work preparing for the disposal of the Sheik’s body.

  After much discussion and advice, it had been decided that the best option would be burial at sea. That way there would be no shrine for the martyr’s misguided followers. So the body was washed, photographed from every conceivable angle, and then flown on a V-22 Osprey to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson cruising in the North Arabian Sea.

  As a formality, the State Department contacted Saudi Arabia’s government and offered to deliver the body to his home country, but bin Laden was as unwanted there in death as he had been in life. Told that the alternative was burial at sea, the Saudi official said, “We like your plan.”

  Procedures for a simple Muslim burial were performed on the carrier. The body was wrapped in a white shroud with weights to sink it.

  The last sequence of color photos in the death album were not grotesque. They were strangely moving. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight Monday morning, May 2. One frame shows the body wrapped in the weighted white shroud. The next shows it diagonal on a flat board, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water with a small splash. In the next it is visible just below the surface, a
ghostly torpedo descending. In the next shot there are only circular ripples on the blue surface. In the final frame the waters are calm.

  The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.

  Acknowledgments

  and Notes

  On the theory that Osama bin Laden’s command of his native language was comparable to the average English speaker’s mastery of his native tongue, I have taken the liberty of here and there smoothing out the clumsy phrases in the translation of bin Laden’s documents by the CIA. The official translations can be found at the Web site of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center: www.ctc.usma.edu.

  It has been my practice to compile detailed source notes for my books, but in this case the number of those who did not wish to have specific information attributed to them directly, even when the source seems obvious, would have made the exercise more frustrating than helpful.

  This work has been informed by two excellent articles, Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (The New Yorker, 8/8/2011), and (in portions of Chapter Four) Shane Harris’s “Killer App” (The Washingtonian, 1/31/2012). Anyone who writes about Osama bin Laden is indebted to Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (Knopf, 2006), and to the superb reporting of Peter Bergen, who over the last ten years made himself the foremost journalistic authority on the man. This book was paticularly informed by Bergen’s oral history, The Osama bin Laden I Know (Free Press, 2006), and by his Manhunt (Crown Publishers, 2011). In the latter book, Bergen recounts some of the same scenes I have described here, but those passages in this book, like the rest of it, are based entirely on my own reporting and interviewing—in some cases with the same participants.

  I would like to especially thank my son Aaron, my cousin David Keane, and their company, Wild Eyes Productions, for help interviewing. I would also like to particularly thank Ben Rhodes, Jay Carney, Dave Moniz, and Preston Golson for helping me set up interviews, and also those at the CIA and in the JSOC who agreed to be interviewed but asked not to be named.