500 Days (86 page)

After his release, Ivins headed to a Giant Eagle store to purchase some groceries, his prescriptions, and Tylenol PM. Just under an hour later he returned, and bought a second seventy-count bottle of the painkiller.

After a quick stop at the C. Burr Artz Library in Frederick, where he used a computer to check on the progress of the anthrax investigation, Ivins headed home. Broken and lethargic, he went straight upstairs to the second-floor bedroom. As he slept, his wife, Diane, left a letter for him on an end table, describing her pain and confusion about his actions over the previous few weeks. He had been cruel to her. And, inexplicably, he had been ignoring his lawyer’s advice to stay away from the lab at night and to stop contacting two women he had harassed in the past.

There were also signs of danger. “You tell me you aren’t going to get any more guns,” she wrote, “then you fill out an online application for a gun license.”

Ivins woke later and saw the letter. After reading it, he flipped the page over and grabbed a pen. “I have a terrible headache,” he wrote. “I’m going to take some Tylenol and sleep in tomorrow.”

He added, “Please let me sleep. Please.” Then he scratched out those words.

Ivins stayed in bed for the next two days. Diane let her husband rest, looking in on him every so often to see if he was all right. Outside, FBI agents were keeping the house under surveillance to make sure that Ivins did not have the chance to leave and start on his promised rampage.

On the night of July 26, Diane checked on her husband at nine; he was fine. She headed to a first-floor bedroom where she had been sleeping and read a book before drifting off again.

But at some point that day, Ivins swallowed dozens of Tylenol tablets, washing them down with wine. As any doctor knew, such an overdose would destroy
his liver and kill him. Late that night, he made his way into the bathroom and collapsed on the floor.

Diane awoke at 1:00
A.M.
and headed upstairs to check on her husband. She found him, still alive and lying in a pool of his own urine. He was cold to the touch and unresponsive. Diane called 911, and Ivins was rushed to Frederick Memorial Hospital. The FBI surveillance unit followed the ambulance.

Six hours later, a nurse called Ivins’s name loudly and he awakened almost imperceptibly.

“Bruce,” the nurse said, “did you intentionally try to commit suicide?”

Groggily, Ivins nodded. Then he attempted to pull out the tubes in his body; he was placed in restraints. The next day, with Ivins fully unresponsive, he was moved to the intensive care unit. The massive overdose had led to kidney failure and was destroying his liver.

There was little that could be done to save him, and Diane insisted that he would not want to be resuscitated if his heart failed. By the next morning, the doctors concluded that Ivins would not awaken again. They consulted Diane, who decided to stop all aggressive life support. Three hours went by, and at 10:47, with his family at his bedside, his heart stopped beating.

Bruce Ivins, the man deemed by the FBI to be the anthrax killer, was dead.

•  •  •  

An elderly, bearded man knelt down beside a palm tree and moved one of the stones encircling the trunk. This was his garden, such as it was, an incongruous patch of pastoral harmony surrounded by the thick walls of a military prison. The vast power he once wielded was gone. A life of gardening, writing, praying, and answering questions was all that remained for Saddam Hussein.

The hunt for Saddam after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had taken many months. He had stayed hidden in Baghdad until the week of April 10, when he concluded that the city would soon fall to the coalition. At that point he gathered his senior deputies for a final meeting, telling them that they would now begin to “struggle in secret.” He left the city and gradually sent away his bodyguards to avoid attracting attention. Eight months later, he was staying in a mud hut with a lean-to in Ad-Dawr, near his hometown of Tikrit. The military received information that Saddam was hiding out in the area and launched a search mission called Operation Red Dawn. As the First Brigade Combat Team of the army’s Fourth Infantry Division swooped in, Saddam went to the backyard, where a small, underground hiding place had been built years before. He climbed through a “spider hole” that had been dug into the ground, big
enough to hide one person. His housemates covered it with a Styrofoam plug, some dirt, and a few ratty carpets. Saddam lay down in the coffinlike space and stayed quiet as the military searched above him. Soon, the soldiers discovered the hole and Saddam climbed out, his hands raised in surrender.

Now he was High Value Detainee Number 1 at Camp Cropper, the military facility at the Baghdad International Airport. His interrogations had begun on February 7, 2004, with the interviewer, FBI supervisory special agent George Piro, using the tried-and-true relationship-building techniques. Each day of questioning began early in the morning and lasted for hours, with Saddam offered breaks to eat, pray, and putter around in the garden.

The first few weeks had focused on Saddam’s history in Iraq. But by March, as it became clear that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, Piro’s supervisors told him to find out why. How could intelligence agencies worldwide have been so wrong?

On May 13, Saddam returned from a break to his nine-by-twelve tiled cell and took a seat on a metal chair across from Piro. The FBI agent and the former dictator of Iraq engaged in a casual conversation, and the discussion soon turned to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

“The U.N. weapons inspections achieved their objectives,” Saddam said simply. “Iraq does not have any WMD and has not for some time.”

“A lot of people think that you were reluctant to cooperate with the inspections process.”

Saddam tossed up his hands. “We cooperated for seven years! We granted the inspectors access to the entire country, including the presidential palaces.”

Piro challenged Saddam, saying that there were instances where illegal components had been hidden.

“There were individuals in the government who were initially reluctant to cooperate with the inspectors,” Saddam replied. “It was difficult for them to be told one day to open all of their files and turn over all of their work and government secrets to outsiders. It took time and occurred in steps.”

By 1998, he said, all of the weaponry was gone. There had been claims that he had secreted away the weapons in presidential palaces. His own palaces! It was an absurd idea. The entire Iraqi leadership would have been put at risk if such armaments were kept there. Before they were destroyed, the weapons had been stored in remote locations in the desert, he said.

“The coalition has gathered information indicating that Iraq was either maintaining or redeveloping its WMD capability,” Piro said.

“They may think so,” Saddam replied, “but it’s not true.”

“Would others in your country do this without your knowledge?”

Saddam shook his head. “No,” he said. “I had meetings with all of my ministers and asked them specifically if Iraq had WMD that I was unaware of. All of them said no.”

He had made it clear to them long before, Saddam said, that he wanted the country to shed all of the chemical and biological weapons and disband any nuclear projects. They knew this, and followed his instructions.

“Iraq,” Saddam Hussein declared, “did not have WMD.”

•  •  •  

Cows and chickens scampered about in fear as a team of twelve Navy SEALs ran through an animal pen in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Behind the men, their MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter rested at an angle on a wall where it had just crashed.

It was early morning on May 1, 2011. After America’s decadelong hunt for Osama bin Laden, the elite military force was closing in on the terrorist leader’s recently discovered home. Bush had been out of office since 2009, and the raid this night had been green-lighted by his successor, Barack Obama. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Obama had ordered his director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, to set in motion plans for capturing bin Laden. A number of new and expanded initiatives were adopted but still the location of the terrorist leader remained a mystery. Then, in August 2010, the intelligence agency believed it had located a bin Laden courier, a man who had been identified through interrogation at Guantanamo. Operatives with the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office tracked the courier, who eventually led them to the Abbottabad compound. Months of intelligence gathering and preparation for an assault followed, culminating in that night’s operation.

The SEAL team sprinted toward the steel gate of the animal pen. A three-man demolition team stuck C-4 explosives to the metal, squeezing it like hardened ice cream onto the hinges. They set off the detonators, and the C-4 blasted open the gate.

From there, more gates and more explosions as the SEALs hustled toward the house where they believed bin Laden was staying. Almost immediately after the American fighters reached the patio, a stocky man appeared brandishing an AK-47. He was shot and killed, along with his unarmed wife, who had been standing beside him.

Some of the SEALs charged the three-story house. They began clearing the
first floor, room by room, but the job was more complicated than they could have anticipated. The house was something of a maze, with false doors and blocked entryways that slowed the search.

The SEALs believed that if bin Laden was in the house, he would be on one of the higher floors, probably the third. But another gate blocked entry to the staircase. The demolition team took over again and blasted through. Three SEALs climbed the darkened stairs. On the way, they saw one of bin Laden’s sons, Khalid, rushing toward them, an AK-47 in his hands. Khalid fired the weapon, and the SEALs shot back, killing him.

Another gate blocked the stairs again; more C-4 took care of that. A bearded man peered over the third-floor railing. It appeared to be bin Laden himself. One of the SEALs raised his gun and fired, but the terrorist leader fell back and ran into his bedroom.

The SEALs reached the third floor and rushed down a hallway, where one of them pushed open the bedroom door. Inside, he saw two women standing with bin Laden. The younger of the two—bin Laden’s fifth wife, Amal—screamed at the SEALs. She approached them, and the first SEAL in the room, fearful that she might have a bomb strapped to her body, shot her in the calf with his M4 rifle. Then he wrapped his arms around her, pushing her and the other woman to the side.

Near the bed, the al-Qaeda chief stood alone, dressed in a traditional Arab outfit of loose, drawstring pants, a tunic, and a prayer cap. The second SEAL team member moved into the room, raised his M4, and trained the infrared laser at bin Laden. He pulled the trigger, and a 5.56-millimeter bullet slammed into the terrorist leader’s chest. As bin Laden fell, the SEAL fired another shot that hit him in the face, blowing off part of his head.

The shooter pushed a button on his radio. “For God and country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” he said. “Geronimo EIKIA.”

The words were code announcing the astounding news—bin Laden was dead.

•  •  •  

Hours later, in the Arabian Sea, the flat-bottom rounded nose of a V-22 Osprey came into view of the sailors standing on the deck of the USS
Carl Vinson.
The engine nacelles mounted on the end of each wingtip rotated from horizontal to vertical, and the Osprey descended toward the Nimitz-class supercarrier. The group of waiting sailors ran over to the aircraft when it landed.

A detail of military police climbed out of the Osprey, then worked with the sailors to remove their cargo from the plane’s belly. It was the body of Osama bin Laden, delivered to the
Vinson
for its final disposal.

Members of the Obama administration had given careful thought about how to handle bin Laden’s corpse. The primary goal was to avoid further inflaming Islamic passions, potentially increasing the dangers faced by Americans from extremists. Photographs were ruled out—releasing a picture of bin Laden, with his head partly gone, would have been not only a strategic blunder, it also would be downright ghoulish. As for bin Laden’s burial, the Americans had to be careful to honor Islamic customs while simultaneously ensuring that they did not create a shrine where jihadists could gather.

Bin Laden was removed from the Osprey and placed in a spot out of sight of other sailors on the
Vinson.
The body was washed and wrapped in a burial shroud. Weights were attached to ensure that it would never rise in the water. Then the military police and sailors placed the corpse on an open-air elevator and took it down to the lowest level of the ship, where it was laid out on a prepared flat board. After some religious words were spoken and translated into Arabic, three of the sailors tipped up the board. The body slid down and fell about twenty-five feet, hitting the water with a splash.

Osama bin Laden, the most infamous mass murderer of the twenty-first century, sank silently to the bottom of the sea.

Every so often, a person of immense talent and skill comes along, and I was lucky enough to have one working with me on this book. I first met Jordan Wolf eight years ago when he was a high school student whom I had hired to sort documents for my last book. I was startled by his quick mind and incomparable work ethic and soon promoted him to be one of my researchers. From there, he went to Yale University for his undergraduate degree and Tufts for his master’s in philosophy, and now is headed for UCLA School of Law to pursue his J.D. and Ph.D. in law and philosophy. But, while he was in school, Jordan agreed to help me again with
500 Days.
This time around, he did everything—interviewing sources, digging up documents, writing depictions of events, and serving as my all-around partner in thinking through this book. Remember his name—I have no doubt he will go on to great things.