Manhunt

by Peter L. Bergen

  Leiter went into the small conference room to watch the feed from the stealth drone, and was soon followed by members of Obama’s cabinet. “Slowly, onesies and twosies, they kept poking their head in,” Leiter recalls. Vice President Joe Biden drifted in, and then Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, and suddenly the room was full, with many of Obama’s top intelligence and counterterrorism officials jammed up against the wall or peering through the doorway to get a better look at the unfolding drama.

  The debate about whether the president should be monitoring the operation was settled when Obama popped into the room and announced, “I need to watch this,” and settled himself into a chair off to one side of the cramped room. Dozens of other officials at the CIA and the Pentagon also were monitoring the same video feed.

  The men and women in the room were updated about each key milestone along the way as the helicopters entered Pakistan’s airspace and headed toward Abbottabad. The tension was palpable. Leiter, who used to fly attack jets for the navy, says, “The only thing I can compare it to is landing a plane on an aircraft carrier at night.” There was very little discussion, except every once in a while an official would ask for clarification of what was going on, such as “Why is that helo there? What are they doing now?” If he could, Webb answered the question immediately; otherwise he made a quick call to find out what was happening.

  The Black Hawks approached Abbottabad from the northwest. Once the helicopters reached their destination, the carefully planned operation began to unravel. As the first chopper tried to land in the largest courtyard in the compound, it suddenly lost altitude. The combination of the additional weight of the stealth technology and the higher-than-expected temperatures in Abbottabad had degraded its performance, causing an aerodynamic phenomenon known as “settling with power,” meaning an unexpectedly fast drop. When the SEALs had practiced the maneuver on a replica of the compound in the States, the compound’s outer walls had been represented by chain-link fencing, whereas the actual walls were made of concrete. The thick walls likely gave more energy to the Black Hawk’s rotor wash and contributed to the chopper’s instability. Because of that instability, the tail of the craft clipped one of the compound walls, breaking off the critical tail rotor. Now the pilot could no longer control the chopper. Relying on his training, he avoided a potentially catastrophic crash by burying the helo’s nose in the dirt in the large yard where the compound occupants grew crops. Because of his quick thinking, the SEALs on the chopper did not sustain serious injuries and, after gathering their wits about them, were able to clamber out of the downed bird.

  The plan had been for both Black Hawks to drop off the two dozen men, lingering for only a couple of minutes before flying out to a distant rendezvous point, where they would then wait for the signal to return for the SEAL team at the end of the mission. The hope was that any curious locals would assume that the two choppers were visiting the nearby military academy. Now one Black Hawk was down and any chance that the mission might remain “deniable” to the media and public was gone. So was the element of surprise.

  Obama grimly watched this all unfold on the grainy video feed being beamed back from the drone high above the compound. The feed clearly showed that the rotors of the first helicopter had stopped spinning. Then the second helicopter, instead of hovering and dropping some SEALs on the roof of the main compound building, simply disappeared out of the shot.

  “We could see that there were problems initially with one of the helicopters landing. So right off the top, everybody, I think, was holding their breath. That wasn’t in the script,” says Obama. “And when our helicopter tail didn’t get over the wall into the yard there and we knew that it was lost, which meant you had to bring in the standby helicopter for the extraction, those were really intense moments,” echoes Secretary Clinton. “This was like any episode of 24 or any movie you could ever imagine.”

  General James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was an old friend of Robert Gates, who was sitting in front of him, also transfixed by the footage of the chopper going down. Clapper looked over at Gates, who was ashen. “I know his heart was in his throat then,” says Clapper. Clapper’s deputy Robert Cardillo says, “I could almost hear heartbeats in the room.” Vice President Biden fingered his rosary beads.

  In Panetta’s conference room at the CIA, now packed with some two dozen officials from the Agency, Joint Special Operations Command, and other parts of the intelligence community, there was silence as the footage of the downed helicopter flickered on the screen. A female analyst who had worked on the bin Laden account for years nervously piped up, “Is that good?”

  In his Texas drawl, Admiral McRaven addressed Panetta without any discernible shift in tone, saying, “We will now be amending the mission. Director, as you can see, we have a helicopter down in the courtyard. My men are prepared for this contingency and they will deal with it.” Within a matter of seconds, McRaven could see on his video feed of the operation that the SEAL team on the downed helicopter had made it out of the bird without any serious problems. About a minute later, McRaven said, “I’m pushing the QRF to the objective,” meaning that the SEALs waiting in the Chinook about twenty minutes’ flying time to the north of the compound would now scramble to get to Abbottabad.

  Despite the contingency plans, some of the officials observing the chopper crash were haunted by the knowledge that it was after just this kind of mishap that an operation could spiral badly out of control. The deadliest battle in the history of the SEALs had taken place six years earlier, in Kunar, in eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban had ambushed a group of four SEALs, three of whom were killed. The mission that was launched to try to extricate the SEALs turned into a fiasco when one of the rescue helicopters went down, killing all eight SEALs and eight Special Operations aviators on board.

  After the helicopter went down in the Abbottabad compound, Mullen’s biggest concern “was that someone at the White House would reach in and start micromanaging the mission. It is potentially the great disadvantage about technology that we have these days. And I was going to put my body in the way to try to stop that. Obviously, there was one person I couldn’t stop doing that, and that was the president.” Obama let the mission proceed.

  AT THE COMPOUND, three SEALs from the downed chopper ran across the small field where the Black Hawk had crashed and opened a door on one of the inside walls of the compound, leading to a self-contained annex area. There they found the simple garage where the Kuwaiti parked his jeep and van and the one-story building where he lived with his family. The Kuwaiti poked his head out from behind a metal gate in this building, and the SEALs shot him twice in the chin, killing him. They also wounded the Kuwaiti’s wife with a shot to her right shoulder. Their silenced weapons made little noise. (The courier’s AK-47 was later found by his bedside. It seems unlikely that he fired it, given its location and the fact that no casings from such a weapon were later found at the scene.)

  Meanwhile, the second Black Hawk pilot had seen what happened to the first chopper and shifted gears. Plan A had been to hover above the roof of bin Laden’s bedroom so that a few SEALs could fast-rope down onto it and surprise bin Laden while he slept. Now the pilot opted for Plan B: the safer course of settling the bird down just outside the compound walls in a field of crops. A small group of SEALs jumped out, four of them to secure the outside perimeter of the compound, together with the interpreter and Cairo, a Belgian Malinois, similar to a German shepherd. The dog would track any “squirters,” or people trying to escape from the compound, and would discourage inquisitive neighbors from getting too close. Most Muslims consider dogs to be “unclean” and are wary of them, in particular attack dogs such as Cairo. Cairo had also been trained to hunt for any hidden chambers or vaults inside the compound that might be hiding bin Laden. The remaining eight SEALs on the second chopper jumped out and set an explosive charge on a solid metal door on one of the compound’s exterior walls, but when the gate was blown off i
ts hinges, they were greeted by the sight of a large brick wall—a dead end. Soon after that, their colleagues from the downed chopper let them in through the main gate of the compound, saving them the trouble of blowing through the massive, thick exterior wall.

  Up in his top-floor bedroom, bin Laden had become a victim of his own security arrangements. The few windows ensured that no one could look in to see him, but now it was impossible for him to see what was going on outside the small room he shared with his beloved Amal. Dressed in tan shalwar kameez robes, the leader of al-Qaeda just waited in the dark in silence for about fifteen minutes, seemingly mentally paralyzed as the Americans stormed his last refuge. With no moon and the electricity out, it was pitch black, which must have added to his confusion. Sewn into his clothing were several hundred euros and two phone numbers, one for a cell phone in Pakistan and another for a call center in Pakistan’s tribal regions. This was the extent of bin Laden’s escape plan, and it wasn’t going to be of much help to him now.

  Three SEALs went from the Kuwaiti’s one-story building through a metal gate in a wall inside the compound and found themselves in a grassy courtyard in front of the main house. The SEALs entered the ground floor. On their left was a bedroom where they shot Abrar, the Kuwaiti’s brother, and his wife, Bushra, killing them both. They were unarmed. At this point, the officials at the White House could no longer see what was going on, as the drone flying high above the compound was feeding back video only of the exterior of the bin Laden residence. Obama remembers, “We were really in a blackout situation and it was hard for us to know what exactly was taking place. We knew that gunshots were taking place, and we knew some explosions were taking place.”

  The SEAL team had no idea what the layout of the floors inside bin Laden’s house might be. As they moved deeper inside, they passed a kitchen and two large storage rooms. Near the back of the house, which had a bunker-like feel, was a stairwell. Blocking their way to the upper two floors was a massive, locked metal gate. The SEALs blasted their way through this gate with the breaching materials they were carrying.

  Leiter says that he was concerned that the house might be booby-trapped with bombs, a technique al-Qaeda had perfected in Iraq: “I kept waiting for some big explosion from the house that just made everything sink.” Brennan was also anxious: “Might there be a quick reaction force that bin Laden may have had, security that we didn’t know about?”

  As the SEALs ran up to the second floor, they encountered bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, whom they shot on the staircase. He appears to have been unarmed. Knots of children were now gathering on the stairs and landings of the bin Laden residence.

  On a shelf in his bedroom were the AK-47 and Makarov machine pistol that were bin Laden’s constant companions, but he didn’t reach for them. Instead, he opened a metal gate, which blocked all access to his room and could be opened only from the inside, and quickly poked his head out to see what the commotion was. He was immediately spotted by the SEALs, who bounded up the next flight of stairs. At this point, unless bin Laden walked out of his bedroom with his hands up and said, “I surrender,” there was no chance that he would be taken alive. Retreating inside, bin Laden made the fatal error of not locking this gate behind him, allowing the SEALs to run past it into a short hallway. They then turned right into his bedroom.

  Hearing the sounds of strange men rushing into their room, Amal screamed something in Arabic and threw herself in front of her husband. The first SEAL who charged into the room shoved her aside, concerned she might be wearing a suicide bomb vest. Amal was then shot in the calf by another of the SEALs and collapsed unconscious onto the simple double mattress she shared with bin Laden. Bin Laden was offering no resistance when he was dispatched with a “double tap” of shots to the chest and his left eye. It was a grisly scene: his brains spattered on the ceiling above him and poured out of his eye socket. The floor near the bed was smeared with bin Laden’s blood.

  For all his bluster that he would go down fighting and his bodyguards would shoot him if he were ever found by the Americans, when the moment finally came, bin Laden went out not with a bang but with a whimper. The fifty-four-year-old bin Laden may have grown complacent or tired during his decade on the run; he had no real escape plan, and there was no secret passageway out of his house. Perhaps he expected some kind of warning that never came. Or perhaps he knew that a firefight inside the enclosed spaces of his house would likely end up killing some of his wives and children. After all, the SEALs shot to kill or to wound most of the adults they encountered in the compound, killing four men and one woman and wounding two other women. Of the eleven adults in the compound that night—which included three of bin Laden’s older children: Khalid, Maryam, and Sumaiya—a total of seven were shot in the space of a quarter of an hour.

  On the audio feed, McRaven heard the SEAL team give the code word Geronimo. Each step of the operation had been labeled with a letter of the alphabet, and G meant that bin Laden was “secured.” McRaven relayed the word Geronimo to the White House. But this was ambiguous: Was bin Laden captured or dead? So McRaven asked the SEAL ground force commander, “Is he EKIA [Enemy Killed in Action]?” A few seconds later, the answer came back: “Roger, Geronimo EKIA.” Then McRaven announced to the White House, “Geronimo EKIA.”

  There were gasps in the Situation Room, but no whoops or high fives. The president quietly said, “We got him, we got him.”

  It was still the middle of the night in Pakistan, and the SEALs were able to see only through the murky, pixilated green light of night vision goggles. McRaven came on the line again to say, “Look, I’ve got a Geronimo call, but I need to tell you it’s a first call. This is not a confirmation. Please keep your expectations managed a little here. Most operators when they are on a mission their adrenaline is sky high. Yes, they are professional, but let’s not count on anything until they get back and we have some evidence.” McRaven also pointed out, “We’ve got SEALs on the ground without a ride.”

  The SEALs’ next task was to blow up the downed helicopter crammed with secret avionics and clad in stealth technology. Then they had to get out of Pakistan without encountering Pakistani forces on the ground or in the air. Everyone following the operation knew that there was much that could still go wrong. Obama says, “All of us, I think, took pause, not wanting to get too excited: Number one because they’re operating in pitch darkness and identification could not be certain. Number two, our guys still weren’t out of there.”

  Leiter says, “We were just amazed by the lack of a Pakistani response. It was, even by Pakistani standards, remarkably slow.” Belatedly, the Pakistanis did scramble two F-16s. Leiter, who had logged hundreds of hours of flight time in attack jets, was not especially concerned, knowing that Pakistani pilots didn’t have much nighttime flying capability. “I had some appreciation for the Pakistanis’ ability to find two helicopters flying near the ground at night with no airborne command and control,” Leiter says. “An American F-16 couldn’t have found them in the time they needed to. It was just a non-risk. Some people were more nervous than I was.” Leiter was, however, concerned that the Pakistan military might interpret the mysterious choppers flying around Abbottabad as an incursion by the Indian air force and was relieved when the Pakistani F-16s started flying away from the Indian border.

  The SEALs grabbed bin Laden’s body and dragged it down the stairs of his residence, leaving a trail of bloody skid marks, all under the watchful eyes of Safia, bin Laden’s twelve-year-old daughter. The bodies of the three other men killed by the SEALs, the courier and his brother and Khalid bin Laden, lay scattered around the compound, blood oozing from their noses, ears, and mouths. Next to her husband was Bushra, the wife of the courier’s brother, also dead.

  Outside the compound, the interpreter waved off curious neighbors who had started to gather, telling them in the local language that a security operation was going on and they should go home. In the twenty-three minutes after they killed bin
Laden, some SEALs wired the disabled chopper with explosives, while others gathered up the many computers, cell phones, and thumb drives that littered bin Laden’s residence, which might shed light on the inner workings of al-Qaeda and its plans for future terrorist attacks. The SEALs also rounded up the more than a dozen women and children, who were distraught and wailing, and moved them out of the way so that they could safely blow up the downed helicopter.

  The SEALs had expected they might find twenty-one-year-old Hamza bin Laden, one of the older sons of al-Qaeda’s leader, at the compound. They were carrying the cards that had detailed information about the adults they might encounter at the bin Laden residence, including Hamza, who had appeared in al-Qaeda propaganda videos while he was a child and had spent much of the decade after 9/11 in Iran. Hamza was known to have returned to Pakistan in the summer of 2010. Could he have escaped during the raid? That seems implausible, given the presence of twenty-three SEALs at the compound, four of whom were patrolling the perimeter with a dog trained to apprehend anyone escaping, while high overhead a U.S. drone monitored the raid. More likely, Hamza had never made it to Abbottabad and was living instead in Pakistan’s tribal regions with other al-Qaeda members.

  One of the SEAL operators took a photo of bin Laden’s face and uploaded the picture to a server. It was sent on to Washington, where two separate teams of facial recognition experts were standing by to compare the picture of the dead bin Laden to existing photographs of him and provide a relatively quick, though not completely foolproof, confirmation that it was al-Qaeda’s leader. DNA testing was the only way to identify him with complete certainty, but that would take longer. SEALs extracted samples of tissue from bin Laden’s body and placed them in vials for DNA analysis. One set of vials would go with bin Laden’s body on the backup Chinook that had just arrived at the compound, and another set would go on the working Black Hawk for the flight back to Afghanistan.