SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden

by Chuck Pfarrer

  In the absence of a briefing from the White House, rumors morphed into uglier and uglier tales.

  The facts are these: During the entire operation, SEAL Team Six fired only twelve bullets. These shots killed Osama bin Laden, his son, and two bodyguards. All of these men were armed or in close proximity to weapons.

  The wife of Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti was killed accidentally. She was standing behind her husband as he exchanged gunfire with a passing helicopter. The operators who entered Bin Laden’s bedroom did not wait for him to arm himself; they shot first. Amal was grazed by a bullet when the SEALs fired at her husband, who was at that instant concealed behind her nightgown and reaching for an automatic weapon. Bin Laden died with a hand stretched toward a rifle and pistol in plain sight next to his headboard.

  * * *

  After the mission, Bin Laden’s body was loaded aboard one of the MH-47s and flown back to Jalalabad. It was photographed and fingerprinted, and another DNA sample was taken. The body was then transferred aboard a V-22 Osprey and flown to the carrier USS Carl Vinson in the Indian Ocean.

  The DNA samples confirmed Osama bin Laden’s identity and blood work aboard the carrier revealed a very low level of plasma cortisol, supporting a diagnosis of Addison’s disease. In accordance with Islamic tradition, Osama was washed, wrapped in clean cloth, and buried at sea as the carrier steamed south from the coast of Pakistan.

  * * *

  Just days after the operation, the CIA started to meet with authors. The agency knew that JSOC would not cooperate with journalists or historians—and that would allow them a chance to “inform the narrative” of the raid at Abbottabad. There was a legend to be made, and all that was necessary was to pour out the facts into the waiting notebooks of eager journalists.

  But which story was the right one? The forty-five-minute firefight? The “kill mission” to Abbottabad? The story was becoming muddled with corrections, and it looked like the tail was starting to wag the dog. The White House cracked down, and in the second week of May, the word went out—no more leaks. Anyone who talked would be fired. This wrong-footed the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA), who had already begun to meet with several authors. Writers and screenwriters who had been invited to headquarters for talks on background suddenly found themselves frozen out. Calls to OPA officers went unanswered. E-mails were ignored. The winks and whispers were replaced with glacial silence. Now the story was that there was no story.

  As far as JSOC was concerned, that was just fine.

  They wanted no part of any publicity whatsoever. The SEAL Teams were astounded when they’d returned to the United States to find that they had been outed. More confusing was why the White House had said anything at all. The SEALs had recovered hundreds of pounds of priceless intelligence, a mother lode of information that could put Al Qaeda away for good. If the operation had been kept secret, it would have posed a perplexing mystery to the Pakistanis and an unfathomable nightmare for Al Qaeda.

  The mission could have been announced later—preferably after the SEALs had neutralized the rest of Al Qaeda’s leadership. SEAL Six had risked their lives to obtain the computers and hard drives stored at Al Qaeda’s nexus. Television braggarts made almost all this intelligence meaningless by confirming that the SEALs had taken it. Eager for screen time, politicians corralled journalists, telling all that they knew. What’s worse, they placed the families of the SEALs at risk by naming the unit and its location. Television news trucks went so far as to cruise neighborhoods in Virginia Beach, searching for a SEAL family to show the world.

  The hunters of Abbottabad became the hunted.

  * * *

  On June 30, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would conduct a full investigation into the deaths of two Al Qaeda terrorists who had been held in CIA custody. Holder was out for blood. He appointed special prosecutor John Durham, and explained that the review would “examine primarily whether any unauthorized interrogation techniques were used by CIA interrogators and if so, whether such techniques could constitute violations of the torture statute or any other applicable statute.”

  In 2010, prosecutors went after the SEALs, now they were going after the CIA. The attorney general was not initiating a new attack, just picking up where he’d left off. The CIA had already terminated two career employees who had interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and identified Osama’s courier. The CIA was still devouring its own.

  * * *

  President Obama nominated Leon Panetta to succeed Robert Gates as secretary of defense. He was confirmed on June 22.

  A story appeared in the New Yorker magazine on August 8, 2011, and appeared to corroborate an ugly tale of murder. The article reiterated the “ground-up assault” theory; it looked like Bin Laden had been killed by a gang as brutal and ruthless as he was.

  As he prepared to move over to the Pentagon, Leon Panetta gave a CIA tour to a gaggle of twenty-five freshman congressmen. The topic of the Bin Laden movie actually came up, and one of the congressmen asked Panetta who he wanted to play him in the movie. Panetta answered right away—“Al Pacino,” he said.

  Before Leon Panetta left the CIA, he’d quietly given OPA the go-ahead to bring back the writers. But not just any writers. Those frozen few who had hoped the agency would call them back now read that the CIA was in the movie business.

  Vanity Fair reported that Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow would direct the CIA’s version of the Abbottabad raid for Sony Pictures. As Ms. Bigelow lunched in the CIA’s food court, she was unlikely to have spotted a table of plain-clothed SEALs, but they saw her.

  Invisible as ever, two SEALs overheard one of OPA’s deputies promising an introduction to the CIA operator who had accompanied the SEALs into the compound. Even the OPA types had no idea who was sitting at the other table. They aren’t called Jedis for nothing.

  When the movie story hit the cable news outlets, there was a kerfuffle. Sony Pictures had held an in-studio fund-raiser for the president back in April—the first time a film studio had ever done so.

  The optics, as they say, didn’t look good.

  The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Peter King, called for an investigation into possible disclosure of classified material, citing news that director Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriter had been given high-level Pentagon access.

  White House press secretary Jay Carney fielded some tough questions, and went to the extent of reading a prepared statement:

  When people, including you in this room, are working on articles, books, documentaries or movies that involve the president, ask to speak to administration officials, we do our best to accommodate them to make sure that facts are correct. That is hardly a novel approach to the media. I would hope that as we face the continued threat from terrorism, the House Committee on Homeland Security would have more important topics to discuss than a movie.

  * * *

  Relations between the CIA and Pakistani intelligence have always been strained. In most allied countries, the host nation’s intel outfits are called “liaison services,” and are courteously informed of CIA operations. They share intelligence and in most cases work together. Within minutes after the last helicopter rumbled across the border back into Afghanistan, the Pakistanis knew they’d been had. The government was convulsed first with bewilderment, then embarrassment, and then rage.

  During the month of April, the CIA had deployed assets into Abbottabad to confirm that the compound was, indeed, occupied by Osama bin Laden. An apartment was rented close by as a listening post and photographic perch. In a slick but later obvious move, a Pakistani physician went door to door in the neighborhood offering free vaccinations for children. The strange people behind the high walls did not take the bait, but the doctor got a close look at their front gate and its multitudinous locks. His descriptions would be used later by the assaulters who would fabricate custom-made C4 charges to blast their way in.

  The CIA’s “assets” who ha
d surveyed Bin Laden’s compound were soon rolled up by Pakistani counterintelligence. The doctor and the landlord who rented the apartment were arrested, beaten, and tossed in prison. So was a military officer alleged to have CIA ties and six policemen suspected to have diverted traffic the night of the assault. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the CIA’s “boots on the ground” were so poorly compartmentalized that it took less than thirty-six hours for the Pakistanis to arrest everyone who had anything remotely to do with the operation.

  The Pakistanis then held an auction for the chunk of Razor 1 that had been left behind. The Chinese won, paid cash, and were allowed to disassemble, photograph, and take material samples of the tail rotor and the scraps that were heaved up around the compound. Out of spite, the Pakistanis allowed the Iranians and the North Koreans to come have a look, as well.

  Two weeks after the raid, Senator John Kerry traveled to Islamabad, hat in hand, to ask that the parts be returned. He came home with the wreckage.

  * * *

  On a sunny afternoon in May, Admiral Bill McRaven met President Obama on a runway in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The base is the home of the famed 101st Airborne Division and the Army’s TF-160 Special Operations Air Regiment, the pilots who flew the mission. SEAL Team Six had been flown in from Virginia and assembled in the conference rooms adjoining a hangar, far from the press. The Death Star, their base in Virginia, was deemed too sensitive for a presidential visit; this was, after all, a photo opportunity.

  After the president made a speech to the 101st Division, Admiral McRaven and the commander in chief went into the locked hangar for a close-up look at a Ghost Hawk helicopter. The president met some of the members of Det Alpha and the staff of the Joint Operations Center. He was given a briefing by Frank Leslie, who ran through the operation on a scale model of the compound that had been used to train the assaulters. The president was allowed to pet Karo, Red Squadron’s K-9, though the Secret Service asked that the dog remain muzzled.

  The president was given a 3 by 5 American flag signed by the SEALs and TF-160 pilots who conducted the raid. An inscription read: “From Joint Task Force Operation Neptune’s Spear, 01 May 2011: For God and country. Geronimo.”

  President Obama promised to put their gift in a place that was “somewhere private and meaningful.”

  Red Squadron had earlier presented Admiral McRaven with a 9 mm Marakov pistol taken from Osama’s bedside table. Inches from Bin Laden’s fingers, the Red Men also recovered Osama’s prized suchka machine pistol. That weapon now hangs on two nails driven into a wall in Red Squadron’s team room at the Death Star. Next to it are the pictures of a dozen Red Squadron operators who have been killed in action since the team went on line in 1981.

  In the hangar that afternoon, the president seemed in no hurry. He posed for pictures and bestowed the Presidential Unit Citation on TF-160 and SEAL Team Six. He made a couple of jokes and everybody laughed.

  The president made sure to shake the hands of each of the operators. As he was introduced to the men of Razor 1, the president asked, “So which one of you guys took out Osama?”

  There was a respectful pause, and Frank Leslie said, “We all did it, sir. It was all of us.”

  HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

  The primary sources for this history were the men of SEAL Team Six who told me what they saw, what they thought, and what they felt. The preparations and rehearsals for Neptune’s Spear spread over several months; in the weeks and months leading up to Neptune’s Spear, it was my privilege to help troops and platoons train for submissions, and run parallel HVT (high-value target) missions. Neptune’s Spear was a highly classified operation that hid its training evolutions in the “plain sight” of other SEAL Team exercises. Even in rehearsals, the Invisible Empire remains invisible. During a complex mission, no one SEAL can see all of an operation, or witness directly what happened in every corner of the target. Von Clausewitz calls this “the Fog of Battle.” Sometimes individual operators did not know what was happening on the other end of the compound. Sometimes they did. The story I have written seeks to draw together these fragments into a cogent narrative. I often had to “de-conflict” the statements of individual operators in order to gain a full picture of who saw what, where they saw it, and when it happened. To a great extent, it is the SEALs themselves who wrote this book. I have based my narrative on their stories, and, whenever possible, I have used their own words.

  My research took me far afield. Since the operation, some of the mission commanders have become public figures—I have made use of their correct names. In every other case I have done my best to protect the identities of both operators and analysts, while at the same time drawing accurate pictures of them as people.

  Like any endeavor regarding intelligence or counterterrorism there is a “white” side—open for business and overt; a gray side, a shadow state somewhere between being public and not being there at all; and then there is the dark side. The dark side is the realm of black programs, covert organizations, and hidden agendas. In the world of black programs, organizations don’t exist, people don’t have names, and things go bump in the night. I have thanks to give in all three shades, white, black, and gray, and I hope the reader will forgive me if I occasionally get a little vague.

  About halfway through, I began to realize that the farther I got from the Beltway the more accurate the information I got. In Washington, politicians who traipsed through the nightly news congratulating themselves on “gutsy decisions” were suddenly struck dumb when I came calling. It was as though having cheered for and congratulated themselves, and after outing the SEALs, they tried to make up for their indiscretions by biting their tongues. I learned long ago to never be disappointed by people. Especially politicians.

  This book details the events of the night of May 1, 2011, and has been based on the first-person accounts of members of SEAL Team Six.

  For reasons of operational security, it has been necessary to obscure, rather than clarify, certain aspects of the mission at Abbottabad. The success or failure of future SEAL missions requires that some of the facts of the operation against Osama bin Laden remain secret. While this may be a passing annoyance to historians, it is necessary to protect men and women in the here and now. The fight against Al Qaeda is not over. The lives of America’s war fighters depend on keeping what they do, and how they do it, a mystery to an enemy who has sworn to kill them and bring terror to our own doorsteps.

  Winston Churchill once said that the truth was so important that it had to be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. Almost sixty years after World War II secrets are still emerging about the special operations carried out by the forebears of SEAL Team Six, the Office of Strategic Services, the Jedberg Teams, Navy Combat Demolition Units, and the Underwater Demolition Teams. Likely it will be another half century before all is revealed about Operation Neptune’s Spear. Until the Joint Special Operations Command writes its own story, history must content itself with the few precious details that have come to light. This book has been written with the best information available. It will be left to some future historian to write the final story of Neptune’s Spear. It will also be the life’s work of another scholar to detail the inner machinations of Al Qaeda and the deadly rivalry between Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.

  The best biographical material on Osama bin Laden may be found in Lawrence Wright’s magnum opus, The Looming Tower; it is the best and most reliable single source for details of his life and the 9/11 conspiracy. Other key foundations of the present history include The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll, Holy War, Inc. by Peter Bergen, Mastermind: The Many Faces of the 9/11 Architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by Richard Miniter, Osama: The Making of a Terrorist by Jonathan Randal, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky, and Inside Al Qaeda Global Network of Terror by Rohan Gunaratna. A complete bibliography of reference books can be found on my Web site: www.chuckpfarrer.com. The work of these scholars, historians, and investigative jour
nalists allowed me to accurately sketch the life and travels of Osama bin Laden. If the present history succeeds, it is because this work stands on the shoulders of giants.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  On the civilian side, I have to thank my literary agent, Julia Lord, who stayed with this project and found a home for it amid the honking and clattering of competing projects. Thanks also to my editor at St. Martin’s, Michael Flamini, who gave me a very long leash even if he couldn’t give me much time. Thanks and love to my mother and father and my wife, Louise, who cared for me, patched me up between trips, and kept the lights on. Louise applied her considerable talents as an editor and writing coach to make sure that this book was the best it could be. She spent many a late night correcting drafts and rewrites as well as turning the galley proofs around in record time. As Dante said, Il Miglior Fabbro. Thanks and love to my son, Paddy, who waited patiently and was brave while his dad was away. And thanks again to my own father, who researched open source material and help sift fact from fiction. Many thanks to Murray Neal of Dragon Skin, who put together my “armored vehicle.” I’m delighted that I didn’t have to put his body armor to the test. Thanks a million to the professionals at the Makko Group, especially Dylan Saunders, who made sure that I was well turned out for my travels in harm’s way. Thanks to Pinnacle Armor and the Makko Group, I am the envy of operators in three war zones.

  A special thank-you to my oldest friend, Lisa Paul, herself a veteran of many a tough bivouac and a cool head under fire. Thanks also to my friends Doug Stanton, Pack, and Becca Fancher, and thanks always and again to the Doctors Brice, Charlie and Judy—a pair of psychiatrists and poets who are among the smartest and most loving people I know. Thanks to Emily and Anna Iannucci, who provided me with a safe house in a place no one would have found me. Friends are the riches of the world. Lance Moody and my comrade Panu Vesterinen are long-suffering friends as well as patriots, gentlemen, and scholars—their ship’s come in, and I congratulate them heartily. Thanks to Lee Wanaar and Rick Kosinsky—two fighters that never quit: you know what you did to make this book possible. Thanks to Dave and Erika DeTar, Otto Bebe and Terry Starr—we’ll eventually have that beer.