The Finish (27 page)

They also argued that he had not adequately considered the downsides of the drone strike, the alternative he advocated. They questioned the idea that this was a clean, virtually risk-free alternative. First of all, neither Flournoy nor Vickers bought Cartwright’s optimism about the small missile hitting the target. The target, after all, was moving. The missile could not be guided. It had never been fired anywhere but on a testing range. You get one shot, they reminded Gates, and if you miss, that’s it. Bin Laden escapes again. Imagine the criticism that would follow:
You got the chance of a lifetime and you blew it with something untried?

At the end of the hour, Gates phoned Donilon at the White House and asked him to tell the president that he had changed his mind. Obama would not learn of Gates’s change of heart until after he had made the decision—but when he did hear, it strengthened his resolve. In the end every one of the president’s top advisers except Biden was in favor of taking immediate action. Two
—
Cartwright and Leiter
—
wanted to use the drone. Everyone else backed McRaven.

The Thursday meeting ended early in the evening, and with the opinions of the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs still weighing heavily against those calling for the raid, the president’s choice seemed anything but certain.

“You’ll have my decision in the morning,” Obama said.

In truth, as the president told me, he had all but made up his mind when he left the Thursday meeting. He had been thinking about it for months. The advantages of the raid were obvious and, to his way of thinking, outweighed the risks. A missile might go astray and, unlike taking a shot from a drone, the raid offered certainty. If bin Laden was there, they would know it and they would bring him out, dead or alive. Getting him without being able to prove it—worse, without
knowing
it—would forfeit a big part of the accomplishment. Here was a chance to bring closure to the great tragedy of 9/11 and strike a mortal blow to al Qaeda. Add to that Obama’s trust in McRaven, and the near-unanimous support of his advisers, and the decision was clear.

There was another compelling reason to send in the SEAL team. If this had been bin Laden’s hideout for years, it might hold a trove of valuable information, perhaps the kind
that would enable the United States to further dismantle al Qaeda. Obama knew the logic behind F3EAD. The only way to exploit bin Laden’s personal data was to send in men who could collect it.

No matter how compelling it was to attempt the raid, the risks were great for the men he ordered in, for the alliance with Pakistan, for the reputation of the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and for his own presidency.

He reviewed the process over and over again in his mind Thursday night into Friday morning. Just as had been the case ten years ago, when he was a state senator in Illinois, his habit was to stay up much later than Michelle and his girls. They had turned in at ten o’clock. He was up another three hours pacing and thinking in the Treaty Room, the upstairs room that functioned as the family’s living room and also the president’s private office. The room displays Henry Ulke’s portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, Théobald Chartran’s large painting of William McKinley signing a peace treaty with Spain, and George P. A. Healy’s depiction of Abraham Lincoln conferring with his military advisers near the end of the Civil War. History bears down on you in a room like that.

“It was a matter of taking one last breath and just making sure, asking is there something that I haven’t thought of?” Obama explained to me. “Is there something that we need to do?”

The questions stayed with him even as he tried to sleep that night. He believed that waiting longer would not accomplish anything, and might risk everything. They were not likely to get better intelligence, that had been clear. In the end, it boiled down to his confidence in McRaven. He had met him first in 2008 when touring Iraq with several other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. David Petraeus had hosted a dinner in Baghdad and had invited the JSOC commander. He had dealt with him a lot more as president, particularly in these last four months.

“I just felt as if I’d gotten to know McRaven,” Obama said. “I had gotten to know the SEALs. I had obviously been monitoring their capacity to carry out night raids consistently in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had mocked up the compound. We had experimented with it. They had run it . . . McRaven—he inspires confidence. And I had pressed him hard. And at that point my estimation was that we weren’t going to be able to do it better a month or two months or three months from now. We weren’t going to have better certainty about whether bin Laden was there, and so it was just a matter of pulling the trigger.”

On Friday morning, before getting the phone call from Gates, before he walked out to the South Lawn to board a helicopter on a trip to the southern states to view tornado damage, he sent an e-mail to Donilon asking him to meet him in the Diplomatic Room at eight o’clock.

Donilon, McDonough, and Chief of Staff Bill Daley were waiting in the large formal room when Obama entered, wearing a dark blue Windbreaker. The view from the room is one of the most dramatic in the White House, over the sloping back lawn, with the Washington Monument in the distance. They could see the waiting presidential helicopter.

“It’s a go,” said Obama. “We’re going to do the raid. Prepare the directives.”

8
The Finish

May 1–2, 2011

McRaven’s men were in Jalalabad, poised. After the president’s order was conveyed Friday afternoon—Afghanistan is eight and a half hours ahead of Washington—they knew the earliest they would go would be early the following evening, Saturday, April 30.

Most of the twenty-four handpicked team were members of Red Squadron of SEAL Team Six. In the more than a year that has elapsed, only one of the men has spoken publicly about it. None were interviewed by me. My account of the raid is based on interviews with the president; senior officials at CIA; sources at JSOC, the White House, and the Pentagon; on interviews with SEAL team members who did not participate directly, and on the account published by the former SEAL under the pseudonym “Mark Owen.”

The SEALs were selected primarily because their commander was available, and the corresponding commander of the army’s Delta Force was not. With its expanding numbers, JSOC had been divvied up three years earlier by McRaven, with Delta assigned to continue operating in Iraq and the SEALs working from Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) throughout the most contentious regions of Afghanistan. Part of the reasoning for choosing the SEAL team, according to several top Pentagon officials, was that in recent years it had successfully conducted about a dozen secret missions inside Pakistan. They were used to conducting these raids with high-level commanders looking over their shoulders, linked by live audio and video—the men called it “General TV.” Sometimes their remote commanders got carried away, steering them around like figures in a video game—“Turn left! Turn right!”

The actual commander, the man they would follow into the target compound, was a short, thickly built, brown-haired naval officer in his late thirties who had chiseled features—if Hollywood were looking for someone to play the role they would be hard-pressed to improve on the original. He had become something of a legend even in these elite ranks, with ten years of experience leading them into combat. It had become so routine for him that he spoke about the job the way an experienced foreman might talk about a construction project. He had a strictly deadpan way of talking; when he cracked a joke, which didn’t happen often, there was usually a delay before anyone noticed. Some of the men he commanded were older than him, but not many. Going in with them would be a Pashto translator and a highly trained dog—a Belgian Malinois named Cairo. The translator, a middle-aged man who had to learn how to rope out of a chopper for this mission, and the dog would help keep the curious away from the compound while the SEALs did their work. As they did before every mission, the men spent time readying their gear and weapons, oiling and cleaning and testing laser sights and night-vision devices, and adjusting straps on harnesses and helmets. The barracks at Jalalabad were familiar to all of them; it had been home away from home for years.

The one thing that was not often in their conversation but always in their thoughts was danger. There were small FOBs all over Afghanistan named after team members who had been killed on raids, friends of these men who had gone about their work with the same skill and care but who had been sent home in an aluminum box. Inside the FOBs there were memorials posted on walls or bulletin boards, displaying photos of the dead, and special operators were disproportionately represented. Their photos contrasted with the faces of the other fallen, the eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old regulars who had been killed by roadside bombs or in mortar attacks or on routine patrols. The special operators were older, and in the pictures they were often bearded and dressed in local civilian attire. Either that or they appeared in official portraits wearing uniforms decked with ribbons and stripes and medals. They were war-fighting professionals. For most it was their chosen career and, unlike younger men who tended to find reasons why this or that soldier had been hit and they had not—a poor decision, a perceived weakness, a fatal lapse in quickness . . . —these men knew better. You trained and practiced and then you performed with a team made up of men every bit as good as you were, and sometimes in spite of all of this you got killed. This mission, targeting Osama bin Laden, was one nearly everyone in the force had imagined being on since 9/11. It was the raid all of these men believed would someday come, and that they had hoped would include them.

Behind this initial force were the men and choppers and planes that McRaven hoped he would not need. There were three MH-47E Chinooks, big as tractor trailers with flat rotors front and back. Also on alert were the fighters and combat-control aircraft that might be needed to fend off Pakistani fighters and ground-to-air defenses. If it came to that, command of the operation would shift from McRaven’s Joint Operating Center in Jalalabad to the theater command center in Kabul, where General Petraeus presided.

Petraeus himself hadn’t known about the mission until just weeks earlier, when he had been informed about it in general terms by General Cartwright and by the CENTCOM commander. His resources would not be used at all unless the mission went badly, so he had not been fully briefed by McRaven until a few days earlier. No one on his staff knew about the raid. His history with bin Laden went back a dozen years, to when Petraeus had stood on the tarmac at Pope Air Force Base as the bodies of American servicemen killed in al Qaeda’s attack on the USS
Cole
were flown home. He had been in on the earlier discussions during the Clinton administration when it had decided to launch the cruise missiles at targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan. He would have a ringside seat for this raid, but if all went well he would have nothing to do but watch.

On Saturday afternoon, McRaven took a call from the president. Obama told the admiral that his confidence in him and his men could not be higher.

“Godspeed to you and your forces,” Obama said. “Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service.”

He added something that went without saying.

“I will personally be following this mission very closely.”

Hours later, on Saturday afternoon Washington time, Ben Rhodes sat down in his small White House office before his keyboard . . . and froze. At some point, the president was going to have to speak to the United States and the world about what had happened, or was happening, inside Pakistan. Rhodes’s job would be to have draft remarks ready for success or failure.

George Little, a CIA press officer, had just spent a few hours with the president’s staff reviewing every outcome the agency could imagine. They had gone through the various press guides and public-messaging guides for each contingency—which heads of states needed to be informed and in what order, how statements should be made. They roughed them all out. There was one for a clean in-and-out, the best case. If they went in and bin Laden wasn’t there and they got out without setting off any big alarms, then they planned to just deny it. It was to remain a covert operation: that is, officially it would not have happened. But what if things got messy? There were a number of those possibilities: messy with bin Laden dead, messy with bin Laden captured, messy but no bin Laden. They went through pages and pages of public-messaging options.

After all that, his head spinning with possibilities, Rhodes sat down to begin drafting something. He planned to start with the best-case scenario, and got as far as the first line, but then stopped.
I can’t,
he thought.
I might jinx this
. If he wrote a speech about them getting bin Laden, and they didn’t, that was going to be an awful document. If he wrote one about not getting bin Laden . . . well, his heart wasn’t in it. If he had to do it, he would, but he wasn’t going to do it unless he had to. So he didn’t write anything. He gave up and got ready to attend the correspondents dinner.

There had been some conversation the evening before about the timing. The dinner was the major black-tie social gala of the year in Washington: televised, and attended by celebrities from Hollywood and the sports world, and by all of the most prominent government leaders and journalists. The main attraction was always the president of the United States, who typically delivered a stand-up comedy routine poking fun at himself and the press. If Obama chose the raid, it would likely take place at the same time as the dinner. How would it look for the president to be making jokes at a podium while the men were risking their lives? And what if something went wrong and everyone had to suddenly leave the party? Every journalist in Washington would realize something major was up. Then again, if they all decided simply not to go, it would alert every news organization in the world that something big was happening.