The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden Read online

  Above all, one is struck by how intimate the space is. When full, as it was for many of these meetings, the top leadership of the nation can be said, without exaggeration, to be huddled.

  By early March the agency had determined that the Abbottabad compound held a “high value target,” and that it was most likely Osama bin Laden. “John,” the team leader at the CIA and the most veteran analyst on the trail, was close to convinced. He put his confidence level at 95 percent.

  The president surveyed confidence levels around the room. Brennan felt about the same as “John,” but others were less certain—some far less certain. The opinion had already been “red-teamed” three times—worked over by agency analysts assigned to poke holes in it: at the Counterterrorism Center, by Brennan’s staff, and by a group within the CIA. Four senior leaders at the Directorate of National Intelligence had reviewed the case and written out their own opinions. Most seemed to place their confidence level at about 80 percent. Some were as low as 40 or even 30 percent. Obama then asked Morell, who was seated in a chair against the wall behind him, under the presidential seal.

  Morell had come to admire Obama’s decision-making skills. He had worked with President Bush up close almost every day, and he had admired him, too, but the two men were very different. Morell and others who worked closely with Bush believed he was widely underestimated. He was plenty smart. He was not as eager as Obama to ingest written reports, but he did read them, and he was a good listener. He grasped the nut of an issue quickly, asked sharp questions, encouraged lively debate, and then, unhesitatingly, often on the spot, made a decision. Obama, on the other hand, had a level of study and contemplation that he kept private. He liked to pore over written reports and, after initiating a discussion of opposing views, would generally retire before coming back with a decision.

  One thing in particular impressed Morell about Obama. Morell had given and sat through thousands of presidential briefings by now, enough to know the in-house tactics of policy makers. Advisers had a way of narrowing the choice to option A or option B, and then steering the president to the one they preferred. It was all in how the issue was framed. This method didn’t have a chance with Obama. He would listen to A and B, ask a lot of good questions, and more often than not propose an entirely different course, option C, which seemed to emerge wholly formed from his head. He had done this just a few days earlier in a widely reported instance concerning Libya. It came during a prolonged policy discussion over what the United States should do about Gaddafi’s apparent intent to slaughter rebels and civilians who were contesting his regime. In that case, option A was just to stand back and not get involved. The consequences would be awful but U.S. military intervention in a third country (Iraq and Afghanistan still being very much live wars) would be hugely unpopular domestically and might, in Libya, where there was no clear idea what would emerge after Gaddafi, end up making things worse. Option B was to intervene militarily on the side of the rebels, essentially do whatever had to be done to prevent them from being systematically slaughtered by the regime. There were strong views on both sides, but the first option was clearly the one favored by most of the staff. Obama then proposed an option C, the course he would eventually pursue. This called for the United States to spearhead air attacks on Gaddafi’s forces for a few days, and then let a coalition of European and Arab countries take over. U.S. forces would step back from most combat missions after the initial thrusts but, through NATO, continue providing critical air support and patrol a no-fly zone. Morell thought it was brilliant.

  He now placed his own certainty that the Pacer was bin Laden at 60 percent.

  “Okay, this is a probability thing,” said Obama. “Leon, talk to me about this.”

  The director explained that ever since the agency’s erroneous call, a decade earlier, that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, a finding that had kicked off a long and very costly war, the CIA had instituted an almost comically elaborate process for weighing certainty. It was like trying to contrive a mathematical formula for good judgment. Analysts up and down the chain were now asked not only for their opinion, but to assign it a confidence level—high, medium, or low. Then they had to explain why they had assigned that level. What you ended up with, as the president was finding, and as he would later explain it to me, was not more certainty but more confusion.

  Obama said as much, and then turned in his chair and looked at the deputy director.

  “Michael, what do you think?”

  Morell had thought a lot about it. He had been personally involved in the finding about Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, and had felt more certain about that than he felt about this.

  “People don’t have differences because they have different intel,” he said. “We are all looking at the same things. I think it depends more on your past experience.” He explained that counterterrorism analysts at work on al Qaeda over the past five years had enjoyed a remarkable string of successes. They had been crushing the terror group inside Pakistan, and they had directly or indirectly prevented further terrorist attacks inside the United States So they were very confident. Those who had been at work longer, like him, had known failure. They knew the fragility of even the soundest-seeming analysis. The WMD story had been a bracing lesson. He bore responsibility for it.

  “Mr. President, if we had a human source who had told us directly that bin Laden was living in that compound, I still wouldn’t be above 60 percent.” He said he had spent a lot of time on both questions—WMDs and Abbottabad. He had seen no fewer than thirteen analytical drafts on the former question, and at least as many on the latter.

  “And I’m telling you, the case for WMDs wasn’t just stronger, it was much stronger,” he said.

  This kicked off more discussion about percentage levels of confidence. The president listened, but he had already pretty much made up his mind.

  “One of the things you learn as president is you’re always dealing with probabilities,” he told me. “No issue comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. No issue comes to my desk where there’s one hundred percent confidence that this is the right thing to do. Because if people were absolutely certain then it would have been decided by somebody else. And that’s true in dealing with the economic crisis. That’s true in an order to take a shot at a pirate. That’s true about most of the decisions I make during the course of the day. So I’m accustomed to people offering me probabilities. In this situation, what you started getting was probabilities that disguised uncertainty as opposed to actually providing you with more useful information.”

  Obama had no trouble admitting it to himself. If he acted on this, he was going to be taking a gamble, pure and simple. A big gamble.

  If they were successful, and if the Pacer was bin Laden, then killing or capturing him would mark a clear and central victory in the war al Qaeda had started almost ten years ago. It would deliver on the promise Obama had made campaigning four years earlier, the one where he said he would take a shot unilaterally in Pakistan if he got a good chance, the promise that nearly everyone had criticized, including some, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who were now in the room helping him to decide. That promise in some ways had defined his national security strategy. So success would be a demonstration of justice achieved at great cost and sacrifice, and with tremendous skill. It would be a satisfying achievement for America and the world, an emotional turning point, but more, it would vindicate the determination and skill of everyone who had given of themselves—in some cases all of themselves—to the struggle. On a practical level, it would be the single greatest blow yet to an organization still scheming to take American lives.

  If he tried and failed, however—and they had not yet begun to calculate all the spectacular ways it might fail—then some brave American warriors might lose their lives attempting something that might turn out to be a major national embarrassment. Failure would likely be as prestige-enhancing for al Qaeda as Desert One had been
for Iran’s mullahs in 1980. Bin Laden’s stature, which had waned considerably since 2001, would get a new boost, the kind that translated into more money, more recruits, and more attacks. Success might bump up Obama’s political standing at home for a few weeks, but failure could brand him as an ineffectual commander in chief, and doom his chances for a second term as surely as Desert One had doomed Carter’s.

  Either way, success or failure, there would be an outraged Pakistan to deal with. American relations with that difficult, nuclear-armed nation were already strained nearly to breaking. Whatever he decided, Obama later told me, was going to be a judgment call based on circumstantial evidence, piecing together patterns. There was still a possibility that this was some warlord from Afghanistan who had set up shop, or that this was a drug dealer from the Gulf who valued his privacy or had a mistress or a second family. There were other stories that might have explained the pattern. The calculation the president had to make was whether it was probable enough that bin Laden was there to justify the risks, given the importance to America’s national security.

  So as the conversation around him about levels of certainty wore on, the president, who usually did more listening than speaking in these meetings, interrupted.

  “This is fifty-fifty,” he said. That silenced everyone. “Look guys, this is a flip of the coin. I can’t base this decision on the notion that we have any greater certainty than that.”

  So, if he decided to act, what were his options? Obama was presented with two. The simplest, and the one that posed the least risk to American forces, was to reduce the compound to dust, along with everyone and everything in and around it. To do the job right, the air force had calculated that would mean raining as many as thirty or more precision bombs from a high-flying B-2, or launching a comparable number of missiles. This would be enough to guarantee that anything breathing on, in, or near that plot of earth would be killed. It would vaporize everything above ground and pulverize anything below. There would be minimal worry about encountering Pakistani air defenses—a lone high-flying B-2 Stealth bomber would be long gone before the country knew it had been hit. With no ground forces there was no chance of mixing it up with that nation’s army or police. It would be a mighty, sudden stroke from a dark sky that would leave nothing but a big smoking hole in the middle of Abbottabad—which, wasn’t going to sell very well. Collateral damage would make the Pakistani fury all the more righteous. But it would get the job done.

  Obama asked how many people were living at the compound and was informed that there were four adult males, five women, and nearly twenty children. He asked about the houses that were close to the compound in the neighborhood. Those, too, would be completely destroyed, along with every resident man, woman, and child. This really gave the president pause. America was not going to obliterate them on a fifty-fifty chance of also killing Osama bin Laden.

  So the president scrapped that plan immediately. He said the only way he would even consider attacking the compound from the air was if the volume and precision of munitions was such that the blast area would be drastically reduced.

  Then McRaven explained the ground option for the first time. His team had not yet fleshed out the mission completely. The one thing he could tell the president for sure was that if his team could be delivered to the compound, they could clear it and kill or capture bin Laden with minimal loss of life. The admiral delivered this opinion with the kind of confidence that can come only with long experience. He wasn’t trying to sell it. He had been in these meetings back in the early years after 9/11, and he had seen how various factions or branches or agencies had worked to sell their approach to the president. This was not like that. He was surprised, given the importance of this mission and the risks it entailed, that the discussions were not more rancorous. Panetta and Brennan had set the tone from the beginning. In every meeting he had attended, options were laid on the table and discussed, pro and con. McRaven had told his aide on the project: “We may end up doing this thing, we may not. In the end we’re going to do what’s best for the country. If it’s dropping one bomb on the compound, then that’s what we’re going to do.” So he presented the still-sketchy ground operation as a simple statement of fact. Without bringing any more people into the planning loop, he said, “I can tell you that we can succeed on the raid. What I can’t tell you yet is how I get in and how I get out. To do that requires detailed planning by air planners who do this for a living and assess the air defense capabilities of that country and who can plot and route how we would get in and how we would get out and what obstacles we would face getting in and getting out.

  “So I am not recommending a raid,” he told the president. “I am telling you that if I could get in, we could execute a raid. Getting out might be a little sporty. I can’t recommend a raid until I do the homework.”

  Even if he had done the homework, the admiral felt no need to push for the raid. He believed everyone in the room would come to that conclusion on his or her own. The facts would steer them to it. He also believed the president would not let this opportunity slip. The bombing option was too loud and messy, too many innocents would be killed, and in the end you would not have any way to prove you had killed bin Laden. After a strike like that, with the big smoking hole in Abbottabad, Pakistan would be understandably furious. There would be no chance that an American team would get the chance to sift patiently through the rubble looking for DNA. Actually getting bin Laden was the only thing that would make the blowback from Pakistan worth it. But you would have to be able to show that’s what you had done. Nothing would accomplish that short of having his corpse or living person in custody. Only that would eliminate any mystery about why you had done it. The risks were greater whenever you sent men in on the ground, but his men were more than capable, and he knew Obama knew it. He had also learned that this president was not unduly risk averse. He had been favorably impressed over the previous two years. Obama had made the final call on almost every major mission JSOC had undertaken in that time, and he was not timid. He would always listen without tipping his thoughts to discussions of the military and political risks, then he would retreat for a time, a few hours or until the next morning, and would generally come back to say, “I gotta go do it.” The only time he said no was when the risks were prohibitively high. Understanding that the president had a broader range of responsibilities than he had as a military commander, McRaven had come to trust Obama’s judgment. The president counted the real risks for the men on the ground more heavily than the political risks, which is what any military officer wants from the commander in chief. In a few cases where even McRaven’s superiors had advised waiting—had said, “It’s a little too risky”—it was the president who had come back to say, “No, okay, let’s go do it.” So the admiral did not voice his own thoughts about which way to go. There was no need.

  Panetta had another thought about the raid option. If bin Laden was not in the compound, the SEALs might be able to depart without creating a major disturbance. The people living there and the neighbors would have a story to tell, for sure, but because the mission was conceived as CIA covert action, the United States could simply deny it. Such a denial would hardly fool the Pakistani government, but it would make the thing less of a poke in the eye. Deniability pushed the mission into the gray area that had sustained secret American operations in Waziristan for years.

  When the meeting ended, Obama asked the air force to work on developing a more surgical strike, and also some “targeted stand-off options,” which meant missiles or, more likely, drones. But the president also wanted a fuller picture of what a ground raid would look like. Could they deliver the force without setting off alarms? Could they get in and out without the need for going to war with Pakistan’s air defenses?

  “Sir, it’s just me and one other guy right now and this concept that we’ve got to come up with,” said McRaven. “I can’t tell you whether or not this will work. I can’t tell you until I pull the team together and we
do the rehearsals, and then I can get back to you.”

  So McRaven was sent off to do his homework.

  This meant running what he called “all the trap lines.” There were a lot of variables. The Abbottabad compound was relatively large at thirty-eight thousand square feet. Bigger meant more people. On a normal-sized compound in Afghanistan, McRaven was used to sending in seventy men. You had to be able to strongpoint the perimeter and every door and window. There was a three-story house and an outbuilding. So you had to get the right force there. You had to get them there without being detected. It was a long way in and a long way out, so you had to be able to refuel before flying back, which meant a staging area somewhere outside the city where you could set down larger choppers carrying fuel and a quick reaction force. The helicopters all had their specifications, depending on altitude and temperature and other factors, so you had to figure out how many men they could carry. At the end of the day it was all about load. Pounds cut into airtime. The more choppers you used, the larger your presence and the greater the likelihood of being discovered, or of mechanical or pilot malfunction—ghosts of Desert One. He wouldn’t have the final calculations until they started rehearsing, but he could tell right away that they were going to have to go in heavier and with fewer men than he would like.