Manhunt
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How to respond to all this must have been confounding for bin Laden, whose love for the limelight was intense and whose total irrelevance to the most important development in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was painfully obvious. In late April 2011 he taped an audio message, which was not released before he was killed, in which he welcomed the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, saying, “We watch this great historic event and we share with you joy and happiness and delight.” On the tape, bin Laden said that Sharia law should govern the new Egypt and Tunisia, but strangely did not mention the revolts that were then also spreading in Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
Bin Laden was still revered by his family and followers living on the Abbottabad compound, but by the spring of 2011, as he embarked on his sixth year of residing there, he had become increasingly irrelevant to the Muslim world. The religious Robin Hood image he had projected in the years immediately after 9/11 had largely evaporated, and most Muslims had rejected al-Qaeda because of its long track record of killing Islamic civilians. Perhaps most fatal to his ambitions, bin Laden never had anything to offer in the way of real solutions to the economic and political problems that continued to plague the Arab world.
Bin Laden at his one and only press conference, held in 1998, in which he declared war against the U.S. CNN VIA GETTY IMAGES
Doting father Osama bin Laden with son Hamza on January 1, 2001. HAMID MIR/DAILY DAWN/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES
New York police stand near a wanted poster for bin Laden in the financial district of New York on September 18, 2001. JEFF HAYNES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A cave in Tora Bora where al-Qaeda militants sheltered during the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. REZA/GETTY IMAGES
Two Afghan anti-Taliban fighters in Tora Bora on December 6, 2001, as the battle against al-Qaeda reached its height. ROMEO GACAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
In December 2001, in his first video statement since the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden delivered a message to the American people.
In this video, shot six years later in 2007, bin Laden’s beard has been trimmed and dyed.
Mohammed al-Qahtani, originally recruited to be a muscle hijacker on 9/11 (top), and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks (bottom), were captured in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Coercive interrogations of the men yielded contradictory information about “the Kuwaiti,” bin Laden’s courier. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES [AL-QAHTANI]; ASSOCIATED PRESS [KSM]
Between 2003 and 2008, Major General Stanley McChrystal transformed Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into a commando force of unprecedented agility and lethality, paving the way for Operation Neptune Spear. PAULA BRONSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES
CIA graphic of bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. CIA
A satellite image of the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. DIGITALGLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
General James “Hoss” Cartwright (right) laughs with CIA director Leon Panetta. ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy testifies before members of Congress alongside Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
President Barack Obama shakes hands with Admiral Mike Mullen in the Green Room of the White House, following his statement detailing the mission against bin Laden on May 1, 2011. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA
The architect of the raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, Vice Admiral William McRaven. WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict Michael Vickers. CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
President Barack Obama makes a point during a meeting in the Situation Room of the White House about the mission against bin Laden. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is next to the president. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter, who led a Red Team to review the intelligence on the Abbottabad compound just a few days before the raid. CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
CIA Director Leon Panetta and his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, watch a screen intently during the Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden. CIA
President Obama and Vice President Biden in the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough, Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are Admiral Mike Mullen, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Chief of Staff Bill Daley, National Security Advisor to the Vice President Tony Blinken, Director for Counterterrorism Audrey Tomason, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA
10 THE SECRET WARRIORS
SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES off the coast of Somalia, as dusk deepened over the Indian Ocean, on the sweltering evening of April 13, 2009, three shots rang out. All the bullets found their targets: three Somali pirates in a small lifeboat bobbing on the darkening sea.
For the past five days the pirates had held hostage Richard Phillips, the American captain of the container ship Maersk Alabama. President Obama had authorized the use of deadly force if Phillips’s life was in danger. Unbeknownst to the pirates, days earlier a contingent of Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) teams had parachuted at night into the ocean near the USS Bainbridge, which was shadowing the pirates. The SEALs had taken up positions on the fantail of the Bainbridge and were carefully monitoring Phillips while he was in the custody of the pirates. One of the pirates had just pointed his AK-47 at the American captain as if he were going to shoot him. That’s when the SEAL team commander on the Bainbridge ordered his men to take out the pirates. Three SEAL sharpshooters fired simultaneously at the pirates from a distance of thirty yards in heaving seas at nightfall, killing them all.
Obama called Vice Admiral William McRaven, the leader of Joint Special Operations Command and of the mission to rescue Phillips, to tell him, “Great job.” The flawless rescue of Captain Phillips was the first time that Obama—only three months into his new job—had been personally exposed to the capabilities of America’s “Quiet Professionals,” the secretive counterterrorism units of Special Operations, whose well-oiled skills he would come to rely upon increasingly with every passing year of his presidency.
It was not always so. Joint Special Operations Command was born out of the ashes of an American defeat in the deserts of Iran three decades before Obama assumed the presidency. When fifty-two Americans were held hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 by fervent followers of the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, President Jimmy Carter authorized a mission to rescue them. The mission was never going to be easy: it entailed flying almost one thousand miles into a remote desert region of Iran, traveling undetected to Tehran, and then rescuing the hostages, who were guarded by Iran’s fanatical Revolutionary Guard.
Operation Eagle Claw, sometimes referred to as Desert One, was doomed almost as soon as it started. Three of the eight helicopters that flew the mission developed mechanical problems because of sand storms. The mission was aborted, and then one of the five remaining working helicopters collided with an American transport plane during a refueling in the Iranian desert, killing eight American servicemen. It was, in U.S. military parlance, “a total goat fuck.” Back in Washington, a rising CIA official in his early forties named Robert Gates was at the White House watching with mounting dismay as the whole disaster unfolded.
A Pentagon investigation found myriad problems with Operation Eagle Claw: Interservice rivalries meant that the army, air force, navy, and marines all wanted to play a role in this important operation, and even though the four services had never worked together before on this kind of mission, each service got a piece of the action. An overemphasis on operational security prevented the services from sharing critical information with one another and also prevented the entire plan from being written down so that it could be studied overa
ll. The navy allowed poor maintenance of the mission helicopters, the air force pilots who flew the mission had no experience in commando operations, and there was no full-scale rehearsal of all the elements of the plan.
Something needed to be fixed. The fix was the creation in 1980 of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC, pronounced “JAY-sock”), located at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, so that the “Special Operators” of the various services could start to work together more seamlessly. The key components of JSOC are secret, “black,” Navy SEAL units, the army’s Delta Force and 75th Ranger Regiment, the helicopter pilots of the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment, and the air force’s Special Tactics Squadron. (The primary mission of “white” Special Forces units, which operate quite openly and are known as the Green Berets, is to train indigenous military forces.)
The top officers who ran the U.S. military were often suspicious of the “snake eaters” in Special Operations, whom they tended to regard as cowboys. Then came the debacle at Mogadishu, Somalia, in early October 1993. A daytime helicopter assault by pilots of the Special Operations Air Regiment and elements of Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, and the 75th Rangers with the goal of snatching Somali clan leaders who were attacking U.S. troops stationed in Somalia, turned into a fiasco in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and eighteen American servicemen died.
Unknown to anyone in the U.S. government at the time, al-Qaeda had sent some of its top trainers from its then base in Sudan into Somalia to train the Somali clansmen fighting the Americans in how best to bring down helicopters using RPGs. This is far from easy to do, as RPGs are designed to be antitank weapons; hitting a flying object with an RPG is difficult to pull off, given the powerful recoil of the RPG launcher.
Scarred by the Battle of Mogadishu, the Pentagon was resistant to using Special Operations Forces to take on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan once the terrorist group had rebased itself there in 1996. President Bill Clinton pushed the Pentagon to deploy the elite units of JSOC into Afghanistan to take out bin Laden, telling General Hugh Shelton, his top military advisor, “You know it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp. It would get us enormous deterrence and show the guys we are not afraid.” Michael Scheuer, the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA at the time, says, “I don’t carry a brief at all for President Clinton. But, numerous times, he asked the military to use commandos or Special Forces to try to kill bin Laden. And General Shelton, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time, always brought him plans back for those operations that looked like the invasion of Normandy!” President Clinton was looking for a covert operation, not a large-scale military assault.
After the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was deeply frustrated that the first American boots on the ground in Afghanistan were from the CIA and not the highly trained counterterrorism units of JSOC. On October 17, 2001, ten days after the U.S. campaign against the Taliban had started, Rumsfeld wrote a secret memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, expressing his irritation: “Does the fact that the Defense Department can’t do anything on the ground in Afghanistan until CIA people go in first to prepare the way suggest that the Defense Department is lacking a capability we need? Specifically, given the nature of our world, isn’t it conceivable that the Department [of Defense] ought not to be in a position of near total dependence on CIA in situations such as this?”
Officials working for Rumsfeld commissioned Richard Shultz, a historian of Special Forces, to find out why JSOC units were not deployed to hit al-Qaeda before the attacks on New York and Washington. After all, fighting terrorists was why these units were founded in the first place. Shultz concluded that in the years before 9/11, the senior officers at the Pentagon had become “Somalia-ized.” As a result, they tended to recommend “big-footprint” operations involving as many as several hundred soldiers, “showstoppers” that made the missions politically impossible at a time when the American public was believed to have no tolerance for U.S. casualties. Another showstopper: before launching an operation, the Pentagon demanded high-quality “actionable intelligence,” which simply didn’t exist in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Special Operations boss General Peter Schoomaker recalled, “Special Operations were never given the mission. It was very, very frustrating. It was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender.”
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon allowed Rumsfeld to push Special Operations to the center of the “Global War on Terrorism.” In a sign of where Rumsfeld wanted to take the military, in the summer of 2003 he took the unprecedented step of asking General Schoomaker to come out of retirement to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And on September 6, 2003, Rumsfeld signed an eighty-page order that empowered JSOC to hunt al-Qaeda in as many as fifteen countries. It wasn’t a blanket permission, since in a number of those countries the president or State Department would still have to sign off on the missions, but it allowed JSOC considerable latitude to operate independently.
Crucially, JSOC—unlike the CIA—would not have to brief Congress about its actions in those fifteen countries. That was because JSOC operated under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which outlined the rules under which the U.S. military operated, unlike the CIA, which operated under Title 50, and was required to brief Congress whenever it conducted covert operations overseas. This might seem like no more than a typical bureaucratic loophole, but it would have a significant result: JSOC was now empowered to mount covert actions in many countries around the world with less accountability than the CIA. JSOC’s overseas operations were all classified, so it also received very little scrutiny from the media or public. For many years the Pentagon didn’t even acknowledge that JSOC existed.
In the decade after 9/11, JSOC mushroomed from a force of eighteen hundred to four thousand, becoming a small army within the military. It had its own drones, its own air force (known as the Confederate Air Force), and its own intelligence operations. The rise of JSOC was inextricably linked to the vision of Major General Stanley McChrystal, a brilliant workaholic from a military family who was beloved by his men and who during the Iraq War would go out with them on missions to capture/kill insurgents. Depending on your perspective, this was either foolhardy or brilliant leadership—or maybe a little of both—given that killing a two-star American general would have been a significant propaganda coup for Iraq’s insurgents.
It was McChrystal who took the Special Operations Ferrari out of the garage and drove it to become a killing machine of unprecedented agility and ferocity. The Iraq War provided the opportunity to make that change because, to prevail against the insurgency, Special Operations would need to be geared for not only one-off missions but also an entire campaign. McChrystal said that Special Operations had to go from being just “a bookseller to being Amazon.com.”
McChrystal realized that the most lethal of the Iraqi insurgent groups, in particular “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” were not fighting like Saddam Hussein’s tank-based army—which fought as every other hierarchical military had done before it—but comprised, rather, loose networks of fighters who operated in largely independent bands.
Unlike satellite imagery of Saddam’s tank formations, intelligence about the insurgents was both fleeting and highly perishable. JSOC would have to become more like al-Qaeda if it was going to defeat al-Qaeda; it would take “a network to defeat a network,” in McChrystal’s formulation. A major part of McChrystal’s strategy was to go after not just the leaders of the insurgency but also the midlevel insurgents who were keeping the trains running. (It is one of history’s little ironies that al-Qaeda itself was set up as a JSOC-like group. The main trainer of al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11 was Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian American army sergeant who had served at Ft. Bragg, the headquarters of JSOC. In the 1980s, Mohamed taught courses on the Middle
East and Islam at the Special Warfare Center at the army base. During his leave from the army, he trained al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan using Special Forces manuals he had pilfered from Ft. Bragg. His life as an al-Qaeda double agent was not discovered until 1998.)
To make JSOC more like al-Qaeda meant making it “flat and fast,” two qualities rarely mentioned in the same sentence as “the U.S. military.” To get JSOC as flat and fast as the insurgents, McChrystal made a number of key decisions. In the summer of 2004 he set up his base of operations in a group of aircraft hangars at Balad Air Base in central Iraq. This was a long way from the stultifying embrace of Washington and the Pentagon, and even a ways from Baghdad, and it would allow JSOC to get outside all the typical bureaucratic restraints that made quick decisions impossible. Then, to break down the “stovepipes” that existed between JSOC and the intelligence community, McChrystal started recruiting CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) analysts to work at Balad, and he also sent Colonel Michael T. Flynn, his top intelligence officer, to work at the CIA station in Baghdad for eight months in 2004. Gradually, other potential bureaucratic rivals were co-opted into McChrystal’s enterprise, so he could quickly and easily draw on the resources of key intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the NSA.