Dirty Wars (81 page)

ANWAR AWLAKI'S YOUNGEST BROTHER,
Ammar, was nothing like him. While Anwar embraced a radical interpretation of Islam and was preaching for jihad against the United States, Ammar was pursuing a career working for an oil company in Yemen. Ammar was Canadian-educated and politically well connected. He dressed in blue jeans, wore hip Armani eyeglasses and sported a goatee. His hair was slicked back and he had the latest iPhone. The last time he had seen Anwar was in 2004. In February 2011, Ammar was in Vienna, Austria, on a business trip. He had just returned to his hotel after sampling some local cuisine with an Austrian colleague when the phone rang in his room. “
Hello, Ammar
?” said a man with an American accent. “My wife knows your wife and I have a gift for her.” Ammar went down to the lobby and saw a tall, thin white man in a crisp, blue suit. They shook hands. “Can we talk a bit?” the man asked, and the two men sat down in the lobby. “I don't actually have a gift for your wife. I came from the States and I need to talk to you about your brother.”

“I'm guessing you're either FBI or CIA,” Ammar said. The man smiled.
Ammar asked him for identification. “Come on, we're not FBI, we don't have badges to identify us,” the man said. “The best I can do is I can show you my diplomatic passport.”

“Call me Chris,” the American said.

“Was that your name yesterday?” Ammar replied.

Chris made it clear he worked for the CIA and told Ammar that the United States had a task force dedicated to “killing or capturing your brother.” He told Ammar that the United States wanted to bring Anwar in alive, but that time was running out. “He's going to be killed,” Chris told him, “so why don't you help in saving his life by helping us capture him?” He added, “You know, there's a $5 million bounty on your brother's head. You won't be helping us for free.”

When Ammar told Chris he didn't want the money, the American replied, “That $5 million would help raise [Anwar's] kids. America is very frank, and I'll just say it to you. There's a $5-million-dollar bounty, and it's up for grabs. And instead of someone else getting it, why don't you get it, and help Anwar's kids get raised decently?”

“I don't think there's any need for me to meet you [again],” Ammar told Chris, reiterating that he had no idea where Anwar was. Still, Chris told Ammar to think it over. Discuss it with his family. “We can meet when you go to Dubai in two weeks.” Ammar was stunned. His tickets for that trip had not even been purchased and the details were still being worked out. Chris gave Ammar an e-mail address—a Hotmail account—and said he'd be in touch.

Ammar returned to Yemen. “I talked to my mom and my brother [not Anwar] about it. And they said, ‘You stop it. Don't even reply to them, don't contact them again. Just stop.'” Ammar ignored the rest of the e-mails from Chris.

WASHINGTON, DC
, 2010-2011;
PAKISTAN,
2011—As the US manhunt for Anwar Awlaki intensified, the most wanted man in the world was spending his time hiding in plain sight. For years, it was assumed that Osama bin Laden was living in a cave or hiding in the tribal areas straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Some US officials thought the United States might never catch him, while some terror analysts believed bin Laden might already be dead. But bin Laden was very much alive and was living in the middle-class Bilal Town neighborhood of Abbottabad, Pakistan, in a large compound less than a mile from the Pakistani equivalent of the West Point Military Academy.

It is unclear exactly when bin Laden had moved to Abbottabad, but
construction on the residence
had been completed in 2005. And it was clearly built for secrecy. The al Qaeda leader lived on the third floor of the largest house on the property with three of his wives and many of his children. Their residence was expertly designed to ensure that no one could see inside. It had almost no windows, save for some
narrow openings
on one of the walls. Ironically, on May 2, 2011, it was those very attributes of the home that would prevent bin Laden from seeing the well-armed US Navy SEALs who were whizzing across Pakistan on a mission to end his life.

THE LAST SERIOUS CHANCE
the United States had of killing or capturing bin Laden had come a decade earlier, in the winter of 2001 in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. A collapse in coordination between the Pentagon and CIA had marred that operation, resulting in bin Laden and his deputy, Zawahiri, disappearing—some thought for good. For the next decade, a determined group of analysts from the CIA followed one lead after another to a seemingly endless string of dead ends. With no human intelligence resources inside al Qaeda, no signals intelligence coming from bin Laden himself and little hope for support from authorities in the regions he was believed to be in, the CIA was stuck. In 2005, the
bin Laden unit was shuttered
, though a number of analysts continued to pursue the al Qaeda leader.

Barack Obama had campaigned on a pledge to make Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda the centerpiece of his counterterrorism policy, and he blasted the Bush administration for dropping the ball in the hunt for bin Laden. As president, Obama had ordered CIA Director Leon Panetta to prioritize the search, labeling the killing or capture of bin Laden Panetta's “
number one goal
” in May 2009. Obama's orders had injected new life—and resources—into the search that had, for four years, largely been conducted by a small group of CIA analysts. While the CIA was ratcheting up its efforts to find bin Laden, not everyone in the intelligence community thought they would produce any result. In April 2010, Major General Michael Flynn told
Rolling Stone
reporter Michael Hastings, “I don't think we're going to get bin Laden,” adding, “
I think we'll get a call
one day from the Paks: Bin Laden's dead, we captured al Zawahiri.” At the time, Flynn was the highest-ranking intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Pakistan and was serving directly under General McChrystal. As Hastings pointed out, Flynn “had access to the most sensitive and detailed intelligence reports.”

But in August 2010, the CIA got its biggest break in the case since Tora Bora, when a CIA asset inside Pakistan spotted Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti in Peshawar. Kuwaiti had long been on the CIA's radar and had been
identified by various al Qaeda figures
captured and interrogated by US forces in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as a top aide to bin Laden and his primary courier. The Agency's asset in Pakistan
followed Kuwaiti's white Suzuki
jeep on a two-hour drive from Peshawar to the garrison town of Abbottabad. As the CIA analysts examined the details of the compound, which they likened to a “
fortress
,” they discovered it had no phone or Internet connection and that its residents
burned their trash
. They
grew their own vegetables
and raised their own chickens and cows. Every week, they would slaughter two goats. The analysts knew they had one of bin Laden's trusted aides in their scope but also knew there could be a bigger fish living in the compound—perhaps even the biggest. They decided not to try to capture Kuwaiti, hoping that he would lead them to bin Laden himself.

In late autumn, Panetta directed his bin Laden analysts to compile a list of
twenty-five ways
to extract intelligence from within the compound. They had already considered placing devices in the sewage system or placing a camera in a tree near the compound. Eventually, the analysts came up with thirty-eight options. According to author Peter Bergen, “One idea was to
throw in foul-smelling stink bombs
to flush out the occupants of the compound. Another was to play on the presumed religious fanaticism of the compound's inhabitants and broadcast from outside the compound what purported to be the ‘Voice of Allah,' saying, ‘You are commanded to come out into the street!'”

Eventually, the CIA enlisted a Pakistani doctor to administer a
false Hepatitis B vaccination program
in the neighborhood. The Agency wanted the doctor and his fake medical team to gain access to the compound and to extract DNA samples from the occupants so that they could compare them to samples the Agency already had from bin Laden's deceased sister. The doctor involved in the effort, Shakil Afridi, was from Pakistan's tribal regions. Eventually, the CIA would pay Afridi to run the fake program, which began in the poorer areas of Abbottabad in order to appear legitimate. In the end, the plan failed and Afridi and his team were
unable to get any DNA samples
. Afridi would later be arrested and imprisoned by Pakistani authorities for working with the CIA.

In the late summer and early fall of 2010, CIA analysts had begun circulating memos regarding the significance of the courier and his relationship to bin Laden, including one that was titled “Closing In on Usama bin Ladin's Courier” and another titled “
Anatomy of a Lead
.”

The CIA set up a safe house in Abbottabad and expanded its “
pattern of life” analysis
of the compound's residents. In addition to the families of Kuwaiti and his brother, they soon discovered that there was another family living in the secluded third floor of the biggest building on the property. By analyzing shadows through aerial imagery, CIA analysts detected someone they believed to be a man who would take daily walks in the courtyard inside the compound in a small vegetable garden—but only under the cover of a tarp, which prevented the drones or satellites from getting anything more than a silhouette of his image. They could not determine the man's height. Internally, the CIA analysts called him “
the Pacer
.”

By January 2011, the general consensus at the CIA was that the Pacer was likely bin Laden himself. President Obama asked his counterterrorism team to develop a range of options for action. Undersecretary of Defense Michael Vickers, Panetta and his deputy Mike Morell met with Admiral McRaven at CIA headquarters and read him in on the intelligence out of Abbottabad. “
First of all, congratulations
on getting such a good lead,” McRaven told them. “Second, this is a relatively straightforward raid from JSOC's perspective. We do these ten, twelve, fourteen times a night. The thing that makes this complicated is it's one hundred and fifty miles inside Pakistan, and logistically getting there, and then the politics of explaining the raid, is the complicating factor. I want to think about it a little bit, but my instinct is to put a very seasoned member of a special unit to work directly with you who will come to the CIA every day and basically begin to plan and flesh out some options.”

The
Wall Street Journal
reported that “
McRaven assigned
one senior special-operations officer—a Navy Captain from SEAL Team 6, one of the
top special-forces units—to work on what was known as AC1, for Abbottabad Compound 1. The captain spent every day working with the CIA team in a remote, secure facility on the CIA's campus in Langley, Va.” On paper, any raid against the compound was to be done using CIA cover so that if it went wrong, the United States could deny the operation. But in reality, McRaven's men would be running the show. Within the CIA, AC1 soon became known as “
Atlantic City
.”

The CIA and Obama's national security team considered a
number of other options
beyond the SEAL team assault. They explored doing a B-2 strike on the compound, similar to the operation that killed Zarqawi in Iraq. But that scenario presented a number of major-league risks: it would be nearly impossible to extract DNA to confirm bin Laden was killed, and the bombing would certainly kill not only all of the women and children in the compound, but potentially residents of other homes in the neighborhood. A drone strike was always an option in Pakistan, but the conditions at the compound would have made the chance of a direct hit unpredictable. Looming over all of the planning was the fact that CIA contractor Raymond Davis was sitting in a Pakistani jail cell facing murder charges and widespread calls for his execution. Any unilateral action by the United States would undoubtedly infuriate the Pakistani government. Some analysts
feared Davis could be killed
in retaliation.

Ultimately, Obama's counterterrorism team decided that a JSOC raid, conducted by veteran Navy SEALs under the command of McRaven, would provide the best opportunity to take out bin Laden. JSOC had conducted raids in Pakistan before, though never this deep into the country—or with such a sizable force. The risk of the Pakistani government spotting the US helicopters that would have to travel 150 miles into the country—and the possibility that the helicopters could be shot down—was serious. Admiral McRaven began assembling a team of SEALs to start preparing for a sensitive operation, but they were not yet briefed on what that mission would be. Once Raymond Davis was released from the Pakistani jail on March 16, momentum picked up for the operation.

McRaven's men would prepare for the mission at a secret facility in North Carolina and at another in the
desert in Nevada
.

ONE OF THE SEALS TAKING PART
in the exercises was thirty-six-year-old Matt Bissonnette, a veteran DEVGRU operator who had spent the last decade participating in a virtually nonstop run of combat deployments that put him behind enemy lines in the expansive post-9/11 US war on terror. Bissonnette had carried out missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa
and, as fate would have it, Pakistan. He had actually participated in a previous attempt to capture bin Laden in 2007 that he had dubbed a “
wild-goose chase
.” He had risen through the Special Ops ranks to become a DEVGRU team leader.

Bissonnette and other JSOC operators were summoned to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, where phones are prohibited and the walls are lined with lead to prevent the use of electronic listening devices. According to Bissonnette, “There were
almost thirty people in the room
, including SEALs, an EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] tech, plus two support guys.” The men received little information other than the fact that they were going to be headed to North Carolina for a “joint readiness exercise.” They were offered no clues as to what was in store. “Overall there was a lot of experience in the room. They'd drawn us from different teams,” Bissonnette recalled. “On most teams, the new guy usually carries the ladder and the sledgehammer. But looking around the room, we had all senior guys.” He added, “It looked like
some kind of dream team
they were putting together.”