Killing bin Laden: How the U.S. Finally Got Its Man

The Four Helicopters chuffed urgently through the Khyber Pass, racing over the lights of Peshawar and down toward the quiet city of Abbottabad and the prosperous neighborhood of Bilal Town. In the dark houses below slept doctors, lawyers, retired military officers — and perhaps the world’s most wanted fugitive. The birds were on their way to find out.

Ahead loomed a strange-looking house in a walled compound. The pilots knew it well, having trained for their mission using a specially built replica. The house was three stories tall, as if to guarantee a clear view of approaching threats, and the walls were higher and thicker than any ordinary resident would require. Another high wall shielded the upper balcony from view. A second smaller house stood nearby. As a pair of backup helicopters orbited overhead, an HH-60 Pave Hawk chopper and a CH-47 Chinook dipped toward the compound. A dozen SEALs fast-roped onto the roof of a building from the HH-60 before it lost its lift and landed hard against a wall. The Chinook landed, and its troops clambered out.

Half a world away, it was Sunday afternoon in the crowded White House Situation Room. President Barack Obama was stone-faced as he followed the unfolding drama on silent video screens — a drama he alone had the power to start but now was powerless to control.

At a meeting three days earlier, Obama had heard his options summarized, three ways of dealing with tantalizing yet uncertain intelligence that had been developed over painstaking months and years. He could continue to watch the strange compound using spies and satellites in hopes that the prey would reveal himself. He could knock out the building from a safe distance using B-2 bombers and their precision-guided payloads. Or he could unleash the special force of SEALs known as Team 6.

How strong was the intelligence? he asked. A 50% to 80% chance, he was told. What could go wrong? Plenty: a hostage situation, a diplomatic crisis — a dozen varieties of the sort of botch that ruins a presidency. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter authorized a daring helicopter raid on Tehran to free American hostages. The ensuing debacle helped bury his re-election hopes.

To wait was to risk a leak, now that more than a hundred people had been briefed on the possible raid. To bomb might mean that the U.S. would never know for sure whether the mission was a success. As for an assault by special forces, U.S. relations with the Pakistani government were tricky enough without staging a raid on sovereign territory.

It is said that only the hard decisions make it to a President’s plate. This was one. Obama’s inner circle was deeply divided. After more than an hour of discussion, Obama dismissed the group, saying he wanted time to reflect — but not much time. The next morning, as the President left the White House to tour tornado damage in Alabama, he paused on his way through the Diplomatic Reception Room to render his decision: send the SEALs.

On Saturday the weather was cloudy in Abbottabad. Obama kept his appointment at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where a ballroom full of snoops had no inkling of the news volcano rumbling under their feet. The next morning, White House officials closed the West Wing to visitors, and Obama joined his staff in the Situation Room as the mission lifted off from a base in Jalalabad, southern Afghanistan. The bet was placed: American choppers invaded the airspace of a foreign country without warning, to attack a walled compound housing unknown occupants.

Obama returned to the Situation Room a short time later as the birds swooped down on the mysterious house. Over the next 40 minutes, chaos addled the satellite feeds. A hole was blown through the side of the house, gunfire erupted. SEALs worked their way through the smaller buildings inside the compound. Others swarmed upward in the main building, floor by floor, until they came to the room where they hoped to find their cornered target. Then they were inside the room for a final burst of gunfire.

What had happened? The President sat and stared while several of his aides paced. The minutes “passed like days,” one official recalls. The grounded chopper felt like a bad omen.

Then a voice briskly crackled with the hoped-for code name: “Visual on Geronimo.”

Osama bin Laden, elusive emir of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, the man who said yes to the 9/11 attacks, the taunting voice and daunting catalyst of thousands of political murders on four continents, was dead. The U.S. had finally found the long-sought needle in a huge and dangerous haystack. Through 15 of the most divisive years of modern American politics, the hunt for bin Laden was one of the few steadily shared endeavors. President Bill Clinton sent a shower of Tomahawk missiles down on bin Laden’s suspected hiding place in 1998 after al-Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. President George W. Bush dispatched troops to Afghanistan in 2001 after al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. Each time, bin Laden escaped, evaporating into the lawless Afghan borderlands where no spy, drone or satellite could find him. Meanwhile, the slender Saudi changed our lives in ways large and small, touched off a moral reckoning over the use of torture and introduced us to the 3-oz. (90 ml) toothpaste tube.

“Dead or alive,” Bush declared in 2001, when the smell of smoke was still acrid, and the cowboy rhetoric struck a chord. It took a long time to make good on that vow — an interval in which the very idea of American power and effectiveness took a beating. Thus, to find this one man on a planet of close to 7 billion, to roar out of the night and strike with the coiled wrath of an unforgetting people, was grimly satisfying. The thousands of Americans across the country whose impulse was to celebrate — banging drums outside the White House, waving flags at Ground Zero — were moved perhaps by more than unrefined delight at the villain’s comeuppance. It was a relief to find that America can still fix a bull’s-eye on a difficult goal, stick with it year after frustrating year and succeed when almost no one expects it.

Living the Good Life
So he wasn’t in a cave after all. Osama bin Laden, master marketer of mass murder, loved to traffic in the image of the ascetic warrior-prophet. In one of his most famous videotapes, he chose gray rocks for a backdrop, a rough camo jacket for a costume and a rifle for a prop. He portrayed a hard, pure alternative to the decadent weakness of the modern world. Soft Westerners and their corrupt puppet princes reclined in luxury and sin while he wanted nothing but a gun and a prayer rug. The zealot travels light, his bloodred thoughts so pure that even stones are as cushions for his untroubled sleep.

Now we know otherwise. Bin Laden was not the stoic soldier that he played onscreen. The exiled son of a Saudi construction mogul was living in a million-dollar home in a wealthy town nestled among green hills. He apparently slept in a king-size bed with a much younger wife. He had satellite TV. This, most of all, was fitting, because no matter how many hours he spent talking nostalgically of the 12th century and the glory of the Islamic caliphate, bin Laden was a master of the 21st century image machine.

He understood the power of the underdog to turn an opponent’s strength into a fatal weakness. If your enemy spans the globe, blow up his embassies. If he fills the skies with airplanes, hijack some and smash them into his buildings. Bin Laden learned this judo as a mujahid fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and he perfected it against the U.S. In 1996 he laid down a marker, literally declaring war on the world’s lone superpower — an incredibly audacious act of twisted imagination. And then, with patience and cunning, he somehow made the war come true. No Hollywood filmmaker ever staged a more terrifying spectacle than 9/11, which bin Laden conjured from a few box cutters and 19 misguided martyrs. When the Twin Towers collapsed, he became the real-life answer to the ruthless, stateless and seemingly unstoppable villains of James Bond fantasy.

It was necessary, then, to find him and render him mortal again, reduce him to mere humanity — not just as a matter of justice but as a matter of self-defense. The raid took him down to size. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, found himself disgusted by bin Laden in a whole new way: “Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

Remember that bin Laden once declared, “We love death. The U.S. loves life.” Evidently that was a line he peddled to would-be suicide bombers. For himself, he preferred life in tranquil Abbottabad.

That proved his undoing. In 2005 an unknown benefactor built the strange compound where bin Laden was eventually found. The site was a triangle-shaped piece of farmland. Walls ranging from 10 ft. (3 m) to 18 ft. (5.5 m) high and topped with barbed wire enclosed the 1-acre (0.4 hectare) property, which lay less than a mile from the military academy that is Pakistan’s answer to West Point. An interior wall 12 ft. (3.7 m) high separated the house from the rest of the grounds. Thus to reach the living areas, it was necessary to pass through two locked gates. A pit in the yard was used for burning household trash, leaving nothing for snooping garbage collectors. On the north side of the house, where the windows were visible, the glass was opaque.

Bin Laden took up residence soon after the compound was finished. Perhaps he knew of other terrorists in the area. Earlier this year, Umar Patek, an Indonesian linked to the 2002 al-Qaeda bombing in Bali, was arrested at the home of an Abbottabad retiree. Patek’s capture came not long after Pakistani authorities arrested an alleged al-Qaeda facilitator named Tahir Shehzad. According to documents published by WikiLeaks, bin Laden’s senior lieutenant in the period after Tora Bora, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, lived for a time in Abbottabad before his capture in 2005 and was visited there by one of bin Laden’s trusted couriers.

But if bin Laden knew that this pretty town with its rolling golf course was home to sympathizers, he should have surmised that it was also home to his enemies. And a person who truly wants to stay hidden should not live in a big house behind towering walls in an otherwise sparsely populated field. People are bound to grow curious — including people working for the CIA.

“Once we came across this compound, we paid close attention to it because it became clear that whoever was living here was trying to maintain a very discreet profile,” a senior U.S. intelligence operative explained. Brennan summed it up more tersely: “It had the appearance of sort of a fortress.”

In Plain Sight
By the time of the raid, Bin Laden had been living in the compound for some five years, surrounded by members of his extensive family, including the adult son who died with him. Why did it take so long for the fortress to come under suspicion? Obama’s view was clear in his televised address from the East Room late Sunday night, when he delivered the news of bin Laden’s death to a stunned global audience. He subtly reprised the charge he had made during his campaign for the presidency: the Bush Administration took its eye off the ball. “Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides” in the war against al-Qaeda, he said. “Yet Osama bin Laden avoided capture.”

Obama continued, “And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network.”

The implication wasn’t lost on Bush’s supporters. While the former President and his senior advisers were quick to praise the successful raid, other Republicans groused about the way it was framed. “That’s Obama politics,” Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Time. He continued, “I can tell you I was involved in a very close way with the Bush Administration — Director [Michael] Hayden when he was at the CIA, as well as Director [Porter] Goss when he was there, and Director [George] Tenet. I know that the focus of everyone in the Bush Administration was to take out bin Laden irrespective of what it took. They never lost their focus.”

A larger and more pressing question was the failure of Pakistan to note the terrorist chieftain’s luxury digs. Abbottabad is just 75 winding highway miles (120 km) from the capital, Islamabad, and teems with Pakistani military brass — current, future and retired. It is home to an entire brigade of the Pakistani army. How could the world’s most wanted terrorist spend five years in a fortress compound under the nose of the government? White House adviser Brennan said it is “inconceivable” that bin Laden didn’t have a support system inside Pakistan. “The United States provides billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan,” says Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey.” Before we send another dime, we need to know whether Pakistan truly stands with us in the fight against terrorism.”

For President Asif Ali Zardari, the charge that Pakistan shielded bin Laden is a personal affront. He blames the al-Qaeda leader for the murder of his wife, former President Benazir Bhutto, who was, as Zardari wrote in the Washington Post, “bin Laden’s worst nightmare — a democratically elected, progressive, moderate, pluralistic female leader.” Zardari moved quickly after the raid to tamp down possible protests, noting that the Taliban was blaming him for the al-Qaeda leader’s death. “We will not be intimidated,” Zardari declared. “Pakistan has never been and never will be the hotbed of fanaticism that is often described by the media.”

Yet another of the lessons we have learned as a consequence of bin Laden’s jihad is that the politics of Pakistan are Byzantine and double-dealing in ways no spy novelist could conjure. Only a week before the raid, news reports revealed that Pakistan — a supposed U.S. ally in the war on terrorism — has been urging Afghan President Hamid Karzai to break with the Americans and team up with China. This is a government, after all, that manages to fight the Taliban with one arm even as elements of its internal spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, support the Taliban with the other.

As Daniel Markey, a former State Department specialist on South Asia, explains, Pakistan is full of suspicious characters and fortified homesteads. Government officials often decide that it’s better not to know too much. So as we ask in coming weeks whether forces inside Pakistan protected bin Laden, pursued him or ignored him, the answer is likely yes to all three. And that should warn us that bin Laden’s death resolves only a part of the twisted, complex drama that is the war on terrorism. Indeed, it may be the easy part.

From Intel to Capture
The path to bin Laden began in the dark prisons of the CIA’s post-9/11 terrorist crackdown. Under questioning, captured al-Qaeda operatives described bin Laden’s preferred mode of communication. He knew that he couldn’t trust electronics, so he passed his orders through letters hand-carried by fanatically devoted couriers. One in particular caught the CIA’s attention, though he was known only by a nickname.

Interrogators grilled 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for details about the courier. When he pleaded ignorance, they knew they were onto something promising. Al-Libbi, the senior al-Qaeda figure captured in 2005, also played dumb. Both men were subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, including, in Mohammed’s case, the waterboard. The U.S. previously prosecuted as torturers those who used waterboarding, and critics say it violates international treaties. They also argue that extreme techniques are counterproductive. The report that Mohammed and al-Libbi were more forthcoming after the harsh treatment guarantees that the argument will go on.

Gradually, the courier’s identity was pieced together. The next job was to find him. The CIA tracked down his family and associates, then turned to the National Security Agency to put them under electronic surveillance. For a long time, nothing happened. Finally, last summer, agents intercepted the call they’d been waiting for.

The CIA picked up the courier’s trail in Peshawar and then followed him until he led them to the compound in Abbottabad. Now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency trained a spy satellite on the triangular fortress. Over time, despite the residents’ extreme secrecy, analysts grew more confident that they had hit the jackpot.

“There wasn’t perfect visibility on everything inside the compound, but we did have a very good understanding of the residents who were there, in terms of the number there and in terms of who the males were and the women and children,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told reporters. “We were able to identify a family at the compound that, in terms of numbers, squared with the number of bin Laden family members we thought were probably living with him in Pakistan.”

Obama was first informed of the breakthrough in August. By February the clues were solid enough for Panetta to begin planning a raid. Panetta called the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Vice Admiral William McRaven, to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. JSOC is the potent weapon created from the humiliation of the failed 1980 hostage-rescue mission. That effort was doomed by inadequate preparation, poor communication and cascading equipment failures. JSOC put an end to those obstacles among the elite U.S. strike forces and has become one of the most effective tools in the American military for dealing with unconventional enemies in the shape-shifting war on terror.

Ultimately, the plan devised by McRaven’s troops called for about 80 men aboard four helicopters. “I don’t want you to plan for an option that doesn’t allow you to fight your way out,” Obama told his military planners. Darkness was the cloak and speed essential; the force had to be in and out of Pakistan before the Pakistani military could respond. They rehearsed against a 30-minute clock. The orders were capture or kill.

Meanwhile, the pace of secret White House briefings accelerated in March and April, culminating in the April 28 session at which Obama weighed the conflicting advice of his senior circle. When the decision was made to strike the compound, bin Laden still had not been spotted among the residents behind the walls.

The raiders found him near the end of their search through the house. The courier was already dead on the first floor, along with his brother and a woman caught in the cross fire. When the SEALs encountered bin Laden, he was with one of his wives. The young woman started toward the SEALs and was shot in the leg. Bin Laden, unarmed, appeared ready to resist, according to a Defense Department account.

In an instant it was over: in all, four men and one woman lay dead. Bin Laden was shot in the head and in the chest. One of bin Laden’s wives confirmed his identity even as a photograph of the dead man’s face was relayed for examination by a face-recognition program. As the SEAL team prepared to load the body onto a helicopter, at Langley McRaven delivered the verdict. His voice was relayed to the White House Situation Room: “Geronimo: E-KIA,” meaning enemy — killed in action.

“We got him,” Obama said.

The strike force had eluded Pakistani radar on the flight into the country, but once the firefight erupted, the air force scrambled jets, which might arrive with guns blazing. A decision was made to destroy the stricken chopper. Surviving women and children in the compound — some of them wounded — were moved to safety as the explosives were placed and detonated. In the meantime, SEALs emerged from the house carrying computer drives and other potential intelligence treasures collected during a hasty search.

Aloft, the raiders performed a head count to confirm that they hadn’t lost a man. That news sent a second wave of smiles through the Situation Room. “They said all the helicopters are up, none of our people are hurt,” a senior Administration official told TIME. “That was actually the period of most relief.” DNA from the body was matched to known relatives of bin Laden’s — a third form of identification.

According to officials, the dead man’s next stop was the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. There, his body was washed and wrapped in a white sheet, then dropped overboard. There would be no grave for his admirers to venerate. The face that haunted the Western world, the eyes that looked on the blazing towers with pride of authorship, sank sightless beneath the waves.

What He Leaves Behind
On Sept. 17, 2001, the same day that President Bush promised “dead or alive,” Secretary of State Colin Powell — already a seasoned veteran of the hunt for bin Laden — had this to say: “We are after the al-Qaeda network. It’s not one individual; it’s lots of individuals, and it’s lots of cells. Osama bin Laden is the chairman of the holding company, and within that holding company are terrorist cells and organizations in dozens of countries around the world, any one them capable of committing a terrorist act.”

The hunt for bin Laden was only one aspect of the war that he unleashed. It has been a war unlike any other, one that defies definition. It has persisted in Afghanistan long after bin Laden and his enabler Mullah Omar were driven from the country. It bled into Iraq without Americans being able to agree whether we had chased or created it there. It is a gray war, without borders or uniforms, fought on frontiers ranging from the rocky highlands of the Silk Road to the aisles of the suburban beauty-supply warehouse where an al-Qaeda trainee bought chemicals to make a bomb. You can’t ignore the war, because it can come and find you when you least expect it.

So while it’s not enough to get one individual, the occasion of bin Laden’s death is a moment to take stock. A scattered enemy can still be a dangerous one. Terrorism experts warn of the possibility that an isolated cell or lone wolf might try to strike in retaliation for the killing of the leader.

But the al-Qaeda network is a tattered tissue compared with what it was when it managed to hit the American mainland as it had never been hit by outsiders before. According to polling by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, across the Muslim world confidence in bin Laden had plunged long before his death — down by half in the Palestinian territories, by even more in Indonesia, Jordan and, yes, Pakistan.

From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria this year, scores of thousands of young people — the very people bin Laden hoped to lead backward across a millennium — have poured into the streets in peaceful uprisings, chanting slogans of democracy. To be sure, Islamic fundamentalists will seek to turn the Arab Spring in their own direction, but regardless of how that plays out, it has been a bad season for bin Ladenism.

The successes against al-Qaeda have cost us dearly — in money, time, easy freedom and untroubled sleep. It has cost the lives of more than 5,000 U.S. and allied service members while leaving many more thousands wounded. The war on terrorism is nearly 10 years old and has no clear end in sight.

But perhaps the most important thing to come from bin Laden’s death is the sense that maybe this struggle won’t last forever. That hope seemed to animate the young people who greeted the news Sunday night with jubilation. Outside the White House, college students turned Pennsylvania Avenue into a giant party, waving flags and chanting “U.S.A.!” They shimmied trees, sang patriotic songs and hugged strangers like sailors on V-J Day. Similar celebrations broke out across the country, but the next day a more contemplative mood settled over people whose lives were marked by 9/11. People like Ben Hughes, 21, a junior at Savannah College of Art and Design, who typed this Facebook message on the first day without Osama bin Laden:

“I was a sixth grade student in Chatham, MA. I distinctly remember walking into school that morning with two friends, one of whom had his birthday that day and was planning a party. When the first plane hit, we were all ushered to the main hallway and made to take seats on the floor for an announcement from our principal. She told us that it seemed an accident had occurred with one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. A pilot may have suffered a heart attack at the helm of the aircraft and hit the building, she said.

“We continued our day without access to television or news outlets. But you could see that the teachers knew more than they let on. When I arrived home I asked my mother if I could watch the news reports, and for what seemed like days we sat there, in both awe and terror. It was the first moment in my short life where I felt entirely helpless.

“In the years since that day I have marked every year with a solid time of reflection and silence. And I will always remember also that I was on a flight between Charlotte, NC and Savannah, GA when the pilot came over the loudspeaker to announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed.”

The innocence lost can never be restored. But the feeling of helplessness need not last forever. It is an older, wiser country that writes the epitaph of the terrorist.