The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (21 page)

Agency officers and JSOC military planners began to put together a set of options for the president to consider. They included a stealth air strike, a ground raid with troops inserted via helicopter, a ground raid with troops infiltrating the site via clandestine means, and more. Consideration was given to simply asking the Pakistanis to conduct the raid themselves, and to carrying out a “compel operation” in which we would tell the Pakistanis, “We are raiding this compound tonight, we’d like you to go with us.” The Pakistanis—or any of our other allies—were not aware of our interest in the Abbottabad compound.

Each of the plans had its drawbacks. The air strike, for example, would result in the deaths of women and children at the compound, the deaths of a family in a small compound directly across the street, and (almost certainly) additional collateral damage to nearby residents because some of the weapons would undoubtedly have missed their target. (It would have been necessary to use a large number of weapons, including “bunker buster” bombs, in case the compound had underground chambers or tunnels.) Additionally, there would be no opportunity to gather intelligence from documents, material, and people found on scene or verify with absolute certainty that we’d actually gotten Bin Ladin.

A ground operation with the troops inserted clandestinely had the disadvantage of requiring that the strike team sneak into Pakistan and quite likely have to fight its way out. The probability of dead or captured Americans was high. A ground operation with the troops inserted via helicopter carried the risk of death or injury to US soldiers as well as that of detection by the Pakistani military long before the helicopters ever got to Abbottabad.

Any option that involved the Pakistanis carried the downside that the occupants of the compound might be tipped off and escape.
We were not concerned that it would have been official Pakistani policy to tip off Bin Ladin, but there would have been so many people involved on the Pakistani side that there could have been a leak, or an al Qa‘ida sympathizer within the government or the military could have taken action to protect Bin Ladin—which in my view is how Bin Ladin avoided the US cruise missile strike in the aftermath of the embassy bombings in East Africa.

We began planning for a major briefing of the president. Donilon, by now promoted to national security advisor, not surprisingly wanted to be briefed first, and he set the date for March 4. Panetta and I wanted to do a dry run before we saw Donilon, so on the evening of February 25, along with our country’s top military leaders, we met in Director Panetta’s conference room to go over the briefing—a briefing that would cover the entire intelligence story and the options that had been developed. But this time we had something new. NGA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—those talented officers who analyze satellite imagery—had produced a scale model of the entire compound. About four feet by four feet, it was sitting on the conference table when Panetta and I walked into the room. It was incredibly accurate, even down to the placement of trees and bushes and the exact size and location of the animal pen.

The prep session went well, as did the briefing for Donilon. He started the meeting by asking how quickly we could put the various options in place, as the president was concerned that we were not moving fast enough. Donilon also gave instructions for the eventual briefing of the president, saying, “You will need to focus on why do we think this is Bin Ladin?” Donilon had some follow-up questions, which we answered in another meeting with him on March 10. He concluded that meeting by saying, “OK, let’s set up a briefing for the president.” The next day Donilon told us the date would be March 14.

In our discussion regarding the various finish options, Agency officers quite understandably favored an option that would place them in the middle of any operation. Having chased Bin Ladin for more than a decade, they wanted to be in on the endgame. It was understandable, but it was also crystal clear to Panetta and me that a ground operation had to be JSOC’s to carry out. After one meeting on the issue in his office, Leon said to me, “Let’s let the professionals do this.” What he meant was that JSOC had much more experience in such matters than did CIA—but his words did not go down well within our ranks. By the time word filtered down to lower levels of CTC and SAD, it had become garbled, and the impression was that
I
had made the comment—and was somehow disrespecting our own troops. While I fully agreed with Panetta’s decision, we could have done a better job of explaining it to our in-house warriors, for whom I have the utmost respect.

* * *

The session on March 14 was one of the most important meetings with a president that I ever attended. We covered two issues in depth—the intelligence picture and the options. On the intelligence, we provided the president with our bottom line that there was a “strong possibility Abu Ahmed was harboring Bin Ladin at the Abbottabad compound.” We emphasized that we did not have direct proof that Bin Ladin was there—just a strong circumstantial case.

Each of the finish options was discussed in detail. The president immediately took the Pakistani options off the table because of the risk of tipping off the targets. The president also rejected the ground assault whereby the team would be clandestinely inserted into Pakistan. It was just too complicated, and getting the team out of Pakistan after the mission would be extremely difficult. The meeting ended with only two options on the table—the air strike and the ground assault with the troops inserted via helicopter—and with
the president making it clear that he wanted to move sooner rather than later. Although he never said it directly, many of us left the session with the sense that he was leaning toward the air strike.

We met again with the president on March 29. Obama, largely because of concerns about collateral damage, began by taking the stealth air strike off the table. He saw the heliborne ground assault as the best option for knowing whether Bin Ladin was there or not, for getting our hands on any intelligence at the site, and for minimizing the deaths of noncombatants. He asked Bill McRaven if he thought it would work. McRaven said, “Mr. President, I can’t look you in the eye and tell you yes until I exercise it. I’ll get back to you in two weeks.”

Because CIA had anticipated this very moment, we had built a full-scale mock-up of the Abbottabad compound. There McRaven brought together the team of Navy SEALs that he would use on the mission and they were briefed, for the first time, on the potential target. Going into the session, most of them had thought that they were going to be asked to conduct a raid to go after Muammar Qadhafi, who at the time was on the run in Libya. It was at our mock-up of the Abbottabad compound that they learned the true identity of their target. There, standing in front of the SEALs, our lead operations officer said, “This is not about Libya. We have found Usama bin Ladin, and you guys are going to go get him.” Although trying not to show emotion, the SEALs were psyched. Following exercises at our facility and a full dress rehearsal at a DOD facility, the SEALs were ready to go.

Although the SEALs belonged to the US military, the president made clear that if there was going to be an operation it would be CIA’s to lead. That was because the president wanted the operation to be covert. On the off chance that Bin Ladin was not there and the raid was not detected by the Pakistanis, the United States would try to keep the whole thing quiet, as if it had never happened. That
meant that the chain of command for the operation went from the president of the United States to the director of CIA to the commander of JSOC. The secretary of defense was not in the chain of command for the operation. The JSOC personnel would be operationally assigned to the Agency to carry out the operation.

The pace of the meetings with the president now accelerated. Three were held in April. Mid-month, McRaven walked the president through the results of his team’s exercises, concluding, “We can do this.” McRaven recommended, if the raid were to be conducted, that it go down on the night of April 30. It would be pitch-black, and anyone wearing night vision goggles would have a huge advantage.

But there was a problem with the thirtieth. Someone mentioned that Saturday, April 30, was the night of the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—where the president was expected to speak. How would it look, they asked, if the president was at a black-tie dinner joking around with a bunch of reporters in the beautiful Hilton Hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., while a group of Americans were dying on a failed mission in Pakistan? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shot down that concern with a well-placed response. “Fuck the White House Correspondents’ dinner,” she said. “Heaven help us if we ever make an important operational decision like this based on some political event.”

But there was also a new option on the table—one that the joint planning team had never looked at in any detail. This option was suggested by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine general Hoss Cartwright, and it had to do with someone at the compound whom we at CIA called “the Pacer.” We were able to determine that there was a lone male person who regularly walked a path in an outdoor grove adjacent to the compound’s main house. Everyone assumed it was Bin Ladin, but we were unable to get close enough to establish his identity or even his height. Panetta asked the experts for an estimate of the Pacer’s height—Bin Ladin was
well over six feet—and the answer unfortunately was “somewhere between five and seven feet.” That analysis did not advance the ball.

At one meeting Cartwright took the position that the mysterious man pacing in the compound was most likely UBL, and that we could use an unmanned aerial vehicle to take him out. CIA had heard through the grapevine that Cartwright might raise this idea and we were opposed, and I took aim to shoot it down. I noted, if Bin Ladin was at the compound, then Cartwright was almost certainly right about the identity of the Pacer. But I also noted that the United States had had a great deal of experience with UAV targeting in recent years—and that the attacks were not always successful. It all depended on the physics of an explosion. If Bin Ladin was at Abbottabad, we would get only one crack at him, I argued. The chances of our missing altogether or of Bin Ladin’s walking away from a strike were just too high.

Another issue was the potential response of the Pakistanis to the incursion into their territory. If the Pakistanis detected the heliborne raid early, or were able to respond to it faster than anyone anticipated, McRaven’s plan was for his men to hunker down at the compound while senior officials negotiated a resolution. At the very end of one meeting, the president gave McRaven one more directive. He told McRaven that he did not like that idea of McRaven’s troops rotting in a Pakistani jail for months as we tried to work out a diplomatic solution. No, the president said. “If you get put into that situation, you will fight your way out.” I thought it was exactly the right decision, and by the look on his face, I know McRaven thought it was the right decision as well.

* * *

Throughout the meetings in April, one of the issues that we discussed at length was the probability that Bin Ladin was at the compound. For weeks this issue came up at meetings. The lead analyst
said she was 95 percent certain that Bin Ladin was there. The senior analytic manager—the one who did the briefings for the president—said he was at 80 percent. The CTC analysts were certainly aware of CIA’s failure regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—where the Agency had made an enormous mistake by accepting another circumstantial case. But they kept going back over the intelligence again and again, asking themselves, “What other explanation could there be?” Taking lessons from Iraq, they outlined possible alternative explanations in their briefings. None of them were as compelling as the Bin Ladin explanation. The chief of CTC went even further. He put together a “red team”—a small group of smart Agency analysts whom he trusted but who were not involved in the operation or the analysis in any way. They were asked to review everything and tell him if we were missing something—if there were other plausible explanations for the mystery of AC1. They did so, and although not quite as convinced as the CTC analysts, they also came down on the side of saying that UBL was likely there. They were at somewhat less than 80 percent but definitely over 50 percent. I myself was at 60 percent.

With estimates all over the lot, it was no wonder that the president was perplexed, and he asked Panetta why there was such a disparity in the probabilities. Leon deftly turned to me and said, “Michael, why don’t you handle that one?”

After gathering my thoughts for a few seconds, I explained to the president that the differences in the judgments about probability did not reflect any difference in what information people had; I assured him that everyone was working on the same set of data. Rather, I told him that the differences in judgments reflected individual experiences. Those at the higher end of the probability scale tended to be in CTC, and they had a confidence in their judgments borne of success over the past several years—plot after plot disrupted, senior al Qa‘ida leader after senior al Qa‘ida leader taken off
the streets. Those at the lower end of the scale—including me—had been through intelligence failures and therefore had less confidence in analytic judgments, particularly circumstantial ones. In my case the failure of CIA’s prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction weighed on my mind. Indeed, I told him, “Mr. President, I believe the circumstantial case that Iraq had WMD in 2002 was stronger than the circumstantial case that Bin Ladin is in the Abbottabad compound.” I added, “Even if we had a source inside the compound and that source told us that Bin Ladin was there, I would not be at 95 percent, because sources lie and get things wrong all the time.”

Mike Vickers told me later that you could hear a pin drop in the room as I said that the Iraq case had been stronger. For his part, the president listened intently and clearly understood what I was saying. He followed up by asking, “So, Michael, if you are only at 60 percent, would you not do the raid?” “No, Mr. President,” I said. “Even at 60 percent, I would do the raid. Given the importance of who this is, the case is strong enough.” The president would later tell people that he’d personally put the odds of Bin Ladin’s being there at fifty-fifty.