Manhunt

by Peter L. Bergen

  Proponents of the raid option, who included Panetta, pointed out that as risky as it was to send in the SEALs, if they did raid the compound and bin Laden wasn’t found, there was still a pretty decent chance that they could just leave and no one would ever know about the operation. And even if a handful of people in and around the compound did find out about it, the operation could simply be denied. And, in any event, whoever was living in that compound wasn’t going to create a public stink, as he was clearly trying to keep a low profile. A Special Operations helicopter assault that didn’t net bin Laden wouldn’t violate Pakistan’s sovereignty because it would never be made public, while a bombing raid would be a very public event, so any chance of “plausible deniability” for the operation would go out the window.

  Another option was to fly a Predator or Reaper drone over the suspected bin Laden residence and fire a small missile or drop a small bomb on the compound. General Cartwright, Obama’s favorite general, was pushing this approach. The idea would be to use a very small munition to hit the mysterious “pacer” whom American satellites were seeing as he took his daily walk. Such a strike required a very high degree of precision, and there was the risk that the drone shot might simply miss its target, as other drone strikes aimed at high-value targets had done in the past, but the risk of civilian casualties was much lower, and the pushback from the Pakistanis would likely be lower than from a conventional air strike. There would still be the problem of proving bin Laden was dead, but there was likely to be subsequent “chatter” about bin Laden’s “martyrdom” among the al-Qaeda leadership, which American satellites would be able to pick up. And al-Qaeda almost always eventually confirmed the death of its leaders in communiqués, because they were happy to announce the passing of one of their “martyrs.”

  Admiral Mike Mullen, Obama’s top military advisor, was skeptical of using the small munition as soon as the subject came up. “From my perspective,” he says, “it was a system that had not been tested. I think we have hung our hopes on sophisticated new technologies sometimes too soon that don’t work out.” Instead Mullen favored the raid.

  Michèle Flournoy was also one of the proponents of the raid, because “the circumstantial evidence at some point became almost overwhelming in that it was very hard to explain this compound and the presence of certain individuals absent the presence of bin Laden. It just didn’t make any sense. Second, I felt that from a symbolic and strategic point of view, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would have a very powerful effect on al-Qaeda on top of the losses they had already suffered. Third, we expected that there would be an intelligence trove that would help us further understand the network and create further opportunities to take action against the core leadership should we actually go in.”

  At the March 14 meeting, Admiral McRaven laid out the raid option, telling Obama very directly, “Mister President, we haven’t thoroughly tested this out yet and we don’t know if we can do it, but when we do, I’ll come back to you and I’ll tell you straight up.”

  Obama asked, “How much time do you need?”

  McRaven said he would need three weeks to rehearse the mission thoroughly.

  Obama observed, “Then you’d better get moving.”

  The officials in the meeting agreed that a helicopter-borne assault team was a risky option. Would the helicopters be detected in Pakistani airspace? And what would the Pakistanis do if they detected them? There were also refueling issues, since the choppers couldn’t go to the target, hover, land, take off, and make it all the way back to Afghanistan. How likely was the refueling site to be detected? Once the Black Hawks were over the compound, what were the potential risks to the helicopters?

  Cartwright mentioned an experimental, radar-evading stealth helicopter that would help to lower the possibility that the Pakistanis would detect the raid, but his comments didn’t get much traction at the time. When the meeting broke up, many of the participants believed that Obama was leaning toward bombing the compound with a B-2 bomber. Hillary Clinton recalls, “Everybody left those meetings totally drained because of the consequences and the stakes that we were dealing with.”

  On March 16, Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who had killed the two Pakistanis two months earlier, was released from jail following an ingenious deal in which the U.S. government paid $2 million of Islam-sanctioned “blood money” to the families of the two victims. This was a significant development for the small group at the White House planning the Abbottabad operation, because there was a real concern that Davis, who was passionately hated in Pakistan, might end up getting killed in his Pakistani prison cell following any kind of U.S. assault on Abbottabad. Now that Davis was a free man, there was one less impediment to taking some kind of military action against the compound.

  By the time of the next “principals” meeting with Obama in the White House, on March 29, the B-2 bombing option had been largely discounted. When Pentagon planners assessed what it would take to destroy the one-acre compound, they found that it would require dropping thirty-two 2,000-pound bombs. This not only would incinerate any DNA evidence but also would be a major air strike in a crowded city, obliterating the compound with its more than twenty inhabitants and destroying another building nearby. Bombs might also fall short of the target, killing still more civilians. The president was concerned about the potential number of civilian casualties and lack of certainty about killing bin Laden. There was also the furious Pakistani response that such an attack would assuredly provoke to consider, and there would be no “sensitive site exploitation,” which is CIA-speak for the forensic examination of computers, cell phones, and pocket litter that typically is performed following a raid to capture or kill a high-value target.

  What remained on the table was a surgical strike by a “standoff” weapon such as a drone, the helicopter-borne assault option, and a wait-and-see approach that boiled down to trying to gather more definitive intelligence. During this meeting, Obama peppered McRaven with questions such as “What if there is a safe room in the compound?” “What if bin Laden isn’t there?” “How do you get bin Laden out of the compound, whether dead or alive?” “What if the helicopters have mechanical problems?” “What happens if we meet resistance at the compound?”

  Throughout this planning process, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was consistently one of the most skeptical of the president’s advisors. His was a voice that carried great weight, as he had worked for six American presidents; he was working for Nixon’s National Security Council when Obama was only thirteen. And Gates had enough experience from his tenure as director of the CIA to know that you could have a pretty strong circumstantial case and still be wrong. In the event of a ground attack on the Abbottabad compound, he was also concerned about the level of risk for U.S. forces and for the American relationship with Pakistan.

  Above all, Gates was concerned about a replay of Operation Eagle Claw, the botched effort in 1979 to release the fifty-two American hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution. The failed rescue operation was a major factor in making Jimmy Carter a one-term president. Eagle Claw was something Gates had lived through in excruciating detail when he was working for then-CIA director Stansfield Turner as his executive assistant. As the disaster unfolded in Iran on November 4, 1979, Gates was with Turner the whole night, shuttling between the CIA and the White House. Gates recalled, “We finally left the White House at about 1:30 in the morning.… I had a long, sad drive home.”

  Now, more than three decades later, another Democratic president was considering putting his presidency on the line with a helicopter assault on the other side of the world in a country that many in the White House considered, at best, a duplicitous ally. Gates repeatedly pressed in White House meetings as the planning continued, “What if you have a helicopter crash?” “What if the Pakistanis respond faster than you think?” “What if guys get pinned down in the compound?” Flournoy says that Gates “didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He was constan
tly asking the hard questions.”

  As the helicopter-borne assault by the SEALs became more plausible, Flournoy says that any chance that the Pakistanis would be given a heads-up became increasingly remote: “Even though we both had very shared interests in getting bin Laden, their concerns about having the U.S. come across the border to do it with a raid, we felt that that could create enough ambivalence that we might not get the support we wanted. At the end of the day, this was such a critical objective, and there’s such a vital interest at stake, and the risk of Pakistanis either losing control of the information or choosing to oppose it because of sovereignty concerns—it was too great. And the decision was made to go unilaterally, but to tell them at the earliest possible opportunity.”

  Now that the decision had been made not to bring the Pakistanis into any aspect of the operation, Obama and his team had to think through how best to deal with whatever their reaction might be, particularly on the ground in Abbottabad, should the president green-light the raid. A senior administration official explains: “McRaven, in some of the earliest briefings, was very sensitive to the idea that we don’t want to create, for lack of a better word, a shit storm with the Pakistanis if we don’t need to. So if this can be accomplished in a way that did not result in dead Pakistanis, either civilians or security forces, that’s the optimal solution.”

  McRaven initially came up with an assault plan that would have had the SEALs avoiding any kind of firefight with the Pakistanis unless it was absolutely necessary. If the Pakistanis did show up in force at the compound, McRaven’s proposal was that the SEALs set up a defensive perimeter and hold them at bay. Meanwhile, senior U.S. officials would explain to their Pakistani counterparts the intelligence case on bin Laden and why the raid had taken place, in the hope that the SEALs would eventually be able to leave without further hindrance.

  In the scenario in which the SEALs were surrounded in the Abbottabad compound by hostile Pakistani soldiers, Obama’s national security team discussed who would be the best person to make the call explaining the situation to the most powerful man in Pakistan, the chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. As this discussion went on without a clear resolution, it was plain that Obama was not at all comfortable with this scenario. “The premium is on the protection of our force, not on keeping the Pakistanis happy,” he instructed McRaven. “I want you to plan against a scenario that you have to fight your way out. You have to be able to face active Pakistani opposition and still get out with all your men safe.” The shorthand for that approach became the “fight your way out” option.

  The Raymond Davis incident helped to shape the thinking of those considering the raid option. What if instead of one American CIA contractor in jail, you ended up having some two dozen Navy SEALs in Pakistani custody because they didn’t have the firepower to fight their way out?

  Obama did not get into the tactical details of where the Chinook helicopters carrying the backup force should be located, nor how many extra SEALs needed to be added to the attacking force; he just told McRaven the force had to be able to fight its way out. “That was a huge fundamental shift, because Bill McRaven thought he was bringing what people wanted, which was a ‘don’t piss off the Paks’ approach,” says a senior administration official. McRaven went back to the drawing board and returned with a variety of ways he could protect the assault team, particularly having a quick reaction force that was deployed deep into Pakistan, rather than on helicopters stationed at the Afghan-Pakistan border, as previously planned. Mullen says, “Obama is the one that put in the Chinook-47s. He is the one that said, ‘There is not enough backup.’ ”

  Mullen, who had visited Pakistan twenty-seven times when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had repeatedly told his counterpart, General Kayani, “If we know we can find Number One or Number Two we are going to get them. Period. And we are going to get them unilaterally. Period.”

  On April 11, Panetta met at CIA headquarters with Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, ISI. Pasha, who had forged a personal relationship with Panetta—calling him by his first name, Leon, and inviting him to his home for dinner with his wife when Panetta had visited Pakistan—complained vociferously about the amount of CIA activity going on in Pakistan, which the Raymond Davis affair had underlined. Pasha said, “You have too many CIA agents in this country, and I don’t care if they’re security officers or case officers or analysts. There are too many of them.” Pasha termed the meeting a “shouting match.” Panetta described it in gentler terms, but it strengthened his determination to keep the Pakistanis out of the loop on the bin Laden raid, and it increased the pressure on the Agency to act quickly, since it was obvious that ISI was now going to start cracking down on CIA activities in Pakistan.

  While the White House continued to debate the various COAs over the course of five days in early April, the SEAL team from DevGru’s Red Squadron began its rehearsals on full-scale models of the compound in a secret facility deep in the forests of North Carolina. They practiced on a one-acre replica of the Abbottabad compound, fast-roping down from Black Hawks onto the courtyard of the compound and the roof of its main building. These rehearsals were observed by the overall commander of Special Operations, Admiral Eric Olson, a thoughtful Arabic speaker and former Navy SEAL, and by Mike Vickers from the Pentagon, Admiral McRaven, and Jeremy Bash of the CIA. The rehearsals took place in daytime and didn’t include a practice run of the helicopter ride into Abbottabad, focusing only on what the SEAL team would do “on target.”

  The raid would employ the “stealth” helicopters Cartwright had suggested using, rendering them more or less invisible to Pakistani radar. One of the main downsides of the raid, however, was how soon the inhabitants of the compound might get tipped off by the sound of the approaching choppers. Even with noise-suppression devices on the stealth Black Hawks, they still made a very loud sound once they were flying in the immediate vicinity. Using stopwatches, the observers found that they could hear the “audio signature” of the helicopters when the aircraft were about a minute away from the target. McRaven had advertised it could be more like two minutes, because wind conditions would affect how the sound traveled.

  During the rehearsals, the two helicopters flew toward the compound replica, dropped the SEAL teams in ninety seconds, and were quickly gone. Methodically, the SEALs practiced sweeping the compound and, as they were finishing, around ten minutes later, the helicopters swept in again to pick them up.

  In the decade since 9/11, the SEALs had done many hundreds of building “take-downs” in hostile environments and had encountered pretty much every type of surprise possible: armed women, people with suicide jackets hidden under their pajamas, insurgents hiding in “spider holes,” and even buildings entirely rigged with explosives. The SEALs had to assume they might encounter any one of these types of threats at the Abbottabad compound. As a result, what became known as the “McRaven option” was constantly “red-teamed,” a formal process by the SEALs to identify potential flaws in the plan. “McRaven had a backup for every possible failure, and a backup to the failure of the backup, and a backup to the failure of the backup of the backup. It was a multilayered set of plans,” recalls Michèle Flournoy.

  When the SEALs on the strike team were finally informed who their target was, a great cheer went up; there was no ambiguity about the purpose of their mission, or about the commitment of the men who were undertaking it.

  The SEAL teams rehearsed again for a week in mid-April, in the high deserts in Nevada, which replicated the likely heat conditions and the elevation of Abbottabad, which sits at four thousand feet. This time they rehearsed the entire mission from nighttime takeoff to the return to base more than three hours later. Again, Olson, McRaven, Vickers, and Bash observed the rehearsal, this time joined by Admiral Mullen. The observers were taken into a hangar, where the SEALs walked them through a “rehearsal of concept” drill using a cardboard model of the comp
ound. The SEAL teams then flew off in their helicopters for about an hour. When they returned, the outside observers, now wearing night vision goggles, watched them as they assaulted the compound. During this rehearsal, wind conditions forced the helicopters to arrive at the target from an unexpected direction. This reminded the observers that no matter how many times the assault was rehearsed, there were still going to be some “game-time” decisions to make. The rehearsals also showed that the whole operation on the ground could be conducted in under thirty minutes—the amount of time the Pentagon had determined that the SEALs would have before they were interrupted by the arrival of Pakistani security forces.

  Mullen had a great deal of faith in McRaven, whom he had known since the younger officer was a navy captain a decade earlier. At that time, McRaven had received rave reviews about his work in the Bush White House. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mullen had made it a point on his frequent trips to Afghanistan to drop in at the JSOC operations center at Bagram Air Base, outside Kabul, typically around midnight, when the SEAL missions were in full swing. As a result, Mullen had a high degree of confidence in the skills of the SEALs, which was reaffirmed when he observed their rehearsal of the Abbottabad raid. “If I am going to send somebody in to die,” Mullen explains, “I want to know as much about it as I possibly can. I also had the opportunity to look the men in the eye. Every single one of them. Personally. I also felt an obligation to understand as much as I could. So when you are sitting around the table with the president I could say, ‘I have confidence and here’s why. Here is what I watched. Here are the details.’ ”