In late January 2011, Bill McRaven was in Afghanistan when he received a call from Mike Vickers, the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Vickers had some important news. The CIA thought it had a lead on bin Laden. Soon McRaven was on a plane back to the States, where he visited the Agency’s Langley headquarters for a briefing from Michael Morell, the head of Special Activities Division. Morell told McRaven about the intelligence that led the Agency to believe there was a good chance that bin Laden was living in a walled compound in the town of Abbottabad, about fifty miles north of Islamabad.
McRaven said he thought a special operations raid on the compound would be “relatively straightforward,” at the tactical level. The challenges would be getting to Abbottabad, which was about 120 miles from the Afghan border. McRaven also said he had two individuals in mind for key roles: a Team 6 squadron commander he liked, who he thought could handle something going wrong on the objective, and a SEAL captain who had long experience in Team 6, whom he soon assigned to work with a planning team at the Agency.1 (For the captain, there was a certain symmetry about being placed in such a key role: he had been one of the first JSOC officers into the tribal areas on the AFO teams after Anaconda. His career had since taken him to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa, as he rose to become Team 6’s deputy commander.)
There was much speculation later about why Team 6, rather than Delta, was handed the bin Laden mission. Some suggested that it was because the JSOC commander, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were all Navy admirals. The real reason is much simpler: if bin Laden was found in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it was always going to be Team 6’s mission. The so-called Af-Pak region was Team 6’s theater of operations. The unit had planned and trained for a bin Laden mission for years, and had already conducted multiple cross-border missions into Pakistan.2
But beyond deciding that if President Barack Obama ordered him to mount a raid, Team 6 would be the unit for the mission, McRaven did not follow convention. Instead of tapping the Team 6 commander, Captain Pete Van Hooser, or “PVH,” as he was known, and letting him decide how to run the mission and whom to send, the JSOC commander declined to inform Van Hooser about the mission immediately. Instead, he went around Van Hooser, reached into Team 6, and selected a particular squadron—Red—and squadron commander for the operation. McRaven also waited several days after informing the Red Squadron leadership about the mission before telling the Team 6 commander, all of which made Van Hooser, the oldest SEAL in the Navy, “just livid,” said a Team 6 source. The silver-haired Van Hooser, who had lost a leg in a parachuting accident, had been brought back onto active duty from retirement to run Team 6.3
McRaven’s selection of Red Squadron, which was not Team 6’s Trident, or alert, force at the time, also perplexed some Red Squadron operators, and led to a certain degree of cynicism. “Everyone knew the squadron that was already deployed could have pulled it off just as well as we could,” said Matt Bissonnette, a Red Squadron SEAL chosen for the mission. “The only reason we were tasked with this mission was because we were available to conduct the needed rehearsals to sell the option to the decision makers at the White House.”4
Some in Team 6 viewed the friction between McRaven, fifty-five, and Van Hooser, who at sixty-two was only on active duty by virtue of an age waiver, through the prism of McRaven’s personal history with Team 6. As a young lieutenant, McRaven had served in Team 6 during the unit’s early years under Richard Marcinko. But after only three months on the job Marcinko had fired him. The setback had no long-term impact on McRaven’s career, and in retrospect, getting fired by Marcinko, who served time in jail, did not look so bad on his résumé. But McRaven never served in Team 6 again. Some operators thought he continued to hold a grudge against the unit because of his experience more than a quarter century previously.5 “He [McRaven] holds his bad time at DevGroup against everybody,” said a Team 6 source, using a common abbreviation for Team 6’s cover name. McRaven denied this, making the point to the author in 2014 that if he had held any grudges against Team 6, “it would not have been involved in all the operations it has been involved in over the last five years.”6
The tension between McRaven and Van Hooser reached a breaking point during an early planning meeting at the CIA attended by a handful of people, including JSOC’s deputy commander, Brigadier General Tony Thomas, and Command Sergeant Major Chris Faris, McRaven’s senior enlisted adviser. The JSOC commander told Van Hooser that his responsibility for the mission would be limited to overseeing the training in the United States. When the force deployed to Afghanistan, it would be commanded by the Ranger Regiment commander, Erik Kurilla, who was running JSOC’s Afghanistan task force at the time. Incensed, Van Hooser tried to resign on the spot, turning as if to leave the room. McRaven called him back, and everyone else left the room while the two SEAL officers hashed out their differences. By the end of the conversation, McRaven told Van Hooser that he could run the operation.7
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Shortly thereafter, about thirty Red Squadron operators gathered for a meeting in a secure conference room at Dam Neck. They were told they’d be doing some training down in North Carolina for a joint readiness exercise, but they all understood something else was going on. It was clear from who was and was not in the room that the squadron’s commander and command master chief had handpicked the most experienced operators from across the squadron to form a large troop of all-stars, rather than use an existing troop whose operators were used to working with each other in a team. Almost all the operators present “had double digit deployments” to Afghanistan, according to Bissonnette,8 so the end result was a highly experienced set of individuals. But the decision not to just go with one of the squadron’s organic assault troops rankled many operators and left lasting bitterness. “They cherry-picked all the guys that they wanted, who were their friends, and made the ‘Super Troop,’” said an operator. “It totally destroyed unit connectivity.… A lot of people just up and left after that.”
Red Squadron’s leadership picked twenty-three operators for the mission, plus a couple of alternates in case someone got hurt during training. The plan was to fly twelve men on each of the two helicopters earmarked for the mission, in addition to the aircrews. The ground force’s twenty-fourth man was a CIA interpreter who took part in the training from the beginning. A military working dog—a Belgian Malinois named Cairo—would complete the ground force, which had about six weeks to prepare.9
Team 6 had been training for almost a decade to conduct a freefall parachute assault on bin Laden’s location. Even though he had been found deep inside Pakistan, rather than in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan, some experienced operators saw no reason to abandon that option, even though it would have required a Combat Talon to carry the assault force deep into Pakistani airspace. “The preferred course of action would have been the airdrop one,” said a Team 6 source. “The guys would get in virtually undetected.… We trained for years for that.”
But decisions made far above the operator level had determined that the assault force would infiltrate on helicopters, that it would fly to the X (i.e., fly straight to the objective, rather than landing at an offset location and creeping up to the objective), and that the helicopters carrying the operators on the most important mission of their lives would be like none they had ever seen before.
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The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and the combat development organizations that support it had been experimenting with stealth technologies for many years, beginning with a program to create a stealthy Little Bird. The program progressed to include the Black Hawk, the 160th’s principal assault aircraft. The work had two overall aims: to reduce a helicopter’s radar signature by giving it a different shape and coating it in special materials, and making the aircraft quieter, which usually involved development of a Fenestron, or shrouded tail rotor. (Much of a helicopter’s noise signature comes from its tail rotor.) The 160th took the issue of reducing aircraft noise very seriously. In training exercises the unit would time how far from the target—in time of flight—the rotor sounds could be heard. As a rule, the larger the airframe, the farther out the target could hear the helicopter. The 160th wanted to reduce the time between an enemy hearing a helicopter approaching and it arriving overhead by as much as possible. “Even [cutting] fifteen seconds is huge,” said a 160th veteran. “And thirty seconds is amazing, because then you can be on top of the target and fast-roping people down.”
The stealth Black Hawk gained almost mythical status, like a unicorn. “I remember first hearing about it … in 2000 to 2001,” said a Delta source. The program quickly gained traction. “I remember in 2004 hearing that it was a line item in the budget,” he said. Knowledge of the special access program was on a strictly need-to-know basis, and hardly anyone needed to know. Shortly thereafter the 160th regimental leadership came looking to 1st Battalion—the core unit of Task Force Brown—for two crews to go down to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, and start training on the new helicopters. In the end one crew went after a couple of pilots volunteered. “I never saw them again,” said a 160th source. “They’d be permanently assigned out there.” The program became more formalized. The aircraft were based at Nellis, but 160th crews trained on them at some of the military’s other vast landholdings in the Southwest: Area 51; China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in California; and Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. U.S. Special Operations Command planned to create a fleet of four and make them the centerpiece of a new covered aviation unit in Nevada. By 2011 Special Operations Command had canceled that plan, but the first two stealth helicopters still existed, and certain 1st Battalion crews would rotate down to Nellis to train on them.
The additional material that made the helicopters invisible to radar also added weight and made them difficult to fly.10 This gave Team 6’s most experienced men pause. Rehearsals had revealed that the “helicopter was very unstable when they tried to hover,” said a Team 6 operator. “Those things had been mothballed. The [pilots] hadn’t flown them in a while, but they got back out there.” However, he added, “rehearsing it in the United States is not like flying the thing in actual combat conditions. Combat is not the first time to try something, and an operation like that—a mission like that—is certainly not.” But when David Cooper, Team 6’s command master chief, put this view to McRaven early in the planning process and suggested the task force at least plan an alternative infiltration method, the JSOC commander gave the idea short shrift. (In fact, McRaven found Cooper’s argument disrespectful and pressured Van Hooser to fire his command master chief, which the Team 6 commander refused to do.)11
Training for the operation was divided between Nevada and North Carolina. In North Carolina, the task force rehearsed the assault at a CIA training facility in Harvey Point, where the Agency had built an almost perfect replica of the bin Laden compound. In Nevada the task force flew both the stealth Black Hawks and the Chinooks against Groom Lake’s approximation of the Pakistani radars they would be flying against on the mission. What they found, according to a Team 6 source, is that by terrain masking—using the terrain to hide from the radar—the Chinooks “could get in without being spotted by the radar.” But JSOC and the CIA nonetheless insisted that the task force use the two-of-a-kind stealth Black Hawks.12
“The helicopters were really forced on us,” a Team 6 source said. “These newfangled helicopters that had never been used before.” During initial planning meetings McRaven had told Red Squadron to “look at all options” as they considered how to conduct the mission. But early on, the JSOC commander told them to forget about jumping in. “McRaven said there were too many wires,” said the Team 6 source, who strongly disagreed with the admiral. “Every one of those operators, except maybe [the squadron commander], could have landed inside of that compound under parachute.”
In Team 6, there were different opinions about whom to blame for the insistence on using the helicopters. Some operators thought the CIA was driving the decision. Others attributed it to McRaven. “He wanted to use these newfangled helicopters,” said an operator. “He sold it to the president that way: These things are invisible to radar, they’ll get in, the [Pakistanis] will never know we were there.” When the helicopters proved unstable during training, the JSOC commander refused to revisit the decision, the operator said.
As they prepared for the mission, the operators’ primary training challenge was to “break the habits from Afghanistan,” where the vast majority of their missions had been based on the same template. “There were so many unknowns in Pakistan,” said a Team 6 source. “What was the [Pakistani military] going to do? And … the civilians—in what was essentially a retired military town, a retired ISI town—what were they going to do?” The Team 6 and Red Squadron leaders put the operators through a variety of contingencies to prepare them mentally for dealing with eventualities that they weren’t used to facing in Afghanistan. “There was no clear-cut answer to any of these scenarios,” the Team 6 source said. The operators had to figure it out on their own. Their reaction to the initial scenarios was not auspicious. “They started off abysmally, with a sense of, ‘kill everybody, even in the surrounding area’ kind of thing,” the source said. “But as they kept going on and the problems got more and more complex, you could see them self-organize, which is what SEALs do very well, working it out on the ground.”
One contingency that those running the training made sure that the operators were as ready as they could be for was a helicopter crash. “We did so many downed helo drills that [the operators] were just sick of it,” the Team 6 source said. “But they figured out the answers to these downed helo scenarios themselves. Nothing was ever pushed on them.”
Other variations to the plan were considered and discarded. “The initial plan had Agency Ground Branch guys going in on the ground to cut off some of the intersections, but that was ruled out by the Agency as too risky,” a Team 6 source said. While CIA operatives had established a safe house13 and reconnoitered the area previously, by the time of the raid there were no U.S. personnel waiting or watching in the neighborhood, he said. The operators were not particularly intimidated by the tactical challenges or potential threats they might face on the objective. “This target wasn’t any more complicated than hundreds of others we’d assaulted over the years,” said Bissonnette. For any other target, the amount of rehearsals would have seemed like overkill. “We had never trained this much for a particular objective before in our lives,” said Bissonnette. However, he added, “the extra preparation helped us mesh, since we’d been drawn from different teams.”14
A big question was how the force on the ground should respond if the Pakistani military showed up and surrounded the compound. According to several published accounts,15 McRaven advised the White House to seek a negotiated solution in that case while the troops strongpointed the compound. But to some operators, it seemed that McRaven told Red Squadron to surrender if they were surrounded. “Then he briefed that to the president,” said a Team 6 source. “Thankfully, the president said, ‘No, they’re not going to surrender, they’ll fight their way out and we’ll go in and get them if we have to.’ The guys were thankful for that. They would not have surrendered anyway. They might have nodded to McRaven, but they would not have surrendered.”
The issue of what to do with bin Laden was simpler. “Bin Laden was the first time [we were told], ‘This is a kill mission, not a capture mission, unless he was naked with his hands up,’” said the Team 6 source. (In this respect, U.S. policy had not changed since Tora Bora almost a decade previously, when, according to Delta officer Tom Greer, “it was made crystal clear to us that capturing the terrorist was not the preferred outcome.”) In planning meetings with the CIA, Team 6 officials had argued that their normal rules of engagement were sufficient. “But they [the CIA] were adamant: kill him,” the source said. “That message came from [CIA director Leon] Panetta.” One thing the task force didn’t have to worry about, a CIA analyst assured them, was Pakistani jets chasing the helicopters. “[He’s] telling us that there’s no way in hell the Pakistanis can scramble their jets, not at night, not going to happen,” the Team 6 source said.
About a week before the end of April, the operators departed Dam Neck to stage at the task force’s Jalalabad base. The president had still not approved the mission. Around the time that the bin Laden mission force arrived in Afghanistan, Kurilla and others in the Afghanistan task force were briefed on the operation. They provided the quick reaction force as well as combat jets flying along the border, ready to race to Abbottabad and provide close air support if the assault force needed it.16
On April 29, the president told his national security team he had decided to authorize the mission, but left the final call on timing to McRaven, who was in Afghanistan. D-day was set for May 1. But later that night McRaven pushed the mission a day to the right, as the forecast said there would be excessive cloud cover over Abbottabad on April 30.17 By now the operation had a name: Neptune’s Spear.
In one of the final staff meetings with McRaven at Jalalabad, two days before the mission, Colonel John Thompson, the 160th commander, made a final effort to dispense with the stealthy Black Hawks, according to a source in the room. “Sir, I really think we need to use the 47s for this and not these 60s,” he told McRaven, noting the success the Chinooks had enjoyed against the Pakistani radar array in Nevada. The admiral was not amused at this late attempt to change the plan, the source said. “McRaven went off on him,” he said. “Embarrassed him, belittled him … I felt bad for the guy.” McRaven disputed this version of events, saying nobody advised him “against any facet of the UBL raid” and that he did not “chew anyone out publicly.”18
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At 11 P.M. on May 1 the stealth Black Hawks took off from Jalalabad, along with three Chinooks carrying a quick reaction force and the gear and personnel for a forward arming and refueling point. The Chinooks were going to set down north of Abbottabad, ready to go to the assistance of the assault force if need be. The plan was for the Black Hawks to refuel there on the way back into Afghanistan. The flight passed uneventfully, the operators dozing in the helicopters until the first shout to alert them that they were nearing the objective: “Ten minutes!”
The operators shook themselves alert and rechecked their gear for the last time. The helicopters had wheeled around to approach Abbottabad from the south. In what was either a fortuitous coincidence or a piece of the operation never publicly acknowledged, the neighborhood in which the compound sat was swathed in darkness from what appeared to be one of the rolling blackouts that regularly afflict Pakistani towns.
With the helicopters a minute or two out, a curious thing happened: someone tried to call a phone associated with one of the two brothers who lived with bin Laden as his aides and couriers. This was unusual because it was the middle of the night and they didn’t normally take phone calls there at any time. The call wasn’t answered.19
Then, with the helicopters hovering over the compound, the operation suddenly teetered on the edge of disaster. As the SEALs got ready to fast-rope out of one of the Black Hawks, it suddenly pitched and seemed to slide toward the ground. The pilot wrestled with the controls, as operators scrambled to get clear of the door so that their legs didn’t get crushed when the helicopter hit the earth. Unable to keep the aircraft aloft, the pilot nonetheless managed to slow its descent to such an extent that Bissonnette, who was in the stricken helicopter, said he didn’t even notice the impact. “If not for his skill as a pilot it could have been a lot worse,” a Team 6 source said.
The cause of the crash was a phenomenon called vortex ring state, or settling with power, which occurs when a helicopter’s rotors cannot get the lift required from the turbulent air of their own downwash. It is rare for Black Hawks to settle with power, but these were no ordinary Black Hawks. The problem resulted in part from an oversight in the construction of the mock-up compound at Harvey Point: whereas the Abbottabad compound was surrounded by a brick wall, the Harvey Point replica made do with a chain-link fence. “That air bled out through that chain-link fence” in North Carolina, said the Team 6 source. “But in reality the compound had those solid walls and that bad air just came right back up into the rotor blades and that thing just lost power.”
As soon as they touched dirt the operators streamed off the helicopter. Although the crash landing had upset their plans, they were now on familiar ground, in the sense that they were taking down a compound just as they did almost every night in Afghanistan. And unlike some Afghan compounds, this one was not particularly well defended, or at least, not by armed men. But the operators still ran into repeated problems trying to clear the compound. Even with a sledgehammer, Bissonnette and a colleague couldn’t bust in the solid metal door to the gatehouse in which they believed bin Laden’s courier lived with his family. In a furious exchange of fire the SEALs killed the courier while they were still outside the gatehouse. Operators sighted the other brother and killed him and, accidentally, his wife as she threw herself in front of him.
Climbing the outside staircase to the compound’s second story, a SEAL saw a clean-shaven young man put his head briefly round the corner. The operator recognized him as bin Laden’s son, Khalid. They called to him. “Khalid!” The youth stuck his head around the corner again and the SEAL shot him dead. “We had planned for more of a fight,” Bissonnette said. As Bissonnette and two other SEALs moved past Khalid’s corpse to ascend to the third tier, they knew they had killed three of the four men they expected to find on the compound. They had now been on the ground about fifteen minutes, plenty of time for bin Laden to prepare a defense. The point man got to the top of the stairs and saw a head poking out of the bedroom. He fired two rounds and the person disappeared back into the room. The point man moved slowly, keeping his rifle trained on the open door of the room. As he came around the door he saw two women screaming over the body of a man who had taken a bullet through his left eye. The round had continued on, taking a chunk off the top of his head. He was still twitching in his death throes. Bissonnette and a third SEAL, Robert O’Neill, fired several rounds into his chest. Three children sat bunched together in the corner.
Osama bin Laden was dead.20
The SEALs turned their attention to dealing with the women and children, collecting as much material of intelligence value as possible—after all, this was the Al Qaeda leader’s home and office—and figuring out what to do with the crashed helicopter.
Under pressure to depart before Pakistani security forces realized what was up, the operators were forced to leave a large amount of potentially valuable material on the objective. Bin Laden, it turned out, was something of a pack rat. “There were things piled up along the walls,” said a Team 6 source. “You basically walked in paths to get through the house. So who knows what was in all those boxes.” The operators grabbed as much as they could of the potentially priceless intelligence material, stuffing computers and other digital devices into the trash bags each had brought for that purpose, “but they simply couldn’t carry it all,” he said. “We left drawers unopened,” Bissonnette said. “The hallway on the second deck had stacks of boxes untouched. We usually did a better job, but we just ran out of time. We were perfectionists, and while the rest of the operation went smoothly after the crash, the SSE [sensitive site exploitation] wasn’t up to standards.”21 The contents of the material left on the objective would remain one of the mission’s enduring mysteries.
As their colleagues filled trash bags with Al Qaeda’s secrets, other operators set charges to destroy the helicopter that had crashed. The pilots weren’t sure such drastic measures were required. They thought they could fly the aircraft out of the compound empty. “But it had already been rigged to blow and [the squadron commander] said, ‘No, blow it in place,’” a Team 6 source said.
The operators whose job it was to fix the charges intended to erase all evidence of the helicopter’s experimental nature couldn’t reach the tail boom, which “was hanging over the wall,” the Team 6 source said. But they had put so much explosive on the rest of the helicopter they didn’t imagine they’d need to cover the tail as well. “They thought it would explode anyway, but it didn’t,” he said. “It sheared off. But no one got in trouble for it.” The next day that sci-fi-looking tail rotor was the star attraction for the media and onlookers who descended on the compound. It was JSOC’s own inadvertent calling card.
Thirty-eight minutes after they had landed, the SEALs were in the air again. Those who had flown in the Black Hawk that had crashed were riding out on a Chinook. But they weren’t out of danger just yet. “Shortly after that is when the Pakistanis were able to figure out what happened,” the Team 6 source said. “[They] spun up and scrambled their F-16s to hunt down those helicopters,” which must have come as something of a surprise to the CIA analyst who had guaranteed it wouldn’t happen. It should have been a race to the border, with the helicopters having a head start and the jets a significantly faster speed. But the jets flew off in the wrong direction. After the mission, someone in Task Force Brown sat down and did the math. Even had the F-16s flown straight after the helicopters, “it would’ve been close but they couldn’t have got them” before they crossed the border, the source said.
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A day or two later, a C-17 touched down near Virginia Beach and the operators dismounted as if returning from just another mission. There was no fanfare, no ticker tape parade.
A little more than thirty-one years previously, a similar group of operators had quietly returned home from a vital mission overseas, also hidden from the public eye. They too were smart, patriotic, and highly motivated. But that is where the similarities end. Their mission—which had failed—had also involved helicopter flights deep into denied territory. Just to put the task force together had been a monumental effort on the part of the nation’s military. In contrast, JSOC had run a dozen other missions on the night that Team 6 killed bin Laden.22 The extraordinary had become routine.