by Obama Barack
“What’s your judgment?” I asked.
I could see him hesitating. I suspected that he’d been around during the run-up to Iraq; the intelligence community’s reputation was still recovering from the role it had played in supporting the Bush administration’s insistence that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. Still, I caught an expression on his face that indicated the pride of someone who’d cracked an intricate puzzle—even if he couldn’t prove it.
“I think there’s a good chance he’s our man,” he said. “But we can’t be certain.”
Based on what I’d heard, I decided we had enough information to begin developing options for an attack on the compound. While the CIA team continued to work on identifying the Pacer, I asked Tom Donilon and John Brennan to explore what a raid would look like. The need for secrecy added to the challenge; if even the slightest hint of our lead on bin Laden leaked, we knew our opportunity would be lost. As a result, only a handful of people across the entire federal government were read into the planning phase of the operation. We had one other constraint: Whatever option we chose could not involve the Pakistanis. Although Pakistan’s government cooperated with us on a host of counterterrorism operations and provided a vital supply path for our forces in Afghanistan, it was an open secret that certain elements inside the country’s military, and especially its intelligence services, maintained links to the Taliban and perhaps even al-Qaeda, sometimes using them as strategic assets to ensure that the Afghan government remained weak and unable to align itself with Pakistan’s number one rival, India. The fact that the Abbottabad compound was just a few miles from the Pakistan military’s equivalent of West Point only heightened the possibility that anything we told the Pakistanis could end up tipping off our target. Whatever we chose to do in Abbottabad, then, would involve violating the territory of a putative ally in the most egregious way possible, short of war—raising both the diplomatic stakes and the operational complexities.
By mid-March, in the days leading up to the Libya intervention and my trip to Latin America, the team had presented what they cautioned were only preliminary concepts for an assault on the compound in Abbottabad. Roughly speaking, I had two options. The first was to demolish it with an air strike. The benefits of that approach were obvious: No American lives would be risked on Pakistani soil. Publicly, at least, this option also offered a certain deniability—the Pakistanis would, of course, know that we were the ones who’d carried out the strike, but they would have an easier time maintaining the fiction that we might not be, which could help quell outrage among their people.
As we delved into the details of what a missile strike would look like, though, the downsides were significant. If we destroyed the compound, how would we ever be certain that bin Laden had been there? If al-Qaeda denied that bin Laden had been killed, how would we explain having blown up a residence deep inside Pakistan? Moreover, there were an estimated five women and twenty children living with the four adult males at the Abbottabad compound, and, in its initial iteration, the proposed strike would not only annihilate the compound but almost certainly level several adjacent residences as well. Not long into the meeting, I told Joint Chiefs vice chairman Hoss Cartwright that I’d heard enough: I was not going to authorize the killing of thirty or more people when we weren’t even certain it was bin Laden in the compound. If we were going to use a strike, they’d have to come up with a much more precise plan.
The second option was to authorize a special ops mission, in which a select team would covertly fly into Pakistan via helicopter, raid the compound, and get out before the Pakistani police or military had time to react. To preserve the secrecy of the operation, and deniability if something went awry, we’d have to conduct it under the authority of the CIA rather than the Pentagon. On the other hand, for a mission of this magnitude and risk, we needed a topflight military mind—which is why we had the Defense Department’s Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), in the room to walk us through what a raid might entail.
The chance to work closely with the men and women of the U.S. armed forces—to witness firsthand their teamwork and sense of duty—had been one of the most humbling aspects of my two years in office. And if I’d had to pick one individual to represent everything right about our military, Bill McRaven might have been that person. In his mid-fifties, with a friendly, open face, a deadpan sense of humor, and a plainspoken, can-do demeanor, he reminded me of a sandy-haired Tom Hanks—if Tom Hanks had been a career Navy SEAL. Like his predecessor at JSOC, Stan McChrystal, for whom he’d served as deputy, McRaven had helped write the book on special ops. For his postgraduate thesis eighteen years earlier, in fact, McRaven had studied a series of twentieth-century commando operations—including a 1943 glider rescue of Mussolini ordered by Hitler, and the 1976 Israeli operation to free hostages in Entebbe—examining the conditions under which a small group of well-rehearsed, highly trained soldiers could use stealth to maintain short-term superiority over larger or better armed forces.
McRaven had gone on to develop a model for special operations that shaped U.S. military strategy around the world. During his storied career, he had personally commanded or carried out more than a thousand special ops in some of the most dangerous settings imaginable, most recently going after high-value targets in Afghanistan. He was also famously cool under pressure. As a SEAL captain, he’d survived a 2001 parachuting accident in which he was knocked semiconscious during a jump and plunged four thousand feet before his chute properly deployed. (The accident broke his back and tore his leg muscles and tendons from his pelvis.) Although the CIA had developed its own internal special ops teams, Leon had wisely chosen to consult with McRaven in mapping out what a raid on Abbottabad might look like. He’d concluded that no CIA operators could match the skill and experience of McRaven’s Navy SEAL team and, thus, had recommended an unusual arrangement in which the chain of command ran from me to him to McRaven, who would have complete authority to design and conduct the mission if we decided to go forward with it.
Guided by data collected by aerial photography, the CIA had built a small three-dimensional replica of the Abbottabad compound, and during our March meeting McRaven walked us through how a raid might go: A select team of SEALs would fly one or more helicopters for nearly an hour and a half under the cover of darkness from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to the target, landing inside the compound’s high walls. They would then secure every perimeter entry point, door, and window before breaking into the three-story main house, searching the premises, and neutralizing any resistance they encountered. They would apprehend or kill bin Laden and fly back out, stopping to refuel somewhere inside Pakistan before returning to the base in Jalalabad. When McRaven’s presentation was over, I asked him if he thought his team could pull it off.
“Sir, right now we’ve just sketched out a concept,” he said. “Until I can get a larger team together to run through some rehearsals, I won’t know if what I’m currently thinking is the best way to do it. I also can’t tell you how we would get in and out—we need detailed air planners for that. What I can tell you is that if we get there, we can pull off the raid. But I can’t recommend the mission itself until I’ve done the homework.”
I nodded. “Let’s do the homework, then.”
Two weeks later, on March 29, we reconvened in the Situation Room, and McRaven reported feeling highly confident that the raid could be executed. Getting out, on the other hand, he said, might be a little more “sporty.” Based on his experience with similar raids and the preliminary rehearsals he’d run, he was fairly certain that the team could finish the job before any Pakistani authorities caught wind of what was happening. Nevertheless, we considered all the scenarios in which that assumption proved incorrect. What would we do if Pakistani fighters intercepted our helicopters, either on the way in or on the way out? What if bin Laden was on-site but hidden or in a safe room, thus e
xtending the amount of time the special ops team spent on the ground? How would the team respond if Pakistani police or military forces surrounded the compound during the raid?
McRaven emphasized that his planning was built on the premise that his team should avoid a firefight with Pakistani authorities; and if the authorities confronted us on the ground, his inclination would be to have the SEALs hold in place while our diplomats tried to negotiate a safe exit. I appreciated those instincts; his proposed approach was yet another example of the prudence I’d consistently encountered when dealing with our top military commanders. But with U.S.-Pakistan relations in a particularly precarious state, both Bob Gates and I expressed serious reservations about this strategy. U.S. drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets in the FATA had been generating increasing opposition from the Pakistani public. Anti-American sentiment had been further inflamed late in January when a CIA contractor named Raymond Allen Davis killed two armed men who approached his vehicle in the teeming city of Lahore, setting off angry protests over the CIA presence in Pakistan and resulting in nearly two months of tense diplomatic drama as we brokered Davis’s release. I told McRaven and the team that I was not going to risk putting the fate of our SEALs in the hands of a Pakistani government that would no doubt face intense public pressure over whether to jail or release them—especially if it turned out that bin Laden wasn’t in the compound. I therefore wanted him to beef up plans to get the raiding party out no matter what—possibly adding two extra helicopters to provide backup for the team in the compound.
Before we adjourned, Hoss Cartwright offered a new, more surgical option for an air strike—one involving a drone that would fire a small, thirteen-pound missile directly at the Pacer while he was taking his daily walk. According to Cartwright, the collateral damage would be minimal, and given the experience our military had developed in targeting other terrorist operatives, he felt satisfied that it could do the job while avoiding the risks inherent in a raid.
The possible courses of action were now in focus. McRaven would oversee the construction of a full-scale model of the Abbottabad compound at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the SEAL team would conduct a series of dress rehearsals. Should I decide to authorize the raid, he said, the optimal time to do it would be the first weekend in May, when a couple of moonless nights would provide the SEALs with extra cover. Left unstated were obvious concerns that with each step we took to plan and prepare, and every day that passed, more people were being read into our secret. I told both McRaven and Cartwright that I wasn’t yet ready to make a decision as to which option, if any, we’d pursue. But for planning purposes, I said, “Assume it’s a go.”
* * *
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ALL THE WHILE, we carried on with business as usual at the White House. I was tracking the situation in Libya, the war in Afghanistan, and the Greek debt crisis, which had flared up again and was once more starting to affect U.S. markets. One day, on the way back from the Situation Room, I ran into Jay Carney, who’d succeeded Robert Gibbs as my press secretary. Jay was a former journalist who’d had a front-row seat for all sorts of historic moments. He’d covered the breakup of the Soviet Union as Time magazine’s Moscow correspondent and had been on Air Force One with President Bush on the morning of 9/11. Now he was telling me he’d just spent part of his daily press briefing fielding questions about whether my birth certificate was valid.
It had been more than a month since Donald Trump had inserted himself into the national political dialogue. My advisors and I had assumed that, having milked it for all it was worth, the media would gradually tire of his obsession with my birth. And yet, like algae in a stagnant pond, the number of stories on his conspiratorial musings proliferated with each passing week. Cable shows ran long segments on Trump and his theories. Political reporters searched for fresh angles on the sociological significance of birtherism, or its impact on my reelection campaign, or (with barely acknowledged irony) what it said about the news business. A major point of discussion was the fact that the document we’d made available on the internet in 2008 was a “short-form” birth certificate, which was the standard document issued by the Hawaii State Department of Health and could be used to obtain a passport, Social Security number, or driver’s license. According to Trump and his fellow birthers, however, the short-form document proved nothing. Why hadn’t I produced the original long-form version of my birth certificate? we were asked. Had information on the long form been deliberately omitted from the short form—perhaps some clue that I was Muslim? Had the long form itself been doctored? What was Obama hiding?
Finally I decided I’d had enough. I called in White House counsel Bob Bauer and told him to go ahead and obtain the long-form birth certificate from its home in a bound volume, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hawaii Vital Records office. I then let David Plouffe and Dan Pfeiffer know that I planned not just to release the document but to say something publicly as well. They thought this was a bad idea, arguing that I’d just feed the story, and anyway, answering such ridiculous charges was beneath both me and the office of the president.
“That,” I said, “is exactly the point.”
On April 27, I walked to the podium in the White House briefing room and greeted the press. I began by remarking on the fact that the national TV networks had all decided to break from their regularly scheduled programming to carry my remarks live—something they very rarely did. I observed that two weeks earlier, when the House Republicans and I had issued sharply contrasting budget proposals, with profound implications for the nation, the news had instead been dominated by talk of my birth certificate. I noted that America faced enormous challenges and big decisions; that we should expect serious debates and sometimes fierce disagreements, because that was how our democracy was supposed to work, and I was certain that we had it in us to shape a better future together.
“But,” I said, “we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other. We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.” I looked out at the assembled reporters. “I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest. But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve. And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them—not on this.”
The room was quiet for a moment. I exited through the sliding doors that led back into the communications team’s offices, where I encountered a group of junior members of our press shop who’d been watching my remarks on a TV monitor. They all looked to be in their twenties. Some had worked on my campaign; others had only recently joined the administration, compelled by the idea of serving their country. I stopped and made eye contact with each one of them.
“We’re better than this,” I said. “Remember that.”
* * *
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BACK IN THE Situation Room the next day, my team and I conducted a final review of our options for a possible Abbottabad operation to take place that weekend. Earlier in the week, I had given McRaven approval to dispatch the SEAL team and helicopter assault force to Afghanistan, and the group was now in Jalalabad, awaiting further orders. In order to make sure that the CIA had adequately pressure-tested its work, Leon and Mike Morell had asked the chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, Mike Leiter, to have a fresh team of analysts pore over the available intelligence on the compound and its residents, to see how the agency’s conclusions matched up with those of Langley. Leiter reported that his team had expressed a 40 to 60 percent degree of certainty that it was bin Laden, compared to the CIA team�
�s assessment of 60 to 80 percent. A discussion ensued about what accounted for the difference. After a few minutes, I interrupted.
“I know we’re trying to quantify these factors as best we can,” I said. “But ultimately, this is a fifty-fifty call. Let’s move on.”
McRaven let us know that preparations for the raid were complete; he and his men were ready. Cartwright likewise confirmed that the drone missile option had been tested and could be activated at any time. With the options before us, I went around the table to get everyone’s recommendations. Leon, John Brennan, and Mike Mullen favored the raid. Hillary said that for her, it was a 51–49 call, carefully ticking through the risks of a raid—especially the danger that we could rupture our relations with Pakistan, or even find ourselves in a confrontation with the Pakistani military. She added, however, that considering that this was our best lead on bin Laden in ten years, she ultimately came down on the side of sending in the SEALs.
Gates recommended against a raid, although he was open to considering the strike option. He raised the precedent of the April 1980 attempt to rescue the fifty-three American hostages held in Iran, known as Desert One, which had turned catastrophic after a U.S. military helicopter crashed in the desert, killing eight servicemembers. It was a reminder, he said, that no matter how thorough the planning, operations like this could go badly wrong. Beyond the risk to the team, he worried that a failed mission might adversely impact the war in Afghanistan. Earlier that same day, I had announced Bob’s planned retirement after four years as secretary of defense and my intention to nominate Leon as his successor. As I listened to Bob’s sober, well-reasoned assessment, I was reminded of just how valuable he’d been to me.
