The Finish (30 page)

The engagement was over in seconds. Amal had been shot in the leg. Bin Laden had weapons on a shelf in his bedroom but had not picked them up. His identity was unmistakable, even with the grotesque hole through his right forehead. The architect of 9/11 had become the most infamous face in the world.

McRaven heard “for God and Country, pass Geronimo. Geronimo. Geronimo.” The word “Geronimo” was part of a coded “mission execution checklist.” It meant the critical milestone of the raid had been passed successfully, securing bin Laden. McRaven conveyed the report immediately to Panetta, and it began to spread waves of excitement through the CIA and White House, and in Kabul where Petraeus and Ostlund were listening in. Petraeus pumped his fist with satisfaction.

In the White House, in the corner of the small crowded conference room, Obama heard “Geronimo ID’d.”

The president knew the ID was still tentative, so he didn’t let himself fully believe it. To whatever extent he felt relief or excitement or satisfaction
. . .
he fought those feelings down. To him it meant the SEALs could now start extricating themselves, which meant they might soon be fighting their way out. There had been a chopper crash and explosions at the compound. If the United States was going to have to defend the raiders on their way out—and there were fighters ready—it meant the worst part might still be ahead. Hearing the report, the president thought,
Get the hell out of there now!

But after McRaven had passed that along, it occurred to him that he had not asked specifically whether bin Laden had been killed or captured.

So he asked, “Find out whether it’s Geronimo EKIA [Enemy Killed In Action].”

The answer came back, “Roger, Geronimo EKIA.” So McRaven passed that on to Panetta and the White House.

“Looks like we got him,” said Obama, only half believing it.

The delay between these two reports would cause some confusion in later accounts, which suggested that the SEALs had first found bin Laden, chased him, and then, a few minutes later, killed him. The finding and the shooting had happened in the time it took the three SEALs to crash into his room. Eighteen minutes had elapsed since the choppers had arrived.

McRaven told Panetta: “Look, I’ve got a Geronimo call, but I need to tell you it’s a first call. This is not a confirmation. Please keep your expectations managed a little here.” He explained that the adrenaline of operators was sky high on these raids. They were looking at everything through night-vision goggles. They were professionals, but
. . .
“Let’s not count on anything until they get back and we have some evidence.” Echoing the president’s thoughts, McRaven reminded Panetta, and everyone else watching, “We’ve still got SEALs on the ground without a ride.”

The video on the screen now showed SEALs emerging from the house, herding the uninjured women and children to one corner of the compound, away from the downed chopper. Some of the men came out carrying a body bag—bin Laden’s body had been dragged feet-first down the stairs, leaving a bloody trail. One of his daughters would later say that she remembered her father’s head banging each step on the way down. The SEALs eventually zipped it into a nylon bag. The assaulters moved deliberately, and Obama felt they were taking too long. Everyone was waiting for the Pakistani response at this point. The president just wanted them in the air.

But the commotion at the compound had, in fact, attracted little interest in the neighborhood, or the country. The translator, wearing a Kevlar vest under his traditional long Pakistani shirt, shooed away the few residents who came out for a look. His training to fast rope was for naught, since his helicopter had instead landed outside the compound. The dog Cairo was enough to convince most to back off. The translator told them sternly in Pashto to go back to their houses, that a “security operation” was under way. People obliged. Monitoring the Pakistani defense forces carefully, McRaven saw no sign that the country’s defenses had been aroused.

There was much to do yet at the compound, inside and out. Upstairs, SEALs were hastily bagging bin Laden’s papers and computer, discs, flash drives, anything that might contain useful intelligence—the site’s pocket litter. Bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal, wounded, was helped down the stairs and outside, haranguing the Americans in Arabic. All four of the men who had lived in the compound, along with one woman, were dead. The surviving women and children were flex-cuffed. The women assumed they were going to be taken away. Questioned by an Arabic-speaking SEAL, the women confirmed that they had killed “The Sheik.” One of the children confirmed that it was Osama bin Laden.

The Chinook summoned by McRaven now landed noisily outside the compound walls. Men were working on planting explosives on the downed Black Hawk and destroying its secret avionics with a hammer. A medic from the Chinook unzipped bin Laden’s body bag, took swabs of blood, and inserted needles to extract bone marrow for DNA testing. Twenty more minutes elapsed before the body bag was carried out to the Black Hawk. One of the bone marrow samples was placed on the Chinook. The intelligence haul was likewise distributed between the two choppers.

Finally, the White House audience saw the downed Black Hawk explode with the set charges. The demolition team scurried to the Chinook and the choppers lifted off, leaving behind a huge blaze, a stunned collection of cuffed women and children, and four bodies. A photo purporting to be the bloody corpse of Khalid bin Laden would turn up on the Internet in the coming days.

Even with the choppers airborne, the tension didn’t lift. They first flew north to Kala Dhaka to rendezvous with the second Chinook and to refuel the Black Hawk. Twenty-five minutes later they took off for the flight back to Jalalabad. All of it without any Pakistani response. When that country’s air force did scramble two F-16s into action, the raiding party was safely across the border.

The choppers landed back in Jalalabad at three a.m. local time. None of the men who went on the raid had been hurt. They had lost a helicopter but they had avoided Pakistan’s defenses completely. And they had killed Osama bin Laden.

The SEALs were certain of it, but the White House and the world would demand more proof. McRaven signed off on his narration for about twenty minutes to go out and meet the men on the tarmac as they lowered the body bag from the chopper. It was unzipped, and photos were taken and transmitted immediately to Washington and Langley. The man had been dead for an hour and forty minutes, and he had taken a shot to the head, so the face was swollen and distorted.

McRaven called Langley with a question for the bin Laden team.

“How tall is this guy?” he asked.

He was told, “Between six-four and six-five.”

The dead man was certainly tall, but no one had a tape measure, so one of the SEALs who was exactly six feet four lay down next to it. The body was roughly the same height.

The president had gone back upstairs while the choppers were in flight and asked to be summoned when they landed. Early Sunday evening in Washington, he surveyed the first photos with other members of the team.

When Rhodes saw the picture he recognized bin Laden immediately, even with the wound. Here was the man who had called a press conference to declare war on the United States fifteen years ago, and who had inspired a trail of blood ever since. Rhodes thought, this is either bin Laden or a six-foot, four-inch, slender, dark-skinned man with a long beard who looked exactly like him, and who had been living in hiding surrounded by bin Laden’s family, protected by a known al Qaeda intimate. It was bin Laden.

When McRaven returned to his command center, Obama asked him, “What do you think?”

“Well, without DNA I can’t tell you I’m a hundred percent sure,” the admiral said. “But I’m pretty damn sure.” He said that the men were just beginning to be debriefed, but that there was some indication from the women interviewed at the compound that they had killed the right man. He reiterated, “Mr. President, I have fairly high confidence that we have killed bin Laden here.”

Still, the president was inclined to be cautious. What would be worse than to announce that you had killed the founder and leader of al Qaeda only to be proved wrong? When Panetta, Morell, and “John,” the bin Laden team leader, arrived at the White House, Morell walked the president through the details of the agency’s facial analysis, which had concluded with 95 percent certainty that the dead man was bin Laden. The president asked about DNA analysis, which would be even more conclusive, but Morell told him that the earliest they would get those results would be Monday morning.

Wouldn’t it be best then to wait? Why take chances? It was now early Sunday evening. From his command seat in the Situation Room, Obama asked if they should announce bin Laden’s death that evening or wait for the DNA results. Would the secret hold? Everyone agreed that the secret would not hold, not with Twitter and e-mail and the Internet and cable TV, not with the mini-conflagration and dead bodies at the compound in Abbottabad, with bin Laden’s wives and children in Pakistani custody, and with word now spreading happily from Jalalabad to Kabul and outward. If the White House said nothing, then who knew what version of the story would come out or what kind of conspiracy theories would take root.

“It won’t really be true until we say it’s true,” said Obama. “So I’m not worried about it leaking out. We should confirm it when we are in a position to confirm it, but not feel pressured to do so.”

No matter when the White House chose to make an announcement, it had to contact Pakistan and explain. No one knew how that country would react. The raid had been a clear violation of its sovereignty, and the fact that the United States, an ally, had not sought its help or consulted with it beforehand was deeply insulting. Still, as Obama explained to me later, “I
t would be easier for them to manage the fallout if it was definitive that it was bin Laden, as opposed to there being ambiguity out there for two or three days, in which case the whole issue of Pakistani sovereignty would be magnified.”

So
Admiral Mullen called General Kayani. The Pakistani army chief by then knew, of course, that there was a downed American helicopter in Abbottabad, but in those early hours of the morning in Islamabad, no one had yet sorted out what had happened. Mullen told him that the United States had conducted a mission and had killed Osama bin Laden.

“Congratulations,” said Kayani.

The conversation went downhill from there. There was going to be trouble ahead between the two countries, for sure, but the general immediately helped resolve the question over when to make the announcement.

“Look, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “There are all these stories about American helicopters and a raid inside Pakistan, all without a good explanation. It would be very helpful if you would stand up and say what happened.”

That decided the matter. They would make the statement that night. Rhodes went to work drafting the comments he had not been able to bring himself to write the day before. Other principals picked up the playbook for a successful raid, each assigned to telephone a different world leader. Obama got on the phone to inform former presidents Bush and Clinton, who had hunted bin Laden during their terms, and British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country had been America’s staunchest ally during the effort.

Jay Carney went to work assembling the White House press corps for a special announcement. He and his staff started contacting reporters, mostly by e-mail. He told them, one after another, “Look, you’ll want to be here, but I can’t tell you why.” Most guessed that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed—one of the Libyan dictator’s sons had been killed the day before. No one guessed bin Laden.

But the news did break out. Twitter users from Abbottabad had been buzzing for hours about helicopters and strange explosions. A Pakistani computer technician named Sohaib Athar filed a report just as the SEAL choppers arrived over the compound, writing “Helicopter is hovering over Abbottabad at 1 a.m. (is a rare event).” Minutes later he reported a loud bang that shook the windows where he was staying nearby. There were other reports like this, but no one knew exactly what had happened until Keith Urbahn, a former chief of staff to Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted:
“So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.” Urbahn quickly followed with, “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.” This was an hour before Obama appeared in the East Room to make the announcement, and the news was quickly everywhere.

In the White House, Carney was alerted to ESPN’s
Sunday Night
Baseball
broadcast of a game between the Phillies and the Mets in Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park. The sellout crowd was chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” It was 10:45 p.m. The game announcers interrupted to deliver the news that there were reports that bin Laden had been killed.

Still, as Obama had predicted, it would not be true until the United States confirmed it. So he sat behind his desk in the Oval Office making last-minute changes to the speech Rhodes had drafted, and then he walked over to the East Room to give it. There were already crowds across the street in Lafayette Square celebrating and chanting “USA! USA! USA!”

It was 11:35 p.m. when the president appeared on television striding up the red carpet toward a podium, and began: “Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”