The Chinook picked up the dozen men from the disabled bird, and all the material seized from the compound—about one hundred thumb drives, DVDs, and computer disks, plus computer hard drives, five computers, and a number of cell phones. Bin Laden’s body was also loaded onto the Chinook. The decision had already been made that his wives and children would be left behind.
In Washington, the officials watching the video feed from the stealth drone could see the two distinctive large rotors of a Chinook helicopter coming into the frame. That was the Chinook carrying the QRF arriving at the compound. The officials could also now see the SEAL teams on the ground gathering outside the wall of the compound waiting to board the chopper for the flight back to base. The video feed then showed a massive fireball as the downed helicopter was blown up. It was “like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie,” says one official, who watched in awe. Then the Chinook took off from the Abbottabad compound and flew out of the drone’s field of vision. At the CIA command center there were high fives all around and fist bumping.
Obama said later that the time the SEALs spent at the compound “was the longest forty minutes of my life, with the possible exception of when [my daughter] Sasha got meningitis when she was three months old, and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right.”
On the way out of Abbottabad, the Chinook and the Black Hawk separated, making them harder to detect as they headed toward Afghanistan. Both flew more direct routes than they had on the way into Pakistan, since speed rather than stealth was now of the essence, and the Black Hawk still needed to take on fuel at the refueling point inside Pakistan. Obama told his national security team, “Inform me as soon as our helicopters are out of Pakistani airspace.”
At about 2:00 a.m. local time, 6:30 p.m. back in Washington, the Chinook landed back at the base in Jalalabad; the entire operation had taken a little over three hours. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, a leading bin Laden analyst, and Admiral McRaven all quickly inspected bin Laden’s corpse. They stretched the body out to its full length but didn’t have a tape measure to confirm that the corpse measured six feet four, the height of the al-Qaeda leader, so a SEAL of roughly the same height lay down next to the body. The height was a match.
When McRaven spoke to Obama, he jokingly apologized for the downed stealth helicopter, saying, “Well, sir, I guess I owe you sixty million dollars.”
“Let me get this straight, Bill. I just left a sixty-million-dollar helicopter in Pakistan and you don’t have a buck ninety-nine for a tape measure?” Obama shot back.
Obama remembers, “It wasn’t really until Bill McRaven personally saw the body that we confirmed that it was bin Laden.” Shortly after this confirmation, the CIA’s director for science and technology called into the Situation Room, reaching CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash. “I have the results of the eight-point facial analysis on bin Laden,” he said. The CIA official walked Bash through the basis of his analysts’ confidence that the photo was a good match for bin Laden: “The length of his nose, the distance between his upper eyelid and his lower eyebrow, the shape of the ear, cartilage—they all match.” Bash scribbled notes furiously and handed them to Panetta. Panetta began reading them out to Obama, saying, “We’ve gotten the facial analysis, and it matches. We believe it’s bin Laden with ninety-five percent confidence.” Cheers went up in the CIA conference room, and champagne bottles were soon discreetly uncorked in a number of Agency offices.
Should the president go out and announce bin Laden’s death publicly that night? After all, there was still a 5 percent chance that it wasn’t bin Laden. Obama’s initial reaction was, “That’s not good enough for me. I’m not going out to the American public with one chance in twenty of being wrong.” Some of Obama’s top cabinet officials urged that a public statement be delayed until the DNA testing was completed, in a day or so. Others said, “Mr. President, this isn’t going to hold. It’s going to leak. You have to make a statement.” Obama said, “No, no, there’s no news until I say so. People can leak all they want. But it’s not news until I say something.”
A photo of the dead al-Qaeda leader was then passed around the Situation Room, and Obama looked it over carefully. Leiter and Brennan looked at each other and said, “It’s bin Laden.” General Clapper remembers, “The pictures were kind of gruesome, but it was him. I was sure it was him.” A White House official recalls, “There was a hole right around one of his eyes and it took off a chunk of his head, but it looked like Osama bin Laden, except for the fact that the beard was shorter and darker. It seemed like the beard had been dyed black and was a little shorter than the long gray beard in all the famous pictures of him walking around.” Leiter remembers thinking, “I don’t need facial recognition. It’s bin Laden with a hole in his head—immediately recognizable. Holy shit! We just killed bin Laden!”
14 AFTERMATH
PAKISTANI SECURITY OFFICIALS began arriving at the Abbottabad compound within a few minutes after the SEALs had left. The officials could hear the sound of helicopters fading into the distance. They found a chaotic scene. First, they saw the burning helicopter, which they reported to the military. Perhaps, they thought, this was a Pakistani training mission gone badly wrong. Then, making their way through the compound gate, the officials came across a wounded woman. She was the courier’s wife, Mariam. Speaking in Pashto, a local language, she said, “I am from Swat. My husband has been killed. If you go inside, there are many Arabs who have been killed.”
Inside the main residence, the officials found several women screaming and shouting, and fourteen children, all handcuffed. They also found four dead bodies, two in the annex building and two on the ground floor of the main building. On the top floor bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal, lay unconscious on the bed, wearing an abaya (a loose black robe) as if she had been planning to go out. Shattered glass was everywhere. One of the older women told the officials in English, “They have killed and taken away Abu Hamza [the father of Hamza].” One of the officials asked, “Well, who is Abu Hamza?” She replied, “Osama bin Laden. They’ve killed the father of my son.”
Bin Laden’s twelve-year-old daughter, Safia, also spoke, saying, “I am Saudi. Osama bin Laden is my father.” The Pakistanis took bin Laden’s three wives and his children into custody and placed them under house arrest while they were debriefed by Pakistani military intelligence investigators.
One of the first journalists to arrive at the compound was Ihsan Khan, the local correspondent for the Voice of America’s Pashto service. Khan, a dogged reporter in a part of the world where that can get you in trouble, had been dozing at home when he was awakened by a quite unusual sound: a helicopter flying over the city at about 12:45 a.m. This was the backup Chinook flying in to replace the downed Black Hawk. The distinctive sound of a helicopter flying overhead at night was something Khan hadn’t heard once during the seven years he had lived in the city, even during the relief efforts in the region following the devastating 2005 earthquake that killed some seventy-five thousand people.
Khan called some buddies to see what was going on. They didn’t know. Then, about twenty minutes later, at 1:05 a.m., Khan heard a huge explosion. This was the sound of the downed chopper being blown up. Khan leapt out of bed and dialed the local police. The line was busy. He made further calls and was told that a helicopter had just crashed. He rushed outside his house and saw a large fireball that looked to be about a mile away.
Whatever was going on was clearly news. Nothing ever happened in Abbottabad! It was one of the most peaceful cities in Pakistan. Khan dashed off an e-mail to his editor at VOA in Washington: “A helicopter crashed down in sensitive area Kakul of Abbottabad. Before the incident heavy firing and blasts were heard by the locals. Officials have confirmed the heli crash but casualties and reasons haven’t been disclosed. I am gathering further details and will be ready for live report. Please call me before the morning bulletin, if possible.”
He then rushed to the location of the fireball, in the
Bilal Town neighborhood. When he reached the compound, he found that the police had already cordoned it off. Locals told him that the electricity in the neighborhood had been switched off, and that this had not been a regularly scheduled “load shedding.” Neighbors also told Khan that just before one of the helicopters had landed at the compound—very likely the backup Chinook—someone on the ground had wielded a colored laser light, flashing it near the compound to guide the helicopter in to land.
Back at the White House, Obama’s team realized that, because of the helicopter crash, the bin Laden operation would not remain secret for long. The officials monitoring the feed from the stealth drone could already see people on the rooftops of buildings in Abbottabad talking on cell phones. And the NSA was already—within an hour of the raid—picking up conversations by local officials in Abbottabad about what had just happened at the mysterious “Arab house.” Ben Rhodes was beginning to receive reports that Pakistani media were at the compound filming the aftermath of the raid and interviewing neighbors. Some Pakistani journalists were already speculating that the helicopter that went down was from a “foreign power,” and soon the daytime news cycle in Pakistan would begin and Pakistan’s raucous and conspiracy-minded media would have a field day with the story. Rhodes says, “Some of us were eager for the president to go out that night and speak to the world, because we were concerned about the story kind of beginning to dribble out sideways.”
The debate that had percolated for months about how best to handle the Pakistanis bubbled up again in the Situation Room. Who should call the Pakistani leadership? And what should that person say? Pakistan is nominally controlled by its civilian government, but the military in fact controls all aspects of its national security policy. It would send the wrong signal for Obama to make the call to the most powerful man in Pakistan, chief of army staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Should Hillary Clinton call him, or should it be Admiral Mullen, who had put in more face time with Kayani than anyone in the White House? Mullen was pushing for a quick decision, saying, “We gotta call!”
Kayani and Mullen had developed a real friendship over the more than two dozen visits to Pakistan that Mullen had made during the past four years to try to shore up the ever-fragile Pakistani-American alliance. Kayani, an analytical thinker not given to bluster, had studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and while he was certainly a proud Pakistani nationalist, he was not reflexively anti-American. Indeed, he had led the effort on the Pakistani military side to cement a “strategic partnership” with the United States over the previous couple of years.
Mullen knew it was important to try to reach Kayani before his generals spoke with him, because it would give Kayani the opportunity to take some ownership of what had happened, rather than leaving him to say that he had had no idea what was going on. The Pakistanis might also think that the events in Abbottabad were part of an attack by their traditional enemy India, and the Obama administration had to make sure that they understood the truth of the matter as soon as possible to avoid any conflict between the two nuclear-armed states.
Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence service, was working in his study late at night when someone called to say, “Sorry to hear about the helicopter crash.” Pasha knew that Pakistani military helicopters didn’t have night vision capabilities, so it would be strange if it were a Pakistani chopper. “Has one of our helicopters crashed?” he asked his men in a series of phone calls. “It was not ours,” he was told.
General Kayani took a call from his director of military operations at about 1:00 a.m. The news was alarming: a helicopter had just crashed near a residential compound in Abbottabad in a region of the country that is thick with military installations and nuclear weapons facilities. Assuming that India might be trying to make a preemptive strike against Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, General Kayani phoned the head of the air force and ordered him to scramble jets to intercept anyone who might be flying that night. Two American-made F-16s were scrambled from their base five hundred miles to the southwest of Abbottabad. Pakistan is quite large—twice the size of California—and the jets couldn’t find the intruders.
Once the two helicopters carrying the SEALs and bin Laden’s body had safely exited Pakistani airspace, the first person Obama called was his predecessor as president. George W. Bush was eating dinner at a restaurant in Dallas with his wife, Laura, when the Secret Service informed him that he would have a call coming in from the White House in twenty minutes. Bush went home quickly to take the call. When Obama told him the news, Bush congratulated him and the SEALs. Bush says, “I didn’t feel any great sense of happiness or jubilation. I felt a sense of closure, and I felt a sense of gratitude that justice had been done.” Obama also called Bill Clinton, the first American president to have tried to kill bin Laden, with the cruise missile strikes on Afghanistan in 1998 that had followed the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa. And he phoned close ally David Cameron, the British prime minister, whose country had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaeda, so that Cameron wouldn’t be surprised by the news the following morning.
Cameron Munter, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, had known of the impending raid in advance but had discussed it with no one at his embassy. Now, in the wee hours of the morning, as he followed the progress of the raid, he stepped outside the embassy chancery in Islamabad and received an unexpected call on his cell phone. It was a senior Pakistani official, who said, “We understand there has been a helicopter crash in Abbottabad. Do you know anything about this?” Munter told the man he would get back to him. He did not do so, believing the first set of calls to the Pakistani leadership was best handled by President Obama and Admiral Mullen. Based on the bewildered reactions of Pakistani officials to the events of that night, it was obvious to Munter and the officials monitoring the situation in the White House that the Pakistanis had not had a clue about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.
Obama called Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, and told him the news. Zardari became emotional. His wife, Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, had been assassinated by the Taliban four years earlier. Zardari told Obama, “I’m happy because these are the same types of people who killed my wife, and her people are my family, so I share in this.”
Admiral Mullen then got through to General Kayani, on a secure line. “Congratulations,” Kayani immediately said upon hearing the news about bin Laden. The conversation lasted a tense twenty minutes. Mullen told Kayani the outlines of what had happened in Abbottabad and said that the president was mulling over making a statement about the raid. Kayani said that he was concerned about the violation of Pakistani sovereignty and urged that Obama go out as soon as possible and explain what had happened. Soon it would be daylight in Pakistan, and there was a mysterious downed helicopter in the middle of Abbottabad that clearly didn’t belong to Pakistan; the local press would be all over the story. Kayani said, “Our people need to understand what happened here. We’re not going to be able to manage the Pakistani media without you confirming this. You can explain it to them. They need to understand that this was bin Laden and not just some ordinary U.S. operation.”
Kayani, in effect, demanded that Obama publicly explain what had happened as soon as it was feasible to do so. Mullen walked back into the Situation Room and said, “Kayani has asked for us to go public,” which swayed Obama to go forward. At about 8:15 p.m. the White House informed the Washington press corps that the president would be making an important announcement in two hours. Earlier in the day, the White House press office had called a “lid,” meaning that the president was not going to do or say anything that would make news for the rest of the day and the White House press corps could go home, but now those same correspondents were told by administration officials, “Just get in!” Biden and Clinton started working the phones from little booths in the Situation Room complex, calling key members of Congres
s and important allies to give them a heads-up before the president made his public announcement about bin Laden’s death. Gates, who had not supported the raid, was the first to leave the White House, at about 8:30 p.m. The rest of Obama’s national security team settled in for what would be a long night.
Network journalists and pundits took to the airwaves speculating about what a speech by the president late on a Sunday night could possibly concern. Initially, they wondered whether the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi might have been killed in the NATO operation Obama had set in motion two months earlier. A day earlier, members of Gadhafi’s family had been killed in a NATO air strike in Libya. Gradually the speculation became more informed as some reporters learned that the announcement had something to do with bin Laden.
Rhodes had sat down before the raid to write the “We got bin Laden” speech for the president, but he was only a few lines in before he thought, “I can’t do this. It’d jinx it; it doesn’t feel right.” Instead, he had building blocks of a potential speech ready to go. The most ticklish aspect of the speech was how to describe Pakistan’s involvement. Rhodes explains, “We decided not to sugarcoat it and say that they had played a role, but it was factually true that some of the intelligence collection that led us to the compound and was associated with the compound was based on Pakistani cooperation. It was unwitting; they didn’t know they were helping to find bin Laden, but they did share things with us that filled out our intelligence picture, so we felt confident saying Pakistani cooperation helped lead to this.”
Obama told Rhodes that, for the speech, he wanted to go back to the events of 9/11, to emphasize that Pakistan had helped in the fight against al-Qaeda, to remind people of the large sacrifice that a decade of war had cost the American people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to end with the idea that America could still do extraordinary things. Obama and Rhodes were both furiously editing the draft of the speech right up to the moment the president walked out to the East Room of the White House to deliver it.
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