In the weeks after the raid, analysis of the documents seized at the compound revealed, as CIA and administration officials presented it, that bin Laden had not been the isolated, irrelevant figure some said he had become, but, rather, had been actively steering his organization from his hiding place, hatching assassination plots against Obama and Petraeus, for example, and setting in motion further attacks on the U.S. homeland.
Then there was Vice President Biden, with his special gift for the self-aggrandizing overstatement, now in the service of his boss, who would call the raid “the most audacious plan in five hundred years.” Biden said that Obama had made this gutsy call after being roundly advised not to, suggesting that only Leon Panetta had been clearly in favor of it. He said Obama had “a backbone like a ramrod.”
Versions of all this appeared in accounts of the raid and its aftermath. It was not a coordinated effort, just a cumulative one. Pulling all of it together, the official glitterized version of the tale could be summarized thusly. A bold new president resorted national defense priorities to go after bin Laden. At his direction, the moribund hunt was revitalized, and a new lead to the al Qaeda leader was found and developed. It discovered bin Laden living not in a mountain cave but, rather, like a millionaire in a “luxury” compound in a polite Pakistani suburb. Steered by the president in strict secrecy, the military was emboldened and directed to alter its plan to, in effect, surrender to Pakistani authorities if discovered, and instead to prepare sufficient backup forces to confront any resistance head-on—to be ready to fight its way out. It was this advice that saved the mission, because when a Black Hawk crashed, a backup helicopter was at hand. Surrounded by advisers who either were opposed to launching the raid or expressed deep misgivings, the president overrode them to order one of the boldest military actions in human history. The brave SEALs then killed Osama bin Laden in a firefight inside the compound, despite his effort to shield himself behind his wife. Documents seized at the compound revealed that bin Laden had been a hands-on leader of the terror organization, not just a sidelined recluse.
There is some truth to this version, but only some.
Start with Obama’s direction to Panetta and Mike Leiter in May 2009, summoning them to that impromptu huddle in the Oval Office. The newly elected president did make it clear that he regarded the hunt for bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as the top national security priority of his administration. But did that really change anything? One senior intelligence official told me that it did not.
“This did not represent a big change,” he said. “We were already doing everything we could, and had been for years.”
Obama’s urgency did have an effect, he said, forcing the various bin Laden team leaders to prepare regular progress reports. He also said that having Director Panetta so actively interested “tends to focus people . . . I think that requiring regular updates pushed our guys even harder, but I doubt that was the reason for the breakthrough. The resources available didn’t change at all. Our focus on AQ senior leaders never suffered from a lack of resources, certainly not the hunt.”
Viewed dispassionately, it appears that the trail to Abbottabad resulted not from redirection but from a slow grind. Each of the critical “breaks,” such as learning the pseudonym “Ahmed the Kuwaiti” from several sources, finding out his true identity in 2007, locating him in 2010, and tracking him to Abbottabad, came as the result of steady, patient, unremarkable effort over many years. None of the breaks was even recognized as significant until the compound started raising eyebrows. Until then, Ahmed the Kuwaiti was just one of many, many thousands of possible leads, stored in a growing catchall database. The more remarkable achievement was connecting these disparate facts, and even then the sum of them led only to the residence of a man suspected of once acting as a courier and aide to bin Laden. It was because the CIA had been following every lead for nine years that the compound was found, and because its analysts had been thinking long and hard about how bin Laden might be living—without heavy security, surrounded by his wives and family, with only one or two trusted aides—that they found the configuration of the compound so compelling. So the argument that it was Obama’s redirection of effort in 2009 that led to bin Laden is true only insofar as every step on the road to success turns out to have been the right one. It was a factor. Obama deserves credit for it. The larger truth is that finding bin Laden was a triumph of bureaucratic intelligence gathering and analysis, an effort that began under President Clinton and improved markedly after 9/11 under President Bush. The effort was going to continue for as long as it took. It took just under ten years. It is hard to find one man in the wide world when he is smart about not being found.
It should also be noted this effort did involve torture, or at the very least coercive interrogation methods. The first two mentions of Ahmed the Kuwaiti were made by Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Mohammed al-Qahtani in coercive interrogation sessions. The third, the misleading characterization of the Kuwaiti as retired by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, came during one of his many waterboarding sessions. Hassan Ghul verified the Kuwaiti’s central role during secret interrogation sessions at an undisclosed CIA detention center. It is not known what methods were used on Ghul, but the agency did seek permission from the Justice Department to employ coercion. There is no simplistic narrative of a hard-pressed detainee coughing up a critical lead, but there is also no way of knowing if these disclosures would have come without resorting to harsh methods. In the case of Qahtani, in particular, given his long nd stubborn resistance, it seems unlikely. Torture may not have been decisive, or even necessary, but it was clearly part of the story.
Efforts to characterize bin Laden as living a cushy life in a “luxury” compound were not just false—they missed a far more telling point. The compound in Abbottabad was large for the neighborhood, but it housed four adult couples and nearly twenty children. By all indications, bin Laden’s lifestyle, by choice, was a far sight below an American middle-class citizen. There are prisons in the United States with better accommodations—although none allow cohabitation with three wives. Far more revealing was his need to hide from everyone, even his own family and closest neighbors. Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, the most notorious criminal of his time during the 1980s and early 1990s and a fugitive from his own country and U.S. special forces, lived and moved openly for most of that time in his home city of Medellin, where he was revered by many. There are men the United States considers terrorists living right now in regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan who are revered in their own tribes and regions, and who live openly in them. Bin Laden had no place in the world where many revered him. Al Qaeda was not a popular movement in his home country of Saudi Arabia or anywhere else in the Arab world or the Middle East. It had its adherents, enough to turn out an angry crowd when provoked by, say, the publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet, or a public demonstration of Koran burning by a buffoonish Florida pastor, but compared to the millions of Arabs who took to the streets to demand the vote in the spring of 2011, al Qaeda was nothing more than a small and violent cult. Bin Laden’s “Nation” of like-minded Muslims was pure fantasy. If he had dared show his face in Pakistan, a Muslim country, someone would have turned him in, if not because it was the right thing to do then for the $25 million reward. It is possible that someone did, since the CIA has not told the whole story and will not say whether anyone has collected the reward.
Obama’s decision to beef up the assault force, to plan for the possibility that the SEAL team would have to fight its way out of the country, did not save the raid. No JSOC mission like this one would proceed without a Quick Reaction Force close by. McRaven would have brought two Chinooks into Pakistan for backup and fuel anyway. The larger force commissioned by Obama, the soldiers and aircraft that would have been summoned if there were a significant response by Pakistani forces, stayed parked in Afghanistan throughout. They were not needed.
The president’s decision to equip the force with enough backup st
rength to fight its way out of Pakistan, if necessary, said a lot about the deteriorating state of relations with that country. As one of the principals pointed out at the April 28 decision meeting, if the ties were so weak that this raid would break them, then they were not going to last long anyway. Coming off bitter negotiations to free CIA contractor Raymond Davis, Obama clearly did not relish the idea of negotiating for the release of two dozen SEALs—or, as he put it to me, “I thought the possibilities of them being held, being subject to politics inside of Pakistan, were going to be very, very difficult.” McRaven had been running occasional raids into North and South Waziristan for years, raids that were officially forbidden but privately winked at by Islamabad, so he had every reason to believe that if his men were discovered in Abbottabad and confronted, something could be worked out. In weighing the repercussions of a mission gone bad, he made the entirely reasonable decision that dead Pakistanis would be more harmful to America’s interests than a team of SEALs discovered to be someplace they didn’t belong. The president felt differently. As it happens, the skill of the raiding force made such considerations moot.
When Obama decided to launch the raid, he was not acting against the advice of his top-level advisers. There was near unanimity for taking action at the April 28 decision meeting, with only Biden urging the president to wait, and with Cartwright and Leiter preferring to strike bin Laden with a small missile fired from a drone. Gates preferred the drone option at the meeting but had reversed himself by the following morning. All of the other top aides and advisers, principals, deputies, and staffers, particularly those closest to the analysis and planning process, unequivocally supported the raid. And as for Biden’s “five hundred year” boast, it says less about the audacity of the mission than it does about the vice president’s appreciation of military history.
It is worth noting one far more daring effort, thirty-one years earlier, if only because it is rarely appreciated as such. When President Carter rolled the dice on a long-shot mission to free more than fifty American hostages in Iran, even the men who went gave themselves only a 20 percent chance of success. The consequences of its failure—eight dead, another nine months of captivity for the hostages, Carter’s loss of a second term—painfully illustrate how much of a gamble it was. Nevertheless, a year after the bin Laden raid, Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2012 election, would take a gratuitous slap at Carter in diminishing the significance of Obama’s decision, arguing that “anyone in the Oval Office would have made the same call, even Jimmy Carter.” A stronger argument could be made that Romney himself would not have ordered the raid, since he had criticized Obama in 2007 for even considering to do such a thing.
Of all the exaggerations that followed the raid, perhaps the most interesting was Brennan’s initial insistence that bin Laden had been killed in a “firefight” and had used women as “shields.” The White House subsequently backed off these statements, and the most obvious explanation for them appears to be a combination of three things: genuine confusion in the first hours, a completely unnecessary desire to boost the heroism of the SEALs, and the eagerness of an old warrior to paint his longtime enemy in an unfavorable light. Brennan had been on bin Laden’s case for almost fifteen years, ever since he had worked as a CIA officer in the Middle East in the 1990s, and the success of the raid was as much of a personal triumph for him as anyone. So he gloated a little, before a worldwide audience. His comments proved to be an embarrassment.
Contrary to initial reports, there was no firefight at the compound. Based on my own reporting and the published account of one of the SEALs, it appears that after an initial burst of inaccurate rounds from Saeed, all of the shooting was done by the SEALs. It is important to note that the SEALs were fired upon initially, even if only briefly and ineffectually. The gunfire confirmed that at least some occupants of the compound were armed and resisting. Having taken this fire, the team had to expect to be fired upon again until the entire compound was secured. None of the other five adults shot in the raid—four killed and two injured—were armed. The raiders were discerning. None of the children were harmed, and only one of the three women shot was killed. It is difficult to second-guess men risking their lives in the rapid takedown of a residence harboring implacable enemies who had fired on them, in the dark, but available evidence suggests that if the SEALs had wanted to take bin Laden alive, they could have.
The Sheik had been upstairs for nearly fifteen minutes as the men approached. If the house had been rigged with explosives for a final suicide blast—and the presence of children argued against it—there would have been ample time for him to detonate before he was confronted in the upstairs bedroom. Amal’s wounding and the need to move her away from the fallen bin Laden apparently prompted the claims of a human shield. According to published accounts and my sources, bin Laden was killed by several shots, one to his head, which knocked him down, and the others to his chest as he lay on the floor, apparently dying. Bin Laden was not actively surrendering, but he was not actively resisting either. It is reasonable to argue, under the circumstances, that if the SEALs’ first priority had been to take him alive, he would be in U.S. custody today, and Obama would have his “political capital” for the criminal prosecution of the 9/11 ringleaders.
What is more likely is that the SEALs had no intention of taking bin Laden alive, even though no one in the White House or chain of command issued such an order. Indeed, it would have taken a strong directive to capture him to forgo the chance to shoot him dead. The men who conducted the raid were veterans of many raids, hardened to violence and death. Their inclination would have been to shoot bin Laden on sight, just as they shot the other men they encountered in the compound.
It is worth imagining, however, the alternative scenario. Bin Laden at the defendant’s table before a judge and jury might have been considerably less inspiring to his followers than bin Laden the martyr. He might have proved implacable in interrogation, but often the more powerful, elder figures in an illicit organization are more amenable to compromise than their underlings. If he chose to talk to his interrogators, he possessed more information than anyone about al Qaeda, its organization and finances, its personnel and methods, its history and ideology, its ongoing projects. Having him in custody would have posed legal and political challenges, but as the president explained to me, he felt such a coup might have worked to his benefit. So as satisfying as it was for millions of Americans to learn that the world’s most notorious terrorist was dead, and that his last sight on Earth was of a Navy SEAL leveling an automatic rifle, a live de-mythologized bin Laden might well have been a better outcome.
The documents seized at the compound revealed bin Laden to be a determined and hectoring correspondent, still dreaming of mass murder in America, but also clearly isolated, frustrated, and out of touch with his group’s remaining capabilities. The currents of history had left him behind; he just hadn’t accepted it yet.
All in all, these efforts to massage the facts about the killing of bin Laden were nothing on the order of President Bush’s showboat landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, and his speech beneath the giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, which set a standard for presidential hotdogging that will long stand and will no doubt embarrass Bush until his dying day. In that case the mission—the U.S. invasion of Iraq—was still decidedly unaccomplished, and would remain so for another long and bloody eight years. In his memoir Decision Points, Bush suggests that the message conveyed by that event was not the one intended, but nevertheless concludes: “It was a big mistake.”
There was nothing on that scale from the Obama White House. Nevertheless, its handling of success illustrates the folly of straining to take credit. Harry Truman said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” The flip side of that observation ought to be: “It is amazing how much credit flows to the deserving who don’t claim it.”
Obama has apparently received lasting cr
edit from the American people. His poll numbers jumped almost 10 percentage points after his Sunday evening announcement, and a year later had leveled off to a point slightly higher than where they were before. Killing bin Laden did diminish the perception of Obama as inauthentic, despite the efforts of his Republican opponents. The president’s popularity remained high even among those who were disappointed in his policies. It also took away any hopes they had of portraying him as a pacifist. Having ended America’s military involvement in Iraq and begun the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he might have been vulnerable to charges of “softness” on national security. Killing bin Laden placed Obama’s commander in chief credentials on secure footing. It boldly underscored his punishing pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership. Even as this effort spread to Yemen, the number of terror attacks attributed to al Qaeda’s various franchises has declined steadily. By 2012 the United States was increasingly targeting midlevel fighters, and the overall number of U.S. drone strikes steadily fell. There is no way to know for sure, but the numbers suggest a dwindling number of targets. U.S. intelligence capabilities have not themselves diminished.