SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (32 page)

“Razor 1 is down!”

On the ground, it had to be thought that the helicopter had been shot down. Operators and corpsmen rushed to the wreckage. The flight deck, one of the most reinforced parts of the helicopter, had survived almost intact. A SEAL corpsman found the flight crew shaken up and in shock, but all right.

The SEALs had been on target approximately twenty minutes. They had gathered an impressive haul of actionable intelligence from Bin Laden’s home. It filled a dozen garbage bags and more. Now they had to get out—on one less helicopter than they had come in on.

All of Kerr’s training came into play.
The plan must survive the blunders of men.
He loaded Bin Laden’s body onto the Command Bird. “Gather up the intel, bag it up, everything, and we are out of here in ten minutes. Wheels up, ten minutes!”

Kerr looked at the wreckage. It was too destroyed to fly and too intact to leave. The Stealth Hawk had to be destroyed. The pilots were still shaken up, but they helped to smash the avionics and other flight controls. The most highly classified pieces of equipment, including the two failed green units, were put onto the Command Bird. They’d be taken back to base and examined to find out what had gone wrong.

As this was happening, all of the noncombatants were questioned and photographed. DNA samples were taken from the three dead terrorists, and Amal’s wounds were dressed and she was given a tetanus shot. Kerr directed that the exfil begin. The trash bags containing the intel went aboard the Command Bird. During the operation, hundreds of pictures had been taken of the rooms, the bloodstains, the beds, the cupboards, the clothing, the weapons, the ammunition—pictures of everything except the missiles. They could not be found.

SEALs would carry away five hundred data systems, hard drives, computers, laptops, monitors, notebooks written in Arabic and English, papers, financial records, and wire diagrams of a new Al Qaeda that Osama was planning—one that did not include Zawahiri.

Osama had watched the news, too. He had considered now that Egypt had its revolution, Zawahiri’s principal qualification for being in the ranks of Al Qaeda’s leadership was gone. Bin Laden did not want attacks carried out against Egypt, and documents show that Zawahiri was planning a spectacular bombing in Tahrir Square. Ironically, intel analysts reading through Bin Laden’s papers would discover that Osama was planning a full break with Zawahiri. That move came too late to prevent Zawahiri from moving against him.

Even Al Qaeda has its local politics.

Demolition charges were set in the wreckage of Razor 1. Explosives were set on all the sensitive parts of the aircraft, especially the engines. Blocks of C4 were wired up with long strings of orange det cord that stretched across the barnyard to a detonator. As the SEALs got a head count and reloaded into the helicopter, Scott Kerr, the interpreter, and his bodyguard were the last Americans to leave the compound. They told the noncombatants to stay where they were, tucked safely behind the guesthouse wall. They obeyed.

In the street, Kerr told the head breacher to set a three-minute delay. The charges were set and the last four men walked into the Command Bird now turning its rotors in the field across the dirt road from the compound. They walked up the helicopter’s tail ramp and Scott gave a thumbs-up. The engines roared and the big Chinook shook itself and started to climb into the sky.

Scott Kerr stood on the tail ramp and looked down at the compound. He felt the helicopter’s deck throb through his boots and the smell of jet exhaust and JP-5 wiped away the smells of the house. He lifted his vision goggles—now he saw it the way Bin Laden had seen it. There were a few lights on. Kerr could see the bone-colored building in an odd-shaped triangle, the “embassy” Bin Laden had built for himself—two acres of sovereign Al Qaeda territory where he thought he was beyond the reach of the nation upon which he had declared war.

Osama had been wrong to think Abbottabad was a safe place.

Scott Kerr watched as the self-destruct charges ripped through what was left of Razor 1. The explosion thudded through the night, setting off car alarms, waking up babies, and rattling windows in Abbottabad. A fiery mushroom cloud lifted over the wreckage and flaming pieces came down around the compound.

In Abbottabad, a dozen people sat at keyboards and tweeted exactly what Scott Kerr was thinking:
Maybe Abbottabad wasn’t really a safe place after all.

Operation Neptune’s Spear, SEAL Team Six’s greatest triumph, had started with a whisper and ended with a night-shattering bang.

WHAT CAME AFTER

AT 11:30 P.M. ON SUNDAY, MAY 1,
President Barack Obama appeared on television to make a short statement. He said that “a small team of Americans” had found the author of 9/11 in a compound in Pakistan. “After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” The president said, “No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties.”

Several versions of the mission began to make the rounds in Washington. Vice President Joe Biden, who’d watched the raid in the White House Situation Room, gave a speech three days after the operation: “Folks, I’d be remiss also if I didn’t say an extra word about the incredible events, extraordinary events, of this past Sunday. As vice president of the United States, as an American, I was in absolute awe of the capacity and dedication of the entire team, both the intelligence community, the CIA, the SEALs. It just was extraordinary.”

Joe Biden told the world that it was a SEAL Team operation.

But worse was to come. A “forty-five-minute firefight” story was bandied about, and then revealed to be an exaggeration. The White House floundered, and a series of conflicting statements managed to impart the impression that Osama had been unarmed. The press had a field day. The story evolved that Bin Laden had been killed at the end of an almost hour-long engagement where the SEALs fought their way up three flights of stairs, found Osama in his bedroom, and shot him in cold blood.

It was little wonder that the words “kill mission” tripped off the tongues of news anchors and pundits.

Facts were in short supply even to those at the top. In an interview given to PBS, Leon Panetta admitted, “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on.”

In the absence of a briefing from the White House, rumors morphed into uglier and uglier tales.

The facts are these: During the entire operation, SEAL Team Six fired only twelve bullets. These shots killed Osama bin Laden, his son, and two bodyguards. All of these men were armed or in close proximity to weapons.

The wife of Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti was killed accidentally. She was standing behind her husband as he exchanged gunfire with a passing helicopter. The operators who entered Bin Laden’s bedroom did not wait for him to arm himself; they shot first. Amal was grazed by a bullet when the SEALs fired at her husband, who was at that instant concealed behind her nightgown and reaching for an automatic weapon. Bin Laden died with a hand stretched toward a rifle and pistol in plain sight next to his headboard.

*   *   *

After the mission, Bin Laden’s body was loaded aboard one of the MH-47s and flown back to Jalalabad. It was photographed and fingerprinted, and another DNA sample was taken. The body was then transferred aboard a V-22 Osprey and flown to the carrier USS
Carl Vinson
in the Indian Ocean.

The DNA samples confirmed Osama bin Laden’s identity and blood work aboard the carrier revealed a very low level of plasma cortisol, supporting a diagnosis of Addison’s disease. In accordance with Islamic tradition, Osama was washed, wrapped in clean cloth, and buried at sea as the carrier steamed south from the coast of Pakistan.

*   *   *

Just days after the operation, the CIA started to meet with authors. The agency knew that JSOC would not cooperate with journalists or historians—and that would allow them a chance to “inform the narrative” of the raid at Abbottabad. There was a legend to be made, and all that was necessary was to pour out the facts into the waiting notebooks of eager journalists.

But which story was the right one? The forty-five-minute firefight? The “kill mission” to Abbottabad? The story was becoming muddled with corrections, and it looked like the tail was starting to wag the dog. The White House cracked down, and in the second week of May, the word went out—no more leaks. Anyone who talked would be fired. This wrong-footed the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA), who had already begun to meet with several authors. Writers and screenwriters who had been invited to headquarters for talks on background suddenly found themselves frozen out. Calls to OPA officers went unanswered. E-mails were ignored. The winks and whispers were replaced with glacial silence. Now the story was that there was no story.

As far as JSOC was concerned, that was just fine.

They wanted no part of any publicity whatsoever. The SEAL Teams were astounded when they’d returned to the United States to find that they had been outed. More confusing was why the White House had said anything at all. The SEALs had recovered hundreds of pounds of priceless intelligence, a mother lode of information that could put Al Qaeda away for good. If the operation had been kept secret, it would have posed a perplexing mystery to the Pakistanis and an unfathomable nightmare for Al Qaeda.

The mission could have been announced later—preferably
after
the SEALs had neutralized the rest of Al Qaeda’s leadership. SEAL Six had risked their lives to obtain the computers and hard drives stored at Al Qaeda’s nexus. Television braggarts made almost all this intelligence meaningless by confirming that the SEALs had taken it. Eager for screen time, politicians corralled journalists, telling all that they knew. What’s worse, they placed the families of the SEALs at risk by naming the unit and its location. Television news trucks went so far as to cruise neighborhoods in Virginia Beach, searching for a SEAL family to show the world.

The hunters of Abbottabad became the hunted.

*   *   *

On June 30, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would conduct a full investigation into the deaths of two Al Qaeda terrorists who had been held in CIA custody. Holder was out for blood. He appointed special prosecutor John Durham, and explained that the review would “examine primarily whether any unauthorized interrogation techniques were used by CIA interrogators and if so, whether such techniques could constitute violations of the torture statute or any other applicable statute.”

In 2010, prosecutors went after the SEALs, now they were going after the CIA. The attorney general was not initiating a new attack, just picking up where he’d left off. The CIA had already terminated two career employees who had interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and identified Osama’s courier. The CIA was still devouring its own.

*   *   *

President Obama nominated Leon Panetta to succeed Robert Gates as secretary of defense. He was confirmed on June 22.

A story appeared in the
New Yorker
magazine on August 8, 2011, and appeared to corroborate an ugly tale of murder. The article reiterated the “ground-up assault” theory; it looked like Bin Laden had been killed by a gang as brutal and ruthless as he was.

As he prepared to move over to the Pentagon, Leon Panetta gave a CIA tour to a gaggle of twenty-five freshman congressmen. The topic of the Bin Laden movie actually came up, and one of the congressmen asked Panetta who he wanted to play him in the movie. Panetta answered right away—“Al Pacino,” he said.

Before Leon Panetta left the CIA, he’d quietly given OPA the go-ahead to bring back the writers. But not just
any
writers. Those frozen few who had hoped the agency would call them back now read that the CIA was in the
movie
business.

Vanity Fair
reported that Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow would direct the CIA’s version of the Abbottabad raid for Sony Pictures. As Ms. Bigelow lunched in the CIA’s food court, she was unlikely to have spotted a table of plain-clothed SEALs, but they saw her.

Invisible as ever, two SEALs overheard one of OPA’s deputies promising an introduction to the CIA operator who had accompanied the SEALs into the compound. Even the OPA types had no idea who was sitting at the other table. They aren’t called Jedis for nothing.

When the movie story hit the cable news outlets, there was a kerfuffle. Sony Pictures had held an in-studio fund-raiser for the president back in April—the first time a film studio had ever done so.

The optics, as they say, didn’t look good.

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Peter King, called for an investigation into possible disclosure of classified material, citing news that director Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriter had been given high-level Pentagon access.

White House press secretary Jay Carney fielded some tough questions, and went to the extent of reading a prepared statement:

When people, including you in this room, are working on articles, books, documentaries or movies that involve the president, ask to speak to administration officials, we do our best to accommodate them to make sure that facts are correct. That is hardly a novel approach to the media. I would hope that as we face the continued threat from terrorism, the House Committee on Homeland Security would have more important topics to discuss than a movie.

*   *   *

Relations between the CIA and Pakistani intelligence have always been strained. In most allied countries, the host nation’s intel outfits are called “liaison services,” and are courteously informed of CIA operations. They share intelligence and in most cases work together. Within minutes after the last helicopter rumbled across the border back into Afghanistan, the Pakistanis knew they’d been had. The government was convulsed first with bewilderment, then embarrassment, and then rage.