People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
—American columnist Richard Grenier in 1993
It was a simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly rehearsed, and exercised with surprise, speed, and purpose.
—Admiral Bill McRaven describing Operation Neptune Spear
On Sunday, May 1, as night fell on Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, McRaven addressed his team, saying, “Gentlemen, since 9/11 each one of you has dreamed of being the man on the mission to get bin Laden. Well this is the mission and you are the men. Let’s go get bin Laden.” There were no smiles or cheers. Some of the SEALs believed that they would die on the mission and had written letters to their wives and children in the event they wouldn’t be returning home.
Obama entered the White House Situation Room at 2 p.m. At the same time, eight and a half time zones to the east in Jalalabad at 10:30 p.m., two oddly shaped stealth Black Hawk helicopters took off heading for the Pakistani border.
On the choppers were twenty-three SEALs and a Pakistani-American who spoke the local language, Pashto. If crowds gathered at the Abbottabad compound, he would tell people there was a Pakistani military exercise going on and they should go home. Also on the flight to Abbottabad was a dog named Cairo, who would prevent “squirters” from sneaking out of the compound, sniff out any explosives, and hunt for possible safe rooms.
McRaven’s team had built a small, makeshift command center at the Special Operations base in Jalalabad for a dozen officials including the SEAL team commander, the helicopter squadron commander, and representatives from the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI. In the command center McRaven positioned himself inside a purpose-built closet so he could monitor the mission and also simultaneously join a videoconference with Panetta at CIA headquarters. Wearing a headset, McRaven narrated the mission’s milestones on the video call. McRaven monitored the assault force on a flat panel display as it moved across the border. The helicopters were followed by a RQ-170 stealth drone flying miles above them transmitting live video back to McRaven and his team.
Half an hour after the Black Hawks had departed Jalalabad, three Chinook CH-47 helicopters took off from the same airfield. This was the backup force. One Chinook loaded with SEALs landed just before reaching the Pakistani border and would act as an additional Quick Reaction Force if there was a large-scale firefight in Abbottabad.
The other two Chinooks filled with SEALs and additional fuel for the Black Hawks flew on into Pakistan to Kala Dhaka, a desolate, mountainous region fifty miles northeast of Abbottabad. The lumbering, buslike Chinooks were far larger than the Black Hawks and were much more likely to be picked up by Pakistani radar, so McRaven wanted to ensure the Black Hawks were well in the lead, should the Chinooks be detected.
The one-and-a-half-hour flight path for the helicopters was indirect by design. They followed the least risky route, avoiding population centers and taking advantage of any terrain that would mask them from Pakistani radar. As the Black Hawks approached Abbottabad, they flew behind a small mountain range, which shielded them. When the Black Hawks came around this range for their descent into Abbottabad there would be a couple of minutes when the helicopters could be detected by radar. More important, people on the ground in Abbottabad were now likely to hear the noise of the helicopter rotors. McRaven thought this was the moment when thing could get dicey, if people living at the compound heard the noise and loosed off rocket-propelled grenades in response.
At the White House, Obama and his war cabinet monitored the progress of the operation in the Situation Room, but they couldn’t see the video feed of the raid supplied by the stealth drone flying high over the Black Hawks and SEALs. That video feed was available only in a small anteroom next door to the Situation Room where one of McRaven’s deputies, Brigadier General Brad Webb, had set up communications gear. Vice President Joe Biden drifted into the room to watch the video feed, followed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama also popped in, announcing, “I need to watch this.” Wearing a windbreaker, the president settled himself into a chair in a corner of the cramped room.
It was a moonless night and the electricity was off in Abbottabad; a nice stroke of luck for the SEALs. Pakistani cities routinely experience “load shedding,” or rolling power blackouts.
Two minutes out from the compound, the side door of the first Black Hawk opened, and some of the SEALs started swinging their feet out of the helicopter and getting their fast ropes ready. Thirty seconds out and they could see the compound.
The plan was for one of the Black Hawks to hover over what was suspected to be bin Laden’s third-floor bedroom. SEALs would then fast-rope onto the roof of the bedroom and surprise al-Qaeda’s leader while he slept. The other Black Hawk would drop another group of SEALs onto the ground near the main building on the compound and they would then advance up the stairs to the third-floor bedroom.
It didn’t work out that way. The rehearsals at the replicas of the compound in the States had taken place with chain link fencing standing in for the high concrete walls surrounding the compound. This fencing had allowed the helicopter’s rotor wash to dissipate, while the concrete walls amplified it, causing a phenomenon known as “settling with power” during which a helicopter gets caught in the downwash from its own rotors. Higher than expected temperatures in Abbottabad also gave the helicopters less “lift,” as the air density was lower because of the elevated temperature. As a result, the first Black Hawk started dropping out of the sky.
McRaven was watching his flat panel display and saw that the Black Hawk was wobbling and clearly losing lift. McRaven thought, “That doesn’t look too good.” The Black Hawk pilot realized what was happening and took immediate action to bring the helicopter down for a “hard landing.”
The SEALs had rehearsed this possibility numerous times. There was a large open space inside the compound walls, which was about a third of an acre where the inhabitants kept cows. The SEALs referred to this area as “the animal pen.”
Before the raid McRaven had talked to the Black Hawk pilot several times, who told him, “Sir, unless I am killed instantly, I will be able to land this helicopter in the animal pen.”
The Black Hawk pilot made a hard landing in the animal pen. As the helicopter went down, the tail rotor clipped the wall of the compound and got hung up there so the chopper could no longer fly.
Watching the video feed of the helicopter going down, Biden, a practicing Catholic, fingered his rosary beads.
McRaven knew the difference between a crash and a hard landing. The helicopter wasn’t on fire and he could see that SEALS were already moving away from the downed chopper.
In his distinctive Texan baritone with no hint of anxiety in his voice, McRaven told Obama’s war cabinet, “We will now be amending the mission. My men are prepared for this contingency and they will deal with it.”
The second helicopter moved to Plan B, landing outside of the compound instead of hovering over the roof of the third-floor bedroom.
Now awake, bin Laden called to his son Khalid on the floor below, where two of his wives, Umm Hamza and Siham, were sleeping. His youngest wife, Amal, went to check on her five children.
Bin Laden’s two oldest daughters, Miriam and Sumaiya, came up from the second floor to be with their father. Together they prayed the Kalima, the Muslim profession of faith, reciting, “There is no God but Allah. Muhammed is the messenger of Allah.”
Bin Laden told his daughters, “American helicopters have arrived. You need to leave the room immediately.” They refused to leave.
The SEALs moved from the animal pen area toward a one-story building that housed bin Laden’s bodyguard Ibrahim and his family. They checked the door, which was locked. One of the SEALs, Matt Bissonnette, placed a small explosive charge on the door. An AK-47 started shooting through the door. Bissonnette and his partner returned fire and everything went quiet.
Bissonnette’s partner shouted in Arabic, “Open the door and come out.”
The door opened and the bodyguard’s wife, Maryam, came out holding a small child, three other children trailing behind her. Ibrahim, her husband, lay dead inside the door.
The SEALs flowed past the annex building onto a lawn area dominated by the main three-story house, which they entered. Now the officials at the White House and at CIA headquarters watching the drone feed could no longer see these SEALs.
Inside the house it was pitch black. Bin Laden’s other bodyguard, Abrar, and his wife, Bushra, lived on the ground floor. One of the SEALs shot and killed them both.
Walking through the kitchen, three SEALs moved deeper into the house. Near the back of the house was a stairwell. A massive iron metal gate completely blocked the staircase and access to the upper two floors of the house.
One of the SEALs thought, “Who has a metal door at the bottom of their stairs?” The SEALs put an explosive charge on the gate, blowing it open. They made their way up to the second floor. “Maya,” the CIA analyst, had told the SEALs that bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, was likely living on the second floor.
On the second floor, the SEAL who was “on point” saw a head pop out and disappear quickly around a corner. The point man whispered, “Khalid. Khalid.” Hearing his name, Khalid looked back around the edge of the hall and the point man shot him dead. The SEALs stepped over Khalid’s body, an AK-47 nearby.
The point man then spotted someone poking his head out of a room on the third floor. He knew immediately it was bin Laden and shot at him. This shot may have wounded al-Qaeda’s leader. Following the point man up the stairs were two SEALs, first Robert O’Neill and then Bissonnette.
Bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal, saw an American soldier coming up the stairs aiming his weapon at her husband. She saw a red beam of light, which was the laser sight of the soldier’s rifle, but she heard no shot from the silenced weapon. Amal rushed the soldier, who shot her in the calf. She passed out on the bed.
“Maya” had told the SEALs that the women living with bin Laden might be wearing suicide vests. The point man rushed into the third-floor bedroom, and seeing two women swept them up in his arms and pushed them against the back wall. If they had suicide vests he would have absorbed the force of the blasts and protected the other SEALs.
O’Neill and Bissonnette shot bin Laden with a few more rounds.I They were carrying photos of al-Qaeda’s leader and it certainly looked like him, although in the photos his beard was gray and in death it was jet black because bin Laden had been applying Just for Men hair dye.
Bin Laden’s two oldest daughters confirmed to the American soldiers that the dead man was their father.
Bin Laden died without putting up a fight. Bissonnette found his guns in his bedroom, an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol. They were sitting on a high shelf above the frame of the door that opened into the room. The chambers of both guns were empty. “He hadn’t even prepared a defense,” Bissonnette thought.
The raid commander called McRaven on a satellite radio, “For God and country: Geronimo.” “Geronimo” was the code name for bin Laden.
McRaven relayed the word “Geronimo” to the White House. McRaven realized he wasn’t sure if that meant bin Laden was captured or killed.
McRaven asked the SEAL ground force commander, “Is he EKIA [Enemy Killed in Action]?”
A few seconds later, the answer came back: “Roger, Geronimo EKIA.”
McRaven announced to the White House, “Geronimo EKIA.”
The president quietly said, “We got him.”
McRaven came on the line again to the White House, saying, “Please keep your expectations managed a little here. Most operators when they are on a mission their adrenaline is sky-high. Yes, they are professional, but let’s not count on anything until they get back and we have some evidence.”
McRaven also pointed out, “We’ve got SEALs on the ground without a ride.”
Bissonnette took photographs of bin Laden’s body, while another SEAL gathered DNA samples using cotton swabs that soaked up his blood and saliva.
About twenty-five minutes into the mission, McRaven received a call, “Sir, the SEALs are requesting some additional time on the ground. Sir, they say they found a whole shit-ton of computers and electronic gear on the second floor.”
Cognizant that the half-hour point was the ideal time to wrap up this kind of operation, McRaven took a deep breath and said, “Okay, grab as much as you can, but we’ve got to kind of get moving here.”
On the second floor bin Laden had meticulously organized his CDs, DVDs, memory cards, thumb drives, computers, and digital voice recorders. The SEALs stuffed bags with as much as they could, taking ten hard drives, five computers, and around one hundred storage devices such as thumb drives and disks.
At about the forty-minute point McRaven told his team, “Okay guys, I’m getting a little nervous here. Let’s go ahead and wrap this thing up.”
Outside the compound the Pakistani-American interpreter saw that the noise of the helicopters and gunfire had woken up neighbors, who were now coming out of their houses. Some of them started running toward the compound. The interpreter realized he had to do something. He called at them in Pashto, saying, “This is a government business. If you want to stay alive, don’t come. Go back to your house.”
Two men kept running toward the compound. A SEAL prepared to shoot. The interpreter tapped the SEAL’s shoulder, saying, “Wait.” The interpreter cursed at the running men, yelling at them in Pashto, “Go back!” They turned around.
On the feed from the drone officials at the White House and CIA saw four black dots moving from the main building on the compound to the one functioning Black Hawk. These were four SEALs carrying bin Laden’s body to the helicopter.
The SEALs were “on target” at Abbottabad for forty-eight minutes, eighteen minutes longer than planned. As a result, they had gathered an immense haul of intelligence, but the city of Abbottabad was now full of blue police lights converging on the compound.
It was time to go. The SEALs did not want the downed Black Hawk’s stealth technology and secret avionics to fall into the wrong hands. They packed the downed helicopter with explosives and set a timer so they would blow up the Black Hawk after a couple of minutes. Just as the downed chopper was about to explode, the backup Chinook was coming in and was very close to landing.
An urgent call to the Chinook pilot instructed him, “Break away!”
The pilot banked steeply to his right. The Black Hawk blew up at 1:06 a.m. in a massive explosion that threw up a 150-foot mushroom cloud. The Chinook made a sharp turn away from the cloud and debris. The explosion was so close to the Chinook that one of the SEALs could feel its heat inside the helicopter. Operation Neptune Spear had come close to losing another helicopter.
The Chinook came in to land to pick up the remaining SEALS on the ground as well as bin Laden’s DNA samples and all the intelligence materials that were retrieved at the compound. Bin Laden’s body was placed on the surviving Black Hawk; that way, if the Pakistanis mobilized their air force and shot down one of the helicopters, there was still evidence that bin Laden was dead.
One Chinook flew a direct route back toward Afghanistan. In the surviving Black Hawk the lights in the cockpit were blinking, indicating that it was low on fuel. It headed to get fuel from the second Chinook in Kala Dhaka, the mountainous, remote region northeast of Abbottabad. The refueling took nineteen long minutes.
Escorted by the Chinook the Black Hawk flew toward Afghanistan. The Chinook pilot noticed his electronic warfare displays were lighting up, which meant that Pakistani radar systems were “painting” the Chinook and it was being tracked. An F-16 jet took off from a base in Pakistan and started searching for the Chinook. One of the SEALs started thinking they might all die because there was no way they were going to outmaneuver an F-16.
At 2:26 a.m. the Chinook and Black Hawk entered Afghan airspace. It was the first time that the SEALs had really enjoyed hearing the words “Welcome to Afghanistan.”
Admiral McRaven was on video link with the White House when the helicopters landed in Jalalabad. Obama asked, “Bill, can you confirm that it’s bin Laden?”
McRaven said, “Mr. President, I can’t until I go visually ID the body.”
The landing field was about five minutes from where McRaven was positioned. By the time McRaven reached the hangar the SEALs had off-loaded the body. McRaven unzipped the body bag, thinking, “He doesn’t look terrific.” Bin Laden had two rounds in his head.
“Maya,” the CIA analyst, looked at bin Laden’s body stone-faced, saying, “I guess I’m out of a fucking job.” And then she walked away.
McRaven had several photos of bin Laden, and when he put them close to the dead man’s face, even though his beard was a little shorter in the photos, it was immediately obvious that it was al-Qaeda’s leader. McRaven knew bin Laden was about six-foot-four. There was a young SEAL standing nearby, McRaven asked him, “Son, how tall are you?”
The SEAL said, “Well, sir, I’m about six-foot-two.”
McRaven said, “Come here, I want you to lie down next to the remains here.”
The young SEAL said, “I’m sorry, sir. You want me to do what?”
McRaven said, “I want you to lie down next to the remains.”
Bin Laden’s corpse was a couple inches longer than the young SEAL.
McRaven called Obama, saying, “Mr. President, I can’t be certain without DNA that it’s bin Laden, but frankly it’s probably about a 99 percent chance that it is. In fact, I had a young SEAL lie down next to him, and the remains were a little taller.”
There was a pause on the other end of the videoconference. Obama said, “Okay, let me get this straight. We had $60 million for a helicopter”—the stealth Black Hawk that had gone down—“and you didn’t have $10 for a tape measure?”
Now that the SEALs and bin Laden’s body were safely out of Pakistan it was time to tell Pakistan’s leaders what had happened.
Obama called Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, whose wife, Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, had been assassinated by allies of bin Laden four years earlier. Zardari told Obama, “I’m happy because these are the same types of people who killed my wife.”
Admiral Mullen called the Pakistani army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the most powerful man in the country, who immediately said “Congratulations.” Kayani urged that Obama publicly explain what had happened as soon as possible, saying, “We’re not going to be able to manage the Pakistani media without you confirming this. You can explain it to them. They need to understand that this was bin Laden and not just some ordinary U.S. operation.”
Photos of bin Laden were transmitted back to the CIA. The two best facial recognition analysts in the agency’s Science & Technology division independently assessed the photos. They examined seven facial features, including eyes, nasal openings, and earlobes and estimated that there was a 95 percent chance it was bin Laden.
Obama’s first reaction was caution. “We’re gonna hold. We will not announce tonight. I’m not going in front of three hundred million Americans with a one in twenty chance of being completely wrong. This is too important.”
Obama’s advisers weighed in, saying, “This story’s not gonna hold. If you wait till morning, it will come out somewhere else.”
The photos of bin Laden’s body were handed around the Situation Room. When Obama looked at them there was a change in his demeanor. It certainly looked like bin Laden. Obama said that he would make the announcement that night.
Obama called George W. Bush in Dallas to tell him that bin Laden was dead.
Obama also called Bill Clinton, saying, “I assume Hillary’s already told you?” She hadn’t.
Going outside for the first time in many hours, Obama walked down the colonnade overlooking the Rose Garden toward the White House’s East Room where the world’s media was waiting. The president could hear chants of “USA! USA! USA!” shouted by the crowds of young Americans who had gathered outside the White House gates. Most of them were children when bin Laden’s men had struck on 9/11.
At 11:35 p.m. in the East Room without preamble Obama announced, “Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
I. The point man, O’Neill, and Bissonnette were the first three SEALs to assault bin Laden’s bedroom. O’Neill has since claimed that he was the shooter who killed bin Laden. Others on the raid team told the author that O’Neill’s account wasn’t accurate. To determine definitively which of the SEALs killed bin Laden is not possible. All the electricity in the compound and the surrounding neighborhood was off on a moonless night and the SEALs were wearing night vision goggles, which allowed them only limited vision. What is certain is that it was a team effort. As McRaven explained to the author, “It wasn’t just the SEAL team and the Night Stalkers [helicopter pilots], it was everybody that has fought in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars after 9/11. And this was why it wasn’t important who killed bin Laden. There may have been one person that pulled the trigger, but there were hundreds of thousands of troops behind us.”