How It Went Down

“I can only speak with authority through Feb. 15, 2009,” said Michael Hayden, who was George W. Bush’s last CIA director. “But at that point, when people would ask ‘When’s the last time you really knew where he was?’ my answer was Tora Bora in 2001.”

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Obama’s first order to his new CIA Director Leon Panetta in 2009 was to “make the killing or capture of OBL the top priority of the war against al-Qaeda.” That order grew out of a controversial Obama campaign pledge that “if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take him out, then we have to act and we will take him out. We will kill bin Laden; we will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national-security priority.”

While journalists have provided a number of histories of the events that led to bin Laden’s death, the purpose of this analysis is to examine White House decisionmaking for lessons that can be applied to future foreign policy challenges. From the tens of thousands of pages of testimony reviewing failures that contributed to al-Qaeda’s successful attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the most memorable one-liner came from counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who said, “Your government failed you.” Summarized in a single line, the takeaway from the bin Laden operation is that American government worked.

Success in this case can be traced to three factors. Subtract any one from the picture and bin Laden would be actively plotting attacks on Americans today.

1. New capabilities created by intelligence and military agencies during the decade after 9/11 gave Obama choices and weapons that were not available to previous Presidents. Had these been available to Bill Clinton in 1998 after al-Qaeda’s attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa or to Bush in 2001 when bin Laden was surrounded at Tora Bora, either would likely have ordered an operation that would have killed bin Laden. As Admiral William McRaven, who led the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the time of the raid, likes to say, “The bin Laden operation would simply not have been possible if CIA and JSOC had not spent a decade in bed together.”

2. After a flawed process in the first year of Obama’s presidency forced him to double down in Afghanistan, Obama put in place a disciplined national-security decisionmaking process — analytically rigorous at its core, insistent on written product and capable of adjusting to the requirements of each specific decision.

3. A Commander in Chief had the confidence and determination to slow the clock long enough to aim carefully before pulling the trigger. This required narrowing the circle of advisers to a handful of White House and sub-Cabinet officials to prevent a leak that would have been fatal to the mission. Until 24 hours before the U.S. acted, a majority of members of the National Security Council (NSC) were still unaware of the operation. Whether the rigorous control adopted in this process can be adapted to other foreign policy decisions remains an unanswered question.

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Hard Choices
Fifteen months after Obama’s initial “Get bin Laden” order, Panetta returned to the White House in August 2010 with good news. The CIA had discovered a multihouse compound in northeast Pakistan in which bin Laden’s favorite courier was living. The compound, which was surrounded by an 18-ft. wall and which Obama’s counterterrorism czar John Brennan named the Fortress, was in Abbottabad, a city about as far from Pakistan’s capital as Baltimore is from Washington. Abbottabad is also home to Pakistan’s leading military academy.

From the moment Panetta appeared, Obama faced four major decisions:

1. When to act? Every day of delay increased the likelihood that bin Laden, if he was actually there, would escape. A leak in Washington that popped up on a blog or in the press would sound an alarm, causing him to flee.

2. Who to include in the decisionmaking? Adding more people would reduce the chances that important dimensions of the operation would go unexamined. But every additional pair of eyes came with a mouth that could be the source of a leak.

3. How, exactly, to capture or kill bin Laden? Obama’s menu had four entres: Predator drones with Hellfire missiles delivering 500-lb. bombs (like those used five months later to kill Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen); B-2 bombers with 2,000-lb. laser-guided bombs (like those used in late 2011 against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya); special forces on the ground; and a joint military operation with Pakistan.

4. Though this was first and foremost a matter of national security, any decision would have political consequences. Everyone involved knew Obama was “betting his presidency” on this issue, as a Deputy National Security Adviser put it. If Obama waited and OBL escaped, Obama would be savaged for fiddling while public enemy No. 1 vanished. If he acted and the operation failed, opponents would tar him as a second Jimmy Carter, recalling the failed 1980 attempt to rescue Americans held hostage in Iran.

The biggest surprise of the entire operation was that it was a surprise. A half-century ago, when the CIA discovered that the Soviet Union was sneaking nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba at the start of what became the Cuban missile crisis, one of the first questions President John F. Kennedy asked was, How long until this leaks? His National Security Adviser thought a week at most. So JFK gave himself five days to deliberate, review the evidence, listen to counterarguments and change his mind more than once. As he noted afterward, if he had been forced to make a decision in the first 48 hours, he would have chosen an air strike on the missile sites rather than the naval blockade he eventually selected. That air strike could have led to nuclear war.

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In today’s Washington, a week is a lifetime. Secrets are often published overnight, as Obama learned painfully in 2009 when he attempted to consider his options in Afghanistan. He found himself “jammed” — his word — into a decision he opposed by a process that began when he asked his new commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to assess the situation. When Obama received McChrystal’s dire 66-page brief that warned of imminent defeat unless a major initiative was undertaken to “reverse the momentum,” the President was shocked. Before he could meet with his national-security team to discuss his options, McChrystal’s report appeared in the press. From that point on, he had only two choices: to back his new commander or back down.

That outcome, in part, eventually led Obama to replace James Jones, his National Security Adviser, with Jones’ deputy, Tom Donilon. Obama then asked Donilon to create a substantially revised and more actively managed national-security decisionmaking process, one that met Obama’s demands for thinking before acting, analyzing every angle of an issue and probing the competing views of his advisers but in the end making his own call. As Donilon explains it, using the somewhat lifeless language of policy managers, his job is to “maximize the President’s optionality.”

In most journalists’ accounts, Obama’s decision to order a strike on bin Laden’s compound was easy. “Take the view of the man in the street,” Panetta said. “If ordinary Americans knew what we knew, they would think it was a no-brainer to go.” But when we stop to consider the choices Obama actually faced, the story becomes more complicated and more interesting. Hunters know that the toughest choice they face is when to fire. If they shoot too soon, they will miss the mark, allowing the kill to escape. But by waiting, they risk that a sound will be made that will spook the target. And yet Obama waited five months after first hearing about bin Laden’s whereabouts and acting.

And if this had been, as Panetta suggested, a straightforward decision, why did his Vice President, the Secretary of Defense and the key military leader involved disagree with Obama’s choice, even after the President’s preference was clear? In the final meeting before the operation, the President took a vote. The most experienced member of this national-security team, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, opposed the raid, restating his view that putting commandos on the ground risked their being captured or killed. Vice President Joe Biden also felt that the risks of acting rather than waiting outweighed the benefits. The military leader in the loop from the outset and the most intensely engaged officer in this decisionmaking process, Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] Vice Chairman James Cartwright, preferred an air strike to boots on the ground.

“It’s Time to Call In the Pros”
In the weeks that followed Panetta’s visit to the White House, CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell gave Donilon and Brennan regular intelligence updates, but virtually no one else. The Abbottabad material was so compartmented that it was excluded from the threat matrix in the President’s supersecret daily brief out of fear that it would raise flags at the departments of State and Defense and other agencies.

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By December 2010, Morell’s team at the CIA’s counterterrorism center was 60% confident that bin Laden was living in the compound, making it, as Morell told Obama, “the hottest lead to bin Laden since Tora Bora.” Obama instructed the CIA to do everything it could to make certain of the identity but to be careful not to flush the prey.

But one worked against the other. Most of the actions the CIA could take to increase its confidence about the target would also unavoidably increase the odds that bin Laden or Pakistani intelligence officers would learn that the U.S. had discovered his whereabouts. More-advanced drones could provide better overhead photography of activity in the compound, but what if one crashed, as an RQ-170 did in Iran seven months later? A broadsheet of options included everything from surveilling the neighborhood with a miniaturized UAV that resembled a bird (so convincing that one was attacked by an eagle) to analyzing local sewage for genetic markers. A number of these were pursued successfully and still remain secret. One was blown after the operation when Pakistani intelligence arrested a doctor who had vaccinated children in the area in the hope of extracting bin Laden family DNA.

In a series of 40 intelligence reviews from August 2010 to April 2011, further questions were explored and competing hypotheses examined — in particular, the possibility that the suspect in Abbottabad was not bin Laden. This led to the creation of what some called the Bible: a three-inch binder listing every question about the operation, from assessing the risks of a leak at various stages to what to do with bin Laden’s body.

On specific instructions from the President, only six people at the White House were in the loop from August to December: Obama, Donilon, Brennan, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, the Vice President’s National Security Adviser Tony Blinken and Biden, supported by Panetta and Morell. Up until then, Panetta and Morell had assumed that the CIA’s small and rarely discussed cadre of paramilitary personnel would conduct the raid. But as they studied their options that winter after hearing the agency’s plan to raid the compound, Morell turned to Panetta and said, “It’s time to call in the pros.”

For a career CIA official fiercely loyal to his agency, this was a painful but realistic admission. Over the previous decade, Morell knew, the military had developed unique capabilities for operations like this one. Thus, with approval from the White House, the circle was expanded to include two — but only two — additional players: McRaven and JCS Vice Chairman Cartwright, who was an Obama favorite. At this point, the circle did not include Cartwright’s boss, JCS Chairman Mike Mullen; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; or even Gates, the Secretary of Defense. In order to divert the money needed for the operation — and ensure its legality — Panetta gave the leaders of the congressional intelligence committees a general idea about the mission at this stage. Six weeks later, when Donilon learned that Panetta had done this, he was astonished.

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Sending in the SEALs
In the President’s mind, the four options for killing bin Laden quickly shrank to three and then two. When Obama first reviewed his choices in late January, the joint operation with Pakistan quickly fell off the menu. On Jan. 27, 2011, CIA contractor Raymond Davis was arrested in Lahore on murder charges, an incident that reminded the White House that its Pakistani allies could never be reliable partners in such a highly sensitive mission. Had Gates and Mullen been fully engaged at this point, it is likely that the consequences of this decision would have been more carefully examined.

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Several weeks later, Obama shelved the Predator plan, which called for Hellfire missile strikes on the tall, mysterious figure whose daily walks around the compound’s courtyard led the CIA to name him the Pacer. A Predator strike against bin Laden would have been a fitting capstone for a technology project launched by the CIA in the 1990s for the specific purpose of targeting OBL. But Obama passed on this option for three reasons. First, he had doubts about whether 500-lb. bombs could pack enough punch to guarantee a kill. Second, since Pakistan was unlikely to cooperate in sifting through the remains, how would the U.S. know if it had killed the right man? If Pakistan dissembled, accusing the U.S. of killing innocent civilians, and al-Qaeda claimed OBL was still alive, how could the U.S. prove otherwise? Third, a Predator strike would mean the U.S. would lose the opportunity to capture evidence at the compound that would be valuable in finishing off al-Qaeda.

Similar arguments led Obama to tilt against a B-2 strike on the compound. Cartwright worked directly with the commander of the B-2 squadron to develop an option that called for dropping 32 2,000-lb. bombs on the target. While this would guarantee that OBL could not escape through underground tunnels, it would also kill the roughly 20 women and children living with him and potentially occupants of neighboring houses.

Thus, step by step, Obama arrived at the choice that promised the highest reward but also carried the highest risks: sending in the SEALs. Though the B-2 and drone options remained on the table until the final advisers’ meeting on April 28, Obama directed McRaven on March 29 to perform a “full dress rehearsal” of the raid. Even then, his advisers’ bets about whether the Pacer was OBL ranged from Panetta at 80% to Morell at 60% to Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, at 40%, with Gates and Biden well below that. As Morell reminded participants, the circumstantial evidence for WMD in Iraq was stronger than the circumstantial evidence for the Abbottabad man’s being bin Laden. Still, Obama had high confidence that special forces could get in and out safely. McRaven was especially persuasive, explaining, “This is what we do. We fly in by helicopters, we assault compounds, we grab the bad guy or whatever is required, and we get out.”

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But what if Pakistan discovered the U.S. forces en route or on the ground and took them hostage? What if a chopper crashed? When Obama raised these questions at a meeting on April 19, McRaven responded, “Oh, you mean the s — t-hits-the-fan scenario?” Though McRaven had thought of most possibilities, Obama found haunting Gates’ vivid recollection of Carter’s failure when a helicopter crashed at Desert One. He thus expanded the final plan to include two additional Chinook helicopters carrying 24 more SEALs for backup so that even if they were discovered and surrounded at the site by Pakistani forces, they could “fight their way out.”

A war cabinet of NSC members held five meetings over the final six weeks to review all the options once more. Participants report that in these sessions Obama invited competing views and re-examinations of his previous conclusions. Even in this phase, the loop was tight: Gates and Clinton had to come to the meetings alone, without their deputies or staff. As more officials needed to be briefed on the operation, every new name required Donilon’s personal approval.

Less than a week before D-Day, on April 25, WikiLeaks’ Guantnamo files appeared on the front page of the New York Times, citing thousands of pages of classified material it had put up on the Web. One of the documents came from the interrogation of the individual from whom the CIA had learned the identity of bin Laden’s courier and pointed to Abbottabad as a refuge for al-Qaeda. CIA interrogators noted that the operative had moved to Abbottabad in mid-2003 after receiving a letter from OBL’s “designated courier” inviting him to become bin Laden’s “official messenger.” Had bin Laden’s protectors read the Times closely, and thus inferred that the U.S. had learned the identity of the courier, the house could have been empty when the SEALs arrived.

On April 28, in a final meeting in the Situation Room, Obama asked each adviser what they would do and took an up-or-down vote on whether to launch the raid. Gates and Biden voted no. The next morning, in a brief meeting in the Diplomatic Reception Room, Obama told Donilon, Brennan, McDonough and chief of staff Bill Daley, “It’s a go.” At that point the circle widened: Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller, special assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan Douglas Lute and others were told of the pending raid. A process that began with just six people in the White House eight months earlier had expanded to include scores of others.

After the U.S. helicopters escaped Pakistani airspace, officials made hundreds of phone calls to key individuals at home and abroad to inform them of the news before making a public announcement. Obama’s first calls were to former Presidents Bush and Clinton. Mullen called Pakistan’s army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, who seemed stunned. Others called key congressional leaders — all according to a telephone playbook Donilon had constructed and participants had rehearsed earlier that day. And when did the news become public? Five minutes after the calls to members of Congress and an hour before the President’s formal announcement, CNN broke the news.

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Lessons
First, this case demonstrates that the U.S. government is capable of extraordinary performance in extraordinary circumstances. The challenge is to find ways to apply lessons learned here to improve performance in ordinary cases.

Second, sometimes secrets matter. And when they do, secrecy matters more. The bin Laden case demonstrates why success requires both discovering secrets and then keeping them, allowing a President time to reflect in private and permitting him to reach a decision and act. As Donilon likes to say, “There is only one way in Washington to keep a secret: don’t tell anybody.”

Third, secrecy comes with a price. Tightening the decision loop in order to prevent leaks means that important angles may not be adequately considered. If Mullen and Lute had been brought in earlier and told to design an alternative story line about Pakistani cooperation in the raid, that might have avoided humiliating the Pakistani military in its own backyard. As it happened instead, there can be no doubt about what Kayani and his army colleagues concluded from this experience. If the U.S. is able and willing to swoop into their country unannounced and take out bin Laden, could a future raid seize their nuclear weapons? (It is a little-known fact that Abbottabad is also a Pakistani nuclear-weapons site.) Going forward, whatever American officials say or do, Pakistanis will presume the worst about the U.S.’s intentions. The consequences of this for our prospects of not only finding an acceptable exit from Afghanistan but also securing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal are becoming clearer every day.

Fourth, the most troubling lesson from this case is the dog that hasn’t barked. In the aftermath of Abbottabad, we are left with two possibilities: either the Pakistanis knew that bin Laden was there, or they didn’t. If Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership was complicit in harboring OBL, we know now where we stand with our nominal ally. Like that of a couple in which the wife has found her husband in bed with a lover and exposed the infidelity publicly, this relationship will not soon recover.

But after intense review of the materials seized in the raid, the brute fact is that not a shred of evidence has been found to suggest anyone in the Pakistani military and intelligence hierarchy knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Thus we are forced to consider the even grimmer possibility that Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership did not know that the U.S.’s most wanted man was living in their country. Could it be possible that a nation that is unaware that bin Laden lived within its borders for six years, moved five times with three wives and fathered four children (two born in local hospitals) is also a nation that is in control of some 100 nuclear bombs? That seems unlikely — but the evidence so far suggests exactly that.

The Obama Administration’s attention is now fixed on the possibility that in the coming year, Iran will produce enough highly enriched uranium for its first bomb. But during these same 12 months, Pakistan will have produced enough material for at least 12 more nuclear weapons.

So as we applaud extraordinary performance in this operation — from the low-level intelligence collectors and helicopter-maintenance technicians to the SEALs and an NSC process that supported a focused, determined Commander in Chief — we are left contemplating a discovery that means we are likely to soon face even more daunting challenges in the days and months ahead.

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