The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  One eye was shot through, but Bissonnette asked another SEAL to pull the good eyelid open so he could get a picture of the dark brown iris. The room was filled with the noise of Amal, who was now screaming hysterically, and the sounds of the other women sobbing. But from outside there was utter silence: no police or army response, no neighbors coming out of their houses.

  Sumaiya and Miriam wanted to turn their father’s body toward Mecca as was traditional after death, but the Americans only had one thing on their minds.

  “What’s his name?” barked a SEAL in Arabic.

  “The Sheikh.”

  “The Sheikh who?” he asked.

  Miriam whispered: “Abdullah bin Muhammed.”

  O’Neill shrugged. He did not understand.

  Sumaiya spoke in Arabic to her sister. “Tell them the truth, they are not Pakistanis.”21

  Miriam could not speak.

  Bissonnette was still busy cleaning Osama. “With each swipe, the face became more familiar,” he said.

  Sumaiya piped up. “My father,” she said at last. “Osama bin Laden.”

  Still not certain, the Arabic-speaking SEAL grabbed Amal’s eleven-year-old daughter, Safiyah, from the balcony.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, gesturing to the body.

  Safiyah was hysterical. “Osama bin Laden.”

  Another SEAL grabbed Khairiah, who was in the hallway.

  “Stop fucking with me now,” said the SEAL, shaking her. “Who’s that?”

  Khairiah started to cry. “Osama,” she blurted out.

  “Osama what?” he asked, still holding her arm.

  “Osama bin Laden.”

  “Hey, dual confirmation,” said the Arabic-speaking SEAL, Will. “Confirmed it with the kid. Confirmed it with the old lady.”22

  Twenty minutes down: The SEAL team leader, who was known by the pseudonym Jay, left the room to call mission commander Admiral McRaven on the satellite. “For God and country, I pass Geronimo,” he said. “Geronimo EKIA.” Enemy Killed In Action.

  Bissonnette took more photos.23 “Lying in front of me was the reason we had been fighting for the last decade,” he thought.24

  Sumaiya, who had been cuffed and placed in a far corner, listened to the sound of what she presumed was her father’s head bumping on every step as his body was dragged down the stairs. A minute later, she and Miriam were taken down, too, following the streak of blood, stepping over her dead brother.

  Seham came next, trying to negotiate steps made slippery with his and Osama’s blood. Her son Khalid was still wearing his pajama trousers and an old vest. She whispered a prayer and knelt to kiss his forehead but the SEALs pulled her away.25

  Khairiah, who had braced the door of her room from the inside before a SEAL forced his way in, was also taken down.26

  Everyone was cuffed as SEALs charged about, stuffing whatever they could into bags—cell phones, DVDs, paperwork, hard drives, thumb drives, cameras—leaving behind what appeared to be a large haul of raw opium stuffed into duffel bags under a bed.

  “There was so much stuff in this house,” recalled Bissonnette, who was struck by the order of Osama’s media center as compared to the disorder of his wives’ quarters. He rifled through Osama’s wardrobe. It “could have passed a Marine Corps boot camp inspection.” As he exited the bedroom he noticed the narrow shelf above the door with the Sheikh’s famous snub-nosed AK and a Makarov pistol lying on it. Osama had spent his whole life with the AK never more than an arm’s reach away—even when visiting his mother, Allia. But now, when he had needed it most, it had been left on the shelf unloaded. “We routinely saw the phenomenon,” Bissonnette noted. “The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger the pussy.”

  Drop-dead time: Before departing, the SEALs tried to corral the women and children and take them out of the house to a corner of Khalid’s vegetable plot. “It was like herding cats,” said Bissonnette. “None of them wanted to move.”

  To get them to stay inside the compound, the Arabic-speaking SEAL told them they would return for them in two hours.

  The SEALs were now five minutes past their drop-dead time and Bissonnette was getting nervous. “We’re running outta time, we got to get going,” he urged as he and three others stumbled across a plowed field hauling a body bag containing Osama’s corpse. Some SEALs were still inside the house and another was setting charges on the downed helicopter. Any plan to take bin Laden’s family with them had been abandoned the moment the first Black Hawk went down.27 The bodies of Khalid, the two Kuwaiti brothers, and Bushra were left where they fell.

  Five minutes later the body of Osama had been loaded onto the still-functioning Black Hawk and the Chalk Two team was ready to go. “We’re done, we’re clean from the target,” said Bissonnette as he clambered into Chalk Two’s chopper.

  Up in the top-floor bedroom, Amal lay gazing up at the blood-spattered ceiling, thinking about her dead husband. After six years cooped up in this airtight place, the end they had never dared discuss had come and gone in just a few seconds.28 If only he had dealt sooner with the change of companion instead of endlessly delaying the issue, then they would not have even been in Abbottabad at all—and he would probably still be alive.

  She felt Hussein trembling beside her, but her leg was throbbing and she could not find the strength to sit up. Where was everyone else? There was not a sound in the house.

  An orange brilliance filled the room and lit up the yellow flowered curtains as a huge explosion shattered the windows, scattering glass over them. The remaining SEAL team had detonated the stricken Black Hawk before departing.

  @ReallyVirtual tweeted: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S.” He added, “Funny, moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy.” A native of Lahore, he had moved to this quiet resort city because he had thought it offered peace and order. Now the whole valley was awake to a major incident.

  Amal’s heart was throbbing. A replacement U.S. helicopter was arriving, a Chinook that came down to scoop up the remaining SEAL team. After only a few seconds on the ground, it skimmed off down the valley. @ReallyVirtual tweeted: “All silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away … the helicopter is gone too.”

  After a few minutes, Amal heard chatter outside, as frightened neighbors began coming out of their houses. They shouted out, asking who was inside and needed help. Was everyone else in the family dead? she wondered, clutching Hussein closer.

  A few streets away, @ReallyVirtual tweeted: “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicopters, and since they’re saying it was not ‘ours,’ so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad.”

  For the first time ever, the gates of the Waziristan Palace stood wide open. Among the curious neighbors stepping inside the compound was a local busybody who had come out of his house when he first heard the helicopter crashing, only to retreat when the SEAL’s Pashto translator threatened to shoot him.29 The only security official in sight was a thin constable from nearby Nawan Shehr police station who made no effort to disperse the rapidly growing crowd who were filming on cell phones as something large, black, and foreign-made burned brightly beside the wall of Khalid’s vegetable plot.30

  While the nervous policeman held back, an off-duty clerk from the Abbottabad provincial administration entered the buildings. He quickly found Maryam, lying in the annex with blood oozing from her wounds. Speaking in her native Pashto and broken Urdu, she told him that “foreigners” had killed her husband. “Some of the Arabs, too,” she said, motioning to the main house.

  Climbing the stairs, the clerk stepped over a pool of blood congealing around Khalid bin Laden’s lifeless body.

  In their frenzied search for evidence, the SEALs had scattered belongings everywhere.

  When the clerk reached the top bedroom, through the chaos of clothes, upturned boxes, and paper he found Amal weeping. “They have killed Hamzah’s father,” she
whispered.

  She pointed to a blood smear on the concrete floor. The clerk had no idea to whom she was referring.31

  By the time he went back downstairs, an ISI colonel had arrived, accompanied by the deputy inspector general of police and a commander from the Pakistan Military Academy.32 Together they cleared everyone out and roughly questioned the survivors in Osama’s family. Everyone heard the shouting. The authorities seemed panicked, eyewitnesses said, as the truth dawned on them.

  On the family side, the only one who spoke with any coherence was Khairiah, the eyewitnesses said, and she confirmed in broken English that the body on the stairs was that of “Khalid, son of Osama bin Laden.”33

  Khairiah broke into furious screams: “Heli come, heli go and take away one or two.”

  Jabbing her finger in their faces, she shouted: “Now you come, when everything over.”

  Shortly after one forty A.M., the ISI colonel received a call from General Pasha, the ISI director general, who was at home inside the heavily guarded Chaklala garrison in Rawalpindi, trying to get ahead of unconfirmed reports spewing out of Abbottabad.

  After the explosion that blew up the damaged Black Hawk, the Pakistan Air Force had scrambled two F16 fighters armed with 30mm cannons and air-to-air missiles.34 “What the hell has happened?” he thundered. He had spoken to General Kayani but the only thing they were able to conclude was that there had been no military exercises scheduled to take place in the early hours of May 2. Whatever this was, it was live and fluid. Their natural inclination was to blame their most deadly enemy—India. Had Indian helicopters crossed the Line of Control?

  The ISI was Pakistan’s “first line of national defense,” stormed Pasha. Until more details of what had occurred in Abbottabad were established, it should take the lead as the “core institution” of the state. The police always bungled operations, got in the way, and “did not know the basics of intelligence work,” so the ISI colonel should get them out of the compound before they discovered anything compromising.

  Pasha also called the garrison commander of the Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad and told him to rouse his unit and help the ISI colonel lock down the site.

  Over in the cantonment area, @ReallyVirtual tweeted: “A Major of the #Pakistan #Army’s 19 FF, Platoon CO says incident at #Abbottabad where #helicopter crashed is accidental and not an ‘attack.’ ”

  Before long he tweeted an update: “Report from a taxi driver: The army has cordoned off the crash area and is conducting door-to-door search in the surrounding area.”

  Inside the compound, around an hour after the SEALs had departed, ISI officers photographed the bodies of Khalid, Ibrahim, Abrar, and Bushra, recovering whatever documents, weapons, and computers had been left behind. The police would be the last to search the crime scene. No First Information Report, the initial stage of any criminal inquiry in Pakistan, would ever be lodged.

  @ReallyVirtual tweeted: “What really happened doesn’t matter if there is an official story behind it that 99.999% of the world would believe.”

  May 2, 2011, 3 A.M., Jalalabad, Afghanistan

  Mission commander Admiral McRaven was standing just inside the hangar with his hands in his pockets when the SEALs delivered the body bag. “Let’s see him,” he said drily, as the corpse thudded onto the concrete floor, where the bag was unzipped. Blood had drained to the bottom of the bag and the skin had a powdery pall.35

  Matthew Bissonnette pulled the beard to the left and right to give McRaven a clear look at the profile, as others crowded around. Osama bin Laden was not quite as they had imagined, and one of the SEALs who was six feet four inches tall lay down to check his height.

  After taking in the scrawny frame, the unexpected crew cut, and the large number of posthumous gunshots, someone brought over Gina Bennett, the CIA analyst who had put it all together. Before the raid she had said she was not interested in seeing the body, but now she approached hesitantly.

  “I still had all my stuff on,” said Robert O’Neill, who took her by the shoulder and ushered her forward. “I asked her, ‘Is that your guy?’ ”

  Bennett looked down and nodded without saying a word.

  He took the magazine out of his gun and gave it to her as a souvenir. “I hope you have room in your backpack for this?” he said. It had twenty-seven of the original thirty rounds left in it.

  When they stripped the body, the SEALs found five hundred euros and two phone numbers sewn into Osama’s clothes, including the special number the Al Qaeda leader had given to his son Khalid for use in emergencies.36 It connected to a phone carried by Atiyah, his Number Three, who knew that if it ever rang Osama was in serious trouble. To the Americans, it appeared to be a paltry effort at emergency protocol. But after two decades in exile, Osama had still believed he knew best what he needed to survive.

  Shortly before leaving Jalalabad, O’Neill glimpsed Bennett sitting alone on the floor of the hangar hugging her legs to her chest and crying. Searching for Osama bin Laden had become her life’s work and now that it was actually over the emotion was overwhelming.

  Bissonnette went over to speak to a team of CIA and military “document exploitation” specialists who were already sifting through material recovered from the compound, preparing for it to be shipped back to the United States for analysis. Thinking of a stack of boxes on the second floor of Osama’s house that he had not had time to pick up, he wanted to apologize. “We could have done better.”

  The analyst laughed. “Stop worrying about it. Look at all this shit. We’ve got more here than we’ve gotten in the past ten years.” Later, the president’s national security advisor, Thomas Donilon, would comment that the material could fill “a small college library.”37

  Twenty-four hours later, the SEALs flew home. As they landed at their base in Virginia Beach, they turned on their phones for the first time in days and were inundated with messages. It had taken less than four hours for the news to break that the Navy SEALs based at Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEV-GRU) had led the Abbottabad raid, and reporters were already crawling all over the base looking for someone to interview.

  After two days’ leave, the team was back at work and listened as their commander, Jay, ordered them to act and speak as though the raid had never happened. To talk, even to close relatives, would violate their code as “quiet professionals,” he said.38

  May 2, 2011, 3:45 A.M., Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  Osama’s surviving family members were brought out of the compound in a fleet of ambulances just as the azam called fajr prayer, the first of the day.39 Streets that would normally be bustling into life remained empty—cleared by the army and ISI. By now the city’s residents didn’t need any encouragement to stay inside. With so many intelligence agents descending on Abbottabad, nobody wanted to catch the ISI’s attention.

  As the first rays of dawn doused Abbottabad in pale sunlight, Amal was hustled into a private room at the army’s Combined Military Hospital on Karakoram Highway. Son Hussein and daughter Safiyah were at her side. Her other three children and relatives were on their way to Islamabad, driven in a bus with curtained windows, armed ISI officers riding up front.

  Maryam was being treated at another hospital, with eight stunned children sitting silently beside her bed—hers and Bushra’s. She had watched in horror as the bodies of her husband, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law had been taken out of the compound, knowing that as the lone adult Pakistani survivor of the raid she would face the brunt of the authorities’ vengeance. All she could think was that if Ibrahim had pressed the Sheikh harder to move out, they might all have got away with it.40

  @ReallyVirtual, who was confined to the cantonment by the roadblocks, tweeted: “I think I should take out my big blower to blow the fog of war away and see the clearer picture.” He gave up on going to bed and watched Pakistani anchors reporting the first sketchy details of a U.S. operation over camera-phone footage of a burning Black Hawk.41

  Over the next cou
ple of hours his Twitter account attracted thousands of new followers and so many foreign journalists tried to reach him that he turned off Skype. “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it,” he tweeted at five forty-one A.M., by which time everyone had heard the rumors about who had been killed. A few minutes later he added: “I need to sleep, but Osama had to pick this day to die :-/.”

  Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  General Pasha was with General Kayani at Army House taking in the fallout from what he was already describing as the “American sting operation.” Admiral Mike Mullen had called Kayani around three A.M. to confirm who had been killed. It had been a terse infogram. Shortly after, the ISI colonel inside the Abbottabad compound had called Pasha to confirm the news—extracted from Seham.42

  “This was a game we all missed because of bad work by all of us, including the police, local government institutions,” Pasha said ruefully. The national security of Pakistan had never been “as critically challenged as it was today,” he added.

  What had happened was a “systemic failure.” Raymond Davis should have been a wake-up call to Washington’s disregard for Pakistani sovereignty. The fact that Pasha had intervened to allow Davis to leave Pakistan made him feel all the more bitter now.

  Suspecting that everyone at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad would soon be out for blood, finger-pointing after their big score in Abbottabad and accusing Pakistan’s military of having concealed Osama bin Laden, generals Kayani and Pasha were deeply worried. They went into default position and ordered a lockdown.

  The inspector general of police for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (as the North-West Frontier Province had been renamed in 2010), the most senior police official in the Abbottabad region, was told to back off as “everything was being handled by the ISI.”