by Adrian Levy
On April 10, Red Squadron reported to a CIA facility in a densely forested area of North Carolina. On the way down, they learned that senior officers from JSOC would be joining them along with staff from the Afghanistan-Pakistan desk at the CIA. “That’s when the wheels started spinning for me: This is big,” said O’Neill.
The following morning the SEALs filed into a secure room where the commander, the CIA staff, and a two-star JSOC general briefed them. “Okay, we’re as close as we ever have been to UBL,” said the commander, as he showed them around the Styrofoam-and-clay model of AC1.
“There was none of that cheering bullshit,” said O’Neill. “We were thinking, ‘Yeah, okay, good. It’s about time we kill this motherfucker.’ ” Over the next few hours, CIA analysts including Gina Bennett briefed them about the compound: how they had found it, who was thought to be inside, and the likely security.
“We’ve got him,” Bennett said. “This is my life’s work. I’m positive.”
Over the next five days, Red Squadron rehearsed in a full-scale mock-up of the compound. It occurred to them that while swooping in would be relatively easy, the chances of all of them getting out were slim. “We’re gonna die, so let’s do this right,” O’Neill said to the others.
On April 18, the team shifted to Nevada, where the heat and elevation approximated Abbottabad. Here, another life-size set had been constructed, and they spent a week fast-roping down from two helicopters that hovered low over the ground. The evolving plan was for one team of SEALs to drop onto the roof and clear the house from the top down, while a second, accompanied by a dog and a Pashto translator, would enter at ground level and hold back any neighbors and Pakistani security forces who turned up. Satellite footage of the Pacer showed a man who did not flinch on the few occasions when a Pakistani military chopper flew over the compound on its way to the military academy. “We might actually be able to get on the deck before [the family] really figure out what is going on,” said another operator on the team.81
The SEALs went over the plan again and again, punctuated by briefings from military top brass. As far as O’Neill was concerned it was only ever a kill mission. “But try not to shoot this motherfucker in the face,” said one of his colleagues. “Everyone is going to want to see this picture.”82
If they got caught they were to fight to the death. O’Neill spoke for everyone when he said, “If we get arrested, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives in a Pakistani prison.”83
To ease the tension, they joked about who would play them in the Hollywood version; after all, Tom Hanks had signed up to play Captain Phillips. Some voted for Brad Pitt or George Clooney. At the end, the commander asked if they were ready.
“Yeah, absolutely,” said O’Neill. “This is going to be easy.”
April 24, 2011, Abbottabad
Security in the city was tight. Given the recent apprehension of the Bali bomber in Abbottabad, extra checkpoints had been set up on all main roads in and out as the streets around Bilal Town and Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul were swept for roadside bombs. Militant madrassas had been shut since Friday afternoon and likely terrorist hideouts had been searched.
The reason for this heightened state of alert was that Pakistan’s army chief General Kayani was addressing a parade of graduating cadets at the academy, whose boundary wall was just about visible from Osama’s compound.
The enhanced security measures were a necessary show of force as much as anything else. Kayani told the cadets that the country had broken the “back of terrorism” in Pakistan thanks to the sacrifices of Pakistan’s soldiers.84 He reminded cadets that the previous August the ISI had declared Al Qaeda the top internal threat to the country. Now that the men before him were full-fledged warriors, it would be their job to assist in the fight.
Less than a mile away, Sheikh Osama composed his latest missive to Atiyah, another huge document that ranged from how Al Qaeda should respond to the Arab Spring (“the most important events that the nation has witnessed for centuries”) to what to do about an approach from the British security services in London. MI5 had sent a message through a Libyan brother living in London, suggesting a deal in which British forces would withdraw from Afghanistan in return for a commitment from Al Qaeda not to attack “England or her interests.” But Atiyah wasn’t convinced it was genuine.85
On the domestic front, Hamzah remained the most important issue. Atiyah was told to get him to Karachi, where he should remain for as short a time as possible before flying to Peshawar. Ibrahim would meet him there, but in disguise. “His name will be Ahmad Khan.” The USB drive Osama was sending with his latest monthly batch of letters saved on it also had a file with “Ahmad’s” new number.86
There was a short letter from Khalid, too. He and Hamzah had been born just weeks apart and had grown up together. But they had not seen each other since they were thirteen. Now Hamzah was married with two children, while Khalid remained in marital limbo. Khalid was excited that the time had finally come for them to be reunited.
“To start with, thanks God for saving you from the prisons of the Rejectionists, the wicked Magi,” he wrote of the Iranians. “We were following your exit with great patience.” Moving on to practical instructions, he continued: “Immediately after arriving at Balochistan, inquire about the security situation in the place where you are; be very cautious and say many prayers.”
If there was time, Hamzah should send his photo to Al Qaeda’s document forger so he could make a new ID.87 If not, “then use my ID, with God’s blessing to [move to] Karachi, then to Peshawar by air or train.”
When his brother arrived in Peshawar he was to call “Ahmad Khan.” Khalid wrote: “Inform him that you are Hamzah and stay with him.” From there, they would arrange the last leg of the journey.88
Khalid also penned a quick message to Karima’s family, anxious to finalize wedding plans during his coming visit to Peshawar. “We [will be] calling you from Peshawar, and the brother who is with me will conduct the phone call with you and we [will] agree to a place to meet,” he noted.89
The marriage finally seemed real. The USB drive also contained a message from Seham to her future sister-in-law. “My beloved sister, I give you the good news that a new dawn has shone on us and the stress of [being unable to] meet you … has been removed,” she wrote. “My son will be in a safe location in Peshawar area ready to receive you and complete our reunion.”90
Seham painted a picture of her anxious son: “He waits impatiently for the day when we meet, when the matter is complete, and our two homes and our two lives are illuminated.” She hoped this would be the “last message that precedes meeting you.” Addressing the delays in a sentence that conjured all of their worries about Khairiah without mentioning her or Iran, she added: “We have been through difficult security circumstances; God only knows it. However, by the grace of Allah, things changed and every day that goes by our situation is from good to better.” But just to be on the safe side, Karima’s mother should as usual “destroy this message after reading it.”
Osama saved a letter to the same USB drive, with a pronouncement about safety. He referenced his earlier suggestion that Atiyah should move out of Waziristan. Thinking about it, and the deteriorating security there, he had decided that all senior brothers should move out to the cities. Atiyah should “arrange homes for them on the outskirts … to distance them from the people, which reduces the security dangers, and they will be with trusted companions,” meaning Pakistani supporters with real ID cards.
Drawing on his own experiences in Abbottabad, Osama added that all such companions would have to have some cover story for how they earned a living, a story that could check out, “especially for those who live close by and have observing neighbors.” With his own experience in mind, he advised that they needed to think about “controlling children.”
If the brothers had family accompanying them, they should be made to follow strict rules. “Not leaving the house except for extrem
e necessity like medical care, and teaching [children] the local languages,” Osama wrote.91 “They do not get into the yard of the house without an adult who will control the volume of their voices.”
Any mujahid brother who followed these simple precautions would always be safe, he assured Atiyah.
April 29, 2011, Bilal Town, Abbottabad
Maryam and her children returned home after dark to find that a new guest had arrived. She did not see them as she retreated to the damp annex and unpacked. But when Bushra came to welcome her back, she confirmed that another bin Laden family member was in the main house.
Extra food had been purchased. There was a new voice upstairs. Tired after her journey from Shangla, Maryam could not face another showdown with Ibrahim. The children were exhausted. He was twitchy and distracted.92
That night she could not sleep and she spied the guest: a young Arab man who looked a lot like Khalid bin Laden. He emerged from under the carport with a heavy bag. Maryam wondered who he was and what he wanted.
Ibrahim had assured her that there would be no more visitors to the house, which was bursting at the seams. Osama had also given his written assurance. She sneaked up to the roof of the annex to spy, and to listen in, a bitter rage filling her head and heart.
Inside the main house the young man—Hamzah bin Laden—produced things one by one to the delight of Osama’s family. They made for curious gifts: old notebooks, jewelry, some secondhand iPods, and an old suitcase as well as camera-phone footage of Saad’s will.
Sheikh Osama filed the material away in a locked security box covered with a pink-and-white, flower-patterned scarf as he explained to his long-lost son how, with Ibrahim and Abrar sick, two more adults and their two children could not be accommodated.
Maryam climbed back down and slipped into bed, meaning to confront Ibrahim in the morning.
Shortly before dawn, the sound of a car engine starting up woke her. She heard whispering under the carport and the clang of the big gate.
The visitor was leaving.93
April 29, 2011, Washington, D.C.
President Obama had finished his National Security Council meeting on April 28 by saying that before making a final decision about the Abbottabad raid he wanted to sleep on it. To make sure they were ready should he decide to proceed, the SEALs flew to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, that night.
At eight twenty the next morning, Obama, surrounded by advisers, consented.94
The next few nights there would be no moon over Abbottabad. If they did not go in, they would have to wait another month. Now that the SEALs were in situ, it would also be hard to keep this kind of operation secret for long.
When word came back from JSOC that there was not enough time to scramble SEAL Team Six for a raid right away, they delayed for twenty-four hours.
However, the following day, Saturday April 30, was the night of the annual White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington. The president decided to attend anyway. Pulling out at such short notice would be bound to make reporters suspicious. On Saturday afternoon, he called McRaven in Jalalabad, not expecting to speak to him again before the SEALs set out: “Godspeed to you and your forces,” he said. “Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service. I will personally be following this mission very closely.”95
When weather forecasts for the Abbottabad region predicted fog on Saturday night, McRaven decided to postpone until Sunday night, enabling Obama to make a trademark urbane, gently barbed, and self-deprecating speech to journalists gathered at the Washington Hilton without the distraction of knowing that thousands of miles away U.S. operatives were risking their lives.
May 1, 11 P.M. Jalalabad, Afghanistan
On Sunday, just minutes after President Obama met with his principals in the White House Situation Room to review final preparations, two Black Hawks lifted off from Jalalabad airfield, the twenty-four-man team split into two units code-named Chalk One and Chalk Two.
“A group of guys knew time on Earth was up, so you could be honest with each other,” recalled Robert O’Neill. “We all accepted and nobody was afraid. It was really cool.”
The CIA analyst Gina Bennett, who had also flown to Jalalabad, had handed each of them a copy of the laminated Sensitive Site Exploitation (SSE) booklet for AC1, containing photographs and biographical information on the occupants of the compound and schematics of its layout. If the mission went according to plan—Osama killed and the others neutralized—it would be the job of several specialists on the SEAL team to seize all the documentation and digital material they could find in the house, vital intelligence that would be shipped back to the U.S. for deep analysis, a procedure the CIA called “documentation exploitation,” which helped the U.S. military plan its future wars.
As Obama sat down in the White House Situation Room around two P.M. local time to review final preparations, in Islamabad CIA station chief Mark Kelton and Ambassador Cameron Munter gathered in a secure room at the embassy. They had made preparations for possible Pakistani reprisals, drafting evacuation plans for employees scattered across the country to either flee to the Indian border or head for Karachi, where they would board the USS Carl Vinson, which was patrolling offshore. Those at the embassy would have to hunker down.
Three Chinooks carrying backup fuel and forces took the same flight path as the Black Hawks, two crossing into Pakistani airspace between army checkpoints twenty miles apart, while one hung back at the border.
Far ahead, the Black Hawks pursued a “nap-of-the-earth” course (military speak for flying at a very low altitude), without lights, over Khyber Agency, down to Chakdara and Kala Dakka and toward AC1.
They had scheduled thirty minutes for the operation.96 On the ground, one SEAL’s job would include calling out the time.
O’Neill, who wore a noise-canceling headset in the helicopter so all he could hear was his heart beating, ran through his last conversation with Gina Bennett. “She asked me why I was so calm. I told her, ‘We do this every night. We go to a house, we fuck with some people, and we leave. This is just a longer flight.’ ”
Around three thirty P.M. in the basement of the White House, in a conference suite across from the Situation Room, Obama’s team began to watch the live feed from a drone circling fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“What really happened doesn’t matter if there is an official story behind it that 99.999% of the world would believe.”
—@REALLYVIRTUAL1
May 1, 2011, Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan
The guest was gone, his twenty-four-hour stopover far shorter than Osama had hoped for and Amal had expected. After eating dinner and clearing away, they all prayed, before Amal and the Sheikh went to bed. She carried two-year-old Hussein, their youngest son, while Osama cradled his Koran.
By eleven P.M., the Sheikh was deep in sleep. Outside, the streets of Abbottabad were plunged into darkness as the electricity went out all over the city.2 Power shortages were so common that no one in the Waziristan Palace even noticed.3
Just past midnight, Amal woke, her head buzzing with worries about Hamzah’s brief visit and their future.
Something caught her ear at twelve twenty A.M.: a thrumming up above.
Chop, chop chop.
It sounded like a storm and she thought she glimpsed a shadow passing across the curtained balcony window.4
The noise was too mechanical to be thunder, and she looked across to her husband for reassurance. Occasionally, Pakistan Air Force helicopters passed overhead—but never in the middle of the night.
It became more powerful, swirling the air and the yellow flowered curtains at the windows.
Osama awoke, a fearful look on his face. Whatever was out there was coming in fast, although too slowly to be some kind of drone strike.5 Amal clutched him. The object that had been hovering above swung violently to the right and then the sound panned to the left. They both jumped when a sickening screech tore through the compound.
The walls of the house shuddered. Amal thought it sounded like “something extremely heavy and metallic crashing down.”
Now the noise was more like a grinding sound. They slipped from their bed and crept through the darkness to the balcony door. “It was a moonless night and difficult to see,” Amal recalled. What popped into her mind was Khairiah’s unsettling arrival from Iran.
Could the family’s shrill-voiced emira who always thought she knew best have inadvertently overlooked something, or someone, leading the enemy to their door? Had she, after all of those years in exile, lost her edge or been corrupted by the Iranians or the Americans? Or maybe it had been Hamzah? Had he been a willing or unwilling stooge?
Amal glanced at Osama, who appeared to be paralyzed by fear.
From the window the thing they could hear could not be seen.
Out of sight, 150 feet away to the west a U.S. military Black Hawk had ditched into the yard, its tail fin bent out of shape and lying across the perimeter wall, with its rotors churning up soil and stones in Khalid’s vegetable garden.
May 1, 2011, Washington, D.C.
In the conference suite across the corridor from the White House Situation Room, President Obama slipped in, motioned for everyone to stay as they were, and pulled up a chair, announcing that he “should be watching this.” Moments later a White House photographer captured him and other senior members of his team as they watched the live drone feed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pictured with a hand clapped over her mouth.6 One chopper had dropped out of the sky and appeared to have landed on the compound wall. To those gathered in the room it looked like a carefully rehearsed mission gone awry before the first boots had even hit the ground.7
For several agonizing minutes, mission commander Admiral William McRaven in Jalalabad, who could see from the chat line that the president was present, remained silent while he searched for a live update from the unfolding crisis. McRaven, who had seen choppers go down many times before and missions survive the blowout, remained calm; but he knew that some of those watching in Washington would be panicking.8
