The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  “This is very sensitive,” Brennan said, folding his hands in front of him. “We may have a lead on bin Laden.”

  They described a scenario that seemed implausible no matter how much I wanted it to be true. Working through our knowledge of a network of couriers associated with bin Laden, we’d identified a compound in Abbottabad, deep inside Pakistan and close to a Pakistani military academy. We weren’t certain that bin Laden was there, but it was the best lead we’d had since he’d slipped across the Afghan border in December 2001. Obama had been meeting for some weeks with a tight-knit circle of advisors, and he was nearing a decision about whether to target the compound—through a Special Forces raid or some kind of strike. I was now going to be brought into that circle, because someone needed to plan for how any action would be explained to the wider world if Obama decided to move forward.

  With this, my entire life narrowed to this one thing, this secret, which I could not talk about with anyone else. I had noticed for the past few weeks that there were occasionally meetings in the Situation Room that were not announced. The assistants of senior national security officials had camera feeds on their computers that could show you what was happening in each of the three conference rooms; for some meetings, those cameras were turned off. I’d felt a little miffed at being excluded from whatever was going on, though I knew better than to ask about it. Now I was being initiated into this secret society.

  I started to attend endless daily meetings, cochaired by Brennan and McDonough, at which every aspect of this matter was discussed. They’d start with a review of the “intelligence case,” usually presented by Michael Morell, the deputy director of the CIA. Morell spoke with frightening precision, numbering his points, leaning forward a bit as he spoke as if bringing you into a conspiracy, and then sitting back in his chair, hands folded, when he was finished. The points were often the same: the nature of the compound, larger and more secluded than other homes in the area, and surrounded by a high wall; the number of people in the compound, their suspected ages and genders, and how they matched up with those of bin Laden’s family; their “pattern of life”—the fact that they almost never came and went, wore Pashtun clothing, and burned their trash; the presence of a tall man who paced occasionally in the courtyard. The pacer, they called him.

  A team of operatives was being deployed to Afghanistan in the event that a mission to capture or kill the pacer was set in motion. Another option was to just take out the compound with a precision strike. Beyond that were many questions: Who would call the Pakistanis and when? Who would call the Saudis and when? What happens if we capture him alive? If he’s dead, how can we verify that it’s bin Laden? How should he be buried? What happens if it’s not him? What happens if it all goes wrong?

  Late on a Thursday afternoon, Obama chaired a meeting that would be his final one before making a decision. The timing was being driven by an almost impossibly cinematic concern: The absence of moonlight over Abbottabad that weekend offered the best window to launch an operation. The meeting kicked off with a briefing on the latest intelligence, and Obama asked questions which suggested that he had spent many hours thinking about it—he knew how tall the people were who lived in this compound, how many families lived there, that they burned their trash. I watched Obama digest this information, wondering how much he’d been turning it over in his head while I’d been with him in other meetings over the last few weeks. Along with me, there were a few other newcomers, including a “red team” of intelligence analysts who had been brought on to review the case that it was bin Laden at the compound. They had a lower degree of confidence—40 to 60 percent, they said. The conversation went down a rabbit hole, people debating percentages, until Obama lost patience with the exercise.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “Ultimately, this is a fifty-fifty call.”

  The conversation then turned to the ways that we could get this pacer. Admiral Bill McRaven was overseeing the special operations team that had deployed to Afghanistan. He spoke with confidence, conveying a sense that this is the type of thing that he and his men did for a living, but that they were also taking extra care in preparing for this circumstance. I’m confident we can get in and out, he said. There was another option—to simply take out the compound—but Obama seemed less interested in that, as it would deny us the certainty that the pacer was indeed bin Laden, and whatever intelligence could be gathered from the compound.

  Obama moved methodically around the table asking for people’s recommendations. For the first time, Gates was in a different place from the uniformed military. He was firmly against a raid. Too risky, he said. He referenced Desert One, Jimmy Carter’s botched effort to rescue the Americans who had been taken hostage by Iran. Like that operation, this one would involve covertly sending American helicopters deep inside another country. Desert One had resulted in eight dead Americans, a humiliated United States, and a stinging electoral defeat for a first-term Democratic president. I was deflated that Gates spoke the words out loud.

  Mullen and McRaven, on the other hand, were strongly supportive. So were Brennan and Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA. Biden was opposed, and he went on at length about the catastrophe that could ensue with Pakistan—a firefight at the scene, threats to our embassy, a break in our relations. Clinton described it, repeatedly, as a 51–49 call. Ultimately, though, it was too risky not to go—what if people learned that we had the chance and we failed to act? To her, the risk of not going outweighed the risk of going. She voted yes.

  It was obvious to me that Obama was going to do this. He had a way of looking straight ahead when he was listening at the same time that his mind was elsewhere. I could tell that he had turned the intelligence over and over in his mind (“this is a fifty-fifty call”), that he understood the risks with Pakistan. When he asked me what I thought, I simply said, “You always said you were going to do this.” Because I’d lived through the debate on the campaign, I knew he had meant what he said about going into Pakistan. He asked me to prepare for four scenarios: (1) bin Laden is at the compound and it’s a success; (2) bin Laden is at the compound and it’s messy—people killed, Pakistani security services, instability; (3) bin Laden’s not there but we get in and out cleanly; (4) bin Laden’s not there and it’s a mess.

  At the end of the meeting, Obama didn’t tip his hand, he just said he’d make his decision overnight. As people filed out of the room, Biden pulled Denis and me into a smaller, adjacent room and closed the door. He looked genuinely pained. “You fellas really think he should do this?”

  “I do,” Denis said.

  I agreed, and repeated my point about Obama’s always having said he would go into Pakistan to get bin Laden.

  “Well,” Biden said, “I’m just trying to give him a little space.” I believed that—Biden sometimes took strident positions in meetings to widen the spectrum of views and options available to Obama. He also worked hard to understand Obama’s mind.

  “You’ve always got his back,” McDonough said.

  “You better believe it,” Biden replied. “But we’re also going to need to say some prayers.”

  I started to prepare all the materials we’d need. I had no one else to work with in the White House, so I sat alone at my classified computer, putting together the playbook for each scenario. I edited declassified points that had been prepared by the CIA laying out the intelligence basis for action—particularly if bin Laden wasn’t there, we’d have to explain why we thought it might have been him. I compiled all of bin Laden’s declarations of war on the United States and his celebrations of the 9/11 attacks. I pulled together statements by Bush and Obama pledging to get bin Laden. Sitting there alone, late into the night, I felt I was revisiting the events that had led me down to Washington and into the Obama campaign—events that had been eclipsed, in some ways, by the turmoil of the Iraq War and the tumult of the Arab Spring. This, I thought, is what we were supposed to
do after 9/11.

  I opened a new document, titled it “Remarks of President Barack Obama,” and began drafting the speeches he might give along with the different scenarios—but the words didn’t come. The negative scenarios were too nightmarish to contemplate, let alone put into words, and the positive scenario seemed as if it should not be jinxed by this kind of preparatory work. I knew that I wouldn’t have a lot of time to write something if the operation went forward, but I left undisturbed the history that had yet to happen.

  The next morning, a Friday, Obama relayed his decision to move forward with the raid, which opened up a three-day window during which the operation could take place. On Saturday, I came to work in the morning to finalize my preparations along with George Little, who was in charge of public affairs at the CIA. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was that night, the annual black-tie affair hosted by the White House press corps, a giant party to which the president and members of his staff and administration are invited and at which the president tries to make a funny speech. As I walked by the Oval Office, I saw Jon Favreau huddling with Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter; they were working on the remarks for the dinner, and they were excited about a series of jokes that would mock Donald Trump, who was going to be in attendance.

  I left work that afternoon to meet my brother, David, for an afternoon run. The awkward fact for me was that David is president of CBS News, and he would be staying at my apartment over the weekend with his wife, Emma. Over the years, the two of us had studiously learned to avoid talking to each other about work. Some of that was due to the risk that each of us could benefit from the other’s professional position; some of it was rooted in a general aversion to talking politics. Growing up, we’d been close—because we were each other’s only sibling, but also because we had different interests and points of view in a way that ensured we weren’t competitors. I was into baseball and underage drinking and books; David was less conventional—memorizing maps, skiing, and agitating to skip the inconvenience of being a teenager in order to get to work. In high school, he worked on Ross Perot’s first presidential campaign; in college, he worked for a Houston city councilman and interned for a libertarian magazine; after graduating, he spent twelve years rising through the ranks at Fox News until he became vice president in charge of news gathering.

  My revulsion at Fox News in those years was surpassed by pride in my brother for rising so quickly. And he wasn’t particularly ideological—he was somewhat cynical about politics in general and a savant about the news business. During the 2008 campaign, David came out to Chicago to visit the Obama campaign offices a couple of times, trying to repair relations with the senior leadership after someone on Fox had said something particularly offensive about Obama. I rarely had advance notice of his meetings, so I was sometimes surprised to see him walk by my workspace on his way to see Axe or David Plouffe.

  During one of these visits to Chicago, my brother came over to my apartment after dinner and we took some beers up to the rooftop of my building, which offered views of the Sears Tower in the distance. He was, he told me, leaving Fox. I didn’t press him on the reasons, but knew that it had become an increasingly ideological and unpleasant place with the rise of Obama. Unspoken also was the possibility that the emerging unhinged anti-Obama milieu driven by Fox’s leader, Roger Ailes, might make life uncomfortable for a member of the leadership team who was closely related to someone working in the Obama White House. He’d gotten an offer to run Bloomberg Television, and he thought he could manage leaving without putting himself on Ailes’s enemies list. I was relieved, and we hugged awkwardly—as brothers do—two guys whose careers were about to take off in ways that we never would have predicted when he was giving me his old IDs to use so I could buy beer.

  That Saturday, we ran a few miles along the Georgetown Canal together, not talking about work—he in better shape and thus better able to talk, going on about the details of parenthood while my mind raced with every possible scenario that could take place the next day. At thirty-eight, he was the youngest president in the history of network news, but I couldn’t talk to him about what would be the biggest story of the year.

  * * *

  —

  LIKE A THIRD-TIER AWARDS SHOW, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is the kind of ritual that you complain about while desperately seeking an invitation. Washington people pretend to be glamorous in the basement of a characterless hotel, drinking bad wine, avoiding one another, and craning their necks to catch a glimpse of passing celebrities. That night, I walked through the cramped, carpeted hallways of the Washington Hilton surrounded by a black-tie crowd of political and media elite, people I never felt entirely comfortable around. Every now and then, I would spot someone who knew—there’s Michael Morell across the room—and we’d make eye contact and nod at each other, as if we were giving a signal: Yes, see you at ten tomorrow. Somewhere in the early morning hours of Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden was waking up, perhaps for the last morning of his life.

  The drama at the dinner was the presence of Donald Trump. After months of dealing with Trump’s invidious “birther” innuendo, Obama took the unprecedented step—just a few days earlier—of publicly releasing his long-form birth certificate. He was not happy. The decision to release the document had been his alone, made with his personal attorney—he knew, in ways that perhaps his white staff didn’t, that the issue wasn’t going to go away otherwise.

  When Obama walked to the microphone, all I could think of was how his mind must have been on the men who were preparing to fly deep into Pakistan on his orders, and how the already absurd scene in front of him must have been even more oppressively trivial. But he betrayed no trace of distraction. Reeling the audience in with his unique approach to comedy—he’d sometimes laugh at jokes he read, as if he was surprised to hear how funny they were when spoken aloud—he slowly worked his way around to Trump: “Donald Trump is here tonight!” Just saying the words brought laughter and applause. “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.” The whole room seemed to exhale at the chance to laugh about it; it was funny, but in a way, Obama was letting the largely white elite laugh about their failure to contain the birtherism in our politics. Some of their networks, after all, had given Trump a platform to peddle racist lies, and few Republicans condemned it. “We all know about your 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, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey.” The room exploded in laughter.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, a Sunday, while everyone was still sleeping, I showered and dressed. Around ten, as people were beginning to stir and wander into the kitchen for coffee, I announced that I had to go to work. David asked if I’d be back soon and I said no, offering no further detail, and we said nothing more.

  The Deputies and Principals met in the Situation Room, where we’d spend the next twelve hours or so. We went through the motions as if it was any other meeting—getting the latest update on the compound; going through all of the various things that had to get done; reading in all of the officials who needed to know that they might be unexpectedly busy later that day. I had to ask Pete Souza, the president’s photographer, to come in to work so he could capture the scene, however it played out. We made Starbucks runs and sat silently waiting for our coffee orders, unable to talk about what we were thinking. Then, back in the secure confines of the Situation Room, we waited, chatting nervously.

  Obama came down around two o’clock to get updated jus
t as the operation was set to begin. Leon Panetta was on a screen from CIA headquarters and McRaven was on from Jalalabad, the Afghan town near the border where the team was taking off for the long helicopter ride to Abbottabad. Once they were in the air for the ninety-minute flight, Obama went back up to the Oval Office to sit and play cards, a more relaxing way to kill time than sitting with us. With nothing to do, we started telling one another the stories of where we were on 9/11 to pass the time. I thought of the view from a helicopter flying through a moonless night in Pakistan.

  Obama came back down a few minutes before the team was supposed to land at the compound. We all took our seats and McRaven began narrating the operation, like a play-by-play announcer giving you the highlights of a baseball game on the radio. All we could see was McRaven’s face, wearing a headset, on a split screen in front of us with Panetta. At one point, a helicopter clipped the side of one of the high walls of the compound as it was coming down, and McRaven told us they’d had to make an improvised crash landing. We still didn’t know if bin Laden was at the compound and already it seemed that the worst-case scenario was playing out. People avoided making eye contact. McRaven sounded unconcerned, as if he was relaying that a light rain shower was passing. The pilot will handle it, he said.

  In the small conference room across the hall, a general sat hunched over a laptop with a video feed in front of him that allowed him to monitor the raid in real time. When Obama figured out that there was a better seat in the next room, he walked over there, trailed by most of his principals. I didn’t go. I was nervous, and felt I shouldn’t intrude. So I was still sitting in the large conference room when both McRaven and Panetta said that “Geronimo” had been identified. I didn’t know what that meant and had to ask someone. That was the code name for bin Laden. To me, this was the key moment—we wouldn’t have to tell the world why U.S. ground forces had flown all that way into Pakistan for no reason. I shot out of my chair and out into the hallway behind the small conference room, which was filled with the most senior people in government. I peered in around them and saw Obama eyeing the screen. Mullen fingered his rosary beads. Suddenly, the phrase “Geronimo EKIA” was being repeated. I heard Obama say, “We got him.” Some people clapped awkwardly. Everyone started smiling at one another silently. Could it really be this easy? the smiles seemed to say. Pete crouched in the corner, taking pictures. I decided to get some air.