The Untold Story of the 247-Day Hunt to Bring the Mastermind of 9/11 to Justice

By Chris Wallace with Mitch Weiss

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Hours after the towers collapsed, President George W. Bush promised the nation in a televised address that America would take the fight to Al Qaeda. Less than a month later, a U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a military offensive aimed at killing bin Laden, his terrorist followers, and dismantling the Taliban government, which had been supporting and protecting Al Qaeda for years. 

With coalition forces on the ground, bin Laden and his allies fled to Tora Bora, a remote mountainous area in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. U.S. Special Forces thought he was trapped in a cave. After a five-day battle, they took Tora Bora in December 2001. But when the smoke cleared, bin Laden was gone. He had disappeared. 

For nine years, Al Qaeda’s leader remained an elusive figure, always just beyond the grasp of his pursuers. Was he in eastern Afghanistan? Maybe Pakistan, plotting new attacks? Or in Saudi Arabia, where he was born? No one knew for sure. 

But then they got a lead from an unlikely source, Gary said. 

Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. had been interrogating Al Qaeda prisoners at both the U.S. Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and CIA secret prisons. Sometimes they’d use interrogation techniques that many critics called torture, such as waterboarding, to get information. Interrogators would often ask detainees about Al Qaeda members who served as couriers.

Gary said analysts believed bin Laden was too smart to let Al Qaeda senior commanders know where his hideout was. So if he wanted to get his messages out, somebody had to carry them – someone whom bin Laden would trust with his life. 

During interrogations, one name kept coming up: Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Some detainees claimed he was an important courier with close ties to bin Laden. But others downplayed al-Kuwaiti’s significance. 

With Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, interrogators waterboarded him 183 times, making sure he was in a “compliant state,” before asking him about al-Kuwaiti. He said, yes, he knew him, but denied al-Kuwaiti was a courier. And he said al-Kuwaiti had left Al Qaeda after 9/11. 

But KSM didn’t know the prison was bugged. So when he returned to his cell, interrogators heard him issue a warning to the other prisoners: Don’t mention “the courier.” Another prominent Al Qaeda member said he didn’t know al-Kuwaiti, then volunteered the name of a courier he said was working for bin Laden. Interrogators later concluded the name he had given them was fictitious. Gary said the misinformation only reinforced their belief that al-Kuwaiti was important to the terrorist group. Otherwise, why would they be protecting him? 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 3-5)

After the United States drove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from power in Afghanistan, President Bush began making the case for invading Iraq. But Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, decided to speak out. At an October 2002 protest in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, he made his position clear. “I don’t oppose all wars. … What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” He said the Iraq conflict was being pushed by “political hacks” to distract the nation from major problems. The text of the speech was circulated on the internet, where he came to the attention of Democratic Party strategists.

But people who believed that Obama was some kind of reflexive antiwar activist weren’t paying attention. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he had staked out a hard-line foreign policy position. In the Democratic presidential primaries, Obama said he’d be willing to attack inside Pakistan – with or without approval from the Pakistani government – to kill bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders. His main rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, labeled Obama native. After Obama landed his party’s nomination, the Clinton attack line was picked up by Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

But Obama didn’t back down. During a debate with McCain, Obama vowed once again to take out bin Laden if he ever appeared in America’s crosshairs, no matter where he was – Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Timbuktu.

“If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling” to do it, the United States would, Obama promised. But he wasn’t finished. No, Obama wanted to make it clear to the American people what he’d do: “We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our highest national security priority.”

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 28-29)

Panetta jumped in, “Mr. President, it’s very preliminary. But we think this is the best lead we’ve had since Tora Bora,” he said. 

Silence. No one in the room wanted to show what they were really thinking. Tony Blinken, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, was skeptical. Yes, it wouldn’t have been brought to the president’s attention if there wasn’t something there. But they’d had so many false leads over the years, it was hard to take this too seriously. Donilon was impressed. Panetta and his team were “quite careful” about what they knew and what they didn’t know. Maybe there was something to this. 

Obama, as usual, showed no emotion. He was calm and collected, and clearly interested, but there were too many “maybes,” he said. Couldn’t the brothers be protecting a powerful criminal? Maybe a different high-ranking Al Qaeda figure? 

Obama’s poker face didn’t bother Morell. He’d worked with the president long enough to know he didn’t bark orders or blurt out his thoughts. He usually deliberated at length before making any decision. But that day, sitting behind his desk, Obama surprised Morell. The president was very direct and clear. 

“Number one, Leon, Michael, find out what the hell is going on inside the compound,” Obama said. “And number two: don’t tell anybody else. This is known only by us. Don’t tell the secretary of state. Don’t tell the secretary of defense. Don’t tell the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. … This is just us for now.”

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 23-24)

The CIA analyst’s job was to pull together all the evidence and expertise on a given topic and provide an answer to a question a policymaker had asked or should ask. An analyst typically developed a working hypothesis based on intercepts, human intelligence operations, photographs and videos, and other streams of information. That hypothesis then drove further collection of information. 

With bin Laden, the questions were: How would he hide? Where? What security would he employ?

For years, everyone assumed he was holed up in the tribal areas to western Pakistan, probably in a cave or a remote area, separated from his family and surrounded by well-armed guards. There was a good chance that his health was failing, and perhaps that he was hooked up to a makeshift kidney dialysis machine.

He would never live in a compound with families. He wouldn’t live in a place with military helicopters flying overhead. He’d have set up layers of defenses around his booby-trapped lair, posted guards, and created tunnels or other elaborate escape routes.

The new lead ran counter to that entire narrative. It suggested that bin Laden was living in a villa in the suburb with his wives, kids, and two families of retainers. He was residing in a sleepy, picturesque city in the shadow of the Himalaya Mountains. Named for James Abbott, a British officer and administrator, the city was a tourist hub with a military academy and medical school. The streets were filled with cadets, medical students, and retirees who enjoyed the temperate weather and the nature trails leading to the mountains. If bin Laden was living here, then the CIA had been wrong about almost everything, for an awfully long time. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 38)

Morell soon got to know all the bad guys in the terrorist world. 

He learned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda – the name is Arabic for “the base.” Their roots dated back to 1978, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up the nation’s Communist government. 

In the wake of the invasion, Muslim insurgents, known as the mujahideen, rallied to fight a jihad, or holy war, against the Soviets. One of their supporters was bin Laden, the seventeenth child of a Saudi Arabian construction magnate. At first, bin Laden provided the mujahideen with money, weapons, and fighters. But he decided he wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines. So he traveled to Afghanistan and fought alongside the insurgents in the rough mountainous terrain.

When the Soviets were driven from Afghanistan a decade later, most of the nation was taken over by Islamic extremists known as the Taliban. Their leaders allowed bin Laden to set up training camps for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, bin Laden worked tirelessly to unite disparate militant groups, from Egypt to the Philippines, under the banner of Al Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam.

While bin Laden waged jihad all over the world, the United States was his primary target. In the years before 9/11, Al Qaeda conducted a series of high-profile terrorist attacks against America. They included the August 7, 1998, bombings of two U.S. embassies – one in Tanzania, the other in Kenya – that killed more than two hundred people.

Morell was in Tenet’s office two days after the attacks, when the CIA chief briefed President Bill Clinton and a cadre of security officials that an international terrorist named bin Laden was responsible. 

Preparing for that presidential phone call had been nerve-wracking for Morell. He’d lost patience with the analysts assembling “talking points” for the call. 

“What the hell are they doing down there?” he’d said.

“Calm down,” Tenet told him. “They’re doing the best they can.”

In a crisis situation, everyone works hard and there’s no need to push, Tenet told him. That’s counterproductive.

Once they were certain bin Laden was behind the attacks, Clinton ordered missile strikes against Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons plant in Sudan.

The embassy bombings changed the atmosphere at the agency.

Before then, the CIA had been prohibited from using lethal force against the terrorist leader. Now, with White House approval, a memorandum of notification (MON) was drafted, which allowed the CIA, using its Afghan surrogates, to kill bin Laden during an operation if it was deemed “unfeasible” to capture him. It essentially allowed the CIA to execute Osama bin Laden.

After the 2000 presidential election – and the controversial victory of George W. Bush – Morell’s telephone rang again, this time with a job offer from the White House. Morell was tapped to become the new president’s daily briefer. He would still work for the CIA. But every morning, he’d go to the White House to tell Bush about the day’s most pressing national security issues, and share the briefing in paper form with the president’s closest advisors.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 41-42)

From the time Bush took office, the CIA was flashing warning lights about bin Laden. He was planning a high-profile attack, but Morell knew some members of the administration – and the Pentagon – were skeptical about the warnings.

Tenet didn’t back down. He kept pushing the administration to take the threats seriously. Morell was there when a member of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s staff told Tenet the CIA was being fooled. The Pentagon was sure that Al Qaeda was conducting a misinformation campaign to get America to waste resources. 

Tenet angrily turned to the official. “I want you to look in my eyes,” he said. “I want you to hear what I have to say. This is not deception. This is the real deal.” In early August 2001, Morell asked terrorism analysts to write a PDB titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

On August 6, while the president was on vacation at his Texas ranch, Morell sat with him in his living room and explained why he had the analysts write it. There was still no specific information to suggest these attacks were aimed at “the homeland.” But everyone knew bin Laden would like “nothing more than to bring the fight here to our shores.” 

A month later, the attack arrived, as the CIA had predicted.

Morell was in Florida with the president, who was rolling out a new education policy. There was nothing in the intelligence report that morning regarding terrorist threats. After the briefing, Morell accompanied Bush to an elementary school in Sarasota, where the president was scheduled to read a storybook and pose for phots.

Just as they pulled up to the school, Ari Fleischer’s phone rang. Bush’s press secretary answered, and then turned to Morell. “Michael, do you know anything about a plane hitting the World Trade Center?”

“No,” Morell said, “but I’ll find out. Ari, I sure hope this is an accident and not terrorism.”

“I sure hope so, too,” Fleisher said.

When the second airliner hit the other tower, they had their answer. Bush was reading a book to sixteen second graders in a small classroom when Andy Card, his chief of staff, approached the president. “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center,” Card whispered in Bush’s ear. 

“America is under attack.”

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 43-44)

The team reconvened a week later. Panetta sat down at the head of the conference table as Gary, Sam, and the others filed quietly in.

The agents didn’t have ten ideas, or twenty-five. No, they had thirty-eight. They had come up with thirty-eight ways to try to get information about the compound and, more important, The Pacer. They even put together what they called the “Chart of 38.”

Panetta smiled as they rattled down the list. Some ideas were outrageous, like throwing a stink bomb into the compound and taking photos when the occupants fled, or putting listening devices in groceries that were delivered to the compound. Maybe use a sound system to blast a deep, booming voice – a James Earl Jones type – that would proclaim: “This is the voice of Allah. I command you to leave the house!”

Yes, some of the ideas were crazy. Panetta didn’t know if they would lead to new information. But so what? Wild ideas were better than no ideas at all. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 79)

The U.S. had invaded Iraq under a failed premise promoted by intelligence officials. They’d warned that Saddam Hussein was offering a safe haven to Al Qaeda terrorists. Worse, they believed Iraq was storing weapons of mass destruction. Neither one turned out to be true.

The Iraq invasion alienated much of the Muslim world and destabilized the entire region. Iraq and Iran had been enemies for decades. They’d fought a bloody war in the 1980s. With Hussein gone, Iran’s power and influence spread unchecked across the Middle East. And now, from all U.S. intelligence reports, Iran was moving ahead with a nuclear program. Obama and other world leaders worried that Iran might try to develop nuclear weapons. If that happened, the balance of power in the Middle East would change forever.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 81)

As much as Panetta wanted to, he couldn’t shut out the world entirely. There were still moments when his mind drifted back to his office, the conference room, or the courtyard of the fortress in Abbottabad.

He was balancing a lot of competing interests. He had to keep Congress in the loop. At their meeting in September, Obama had sworn everyone to secrecy, forbidding anyone to mention the compound. But the bin Laden operation was costing a lot of money, and CIA funding was granted by Congress. Panetta needed to go to Capitol Hill for a “reprogramming” of funds to continue the stakeout. Just before the holiday, Panetta, without Obama’s knowledge, had briefed key congressional leaders about the operation. He promised to keep them updated and asked the leaders not to leak the information.

It was a risky move, but Panetta didn’t have a choice. During his confirmation hearing, he had given Congress his word that he’d keep them informed of CIA operations. He knew congressional leaders were entitled by law to know. Still, he knew Obama couldn’t find out he’d told them, and neither could anyone else on the bin Laden team. And now the November midterm election had put Republicans in charge of Congress, raising the stakes even higher. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 93)

In Iran in 1979, massive protests against Shah Mohammad Reza led to his overthrow. The Shah’s repressive regime was replaced by an Islamic republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fiery Islamic fundamentalist who had been expelled from Iran for speaking out against the Shah.

Khomeini’s extremist Revolutionary Guard had cracked down on anyone opposed to their strict new religious rules. The Shah, who had been suffering from cancer, fled to the United States for medical treatment. On November 4, 1979, Islamic militants stormed the U.S. embassy and took fifty-two Americans hostage. They demanded the Shah be returned to Iran to face trial for his reign of terror.

President Jimmy Carter refused. Operation Eagle Claw, a military rescue operation, was mounted to free the hostages. In April 1980, an elite team was organized to take back the embassy compound. But at a rendezvous point in the Iranian desert, a severe sandstorm caused several helicopters to malfunction, including one that veered on takeoff into a large EC-130 transport plane. Eight American servicemen were killed, and the mission was aborted. It was an international humiliation that likely cost Carter his reelection.

The hostages were finally released on January 20, 1981, a few hours after the new U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated. All told, they were held 444 days.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 100-101)

McRaven was part of Operation Desert Shield, which liberated Kuwait and sent Hussein’s troops straggling in retreat back to Iraq.

After the war, McRaven earned a master’s degree at the Naval Post-graduate School in Monterey, California. He saw a need for a graduate-level program in special operations warfare – not just for the navy, but throughout the armed services. McRaven helped create the school’s special operations and low intensity conflict curriculum, and in 1996 was the program’s first graduate. His master’s thesis, “The Theory of Special Operations,” broke new ground.

McRaven’s paper reviewed a series of daring twentieth-century commando operations, including a 1943 glider rescue of Mussolini ordered by Hitler, and the 1976 Israeli operation to free hostages in Entebbe, Uganda. It detailed how a small group of highly trained, well-rehearsed soldiers can use stealth to maintain short-term superiority over larger or better-armed forces. The keys to successful missions, he wrote, are simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose.

His master’s thesis was published as a book. It quickly became the bible for military special operations units throughout the world. McRaven used those principles to develop a model for special operations to shape U.S. military strategy.

Still, McRaven was not an academic theorist. During his long career, he had personally commanded or carried out more than a thousand special operations in some of the most dangerous places imaginable, mostly going after high-value targets in Afghanistan. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 108-109)

The CIA had come up with several possible Courses of Action (COAs). Panetta went over each ont of them – even ones that he had privately ruled out. He discussed the pros and cons of each proposed operation.

One option: “Inform Pakistan.” They would tell the Pakistanis what U.S. intelligence had uncovered and urge them to take action. This was the saddest move from a diplomatic standpoint.

Option two: A joint operation with the Pakistani military. The risk to U.S. forces would be vastly reduced, Panetta said. CIA leaders had bounced around the idea, but Pakistan’s intelligence service – the ISI – had a reputation for leaks and divided loyalties. Many ISI agents had ties to the Taliban. It was impossible to trust them with the information.

That raised another possibility – what the agency called “Compel Pakistan.” Tell Pakistani authorities the U.S. was conducting  a raid that night, and press the Pakistanis to come with them. 

The problem with all of these COAs, of course, was that they relied on assistance and secrecy from an uncertain ally. Panetta now laid out three other options, based on the U.S. acting on its own. 

America could launch an air strike. The benefits of simply demolishing the compound were obvious: No U.S. lives would be risked on Pakistani soil. But how could they be sure that bin Laden was there and had been killed? If Al Qaeda denied their leader was dead, how would the United States explain blowing up a residence deep inside Pakistan in the middle of a crowded city? Intelligence estimated that five women and twenty children lived in the compound. The strike would annihilate the buildings and adjoining residences, too. No one could say how many innocent civilians would die. 

Another choice was to authorize a special ops mission. A team would fly into Pakistan by helicopter, raid the compound, and get out before the Pakistani police or military had time to react. That would take a lot more planning.

They’d have to pick a team. They’d have to pull off the operation inside another country without being seen – or at least, without being stopped. To preserve secrecy – and maintain deniability if something went wrong – the mission would have to be conducted under CIA authority rather than the Pentagon’s. 

Panetta said the final option was using CIA operators – the agency’s paramilitary unit. They were mostly former special operators or Marines who helped train and run covert operations around the world. The CIA guys would come in on the ground, raid the compound, capture the target, and find some way to sneak him out of Pakistan.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 122-123)

Since the last meeting with the president, Panetta had been refining their options, adding more details. They had looked even closer at bombing the compound. 

He’d brought in a group of “flyboys” to CIA headquarters, specialist airmen from the 509th Bomber Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City. They made a great impression with their short haircuts and leather jackets, and they wasted no time in describing how they could conduct a mission to kill The Pacer: Two B-2 bombers would leave Whiteman and fly halfway around the world to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There they’d “stealth up,” switch on their radar-blocking technology, and bank right. Minutes later, they would be over their target. 

Each bomber would drop sixteen JDAMs (joint direct attack munitions). Each bomb weighed two thousand pounds.

Jeremy Bash had a few questions for them. What would they see after the bombs dropped?

“Nothing,” one of the flyboys responded. 

“Nothing? What does that mean?” Bash asked.

The compound would be reduced to rubble within moments, he responded.

Bash wanted him to elaborate. Would anything be left over? A flyboy shook his head.

“Would we be able to collect DNA from the bodies?” Bash asked.

That was highly unlikely because all the bodies would be nothing more than “dust,” a flyboy said, adding that they wouldn’t be able to contain the damage to just the compound and a few “rows of houses across the street.”

“Everything would be blown to smithereens,” he said.

So, if bin Laden was there, he’d be killed, along with everyone else in the compound and the surrounding neighborhood. Panetta and Bash knew that would create another problem. They’d have almost no chance of ever proving they had killed bin Laden. It was unlikely that the Pakistanis would invite U.S. officials to the smoldering ruins to search the DNA. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 144-145)

McRaven said he’d built his plan on the premise that his team should avoid a firefight with Pakistani authorities. If confronted, his inclination was to hold the team in place until U.S. diplomats negotiated a safe exit.

Obama appreciated his candor, but with U.S.-Pakistan relations in an especially precarious state, the president had serious reservations about this strategy. No, he would not put the fate of SEALs into the hands of the Pakistani government, especially if bin Laden wasn’t found inside. Public outcry would land them all in jail, or worse.

The president knew he couldn’t rely on the Pakistanis. He knew he couldn’t rely on diplomacy. He didn’t want McRaven’s men “rotting in jail.” So Obama decided to make sure that McRaven had clear and concise instructions on what to do if the Pakistani police or military arrived at the compound. He needed to make sure there was no confusion how he wanted them to handle such a scenario.

“Fight your way out,” the president directed. 

McRaven smiled. The president’s words meant McRaven could put together combat air support to protect his men in the compound, or during their return to Afghanistan. His “gorilla package” would include everything in his military arsenal, including fighter jets and AC-130 gunships. McRaven then showed a few more slides, including the helicopter route out of Pakistan. If everything worked well, McRaven estimated the mission would take three and a half hours – ninety minutes of travel each way and a half hour for the mission. No more. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 148-149)

Two years earlier, O’Neil and his team had taken part in a high-profile rescue in the Indian Ocean that unfolded on live television. In a short time, the daring rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates had become etched in SEAL Team 6 lore.

Phillips, a U.S. merchant mariner, was taken hostage by four Somali pirates after they seized his cargo ship. The pirate removed Phillips from the ship and placed him in a eighteen-foot-long enclosed lifeboat. They were either going to extort money from the United States for his safe release or sell him to a group of extremists with ties to Al Qaeda. Either way, the pirates hoped to make millions.

But things didn’t go as planned. U.S. warships quickly arrived and blocked the pirates’ escape route. Phillips was stuck in the tiny vessel while the pirates tried to figure out their next move. The situation was tense. The pirates threatened to kill Phillips. To defuse the situation, the U.S. Navy struck a deal with the priates. The USS Bainbridge, a destroyer, would attach a one-hundered-foot line to the lifeboat and tow it to shore.

Meanwhile, a SEAL team in the United States began planning a rescue. O’Neill was at his four-year-old daughter’s preschool Easter party when his pager beeped and up came a top-secret code. He had to get out of there, fast. He called his wife, Amber, with the news.

She didn’t ask any questions. She could easily guess where her husband was headed, as the hostage drama was all over the news. O’Neill had an hour to get to the military base where a Boeing C-17 Globemaster transport plane was waiting. Amber picked up their daughter. O’Neill gave them both a hug and kiss, then hurried to his car.

It was a twenty-minute drive, and O’Neill was already in uniform. He had time enough to stop at the 7-Eleven outside the base and grab a few necessities. He parked, got some cash from the ATM, and chose a couple of cans of Copenhagen and a carton of cigarettes. He would have made it in and out with time to spare – except for a lollygagging guy in front of him in the checkout line. The man wandered back to the newspapers, scanned the headlines, and finally pulled a copy of USA Today off the rack. The Captain Phillips ordeal was the lead story. The man tottered back to the counter, slammed the newspaper down, and said, “Man, I sure wish someone would do something about this!”

O’Neill snapped. “Hey, buddy, pay for your shit and we will.” 

The man stared at O’Neill. This was Virginia Beach, home of several elite military units. He jumped out of the way. O’Neill bought his things and ran outside to his car. Minutes later he pulled into a parking lot on the base and hurried to the team room. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 151-152)

“So, Michael, if you’re only at 60 percent, would you not do the raid?” Obama asked.

“Even at 60 percent I would do the raid. Given the importance of who this is, the case is strong enough,” he said.

The president leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, what do you all think?” He turned to his right, to Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden said he’d be more comfortable if they had additional information. Why put troops at risk and further damage U.S. relations with Pakistan if they weren’t sure bin Laden was there?

Gates said the intelligence was too weak. He recommended against a raid, although he was still open to a drone strike. He was still haunted by the failed mission to rescue U.S. hostage in Iran back in 1980. Hell, he recalled sitting at this same table in this same room three decades earlier as that tragedy unfolded. He was worried about U.S.-Pakistan relations deteriorating to the point that it would affect the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. depended on Pakistani supply routes. And what about the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters operating along the border? Forget about Pakistan’s cooperation in rooting them out.

Mullen supported the raid. So did Panetta, who believed this was the most important decision of his career. They would deploy forces into harm’s way, but their objective was the world’s number one criminal: Osama bin Laden. For ten years everyone had talked about getting bin Laden. They never thought it was possible. But now, here they were with the president, deciding whether to go after him. If they were successful, it would send a powerful message to the world about the United States’ ability to track down and stop bad guys. To show everyone that the U.S. will never give up until justice is done. For Panetta, this would be the defining moment for the Obama administration. 

Panetta decided to make another passionate plea.

“There’s a formula I’ve used since I was in Congress,” he said. “If I asked the average citizen, ‘If you knew what I knew, what would you do?’ I think in this case, the answer is clear. This is the best intelligence we’ve had since Tora Bora. I have tremendous confidence in our assault team. If we don’t do this, we’ll regret it.”

Secretary of State Clinton was the last person to respond to the president’s question. She had never been in a meeting where the stakes were higher. She knew this would “make or break Obama’s term in office.” If they were successful – if they got bin Laden – Obama would get the credit. But if it turned out poorly – the Pakistanis showed up and there was a firefight and America lost men – it would be the end of his presidency.

She had worked with Obama long enough to understand that he was a methodical decision maker. He’d look at all the pros and cons and analyze them before making a final decision. She owed it to him – and the others at the table – to lay things out in a methodical way. And so she carefully went through all the arguments for a raid – as well as all the arguments against. 

Clinton said she, too, wished they had time to collect better intelligence. She knew the president would be taking a considerable risk. But Clinton said she strongly believed that The Pacer was bin Laden. And after years of searching for the terrorist responsible for taking so many lives, this was a “rare opportunity” to get him. They had to roll the dice. They might not get another chance. 

In the end, Clinton said that for her, it was a “51-49 call.” Obama should order McRaven to conduct the special operations raid. 

Obama listened carefully. He understood everyone’s concerns. President Carter never recovered politically from the Operation Eagle Claw disaster. The president knew his national security team believed that he would suffer the same fate if a raid went sideways. For Obama, it wasn’t about running for another term. His decision would be based on intelligence, not politics. 

Obama had heard enough. In fact, he was getting a little annoyed. “I know we’re trying to quantify these factors as best we can. But ultimately, this is a 50-50 call,” he said.

As far as he was concerned, there were four outcomes when it came to a raid. They involved going in easy, meaning the SEALs met no resistance, or going in hard, which meant they faced opposition. The men could go in easy and bin Laden would be there. They could go in hard and he would be there. They could go in easy and he would not be there. Or they could go in hand and he would not be there. Obama said there was only on disaster scenario: They went in hard – things got messy – and bin Laden wasn’t there. He said he could live with three of the four outcomes. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 210-213)

They thought it was important to have Gates support the raid. Maybe it would help persuade Obama to green-light the mission. The three officials understood why Gates opposed the operation. He had lived through the failed 1980 Iranian hostage rescue.

The secretary sat impassive as Vickers went over the intelligence in the bin Laden operation one more time. He told Gates the evidence was “really quite strong.”

“Our forces can do this,” he added.

Then it was Millen’s turn. He and Gates had known each other for decades. Gates once told Mullen that Joe Biden hadn’t been right about an important issue in forty years. After yesterday’s meeting with the president, the two had shared a ride back to the Pentagon. That’s when Mullen turned to Gates and reminded him about his Biden comment.

“What’s going on here?”  Mullen said. “Over the last forty years, he’s got it all wrong and now you voted with him two days in a row?” They both laughed. In Gates’s office, Mullen made the same pitch as Vickers: They could pull this off.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 220-221)

This was officially a CIA operation. It had been classified as a “Title 50,” referring to a section of the U.S. code that authorized the agency to carry out covert missions. This way, if something went wrong, the United States could deny it had anything to do with the raid. But everyone knew the mission was McRaven’s to direct.

Someone brought up the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The president was expected to go. But should he be laughing and glad-handing with a major military operation unfolding half the world away?

“Fuck the Correspondents’ Dinner,” Hillary Clinton snapped.

Everyone stopped. Clinton explained. The dinner was set for 8 p.m. Saturday night. Pakistan was several time zones ahead of Washington. If things went according to plan they’d know long before the dinner started whether the mission was a success or not.

If Saturday was the best night for the raid, McRaven should go for it, Clinton said. Would it be difficult if something went wrong? Yes. But it would be more difficult if they said, “Oh, sorry, you can’t go after bin Laden because we have a dinner that night. If we ever let a political event get in the way of a military operation, shame on us.” That was absurd.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 222)

Leon Panetta was in the crowd, too, sitting at the Time magazine table. He was tense in his tuxedo, but trying hard not to show it. It was surreal, he thought. Actor George Clooney and director Steven Spielberg were seated at his table, and everyone was laughing and enjoying themselves. If these people only knew what the hell is about to happen, what kind of mission we’re trying to conduct …, he thought to himself.

When it was Obama’s turn, he opened with a video segment called, “I Am a Real American,” which poked fun at the controversy about his birth certificate. When it was over, he stood up. He faced the audience, flashing his big wide smile. 

“My fellow Americans,” Obama began, emphasizing “fellow.”

He rattled off joke after joke. About halfway in, he focused on Trump. After weeks of attacks, the president got his revenge.

“I know he’s taken some flak lately,” Obama said, “but no one is prouder to put this birth certificate issue to rest than Donald. That’s because he can get back to the issues that matter, like, Did we fade the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

Obama also took a jab at Trump’s plans to run for presidency in 2012. 

“We all know about your credentials,” he snarked. 

Trump didn’t laugh. He sat there with a sour face.

But Obama wasn’t done. He said the billionaire businessman could bring change to the White House, transforming it from a stately mansion into a tacky casino with a whirlpool in the garden.

“Donald Trump owns the Miss USA pageant, which is great for Republicans. It will streamline their search for vice president,” he joked. 

The audience howled. Donald Trump seethed.

Obama couldn’t imagine what was going through Trump’s mind during the few minutes he laid into him. And he didn’t care.

But the same reporters who laughed at Aboama’s jokes that night would continue to give Trump plenty of airtime. And what the president could not have envisioned was that – as preposterous as it sounded – Trump would one day sit in Obama’s chair in the Oval Office. In fact, the beating he took at the dinner may have been part of his motivation. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 228-229)

Word came: The Black Hawks were in the air. Obama headed down to the Situation Room. The atmosphere was tense. All the key players were sitting around the conference table: Biden, Clinton, Donilon, Gates, Millen. Adjoining rooms were full of assistants and technicians. 

Obama was updated on plans for notifying Pakistan and other nations after the raid. If The Pacer was indeed bin Laden, and he was killed during the operation, preparations had been made for a traditional Islamic burial at sea. They were concerned that if bin Laden was buried on land, his grave could become a shrine for his followers.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 245)

Van Hooser told McRaven that the SEAL squadron commander was on the radio with an urgent message. “OK, put him on,” McRaven said.

A deep, clear voice said the words McRaven had been hoping for: “For God and country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.”

“Germonimo” was the code name they’d given bin Laden before the mission. The message could only mean one thing: They’d found bin Laden. McRaven quickly relayed the message to Panetta. 

Moments later, Van Hooser confirmed that “Geronimo was EKIA.” Enemy Killed in Action.

He passed the information to Panetta. The JOC exploded in cheers. McRaven wasn’t ready to celebrate yet. Neither was Van Hooser. “Shut the fuck up!” he shouted at the others. “We still have to get these guys home.”

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 265-266)

Obama looked at McRaven over the video teleconference line. The admiral said he had examined the body. They didn’t have the results yet of DNA tests or the CIA’s facial recognition software, but in his opinion, the body was bin Laden’s. 

He even told Obama that he had a six-foot-two SEAL lie next to the body to compare his height to bin Laden’s.

“OK, Bill, let me get this straight. We have $60 million for a helicopter, and you don’t have $10 for a tape measure?” Obama joked.

They lagged, a rare moment of levity.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 275)

The meeting was about to adjourn when Morell rushed into the room, carrying the facial recognition report. The analysis measured details like the curvature of his ear, the space between his eyes and the shape of his earlobes. Everything matched.

“We got him,” Obama said. Now there was no guessing. Obama decided he would tell the nation later that night. A Sunday night. How many people would tune in? So what? They had to get it out there.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 277)

The captain of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was ready. A Boeing V-22 Osprey had delivered bin Laden’s body to the ship. Now it was about to be lowered to its final resting place in the Arabian Sea.

No one would know the exact location of the watery grave. In Islam, the burial takes place as quickly as possible after death. The U.S. officials followed Muslim tradition. They washed bin Laden’s body before wrapping it in white cloth. They placed his body in a bag with weights to sink it to the bottom. It lay on the deck while a muslim seaman spoke the prescribed Arabic prayers.

Only a small group of the ship’s leadership was informed of the burial. Most of the sailors had no idea what was going on. And only a handful were at the burial ceremony, including a navy photographer.

The seaman finished and stepped back. Less than a day after he was killed, Bin Laden’s body was placed on a flat board, his feet facing the water. Several men tipped the board up, and bin Laden’s body slid twenty-five feet into the sea. It disappeared beneath the surface.

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 280–281)

Why had the Black Hawk crashed to the ground while hovering over the compound? Engineers said the chopper got caught in an air vortex caused by higher-than-expected temperatures and the high compound walls, which blocked the downwash of the rotor’s blades. During dress rehearsals, they had substituted chain-link fences for the masonry walls. The air could flow through them instead of being trapped.

McRaven also discovered another problem. The day of the missions, the meteorologists said the temperature would be 18 degrees Celsius, or 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That was perfect for the operation. But it turned out they were wrong. The temperature was really between 20 and 23 degrees Celsius, or between 68 and 73.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Flying in that was a mistake. If McRaven had known the real temperature, he might have postponed the mission. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 291)

The unit had a gift for Obama as well. Not every SEAL had supported Obama in 2008. Politically, some still weren’t Obama fans. But almost all of them gave the president high marks for having the courage to approve the mission. The president had trusted them to pull off an impossible operation, and they had rewarded his faith. So now, in the front of the room, they handed him a framed U.S. flag, one they had carried with them on the raid. They had each signed the back of the frame, using their call signs instead of their names. Obama was genuinely touched by the gesture. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 298)

The biggest surprise was how long he had been living in Abbottabad – since 2005. The first rule of operational security for any terrorist on the run is to keep moving – to sleep in a different location every night and never let anyone follow a trail to where you are. Not only did bin Laden stop moving, he set up a sprawling household in the compound. Two of his first four wives lived on the second floor. Then there was Amal, who at twenty-nine was a quarter century younger than her husband. She shared his bed on the third floor. There were also twelve children in the house, the youngest just age two. 

John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor in the White House, told me: “He never should have been in that compound that long, I think he got a little bit too comfortable and confident that he was not going to be found out.”

Bin Laden boasted about how long he had been able to avoid detection. In an undated letter, apparently composed in the final year of his life, he wrote, “Here we are in the tenth year of the way, and America and its allies are still chasing a mirage, lost at sea without a beach.” 

The second surprise was what bin Laden was doing in the compound. CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said, “Our pre-raid understanding of bin Laden’s role in the organization had been wrong. We’d thought that bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was running the organization on a day-to-day basis, essentially the CEO of Al Qaeda, while bin Laden was the group’s ideological leader, its chairman of the board. … Bin Laden himself had not only been managing the organization from Abbottabad. He had been micromanaging it.” 

How much of a micromanager was he? The SEALs recovered a spreadsheet of expenses for the terror organization from April to December 2009. In 2010, bin LAden advised a deputy not to give advances to members of Al Qaeda on their monthly salaries. And there was an application recruits had to fill out one of the questions: “Do you wish to execute a suicide operation??” along with space for contact information for the next of kin. 

Through his courier – Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti – he also tried to set strategy and maintain discipline inside Al Qaeda. Al-Kuwaiti carried letters and thumb drives that ended up with Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who acted as bin Laden’s Chief of staff. The communications reflected his changing concerns over the years. 

In 2005 to 2006, bin Laden worried about the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, in the civil war there. Al Qaeda (AQI) was slaughtering other Muslims, both Shia and Sunni. Bin Laden directed them to stop the attacks, which he feared were bad for the brand and would turn “the street” against Al Qaeda – shifting the focus away from the real enemy in the United States. Al-Zarqawi didn’t listen.

By 2011, bin Laden’s attention had turned to the Arab Spring sweeping across the Middle East. This wasn’t a “top down” global jihadist organization following orders. No, this was an organic, spontaneous movement that toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and threatened other dictators. Bin Laden hoped the Arab Spring would force the U.S. to withdraw from the region. But he feared the worst thing that could happen to a charismatic leader – becoming irrelevant.

Bin Laden did what he could to hold on to his platform. In 2007, he issued a half-hour-long video message, his first in three years. Concerned about his appearance, he dyed his hair and beard black. And he issued an average of five audiotapes a year.

One thing never changed: his obsession with striking the United States again. In 2011, coming up on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, he called for Al Qaeda affiliates to hit major American cities like New York and Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago, inflicting as many casualties as possible. He talked about assassinating President Obama as well as General David Petraeus, who had turned the tide in Iraq against al-Zarqawi and AQI. He continued to discuss attacking commercial airlines. He even suggested putting trees on railroad tracks to derail trains. But his lieutenants responded that Al Qaeda no longer had the finances or organization to carry out such attacks. 

There was something else that came out of the Abbottabad raid – evidence of how bin Laden spent his time during his years in the compound. The SEALs found a stack of books ranging from the 9/11 Commission Report to Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars. But there were also fringe conspiracy tracts, like Bloodlines of the Illuminati and The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by a Holocaust denier.

He had tapes of Hollywood movies, kids’ cartoons (a favorite was Tom and Jerry), and an extensive collection of pornographic videos. Most memorable and devastating was a videotape of bin Laden watching clips of himself on television, hunched over, huddled in a blanket, wearing a knit cap, his beard gone gray, holding a TV remote control. 

(Wallace and Weiss 2021, 300-303)

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References

Wallace, Chris, and Mitch Weiss. 2021. Countdown Bin Laden: The Untold Story of the 247-Day Hunt to Bring the Mastermind of 9/11 to Justice. N.p.: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster.

ISBN 978-1-9821-7652-5