Interestingly, no one in the meeting said what was obviously on all our minds—that there was a chance Bin Ladin might be behind the privacy wall. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I struggled to not let my optimism get out of hand. Panetta told CTC what it already knew—that we needed to know a lot more about “AC1,” the Agency’s designation for Abu Ahmed’s Abbottabad compound, and its occupants.
Over the next few weeks CTC briefed the director and me on additional information on the compound. CTC learned that the brothers had paid a great deal of money for the property but had no visible means of income. It learned that the compound, larger and more valuable than any other home in the area, had no telephone line or Internet connection. It learned that the two brothers were residing in Abbottabad under aliases and that their wives were lying to their own extended families about where they lived. Another piece to the puzzle was that the residents of the compound burned all their trash rather than putting it out for collection like everyone else in the neighborhood. And it was discovered that none of the multiple children living in the compound were attending school, unlike the other children in what was an upscale neighborhood of Pakistan. All of this was suspicious but did not prove anything.
We took all this information to the White House. We started with John Brennan, my friend and fellow career CIA officer. Brennan instantly grasped the significance of the intelligence and he had us give the same briefing to the national security advisor, General Jim Jones, and his deputy, Tom Donilon. They in turn asked us to brief President Obama. All the briefings were held in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.
The briefing of the president—on September 21—walked the commander in chief through the history of our interest in couriers, from the information obtained years before from al Qa‘ida detainees up to the latest intelligence on what we could observe at the compound and what we had learned about it. We told the president that there seemed to be one or two men at the compound aside from the brothers, and we highlighted the possibility that Abu Ahmed and his brother could be harboring Bin Ladin. The president gave us two orders. First, he told us that he wanted more information on the compound. And second, he told us to not brief anyone else on what we had already found. I did not hear the president order such strict security about any other issue during my time working with him.
* * *
I admired the president. He was brilliant and deeply attentive in any substantive meeting. I thought he quickly got to the heart of an issue and asked the right questions. The president, however, would sometimes take too long to make a decision (just the opposite of President Bush)—a result, I believe, of his strong desire to get all questions answered before moving forward.
At the same time, the president also had a way of making decisions that satisfied competing factions among his national security team. His decision on Libya—although unfortunately described as “leading from behind”—was an example of this. In a National Security Council meeting to discuss the issue, half of the national security team made clear that it was decidedly against any military intervention in Libya—we were already providing humanitarian support and had placed sanctions on the Libyan regime. This group argued that while Qadhafi’s actions against his own people were deplorable, there was no strategic interest on the part of the United States in intervening. The other half of the team felt just as strongly, arguing that we had a moral responsibility to go all in, including by putting US troops on the ground, if necessary, to stop Qadhafi from murdering huge numbers of his own people, which was what he was doing and what he was planning to do in order to save his regime.
In NSC meetings the president would typically listen to his advisors and ask questions, but not make a decision in the room, preferring to think over the matter and discuss it with his closest aides. But the Libya decision was different. He made it on the spot. His decision to support the moderate Arab states and the Europeans in declaring a no-fly zone and ultimately in attacking from the air the Libyan regime’s military units targeting civilians—but to do so only with capabilities that others did not have—satisfied everyone in the room. When he made the decision, I leaned over to Denis McDonough and whispered, “So that’s why he is the president of the United States.”
I also found the president personally engaging—in contrast to the media portrayal of him as aloof. I think this dichotomy exists because the president is different in large groups from how he is in small ones. He is quiet in large groups, but his personality shines through much more in smaller settings. When the president asked me to come to the Oval Office on a cold January day in 2013—to tell me that he had chosen John Brennan to be the next director of CIA—he could not have been more gracious. In a great irony, John and I had recommended each other to the president, and now, in the Oval Office, I asked the president if something like that had ever happened to him before. He said, “Not in this town, pal.” He did ask me what other job I might be interested in, as he said he did not want to lose me. I jokingly said, “I always wanted to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.” He laughed. I felt comfortable with our forty-fourth commander in chief.
* * *
At CIA you become accustomed to handling tightly compartmented information—but no secret in my thirty-three years of work at the Agency was more tightly controlled than the knowledge that we might have found Bin Ladin. The White House made the secretary of state aware of the intelligence only several weeks before the raid, as the discussions on whether to go forward moved into full stride. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center was told just a couple of weeks before the raid, as we needed to start thinking about possible retaliation by al Qa‘ida. The attorney general, the FBI director, and the secretary of homeland security learned of it only a day or two beforehand.
In the weeks and months following the initial briefing of the president there were many follow-up meetings at the White House. The security was extraordinary. Brennan scheduled the meetings and made sure that their purpose did not leak. On the official NSC calendar they were listed as “Mickey Mouse meetings.” Each time we met, the security cameras inside the Situation Room were turned off. When staff entered the room to bring a beverage to the president, everyone stopped talking.
Even within CIA we kept the secret extremely close. I delegated the authority to “read in” people to the operation to the head of the Counterterrorism Center because I knew he would not abuse the authority. In fact, I knew he would be even more careful than I. When our counterterrorism analysts wanted a written briefing on everything that could be learned about the city of Abbottabad, they turned to the Open Source Center—a part of CIA that mines public sources for information important to national security. But instead of asking for research only on Abbottabad, they asked for research on a number of Pakistani cities. Like Bin Ladin himself, our analysts hunting Bin Ladin were hiding in plain sight.
Our congressional oversight committees were another story. Without the White House’s knowledge, Panetta had been keeping the leadership of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee aware of the big picture. Panetta did not ask for permission from the White House because he knew the answer would be no. I told Panetta that I supported his decision. At one of the White House sessions, as the raid was nearing, Tom Donilon suggested that CIA might want to bring the leadership of the intelligence committees into the loop. Panetta said that he had done that from the beginning. Donilon was not pleased, but it went miles in keeping Panetta’s and my relationships with our committees strong. And nothing leaked from these briefings.
* * *
Given the president’s order to learn more about the compound, we ramped up our brainstorming about ways to get more information on who and what was hidden behind the walls of AC1. After a couple of weeks, Panetta was getting impatient with the lack of good ideas, and he began to drive the folks in CTC nuts with his own ideas—and there were many of them. He asked, “Can we tap
into the sewage pipes leading from the compound and do DNA testing on the outflow?” There were a few trees just outside the compound and he asked about sending assets out to climb the trees and plant surveillance cameras. (Apparently he was not the only one to think of that because a short time later Abu Ahmed and his brother were seen outside the compound chopping down the perfectly good trees.)
At a meeting in his office on November 5, Panetta pushed hard for more collection on the compound. He demanded that a list of ten proposals be delivered to him and me in just a few days. Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, went even further, telling CTC to put everything it could think of—whether operationally feasible or not—on a piece of paper to satisfy the boss. CTC did exactly that, producing a matrix of thirty-eight ideas. The “Chart of 38,” as it was called, went on for a number of pages. It worked—it satiated the director.
Some collection efforts paid off, and in the fall of 2010, we obtained two additional pieces of information, which strengthened the case that Bin Ladin might be at the compound in Abbottabad. First, we learned that a third family was living in the compound—and that the size of that family was the size we believed Bin Ladin’s would be at this point in his life. We learned that no members of this third family ever left the compound and that none of the neighbors were even aware of their existence. CTC analysts thought it noteworthy that although the compound was owned by Abu Ahmed and his brother, the third family was living on the top two floors of the main house—the best quarters. This was another one of the many interesting data points our analysts weighed.
Second, we learned that Abu Ahmed was still in the game—still working for al Qa‘ida. This information was a critical piece of the puzzle. It eliminated one possibility we’d feared—that Abu Ahmed was only a “former terrorist” and was no longer working for al Qa‘ida. I am not at liberty to explain exactly how we obtained these two critical nuggets of information, but I can assure you it was spycraft at its best.
The new information was briefed to the president on December 10, 2010, and this time he asked us to start thinking about “finish options” or “CONOPs”—“concepts of operation”—for how the United States should go after Bin Ladin if the president decided to act. Initially he told us not to involve the military in our planning, although Panetta and I did brief the leadership of the Defense Department—Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, Vice Chairman Hoss Cartwright, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers. (The main purpose in telling our colleagues was to give them a heads up because we knew we would be coming to them for help at some point, but doing so also meant that Mike Vickers was able to help us with our initial thinking about options.) Within CTC and the Agency’s Special Activities Division (SAD)—CIA’s paramilitary wing—planning began for various types of action.
On January 24, 2011, the president asked that we bring the military into the discussion. On the recommendation of Panetta and me, he decided that we would turn to Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Nearly every night in Afghanistan, military special operators carried out raids like the one we were considering.
Within days McRaven, accompanied by Mike Vickers, visited the Agency, where he was read into the operation in my office. He took the information on board, did not express any emotion—besides saying, “Great work”—and said he would send two of his best planners to the Agency to assist our folks. They were there in only two days. Soon thereafter McRaven came back to me with a request to bring in some air planners, since a heliborne ground raid would require air assets. I said yes. I also said yes to a DOD request for Air Force planners to look at an air strike option. This was all necessary, but I was getting uneasy as the circle of knowledge expanded.
Agency officers and JSOC military planners began to put together a set of options for the president to consider. They included a stealth air strike, a ground raid with troops inserted via helicopter, a ground raid with troops infiltrating the site via clandestine means, and more. Consideration was given to simply asking the Pakistanis to conduct the raid themselves, and to carrying out a “compel operation” in which we would tell the Pakistanis, “We are raiding this compound tonight, we’d like you to go with us.” The Pakistanis—or any of our other allies—were not aware of our interest in the Abbottabad compound.
Each of the plans had its drawbacks. The air strike, for example, would result in the deaths of women and children at the compound, the deaths of a family in a small compound directly across the street, and (almost certainly) additional collateral damage to nearby residents because some of the weapons would undoubtedly have missed their target. (It would have been necessary to use a large number of weapons, including “bunker buster” bombs, in case the compound had underground chambers or tunnels.) Additionally, there would be no opportunity to gather intelligence from documents, material, and people found on scene or verify with absolute certainty that we’d actually gotten Bin Ladin.
A ground operation with the troops inserted clandestinely had the disadvantage of requiring that the strike team sneak into Pakistan and quite likely have to fight its way out. The probability of dead or captured Americans was high. A ground operation with the troops inserted via helicopter carried the risk of death or injury to US soldiers as well as that of detection by the Pakistani military long before the helicopters ever got to Abbottabad.
Any option that involved the Pakistanis carried the downside that the occupants of the compound might be tipped off and escape. We were not concerned that it would have been official Pakistani policy to tip off Bin Ladin, but there would have been so many people involved on the Pakistani side that there could have been a leak, or an al Qa‘ida sympathizer within the government or the military could have taken action to protect Bin Ladin—which in my view is how Bin Ladin avoided the US cruise missile strike in the aftermath of the embassy bombings in East Africa.
We began planning for a major briefing of the president. Donilon, by now promoted to national security advisor, not surprisingly wanted to be briefed first, and he set the date for March 4. Panetta and I wanted to do a dry run before we saw Donilon, so on the evening of February 25, along with our country’s top military leaders, we met in Director Panetta’s conference room to go over the briefing—a briefing that would cover the entire intelligence story and the options that had been developed. But this time we had something new. NGA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—those talented officers who analyze satellite imagery—had produced a scale model of the entire compound. About four feet by four feet, it was sitting on the conference table when Panetta and I walked into the room. It was incredibly accurate, even down to the placement of trees and bushes and the exact size and location of the animal pen.
The prep session went well, as did the briefing for Donilon. He started the meeting by asking how quickly we could put the various options in place, as the president was concerned that we were not moving fast enough. Donilon also gave instructions for the eventual briefing of the president, saying, “You will need to focus on why do we think this is Bin Ladin?” Donilon had some follow-up questions, which we answered in another meeting with him on March 10. He concluded that meeting by saying, “OK, let’s set up a briefing for the president.” The next day Donilon told us the date would be March 14.
In our discussion regarding the various finish options, Agency officers quite understandably favored an option that would place them in the middle of any operation. Having chased Bin Ladin for more than a decade, they wanted to be in on the endgame. It was understandable, but it was also crystal clear to Panetta and me that a ground operation had to be JSOC’s to carry out. After one meeting on the issue in his office, Leon said to me, “Let’s let the professionals do this.” What he meant was that JSOC had much more experience in such matters than did CIA—but his words did not go down well within our ranks. By the time word filtered down to lower levels of CTC and SAD, it had become
garbled, and the impression was that I had made the comment—and was somehow disrespecting our own troops. While I fully agreed with Panetta’s decision, we could have done a better job of explaining it to our in-house warriors, for whom I have the utmost respect.
* * *
The session on March 14 was one of the most important meetings with a president that I ever attended. We covered two issues in depth—the intelligence picture and the options. On the intelligence, we provided the president with our bottom line that there was a “strong possibility Abu Ahmed was harboring Bin Ladin at the Abbottabad compound.” We emphasized that we did not have direct proof that Bin Ladin was there—just a strong circumstantial case.
Each of the finish options was discussed in detail. The president immediately took the Pakistani options off the table because of the risk of tipping off the targets. The president also rejected the ground assault whereby the team would be clandestinely inserted into Pakistan. It was just too complicated, and getting the team out of Pakistan after the mission would be extremely difficult. The meeting ended with only two options on the table—the air strike and the ground assault with the troops inserted via helicopter—and with the president making it clear that he wanted to move sooner rather than later. Although he never said it directly, many of us left the session with the sense that he was leaning toward the air strike.
We met again with the president on March 29. Obama, largely because of concerns about collateral damage, began by taking the stealth air strike off the table. He saw the heliborne ground assault as the best option for knowing whether Bin Ladin was there or not, for getting our hands on any intelligence at the site, and for minimizing the deaths of noncombatants. He asked Bill McRaven if he thought it would work. McRaven said, “Mr. President, I can’t look you in the eye and tell you yes until I exercise it. I’ll get back to you in two weeks.”
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 16
