Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden
By: Mark Mazzetti, Helene Cooper and Peter Baker, New York
Times
WASHINGTON - For years, the agonizing search for Osama bin Laden
kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the
Central Intelligence Agency drove up behind a white Suzuki
navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote
down the car's license plate.
The man in the car was Bin Laden's most trusted courier, and
over the next month C.I.A. operatives would track him throughout
central Pakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said, he led
them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and
surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles
from the Pakistani capital.
On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American commandos in
four helicopters descended on the compound, the officials said.
Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would not take off.
Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in
Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed to
finish their mission and leave before a confrontation. Of the five
dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet
in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped his picture with a
camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial
recognition program.
And just like that, history's most expansive, expensive and
exasperating manhunt was over. The inert frame of Osama bin Laden,
America's enemy No. 1, was placed in a helicopter for burial at
sea, never to be seen or feared again. A nation that spent a decade
tormented by its failure to catch the man responsible for nearly
3,000 fiery deaths in New York, outside Washington and Pennsylvania
on Sept. 11, 2001, at long last had its sense of finality, at least
in this one difficult chapter.
For an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism
for a string of intelligence failures over the past decade, Bin
Laden's killing brought a measure of redemption. For a military
that has slogged through two, and now three vexing wars in Muslim
countries, it provided an unalloyed success. And for a president
whose national security leadership has come under question, it
proved an affirming moment that will enter the history books.
The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking
intelligence work, including the interrogation of C.I.A. detainees
in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where sometimes what was not
said was as useful as what was. Intelligence agencies eavesdropped
on telephone calls and e-mails of the courier's Arab family in a
Persian Gulf state and pored over satellite images of the compound
in Abbottabad to determine a "pattern of life" that might decide
whether the operation would be worth the risk.
As more than a dozen White House, intelligence and Pentagon
officials described the operation on Monday, the past few weeks
were a nerve-racking amalgamation of what-ifs and negative
scenarios. "There wasn't a meeting when someone didn't mention
'Black Hawk Down,' " a senior administration official said,
referring to the disastrous 1993 battle in Somalia in which two
American helicopters were shot down and some of their crew killed
in action. The failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980
also loomed large.
Administration officials split over whether to launch the
operation, whether to wait and continue monitoring until they were
more sure that Bin Laden was really there, or whether to go for a
less risky bombing assault. In the end, President Obama opted
against a bombing that could do so much damage it might be
uncertain whether Bin Laden was really hit and chose to send in
commandos. A "fight your way out" option was built into the plan,
with two helicopters following the two main assault copters as
backup in case of trouble.
On Sunday afternoon, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani
territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the Situation
Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it unfolded.
Much of the time was spent in silence. Mr. Obama looked "stone
faced," one aide said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. fingered
his rosary beads. "The minutes passed like days," recalled John O.
Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief.
The code name for Bin Laden was "Geronimo." The president and
his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a
video screen, narrating from his agency's headquarters across the
Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan.
"They've reached the target," he said.
Minutes passed.
"We have a visual on Geronimo," he said.
A few minutes later: "Geronimo EKIA."
Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation
Room.
Finally, the president spoke up.
"We got him."
Filling in the Gaps
Years before the Sept. 11 attacks transformed Bin Laden into the
world's most feared terrorist, the C.I.A. had begun compiling a
detailed dossier about the major players inside his global terror
network.
It wasn't until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up
Qaeda operatives - and subjecting them to hours of brutal
interrogation sessions in secret overseas prisons - that they
finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers
and money men Bin Laden relied on.
Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier.
When the Americans ran the man's pseudonym past two top-level
detainees - the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda's operational chief, Abu Faraj
al-Libi - the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised
suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying
and that the courier probably was an important figure.
As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being
buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments
about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and
the intense criticism for using waterboarding and other extreme
interrogation methods that critics said amounted to torture.
By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that
the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency's top clandestine
officer ordered an overhaul of the agency's counterterrorism
operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic
reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the
courier's family name. With that, they turned to one of their
greatest investigative tools - the National Security Agency began
intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man's
family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full
name.
Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him
driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of
surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad,
American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big,
perhaps even Bin Laden himself. It was hardly the spartan cave in
the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding place. Rather,
it was a three-story house ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls,
topped with barbed wire and protected by two security fences. He
was, said Mr. Brennan, the White House official, "hiding in plain
sight."
Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most
senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials
didn't even list the topic in their alerts to each other.
That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his
presumed hiding place.
"It was electric," an administration official who attended the
meeting said. "For so long, we'd been trying to get a handle on
this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is."
There was guesswork about whether Bin Laden was indeed inside
the house. What followed was weeks of tense meetings between Mr.
Panetta and his subordinates about what to do next.
While Mr. Panetta advocated an aggressive strategy to confirm
Bin Laden's presence, some C.I.A. clandestine officers worried that
the most promising lead in years might be blown if bodyguards
suspected the compound was being watched and spirited the Qaeda
leader out of the area.
For weeks last fall, spy satellites took detailed photographs,
and the N.S.A. worked to scoop up any communications coming from
the house. It wasn't easy: the compound had neither a phone line
nor Internet access. Those inside were so concerned about security
that they burned their trash rather than put it on the street for
collection.
In February, Mr. Panetta called Vice Adm. William H. McRaven,
commander of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, to
C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., to give him details about the
compound and to begin planning a military strike.
Admiral McRaven, a veteran of the covert world who had written a
book on American Special Operations, spent weeks working with the
C.I.A. on the operation, and came up with three options: a
helicopter assault using American commandos, a strike with B-2
bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint raid with
Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told about the
mission hours before the launch.
Weighing the Options
On March 14, Mr. Panetta took the options to the White House.
C.I.A. officials had been taking satellite photos, establishing
what Mr. Panetta described as the habits of people living at the
compound. By now evidence was mounting that Bin Laden was
there.
The discussions about what to do took place as American
relations with Pakistan were severely strained over the arrest of
Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor imprisoned for shooting two
Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore in January. Some of Mr.
Obama's top aides worried that any military assault to capture or
kill Bin Laden might provoke an angry response from Pakistan's
government, and that Mr. Davis could end up dead in his jail cell.
Mr. Davis was ultimately released on March 16, giving a freer hand
to his colleagues.
On March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinions on
the options.
Mr. Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling it
risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial
bombardment using smart bombs. But a few days later, the officials
returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000
pounds each. And how could the American officials be certain that
they had killed Bin Laden?
"It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn't have
given us a body," said one American intelligence official.
A helicopter assault emerged as the favored option. The Navy
Seals team that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at
training facilities on both American coasts, which were made up to
resemble the compound. But they were not told who their target
might be until later.
Last Thursday, the day after the president released his
long-form birth certificate - such "silliness," he told reporters,
was distracting the country from more important things - Mr. Obama
met again with his top national security officials.
Mr. Panetta told the group that the C.I.A. had "red-teamed" the
case - shared their intelligence with other analysts who weren't
involved to see if they agreed that Bin Laden was probably in
Abbottabad. They did. It was time to decide.
Around the table, the group went over and over the negative
scenarios. There were long periods of silence, one aide said. And
then, finally, Mr. Obama spoke: "I'm not going to tell you what my
decision is now - I'm going to go back and think about it some
more." But he added, "I'm going to make a decision soon."
Sixteen hours later, he had made up his mind. Early the next
morning, four top aides were summoned to the White House Diplomatic
Room. Before they could brief the president, he cut them off. "It's
a go," he said. The earliest the operation could take place was
Saturday, but officials cautioned that cloud cover in the area
meant that Sunday was much more likely.
The next day, Mr. Obama took a break from rehearsing for the
White House Correspondents Dinner that night to call Admiral
McRaven, to wish him luck.
On Sunday, White House officials canceled all West Wing tours so
unsuspecting tourists and visiting celebrities wouldn't
accidentally run into all the high-level national security
officials holed up in the Situation Room all afternoon monitoring
the feeds they were getting from Mr. Panetta. A staffer went to
Costco and came back with a mix of provisions - turkey pita wraps,
cold shrimp, potato chips, soda.
At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta sketched out the operation to the
group for a final time. Within an hour, the C.I.A. director began
his narration, via video from Langley. "They've crossed into
Pakistan," he said.
Across the Border
The commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a base
in Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan. The goal was
to get in and get out before Pakistani authorities detected the
breach of their territory by what were to them unknown forces and
reacted with possibly violent results.
In Pakistan, it was just past midnight on Monday morning, and
the Americans were counting on the element of surprise. As the
first of the helicopters swooped in at low altitudes, neighbors
heard a loud blast and gunshots. A woman who lives two miles away
said she thought it was a terrorist attack on a Pakistani military
installation. Her husband said no one had any clue Bin Laden was
hiding in the quiet, affluent area. "It's the closest you can be to
Britain," he said of their neighborhood.
The Seal team stormed into the compound - the raid awakened the
group inside, one American intelligence official said - and a
firefight broke out. One man held an unidentified woman living
there as a shield while firing at the Americans. Both were killed.
Two more men died as well, and two women were wounded. American
authorities later determined that one of the slain men was Bin
Laden's son, Hamza, and the other two were the courier and his
brother.
The commandos found Bin Laden on the third floor, wearing the
local loose-fitting tunic and pants known as a shalwar kameez, and
officials said he resisted before he was shot above the left eye
near the end of the 40-minute raid. The American government gave
few details about his final moments. "Whether or not he got off any
rounds, I frankly don't know," said Mr. Brennan, the White House
counterterrorism chief. But a senior Pentagon official, briefing on
the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Bin Laden "was killed
by U.S. bullets."
American officials insisted they would have taken Bin Laden into
custody if he did not resist, although they considered that
likelihood remote. "If we had the opportunity to take Bin Laden
alive, if he didn't present any threat, the individuals involved
were able and prepared to do that," Mr. Brennan said.
One of Bin Laden's wives identified his body, American officials
said. A picture taken by a Seals commando and processed through
facial recognition software suggested a 95 percent certainty that
it was Bin Laden. Later, DNA tests comparing samples with relatives
found a 99.9 percent match.
But the Americans faced other problems. One of their helicopters
stalled and could not take off. Rather than let it fall into the
wrong hands, the commandos moved the women and children to a secure
area and blew up the malfunctioning helicopter.
By that point, though, the Pakistani military was scrambling
forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani territory. "They
had no idea about who might have been on there," Mr. Brennan said.
"Thankfully, there was no engagement with Pakistani forces."
As they took off at 1:10 a.m. local time, taking a trove of
documents and computer hard drives from the house, the Americans
left behind the women and children. A Pakistani official said nine
children, from 2 to 12 years old, are now in Pakistani custody.
The Obama administration had already determined it would follow
Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours to avoid offending
devout Muslims, yet concluded Bin Laden would have to be buried at
sea, since no country would be willing to take the body. Moreover,
they did not want to create a shrine for his followers.
So the Qaeda leader's body was washed and placed in a white
sheet in keeping with tradition. On the aircraft carrier Carl
Vinson, it was placed in a weighted bag as an officer read prepared
religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native
speaker, according to the senior Pentagon official.
The body then was placed on a prepared flat board and eased into
the sea. Only a small group of people watching from one of the
large elevator platforms that move aircraft up to the flight deck
were witness to the end of America's most wanted fugitive.