The Killing of Osama Bin Laden: How the Mission to Hunt Down a Terrorist Mastermind was Accomplished
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THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
How the Mission to Hunt Down a Terrorist Mastermind was Accomplished
MARK YOSHIMOTO NEMCOFF
Glenneyre Press
Los Angeles, CA
Copyright © 2011 Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.
Published by Glenneyre Press, LLC.
Los Angeles, CA
www.wordsushi.com
First Edition
ISBN 13: 978-1-934602-03-4
Cover Design by: MYN
Praise for:
THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
"I would bet there will be phones ringing at the Pentagon or inside the Beltway once word of this book gets out... if you are looking for a highly informative and thrilling rendition of how the man Hunt for Osama bin Laden unfolded, definitely look no further than this one."
FIVE STARS! “This might as well have been the actual first person account of the hunting down and subsequent killing of the Nation's, nay World's, Public Enemy #1. Mark Yoshimoto-Nemcoff's has a very detail oriented and compelling view as to how the final solution went down. It's an excellent read. You will not be able to push the "next page" button fast enough.”
FIVE STARS! “Mr. Nemcoff weaves a story so real it feels as though you are part of the inner circle who was there with the President. A fitting tribute to all our fallen heroes, our loved ones, and one that permeates to the very fiber of being an American. I highly recommend this to any American who bare witness to that fateful September morning and has been forever touched. Well done Mr. Nemcoff...well done indeed!”
FIVE STARS! “This is an amazing book that chronicles one of the most cathartic events to happen in a long time. Well worth reading.”
FIVE STARS! “This is an informative book, especially for the price. The author seemed to have some inside information in areas of the book that was not common TV news. A good book, short and easy to read, about the mission to get Bin Laden.”
FIVE STARS! “My son lent me this book to read because I wanted to know more about how Osama Bin Laden was killed. This book really details this amazing story and has a lot of details and information I hadn't read or seen in the news or anywhere else. It's a great quick read, well written and it comes off as the kind of thriller you'd see on the big screen.”
FIVE STARS! “Part detective story. Part spy thriller. Part techno action blockbuster. This story absolutely does reads like a Tom Clancy novel, but true. Packed with details on how it all happened. After reading this book, I feel like I've been debriefed on the op by the Director of the C.I.A. himself! Bravo!”
FIVE STARS! “Fantastic story. It reads right out of a Clancy novel. The only difference is that it really happened. I really enjoy Mark's writings. This is my fourth book I've read and each contain great stories. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in what happened and how the US finally got Osama Bin Laden.”
FIVE STARS! “Let me just tell you, I have all of MYN's books, he is a great author and this book is no exception! His writing style is unique and fun, I never use to read books, well I never got threw a book, I was always board and Mark brought a new excitement to reading for me. Everyone show have this book!
FIVE STARS! “Another amazing book by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, and the best I've read on the subject so far. "The Killing of Osama Bin Laden" is a must read.”
Praise for:
MARK YOSHIMOTO NEMCOFF
"Nemcoff's stories cut to the chase – blistering action meets brutal reality." - NYT Bestselling author, Scott Sigler
BOOKS BY MARK YOSHIMOTO NEMCOFF:
NON-FICTION:
Where’s My F*cking Latte? (And Other Stories About Being an Assistant in Hollywood)
Go Forth and Kick Some Ass (Be the Hero of Your Own Life Story)
FICTION:
Diary of a Madman
The Doomsday Club
The Art of Surfacing
Number One with a Bullet
Shadow Falls: Badlands
THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
How the Mission to Hunt Down a Terrorist Mastermind was Accomplished
MARK YOSHIMOTO NEMCOFF
MAY 1, 2011
I turned on the TV and saw him there, the boy in the tree. Outward he glanced, his face struck with a sense of jubilation and awe as he and a growing throng by the edge of the fence gazed toward the White House. Men, women and children had come to the home of the President of the United States to wave the flag, be together and feel good about being Americans at a time when lately it seemed like a damn bit too long since there had been reason to celebrate anything.
They had emerged in droves from hotels and townhouses nearby. Several Georgetown students sprinted down Pennsylvania Avenue shouting, “U.S.A! U.S.A!” In a way, it seemed like Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve all wrapped up into one.
Osama Bin Laden, the criminal mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed thousands of innocent civilians, the man who epitomized evil in this world, was dead.
There was no way to measure the surprise felt by America on the night of May 1, 2011 other than to look out into the streets and see those faces lit up with glee. I have no doubt the volume of beers being poured in bars and taverns across the country reached a peak not seen since the U.S. Olympic Hockey Team pulled off the Miracle on Ice back in Lake Placid some three decades earlier.
At front and center of the world’s consciousness, for the moment at least, was the sense that we had finally put a big W in the win column for once. Our military expansion across the globe into regions most Americans had never heard of had caused one of the many rifts tearing this country apart. The financial cost of the War on Terror paled in comparison to the loss of all those young American lives. All those bright futures that would never be realized because of a crusade to end the state of fear this country had been plunged into on that dark September morning back in 2001.
For a decade it all seemed for nothing. A waste beyond the imagination. A war for oil. An exercise in futility.
Color coded terror alerts became the norm. Travel became a ridiculous hassle. I can barely remember what it was like to wear shoes through the airport without having to take them off. Extensive pat downs akin to molestation and full body scanning made us feel more violated than safe.
The world had changed so much, so fast; none for the better. We had gone headlong into a downward spiral of Orwellian proportions. If the terrorist’s aim was to disrupt our lives and resources by plunging our country into a state of perpetual fear then it seemed like the damned terrorists were winning.
However, all of that changed on May 1, 2011 in a little-known garrison town, deep behind the Pakistani borders, and in
plain view of the whole world. The manhunt for the criminal who had stolen our safety away from us was now over setting off the collective sigh heard ‘round the world. We had put Osama Bin Laden on the night train to the big adios.
Navy SEALs got the murdering bastard, putting a hot round into his skull for good measure.
U.S. Intelligence sources sifted through nearly a decades’ worth of raw data accumulated from the repeated questioning of detainees. Once and for all, they had been able to pinpoint where America’s top enemy had been hiding. This ridiculous cat-and-mouse game was finally over. We were able to finally show that nobody takes our cheese and gets out of this place alive.
Really, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy and Americans knew it. Outside the White House gates, a large group within the growing crowd burst into an impromptu version of “The Star Spangled Banner” as the rest of the world watched on TV and awaited news on how the most significant story of the 21st century had come to be. In New York City, a town whose very history will forever be intertwined and tainted with the shadow of the most unspeakable monster in a generation, Times Square and the streets near Ground Zero erupted with the voices those screaming “God Bless America” as tears welled up in their eyes.
The Internet was virtually choked with traffic. Twitter users and Facebook friends alerted the world to the news and basked in the comfort of community.
Those lost would never be forgotten. Somewhere, the heroes of 9/11 were smiling down upon us because finally, we had gotten the pathetic fool who dared to try to break our indomitable spirit.
MANHUNT
Nearly a decade after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks made him the most wanted fugitive on the planet, we still hadn’t apprehended Osama Bin Laden. A price had been put on his head and a blank check written by our government to fund his capture. The promise had been made to every citizen of the United States whose lives were forever changed by the deeds of a false prophet masquerading as the messenger of God’s will.
We will get him...became our mantra. Deep in our hearts as Americans, we knew justice would be meted out for these heinous crimes. Sonofabitch was going to pay.
Then somehow, over time, though our national resolve had only slightly wavered, our hunger to bring the bad guy to justice had gone from full-blown fervor to a faded bumper sticker. His name had certainly not been forgotten, least of all by those who still remembered the sick feeling of watching the events of that dark September morning, but somehow the flame had burned dim. Our reason to continue sending troops to Muslim countries that certainly didn’t appear to want us there seemed clouded at best.
We had lost sight of the target. Instead of the constant demonizing one particular Muslim, the absence of Bin Laden from the public eye began to birth a climate in parts of this country where it just seemed natural to demonize all Muslims.
Even those who were natural born, law-abiding American citizens.
The damage to the American psyche caused by the inability to locate Bin Laden was enormous. If the only people with the resources to do the job, couldn’t, then who would protect us, the little people?
It wasn’t for lack of desire on our government’s part that Bin Laden had not been quickly apprehended, but more because Osama Bin Laden had again taken to the wind, a practice he had perfected while fighting the Soviets in the mountains of Afghanistan during the 1980s. One minute he was supposedly in this place or that place, and then the next moment he wasn’t. Osama Bin Laden had become harder to find than Waldo in a candy cane factory.
Sporadic news updates over the last decade placed Bin Laden in the rugged terrain of the mountainous Tora Bora region along the Afghan border. A barely regulated, mostly autonomous zone of impossibly rocky hills and mountains, Tora Bora offered unspeakably bad weather and plenty of opportunities to use up precious resources and human lives searching through a nearly endless labyrinth of caverns. The caves had been utilized since ancestral times to help tribal warriors fight off foreign invaders, but by 2001 were electrified with hydro-electric power harnessed from running streams. For this, Bin Laden had the United States to thank. The entire multi-level cave complex had been fortified in part by the CIA to help the Mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Back in mid-December 2001, when the wounds of 9/11 were still quite fresh, U.S. Army forces fighting in Tora Bora came within 2000 meters of Bin Laden, only to see him slip away into Pakistan. There he took an easterly route through snow-covered mountains to the area of Parachinar. Gary Bernsten, a former CIA officer who led the team tasked with finding Bin Laden, later claimed that the al-Qaeda leader could have indeed been captured if the United States Central Command, headed at the time by General Tommy Franks, had given them the troops they had requested to get the job done.
Since then, it has been noted publicly by some of those who had fought at Tora Bora that lack of mission support deserves only partial blame for Osama’s escape. The lion’s share of the credit belongs to those who held the mistaken notion that Pakistan was effectively guarding its own border.
Pakistan, our ally in the War on Terror.
Pakistan, the very same country where seven other major al-Qaeda figures have since been found to be hiding.
March 2002: Saudi national Abu Zubaydah, considered to be a close aid of Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s Director of Communications and international operations.
September 2002: Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, suspected of attacking the American warship USS Cole in 1998, arrested in the southern coastal city of Karachi.
March 2003: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, arrested near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
July 2004: Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, suspected of planning of attacks on the U. S. embassy in Kenya. He was handed over to American authorities after Pakistani forces picked him in the eastern border city of Gujrat.
May 2005: Abu Faraj al-Libi, who at the time was al-Qaida’s top man in Pakistan and allegedly responsible for planning a 2006 plot to detonate liquid explosives carried on board at least 10 airplanes travelling from the United Kingdom.
Increased Predator strikes used in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region took the lives of two other al-Qaeda leaders. Abu Lais al-Libi in 2008. Mustafa Al Yazid in 2010. Both blown to bits by drones.
Pakistan. Pakistan. Pakistan.
All five of the al-Qaeda leaders who had been arrested were captured in highly populated urban areas.
Karachi is Pakistan’s largest city. Islamabad, the nation’s capitol.
Raise your hand if you see a pattern here.
As far as anyone knew, Bin Laden had slipped into northwest Pakistan and had been reduced to living in caves to evade capture. By late 2005, U.S. Intelligence intercepted a letter from Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a senior member of al-Qaeda, to Abu Musab al-Zarquawi, a Jordani militant Islamist known to run a paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan for terrorist recruits. The message instructed Zarqawi to, "Send messengers from your end to Waziristan so that they meet with the brothers of the leadership... I am now on a visit to them and I am writing you this letter as I am with them...”
If Bin Laden was indeed in Waziristan, and there was little reason to believe he wasn’t, finding him on Pakistani soil in a lawless mountain region lorded over by tribal leaders and Taliban fighters sympathetic to al-Qaeda anti-Western sentiments would be more difficult than ever.
In early 2009, satellite-aided geographical analysis pointed to three compounds in Parachinar as the most-likely locations where Bin Laden was hiding. However, within the span of just a few months, the hunt for Bin Laden moved north to the Chitral District, Pakistan’s most northerly region. Captured al-Qaeda leaders had given up confirmation that this was where the al-Qaeda chief was holed up. The manhunt continued. Patrols sent out in constant search turned up nothing.
Then in December, a Taliban detainee in Pakistan claimed Bin Laden had slipped back into Afghanistan. Days later, frustrated U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert G
ates, publicly stated the joint military forces had no reliable information on the whereabouts of their elusive target. The ghost continued to stay steps ahead of his pursuers even as the War on Terror raged on.
By this time, rumors had been circulating for years that Bin Laden’s health had been fading, his kidneys failing, and some, including Pakistani leaders, even boldly claimed the al-Qaeda leader had gone to his final reward. Speculation over Bin Laden’s death was bolstered by how his sporadic videotaped warnings to America in which he begun to look haggard and almost frail, had given way to audiotapes released by his minions featuring a voice possibly not even belonging to the al-Qaeda leader.
For all we knew, he had gone up a mountain and vanished into thin air.
But in the end, Osama Bin Laden, mastermind behind 9/11 and the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, among other acts of murder against innocent civilians, was not only alive, but living well. Contrary to popular belief, he was not cowering in a primitive cave like an animal, but instead hiding in an affluent suburb of Pakistan, inside a million dollar mansion built behind 18-foot high concrete walls topped with barbed wire.
The world’s most wanted fugitive had eluded capture by hiding almost in plain sight.
ABBOTTABAD
Welcome to a city of 90,000 people; a lush, touristy suburb situated in the Orash Valley just an hour’s drive north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. Sitting at an altitude of 4100 feet, the air is thin and the summers warm. Since colonial times, Abbottabad has been a major transit point to all major tourist regions of Pakistan. In fact, tourism makes up one of the largest portions of the local economy.