The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden Read online

  Nobody had been happy with the line in a pre-speech review at Obama’s Washington headquarters. Present were Robert Gibbs, Susan Rice, Jeh Johnson, Rand Beers, and Richard Clarke, the campaign’s premier consultant on security matters.

  “Look, that is not how you talk about these things,” said Clarke. He explained the importance of working with the tribes in Pakistan’s northwest territories.

  But the candidate was resolute. He wanted the line in. It said exactly what he thought, and what he planned to do as president. I do not oppose all wars. He was going to go after the real threat. So the discussion focused on the wording. Two caveats were added: “If we have actionable intelligence” and “high-value targets.” This was to make it clear that Obama was talking about acting only in an exceptional circumstance, and only in a specific, limited way.

  No matter. The careful phrasing was ignored. Obama had covered a lot of ground in the speech, reiterating his plan to get troops out of Iraq, pledging to reinvest in the effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and promising to give a major speech somewhere in the Middle East, within his first hundred days as president, to redefine the U.S. mission for that region. He also promised to close the prison at Guantánamo and to end Bush-era programs that “tracked” American citizens. But the line about going after targets in Pakistan got nearly all of the press. There was heat from every quarter.

  Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times reported that Obama had “vowed to dispatch American soldiers to eradicate terrorist camps” in Pakistan.

  The subhead on the story in the Los Angeles Times said, “He says he’d reserve the right to invade,” and reporter Paul Richter wrote, “Senator Barack Obama said Wednesday that the United States should reserve the right to invade the territory of its Pakistani allies and withdraw U.S. financial aid if it believed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was failing to do enough to stop terrorists.”

  Liberals accused Obama of embracing the Bush administration’s cowboy mentality. Conservatives faulted Obama for a supposed lack of sophistication: Didn’t he understand the delicacy of our relationship with Pakistan? Even if that was his plan, didn’t he understand that you don’t talk about things like this?

  Liberal blogger Jerome Armstrong was disappointed. “For progressive Democrats who want a more peaceful leadership in the world . . . [Obama’s speech] fails the threshold of getting us out of picking fights in the Mideast, and discarding the Bush doctrine of preemptive attacks.”

  Conservative columnist William Kristol wrote that Obama was “frantically suggesting that he would invade Pakistan” in order to shore up his tough-guy credentials against Hillary Clinton.

  On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh mocked Obama. He noted that Osama bin Laden had been exhorting his followers to overthrow Musharraf, and now Obama—“I get these guys confused,” he said—had threatened to “invade Pakistan.” Limbaugh added, “Poor Musharraf is going to get it on both ends if Obama is elected.”

  “It’s a very irresponsible statement, that’s all I can say,” said Pakistan’s foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri. “As the election campaign in America is heating up we would not like American candidates to fight their elections and contest elections at our expense.” Kasuri said that President Bush had called to privately reassure Musharraf, terming Obama’s comments “unsavory” and prompted by political considerations “in an environment of electioneering.”

  “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to attack an ally of ours,” said former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who was then a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. “I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort.” He said, U.S. troops “shouldn’t be sent all over the world,” and called the comments “ill-timed” and “ill-considered.”

  Again, some in Obama’s camp wanted the candidate to issue an explanation, but once again he refused. He had meant what he said. Obama told his staff that their public posture on the comment should be to shoot down any talk of an “invasion,” but to stand behind his willingness to act unilaterally in Pakistan if the right occasion presented itself.

  “I am not going to be lectured about foreign policy by the same people who were responsible for this catastrophic war in Iraq,” he maintained, in response to some of the criticism. It illustrated, he said, his willingness to “think outside the box.” The campaign released a memo by Power, reiterating the candidate’s promise: “Conventional wisdom would have us defer to Musharraf in perpetuity. Barack Obama wants to turn the page. If Musharraf is willing to go after the terrorists and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a base of operations, Obama would give him all of the support he needs. But Obama made clear that as president, if he had actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan—and the Pakistanis continued to refuse to act against terrorists known to be behind attacks on American civilians—then he will use highly targeted force to do so.”

  Despite this effort to explain, the supposed call to “invade” Pakistan quickly entered campaign lore . . . and evolved. Obama’s eventual Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, would claim that Obama had threatened to “bomb” Pakistan.

  “The best idea is to not broadcast what you’re going to do,” McCain said the following February. “That’s naive. The first thing that you do is you make your plans and you carry out your operations as necessary for America’s national security interest. You don’t broadcast that you are going to bomb a country that is a sovereign nation and where you are dependent on the goodwill of the people of that country to help you in the war—in the struggle against the Taliban and the sanctuaries which they hold.”

  So in 2007 and early 2008, on the question of going after Osama bin Laden, Obama’s call for direct, unilateral action was roundly condemned. It remained his plan, however, and as soon as he was elected he acted on it. As Obama settled into the job, his determination to pursue al Qaeda’s leadership was plain. If bin Laden had empowered himself, or had felt chosen by God, Obama had been elected. He had sought and had been chosen by the people of the United States to make these life-and-death decisions.

  The new president immediately began shifting resources from Iraq, where he was determined to systematically draw down U.S. involvement, to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Large numbers of drones began leaving Iraq and flying missions over the steep mountains of eastern Afghanistan and the lawless regions of northwest Pakistan. The Joint Special Operations Command, which had been operating out of Balad Air Base, in Iraq, relocated in the summer of 2009 to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, beefing up bandwidth at the new encampment to retain links between intelligence computers and analysts in Washington. And as we have seen, the number of drone attacks spiked. America’s relationship with Pakistan grew more troubled.

  When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October of 2009, just as he was deciding to send thirty thousand more American troops to Afghanistan, Obama had a chance to fully articulate once more his thinking about war.

  Again Rhodes was pressed into service. This time Obama presented him with a handwritten first draft, which had three quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian who argued strongly for the necessity of war and who rejected pacifism as a sure prescription for tyranny. The emergence of fascism in Germany and Japan, and communism in Russia, had prompted Niebuhr to famously renounce his lifelong pacifism. That movement had enjoyed a resurgence after World War I, with its seemingly senseless slaughter of millions. Now, with the world teetering on the brink of an even larger catastrophe, pacifists, who included a good many Christian thinkers in Europe and America, argued that if enough people refused to serve in armies, states would be unable to wage war ever again. Niebuhr did not believe it. The passages Obama quoted were from Niebuhr’s 1939 essay, “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” in which the theologian argues, “If we believe that if Britain had only been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent of conscientious o
bjectors to military service, Hitler’s heart would have been softened and he would not have dared to attack Poland, we hold a faith, which no historical reality justifies.” Niebuhr believed that just as men were imperfect, so, too, were states, and just as men must struggle to defeat evil in themselves, they must also struggle to defeat evil at large.

  Obama had pronounced his willingness to “take up arms” years earlier. Now, armed with more military power than anyone in any other country, he was not just prepared to use it, he felt morally obligated to do so. Just as he had done before the antiwar audience in Chicago seven years earlier, he would use this pacifist platform to argue his belief in the moral use of violence. The Nobel Peace Prize itself had grown out of the same pacifist movement Niebuhr turned against in 1939. It was one of the award categories established by Alfred Nobel at the behest of his friend Bertha von Suttner, a well-known nineteenth-century Austrian novelist, pacifist, and eventual peace prize recipient. So it is not surprising that Obama looked back to Niebuhr’s arguments as he prepared to accept the prize himself in Oslo.

  His speech there was a brief lecture on the necessity of war, and a tribute to the use of force—American force above all—as the only practical means of achieving the peace prize committee’s high ideals. He saluted two of the twentieth century’s most famous practitioners of nonviolence, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi, but said, “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have stopped Hitler’s armies. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

  Evil does exist in the world. As president, Barack Obama had been given an opportunity to take up arms against the enemies of the United States in a more direct way than had any previous holder of that office. He welcomed it. He did everything he could to push the matter. The CIA had long called whoever was in the White House the “First Customer,” and on this issue there was no confusion about what the customer most wanted.

  High in his seventh-floor office at Langley, overlooking the Potomac, Michael Morell had felt the same way for a long time. In his climb to the post of deputy director, he had run the agency’s analysis division, and he knew that, despite their lack of success, they had never lost the sense of urgency. He still remembered flying around with President Bush on 9/11, the uncertainty and fear in the country, the way he had felt looking in on his daughters sleeping when he finally returned home. Even with two wars to fight, there had never been a want of manpower or of resources for finding bin Laden.

  Still, he felt, Obama’s push might have some effect. Morell’s new boss, Panetta, for one, was now demanding those regular progress reports: at least one a month. In any large organization a demand for progress reports has an effect. No one wants to file a progress report showing no progress.

  4

  The Targeting Engine

  There had been times, off and on, when the United States government knew where Osama bin Laden was. The CIA had been interested in him since 1991, after he moved from Afghanistan to the Sudan. Almost everywhere the agency looked in the expanding Sunni extremist world, his name came up. Not as a commander but as the go-to person for false documents, money, training, weapons, or chemicals that could be made into bombs. In December 1995, the agency created a small bin Laden unit, headed by Michael Scheuer.

  A burly, confident man with a full beard and glasses who speaks with a flat Midwestern accent, Scheuer was less inclined than many in the CIA hierarchy to swallow his own opinions. He had not been a typical CIA recruit. A Buffalo native, he had worked as a rigger for Union Carbide while earning two master’s degrees and then a PhD at the University of Manitoba, in Canada. He believed his bin Laden unit was the first ever established to hunt down an individual, and as the effort matured—as he learned more and more about bin Laden—he grew increasingly convinced of the danger al Qaeda posed for the United States. In time, his assessment of that danger outpaced his superiors’. His small group worked out of an office in a business center just a short drive from the main CIA campus at Langley. Scheuer named the office after his son Alec: “ALEC Station.”

  The best weapon they had for gathering intelligence at that point was rendition, the practice of arresting a suspect and turning him over to authorities in another country for interrogation. The practice enabled the agency to at least technically abide by rules against torture. The CIA obtained assurances that captives would not be abused, which some foreign governments likely honored more diligently than others. At that point the agency did not have the option of killing suspected senior terrorists: they had to be arrested and held somewhere. Rendition enabled the Clinton administration to avoid the legal difficulties of placing them in U.S. custody. As Scheuer would remember it, this was not so much a matter of explicit policy as it was policy by default. He would seek guidance from the White House about what to do with a target, and the answer would come back, “That’s your problem.” The problem was solved by willing governments in East Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East.

  Rendition did not, as it happens, produce the first big breakthrough for ALEC Station. That came in September 1996, when a Sudanese militant named Jamal al-Fadl, a former close associate of bin Laden’s, turned up at the U.S. embassy in Eritrea offering to tell everything he knew about al Qaeda. He was flown to the United States and placed in the federal witness-protection program. He provided the first trove of fresh information about bin Laden and his organization—about its personalities, structure, and planned operations. His relevations ratcheted up interest in the group, which was clearly willing and able to launch major terror attacks.

  By 1999, ALEC Station employed twenty-seven people, many of them women. They ran an unorthodox CIA office, very informal. People dressed casually. Because it maintained informants and contacts worldwide, the office was open twenty-four hours a day. Everyone worked long hours so few formalities of office life took hold. Scheuer would nap every afternoon in his office. As their sense of the threat posed by al Qaeda grew, so did their sense of mission. Some in the office, like Scheuer, passed up offers for promotions in order to stay with the work. Marriages broke up. The place had a cultish feel. Because Scheuer presided over so many dedicated women officers, some started calling his group “the Manson family.”

  They couldn’t get bin Laden arrested in the Sudan, so they came up with a plan to harass him. He had a number of large projects under way there—road building, agricultural programs, and businesses. He was also actively underwriting terror attacks throughout the region. So ALEC Station proposed sabotaging his construction equipment. They wanted to spike engines with slurry that would force them to seize up. When the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was briefed on the plan, one member objected: “If you do that, won’t you be putting some Sudanese farmer out of work?” The project was scrapped.

  Not long afterward, when the attempted assassination of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was linked to al Qaeda, the Sudan was pressured by states in the region to expel bin Laden. He relocated to Afghanistan, where he declared his war on the United States. This move pleased ALEC Station, because the NSA could now listen in on phone conversations in Afghanistan; there was also an enormous archive of overhead imagery left over from the mujahidin–Soviet wars, and the CIA had many friendly contacts in that country. In 1997, Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, invited bin Laden to live in Kandahar, at an experimental agricultural station called Tarnak Farms, south of the city. This was an area where the agency had an especially rich network of spies, a group it called “Tripoints.”

  For once they could watch bin Laden closely and listen to him and his people. Lacking the authority to kill him, Scheuer’s group laid plans to kidnap him—that would have been in May or June of 1998, several months before the embassy bombings in East Africa. They intended to hold him in a remote mountainous a
rea for interrogation and then fly him to an Arab state for imprisonment (unless the United States decided to prosecute him directly). They fleshed out a raid in detail, a snatch-and-grab mission inside Afghanistan employing a special ops team delivered by helicopter. But when the plan was run up the chain it was vetoed as too risky. American forces might get killed, and because bin Laden lived with his wives and children, some of the children might be harmed. Scheuer recalled being mystified by the decision. He asked, “How much more of a threat do you need before you finally do something?”

  When Director George Tenet paid a visit to ALEC Station not long afterward, one of the women on Scheuer’s staff confronted him angrily: “You and the White House are going to get thousands of Americans killed.”

  Tenet told them that he understood their anger, but that it would subside. By now the group’s growing sense of urgency, coupled with its cultish image and high number of female staffers, had begun to work against it. They were seen as overly emotional and alarmist. Tenet’s response reflected this subtle prejudice and rankled ALEC Station still further.

  “You will all think clearer in a couple of days,” he said.

  In August, after the embassy bombings, Scheuer recalls being asked if the plan to kidnap bin Laden could still be pursued. The answer was no. Bin Laden knew that the chances of America taking action would grow after those attacks. He had gone into hiding. They had missed the chance.