by Joby Warrick
If it was really him.
The service ended with no further word from Pakistan. Panetta paid his respects to Hanson’s family, and the CIA director’s black car pulled out of the cemetery and headed north, away from Washington and toward Baltimore. Panetta had an appointment at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic eavesdropping service, and the hunt for al-Masri would follow him there.
Panetta had scarcely arrived at the NSA building when he was summoned to one of the agency’s secure phones. The CIA’s counterterrorism chief had fresh news, not all of it good.
“We think we’ve got this guy, but there may be some collateral damage,” the chief was saying, referring to the women and children believed to be in the building the agency’s drones were watching.
Panetta’s heart sank. Nothing was coming easy with this one. He called Emanuel’s office again. The White House was nervous too.
“It’s your decision,” Panetta was told.
The CIA director sat quietly for a moment, the day’s events replaying in his brain. He picked up the phone again and called his counterterrorism director.
“Look, I need to know how certain you feel about the target,” he began. “This is really important.”
“Eighty percent,” the counterterrorism chief was saying. “Maybe ninety percent, in terms of knowing we have the right target.”
The numbers weren’t the ones Panetta was hoping for. But this might well be the best chance the agency would ever get.
“I don’t see how I can’t do it,” he finally said. “Go ahead.”
Panetta hung up the phone and tried to focus on his meeting. Later in the afternoon he received reports about the missiles’ deadly flight and the utter destruction of the targeted building. He learned of the recovery of bodies, and he was given the news—painful to contemplate for him—that two women and a child were among the dead. As for the fate of al-Masri himself, there was only silence out of Pakistan. Nothing more was learned during the rest of the day, or the following morning, or the day after that.
Then, on Memorial Day, the agency’s surveillance network picked up the first snippet of conversation hinting of a momentous change in al-Qaeda’s highest ranks. The terrorist group had lost one of its leaders, and the formal announcement would be posted soon on one of the usual jihadist Web sites. Al-Masri, the operational commander, had been targeted by a CIA missile at a safe house near Miranshah on May 21 and was now dead.
Panetta immediately picked up the phone and called his friend Emanuel at the White House.
“Rahm,” he said, “we just took out Number Three.”
The whereabouts of No. 1, bin Laden, and No. 2, Zawahiri, remained unknown.
EPILOGUE
On May 1, 2011, the same fierce desire to avenge September 11 that led to a terrible miscalculation at Khost produced a long-sought victory. Less than one year after al-Masri was confirmed dead, the hunt for bin Laden also ended.
Bin Laden, the CIA discovered, had been hiding not in the dusty borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in a green valley town in Pakistan called Abbottabad, noted for its pleasant weather, shopping malls, and top-rated golf course. There, a half day’s drive from the Afghan border, his followers had constructed a palatial compound for the al-Qaeda chief, far from the buzzing CIA drones and shielded from neighbors by twelve-foot walls topped with razor wire.
Bin Laden set up housekeeping within the compound in 2005, joined by three of his five wives and at least two of his eighteen children. The house had no telephone or Internet, but it had a shaded garden for morning strolls and a balcony with its own seven-foot-tall privacy barrier so the terrorist mastermind could sun himself in seclusion. His third-floor bedroom window afforded a view of cabbage fields, grazing cattle, and craggy hills, while the satellite TV served up a daily diet of Arab-language soap operas and news shows. In March 2011, in his sixth year inside the compound, he quietly marked his fifty-fourth birthday, a middle-aged man with graying locks and a thickening waist, his once-towering global ambitions now confined to a space smaller than a soccer field.
Unknown to him, even this small sanctuary was soon to disappear.
Thousands of miles away in another green suburb, tiny scraps of data, collected and studied by scores of different people over nearly a decade, had been assembled like a giant puzzle to reveal a possible answer to one of the most vexing mysteries of the age. For the first time since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA believed it knew where to find bin Laden.
The trail of evidence stretched across three continents. It started in Pakistan, where security forces captured a pair of midlevel al-Qaeda operatives with knowledge of the terrorist group’s inner workings. It wound through a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe, where the interrogation of one of the men yielded a partial name. It picked up intensity in Langley, Virginia, where Jennifer Matthews and her colleagues in the CIA’s bin Laden unit poured over the new data searching for patterns and connections. In 2007, it reached the office of then-CIA director Michael V. Hayden, who was briefed by his senior counterterrorism advisers one morning about a potentially momentous discovery: They had learned the name of the trusted al-Qaeda courier who served as bin Laden’s personal connection to the outside world. All that remained was to find the man who would lead them to bin Laden’s door.
“We think we’ve found a path forward,” one of Hayden’s briefers said.
The task of locating bin Laden’s courier could take months or even years, Hayden knew, but he considered the discovery important enough to warrant a full airing during one of his regular meetings with President George W. Bush and his national security advisers. True, there had been other promising leads—some of them more akin to Elvis Presley sightings than intelligence tips, Hayden thought. This one seemed more promising than most, but it was not, he cautioned, a breakthrough.
“There is rarely a ‘eureka’ moment,” Hayden has said. “It’s one grain of sand at a time.”
Indeed, the progress in finding the courier remained agonizingly slow. The man had first come to the CIA’s attention soon after the September 11 attacks, when investigators learned of bin Laden’s preference for using personal couriers to send messages, rather than relying on e-mail or phone calls that could be electronically tracked. Captured Afghan fighters spoke of a particularly favored courier, a young Pashtun businessman who was known within al-Qaeda circles by his jihadist name, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But it took the CIA several years and a series of lucky breaks—including the arrests of the two al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan in 2004 and 2005—before the agency discovered his real name: Sheikh Abu Ahmed. Still, CIA officials had no idea where to find him.
In 2007, with Hayden at the helm, the CIA embarked on a massive search for the mysterious courier. The National Security Agency, with its computer networks and global eavesdropping capabilities, swept phone and Internet lines for the name. At the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Elizabeth Hanson’s team of targeters assembled a profile of the man and scrubbed interrogation transcripts for clues that might lead to a family member, business connection, or hometown. The search was still active in the closing weeks of 2009 when Matthews and Hanson, by then at Khost, turned their attention to another possible path to bin Laden’s inner circle, the Jordanian agent Humam al-Balawi.
A few weeks after Elizabeth Hanson was laid to rest, the CIA finally hit pay dirt. In early summer 2010, the NSA was conducting routine phone surveillance of a suspected Pakistani terrorist when a man named Sheikh Abu Ahmed came on the line. Within days, the CIA had tracked Abu Ahmed to the Pakistani city of Peshawar and identified his car and license plate. Then, in August, agency operatives followed the man to his principal residence, a suspiciously large, highly secure compound in Abbottabad with high walls capped with razor wire. Many of the dwelling’s features stood out as strange, including its lack of a phone or Internet connection, and the owner’s penchant for burning his trash rather than hauling it to the street. The
three-story main building appeared to be shared by at least three families, including a tall, bearded man who, intriguingly, had never been seen outside the walls.
Beginning that month, the CIA turned its full attention to discerning the bearded man’s identity.
Through the fall and winter, in a process closely tracked by CIA director Leon Panetta and his top aides, the agency studied the dwelling, using satellites, sophisticated listening gear, and spies on the ground. More than once, agency cameras captured the image of the mystery man pacing inside the compound’s walls. Everything about him fit bin Laden’s description, but his face could not be clearly seen.
Around the time of bin Laden’s birthday in March 2011, Panetta gave the first of several presentations to the White House’s national security team. There was no hard proof, he acknowledged, that the occupant of the Abbottabad compound was the terrorist leader. Panetta himself judged the probability to be no better than 60 to 80 percent.
But that, he argued, was close enough.
“When you put it all together,” Panetta recalled telling White House officials, “we have the best evidence since Tora Bora. And that makes it clear that we have an obligation to act.”
He continued: “We’re probably at a point where we’ve got the best intelligence we can get.”
Just after midnight Afghanistan time on May 2, a warm, humid night with the barest sliver of a moon, a pair of specially modified U.S. MH-60 helicopters slipped across the border on their way to Abbottabad. The choppers sprinted across 120 miles of Pakistan, skimming treetops and hugging mountain ridges to avoid detection by Pakistani radar. Only a few dozen Americans knew about the flight, and many of them were seated at that hour around a conference table in the White House’s Situation Room, watching anxiously as the mission unfolded on large TV monitors. Appearing on a separate screen was Panetta, who was tasked with narrating the events from his command center across the Potomac River in Langley.
President Barack Obama, wearing an open-collar dress shirt and casual jacket, leaned forward in his seat, his elbows resting on his knees. He frowned at the screen and said little as Panetta reviewed again the likely contours of the mission, as well as the formidable risks. Obama understood these well; three days earlier, in the same room, the president’s national security team had given him a long list of possible outcomes, many of them frightful. If there was to be any U.S. strike on the compound, a missile lobbed from a Predator or stealth bomber would be safer for Americans, Obama was told. And yet, a bomb would almost certainly kill women and children, inflame Pakistanis, and leave Americans in doubt about whether they had succeeded in hitting their intended target. On the other hand, sending American soldiers into the compound could be even more perilous. U.S. soldiers could be captured or killed by al-Qaeda, drawn into gun fights with local civilians, or blasted from the sky by Pakistani military jets whose pilots would know nothing of the secret U.S. mission. Alternatively, the Americans might successfully fight their way into the Abbottabad compound only to find they had nabbed a different tall, middle-aged man, one with a passing resemblance to bin Laden.
Obama weighed the risks overnight in his private quarters before deciding to roll the dice. He would send in the Navy SEALs, highly trained commandos who hailed from the Virginia Beach base that Blackwater guard Jeremy Wise had once called home.
Now a nervous hush fell over the Situation Room as the president and his advisers followed the movement of the two Black Hawks on the TV monitors. The choppers, carrying about two dozen commandos and crew members, thundered into Abbottabad on schedule just after 1:00 A.M. but immediately ran into trouble. One helicopter was to hover over the main house while the commandos rappelled from ropes onto the roof. Instead, the chopper malfunctioned and landed hard in an outer courtyard, its tail rotor hopelessly damaged after striking a wall during the descent.
The commandos from both birds then clambered over the walls into the main courtyard, only to come under automatic rifle fire. One of bin Laden’s protectors who lived in the compound had been roused from his bed by the commotion and began spraying bullets in the direction of the black-clad figures pouring over the walls in the dark.
The Americans with their night-vision equipment quickly overwhelmed the defender, killing the shooter and a woman who was caught in the crossfire. Two other men were killed as the commandos stormed the main building, including one later described by U.S. officials as an adult son of bin Laden.
The minutes ticked by, and still the SEALs had seen nothing of the man they were seeking. The commandos scoured the compound in two teams, one of which began methodically clearing the rooms on each floor of the main house. From that moment and continuing for what seemed like hours, the TV monitors in the Situation Room essentially went dark.
“Once those teams went into the compound, I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty or twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta recalled afterward. “There were some very tense moments.”
It would be days before the full details were known about the bloody struggle that ensued on the compound’s third floor. Working slowly to avoid booby traps, one of the SEAL teams picked its way through a maze of barriers on the staircase until they found themselves outside the entrance to the last of three separate living quarters. After breaking the door, the two lead commandos burst into the room in time to see a dark-robed figure charging toward them. One of the men squeezed off a round, and the figure, a woman, dropped to the floor, wounded in the leg. Behind her in the dim light the Americans could perceive a tall man with a long, gray-flecked beard, wearing loose-fitting Pakistani-style pajama pants and kameez tunic. The man was neither cowering nor armed but standing defiantly. SEAL training demanded a split-second judgment. There was no hint of surrender. Was the man wearing a bomb?
The first shot caught the bearded man squarely in the chest. The next one pierced the side of his forehead near the eyebrows, blowing out the front of his skull.
For the listeners at the White House and in Langley, the muted sounds of struggle were impossible to interpret. More minutes passed without a further sign, and then, finally, a male voice came through the speaker.
“Visual on Geronimo,” the voice said, using a prearranged code. Bin Laden’s identity had been confirmed.
Within minutes, the SEALs were safely in their choppers—a third one had been dispatched to replace the broken bird—carrying with them a large cache of computer equipment taken from the compound, as well as bin Laden’s bloodied corpse.
The entire operation had lasted forty minutes. Moments later, when the helicopters crossed into Afghan air space and out of range of Pakistani interceptors, the group in the Situation Room burst into spontaneous applause.
“We got him,” Obama finally said.
The following morning, as millions of Americans awoke to the news of bin Laden’s death, Panetta paused in his Langley office to compose a brief message that would be distributed that day to CIA employees around the world. It was in large part a congratulatory note, commending the agency’s men and women for achieving a goal that had eluded them for nearly a decade.
“Today, we have rid the world of the most infamous terrorist of our time,” Panetta began.
Then, in a somber turn, Panetta paid special tribute to CIA officers who had not lived to see their work bear fruit. “Our heroes at Khost,” he wrote, “are with us, in memory and spirit, at this joyful moment.”
The fight was not yet over, Panetta knew. There would be a new No. 1 at al-Qaeda. Almost certainly, there would be retaliatory attacks, perhaps major ones. But not on this day.
It was a balmy May morning with brilliant streaks of sun, just like the one a year earlier in Arlington, and Panetta allowed himself a moment to bask in the achievement. The world had been made to feel a bit safer, at least for a time, and the quiet pledges made at eight American and Jordanian gravesides had been fulfilled.
“A promis
e,” Panetta wrote, “has been kept.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A project of this size is always a collaboration, but in this case there are numerous individuals without whom this book quite literally could not have been written. Some of them are generous colleagues who assisted me in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East, sometimes exposing themselves to risk. Others are current and former government officials who shared my belief in the importance of this story. Still others are relatives and spouses of slain officers who gave me their trust and shared precious and often painful memories. Several sources in the latter two groups were extraordinarily generous with their time and insights, meeting with me a dozen times or more. Yet, some of them can never be acknowledged by name because they are restricted from speaking publicly by secrecy rules or confidentiality agreements. To each of them I owe an enormous debt of gratitude.
I have been privileged over the past fourteen years to work for a world-class news organization that nurtures journalists and supports their professional growth. I am grateful to the Washington Post and its editors for granting me a leave of absence to work on this book, and for offering encouragement and support in countless other ways. Special thanks go to Washington Post Company board chairman Donald E. Graham and publisher Katharine Weymouth, who offered personal encouragement along the way, as well as executive editor Marcus Brauchli, managing editor Liz Spayd, and national editor Kevin Merida. I am especially indebted to my immediate supervisors, national security editor Cameron Barr and deputy editor Jason Ukman, for their kindness, patience, and advice. A great many current and former Post colleagues assisted me in this journey, but I am particularly grateful to David Hoffman, Peter Finn, R. Jeffrey Smith, Ellen Nakashima, David Ignatius, Greg Miller, Karen DeYoung, Steve Coll, Bob Woodward, Jeff Stein, Walter Pincus, Robert Miller, Michel du Cille, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Karin Brulliard, Josh Partlow, Dana Priest, Glenn Kessler, Mary Beth Sheridan, John Pomfret, and David Finkel. Several colleagues and friends read some or all of the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions and feedback, including Cameron Barr, David Rowell, Jeff Leen, and a friend from the clandestine world whose expert advice, unflagging enthusiasm, and extraordinary kindness sustained me through many a rough patch. Many others provided critical technical assistance and insight, including Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence Group, Ben Venzke of IntelCenter, Jarret Brachman, and numerous current and former members of the intelligence and defense agencies of the United States, Jordan, and Pakistan. Suzanne Kelly, a talented author and CNN producer who shared my fascination for this story, is owed special thanks for her ideas, inspiration, and selfless generosity.
