There was no stoop yet to his tall, lean frame, and daily pacing sessions behind the high walls of his compound gave him at least a modicum of exercise. He walked beneath a tarp suspended over the compound’s vegetable garden that deflected direct sunlight and shielded him from prying eyes. The Sheik had been athletic in his youth, playing soccer and volleyball. He was vain about his appearance. The whitening of his hair and beard bothered him. The most wanted man in the world worried less about being recognized than not being recognized. On TV, that is. He had been in such deep hiding that few outside his immediate family had seen him in person for years. But his self-made videos and the periodic pronouncements smuggled out by couriers were seen everywhere. It would not do for him to appear old. Given fundamentalist Islam’s ban on depicting the human form, there were only a few images of the Prophet Muhammad, but no one better appreciated the power of pictures than the Sheik, and those of the Prophet that did exist generally showed him young and virile, with flowing robes and a dark beard. He had mimicked those images all his life. So now he dyed his hair and beard black for his taping sessions, with results that were predictably amateurish. The color was too uniform and dark. He looked like a caricature of himself: Osama bin Laden with a cheap dye job.
He had plenty of time to think. He could picture what must be done but could no longer make it happen. Al Qaeda’s name had been so usurped and muddied by younger, less careful warriors in Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere—men less constrained, as he was, by the strict dictates of faith—that bin Laden apparently thought of changing his group’s name. Among his papers were long lists of possible alternatives, most of them amusingly clumsy in their English translation, but all attempted to identify the group closer to his religious ambitions. Increasingly, affiliates were fighting local wars over local problems, and ignoring the Sheik’s overarching vision. This was no small matter. The path he saw was immutable, and perfect, and straying from it meant nothing less than failure. He weighed al Qaeda’s every act and public comment with mounting dismay.
Take the case of Faisal Shahzad, the young man coached by bin Laden’s followers in Waziristan to explode a car bomb in Times Square. No doubt Shahzad’s attempt was an example of bin Laden’s men trying to follow his instructions—he repeatedly urged renewed attacks in the United States at iconic, well-populated locations. Times Square fit the prescription perfectly, as did Shahzad. He was the son of a wealthy and prominent Pakistani air force officer. He had been raised in luxury and given the best of international educations. After marrying an American woman of Pakistani descent, settling in Connecticut, and fathering two children, he applied for and completed a program to become an American citizen. Then he’d traveled to Pakistan and received training on how to set off the bomb. A young volunteer with an American passport must have seemed a godsend to the besieged plotters in Waziristan. But alert Times Square sidewalk vendors had thwarted Shahzad’s mission and the would-be bomber was arrested. Just before he was sentenced to life in prison, a judge had asked Shahzad about the oath of allegiance he had sworn to the United States when he was made a citizen.
“I sweared,” he said, “but I didn’t mean it.”
This bin Laden found offensive, despite the fact that years earlier he had taken the opposite viewpoint about breaking an oath in an argument with his mentor Abdullah Azzam, who had opposed bin Laden’s plan to bomb a bus full of tourists in Pakistan.
“[Shahzad] was asked about the oath that he took when he obtained American citizenship,” he wrote to al-Rahman. “And he responded by saying that he lied. You should know that it is not permissible in Islam to betray trust and break a covenant. Perhaps the brother was not aware of this. Please ask the brothers in Taliban Pakistan to explain this point to their members. In one of the pictures, brother Faisal Shahzad was with commander Mehsud [Hakimullah Mehsud, who would be killed by a drone strike in 2012]; please find out if Mehsud knows that getting the American citizenship requires taking an oath to not harm America. This is a very important matter because we do not want mujahidin to be accused of breaking a covenant.”
The Sheik seemed to have little appreciation for the murderous pressure on his followers in the field. He wanted more attacks on America, but he had no new ideas. Instead, with quaint courtesy and diligent thrift, he pushed for a duplication of the 2001 attacks. He wrote: “It would be nice if you would pick a number of the brothers, not to exceed ten, and send them to their countries individually, without any of them knowing the others, to study aviation. It would be better if they are from the Gulf states, as study there is at the government’s expense. They have to be picked with the utmost care and with very accurate specifications, one of which is that they are willing to conduct suicide actions and are prepared to do daring, important, and precise missions that we may ask of them in the future. So please pay top attention to this matter due to its utmost importance. Establish a mechanism to monitor and follow up on the brothers going to study aviation so that we reduce the chances of them slackening from conducting jihad. . . . It would be nice if you would ask the brothers in all regions if they have a brother distinguished by good manners, integrity, courage, and secretiveness, who can operate in the United States. He should be able to live there, or it should be easy for him to travel there. They should tell us this without taking any action and also tell us whether or not he is willing to conduct a suicide operation.”
He concluded his letter of October 21 to Rahman by inquiring after the growing lists of “widows and orphans.”
“Please make sure to keep the children and all of the families away from the areas that are being photographed and bombed. I pray to God Almighty to protect you and all the brothers around you. May He grant you success. May God’s peace, mercy, and blessings be upon you.”
He signed with an old nickname, “Your brother Zamray.”
At the time he was writing this, after all those years in hiding, after his rigorous routines of self-protection had become rote, after not a whisper of suspicion that anyone outside his inner circle knew of his whereabouts, the Sheik had every reason to feel secure.
Except he wasn’t.
6
Disguised Uncertainty
Winter 2010–2011
At the White House in the fall of 2010, Ben Rhodes noticed a growing number of meetings to which he was not invited. As with the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Rhodes had become Obama’s go-to writer for speeches and statements explaining his decisions as commander in chief. Rhodes’s official title was “Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting.” His hair had thinned on top, he rarely did anything but work, and he dressed every day in a suit and tie, but at thirty-two he had a job that anyone with his interests would envy. There were not many high-level national security discussions from which he was barred.
His desk was deep in the warren of small offices in the West Wing, just downstairs from the Oval Office and the primary corridors of power. Windowless and closet-like, his and the other offices of the national security staff were as humble as the jobs were important. Rhodes’s space was just big enough for his desk and chair, a waist-high bookshelf, and one more chair opposite the desk. It was as spare as an intern’s quarters at most law firms. Rhodes helped the president craft speeches, shape security policy, and decide how to frame critical issues for the public. He knew that John Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, had been holding frequent meetings now for months, and that Donilon, the president’s national security adviser, often sat in. The mystery sessions were simply called “John Brennan’s group.” Ordinarily there were cameras that monitored the conference rooms so that staffers and secretaries could keep track of where people were, but for John Brennan’s group the monitors went black. Rhodes wondered about that. Was the country about to be attacked again? Was it something serious related to nuclear weapons? There was a very short list of things that would engender that level of secrecy within the basement offices of the White House. On
e of the thoughts that occurred to him was that maybe they had found bin Laden.
After getting briefed in late summer on the compound in Abbottabad, Obama had left his intelligence chiefs with instructions to nail down who was living in it and report back. These regular reports documented heroic efforts to scrutinize the residence from afar. Using a variety of tools, including agents on the ground and surveillance platforms that were far enough away to avoid any possibility of notice, the agency was now able to flesh out life in the compound in far more detail. Other than occasional visits to the mosque, or taking their own children to the madrassa, the religious school attached to it, the “Khan” brothers kept to themselves. No one except a local handyman was ever invited inside the compound walls. Among the most religious people in Bilal Town—and the Khan brothers were clearly that—it was not uncommon to hide women away behind high walls and locked doors. Longer observation confirmed that the children of the hidden family, the ones who did not attend the madrassa, were seen to leave the compound only when one of the brothers took them to the doctor for a routine visit or treatment for some minor ailment or scrape. This would give the CIA an idea.
There was no way to catch a glimpse of the hidden family upstairs. The walls were high, the windows opaque. Only one member of the family could be seen regularly, a tall man in traditional Pashtun dress and prayer cap who took daily walks inside the compound walls. He walked in brisk small circles around the vegetable garden, part of which had a tarp stretched overhead to shield the patch of ground from direct sunlight—or, perhaps, one could imagine, to shield the walker from eyes in the sky. Overhead cameras were able to get images of him anyway, but they were not very good. The agency did not want to risk putting a drone or observation aircraft directly overhead for fear of tipping off the residents—or the Pakistani government, which it feared would amount to the same thing. The angle or altitude of the standoff cameras made it impossible to get a clear look at the walker’s face. He appeared to be tall and thin. Efforts were made to more accurately gauge the man’s height by measuring his stride and the shadow he cast, but the calculations were only precise enough to confirm what they could see for themselves: he was tall.
Brennan, for some reason he cannot fully explain, and that may have been no more than wishful thinking, felt in his bones that this was bin Laden. They called the man “the Pacer.” Perhaps Brennan was inclined to believe it already, given the extraordinary lengths taken to hide this man, but as soon as he saw an image of the Pacer . . . he knew. We recognize people by many things other than their facial features and hair color, or their size and shape. We sometimes recognize someone we have seen before at just a glance, a glimpse out of the corner of the eye, something in the way they carry themselves or stoop or tilt their head or swing their arms. Brennan is a big wide man, imposing and stern, a former CIA officer who had been involved in efforts to go after the al Qaeda leader all the way back to when ALEC Station was up and running. He had been based in Saudi Arabia at the time, butting heads with Scheuer over how much or how little the Saudis’ help could be trusted. He had worked closely with the Saudis after the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. And he had seen Predator images of the Sheik taken from overhead in Afghanistan during that period, a tall man in robes surrounded by security, striding confidently. This was a different setting, Abbottabad, and the clothes were different, but here was the same man, the same walk. There wasn’t hard evidence he could show to convince anyone else, but Brennan felt he recognized the Pacer.
Panetta briefed the president periodically through that fall, and in December his deputy Morell, “John,” the head of the CIA’s bin Laden team, and several others met with Donilon and Brennan at the White House. There was no breakthrough to report. The images of the Pacer were not clear enough to remove all doubt. None of their efforts had managed to pierce the compound’s walls. An agency team was now living in a house in Bilal Town. They noted everything they could see, but they couldn’t see much. They watched the comings and goings of the Ahmed brothers. They counted the laundry that was hung out to dry. They had determined that the hidden family was large: three wives, a young man, and ten or more children, several of them teenagers or young adults. The number of wives and children corresponded with their theorizing about who might surround bin Laden on the run. He had always kept most of his family with him. The analysts still could not prove that the mystery man was bin Laden but, then again, there wasn’t a single scrap of information that ran counter to that theory, either. Sometimes when you are looking hard enough at something, when you are ready for anything that might shoot down your hypothesis, and nothing comes . . . lack of disproof begins to feel like proof.
“We think we have the best intelligence case for the location of bin Laden since Tora Bora,” Morell told Donilon.
So, on December 14, just before Obama left for his annual holiday trip with his family to Hawaii, Panetta visited him in the Oval Office.
Obama listened and weighed the evidence. He was impressed. Now that there were actually “eyes on” the compound the whole prospect seemed more real, and all the new intel fit the puzzle neatly. Obama was struck, just as the others had been, by actually being able to see the mystery man. You couldn’t tell exactly who it was, but something about actually seeing the target moving inside the high walls, hiding from the world, registered with him.
“At this point, you’re saying to yourself, this is all circumstantial, but it’s hard to figure out what the explanation would be for that particular pattern,” said Obama. “And so at that point I think there’s a part of me that’s thinking this might be for real.”
Still, the president was cautious. He told Panetta, “For all we know this could be some sheik hiding from one of his wives.”
He wanted more. He instructed Panetta to get creative, to figure out a way to nail it down. He said to continue keeping a tight lid on it. And he also instructed Panetta to start preparing options for action.
As closely as the secret was held, Bill McRaven had gotten wind of it back in November. Those monitors might have been blacked out for meetings inside the NSC’s offices, and McRaven was now spending most of his time in Afghanistan, but it was hard to keep the JSOC commander completely out of the loop.
He had worked in the White House himself. It was when he was just beginning to work his way back from his severe jump injuries, his body adjusting to the plates and pins that now held his pelvis together. He’d gotten a surprise phone call in October 2001, from Wayne Downing, a former four-star general who had led the Special Operations Command. The two men had gotten to know each other during the years before Downing’s retirement. The general had just been asked by President Bush to unretire and take up a position in the White House as a kind of counterterrorism czar—an ill-defined special assistant role designed to bring some measure of coordination to the multiple agencies and services involved in the new war. Before he even officially accepted the job, Downing called to ask McRaven if he would come to Washington to help.
“You bet,” said the SEAL captain.
A few weeks later, Downing caught up to the still hobbled SEAL as he was driving across the country from San Diego to his new desk job in Norfolk, Virginia.
“Hey, I’ve taken the job,” Downing said. “Can you be here on Monday?” That was just four days away.
“Yeah, I think so,” said McRaven.
When he showed up at the White House in his wheelchair, Downing told him simply, “Figure out what you’re going to be.”
It was a terrific opportunity for any military officer, especially one who had years earlier abandoned the idea of advancement in order to stay in the field, jumping out of planes and working deep underwater. The chance was not lost on McRaven. It seemed clear from the beginning that, in the long term, finding and taking down a furtive terror organization would require the kind of creative, cross-disciplinary skills long practiced by special ops. If every new war demanded that the military rethink how it fights, McRav
en was already a few steps ahead. He had written a book on the subject while attending the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, entitled Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice. It was a rare military graduate thesis to be picked up by a commercial publisher—the Presidio Press, which published it in 1995. In the book, McRaven had studied eight special operations missions, from the German attack on the fortress of Eban Emael in 1940, prior to the blitzkrieg of Belgium, to the Israeli raid at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, the raid that prompted President Carter to request creation of a similar counterterrorism unit for the U.S. military. McRaven had visited the sites of these raids, interviewed many key participants, and pieced together his own understanding of why they had succeeded or failed. As he did so, he crafted a way of thinking about such specialized missions. Now he would have a seat at the table, a chance to apply those ideas to America’s newest military challenge.