The Way of the Knife (36 page)

The vaccination team never got into the compound, and Afridi decided that pressing the matter might arouse suspicions and prompt the people in the compound to alter their procedures or even flee. Having completed the work in Bilal Town, Dr. Afridi went to Islamabad with his empty vaccination kits to where Sue and her Toyota Land Cruiser were waiting for him at a designated spot. He told her everything he knew about the people in the compound. He handed her the vaccination kits, and she handed him 5.3 million rupees in cash.

—

FROM A MAKESHIFT BASE
in eastern Afghanistan, four American helicopters lifted off, banked east against a moonless sky, and brought dozens of heavily armed young men into battle in a country where the United States had not declared war. The group of Navy SEALs had prepared for a bloody firefight with fiercely loyal men defending Osama bin Laden, or even with Pakistani troops: A decade of secret American operations inside Pakistan had so frayed relations between two putative allies that a pitched battle between American and Pakistani troops in the middle-class hamlet of Abbottabad was a risk that the SEALs contemplated as they touched down inside bin Laden’s walled compound.

There had been ominous signs of disaster as the helicopters reached their destination. One of the helicopters got caught in a wind vortex and was forced into a hard landing after its tail clipped the wall of the compound, a snafu with echoes of the failed 1980 mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran. But once the SEALs penetrated the house on Pathan Street with C-4 explosives and made their way up the stairs, bin Laden’s end came swiftly. The Americans saw the al Qaeda leader at the top of the stairs on the third floor, peering out of his room, and one of the commandos shot him in the right side of his face. He fell back into his bedroom and lay twitching on the floor in a pool of blood. The SEALs took pictures of bin Laden’s corpse, put it into a body bag, and
dragged it down the stairs
and out the door.

Less than forty minutes after the helicopters arrived in Abbottabad, history’s most expensive and exasperating manhunt had been brought to an end. The SEALs destroyed the downed helicopter to prevent the Pakistanis from gaining access to the classified navigation equipment inside, with only the helicopter’s severed tail surviving the planned destruction. They piled into the functioning Blackhawk and a Chinook helicopter that had been waiting in reserve. They flew west, back into Afghanistan, carrying bin Laden and dozens of computer hard drives, cell phones, and thumb drives that had been scattered around the compound.

The details of the bin Laden raid did not trickle out into Pakistan until later that day. As they did, Asad Munir sat mesmerized in front of the television in his living room. He was convinced there was more to the story. The former ISI station chief in Peshawar, the man who spoke reverentially about his days working with the CIA in the months after the September 11 attacks, was certain that the CIA would never carry out a military operation in the middle of his country without the help of Pakistani soldiers or spies. “How could they?” he recalled thinking. “The CIA doesn’t have any troops.”

But that night, the CIA did have troops.

In the months before the mission was launched, as spy satellites peering down from space took pictures of the house on Pathan Street and Dr. Afridi and his team tried to get inside the compound, U.S. military and intelligence officials presented the White House with a number of attack options. The option considered least risky, using a B-2 stealth bomber to slip past Pakistani radar and raze the compound, was ruled out because it would have provided the Obama administration no definitive proof that bin Laden had been killed in the operation. Pakistani authorities would cordon off the area and sift through the rubble, and the only details that the United States would learn would be those things that the ISI chose to tell.

President Obama instead chose the riskier option, sending the SEALs deep into Pakistan to kill bin Laden. Besides the obvious perils of such an operation, officials worried about sending American ground troops so far into Pakistan. Until then, the only combat missions the American military had carried out on Pakistani soil had been in the tribal areas. The missions took place within miles of the Afghan border, allowing for a quick escape back into Afghanistan if something went wrong.

There was also the question with which American leaders had been grappling for years: Under what authority could the United States send troops into a country with which America was not at war? It was the question that Donald Rumsfeld asked in the days after the September 11 attacks, when he looked with envy at the CIA’s ability to go to war anywhere around the globe. In the years since, lawyers and policy makers had steadily chipped away at the wall separating the work of soldiers and spies. The rivalries between the Pentagon and CIA during the early part of the decade gave way to a détente and a new arrangement in which special-operations troops on combat or spying missions were “sheep-dipped”: temporarily turned into CIA operatives.

So as President Obama made the final decisions about the bin Laden operation, a decade of evolution in the way America wages war gave him more options than had existed for previous American presidents. It would be an American military mission, carried out by teams of Navy SEALs. But the entire team was “sheep-dipped” for the mission, put under the CIA’s Title 50 authority for launching covert actions. President Obama put CIA director Leon Panetta in charge of the operation.

From the moment that the Blackhawk helicopters took off from the base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, through the tense minutes when the SEALs moved up the dark staircase in the house on Pathan Street, to the final moments when the helicopters rose into the sky carrying bin Laden’s dead body, Panetta relayed updates from the mission to rapt Obama administration officials jammed into the White House Situation Room. The liberal Democratic congressman from California, a man who learned only shortly before arriving at Langley that much of his job would require delivering death sentences to America’s enemies around the world, had the controls of the killing machine. As the operation unfolded,
Panetta kept one hand in his pocket
, fingering a string of rosary beads.

The suffocating tension inside the White House Situation Room lifted only after all the SEALs had piled into the helicopters and escaped Pakistani airspace without forcing a confrontation with the Pakistani air force. But back in Abbottabad, the wreckage from one of the Blackhawks was still burning and several dead bodies lay on the floor of the house where the SEALs had done their violent work.

Somebody was going to have to tell the Pakistanis what had just happened.

The task fell to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been something of a troubleshooter as the United States and Pakistan lurched from one crisis to the next. The son of a Hollywood press agent and a man who from an early age saw the value of cultivating personal relationships, Mullen had developed a close rapport with General Kayani—the former head of the ISI who had become army chief—during endless dinners at Kayani’s house in Islamabad. The two men would talk late into the night about Pakistan’s precarious security in a region dominated by India, China, and Russia, with Kayani chain-smoking through each dinner course. Mullen had spent the flights to Islamabad reading
Freedom at Midnight,
the 1975 classic about India’s independence from the British Empire and the India–Pakistan partition. One member of Mullen’s traveling entourage noticed that, from behind, the two men even looked alike—roughly the same height, same hair color, same slightly rumpled khaki uniform, similar lumbering gait—distinguished only by the cigarette smoke that rose from the Pakistani general.

Speaking from a phone outside the Situation Room, Mullen called Kayani and informed him of what had just happened.

Kayani already knew the basics. Hours earlier, he had taken a call from one of his aides, who told him about vague reports that a helicopter had crashed in Abbottabad. Kayani’s first thought was that Pakistan was under attack from India, and
he immediately ordered
his air-force commanders to scramble F-16 jets to repel the invasion. But the concerns about an Indian attack soon receded, and by the time Mullen called Kayani, the Pakistani general knew that Americans had been in his country.

During a tense phone call, Mullen said that American troops had been in the compound in Abbottabad and had killed bin Laden.
There was a downed American helicopter
at the scene. Then Mullen raised a subject that Obama officials had been debating since bin Laden’s death had been confirmed: Should President Obama make a public announcement that night or wait until the following day? Dawn had already broken in Islamabad, and Kayani told Mullen that President Obama should make an announcement as soon as possible, if only to explain why there was a burning American military helicopter in central Pakistan. After a few more minutes, the conversation was over and the two men hung up.

Kayani, whose position as head of the Pakistani military made him the most powerful figure in the country, was facing the most acute crisis of his long career. Within days, Pakistan’s top generals would excoriate him for allowing the United States to violate Pakistani sovereignty, but during the phone call with Mullen he had struck a conciliatory tone, because bin Laden had just been killed less than a mile from Pakistan’s premier military academy. Lashing out at Mullen that night, it seemed to Kayani, might feed America’s suspicions about Pakistan’s government harboring terrorists and lead to a permanent break between the United States and Pakistan. A proud man who had reached the pinnacle of his military career, Kayani faced an unsavory choice. He could either appear complicit in hiding Osama bin Laden or incompetent for being unable to stop the world’s most hunted man from taking refuge in the middle of his country. He chose the latter.

—

IN TRUTH,
any fading embers of productive relations between the United States and Pakistan had largely been extinguished by the time bin Laden was killed. The Raymond Davis episode had poisoned Leon Panetta’s relationship with General Pasha, the ISI chief, and the already small number of Obama officials pushing for better relations between Washington and Islamabad dwindled even further. Ambassador Cameron Munter was reporting daily back to Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone campaign, and Admiral Mullen generally agreed with Munter that the CIA seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum, oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on America’s relations with Pakistan’s government.

The CIA had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when CIA targeters weren’t certain about exactly who it was they were killing. Under the rules of so-called signature strikes, decisions about whether to fire missiles from drones could be made based on patterns of activity deemed suspicious. The bar for lethal action had again been lowered.

For instance, if a group of young “military-aged males” were observed moving in and out of a suspected militant training camp and were thought to be carrying weapons, they could be considered legitimate targets. American officials admit it is somewhat difficult to judge a person’s age from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas
a “military-aged male
” could be as young as fifteen or sixteen. Using such broad definitions to determine who was a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials to claim that the drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians. It was something of a trick of logic: In an area of known militant activity, all military-aged males were considered to be enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant, unless there was explicit intelligence that posthumously proved him to be innocent.

The perils of this approach were laid bare on March 17, 2011, just two days after Raymond Davis was released from prison under the “blood money” arrangement and spirited out of the country. CIA drones attacked a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, killing dozens of men. Ambassador Munter and some at the Pentagon thought the timing of the strike was disastrous, and some American officials suspected that the massive strike was the CIA venting its anger about the Davis episode. Munter thought that General Pasha, the ISI chief, had gone out on a limb to help end the Raymond Davis affair and that the Datta Khel strike could be perceived as a deliberate thumb in the eye. More important, however, many American officials believed that the strike had been botched, and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.

Other American officials came to the CIA’s defense, saying that the tribal meeting was in fact a meeting of senior militants, and therefore a legitimate target. But the drone strike unleashed a furious response in Pakistan. General Kayani issued a rare public statement, saying the operation was carried out “with complete disregard to human life,” and street protests in Lahore, Karachi, and Peshawar forced the temporary closure of American consulates in those cities.

Munter wasn’t opposed to the drone program, but he believed that the CIA was being reckless and that his position as ambassador was becoming untenable. His relationship with the CIA station chief in Islamabad, already strained because of their disagreements over the handling of the Raymond Davis case, deteriorated even further when Munter demanded that the CIA notify him before each missile strike and
give him the chance
to call off the operation. During one screaming match between the two men, Munter tried to make sure the station chief knew who was in charge, only to be reminded of who really held the power in Pakistan.

“You’re not the ambassador!” Munter shouted.

“You’re right, and I don’t want to be the ambassador,” the CIA station chief replied.