At the JSOC headquarters in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul, Admiral McRaven gave a tour to a visiting “codel,” a delegation of visitors from Congress. He gave no hint that he was just about to launch the most important operation of his life.
Throughout the long day in Alabama and Florida, Obama kept his game face on. He said later that the Abbottabad operation “was weighing on me, but, you know, something I said during the campaign that I’ve learned over and over again in this job, is the presidency requires you to do more than one thing at a time.”
One of those things was to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday evening—the nearest thing to Oscar night that dowdy Washington, D.C., has to offer. It is an annual tradition going back decades in which the president and pretty much every other important official in the administration—as well as many who like to think of themselves as important—gather with the Washington press corps for a black-tie dinner. Adding a little tinsel to the proceedings, New York media moguls attend, and a sprinkling of Hollywood stars and business heavyweights fly in for the night. The evening’s entertainment generally consists of a comic who gently roasts politicians on both sides of the aisle, while the president takes a few pot shots of his own at his critics and the press.
Unbeknownst to the Washington press corps, the 2011 Correspondents’ Dinner had been the subject of intense discussions in the Situation Room in recent days. Should the Abbottabad operation be delayed until after the dinner? There was sound reason to consider this idea, because if the raid went badly, the plan was to try to keep it a covert action and not acknowledge it, but you couldn’t do that very well if just about all the senior national security officials attending the dinner suddenly got up and left to deal with the fallout from a botched raid. Similarly, if the president canceled his appearance at the dinner at the very last minute, the press corps would surely sense that something was up and start digging into what had caused the cancellation. Officials discussed how they might throw the press off the scent by simply announcing that the president had the flu. The counterargument was that if the Obama administration delayed the operation and then it came out that they had missed an opportunity to get bin Laden because of the dinner, it would be a public relations disaster of biblical proportions.
Obama was reluctant to consider moving the Abbottabad operation until after the Correspondents’ Dinner. “The only thing that was going to drive the ‘go’ or ‘no go’ on this mission were the mission requirements of the SEALs in the field,” he said. By Friday night, the discussion about what to do about the dinner was rendered moot, as it was predicted that there was going to be excessive cloud cover in northern Pakistan the following evening. McRaven decided to push the mission back twenty-four hours, to Sunday night.
On Saturday afternoon, during a break from rehearsing his speech for the Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama called McRaven for a final status check, as it was by now late Saturday night in Afghanistan. During a twelve-minute phone call, McRaven affirmed that they were ready to go. The president concluded the call, saying, “I couldn’t have any more confidence in you than the confidence I have in you and your force. Godspeed to you and your forces. Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service and the message that I personally will be following this mission very closely.”
Operation Neptune Spear was now a go. The name given to the mission was a nod to the trident wielded by Neptune, the mythological god of the sea, that appears on the badge awarded to all those who qualify as SEALs.
At 7:00 p.m. Saturday, Barack and Michelle Obama showed up as scheduled at the cavernous banquet hall of the Washington Hilton, the president in black tie and the first lady in a brown silk sleeveless gown with a plunging neckline. At the back of his mind, Obama was turning over the details of the Abbottabad operation, but he still managed to deliver a hilarious after-dinner monologue centered largely on the faux controversy about whether he was actually an American citizen. In the audience was Donald Trump, the blowhard billionaire who had been especially vocal in questioning the president’s citizenship, and who hosted the NBC reality show Celebrity Apprentice. Obama began his monologue by saying, “My fellow Americans … Donald Trump is here tonight! Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than ‘the Donald.’ And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing?… But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about [Donald Trump’s] credentials and breadth of experience. For example—no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice—at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mister Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.” Trump listened to the president’s deft skewering with a pained smirk.
Laughing along at the dinner were many of the key players in the impending bin Laden operation: Leon Panetta, Robert Gates, Tom Donilon, Admiral Mike Mullen, Mike Vickers, and White House chief of staff Bill Daley. The emcee of the dinner, comedian Seth Meyers, at one point made a joke about the long hunt for bin Laden. “People think bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Kush,” quipped Meyers, “but did you know that every day from 4 to 5 p.m. he hosts a show on C-SPAN?” Obama let rip a big guffaw at that one.
ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos had gotten wind of the fact that, somewhat unusually, the White House was going to be closed to all tours the following day. Chatting with Bill Daley, Stephanopoulos quizzed him: “You guys have got something big going on over there?” Daley was momentarily spooked, but recovered, saying blandly, “Oh no. It’s just a plumbing issue,” which seemed to satisfy Stephanopoulos.
A few blocks away, at the historic Meridian House, Mike Leiter was married to Alice Brown. The judge conducting the ceremony was Laurence Silberman, who had led the commission that examined why the CIA had mistakenly concluded that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction. In less than twenty-four hours the CIA would have a chance to wipe away the memory of that grim chapter in its history. Or it might be embarrassed again.
13 DON’T TURN ON THE LIGHT
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, the residents of the bin Laden compound were startled awake by the strange sounds of explosions nearby. Bin Laden’s daughter Maryam, age twenty, rushed upstairs to his top-floor bedroom to ask what was going on. “Go downstairs and go back to bed,” he told her.
Then bin Laden told his wife Amal, “Don’t turn on the light.” It was a pointless admonition. Someone—it is still not clear exactly who—had taken the sensible precaution of turning off the electricity feeding the neighborhood, thus giving the SEALs a large advantage on that moonless night. Indeed, those would be the last words Osama bin Laden would ever utter.
SIX HOURS EARLIER, around 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, May 1, Obama’s national security staffers had begun arriving at the White House. Some of them drifted over to a nearby Starbucks to get caffeinated for what was obviously going to be a very long day. One or two of them were a little the worse for wear from having attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the night before. Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough had gone to his friend Mike Leiter’s wedding. After a late night—“It was my wedding, for God’s sake!”—Leiter, who had already postponed his honeymoon, told his new bride he had to go to the White House for some important meetings. “I might not be back for a while. I can’t tell you why. You’ll understand later,” he said. Leon Panetta got up early that morning. While shaving he looked at himself in the mirror and thought, “The next time I look in this mirror, we will have accomplished something significant, or I will have to be explaining myself to a lot of people.”
The nat
ion’s top security officials were careful to project a show of business as usual. As was his habit, Panetta, a committed Catholic, attended Sunday Mass. At about 9:45 a.m., President Obama left the White House for his usual round of golf at Andrews Air Force Base, but he played only nine holes. At 10:00 a.m. the “deputies” meeting began. The subcabinet officials assembled there each had thick briefing books that featured options labeled “branches” and “sequels,” covering pretty much every contingency that might arise during Operation Neptune Spear.
At around noon, the principals of Obama’s cabinet began arriving at the White House. So as not to attract attention, the armor-plated limos of cabinet officials such as Hillary Clinton were not parked in their usual spots near the West Wing, where the inquisitive White House press corps might notice them. The White House had canceled all tours so that tourists wouldn’t see all the unusual comings and goings. Katie Johnson, the president’s personal secretary, had scheduled a White House tour for the stars of the movie The Hangover, who were in town for the Correspondents’ Dinner, and she asked Ben Rhodes if he could grant an exception. Rhodes told her it wouldn’t be possible.
The White House national security team had set up secure communications in the Situation Room, connected to Admiral McRaven, who was by now in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. The “Sit Room” was also in secure communication with Panetta’s offices at CIA headquarters and with the Ops Center in the Pentagon, where General Cartwright was monitoring all the intelligence feeds coming in from the field and had a team of some thirty officers standing by to respond to any contingency.
Cartwright’s team had created an operational matrix that covered any likely eventuality: a helicopter going down, bin Laden taken alive, a dead bin Laden, an injured bin Laden, and someone other than bin Laden living at the compound. Cartwright’s biggest concern was that Pakistan’s premier military academy was less than a mile away from the compound. Might a large force of Pakistani soldiers be up at night for some reason and stumble on the operation? This could lead to a shootout with the Pakistanis. Not good. If Pakistani troops did suddenly appear in force, the plan was for the SEALs to try to avoid a firefight and to sit tight in the compound while senior U.S. military officials in Washington tried to negotiate their safe passage. But the SEALs had enough firepower and backup with the quick reaction force (QRF) on the Chinooks that they could fight their way out, if it came to that.
At 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, as night fell seven thousand miles to the east, in Pakistan, Obama’s war cabinet began to gather in the Sit Room. Across the Potomac River, in Langley, Virginia, Panetta was in a spacious conference room on the top floor of CIA headquarters. The room had been transformed into a command center, with maps on the walls, computers monitoring the operation, and two large screens with secure video streams, one linked to the Situation Room, the other to Admiral McRaven in Jalalabad.
“What do you think?” Panetta asked CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell.
“I won’t be surprised if bin Laden is there. And I won’t be surprised if he isn’t there,” Morell said.
“That’s where I am,” Panetta agreed.
Also observing the operation at the CIA was Admiral Eric Olson, a veteran of the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993, now the overall commander of Special Operations. Olson had been awarded the Silver Star for “conspicuous gallantry” in Somalia and was keenly aware of how a U.S. helicopter assault in a foreign city could go badly wrong.
The CIA director narrated developments to the officials at the White House as he heard them from McRaven. Panetta was in nominal control of the operation so that it would remain covert and so that the White House would preserve “deniability” should bin Laden not be at the compound and the raid go undetected by the Pakistanis. But the CIA’s “command and control” of the operation was a fiction; the real commander was McRaven.
At 1:22 p.m., Panetta ordered McRaven to perform the raid, telling him, “Go in there and get bin Laden, and if bin Laden isn’t in there, get the hell out!”
At 2:00 p.m., Obama returned from his golf game and went straight to the Sit Room for the final meeting with his national security team as Operation Neptune Spear commenced. At 2:05 p.m., Leon Panetta began one more overview of the operation.
It was now just past 11:00 p.m. in Abbottabad, and the bin Laden household was in bed. And given the time difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it was just past 10:30 p.m. in Jalalabad, where the U.S. Navy SEAL team, consisting of twenty-three “operators” and an interpreter—a “terp,” in military parlance—were readying themselves to board two Black Hawk choppers. The helicopters would carry them more than 150 miles to the east, perhaps to confront the man responsible for the deadliest mass murder in American history. The men carried small cards filled with photos and descriptions of bin Laden’s family and the members of his entourage who were believed to be living at the compound. Also along for the operation was a combat dog named Cairo, wearing body armor just like his SEAL teammates.
Half an hour later, at about 11:00 p.m. local time, the two Black Hawks took off from the Jalalabad airfield, heading east toward the Pakistani border, which they would cross in about fifteen minutes. The MH-60 choppers were modified so as to remain undetected by Pakistani radar stations, which were in “peacetime” mode, unlike the radar facilities on the border Pakistan shared with its longtime enemy India, which were always on heightened alert. Painted with exotic emulsions designed to help them evade radar, the modified MH-60s also gave off a low heat “signature” in flight, and their tail rotors had been designed to make them less noisy and less susceptible to radar identification. On top of that, the helicopters flew “nap-of-the-earth,” which means perilously low and very, very fast—only a few feet above the ground, driving around trees and hugging the riverbeds and valleys that penetrate the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range. This also made them harder to detect by radar. After crossing the Pakistani border, the choppers swung north of Peshawar and its millions of residents and eyeballs. The total flight time to the target was about an hour and a half.
The secrecy surrounding the bin Laden raid was so intense that of the 150,000 American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, the only one who had been briefed about the operation was their overall commander, General David Petraeus, who had received a heads-up three days earlier. As on most nights in Afghanistan, there were some dozen Special Forces operations launching that night to capture or kill militant commanders. The bin Laden raid was different not only because of the target but also because it was taking place in a country that the United States was nominally allied to but that had not been notified of the operation.
Shortly before midnight, Petraeus strolled into the ops center in NATO headquarters and asked everyone except one officer to leave. He then opened up a classified chat room on a computer that allowed him to monitor the operation. If needed, Petraeus was ready to order U.S. aircraft in Afghanistan to respond to Pakistani jets trying to intercept or even attack the American helicopters now entering their airspace.
Once the two Black Hawks were inside Pakistan’s airspace, three bus-size Chinook helicopters took off from the Jalalabad airfield. One landed just inside the Afghan border with Pakistan, and two flew on to Kala Dhaka, in the mountainous region of Swat, about fifty miles northwest of Abbottabad, landing on a flat beachlike area on the banks of the broad Indus River. This part of northern Pakistan was barely populated and wasn’t controlled by either the Taliban or the Pakistani government. On these two Chinooks was the QRF, consisting of two dozen SEALs who would go forward if the SEALs on the Black Hawks encountered serious opposition when they landed at the compound. The Chinooks also carried bladders of fuel for the Black Hawks, which would need to be refueled on the flight back to Afghanistan.
ADJOINING THE WHITE HOUSE situation room, which can accommodate more than a dozen senior officials at a large, highly polished wooden table and a couple dozen more staffers on the “backbencher” seats around
the walls, is a much smaller meeting room. Like the Sit Room, this conference room has secure video and phone communications, but it has only a small table and can comfortably accommodate only seven people. In this room was Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, a deputy commander of JSOC, dressed in a crisp blue air force uniform festooned with ribbons, monitoring the SEAL teams on the raid in real time on a laptop, together with another JSOC officer. On the video monitors of the small conference room, grainy video of the unfolding raid was fed in from a bat-shaped RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone flying more than two miles above Abbottabad.
National Security Advisor Tom Donilon stopped by the small conference room and asked what the officers were doing. Told that they were getting ready to unplug their equipment and move it into the main Situation Room, Donilon said, “No, you’re not. Shut this off. I don’t want this going on.” Donilon didn’t want to leave anyone with the impression that the president was micromanaging a military mission for which he’d already approved the plan. The officers pointed out that if they shut down their equipment there would no longer be a way to communicate with McRaven. “Okay,” Donilon said, “you have to keep it all in this room.”
Next door, a debate was percolating in the Situation Room about whether the president should be monitoring the operation live as it happened. Leiter recalls, “The White House, as only the White House can, had an endless debate about whether or not the president should monitor in real time. What if something went wrong and the president said something or did something? I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for the debate to be solved. I was going to watch the damn thing.”
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