In Iraq, McRaven had led the shadowy Task Force 121, which tracked down Saddam Hussein in December 2003. Much of the public credit for Saddam’s capture went to conventional army units, but it was, in fact, the Special Operations forces under McRaven’s command who had done most of the work to find the former Iraqi dictator.
As the Iraq War began to wind down in 2009, David Petraeus, the overall commander of the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, told McRaven to shift his emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan. In the summer of 2009, McRaven moved his headquarters from Iraq to Afghanistan, tripled the number of his men there, and greatly increased the level of air support and intelligence operations. As a result, Special Operations missions in Afghanistan went from two hundred a year in 2008 to well over two thousand a year by 2010.
During McRaven’s tenure at JSOC, the “jackpot” rate—the rate of missions in which Special Operations forces captured or killed their targets in Afghanistan or Iraq—soared from 35 percent to more than 80 percent. The amount of punishment JSOC was inflicting on the Taliban can be gauged by the fact that, during this period, the average age of Taliban commanders in Afghanistan declined from thirty-five to twenty-five.
McRaven is a strapping, dark-haired, blue-eyed Texan in his mid-fifties. In person, as he chugs a Rip It—a heavily caffeinated beverage popular with American soldiers in Afghanistan—he speaks in well-thought-out paragraphs, but he also peppers his speech with the occasional doggone, as well as more robust swear words. A battle-hardened colleague says McRaven reminds him of the comic-book superhero Captain America, while another says he “is reputed to be the smartest SEAL that ever lived. He is physically tough, compassionate, and can drive a knife through your ribs in a nanosecond.” Even as a three-star admiral, McRaven went out with his teams on snatch-and-grab missions about once a month in Afghanistan.
In January 2011, McRaven visited CIA headquarters, where he was briefed by Michael Morell, the head of the Special Activities Division, a small and elite paramilitary force within the Agency, and officials from the Counterterrorism Center. McRaven could see immediately that to level a compound the size of the one in Abbottabad was going to take dropping two dozen or so two-thousand-pound bombs on the target. And there was no guarantee that the bombs would land with 100 percent accuracy in what is a good-sized Pakistani city. A Special Operations raid was the more plausible military approach, he believed. But he told colleagues he didn’t want to force the idea down anyone’s throat—better to let them come to this decision on their own, over time.
“First of all, congratulations on getting such a good lead,” McRaven said. “Second, this is a relatively straightforward raid from JSOC’s perspective. We do these ten, twelve, fourteen times a night. The thing that makes this complicated is it’s one hundred and fifty miles inside Pakistan, and logistically getting there, and then the politics of explaining the raid, is the complicating factor. I want to think about it a little bit, but my instinct is to put a very seasoned member of a special unit to work directly with you who will come to CIA every day and basically begin to plan and flesh out some options.”
McRaven threw out some names of who should be in charge of the operation on the ground. Of one particular SEAL team commander he liked, he said, “He’s an experienced operator. They’re gonna land on the compound and something is going to go wrong. They’re going to have to improvise, change the plan, go to Plan B, or wriggle their way out of a sticky situation.”
McRaven tasked a navy captain with developing scenarios for some kind of assault on what was dubbed Abbottabad Compound 1 (AC1). The planning for the operation was done at the CIA, because this was going to be a covert, “deniable” operation, in which the chain of command ran from the president to Panetta and then to McRaven, rather than through the conventional military structure. CIA officials took to referring to AC1 with the code words “Atlantic City” when they e-mailed one another, a nod to the fact that the whole operation was something of a gamble.
In an unmarked office on the first floor of the CIA’s printing plant, the navy captain covered the walls with satellite images and topographical maps of Abbottabad and began planning the assault on AC1, together with the commander of Seal Team 6’s Red Squadron. McRaven later added a half dozen other planners to think through the air and ground options for the assault. One plan was to land a SEAL team some ways outside Abbottabad and proceed to the compound on foot. Abbottabad’s size, however, and the chance of discovery, or of the forces tiring after a long run to the target, nixed that plan.
McRaven had quite literally written the book on Special Operations. He had helped establish a Special Operations curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and after taking up a job in the Bush White House just weeks after 9/11, he had become one of the principal authors of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy. McRaven’s 1996 book, Spec Ops, is a lucid dissection of eight decisive actions, ranging from the British forces who used midget submarines to badly damage the Tirpitz, a key Nazi battleship, in 1943; to the Nazi rescue the same year of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from his anti-Fascist captors; to the raid at Entebbe in 1976 that freed Israeli hostages held in Uganda by Palestinian terrorists.
For his book, McRaven interviewed many of the key participants in the raids he examined and traveled to the sites of the operations. After a careful investigation of each raid, he identified six principles that had made these operations a success: repetition, surprise, security, speed, simplicity, and purpose. Repetition meant frequent and realistic rehearsals so that the “friction” of actual battle was reduced. Surprise meant catching the enemy entirely off guard; the Nazi rescuers of Mussolini crash-landed gliders on a mountain near the hotel where the Fascist leader was being held and rescued him without a shot being fired. Security meant, of course, confining the knowledge of the operation to a small circle. Speed meant that “relative superiority” over the enemy needed to be achieved in the first few minutes of the attack, and that the entire mission should be completed in half an hour. Simplicity ensured that the operation was well understood by each of the soldiers involved—“release the hostages” at Entebbe—and purpose meant that the soldiers were completely committed to the mission.
There are many heroes in McRaven’s book, but the star is Jonathan Netanyahu (the older brother of the Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu), who led the raid on Entebbe. An officer who read Machiavelli to relax and was an intense Israeli patriot, Netanyahu was imbued with total responsibility for his men and mission, and involved in the smallest details of any operation. At the time of the Entebbe raid it was virtually unthinkable that a force would fly more than seven hours from Israel to Uganda to launch a rescue operation. Adding to the element of surprise, the Israeli commandos who landed at Entebbe airport wore Ugandan military uniforms, and the lead assault element drove the same type of Mercedes driven by Ugandan generals. From the time the first Israeli transport plane landed at Entebbe, it took only three minutes for the commandos to secure the hostages, but Jonathan Netanyahu was mortally wounded in the assault.
As McRaven formulated the assault on the Abbottabad compound, his planning was deeply informed by the key principles he had laid out in Spec Ops. It was a simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.
The McRaven option was not the only “kinetic” (the Pentagon’s way of saying “lethal”) plan that the Obama national security team gave serious consideration to. Should a B-2 bomber obliterate the compound? Might a drone strike be a better option? And could the operation involve the Pakistanis in some shape or form? Toward the end of February, as all these options received serious consideration, Vickers decided it was now time to read in the Pentagon’s top policy thinker, Michèle Flournoy, because each military option came freighted with policy implications, many of them knotty.
As undersecretary for policy, Flournoy was the highest-ranking woman ever to serve at the Pentagon and wa
s often mentioned as the first woman likely to be tapped to be secretary of defense. A mother of three with a graduate degree in international relations from Balliol College, Oxford, and a long history of working on heavyweight national security issues such as the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, Flournoy is a regal presence in well-tailored pantsuits and pearls. She speaks deliberately, without a hint of bluster, and is typical of the “no drama” officials Obama likes to have around him.
The most nettlesome issue that Flournoy had to help think through was how to deal with the Pakistanis. After all, whether it was a SEAL raid, a bombing run, or a drone strike, all these actions were major violations of the national sovereignty of a country that was, at least nominally, a close ally of the United States. There was a range of options to consider with the Pakistanis: you could clue them in about the Abbottabad compound and they would become partners in the next steps; you could tell them ahead of time about the assault plan, but too late for them to do anything about it; you could tell them at the point of execution; or you could tell them afterward. The downside of involving the Pakistanis was that, based on a decade of dealing with them in other operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it seemed likely that sensitive information might leak.
“We had a very serious debate and set of discussions over the pros and cons of how much to tell the Pakistanis and whether to do this in partnership with them. It was not dismissed lightly at all. That said, we’ve also had a fair amount of experience with them that suggested they have some significant operational security challenges internally,” says Flournoy.
The question about how to handle the Pakistanis was complicated by the fact that U.S.-Pakistani relations—never the warmest—were now at a nadir. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance has always been complex, with recriminations on both sides. The Pakistanis felt that the United States was a “fair-weather friend” that used them instrumentally—whether to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s or, more recently, to defeat al-Qaeda—only to abandon them when they were no longer of use. For their part, American policymakers were keenly aware that Pakistan was a sanctuary for militant groups killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan—groups that enjoyed some kind of support from elements in Pakistan’s military.
Just as the intelligence picture at the Abbottabad compound began to sharpen, this history of U.S.-Pakistani mistrust was significantly worsened when Raymond Davis, an American citizen, killed two Pakistanis in the bustling city of Lahore on January 25, 2011. The U.S. government subsequently made a number of shifting and false assertions about Davis’s job, but over the course of several weeks it became painfully clear that the muscular Davis—who had calmly shot two Pakistanis he claimed were robbing him in the middle of the day, in front of many eyewitnesses—was, in fact, a CIA contractor. This seemed to confirm every Pakistani conspiracy theory about the country being awash in CIA spies, and many Pakistanis, including some politicians, called for the execution of Davis. The severe tension between the United States and Pakistan after this incident further decreased the already slim chance that the U.S. government would inform any element of the Pakistani government or military about what it had recently learned about the possible location of al-Qaeda’s leader.
An additional consideration was that the American war effort in landlocked Afghanistan was highly dependent on supplies coming in through Pakistan; in early 2011, about three-quarters of all NATO and U.S. supplies, including food, fuel, and equipment, had to transit Pakistan. Pakistan also allowed its airspace to be used for the three to four hundred daily flights into Afghanistan by U.S. aircraft supplying the one hundred thousand U.S. soldiers based there.
Cognizant of the fact that the Pakistanis could decide to close off these vital supply routes, Flournoy worked to bolster what the Pentagon termed the Northern Distribution Network, a series of logistical arrangements connecting ports on the Baltic Sea to Afghanistan through its Central Asian neighbors and Russia. “So there was a big push with presidential letters, people going out, signing new agreements, getting things in place, just to make sure we had that network as shored up as possible,” says Flournoy. In a speech in St. Petersburg on March 21, Defense Secretary Robert Gates pledged that the United States and Russia would work together to expand the Northern Distribution Network into Afghanistan. That these new arrangements served in part as insurance against any possible fallout from the Abbottabad operation was known to only a handful at the Pentagon.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had often smoothed things over with the Pakistanis whenever there was one of the frequent crises in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, made it clear that preserving that relationship was not the priority when it came to getting bin Laden. “I didn’t want to miss the opportunity,” Clinton said. “I didn’t want another Tora Bora, where we overthought it, and we underresponded. And I remember at one point one of the briefers saying, ‘This will be considered a gross violation of the Pakistanis’ national honor,’ and I exploded at that moment and said, ‘What about our national honor? And what about going after a man who killed three thousand innocent people?’ ”
By now Obama was pushing for real courses of action (COAs, pronounced “KO-ahs”) against the compound, rather than just additional intelligence gathering. National Security Council official Nicholas Rasmussen recalls that Obama had “decided that the potential for this story to be leaked somehow was of such great importance that we needed to accelerate efforts on this. And then added to that was the sense from Panetta that nothing in the intelligence world was going to bear further fruit over the next three or four months. We might marginally increase our confidence in the CIA’s conclusions, but only marginally so. There wasn’t any developmental effort under way that would give us the Polaroid shot of bin Laden.” (Although the CIA was never able to get a picture of bin Laden, officers did obtain a picture of the Kuwaiti’s brother.)
On a Friday evening in late February—a good time for a discreet meeting—a group of black Suburbans pulled up at CIA headquarters carrying Admiral McRaven, Mike Vickers, and General Cartwright. Cartwright, an introverted U.S. Marine aviator with a deep understanding of and love for technology, had endeared himself to some of Obama’s inner circle during the discussion of the “surge” of U.S. forces into Afghanistan in the fall of 2009, when he had bucked the prevailing consensus among Gates, Mullen, and Petraeus, all of whom wanted a large-scale troop deployment of forty thousand soldiers for a counterinsurgency campaign. Cartwright had worked with Joe Biden and Tony Blinken to sketch a plan for a contingent of only twenty thousand supplemental forces in Afghanistan that would execute a “counterterrorism plus” mission, rather than a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign. Obama had ended up splitting the difference and authorizing thirty thousand soldiers for the surge, but Cartwright’s perceived independence from the Pentagon brass had made him a powerful voice inside Obama’s war councils.
McRaven, Vickers, and Cartwright were at headquarters to review with Panetta the possible courses of action for Abbottabad. Over sandwiches and sodas, seated around the massive wooden table in the director’s conference room, with the model of the compound in front of them, they discussed the intelligence picture with a small group of officials from the Counterterrorism Center. Then the group talked about four possible COAs: a bombing run by a B-2 bomber, a raid by Special Operations that would be done without informing the Pakistanis, a drone strike, and a joint operation with the Pakistanis. McRaven explained that a Special Operations assault on the bin Laden compound was going to be relatively easy. What was likely to be difficult was dealing with the Pakistani reaction to the raid, whether on the ground or in the air.
After the meeting, which was a dress rehearsal for a detailed discussion with the president in about two weeks, Panetta, Michael Morell, and Jeremy Bash retired to Panetta’s office. Panetta was pumped up. Pouring them each a glass of scotch, he said, “I think our folks have developed four really good options. None of them is perfect, they’re all really t
ough, but we’ve got to stay on this. We’ve got to really get more intelligence and we have really got to flesh out these options, because I can’t imagine at the end of the day, we’re not going to do something about this.”
ON MARCH 14, 2011, Obama’s war cabinet gathered at the White House to brief the president. The COAs presented to Obama orally and also in memo and graphic form included the bombing run by a B-2 bomber, a drone strike, the raid option, and some kind of bilateral operation with the Pakistanis.
The B-2 strike had some attractions. Anyone who was in the compound or in any possible tunnels underneath it would die, and no American forces would be at risk. But a B-2 raid also had significant downsides. To destroy the compound, which sprawled over one acre, would require a large payload of bombs. General Cartwright pointed out that the force of the bombs would be like an earthquake in the area. Such blunt force would certainly incur civilian casualties, not only of the women and children known to be living at the compound but also people in neighboring homes. And of course there would be no proof of bin Laden’s death, since all DNA evidence would vanish in the air strike, and with it any proof that he had been living there.
The B-2 bombing option sparked debate. According to Tony Blinken, “Some people said, ‘The DNA evidence was not the most important thing. If bin Laden was there, and we knew that with certainty, and we could take him out, taking him definitively off the battlefield was what counted.’ But a number of people felt that half—if not more—of the success we would achieve would be the world knowing bin Laden was gone, and you had to be able to prove that, or at least have enough proof to dispel most doubts and conspiracy theories.”
One way to limit the number of civilian casualties would be to drop a small bomb directly on the compound, but a bomb with a small payload might not actually kill bin Laden. And because the CIA had no way to see inside the compound, there was also the possibility that bin Laden might shelter in a vault hidden inside the building, or even escape through a tunnel to live another day. Using thermal imaging, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency concluded that the water table around the Abbottabad compound was quite high. Indeed, large streams course through the neighborhood in which the compound sits. Given the high water table, analysts discounted the idea that bin Laden might escape through a tunnel, but they were concerned that he might have some kind of safe room or vault in his house.
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