by Leon Panetta
“Specific components of the strategy are working well, and there are notable operational gains,” the national security staff reported at the first of those sessions. “Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan is weakened and under more sustained pressure than at any other point since it fled Afghanistan in 2001.” For the first time, it was realistically possible to foresee the destruction of Al Qaeda’s core. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s momentum had been seized and reversed in some parts of the country. Our forces, Petraeus reported, were “hitting on all cylinders.”
That created an opportunity, and President Obama wanted to seize it. As he put it during the January meeting, 2011 presented the possibility of moving to the political aspects of our mission and to encouraging reintegration and reconciliation within Afghanistan; the military would provide backing, but its work would be guided by a larger political strategy. All of this seemed reasonable and promising.
Then Vice President Biden introduced a sobering note. How long, he asked, would Afghanistan require significant American aid? Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador to Kabul, responded that it would be at least another ten to fifteen years, and both Biden and Jack Lew from OMB estimated that the amount of aid needed to sustain this security operation would be $6 to $8 billion a year. That put things in perspective.
“We must adjust our sights,” the president remarked cautiously, reminding the group that support for Israel and Egypt was about $5 billion a year and adding, though it was hardly necessary, that there was “substantially more support in Congress” for Israel and Egypt than either Afghanistan or Pakistan. Without that aid, would Afghanistan fall backward? What level of support did it require to survive, and what constituted sufficient stability for the purposes of the United States?
In other words, the White House staff argued, we should aim for what was “good enough” for Afghanistan. The president explained the approach succinctly, and in my view correctly. The goal was, he said, a nation that did not harbor terrorists capable of striking the United States and one with a government sufficiently supported by the people that it could remain stable into the future. That’s well short of nation building.
The descriptor—Afghanistan “good enough”—never sat easily with me. It struck me as insulting to the Afghans, and sounded defeatist and therefore not sufficiently respectful of all those who had died in the war. But that was a disagreement about language, not policy. I was pleased that we were coming to the realization that we had a sound benchmark for American involvement in a troubled country that we will never make modern, but we might at least make safe and stable.
My job in that context was fairly specific: It was to batter Al Qaeda and prevent it from regrouping or reemerging as a force in Afghanistan. As I reported to the National Security Council on March 3, Al Qaeda’s leadership was being removed faster than it could be replaced; if permitted to keep up the pressure, the United States “could inflict irreparable damage.” But beyond simply thinning Al Qaeda’s ranks, there were two targets whose elimination would have more far-reaching consequences: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. And of those, bin Laden had special significance, for “remnants would cling to Al Qaeda as long as Osama bin Laden is at large.” Our part of the fight, then, was to find and either kill or capture Osama bin Laden.
THIRTEEN
“Go In and Get Bin Laden”
Osama bin Laden was the ubiquitous face of terrorism. He was the person chiefly responsible for the deaths of three thousand Americans, the most wanted man on earth. And as of early 2009 we had absolutely no idea where he was. When I arrived at the CIA, the last reliable information we had had of bin Laden was during the battle for Tora Bora, a fortified set of caves and trenches in the thin air of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. A ferocious, frigid struggle for that complex in late 2001 resulted in its capture, but not before bin Laden, who knew those mountains intimately, snuck away—an escape that reinforced his mythic status among his followers. We had a few reports of him in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province in mid-2002. And then the trail went cold—so cold, in fact, that the Bush administration, once enthralled by the hunt, reversed itself entirely and worked to downplay any expectations. In 2006, Bush declared that the capture of bin Laden was no longer a “top priority.”1
By contrast, as a senator and a presidential candidate, Obama had made it clear that the search for bin Laden was a top priority for him. He memorably and portentously proclaimed during a presidential debate with John McCain that he would not hesitate to act if given the opportunity to strike at bin Laden, even if it offended Pakistan, where it was often assumed bin Laden was hiding. “If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out,” he said on October 7, 2008.2 Soon after I was confirmed to my position, the two of us met, and he stressed that he’d meant what he said. He was emphatic and unambiguous: Killing or capturing Osama bin Laden was to be the single most important mission for the CIA. I understood and agreed.
Beyond the question of justice, bin Laden’s continued freedom and the Bush administration’s resigned acceptance of it seemed to crystallize much of what Obama was determined to change in the areas of national security and intelligence. He was convinced that the war in Iraq had distracted the United States from the genuine threat to our security—that of terrorism generally and Al Qaeda specifically. He argued repeatedly in the campaign that while the Bush administration was pursuing phantom enemies and nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we had lost our focus on those who actually had attacked the United States. Even the war in Afghanistan, launched to roust Al Qaeda, had by 2009 become mired in debates over nation building, the reliability of Karzai, and other complications. For the new president, nothing was more symbolic of that misdirection than bin Laden himself, who had killed more Americans than any terrorist in history, was actively attempting to kill more, and yet was still at large. This mattered to the new president.
The agency I inherited was gamely pressing on, though without much support or sense of direction. In the years before I arrived, the CIA had surged officers into the area along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, hoping to recruit agents to find someone—anyone—who knew where bin Laden was hiding. Not much came from it. The agency had also carefully scrutinized bin Laden’s videotaped messages, trying to cull information from the background noise and images. Steve Kappes reluctantly conceded that we’d not learned much from those efforts either.
We theorized that bin Laden operated within a very tight circle of trust, communicating to his forces through people he personally knew and had confidence in. That helped shape our efforts, which I laid out for the president in June 2009 when I took a counterterrorism team with me to the White House to brief him. At that point we were pursuing three principal lines of effort: We were analyzing bin Laden’s media communications, looking for members of his family, and trying to penetrate his courier network. We also operated under the assumption that bin Laden was not moving around but rather had holed up somewhere. He was, after all, one of the most recognizable people on earth, with a bounty on his head. He would, we speculated, flee if he believed he was in danger, but otherwise he would probably remain in whatever safe location he had secured.
Bin Laden’s family offered one possible way to connect to him. We identified one of his sons, for instance, and discovered that he had been held under a form of house arrest in Iran. But by that time, we discovered that the son, Saad bin Laden, had been released, so we tracked him to Pakistan, hoping he would reach out to his father now that he was free. That lead dried up when the younger bin Laden was killed. The world would not much miss him, but our chance to follow him to his father evaporated as well.
The courier line of inquiry held out possibility too, though our efforts there were similarly stymied. One of the slides I presented to the president in June 2009 listed as one possible co
urier the name “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.” No other information was provided, and neither I nor the president elaborated on it that day.
If the significance of the courier at that point eluded us, the priority of the effort was crystal clear: President Obama had ordered that capturing or killing bin Laden was to be the most important objective of America’s intelligence services. I understood the order, and recognized that it came directly from my commander in chief. With the president’s clear direction, I thus set about to recapture the agency’s dissipated urgency with respect to bin Laden. I began to ask for regular updates on the hunt for HVT1 and HVT2—High Value Targets 1 and 2, our shorthand for bin Laden and Zawahiri. At the end of each CT-ME update, I asked the specialists assigned to bin Laden to stay after the conclusion of the main meeting, and probed them for details on our hunt for Al Qaeda’s chief.
Those discussions were frustrating, more a description of what we didn’t know than what we did. At our weekly briefings, when I would ask for signs of progress, too often the response was, “Nothing to report, sir.” They were enlivened by the prospect in late 2009 that we had a bead on Zawahiri, but, sadly, that ended with the tragedy at Khost. We climbed back into action afterward but remained hampered by unclear lines of authority and responsibility.
Soon after the Khost bombing, I asked a senior group of CIA officials who the person responsible for finding bin Laden was. The head of the National Clandestine Service raised his hand. So did the head of the Counterterrorism Center. So did the head of the center’s Pakistan-Afghanistan Department. So did a few others. If I’ve learned one lesson in management over the past forty years, it’s that if everyone is in charge, nobody is.
From that day on, I ordered that a single person, or two at most, be placed in charge of this hunt. It took some internal discussions to figure out who that would be, but the Counterterrorism Center eventually settled on two people: Gary, the head of the CTC’s Pakistan-Afghanistan Department and a career officer with deep knowledge of the Middle East; and Sam, an analyst who was immersed in Al Qaeda and regarded as the agency’s leading expert on the organization.* I directed that Gary and Sam report to me weekly with updates on the search.
In the movies, plots turn on big moments, epiphanies where a suspect breaks or a mystery is revealed. In the real world of intelligence, by contrast, breakthroughs are the result of patient and resolute work, the slow accumulation of facts, each of which may seem ambiguous but that collectively add up to a hypothesis. That was the case in our search for a courier who might be working with bin Laden.
The first information we had received about couriers came to the CIA in 2002 when a detainee associated with Al Qaeda identified a bin Laden courier by the nickname of “Abu Ahmed.”
The following year, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (better known as KSM) was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. He was turned over to the CIA and subjected to extensive interrogation, including waterboarding. KSM did confirm that someone he called “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti” had been a courier for bin Laden, but he did not provide us with the man’s true name. We suspected he was lying, which made us all the more interested in his account—why bother to lie?—but we still did not have a real name, much less a whereabouts for this possible courier.
Then another detainee confirmed part of what we suspected: Abu Ahmed did, in fact, work closely with bin Laden and had not, as far as the detainee knew, ever retired from that work. We now believed Abu Ahmed represented an important lead, but we still did not have his real name.
And then in 2007 another source passed along information that closed that gap: Abu Ahmed’s name, Ibrahim Sa’id Ahmed Abd al-Hamid, a native of Kuwait who had joined Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. At last we had the real name of a real courier, but there were two more questions: Was he alive, and if so, where was he? Detainees either did not know or would not say.
We searched the world, and at first received discouraging information that Ibrahim had been killed fighting in Afghanistan. That sidetracked us for a while, but it turned out to be wrong. It was instead one of his brothers who had died. Ibrahim remained alive and was said to be living and working in Pakistan.
What followed was a methodically constructed attempt to figure out where Ibrahim lived and worked, a plan designed with utmost care to minimize the possibility of tipping off the courier that we were on to him. We knew that Ibrahim periodically arrived in a certain city, but we didn’t know where he was coming from. We considered following him, but he was careful and alert to any hint of surveillance. Finally, we tracked him all the way to a dead-end street on the outskirts of Abbottabad. That seemed to be the end of the line, so we dispatched an agent to see what lay at the end of that road.
On August 27, 2010, at the end of our regular CT-ME update, Gary and Sam stayed behind for my bin Laden briefing. They told me that afternoon that we had followed Ibrahim’s car to what our officers described as a “fortress.” My ears pricked up. “Fortress?” I asked. “Tell me about this fortress.” Beginning that day, we spared no resource—human or technological—in determining what lay behind the twelve- to eighteen-foot walls of that home in Abbottabad. It became known as AC1 (Abbottabad Compound 1).
Michael Morell, whom I appointed deputy director after Steve Kappes retired in the summer of 2010, helped me analyze what exactly this compound represented. Mike was the agency’s brightest analyst and was deeply respected by the operators. Through the entire operation, I never wanted Michael far from me. The house itself was curious. It was by far the biggest in the neighborhood—eight times the size of the next largest. Property records indicated that Ibrahim and his brother were the owners, but neither was wealthy enough to afford a property valued at roughly $1 million. Moreover, Ibrahim appeared to live not in the main residence but in a guesthouse inside the compound’s walls, strange if he was the principal owner. The main home was three stories tall, and the top floor had a balcony, but the balcony was enclosed by a seven-foot-tall wall. Who puts a privacy wall around a balcony? Barbed wire topped the perimeter wall. There was no Internet connection or landline telephone at the house. It seemed clear that someone inside this compound had gone to extraordinary lengths to secure his privacy, but that could mean many things. It could be a criminal, a drug dealer, even another high-value terrorist.
We clearly needed to know more, but there was enough to suggest that something significant was going on inside this compound. In September, less than a month after we identified the compound as being potentially important, I briefed the president for the first time about our mounting suspicions. I told him about the compound’s security and privacy structures, as well as the unusual ownership situation. He asked what we were doing to collect more information about the house, and I told him we were devoting every effort to finding out more. He urged us to step up our efforts.
It was not easy.
Our surveillance revealed that a man would periodically emerge from the house and rapidly pace around the compound, not so much strolling as seeming to quickly try to get a little exercise, a little like a prisoner in a yard. We dubbed him “the Pacer.”
We could not tell much about him. We discussed mounting a telescope on a nearby hill, but the sightlines were not good, and our people worried that it might be noticed. I suggested putting a camera in a tree at the edge of the compound, but the trees were deciduous, and the camera would certainly be noticed if attached to bare limbs. The residents burned their own trash—intriguing in a neighborhood with trash service, but not helpful in identifying the residents.
We were, however, able to develop some information about the compound and those inside it. We determined that there were three families inside the walls, and as we watched their movements, we gradually developed a roster of those who occupied the compound and their habits. Ibrahim and his family lived in the guesthouse, as did his brother and his brother’s wife. In the main house were an adult male, at least one adult female, and an adolescent mal
e. There were six children living in the compound as well. That hardly sealed the case that it was bin Laden, but it did conform to other intelligence regarding him, as we believed he was probably living with the youngest of his three wives, a teenage boy, and three young children born in the years since 9/11.
It occurred to me that it would be helpful to determine how tall that man was, since bin Laden was well over six feet. We brought in analysts who were experts at measuring shadows in photographs. But they couldn’t tell his height.
In November, we received enticing information that gave us a strong sense that Ibrahim was still working with his former colleagues. To us, that meant he was back with bin Laden.
Now we had a suspicious fortress and an evasive courier. That courier practiced extraordinary security, lied to his family about where he was, and was believed to have once worked for bin Laden.
Just before Christmas, I again briefed the president on our surveillance of the compound and the courier. By now our view was hardening that we had located an important target, but as the president pointed out, we still did not really know who it might be. We knew that a family was living inside and never stepped out of the walls and that great pains were being taken to protect their privacy. We did not know who they were or why they were so secretive. I returned from the briefing that day and told our team that the top priority of the CIA, the most important mission of the most important intelligence service in the United States, was to figure out who lived in that house. I urged the team to think broadly about what it needed to fully comprehend who was behind those walls. I told them not to worry about budgets and urged them to produce new ideas for figuring out who our suspect was.
They had been working at this long and hard, and my demand that they dig deeper at first produced a weary resignation. Understandably, they felt they already had used every tool in their toolbox and could not imagine what else to try. I would not accept that we were out of ideas. Frustrated, I told them I wanted ten new thoughts at our next meeting. I was openly angry, furious at their seeming acceptance that we had done all we could. They left in silence. My Italian blood was up.
