In 2009, when I was serving as the third-ranking official at CIA, the Agency hosted a visit from Kevin Bacon. That’s right. That Kevin Bacon. He was in DC playing in a band, and our Office of Public Affairs invited him. So I hosted him for a thirty-minute courtesy call. The discussion was wide-ranging and turned at one point to six degrees of separation. Bacon jokingly said, “I’ll bet there are even six degrees of separation between Usama bin Ladin and me.” Without missing a beat, our most senior operations officer, who I had invited to the meeting, replied, “Since you walked into this room, the degrees of separation between you and Bin Ladin became a lot less than six.”
* * *
When he slipped away from us in Tora Bora, Bin Ladin virtually disappeared. There were lots of rumors, and occasional “sightings,” but we had virtually no intelligence on where he was or what he was up to because his operational security was that good. Some observers speculated that he might be dead. Our view, based on little evidence, was that he was alive, probably living somewhere in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan—still the ideological leader, but not the day-to-day operational leader of al Qa‘ida. We assessed that day-to-day management had passed to Bin Ladin’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
We were mostly on our own in the hunt for Bin Ladin. For their part, the Pakistanis and the Afghans pointed fingers only at each other—with the Pakistanis saying with certainty that he was in Afghanistan, not Pakistan, and with the Afghans saying he was in Pakistan. I cannot remember a single time when either country brought us a lead on Bin Ladin.
At CIA we could not afford to fixate on Bin Ladin alone—pursuing him as if he were some white whale. The evil that he’d spawned was metastasizing and causing undeniable threats to the United States and our allies around the world. But Bin Ladin remained the primary target because he was the named leader of the group and was such a powerful motivator of jihad both in South Asia and around the world. I never despaired about getting him, but it was enormously frustrating to have so little information with which to work. It was also frustrating to have to regularly answer the question “So why haven’t you caught Bin Ladin?” from Congress, the White House, and the media. One of our senior operational officers came to answer that question with a sarcastic quip that was nonetheless true. He said, “Because he is HIDING!” My answer to this question was that it was hard, and I would go on to note that it had taken the FBI seventeen years to find the Unabomber and seven years to find Eric Rudolph, the bomber at the Atlanta Olympics, and that these guys had been hiding in the United States, on the FBI’s own turf, not on the other side of the planet in someone else’s country.
Jose Rodriguez, the now-retired former director of our Counterterrorism Center and former head of all clandestine operations at CIA, told me that he’d once gotten so tired of answering the question about why we had not yet caught Bin Ladin that he swore he would say “Fuck you!” to the very next person who asked. That evening at home, over dinner, Rodriguez’s wife Patti innocently asked, “So why haven’t you guys got Bin Ladin yet?” Rodriguez did not tell me how he’d answered.
We had a very systematic approach to trying to locate Bin Ladin. We devoted extensive effort to learning about and locating his far-flung family. That approach never bore fruit. Another thread was to focus on his public utterances. Periodically Bin Ladin would issue an audio statement—and on rare occasions he would release a video. Agency analysts seized on those occasions to study technical details, images, background, and the like—trying to identify anything that might suggest even a general location for Bin Ladin. We tried to reverse engineer how the messages had gotten from Bin Ladin to the media outlets that broadcast them—to see if we could backtrack to their originator. Despite the great expenditure of resources, particularly in terms of analysts’ time, this approach did not produce dividends either.
The other path we pursued was figuring out how he was communicating with his immediate subordinates and then using that link to find him. We assumed that Bin Ladin was too savvy to use modern technology to communicate and instead was relying on couriers to stay in touch with his terrorist organization. Starting in 2002, we learned from detainees of a person who had worked with Bin Ladin prior to 9/11 and who had worked for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) after 9/11. One detainee told our officers that this individual served as a courier for messages to and from Bin Ladin. Another detainee speculated that he was the sort of person who could be living with Bin Ladin. The guy’s nom de guerre—his Arab nickname—was “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.”
What particularly caught our interest was the reactions of the two most senior al Qa‘ida detainees in our custody—KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libi. By the time we asked them about Abu Ahmed, both were cooperating with us, answering our questions in great detail. Regarding Abu Ahmed, however, KSM said he remembered him but he denied that Abu Ahmed was Bin Ladin’s courier and he said that Abu Ahmed had left al Qa‘ida after 9/11—statements inconsistent with what the other detainees had told us. And Abu Faraj insisted that he did not know Abu Ahmed and indeed had never even heard of him—again directly contradicting what others had told us about a close relationship between the two. The coup de grace occurred when KSM returned to his cell after the questioning and communicated to other prisoners that they should not mention anything about “the courier.” Both KSM and Abu Faraj, who had given us information extremely damaging to al Qa‘ida, were going out of their way to protect Abu Ahmed. Our interest in the courier was now sky-high.
It took us several years to learn Abu Ahmed’s true name and several more years to find his general location—somewhere in Pakistan. We did this by employing the capabilities of CIA to recruit human sources and of the NSA to collect communications. It was a team effort. Then our challenge was to pinpoint his location, put eyes on him, and surveil him until he took us to the next lead. At that point we didn’t know if he was the courier—the individual with direct access to Bin Ladin—or merely a courier who would only lead to other couriers. But we hoped that if we could find where he lived he would in some way lead us to his boss.
* * *
During one of the thrice-weekly CT sessions in August 2010, senior CTC officials told Director Panetta and me that they needed to talk privately to us after the main meeting. They had something to report. This was not an unusual event, as CTC often had something sensitive to tell us. We called it “going small.” But “going small” on this particular day was the most significant such meeting I ever attended.
“We have found a guy we know as Abu Ahmed,” CTC told us. They said, “He is living in the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan,” and explained that his residence was within a stone’s throw of the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. They told us the history of Abu Ahmed and the history behind the lead. They told us that Abu Ahmed was living in Abbottabad along with his brother, Abrar. They said they did not know for certain that Abu Ahmed was a courier for Bin Ladin, but the fact that he and his brother were practicing extraordinary operational security—for example, powering up and using their cell phones only when they were miles from Abbottabad—made them of great interest.
The CTC briefers handed out satellite photos of the place where the brothers were living. It was a compound with walls twelve to eighteen feet high and topped with barbed wire. The facility had internal walls that seemed to segment the compound, and the main house had a strange lack of windows. Most unusual was that there was an outdoor terrace off the third floor, surrounded by a privacy wall. “Who puts a privacy wall around a patio?” Panetta asked. “Isn’t the whole purpose of a terrace to see out?” “Exactly,” said one of the analysts.
Interestingly, no one in the meeting said what was obviously on all our minds—that there was a chance Bin Ladin might be behind the privacy wall. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I struggled to not let my optimism get out of hand. Panetta told CTC what it already knew—that we needed to know a lot more about “AC1,” the Agency’s designation for Abu Ahmed’s Abbottabad compound, and its occupants.
Over the next few weeks CTC briefed the director and me on additional information on the compound. CTC learned that the brothers had paid a great deal of money for the property but had no visible means of income. It learned that the compound, larger and more valuable than any other home in the area, had no telephone line or Internet connection. It learned that the two brothers were residing in Abbottabad under aliases and that their wives were lying to their own extended families about where they lived. Another piece to the puzzle was that the residents of the compound burned all their trash rather than putting it out for collection like everyone else in the neighborhood. And it was discovered that none of the multiple children living in the compound were attending school, unlike the other children in what was an upscale neighborhood of Pakistan. All of this was suspicious but did not prove anything.
We took all this information to the White House. We started with John Brennan, my friend and fellow career CIA officer. Brennan instantly grasped the significance of the intelligence and he had us give the same briefing to the national security advisor, General Jim Jones, and his deputy, Tom Donilon. They in turn asked us to brief President Obama. All the briefings were held in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.
The briefing of the president—on September 21—walked the commander in chief through the history of our interest in couriers, from the information obtained years before from al Qa‘ida detainees up to the latest intelligence on what we could observe at the compound and what we had learned about it. We told the president that there seemed to be one or two men at the compound aside from the brothers, and we highlighted the possibility that Abu Ahmed and his brother could be harboring Bin Ladin. The president gave us two orders. First, he told us that he wanted more information on the compound. And second, he told us to not brief anyone else on what we had already found. I did not hear the president order such strict security about any other issue during my time working with him.
* * *
I admired the president. He was brilliant and deeply attentive in any substantive meeting. I thought he quickly got to the heart of an issue and asked the right questions. The president, however, would sometimes take too long to make a decision (just the opposite of President Bush)—a result, I believe, of his strong desire to get all questions answered before moving forward.
At the same time, the president also had a way of making decisions that satisfied competing factions among his national security team. His decision on Libya—although unfortunately described as “leading from behind”—was an example of this. In a National Security Council meeting to discuss the issue, half of the national security team made clear that it was decidedly against any military intervention in Libya—we were already providing humanitarian support and had placed sanctions on the Libyan regime. This group argued that while Qadhafi’s actions against his own people were deplorable, there was no strategic interest on the part of the United States in intervening. The other half of the team felt just as strongly, arguing that we had a moral responsibility to go all in, including by putting US troops on the ground, if necessary, to stop Qadhafi from murdering huge numbers of his own people, which was what he was doing and what he was planning to do in order to save his regime.
In NSC meetings the president would typically listen to his advisors and ask questions, but not make a decision in the room, preferring to think over the matter and discuss it with his closest aides. But the Libya decision was different. He made it on the spot. His decision to support the moderate Arab states and the Europeans in declaring a no-fly zone and ultimately in attacking from the air the Libyan regime’s military units targeting civilians—but to do so only with capabilities that others did not have—satisfied everyone in the room. When he made the decision, I leaned over to Denis McDonough and whispered, “So that’s why he is the president of the United States.”
I also found the president personally engaging—in contrast to the media portrayal of him as aloof. I think this dichotomy exists because the president is different in large groups from how he is in small ones. He is quiet in large groups, but his personality shines through much more in smaller settings. When the president asked me to come to the Oval Office on a cold January day in 2013—to tell me that he had chosen John Brennan to be the next director of CIA—he could not have been more gracious. In a great irony, John and I had recommended each other to the president, and now, in the Oval Office, I asked the president if something like that had ever happened to him before. He said, “Not in this town, pal.” He did ask me what other job I might be interested in, as he said he did not want to lose me. I jokingly said, “I always wanted to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.” He laughed. I felt comfortable with our forty-fourth commander in chief.
* * *
At CIA you become accustomed to handling tightly compartmented information—but no secret in my thirty-three years of work at the Agency was more tightly controlled than the knowledge that we might have found Bin Ladin. The White House made the secretary of state aware of the intelligence only several weeks before the raid, as the discussions on whether to go forward moved into full stride. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center was told just a couple of weeks before the raid, as we needed to start thinking about possible retaliation by al Qa‘ida. The attorney general, the FBI director, and the secretary of homeland security learned of it only a day or two beforehand.
In the weeks and months following the initial briefing of the president there were many follow-up meetings at the White House. The security was extraordinary. Brennan scheduled the meetings and made sure that their purpose did not leak. On the official NSC calendar they were listed as “Mickey Mouse meetings.” Each time we met, the security cameras inside the Situation Room were turned off. When staff entered the room to bring a beverage to the president, everyone stopped talking.
Even within CIA we kept the secret extremely close. I delegated the authority to “read in” people to the operation to the head of the Counterterrorism Center because I knew he would not abuse the authority. In fact, I knew he would be even more careful than I. When our counterterrorism analysts wanted a written briefing on everything that could be learned about the city of Abbottabad, they turned to the Open Source Center—a part of CIA that mines public sources for information important to national security. But instead of asking for research only on Abbottabad, they asked for research on a number of Pakistani cities. Like Bin Ladin himself, our analysts hunting Bin Ladin were hiding in plain sight.
Our congressional oversight committees were another story. Without the White House’s knowledge, Panetta had been keeping the leadership of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee aware of the big picture. Panetta did not ask for permission from the White House because he knew the answer would be no. I told Panetta that I supported his decision. At one of the White House sessions, as the raid was nearing, Tom Donilon suggested that CIA might want to bring the leadership of the intelligence committees into the loop. Panetta said that he had done that from the beginning. Donilon was not pleased, but it went miles in keeping Panetta’s and my relationships with our committees strong. And nothing leaked from these briefings.
* * *
Given the president’s order to learn more about the compound, we ramped up our brainstorming about ways to get more information on who and what was hidden behind the walls of AC1. After a couple of weeks, Panetta was getting impatient with the lack of good ideas, and he began to drive the folks in CTC nuts with his own ideas—and there were many of them. He asked, “Can we tap into the sewage pipes leading from the compound and do DNA testing on the outflow?” There were a few trees just outside the compound and he asked about sending assets out to climb the trees and plant surveillance cameras. (Apparently he was not the only one to think of that because a short time later Abu Ahmed and his brother were seen outside the compound chopping down the perfectly good trees.)
At a meeting in his office on November 5, Panetta pushed hard for more collection on the compound. He demanded that a list of ten proposals be delivered to him and me in just a few days. Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, went even further, telling CTC to put everything it could think of—whether operationally feasible or not—on a piece of paper to satisfy the boss. CTC did exactly that, producing a matrix of thirty-eight ideas. The “Chart of 38,” as it was called, went on for a number of pages. It worked—it satiated the director.
Some collection efforts paid off, and in the fall of 2010, we obtained two additional pieces of information, which strengthened the case that Bin Ladin might be at the compound in Abbottabad. First, we learned that a third family was living in the compound—and that the size of that family was the size we believed Bin Ladin’s would be at this point in his life. We learned that no members of this third family ever left the compound and that none of the neighbors were even aware of their existence. CTC analysts thought it noteworthy that although the compound was owned by Abu Ahmed and his brother, the third family was living on the top two floors of the main house—the best quarters. This was another one of the many interesting data points our analysts weighed.
Second, we learned that Abu Ahmed was still in the game—still working for al Qa‘ida. This information was a critical piece of the puzzle. It eliminated one possibility we’d feared—that Abu Ahmed was only a “former terrorist” and was no longer working for al Qa‘ida. I am not at liberty to explain exactly how we obtained these two critical nuggets of information, but I can assure you it was spycraft at its best.
The new information was briefed to the president on December 10, 2010, and this time he asked us to start thinking about “finish options” or “CONOPs”—“concepts of operation”—for how the United States should go after Bin Ladin if the president decided to act. Initially he told us not to involve the military in our planning, although Panetta and I did brief the leadership of the Defense Department—Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, Vice Chairman Hoss Cartwright, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers. (The main purpose in telling our colleagues was to give them a heads up because we knew we would be coming to them for help at some point, but doing so also meant that Mike Vickers was able to help us with our initial thinking about options.) Within CTC and the Agency’s Special Activities Division (SAD)—CIA’s paramilitary wing—planning began for various types of action.
On January 24, 2011, the president asked that we bring the military into the discussion. On the recommendation of Panetta and me, he decided that we would turn to Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Nearly every night in Afghanistan, military special operators carried out raids like the one we were considering.
Within days McRaven, accompanied by Mike Vickers, visited the Agency, where he was read into the operation in my office. He took the information on board, did not express any emotion—besides saying, “Great work”—and said he would send two of his best planners to the Agency to assist our folks. They were there in only two days. Soon thereafter McRaven came back to me with a request to bring in some air planners, since a heliborne ground raid would require air assets. I said yes. I also said yes to a DOD request for Air Force planners to look at an air strike option. This was all necessary, but I was getting uneasy as the circle of knowledge expanded.
Agency officers and JSOC military planners began to put together a set of options for the president to consider. They included a stealth air strike, a ground raid with troops inserted via helicopter, a ground raid with troops infiltrating the site via clandestine means, and more. Consideration was given to simply asking the Pakistanis to conduct the raid themselves, and to carrying out a “compel operation” in which we would tell the Pakistanis, “We are raiding this compound tonight, we’d like you to go with us.” The Pakistanis—or any of our other allies—were not aware of our interest in the Abbottabad compound.
Each of the plans had its drawbacks. The air strike, for example, would result in the deaths of women and children at the compound, the deaths of a family in a small compound directly across the street, and (almost certainly) additional collateral damage to nearby residents because some of the weapons would undoubtedly have missed their target. (It would have been necessary to use a large number of weapons, including “bunker buster” bombs, in case the compound had underground chambers or tunnels.) Additionally, there would be no opportunity to gather intelligence from documents, material, and people found on scene or verify with absolute certainty that we’d actually gotten Bin Ladin.
A ground operation with the troops inserted clandestinely had the disadvantage of requiring that the strike team sneak into Pakistan and quite likely have to fight its way out. The probability of dead or captured Americans was high. A ground operation with the troops inserted via helicopter carried the risk of death or injury to US soldiers as well as that of detection by the Pakistani military long before the helicopters ever got to Abbottabad.
Any option that involved the Pakistanis carried the downside that the occupants of the compound might be tipped off and escape. We were not concerned that it would have been official Pakistani policy to tip off Bin Ladin, but there would have been so many people involved on the Pakistani side that there could have been a leak, or an al Qa‘ida sympathizer within the government or the military could have taken action to protect Bin Ladin—which in my view is how Bin Ladin avoided the US cruise missile strike in the aftermath of the embassy bombings in East Africa.
We began planning for a major briefing of the president. Donilon, by now promoted to national security advisor, not surprisingly wanted to be briefed first, and he set the date for March 4. Panetta and I wanted to do a dry run before we saw Donilon, so on the evening of February 25, along with our country’s top military leaders, we met in Director Panetta’s conference room to go over the briefing—a briefing that would cover the entire intelligence story and the options that had been developed. But this time we had something new. NGA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—those talented officers who analyze satellite imagery—had produced a scale model of the entire compound. About four feet by four feet, it was sitting on the conference table when Panetta and I walked into the room. It was incredibly accurate, even down to the placement of trees and bushes and the exact size and location of the animal pen.
The prep session went well, as did the briefing for Donilon. He started the meeting by asking how quickly we could put the various options in place, as the president was concerned that we were not moving fast enough. Donilon also gave instructions for the eventual briefing of the president, saying, “You will need to focus on why do we think this is Bin Ladin?” Donilon had some follow-up questions, which we answered in another meeting with him on March 10. He concluded that meeting by saying, “OK, let’s set up a briefing for the president.” The next day Donilon told us the date would be March 14.
In our discussion regarding the various finish options, Agency officers quite understandably favored an option that would place them in the middle of any operation. Having chased Bin Ladin for more than a decade, they wanted to be in on the endgame. It was understandable, but it was also crystal clear to Panetta and me that a ground operation had to be JSOC’s to carry out. After one meeting on the issue in his office, Leon said to me, “Let’s let the professionals do this.” What he meant was that JSOC had much more experience in such matters than did CIA—but his words did not go down well within our ranks. By the time word filtered down to lower levels of CTC and SAD, it had become garbled, and the impression was that I had made the comment—and was somehow disrespecting our own troops. While I fully agreed with Panetta’s decision, we could have done a better job of explaining it to our in-house warriors, for whom I have the utmost respect.
* * *
The session on March 14 was one of the most important meetings with a president that I ever attended. We covered two issues in depth—the intelligence picture and the options. On the intelligence, we provided the president with our bottom line that there was a “strong possibility Abu Ahmed was harboring Bin Ladin at the Abbottabad compound.” We emphasized that we did not have direct proof that Bin Ladin was there—just a strong circumstantial case.
Each of the finish options was discussed in detail. The president immediately took the Pakistani options off the table because of the risk of tipping off the targets. The president also rejected the ground assault whereby the team would be clandestinely inserted into Pakistan. It was just too complicated, and getting the team out of Pakistan after the mission would be extremely difficult. The meeting ended with only two options on the table—the air strike and the ground assault with the troops inserted via helicopter—and with the president making it clear that he wanted to move sooner rather than later. Although he never said it directly, many of us left the session with the sense that he was leaning toward the air strike.
We met again with the president on March 29. Obama, largely because of concerns about collateral damage, began by taking the stealth air strike off the table. He saw the heliborne ground assault as the best option for knowing whether Bin Ladin was there or not, for getting our hands on any intelligence at the site, and for minimizing the deaths of noncombatants. He asked Bill McRaven if he thought it would work. McRaven said, “Mr. President, I can’t look you in the eye and tell you yes until I exercise it. I’ll get back to you in two weeks.”
Because CIA had anticipated this very moment, we had built a full-scale mock-up of the Abbottabad compound. There McRaven brought together the team of Navy SEALs that he would use on the mission and they were briefed, for the first time, on the potential target. Going into the session, most of them had thought that they were going to be asked to conduct a raid to go after Muammar Qadhafi, who at the time was on the run in Libya. It was at our mock-up of the Abbottabad compound that they learned the true identity of their target. There, standing in front of the SEALs, our lead operations officer said, “This is not about Libya. We have found Usama bin Ladin, and you guys are going to go get him.” Although trying not to show emotion, the SEALs were psyched. Following exercises at our facility and a full dress rehearsal at a DOD facility, the SEALs were ready to go.
Although the SEALs belonged to the US military, the president made clear that if there was going to be an operation it would be CIA’s to lead. That was because the president wanted the operation to be covert. On the off chance that Bin Ladin was not there and the raid was not detected by the Pakistanis, the United States would try to keep the whole thing quiet, as if it had never happened. That meant that the chain of command for the operation went from the president of the United States to the director of CIA to the commander of JSOC. The secretary of defense was not in the chain of command for the operation. The JSOC personnel would be operationally assigned to the Agency to carry out the operation.
The pace of the meetings with the president now accelerated. Three were held in April. Mid-month, McRaven walked the president through the results of his team’s exercises, concluding, “We can do this.” McRaven recommended, if the raid were to be conducted, that it go down on the night of April 30. It would be pitch-black, and anyone wearing night vision goggles would have a huge advantage.
But there was a problem with the thirtieth. Someone mentioned that Saturday, April 30, was the night of the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—where the president was expected to speak. How would it look, they asked, if the president was at a black-tie dinner joking around with a bunch of reporters in the beautiful Hilton Hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., while a group of Americans were dying on a failed mission in Pakistan? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shot down that concern with a well-placed response. “Fuck the White House Correspondents’ dinner,” she said. “Heaven help us if we ever make an important operational decision like this based on some political event.”
But there was also a new option on the table—one that the joint planning team had never looked at in any detail. This option was suggested by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine general Hoss Cartwright, and it had to do with someone at the compound whom we at CIA called “the Pacer.” We were able to determine that there was a lone male person who regularly walked a path in an outdoor grove adjacent to the compound’s main house. Everyone assumed it was Bin Ladin, but we were unable to get close enough to establish his identity or even his height. Panetta asked the experts for an estimate of the Pacer’s height—Bin Ladin was well over six feet—and the answer unfortunately was “somewhere between five and seven feet.” That analysis did not advance the ball.
At one meeting Cartwright took the position that the mysterious man pacing in the compound was most likely UBL, and that we could use an unmanned aerial vehicle to take him out. CIA had heard through the grapevine that Cartwright might raise this idea and we were opposed, and I took aim to shoot it down. I noted, if Bin Ladin was at the compound, then Cartwright was almost certainly right about the identity of the Pacer. But I also noted that the United States had had a great deal of experience with UAV targeting in recent years—and that the attacks were not always successful. It all depended on the physics of an explosion. If Bin Ladin was at Abbottabad, we would get only one crack at him, I argued. The chances of our missing altogether or of Bin Ladin’s walking away from a strike were just too high.
Another issue was the potential response of the Pakistanis to the incursion into their territory. If the Pakistanis detected the heliborne raid early, or were able to respond to it faster than anyone anticipated, McRaven’s plan was for his men to hunker down at the compound while senior officials negotiated a resolution. At the very end of one meeting, the president gave McRaven one more directive. He told McRaven that he did not like that idea of McRaven’s troops rotting in a Pakistani jail for months as we tried to work out a diplomatic solution. No, the president said. “If you get put into that situation, you will fight your way out.” I thought it was exactly the right decision, and by the look on his face, I know McRaven thought it was the right decision as well.
* * *
Throughout the meetings in April, one of the issues that we discussed at length was the probability that Bin Ladin was at the compound. For weeks this issue came up at meetings. The lead analyst said she was 95 percent certain that Bin Ladin was there. The senior analytic manager—the one who did the briefings for the president—said he was at 80 percent. The CTC analysts were certainly aware of CIA’s failure regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—where the Agency had made an enormous mistake by accepting another circumstantial case. But they kept going back over the intelligence again and again, asking themselves, “What other explanation could there be?” Taking lessons from Iraq, they outlined possible alternative explanations in their briefings. None of them were as compelling as the Bin Ladin explanation. The chief of CTC went even further. He put together a “red team”—a small group of smart Agency analysts whom he trusted but who were not involved in the operation or the analysis in any way. They were asked to review everything and tell him if we were missing something—if there were other plausible explanations for the mystery of AC1. They did so, and although not quite as convinced as the CTC analysts, they also came down on the side of saying that UBL was likely there. They were at somewhat less than 80 percent but definitely over 50 percent. I myself was at 60 percent.
With estimates all over the lot, it was no wonder that the president was perplexed, and he asked Panetta why there was such a disparity in the probabilities. Leon deftly turned to me and said, “Michael, why don’t you handle that one?”
After gathering my thoughts for a few seconds, I explained to the president that the differences in the judgments about probability did not reflect any difference in what information people had; I assured him that everyone was working on the same set of data. Rather, I told him that the differences in judgments reflected individual experiences. Those at the higher end of the probability scale tended to be in CTC, and they had a confidence in their judgments borne of success over the past several years—plot after plot disrupted, senior al Qa‘ida leader after senior al Qa‘ida leader taken off the streets. Those at the lower end of the scale—including me—had been through intelligence failures and therefore had less confidence in analytic judgments, particularly circumstantial ones. In my case the failure of CIA’s prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction weighed on my mind. Indeed, I told him, “Mr. President, I believe the circumstantial case that Iraq had WMD in 2002 was stronger than the circumstantial case that Bin Ladin is in the Abbottabad compound.” I added, “Even if we had a source inside the compound and that source told us that Bin Ladin was there, I would not be at 95 percent, because sources lie and get things wrong all the time.”
Mike Vickers told me later that you could hear a pin drop in the room as I said that the Iraq case had been stronger. For his part, the president listened intently and clearly understood what I was saying. He followed up by asking, “So, Michael, if you are only at 60 percent, would you not do the raid?” “No, Mr. President,” I said. “Even at 60 percent, I would do the raid. Given the importance of who this is, the case is strong enough.” The president would later tell people that he’d personally put the odds of Bin Ladin’s being there at fifty-fifty.
* * *
The question of whether to conduct a raid was hotly debated by the handful of senior officials privy to the intelligence. Some people thought that the risks were too high. The vice president was unconvinced about the intelligence and concerned about what a failed mission would do to our relations with Pakistan. And Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, a career CIA officer and former CIA director, also said that he felt the intelligence was too weak and he thought the risks to US forces going in were too high. He noted that something almost always goes wrong in this kind of military operation. He repeatedly brought up the tragedy of “Desert One,” the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt during the Carter administration. He told us how he had sat around a conference table in that same Situation Room thirty years before as that tragedy played out. The secretary’s view was that if we took action, we should go the UAV route. Hoss Cartwright was also opposed to the raid, seeing the UAV option as a better choice as well.
Beyond those three, however, the national security team came down on the side of going ahead. But even as the consensus seemed to be building to conduct a strike, there was a school of thought that advocated waiting until we had more definitive intelligence. Panetta and I responded with three points: (1) there was no guarantee that more time would deliver more intelligence; (2) the number of people who were aware of the intelligence reporting and analysis was growing and a leak could happen at any moment, thereby tipping off Bin Ladin; and (3) even without receiving some warning, there was nothing to say that Bin Ladin might not decide it was time to pull up stakes and move somewhere else, as we did not know whether this was a long-term or a short-term residence for the al Qa‘ida leader. Without round-the-clock surveillance, which was simply not available, either of the latter two scenarios would force us to start all over again.
Panetta made perhaps the strongest argument—something that everyone knew but was unwilling to say. Stepping out of his role as a provider of intelligence only and not advocating policy, Panetta said at one meeting that “I’ve always operated by a simple test—what would the American people say?” He added, “There is no doubt in my mind that if they knew what we know—even with the range of confidence levels we have—that they would want us to go after the man responsible for all those deaths on 9/11.” It was a powerful argument.
There was a final Mickey Mouse meeting in the Situation Room, where the president polled the principals on whether they would recommend going ahead with the mission. The vice president and Bob Gates voted no; everyone else voted yes. But the next morning three of Gates’s top people—Admiral Mike Mullen, Mike Vickers, and Michèle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy—all came to Gates in an effort to convince him that he should support the raid. After the nearly hour-long meeting Gates called Tom Donilon and told him that he was changing his vote to yes. I have great admiration for Bob Gates for many reasons, and his willingness to be open-minded and to listen to what his subordinates are telling him is one of those reasons.
* * *
Throughout the entire process, two things were a constant—the attempt to get more intelligence and the questioning about the analysts’ confidence that Bin Ladin was there. Try as we might, we were unable to get much additional intelligence to help the president decide whether to take action against the Abbottabad compound or not.
On the analytic side, there would be one more red team before the final “go” decision. In April 2011, Brennan quite appropriately wanted to consider how al Qa‘ida might retaliate against us should we get Bin Ladin. To think through that problem he needed the help of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). In addition to focusing on the task at hand—possible retaliation—the organization’s head, Mike Leiter, suggested to Brennan that NCTC do a formal red team on the CIA analysts’ conclusion that Bin Ladin was at Abbottabad.
Brennan and Leiter both asked me what I thought. I was aware of the alternative analysis that the CTC itself had done and the red teaming that the director of CTC had ordered. And while I thought it was overkill, I said, “Why not?” For a decision of this magnitude you could not be too careful. So Leiter put together a team of two NCTC analysts and two CIA analysts on assignment to his unit to review the intelligence again. Those four analysts did not reach a consensus. They had a wide range of views. One of them put the probability at 60 percent that Bin Ladin was there (which was also my level of confidence). Two others came down at around 50 percent, and one gave it only a 40 percent chance, which I took to mean that he did not think Bin Ladin was there. Each analyst did think that the Bin Ladin theory was the best explanation for what we were seeing at the compound. Still, when Leiter briefed his team’s conclusions to the president, it was a replay of my earlier Iraq WMD comment—a sobering reminder of how thin the case was for Bin Ladin’s presence in Abbottabad.
* * *
On April 29, just one day after the final meeting with the president, the secure phone rang in Director Panetta’s office. It was National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. He informed us that the president had ordered the mission to proceed. Panetta, sensing that it was a historic moment, wrote out a memo for the record in longhand. It read:
Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1. The decision is to proceed with the assault. The timing, operational decision making, and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The direction is to go in and get Bin Ladin and if he is not there, to get out. These instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at 10:45 a.m.
It is impossible to fully convey the size of the knot you feel in your stomach when you are among the few people on the planet who know that such a major event is about to occur, and when the outcome is so uncertain. Just an hour or so before the raid, as we two were alone in his office, Panetta asked me what I thought in my heart of hearts: “Is he there?” “Sir,” I said, “I will not be surprised if we find him there—and I will not be surprised if we don’t.” Panetta simply answered, “Me too.” It was a roll of the dice.
After the raid was conducted, media commentators talked about the president’s “gutsy decision.” My view was that the decision to take action had not been the tough part. The case was strong enough to take action; in fact, the case was strong enough that the president had to take action. Had he not, and had it later become known that CIA had thought Bin Ladin was there, it would have been extraordinarily damaging to his presidency and to US credibility. No, to me, the gutsy part was the president’s decision about what kind of action to take. By putting US boots on the ground and placing American lives at risk, he made a difficult, but ultimately correct, decision. The easy way out would have been to obliterate the compound with munitions from a couple of B-2 bombers. As a result of his decision, we limited the collateral damage significantly, knew for certain that we had gotten Bin Ladin, and obtained a treasure trove of intelligence from the compound.
As it turned out, the debate about launching a raid on the night of the correspondents’ dinner was moot—the weather was bad in Pakistan and McRaven elected to postpone the operation for one day.
* * *
The CIA director’s wood-paneled conference room, across a narrow hallway from my office and that of Leon Panetta, had been turned into a makeshift command center. The long, polished table was stacked with computer terminals manned by CIA and JSOC personnel in constant touch with Admiral McRaven’s headquarters in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and monitoring various sensors around the region. A handful of senior CIA officials were there, but nowhere near all of them.
Many senior CIA personnel, all with the highest security clearances possible, were still unaware that we thought we had found Bin Ladin, unaware of the history that was about to be made. In keeping the information from Agency officials, cabinet officers and the like, we were not signaling any measure of distrust. It is simply that in a mission of this magnitude, every additional person briefed on the operation increases the possibility of an unintentional leak that might scuttle the operation. In the days that followed the raid, I would have to explain (if not apologize) to a lot of people who wished they had been clued into the operation in advance.
The extraordinary operational security had also given me some trouble much closer to home. A friend of mine had offered tickets to the Washington Capitals hockey play-off game against the Tampa Bay Lightning on May 1. And since the raid was called off on April 30, I thought there was a chance that bad weather would postpone it again the next day and that I would be able to go to the game. So I accepted the tickets.
By midmorning D.C. time on May 1, however, it was clear that the weather in Pakistan was cooperating and the mission would be a go. Not wanting the tickets to go to waste, I called Mary Beth and asked her to pick them up so someone else could put them to use. As the wife of the deputy director, Mary Beth had her own CIA pass and could normally drive onto the compound and come into the headquarters building without an escort. But if she came to my office on May 1 she would have seen the extraordinary beehive of activity in the adjoining conference room and would have figured out that something was up. She too was among the many who did not have a “need to know.” So I told my security detail to meet her “downstairs” and “under no circumstances should she be allowed upstairs.” But they went a step further than that and decided to meet her at the Agency’s front gate a quarter mile away from the main entrance to the building. They simply said, “Ma’am, here are the tickets,” with a tone and look that said, “This is as far as you go.” She already hadn’t been too happy with my working schedule over the past several months, and now the frosty reception from the security detail was a big push toward the edge.
But what really angered her was something else. She called me later that morning and said that clearly I should be able to stop working for a short while and dash to Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, where our daughter Sarah was about to have her last high school choral performance. “It will just take an hour,” she said. “Whatever you are doing can’t be that important.” She was quite insistent. “I’m sorry,” was all I could muster. “I can’t. I can’t. Gotta go.” Mary Beth subsequently told me that she spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening furious with me. By about eight p.m.—after I had been “radio silent” for nearly eight hours—she sat on the couch and asked herself, “So, how does this divorce thing work?” It was only after the president made the decision to inform the American people about the raid that I was able to call her. I still did not tell her what we had done, but I said the president would be talking to the nation in a bit and that she would understand and hopefully forgive me. She asked, “Did something terrible happen?” I said, “No, it will be good news.” “You got him?” she asked. Mary Beth had been on the fringes of the al Qa‘ida story long enough to correctly decipher what “good news” meant. I only responded, “Love you, gotta go.” At least my marriage was saved.
* * *
A little bit earlier in the day, Director Panetta and I had monitored the raid from the outfitted CIA director’s conference room. We were sitting in the middle of the large conference table, connected by secure video teleconference to both Admiral McRaven in Afghanistan and the White House. The director was technically in charge, but in reality he and I had little to do with the actual operation. We were spectators, not participants. And it felt like it. The next day the director held an all-hands meeting in the CIA auditorium to talk about the raid and at one point mentioned to the workforce that, since this had been a covert action, he had been in command of the operation. He paused for a few seconds and said, “OK, that is total bullshit. I was not in charge of anything.” He and the entire audience exploded in laughter.
But there was no laughing going on when the raid was taking place. Our hearts were in our throats when one of the raid helicopters crashed while hovering a short distance over the grounds of the compound during the raid. My first thought was for the safety of the SEALs on board. This was quickly followed by my second thought: “Shit, Bob Gates might have been right to warn as much as he did about bad things happening on a mission like this.” I also thought, “So much for operational security.” That was sure to wake up everyone in Abbottabad. Agency officers noted that nearby residents were starting to stir, but thankfully there was not an immediate security response that might have doomed the raid.
During the helicopter crash, I did note that Admiral McRaven remained completely composed and collected. He calmed me down by his demeanor. I have great admiration for McRaven. I think he is one of the greatest warriors ever produced by the US military. I have been impressed with him on many occasions, but never more so than when that helicopter went down. Only moments after the crash, McRaven would announce that no one was hurt, that the mission would continue, and that a backup helicopter was being brought up to replace the damaged helo. The extra helicopter was in place in part because of the president’s earlier insistence on supplying a backup in case the team needed to fight its way out.
The actual attack has been more than adequately depicted by both reporters and participants, so I will not attempt to do a play-by-play here. Among the things not fully understood by the public, however, is that even in the immediate aftermath of the raid we were not certain that we had gotten Bin Ladin.
After the departing mission helicopters cleared Pakistani airspace, Panetta and I went to the White House to meet with the president and his senior national security team to discuss next steps. The last thing anyone wanted was for the president to come out and declare Bin Ladin dead only to have him pop up very much alive sometime later. The SEALs on scene said they thought the man they’d killed on the third floor looked like Bin Ladin, and that when they’d questioned some of the women and children in the house one of them had said the dead man was “Sheikh Usama.” Still, that was hardly enough evidence. Once the body was back in Afghanistan, McRaven had it laid out on a hangar floor while one of his taller troops lay down alongside it to estimate the height of the dead man to see how it compared to Bin Ladin’s known six-feet-four-inch frame; the height looked right. CIA’s Science and Technology experts employed facial recognition technology and told us they were 90 to 95 percent sure we had our man, and I briefed this analysis to the president. But still he was not sure he should inform the American public if there was any uncertainty. There was discussion of possibly waiting till the next day, when we would have preliminary DNA analysis, or even the day after, when the final DNA analysis would be completed. That all changed when Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called his counterpart in Pakistan, General Ashfaq Kayani. Before Mullen could say anything, Kayani told Mullen that we had gotten Bin Ladin. With this, and with the certainty that news would start getting out, the president felt it safe to make his announcement to the world.
(The next morning we received preliminary DNA tests from a US military lab in Afghanistan, and the results were positive. Later that day we got the final DNA results from a lab in the United States. The lab said that there was only a one in one trillion chance that it was not Bin Ladin. That was good enough for even the most skeptical of analysts.)
At 11:35 p.m. the president addressed the nation. I watched his remarks from a chair in the Situation Room, where so much planning for the mission had taken place. It turned out that my job was not done for the day, however. Media interest in the events of the raid was, to say the least, enormous. So the White House press office had set up a “press backgrounder.” This is a session with the media, usually led by senior officials, in which the media are able to use whatever the officials say; however, for reasons of sensitivity, such as talking about intelligence matters, they cannot quote the senior officials by name. Instead the ground rules are set ahead of time regarding how the media are permitted to refer to the senior officials—“senior administration official,” “senior military official,” etc.
I was there to explain to the media the intelligence that had led us to conclude that Bin Ladin was probably at the compound. I did so carefully, without giving away any classified information. I was followed by Mike Vickers from the Defense Department, who provided a briefing on the raid itself.
It was probably close to one a.m. when Director Panetta and I walked out of the West Wing and onto West Executive Avenue, where our security details were waiting to take us home. We heard partygoers in nearby Lafayette Square chanting, “USA, USA, USA, CIA, CIA, CIA.” It was surreal, and I said to myself, “I’ll never hear that again.” Panetta and I hugged. It was the second time we’d done so that day—the first being during the raid, when the SEAL commander on the ground in Pakistan—just nineteen minutes after the SEALs’ boots had hit the ground—announced, “For God and country, Geronimo EKIA,” the code words indicating that the SEALs thought they had gotten their man.
In the days that followed, there was a tremendous sense of pride, satisfaction, and relief. I have never had such a mix of emotions. When I arrived at work the morning after the raid, there was a letter sitting on my desk. It was from a close colleague and friend in a foreign intelligence service, with whom CIA and I had worked closely against al Qa‘ida. It was the first of many such letters, but none was more beautifully written. It read:
Dear Michael,
May I be one of the many who offer you and the Agency my most profound congratulations and deep professional admiration for this outstanding success. Brilliantly developed, conceived, planned, and executed. Exemplary stuff—the CIA at its best. Our world is one where contemporary history is carved in stark events and dates. Today is one on the side of justice and will be remembered for generations. Many successes have come before and many are yet to come before the end of the al Qa‘ida menace, but today the United States has written a new chapter and shown that none may escape. Outstanding. My congratulations to all.
* * *
But despite our success, there was still a lot of work to be done. One major issue was the state of US–Pakistan relations and particularly the relations between CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ties between our two nations and their intelligence services had long been strained. But in recent months, just before the Bin Ladin raid, they had gotten much worse. In January 2011, Raymond Davis, a United States citizen assigned to the consulate in Lahore, killed two armed men in Lahore, Pakistan, who were trying to rob him. A car from the US consulate coming to the aid of Davis accidentally struck and killed a third Pakistani. Davis was held for almost two months in a Pakistani prison and was released only after intense diplomatic pressure and payment of $2.4 million in compensation to the families of the dead Pakistanis. Feelings among Pakistanis were more than a little raw over the Davis incident and grew worse with the Bin Ladin raid.
So a few weeks after the raid, the president sent his South Asian special envoy, Marc Grossman, and me to Pakistan to start repairing ties. My job was to meet with the head of the Pakistani ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Pasha, one of the most powerful men in a country where civilian institutions are largely subservient to the military. After flying all night to Pakistan I was taken to General Pasha’s home in a military garrison outside of Islamabad. It reminded me of the kind of home one would see on any US military base. I was ushered into a small sitting area where only the two of us were present. No aides, no note takers. A waiter arrived with juice and appetizers. After exchanging greetings and questions about our families, the two of us just sat there looking at each other. The silence went on for a minute or more. We both then laughed because it was so uncomfortable. But the subjects at hand were no laughing matter.
Pasha explained to me that the United States and particularly CIA had deeply embarrassed Pakistan. I clearly understood this. He explained that the embarrassment was twofold: one, embarrassment for his service because it had not found Bin Ladin, and two, embarrassment for the Pakistani military because it could do nothing to stop such a raid deep in its country. Pasha said that if one of the United States’s allies conducted a military raid in the United States, killing a fugitive and hauling his body away, we would be livid—and rightly so.
But I hoped that Pasha understood our position. I explained that we had found the most wanted man in the world living less than a mile away from their military academy—a place where he had apparently resided for years, despite years of Pakistani officials’ arguing that Bin Ladin was not in Pakistan. I reminded Pasha that the United States—including President Obama—had said publicly that if we found Bin Ladin we would come and get him. There had been ample warning. Finally, I told Pasha that while I knew that neither he nor the most senior officials in Pakistan had been aware of Bin Ladin’s presence in Abbottabad, it was impossible to dismiss the notion that some Pakistani security officials at some level might have been aware of his presence. I said, “Americans find it hard to believe that no one in your Abbottabad detachment or in the Abbottabad police ever questioned what was going in that compound.”
We were in a standoff over the Bin Ladin raid, but we moved on to “Where do we go from here?” We eventually had a fruitful discussion. It was so fruitful that Pasha suddenly decided that we should immediately visit his boss, General Ashfaq Kayani, and continue the conversation with him. Kayani was the chief of the army staff at the time and the most powerful man in Pakistan. It was by now late in the evening, but Pasha was insistent. “Come with me! I will drive us.” I assumed that Kayani lived in the same military cantonment, but it turned out he lived across town. With me in the passenger seat without a cell phone, Pasha sped off for God knew where. As we were driving off, my security detail caught a glimpse of what they thought might be their boss—the guy they were supposed to be protecting—being driven off in the night. They jumped in their cars and started off in hot pursuit. Pasha too had a security detail and they were following their boss, but they had the huge advantage of knowing where they were going. In retrospect the scene was comical—although it certainly did not seem so at the time to my security team, which was racing through the dense traffic to make sure I wasn’t being kidnapped. Nor was it humorous to one of my agents, who bravely pushed his way through Pasha’s security at the entrance to Kayani’s cantonment to make sure I was OK. The head of my detail—who had held his position for over a decade—told me later that it was his worst moment on the job.
After the Bin Ladin raid, I had one more related mission to complete, one that was considerably more comfortable to perform. President Obama, knowing that I was with President Bush on 9/11, personally asked me to fly down to Dallas, Texas, a few days after the raid and give his predecessor a complete briefing on the operation. It was an incredibly generous gesture on the part of President Obama.
President Bush was gracious as always. But on that day, he was like a kid in a candy shop. He wanted to know every detail. I had taken the senior CIA analyst with me, as well as a senior JSOC officer. We walked the former president through the intelligence picture and the raid itself. At the end the president said, “You know, Laura and I were supposed to go to the movies tonight, but this is better than any movie I will ever see. I think we will stay home.” There was also a personal moment between me and the person I used to brief. He gave me a challenge coin, a highly prized medallion that military commands and some senior officials hand out. It was his commander in chief coin. When he handed it to me and we shook hands, I felt closure for the first time since 9/11.
* * *
When I was serving as deputy director, my staff would put together a reading package every Friday for the weekend. Dozens of highly classified multi-page documents would be sent home with me when I left Langley on a Friday evening. I stored these documents in a safe in what we call a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF for short. The SCIF itself, sort of like a small bank vault, was in my attic and was protected by multiple alarm systems and security cameras. And my security agents were never far from my home.
In August 2011, when I was serving as acting director for the first time, I poured myself a cup of coffee, pulled the weekend reading material from the safe, put the pile on my lap, put my feet up, and started to read. About halfway through the pile was a paper produced by our counterterrorism analysts outlining their take on the information derived from a treasure trove of documents scooped up during the Bin Ladin raid. I had been waiting for this paper, so I settled in for a thorough, word-by-word read.
I was not surprised by most of what I read. One of the many takeaways from the DOCEX (document exploitation) from Bin Ladin’s office at Abbottabad was that al Qa‘ida was still very much intent on attacking the West. The documents showed that Bin Ladin, in the months before his death, had been engaged in ongoing discussions with his key operatives about pursuing mass casualty attacks in the United States and against the infrastructure that operates the global oil industry—oil pipelines, terminals, and tankers. The oil industry has long been a target of al Qa‘ida (in February 2006, al Qa‘ida attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq facility, the largest oil processing facility in the world, responsible for half of Saudi oil exports). And, as expected, Bin Ladin had underscored the group’s enduring interest in attacking commercial airlines.
As I read on, I became more engrossed in the paper. The captured documents also made clear that the United States was still by far the primary target of al Qa‘ida. Bin Ladin considered us enemy number one, calling us “the leader of the nonbelievers.” And although the United States and its partners had done great damage to the terrorist group’s central leadership operating out of the tribal areas of Pakistan, al Qa‘ida, and similar groups inspired by it, was still intent on attacking us and still capable of inflicting significant damage. When I finished reading, I just sat there. The paper had reinforced all my instincts about the group.
The one thing that surprised me was that the analysts made clear that our pre-raid understanding of Bin Ladin’s role in the organization had been wrong. Before the raid we’d thought that Bin Ladin’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was running the organization on a day-to-day basis, essentially the CEO of al Qa‘ida, while Bin Ladin was the group’s ideological leader, its chairman of the board. But the DOCEX showed something quite different. It showed that Bin Ladin himself had not only been managing the organization from Abbottabad, he had been micromanaging it. He had been approving personnel appointments, approving how money was spent, and intimately involved in attack planning. He had still been very much involved in day-to-day terrorist operations, and he had still been very much involved with al Qa‘ida’s growing offshoots around the world, particularly al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. This, of course, magnified the value of removing Bin Ladin from the battlefield.