SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden
Page 1
FOR THE RED MEN.
NOW THE WORLD KNOWS WHO YOU ARE.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Neptune’s Spear: The Bigger Picture
Abbottabad: May 1, 2011—Late That Night
THE SEAL ROAD TO ABBOTTABAD
Men with Green Faces
An Invisible Empire: The Birth of the Joint Special Operations Command
Team Jedi
Going Solo
Maersk Alabama
BIN LADEN’S ROAD TO ABBOTTABAD
The Day the World Changed—September 11, 2001
Rich Kid
Learning to Hate
The Making of a Jihadi
Hero of the Lion’s Den
The Emir
Weapons of Mass Denial
NEPTUNE’S SPEAR
Continue to Plan, Plan to Continue
The Man Without a Country
Neptune’s Spear
Thirty-eight Minutes
What Came After
How This Book Was Written
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Photographs
Also by Chuck Pfarrer
About the Author
Copyright
By knowing things that exist
you can know what does not exist.
MIYAMOTO MUSASHI
The Book of Five Rings
NEPTUNE’S SPEAR
THE BIGGER PICTURE
The operation that killed Osama bin Laden was a combined, multiservice effort, carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command, SEAL Team Six, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named Neptune’s Spear, it was the quintessential information-age mission, conceived by a Navy admiral who wrote the book on special operations and watched on an Internet link by a president with a Twitter account.
The men who entered Osama bin Laden’s compound and brought him to justice were members of the smallest and most elite special operations force in the United States military, the Navy SEALs. The exact number of SEALs deployed worldwide is a closely held secret. It can be told, however, that since World War II, fewer than ten thousand men have earned the right to wear the trident: an eagle, anchor, and flintlock badge that marks a sailor as a fully qualified Navy SEAL.
It takes more than two years of intense, nonstop training to earn the basic SEAL qualification of 5326, combat swimmer. From that point on, a rookie SEAL enters one of the most rigorous meritocracies conceived by man. A SEAL is judged not only by the missions he has undertaken but also by his courage, skill, physical ability, and character. Within this small fraternity a man’s reputation is earned solely by his standing as an operator. To rise in the ranks, every SEAL, both officer and enlisted, must demonstrate that he can lead physically in combat, and intellectually in the planning cycle. There is no shortcut to command.
This is the history of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. It is also the story of the SEAL operators themselves, the daunting challenges they faced, and the ever-evolving and dangerous menace posed by Osama bin Laden and his hell-spawned creation, Al Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States of America, and for fifteen years terrorists working in his pay killed as many people as they possibly could. Surprisingly, for an organization that declared itself to be at war with “Crusaders and Jews,” most of Osama bin Laden’s victims were Muslims.
In writing this book, certain accommodations have been made to protect operational security and the identity of SEAL Team operators. This is necessary to protect both them and their families. Obscured also are some of the locations of bases and mission elements.
When the government revealed Operation Neptune’s Spear, some of the men involved became public figures. I have used their correct names. The names of operational SEALs, past and present, have been changed, as have the names of the intelligence professionals who supported them. I have tried to draw the personalities involved in this mission as accurately as possible. Some of my portraits are frank. In addition, it has been necessary to omit some details of the operation at Bin Laden’s compound—so as not to contribute to the tactical understanding of our enemies. The SEALs I have left in shadow, and those serving elsewhere, have the respect and thanks of a grateful nation. I am proud to count myself as a brother.
Every mission the SEALs undertake adds to the “corporate knowledge” of the team. Neptune’s Spear was certainly no exception. In order to comprehend the events at Abbottabad, one has to understand the men who conducted the mission. That includes an appreciation for what it takes to become a SEAL—a grueling two-and-half-year process—and the further, decades-long journey a SEAL operator must make before he can be selected for duty at SEAL Team Six. So difficult is the training process, and so skilled are the operators, that the men of SEAL Team Six are called Jedis. This nickname is hardly an exaggeration.
Several key missions were undertaken by SEAL Team Six before the Bin Laden operation; these included an operation to free the captain of the Maersk Alabama, Richard Phillips, who had been captured by Somali pirates. Another mission was the pursuit and interdiction of Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden’s handpicked operational commander in Iraq. Both of these operations contributed to the tactical acumen the SEALs brought to Osama’s compound. They are recounted here so the reader may judge the men and the organization that accomplished a nearly impossible operation.
This book will also briefly examine the historical currents and intellectual climate that shaped the character of a man who decided to overthrow the world. The reader will forgive a brief diversion into both the history of Islam and the politics of the Middle East.
These subjects were studied intently by the SEAL operators who descended on Bin Laden’s compound. For almost ten years, they read his pronouncements and fatwas, researched his operations and plans, listened in on his phone conversations, and traced the flow of his money. They knew their enemy well.
And on the night of May 1, 2011, they came calling.
ABBOTTABAD: MAY 1, 2011—LATE THAT NIGHT
ON THE NIGHT THAT OSAMA BIN LADEN was killed, Sohaib Athar could not sleep. The thirty-three-year-old IT consultant had moved his young family to Abbottabad almost six months earlier. He’d come to this quiet city after his wife and son were hit by a car on the teeming streets of Lahore. A physics grad of Forman Christian University, Sohaib also held a master of science from the University of the Punjab. He liked to say that in his previous life he was a “start-up specialist”—he’d come to Abbottabad to open a coffee shop and Internet café. Business was good. His Web site said proudly that his was the first coffee shop in Abbottabad to brew fresh espresso. Sohaib Athar was a quiet man and he wanted a quiet life.
That night, the windows were open in his apartment on the Jadoon Plaza. The heat of the day was slow in breaking, and by midnight, scented wind blew down from the Shimala Hills above the city. Spring was coming to the foothills of the Hindu Kush, and as the days had grown hotter, people were shifting their activity to the evening, when it was cooler. Past midnight, a handful of shops were still open, and now and again a truck would rumble past the dusty strip mall sprawling on either side of Sohaib’s balcony. The city of Abbottabad was falling asleep.
Just before one in the morning on May 2, Sohaib heard a buzzing sound; it grew in volume and faded, came in with the wind and left with it. Finally, he could tell it was the noise of a helicopter—or maybe a couple of them.
Sohaib looked out the window toward t
he echoing hills. The night was hazy, and above the glare of the streetlights he could see nothing. The sound came again and then it was gone, like someone had thrown a switch.
He crossed from the balcony to his laptop and logged on to his Twitter account: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”
Sohaib could have no idea of what was unfolding three miles to the east of his balcony. It was 12:58 a.m., and at a place called Yaba Yar, a team of United States Navy SEALs were jumping from helicopters into the high-walled compound of Osama bin Laden.
A top secret Stealth Hawk helicopter had lost power and crashed after inserting an assault element on the roof of the main building. Later, a Pentagon spokesman would claim that there had been a “rough landing” but the men who witnessed it, and the others watching overhead monitors knew better.
It was there, hovering above the main building, and then it fell out of the sky. Enveloped in an opaque cloud of dust, 32,000 pounds of top secret American technology slammed into the ground and beat itself to pieces. It took fifteen agonizing seconds for the engines to flame out and for the rotors to stop. During that eternity, broken pieces of aircraft, communications equipment, and flight components were tossed in all directions. The transmission blew itself apart and one of the forty-two-foot-long Kevlar rotors was launched a hundred yards, landing in a field of beans.
It was a flat miracle that no one was killed.
When the dust cleared, SEALs and pilots in the other aircraft could see men moving in the wreckage. Incredibly, the five-member flight crew had survived.
A little more than a mile away, Sohaib stood on his balcony, listening.
He had not heard the helicopter go down—and he was unlikely to have noticed the sound, for the death throes of a real helicopter are nothing like the crashes in the movies. The doomed helicopter’s engines had screamed and the disintegrating rotors had made a sound like a stick being pulled across a picket fence. Sohaib listened; another helicopter, this one an MH-47 Chinook, flew nearby and lumbered off to the east. He heard the Chinook, but did not see it. Like the other helicopters used in the assault, this aircraft flew without lights and was painted the exact color of the dusky night.
Sohaib went to his keyboard and tweeted again: “Go away helicopter—before I take out my giant swatter ;-/”.
At four minutes past one in the morning, an enormous boom shook the city—a thunder blast out of a cloudless sky. Far away in the darkness, the SEALs had used plastic explosive charges to blow in the front gate of Bin Laden’s compound. People who heard the explosion said it sounded like a car bomb.
Sohaib watched the tweets of his friends scroll across his laptop’s screen: @m0chin tweeted: “All silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away too … the helicopter is gone…”
Then one from han3yy: “OMG: S Bomb Blasts in Abbottabad. I hope everyone is fine ☺”.
Traffic on the street below Sohaib’s window had now stopped completely. The entire city of Abbottabad seemed to hold its breath. There were two or three more explosions, smaller, muffled, but Sohaib thought they might be just as deadly. Maybe he had been foolish to think that this was a safe place. He walked back into his living room, sat down at his laptop and tweeted again:
“Funny, moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy.”
Sohaib Attar and Osama bin Laden had both come to Abbottabad for the same reasons … to put themselves, and their families, beyond danger.
Both of them thought that Abbottabad was a safe place.
One of them had been wrong.
THE SEAL ROAD TO ABBOTTABAD
MEN WITH GREEN FACES
JUNE 2006: JOHNNY COFFEE AND DREW HOLLAND spent all of the sweltering day crowded into a hole slightly more than three feet wide and two feet deep. Camouflaged from head to toe, covered by fallen date fronds and bits of garbage, they were hiding almost in plain sight. They had inserted the night before by helicopter, patrolled along the fringes of a darkened Baghdad neighborhood, through a graveyard, over its crumbling walls and into a grove of date palms. They were dug in with their weapons facing slightly west, three hundred yards from a group of houses in the northwest corner of Baghdad. To an unpracticed eye, there was no place to hide under the palms. There were no bushes, no scrub, no terrain features that looked large enough to hide even a dog, let alone two men loaded down with weapons and communications equipment. But they were in, they were set up, and they were waiting.
Johnny and Drew were a “shooting pair,” a sniper and spotter from Joint Task Force 20, a hunter-killer element of the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC. Pronounced “jay-sock,” it is an umbrella organization that oversees America’s premier counterterrorism operators, including SEAL Team Six and the Army’s Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, (SFOD-D), aka Delta Force. Both men hidden in the date grove were members of the smallest and most elite special operations unit in the world: SEAL Team Six.
Johnny Coffee was the designated shooter; he was thirty-four years old and had been a Navy SEAL and a sniper for more than a decade. This was his second tour in Iraq, and his fifth combat deployment. His spotter and boss on this mission, Drew, was six months older than Johnny, but already a master chief petty officer, and the OIC (officer in charge) of the sniper cell of SEAL Team Six. They were operating using the call sign Stingray Zero Two.
Johnny and Drew had been in many hides together, in many places, and knew to trust both their camouflage and each other. In their line of work, this sort of a hiding place was called a “spider hole”—and for good reason. Early after sunup, Johnny had to endure the attentions of a six-inch-long camel spider as it leisurely made its way up his arm, across his shoulder, and over the back of his neck. Even if they didn’t care for the neighbors, it was a good layup. They were well hidden, and if things should go wrong, there was hard cover just behind them: a section of mud brick wall and a stretch of canal where they could make a stand if it came to a gunfight.
Both of the men hidden under the trees were masters of their craft. In their lifetimes, they had been on hundreds of missions and in dozens of hides. This operation was important, perhaps even the most important one they would ever perform, but minute to minute and hour to hour, they could be forgiven for thinking that this op was like every other SLJ they’d ever been sent on. “LJ” stands for “little job,” and the “S” can stand for a couple of things.
They waited, and they sweated. The building they were watching was an Al Qaeda safe house. In it, intel told them, was Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden’s operational commander in Iraq. But intel was sometimes wrong.
In front of them, where the date grove ended, was a dusty playing field and the corner of a sprawling dump. Johnny put his rifle scope on the last house on the end, a two-story place where the dirt road turned off to the north. All day, no one came in or out. Women, children, and old men walked by the house but no one seemed to visit. That was reason enough to keep watching.
Johnny and Drew had chosen their layup well—that had been proven shortly after noon, when a group of children and their mother walked into the grove and gathered some of the fallen fronds to cook their lunch. For ten agonizing minutes, the children trotted back and forth in front of their hiding place, gathering scraps of wood and breaking stems of date palms. Finally, mother and kids wandered back to their village and the SEALs could exhale.
The afternoon passed like a slow, hazy, and not-so-pleasant daydream.
Johnny and Drew had operated together so long that they half joked that they could read each other’s minds. When snipers are in a hide, they do not speak to each other, even in whispers. They make themselves understood using hand signals—a simple language sufficient to communicate range, direction, weapon status, and the presence of an enemy. When on an operation, there is no need to communicate abstract ideas or idle chat. All of their attention, and all of their beings, are projected downrange. Such concentration is necessary if one is to take a
one-thousand-yard head shot.
At two o’clock a white Toyota truck stopped in front of the house, but drove off after a few seconds. There was no sign of Zarqawi, and Johnny began to wonder, Maybe there’s no HVI at all. “HVI” is SEALspeak for a “high-value individual.” Johnny and Drew were prepared to wait all night, and the next night, if necessary. If there was a shot to take—they would make it.
A little after three o’clock, a dump truck arrived and tipped a stinking bin full of glutinous trash. It landed close enough for Johnny to count the plops it made hitting the ground. First came the stink, and then came the flies. The afternoon seemed to stretch into an infinity of small annoyances and gnawing frustration.
At 1600 hours, 4:00 p.m., Drew texted “no joy” on the burst transmitter. They been watching the house now for a little over twelve hours, and had seen no one. They could not ID the man they had been sent after. Drew received a two-word answer from the Joint Operations Center: “Wait. Out.”
When it was full dark, Johnny pointed a thermal imaging scope at the house. In reds and blues, he could see a plume of heat coming from the chimney; dinner was being prepared, and now and again someone would move past the gate and the head-high mud wall that enclosed the front yard. Whoever lived in the house slept during the day.