Sea Stories

by William H. Mcraven

  While the compound was somewhat unusual, with its high walls, barbed wire, and security lighting, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Pakistan and certainly not for what we had seen in Afghanistan. The only real aberration was an unusually high wall to the south. While the main walls surrounding the compound measured twelve feet high, the south wall had been built up another six feet. At eighteen feet high it was quite difficult for anyone to see inside the compound from any vantage point in Abbottabad.

  What the analysts didn’t know was the layout inside the living quarters. Overhead imagery could tell you a lot, but it couldn’t see through walls. The analysts believed that there were no underground tunnels, but they couldn’t be sure. If it was bin Laden, there was a general assumption that he would have an escape route out of the compound. This was common practice, and during my time in Iraq and Afghanistan, we frequently found tunnels where the high-value targets would hide until the security forces left their homes. Additionally, and most disturbing, the analysts didn’t know if the house was wired with explosives. Again, this was not uncommon with many compounds we had raided over the years. While the possibility of booby traps, explosively wired houses, pressure plate IEDs, and escape routes loomed large, there were no obstacles that we had not encountered before. I was confident that if we could get to the compound, we could get bin Laden—if he was there.

  For the next several hours I looked at the bigger picture. How could I get an assault force to the compound? It was about 162 miles by air from the border of Afghanistan to Abbottabad. The Pakistanis had a sophisticated Integrated Air Defense System (IADS), and we knew from experience that their radars could pick up our helos and airplanes when we flew close to the border.

  I looked at several other alternatives. Could we do an offset parachute insertion into a remote landing zone and then walk to the compound? Could we pile some commandos into a Trojan horse–like vehicle and drive to Abbottabad? Could we come in under tourist visas, assemble at a safe house, and get the Agency to move us to the compound? Unfortunately I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions.

  After several hours I left the facility and met up with Sellers. We headed back over to the Pentagon so I could debrief the Secretary and Admiral Mullen.

  After a short review of the new intelligence, I said, “Sir, I need to bring at least one more man into the planning effort.”

  Gates and Mullen exchanged glances. “Who do you have in mind?” the admiral asked.

  “Captain Rex Smith, sir. He’s a Navy SEAL with extensive combat experience, and he works here in D.C. He can move around the town without drawing a lot of attention.”

  “All right,” Mullen agreed. “But he’s the only guy for now. I’ll talk to the Agency and the White House. Don’t speak with him until I get back to you.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Bill, can you do this mission?” Mullen asked again.

  “Sir, I don’t know yet. I need to talk to some folks. We will need to do some detailed planning and rehearsals. Only then will I know if it’s feasible.”

  “The President is likely to want a Concept of Operations in a few weeks,” the Secretary noted.

  “In a few weeks I can have a detailed concept,” I said. “But without bringing in the aviation and ground operators to really look at the problem and rehearse the concept, there is no way I can be certain of success.”

  “Okay,” Mullen said. “For now it remains just you, and I will check on your D.C. guy. But no one else is allowed in until the President agrees.”

  “Understand, sir.”

  I left the Pentagon and headed back to my hotel. Within an hour I received word that Rex Smith was approved to join my one-man team.

  Nicknamed “the Senator,” Rex was the spitting image of the 1950s movie star Robert Mitchum. He was always poised, with a coolness and sense of confidence that makes him the man in the room whom everyone wants to listen to. Tall, broad-shouldered, with black hair, he was wickedly smart and exceptionally experienced. The captain had worked for me on several occasions in the past decade, and I trusted his operational judgment implicitly.

  I closed the door to his small office.

  “Rex, I’m going to tell you something, and I need to ensure that no one, absolutely no one else, learns about this.”

  As big men tend to do, he was slightly slouched in his chair. He sat up and leaned forward. “Yes sir. No one will know.”

  “No one,” I repeated.

  “Yes sir. No one.”

  “We have a lead on bin Laden.” I let it sink in for a second. “The Agency is planning a mission to get him. They have asked us to help with the planning.”

  Rex nodded. Like me, he had been through bin Laden sightings before, so his reaction was measured.

  “I need you to go over to the Agency and listen to what they have to say. They have developed a number of courses of action, only one of which is a raid option. But right now that’s not at the top of their list.”

  He shifted in his chair and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. Just listen. The last thing I want is for the Agency to think that we are trying to take over the mission.”

  “Should I help with the planning?”

  “The SAD guys are planning the ground option. If they ask for your insight then provide it. But stay away from implying we could do it better.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “I head back to Afghanistan tonight. So call me if things begin to develop or you have any questions.”

  “Yes sir.”

  I knew that Rex was the perfect man for the job. He was engaging and had a likability that generated openness and partnership. If anyone could gain the Agency’s trust, it was “the Senator.”

  By the next day I was back in Afghanistan. Over the next few weeks Rex called me almost every day with an update. Now that he had seen the intelligence, his enthusiasm was evident. This might just be the real deal and he knew it.

  As expected, I received a call three weeks later asking me to return to the States. The President wanted a meeting to review the intelligence and discuss his options. Heading back to the States so soon after returning to Afghanistan would normally have spiked attention, but Libya was falling apart and NATO and the United States were supporting the National Liberation Army fighting against Gadhafi. For the next several months, all my movements and my frequent visits to the White House were assumed to be closely held planning for Libya.

  Soon after arriving back at Fort Bragg, I contacted some subject matter experts and, without revealing too much, tried to get answers to my four questions: Could I insert a small team into an offset drop zone and have them walk on foot to the compound? Could we build a Trojan horse truck, fill it with armed operators, and drive across the border from Kabul to Abbottabad? Could we take commercial flights directly into Islamabad, get weapons and gear from the Agency, and drive to Abbottabad? Finally, could we fly the 162 miles from the border undetected by Pak radars and go straight to the target?

  My command had one of the finest Air Force aviation squadrons in the military. The pilots from this squadron knew every trick in the book when it came to inserting a small unit of operators onto a parachute drop zone. I called the squadron commander and told him that I needed one of his best pilots for a few days just to do some preliminary planning for a possible Libyan contingency. It was a shallow cover story and it’s likely the commander didn’t believe it, but he knew not to ask too many questions.

  After a day of looking at possible air insertion routes and likely drop zones, it was apparent the offset infiltration idea was not going to work. Next I contacted some of our clandestine operators and asked them to look at the Trojan horse idea. While it had merit, it also had the greatest risk of compromise and took the longest to execute. Finally, I ruled out entering the country on tourist visas because the scrutiny of Americans entering Pakistan had been significantly elevated after the Raymond Davis incident. Davis was a government con
tractor who killed two undercover Pakistani policemen after he mistook them for criminals trying to assault him. Consequently, every American was now viewed suspiciously and there seemed to be no way of getting men and weapons into Pakistan without getting caught.

  As expected, the Pakistanis had a well-integrated air defense capability. However, the Pakistanis viewed their greatest threat as coming from India. Consequently, there appeared to be holes in the radar coverage on their western frontier that we could use to mask our helicopter insertion.

  As I reviewed each option I compared them against an intellectual model I had created twenty years earlier while studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The model was based on a theory that attempted to explain why special operations forces succeeded, particularly in light of the fact they are a small force normally going against a well-defended target. Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian military strategist, said that the defense is stronger than the offensive, because the defense only has to “preserve and protect” while the offense has to “impose its will upon the enemy.” The “defense” in this case was the Pakistani air defenses, the battalion of Pak infantry surrounding the objective, and the Abbottabad compound itself.

  Clausewitz asserted that the only way for an attacking force to overcome the natural strength of the defense was through mass and maneuver. But special operations missions seemed to defy conventional wisdom—why was this? I concluded that special operations forces were able to achieve “relative superiority” over an enemy by developing a “simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.” And to compare my theory against real missions, I conducted eight case studies and developed a relative superiority model. The model showed how, in the course of a commando mission, the special operations force gained “relative superiority,” how long they maintained it, and when they lost it. What is crucial for the success of any special operations mission is to minimize the time from when you are vulnerable to when you achieve relative superiority. Unlike real military superiority, relative superiority only lasts for a short period of time. No matter how I compared each Abbottabad option to the relative superiority model, the outcome was the same. The best approach was the simplest and the most direct: fly to the target as quickly as possible, get bin Laden, and get out. Nothing complicated, nothing exotic, just like thousands of missions we had done before. By the end of the week I knew what needed to be done. What I didn’t know was, could it be done?

  The day prior to briefing the President, the Director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, asked me to meet with him and his key staff members at Langley. Since he had taken over the CIA in 2009, Panetta and I worked together on a number of operations. He was the consummate team player, gregarious, bawdy at times, with a laugh that was contagious. You couldn’t resist Leon Panetta’s embrace. And no matter what you were doing, it was never about Panetta. It was always about doing what was right for the nation. But Panetta also had a tremendous depth of experience that served the Agency and eventually Defense very well. An eight-term Congressman from Monterey, Panetta had also been the White House Chief of Staff under Clinton and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He knew Washington.

  In the Director’s office, with his senior staff present, we reviewed the current options for Abbottabad. General Cartwright had advocated for an air option to bomb the compound. Having bombed a number of compounds in my day, I knew that to ensure bin Laden was dead, the air option would require a massive ordnance drop. While this might ensure bin Laden’s demise, it was likely to have significant collateral damage and leave a large smoking hole in the middle of Abbottabad. Probably not good for U.S.-Pakistani relations. Even after the bombing raid, we would never know for certain if bin Laden was dead. While this option seemed far-fetched to me, it remained a viable one.

  The second option was a CIA-led snatch and grab using a handful of Special Activities Division officers who would quietly enter Pakistan, travel from Islamabad to Abbottabad, and grab bin Laden. However, the flaw in the plan was trying to get bin Laden out of Pakistan, either dead or alive. There was an offshoot to this SAD plan that involved the Pakistanis. No one in the room thought bringing the Pakistanis into our confidence was a good idea, but we wanted to provide the President with all the options. The final option was the special operations raid.

  “Well?” Panetta told his staff. “I’m in favor of the SOF raid, but I want to know what the rest of you think.”

  Going around the room, I was surprised by the responses. Those CIA officers who disliked SOF the most seemed to be our staunchest supporters. Panetta encouraged professional dissent and there was no holding back from some of his senior staff.

  “There is no fucking way we can let the Paks in on this. That option should not even be on the table,” came one reply.

  “What happens after we bomb the shit out of this place and it’s not bin Laden? I mean, these guys have nukes and they are already pissed off about Davis.”

  “Look, the ISI must know bin Laden is there. For God’s sake, he’s a fucking mile down the road from their West Point.”

  “While I like our SAD guys, this is just beyond the scope of what they can do.”

  Everyone had an opinion.

  Finally, Panetta turned to me. “Bill, what do you think?”

  I looked around the room. Most of the senior staff and I had worked closely together for the past ten years. Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Lebanon, Israel—somewhere our paths had crossed. They were exceptional patriots and very, very good at their profession. But there were one or two senior officers who felt threatened by SOF and always tried to undermine our efforts. And in this crowd, those senior officers’ opinions mattered.

  “Sir, right now I don’t have enough information to tell you whether the special operations raid will work. We have a lot of detailed planning still to do and then I need to conduct several rehearsals before I’m ready to give you or the President a good answer.”

  “What about the SAD option?” one of Panetta’s staff asked me.

  I hesitated. I really liked the young SAD officer who was planning the CIA mission, but relative to my SOF operators, his team had limited combat experience; and in order for his operation to be successful, he still needed helicopter support.

  “Sir, I think the SAD option is workable, but based on their current planning they’ll still need a helo to extract their team and bin Laden.”

  “Then why not just have your guys do the mission?” Morell said, asking the obvious.

  I turned to Panetta. “Sir, we can support the SAD guys or we can do a unilateral SOF raid, but we’ll need to choose one or the other.”

  “Look,” Panetta said. “I think the only real option we have here is the special operations raid. But let’s keep looking at the other courses of action and see what unfolds.”

  Two of the senior officers present were former CIA chiefs of station in the Middle East, and I could tell by their body language that, while they respected the SAD guys, they thought the SAD plan was unworkable. Panetta tabled the discussion and asked for a further review.

  For the next hour, Panetta drilled his staff on finding ways to verify that “the pacer” was bin Laden. Could we get better overhead photos? Could a CIA source plant a camera on the outer wall and look into the compound? Without proof that “the pacer” was bin Laden, the President was unlikely to authorize any direct action against the Abbottabad compound.

  As the meeting ended Panetta pulled me aside and reaffirmed his support for the SOF raid. I was pleased that he was so firmly in the raid camp, but I wasn’t ready to lead the charge just yet and I didn’t want to offer the President of the United States an option that I couldn’t guarantee.

  Sellers dropped me off outside the White House. I wore my Navy Service Dress Blue, the double-breasted uniform with the gold stripes on the sleeves. I debated wearing a suit to the White House in order to avoid being r
ecognized, but with Libya in full swing, hiding in plain sight seemed to be a better idea.

  As I approached the south entrance along the back side of the Old Executive Office Building, I heard my name called. There, waiting to pass through the south entrance, was Karen Tumulty, a childhood friend whom I had not seen in forty years, but who I knew was a reporter for the Washington Post.

  “Bill!” she said, hugging me. “What are you doing here?”

  Just what I needed. A Washington Post reporter. What was I doing here? Hadn’t I thought through that question? No. Apparently not.

  “Oh, well. You know. A lot going on in the world.” I smiled.

  “Libya, huh?”

  “Well…” But before I could stammer any more, I quickly changed the subject and asked about her family and her career. We talked for several minutes, trying to catch up on the past forty years. Karen was an extremely well-respected political reporter, and while national security was not her beat, reporters are curious by nature. The sooner I could break contact the better.

  “Karen, it was great seeing you again. I’m in D.C. a lot. Maybe we can get together for coffee.”

  “That would be wonderful,” she said. “No business. I promise I won’t ask about your work.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  I hugged her one final time, picked up my badge from the Secret Service agent, and walked onto the White House grounds. I drew a deep breath. Next time I would be better prepared for the unexpected.