by Ben Rhodes
I walked outside to the area adjacent to the press briefing room, where a driveway curves down from the entrance to the West Wing to the bowels of the White House residence. It’s among the least scenic places on the complex: a slab of gray concrete between a sloping lawn and the white walls of the structure where the press sits. But you could smoke there, and that’s what I did, pacing back and forth. The whole operation was playing out thousands of miles away, and the people I worked for were still monitoring it inside the quiet of the West Wing, behind the closed doors of the Situation Room. There was work ahead—meetings, to-do lists, notifications to foreign governments, calls to former presidents and congressional leaders, a speech to be written and delivered. But I needed these minutes alone.
The balcony of my Queens apartment used to have no view of Manhattan except for the tops of those towers, something I didn’t even realize until a few days after the attacks. I was one of millions of people whose lives had been altered in some way by 9/11, I thought. A twenty-four-year-old graduate student, handing out city council campaign flyers outside a polling site, preparing for a life of…what? I’d never know. I lost that life and was now a thirty-three-year-old government official pacing outside his workplace. Normally, at important moments in our lives, we call the people we love. I could call no one.
In that moment, it was as if none of the events of the last decade had taken place—no wars, no Great Recession, no political discord, no experience of my own. It was as though I had just turned away from the sight of the first tower collapsing into ash. Osama bin Laden was dead. I was one of a few dozen people in the world who possessed that knowledge. It was midafternoon and the Sunday sun was high in the sky. A couple of cameramen doing weekend duty walked by. I stood there, hesitant to go back inside because that would set time back in motion, the purity of the event polluted by what came next. Nothing would ever feel this right.
* * *
—
I WALKED BACK INTO an unchanged scene in the Situation Room. Then Obama stood up and announced that he wanted to be notified as soon as the Special Operations team was out of Pakistani air space. There were muted congratulations, but things could still go wrong; there was much to do.
Once the team was safely back in Jalalabad, Obama returned to the meeting. Admiral Mullen left the room to call the chief of Pakistan’s army, General Kayani, to tell him we’d launched this military operation in his country. The question became how certain we could be that it was bin Laden. Apparently, some of the women in the compound had identified him at the scene—Sheikh Osama. The intelligence community had done a facial recognition test that confirmed it was him, but these tests had only a 95 percent confidence rate. DNA evidence would take another day or two. McRaven reported that one of his men, someone who—at six foot four—was the same height as bin Laden, had lain down next to the corpse to confirm that the height was a match. Obama leaned forward. “You guys need to get a tape measure.”
There was a debate about whether to make a statement that night or the next morning. The consensus in the room was the next morning, as we’d want to get the highest confidence that it was bin Laden, and we had a number of notifications to make. I was worried that the Pakistanis or al Qaeda could get out in front of us. There was, after all, the smoldering wreckage of a helicopter in the middle of a compound deep inside Pakistan. I had the Situation Room monitoring media from the region. One story posted with the headline ARMY CHOPPER CRASHES IN ABBOTTABAD. “The chopper,” the story read, “was on its routine flight when it crashed….Witnesses disclosed that there were two helicopters, one of which crashed to the ground. The cause of the crash is as yet unknown.” Twitter users in the area were beginning to post about a crash. When Mullen returned, he said that Kayani wanted us to put the news out right away so that it would be clear we were going after bin Laden—the only potential justification for going so deep into Pakistan.
With that, Obama decided to announce the operation that night. It was approaching eight o’clock already. We’d have to notify the television networks, read in all of the spokespeople for the government, and I’d have to draft remarks. As Obama was walking out of the room—on his way to call former U.S. presidents and the leaders of Pakistan and the United Kingdom—I stood up and called out from across the room, “Hey, I’m going to have to grab you for a few minutes.” Everyone turned and looked at me with a bit of surprise—it was a presumptuous way to talk to the commander in chief in front of a room full of people. He gestured for me to follow him.
We sat down in the chief of staff’s office to go over what he wanted to say. “Let’s keep it straightforward,” he said: “Tell the story of how we got here, starting on 9/11; announce the operation; underscore the need to remain vigilant.”
“I was thinking of that speech you gave during the campaign,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled. “Me, too,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.”
He wanted to end on the note that “America can do big things.” He wanted to remind the country, he said, that we once came together around 9/11; that for all the pain and polarization of the last decade, we stuck with it, and we got bin Laden. “No other country in the world,” he said, “could have done that.”
One by one, I had to call people—Dan Pfeiffer, David Plouffe, Jay Carney, our press secretary—and ask them to assemble in the White House immediately. When I told the NSC spokesman, Tommy Vietor—one of my closest friends—he said, “Fuck yes, I’ve been waiting three years to get this call.” I was frantic, needing to write a speech while these guys were scheduling an address to the nation and fending off leaks.
I sat at my desk and drafted the statement, ignoring the steady flood of emails that started to come in once the news began to trickle out. We told the networks to plan for a statement from Obama a little after ten, but that time started to slip. As I was writing, I was feeling that the remarks reflected my own journey—the images of 9/11 that I’d seen (“hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky”); the stories of 9/11 families whom I’d come to know during my work with the 9/11 Commission (“parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace”); the steady counterterrorism work that I’d witnessed in government (“around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists”); the necessity of not making this a war of religion, which had been central to our message in Cairo (“the United States is not—and never will be—at war with Islam”). Sitting there, as much as I wished I had a draft to work from, I realized another reason why I had been unable to write anything in advance: Inhabiting the moment of bin Laden’s demise allowed the full experience of the last ten years to reemerge.
When I went upstairs, Obama was talking to the Pakistani president who had succeeded Pervez Musharraf, Asif Ali Zardari, a man who was thrust into a leading role when his wife, Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister, was assassinated by extremists—a politician who was sure to face a backlash at home over America’s violation of Pakistani sovereignty. But he wasn’t upset. Whatever the fallout, he told Obama, it’s very good news. It’s been a long time. God be with you and the people of America.
Obama was calm, focused on the next thing he needed to do. I waited outside the Oval Office for him to finish his calls, then sat at the desk of his personal assistant, Anita Decker Breckenridge, who had been with Obama since his days in the Illinois State Senate, making a few rounds of edits, his appearance drifting later and later. Around eleven thirty, he handed me the final pages, and I ran ahead of him, down the colonnade and up to the East Room, where he’d make the remarks, so I could insert the last changes into the teleprompter before he made the long walk down the red-carpeted hallway to address the American people.
It is strange to watch a president speak to an empty room, especially when you know that tens of millions of people are watching. Clinton, Gates,
Mullen, and a few others sat in scattered chairs while Obama spoke into a camera. I stood against the back wall, watching him speak phrases that would take on their own life—“Justice has been done,” which would be a headline in newspapers around the world; “We must—and will—remain vigilant,” an exhortation that I would see flashing, time and again, in the opening credits to the Showtime series Homeland. John Brennan stood next to me, a rare look of satisfaction on his face. I leaned over and asked him, “How long have you been trying to get this guy?”
“Fifteen years,” he answered, saying nothing more.
When the speech was over, we all gathered around Obama, unsure what to do next. He thanked everyone for all the work we’d done, then said he was heading upstairs to be with his family and go to bed. The cabinet members made their way to the black cars that would take them where they needed to go. I had to go back to the West Wing to lead a conference call for reporters, making use of the talking points we’d prepared in advance. When I walked outside into the spring night on the colonnade, I could hear raucous cheering and chants of “U.S.A.!” drifting over the White House.
I left work some thirteen hours after I’d arrived guarding the secret of why I was there. Now the entire world knew. The only exit that was open was the southeast gate, down on Seventeenth Street, and the streets were full of people. I saw college students piled into cars, driving slowly, honking horns, waving flags, two guys standing on top of a slow-moving car as though they’d conquered the world, and it occurred to me that they were only ten years old when 9/11 happened. They’d grown up in this reality and now they were reveling in the closest thing that the United States of America would ever get to a “victory” in the post-9/11 wars.
When I got home, Ann was up with the television on. “I’m proud of you guys,” she said. We shared a long hug. “Do you think he told Michelle?” she asked.
* * *
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THE NEXT DAY, we asked Brennan to do the regular White House briefing to respond to the deluge of inquiries that we were getting. In his straight, authoritative style, he relayed what we’d heard back about the raid from the military, including the fact that bin Laden had been killed in a firefight and may have used women as human shields. Republicans pounced on this, accusing us of leaking details about the raid to make Obama look good. In fact, Brennan was trying to denigrate bin Laden—a man he hated, the leader of a terrorist organization that he wanted to shame. When the information changed as all the participants in the raid were debriefed, we updated our answers, which led to more questions from the press and more criticism from Republicans. The high of the raid, the ability to just feel good about something, dissipated quickly. If the country’s politics couldn’t even allow us to enjoy this, then literally nothing would bring the country together.
Obama had one final decision to make: whether to release photographs of bin Laden’s body. I argued in favor. My concern was that al Qaeda would use the absence of photos to suggest that bin Laden was still alive, creating a conspiracy theory that we’d have to deal with for years to come. I was totally wrong, as al Qaeda ended up confirming bin Laden’s death within days.
Someone in the military compiled, literally, a photo album of those several hours between the operation and the burial, and we met in the Chief of Staff’s Office to flip through the photos in silence. There is the bloodied corpse of bin Laden. There he is laid out on the floor. There he is being prepared for an Islamic burial. There is the tall, shrouded body being lifted, tilted, and then slipped into the sea. A final photo showed the last visible end of the corpse disappearing beneath the water.
Obama, a man who had publicly released his own birth certificate a few days ago, told us in the Oval Office that no—there was no way that we would release the photos. “We’re not going to spike the football,” he said.
CHAPTER 12
GATHERING CLOUDS
Every presidency is a story with one person at the center of it. This is how America organizes its political life and history books. This is how the world consumes the disparate elements of American democracy in an age of American dominance. The president as hero or villain; the president as the person who decides, consoles, commemorates, and reacts; the president as temporary royalty, in command and at the mercy of events that share this time with him.
In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama’s story was gaining a certain momentum. A hundred thousand troops had left Iraq. The economy had stabilized. Healthcare reform was law. Bin Laden was dead. Obama had largely done the most important things that he said he was going to do. The United States could pivot from saving our economy to assembling the pieces of a new foundation. The war in Afghanistan was about to turn to deescalation. The Arab Spring held out the promise that positive change could be forced upon the world by the frustrated masses.
But something was missing—the supporting characters, in Congress and around the world.
With the kinds of opposition parties that Johnson or Reagan had, Obama would have been reforming the tax code and rebuilding American infrastructure. But at home, the Republican Party had embraced a strategy of virulent and brazen opposition that led healthy majorities of its own voters to believe that Obama was born in Kenya. Mitch McConnell, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate, abandoned any pretense of cooperation, saying that his top priority was to make Obama a one-term president. The decorum that usually shielded national security from politics was tossed aside. The hard truth was that Republicans had been rewarded for this behavior by winning the House of Representatives, aided in part by the constant echo chamber of Fox News and the flood of unregulated money released into American politics by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. With this Congress, even just basic business like funding the government and confirming nominees for political appointments was going to be a struggle. Ambitious legislative activity was out of the question.
Abroad, the forces of tribalism and nationalism were building, like tremors before an earthquake. As autocrats were threatened in the Arab world, they responded with escalating violence and sectarianism. Globalization had pushed up against people’s sense of their own unique identity. In Russia, Vladimir Putin was planning his own return to the presidency, watching warily as popular movements upended Mubarak and Gaddafi. In Europe, the undertow of the financial crisis had spread an economic malaise that was beginning to eat away at public confidence in the European Union. Conflict, a changing climate, and the spread of smartphones and smuggling networks were increasing the flow of refugees from South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. In Israel, where Obama had wanted to pursue peace, he did not have a partner.
* * *
—
ONE FRIDAY NIGHT IN MAY, Ann and I were out having drinks when I got a call from the White House operator asking me to come meet Obama around ten. “There’s not someone else who can go?” Ann said, only half-kidding.
When I got there, Obama came down to the Usher’s Office, just downstairs from his residence, wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt—the only sign that he was into a weekend. He’d been working. We had all been working nonstop since Egypt caught fire.
That week, in a speech at the State Department, Obama had taken positions on two of the four “final status issues” related to Middle East peace, the questions that must form the basis of any two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. On behalf of Israel, he called for it to be recognized as a “Jewish state” (the step we didn’t take in Cairo), and he endorsed an Israeli security presence within a Palestinian state that would end only after a negotiated transition. He also called for borders “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps”—a euphemism known to anyone who has worked on the peace process, which meant a Palestine that is roughly the same size as the one at the end of the 1967 war, with exchanges of land to account for Israeli settlements that have been established since.
In a way, there was noth
ing remarkable about Obama’s stating public positions: It was one of those oddities of foreign policy that everyone who worked on Middle East peace knew what positions the United States had taken privately in negotiations dating back to the Clinton administration. The border and security arrangements that Obama described were the first two final status issues. The other two, thornier ones were refugees and Jerusalem. Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to return to Israel, but would be resettled within the new Palestinian state. Jerusalem would be the capital of both countries, with East Jerusalem going to the Palestinians. Yet these positions were never stated publicly, because neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians were prepared to accept them.
We had reached an impasse. The peace process of 2010 had collapsed when the Israeli government refused to extend a partial freeze on new settlement construction, and the Palestinians refused to negotiate without one. In February 2011, Obama had vetoed a resolution at the UN Security Council that condemned Israeli settlement construction using words taken from Obama’s speeches. Now the Palestinians were threatening to seek formal recognition at the United Nations. Prime Minister Netanyahu had been similarly recalcitrant, talking about peace and doing nothing to pursue it. The question was what we should do about all of this.
