by Obama Barack
The team had planned for us to follow the operation indirectly, through Leon, since Tom was concerned about the optics of me communicating directly with McRaven, which might leave the impression that I was micromanaging the operation—a bad practice generally and a political problem if the mission failed. On my way back into the Situation Room, though, I had noticed that a live aerial view of the compound, as well as McRaven’s voice, was being transmitted to a video monitor in a smaller conference room across the hall. As the helicopters drew close to the target, I stood up from my seat. “I need to watch this,” I said, before heading to the other room. There I found a blue-uniformed air force brigadier general, Brad Webb, seated in front of his computer at a small table. He tried to offer me his seat. “Sit down,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder and finding a spot in a side chair. Webb let McRaven and Leon know that I had changed venues and was watching the feed. Soon the entire team had squeezed into the room.
This was the first and only time as president that I’d watch a military operation unfold in real time, with ghostly images moving across the screen. We’d been following the action for barely a minute when one of the Black Hawks lurched slightly on descent, and before I could grasp exactly what was happening, McRaven informed us that the helicopter had momentarily lost lift and then clipped the side of one of the compound’s walls. For an instant, I felt an electric kind of fear. A disaster reel played in my head—a chopper crashing, the SEALs scrambling to get out before the machine caught fire, a neighborhood of people emerging from their homes to see what happened as the Pakistani military rushed to the scene. McRaven’s voice interrupted my nightmare.
“It’ll be fine,” he said, as though remarking on a car fender bumping into a shopping cart at the mall. “The pilot’s the best we have, and he’ll bring it down safely.”
And that’s exactly what happened. I’d later learn that the Black Hawk had been caught in a vortex caused by higher than anticipated temperatures and the rotor’s downwash of air getting trapped inside the compound’s high walls, forcing the pilot and the SEALs on board to improvise both a landing and their exit. (In fact, the pilot had purposely set the tail of the chopper on the wall to avoid a more perilous crash.) But all I saw in the moment were grainy figures on the ground, rapidly moving into position and entering the main house. For twenty excruciating minutes, even McRaven had a limited view of what was taking place—or perhaps he was staying silent on the details of the room-to-room search his team was conducting. Then, with a suddenness I didn’t expect, we heard McRaven’s and Leon’s voices, almost simultaneously, utter the words we’d been waiting to hear—the culmination of months of planning and years of intelligence gathering.
“Geronimo ID’d…Geronimo EKIA.”
Enemy killed in action.
Osama bin Laden—code-named “Geronimo” for the purposes of the mission—the man responsible for the worst terrorist attack in American history, the man who had directed the murder of thousands of people and set in motion a tumultuous period of world history, had been brought to justice by a team of American Navy SEALs. Inside the conference room, there were audible gasps. My eyes remained glued to the video feed.
“We got him,” I said softly.
Nobody budged from their seats for another twenty minutes, while the SEAL team finished its business: bagging bin Laden’s body; securing the three women and nine children present and questioning them in one corner of the compound; collecting computers, files, and other material of potential intelligence value; and attaching explosives to the damaged Black Hawk, which would then be destroyed, replaced by a rescue Chinook that had been hovering a short distance away. As the helicopters took off, Joe placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
“Congratulations, boss,” he said.
I stood up and nodded. Denis gave me a fist bump. I shook hands with others on the team. But with the helicopters still rotoring through Pakistani airspace, the mood remained quiet. It wasn’t until around six p.m., when the choppers had safely landed in Jalalabad, that I finally felt some of the tension start to drain out of me. Over a video teleconference line a short while later, McRaven explained that he was looking at the body as we spoke, and that in his judgment it was definitely bin Laden; the CIA’s facial recognition software would soon indicate the same. To further confirm, McRaven had a six-foot-two member of his team lie next to the body to compare his height to bin Laden’s purported six-foot-four frame.
“Seriously, Bill?” I teased. “All that planning and you couldn’t bring a tape measure?”
It was the first lighthearted thing I’d said all day, but the laughter didn’t last long, as photographs of bin Laden’s corpse were soon passed around the conference table. I glanced at them briefly; it was him. Despite the evidence, Leon and McRaven said that we couldn’t be fully certain until the DNA results came back, which would take another day or two. We discussed the possibility of holding off on an official announcement, but reports of a helicopter crash in Abbottabad were already starting to pop up on the internet. Mike Mullen had put a call in to Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and while the conversation had been polite, Kayani had requested that we come clean on the raid and its target as quickly as possible in order to help his people manage the reaction of the Pakistani public. Knowing there was no way to hold the news for another twenty-four hours, I went upstairs with Ben to quickly dictate my thoughts on what I would say to the nation later that evening.
For the next several hours, the West Wing ran at full throttle. While diplomats began to contact foreign governments and our communications team got ready to brief the press, I placed calls to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and told them the news, making a point to acknowledge with Bush that the mission was the culmination of a long, hard process begun under his presidency. Though it was the middle of the night across the Atlantic, I contacted David Cameron as well, to recognize the stalwart support our closest ally had provided from the very beginning of the Afghan War. I expected my most difficult call to be with Pakistan’s beleaguered president, Asif Ali Zardari, who would surely face a backlash at home over our violation of Pakistani sovereignty. When I reached him, however, he expressed congratulations and support. “Whatever the fallout,” he said, “it’s very good news.” He showed genuine emotion, recalling how his wife, Benazir Bhutto, had been killed by extremists with reported ties to al-Qaeda.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t seen Michelle all day. I’d let her know earlier what would be happening, and rather than sit anxiously at the White House, waiting for news, she’d left Malia and Sasha in their grandmother’s care and gone out to dinner with friends. I had just finished shaving and putting on a suit and tie when she walked through the door.
“So?” she said.
I gave a thumbs-up, and she smiled, pulling me into a hug. “That’s amazing, babe,” she said. “Really. How do you feel?”
“Right now, just relieved,” I said. “But check back with me in a couple of hours.”
Back in the West Wing, I sat with Ben to put the finishing touches on my remarks. I had given him a few broad themes. I wanted to recall the shared anguish of 9/11, I said, and the unity we’d all felt in the days that immediately followed. I wanted to salute not just those involved in this mission but everyone in our military and intelligence communities who continued to sacrifice so much to keep us safe. I wanted to reiterate that our fight was with al-Qaeda and not Islam. And I wanted to close by reminding the world and ourselves that America does what it sets out to do—that as a nation we were still capable of achieving big things.
As usual, Ben had taken my stray thoughts and crafted a fine speech in less than two hours. I knew that this one mattered to him more than most, since the experience of watching the Twin Towers collapse had changed the trajectory of his life, propelling him to Washington with a burning drive to make a difference. It brought back my own memories of that day:
Michelle having just taken Malia to her first day of preschool; me standing outside the State of Illinois Building in downtown Chicago, feeling overwhelmed and uncertain after assuring Michelle over the phone that she and the girls would be okay; three-month-old Sasha sleeping on my chest later that night as I sat in the dark watching the news reports and trying to contact friends in New York. No less than Ben’s, my own course in life had been fundamentally altered by that day, in ways that at the time I could not possibly have predicted, setting off a chain of events that would somehow lead to this moment.
After scanning the speech one last time, I stood up and clapped Ben on the back. “Good job, brother,” I said. He nodded, a jumble of emotions passing across his face before he rushed out the door to get the final edits on my remarks entered into the teleprompter. It was now almost eleven-thirty p.m. The major networks had already reported bin Laden’s death and were waiting to take my address live. Celebratory crowds had gathered outside the White House gates, thousands of people filling the streets. As I stepped into the cool night air and started walking down the colonnade toward the East Room, where I’d give my remarks, I could hear the raucous, rhythmic chants of “USA! USA! USA!” coming from Pennsylvania Avenue—a sound that echoed far and wide and would continue deep into the night.
* * *
—
EVEN AFTER THE jubilation quieted down, all of us in the White House could feel a palpable shift in the country’s mood in the days immediately following the Abbottabad raid. For the first and only time in my presidency, we didn’t have to sell what we’d done. We didn’t have to fend off Republican attacks or answer accusations from key constituencies that we’d compromised some core principle. No issues with implementation or unforeseen consequences sprang up. I still had decisions to make, including whether to release photos of bin Laden’s dead body. (My answer was no: We didn’t need to “spike the football” or hoist a ghoulish trophy, I told my staff, and I didn’t want the image of bin Laden shot in the head to become a rallying point for extremists.) We still had to patch up relations with Pakistan. While the documents and computer files seized from the compound proved to be a treasure trove of intelligence, confirming that bin Laden had continued to play a central role in planning attacks against the United States, as well as the enormous pressure we’d managed to put on his network through our targeting of its leaders, none of us believed that the threat from al-Qaeda was over. What was beyond dispute, though, was that we’d dealt the organization a decisive blow, moving it a step closer to strategic defeat. Even our harshest critics had to acknowledge that the operation had been an unequivocal success.
As for the American people, the Abbottabad raid offered a catharsis of sorts. In Afghanistan and Iraq, they’d seen our troops wage almost a decade of war, with outcomes they knew to be ambiguous at best. They’d expected that violent extremism was here to stay in one form or another, that there’d be no conclusive battle or formal surrender. As a result, the public instinctively seemed to seize on bin Laden’s death as the closest we’d likely ever get to a V-Day—and at a time of economic hardship and partisan rancor, people took some satisfaction in seeing their government deliver a victory.
Meanwhile, the thousands of families who’d lost loved ones on 9/11 understood what we’d done in more personal terms. The day after the operation, my daily batch of ten constituent letters contained a printed email from a young woman named Payton Wall, who’d been four years old at the time of the attacks and was now fourteen. She explained that her dad had been in one of the Twin Towers and had called to speak to her before it collapsed. All her life, she wrote, she’d been haunted by the memory of her father’s voice, along with the image of her mother weeping into the phone. Although nothing could change the fact of his absence, she wanted me and all those who’d been involved in the raid to know how much it meant to her and her family that America hadn’t forgotten him.
Sitting alone in the Treaty Room, I reread that email a couple of times, my eyes clouded with emotion. I thought about my daughters and how profoundly the loss of their mother or father would hurt them. I thought about young people who’d signed up for the armed forces after 9/11, intent on serving the nation, no matter the sacrifice. And I thought about the parents of those wounded or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Gold Star moms Michelle and I had comforted, the fathers who’d shown me pictures of their departed sons. I felt an overwhelming pride in those who’d been part of the mission. From the SEALs themselves, to the CIA analysts who’d pieced together the trail to Abbottabad, to the diplomats who had prepared to manage the fallout, to the Pakistani American translator who’d stood outside the compound shooing away curious neighbors as the raid took place—they had all worked together seamlessly and selflessly, without regard to credit or turf or political preferences, to achieve a shared goal.
With these thoughts came another: Was that unity of effort, that sense of common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? The question nagged at me. For all the pride and satisfaction I took in the success of our mission in Abbottabad, the truth was that I hadn’t felt the same exuberance as I had on the night the healthcare bill passed. I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. And the fact that this was the case, the fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be—and how much work I had left to do.
I set such musings aside for the rest of that week, allowing myself a chance to savor the moment. Bob Gates would attend his last cabinet meeting and get a rousing ovation, appearing, for a moment, genuinely moved. I spent time with John Brennan, who had been involved one way or another in the hunt for bin Laden for close to fifteen years. Bill McRaven stopped by the Oval Office and, along with my heartfelt thanks for his extraordinary leadership, I presented him with a tape measure I’d had mounted on a plaque. And on May 5, 2011, just four days after the operation, I traveled to New York City and had lunch with the firefighters of Engine Company 54/Ladder 4/Battalion 9, which had lost all fifteen members who’d been on duty the morning of the attack, and participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at Ground Zero. Some of the first responders who had rushed into the burning towers served in the honor guard that day, and I had a chance to meet with the 9/11 families in attendance—including Payton Wall, who got a big hug from me and promptly asked if I could arrange for her to meet Justin Bieber (I told her I was pretty sure I could make that happen).
The next day, I flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where McRaven introduced me and Joe to the SEAL team and pilots involved in the Abbottabad raid. A small-scale model of the compound had been set up at the front of the room, and as the commanding officer methodically walked us through the operation, I studied the thirty or so elite military members seated before me in folding chairs. Some of them looked the part—strapping young men whose muscles bulged through their uniforms. But I was struck by how many of them could have passed for accountants or high school principals—guys in their early forties, with graying hair and understated demeanors. They were a testament to the role that skill and judgment born of experience played in successfully navigating the most dangerous missions—experience, the commander emphasized, that had also cost the lives of many of their colleagues. When the briefing was over, I shook hands with everyone in the room and presented the team with the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest award a military unit could receive. In return, the men surprised me with a gift: an American flag they had tak
en with them to Abbottabad, now in a frame with their signatures on the back. At no point during my visit did anyone mention who had fired the shot that killed bin Laden—and I never asked.
On the flight back, Tom gave me an update on Libya. Bill Daley and I reviewed my schedule for the month ahead, and I caught up on some paperwork. By six-thirty p.m., we’d landed at Andrews Air Force Base, and I boarded Marine One for the short ride back to the White House. I was in a quiet mood as I gazed out at the rolling Maryland landscape and the tidy neighborhoods below, and then the Potomac, glistening beneath the fading sun. The helicopter began its gentle turn, due north across the Mall. The Washington Monument suddenly materialized on one side, seeming almost close enough to touch; on the other side, I could see the seated figure of Lincoln, shrouded in shadow behind the memorial’s curved marble columns. Marine One began to shudder a bit, in a way that was now familiar to me, signaling the final descent as it approached the South Lawn, and I looked down at the street below, still thick with rush-hour traffic—fellow commuters, I thought, anxious to get home.
