Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (65 page)

Training for the operation was divided between Nevada and North Carolina. In North Carolina, the task force rehearsed the assault at a CIA training facility in Harvey Point, where the Agency had built an almost perfect replica of the bin Laden compound. In Nevada the task force flew both the stealth Black Hawks and the Chinooks against Groom Lake's approximation of the Pakistani radars they would be flying against on the mission. What they found, according to a Team 6 source, is that by terrain masking—using the terrain to hide from the radar—the Chinooks “could get in without being spotted by the radar.” But JSOC and the CIA nonetheless insisted that the task force use the two-of-a-kind stealth Black Hawks.
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“The helicopters were really forced on us,” a Team 6 source said. “These newfangled helicopters that had never been used before.” During initial planning meetings McRaven had told Red Squadron to “look at all options” as they considered how to conduct the mission. But early on, the JSOC commander told them to forget about jumping in. “McRaven said there were too many wires,” said the Team 6 source, who strongly disagreed with the admiral. “Every one of those operators, except maybe [the squadron commander], could have landed inside of that compound under parachute.”

In Team 6, there were different opinions about whom to blame for the insistence on using the helicopters. Some operators thought the CIA was driving the decision. Others attributed it to McRaven. “He wanted to use these newfangled helicopters,” said an operator. “He sold it to the president that way: These things are invisible to radar, they'll get in, the [Pakistanis] will never know we were there.” When the helicopters proved unstable during training, the JSOC commander refused to revisit the decision, the operator said.

As they prepared for the mission, the operators' primary training challenge was to “break the habits from Afghanistan,” where the vast majority of their missions had been based on the same template. “There were so many unknowns in Pakistan,” said a Team 6 source. “What was the [Pakistani military] going to do? And … the civilians—in what was essentially a retired military town, a retired ISI town—what were they going to do?” The Team 6 and Red Squadron leaders put the operators through a variety of contingencies to prepare them mentally for dealing with eventualities that they weren't used to facing in Afghanistan. “There was no clear-cut answer to any of these scenarios,” the Team 6 source said. The operators had to figure it out on their own. Their reaction to the initial scenarios was not auspicious. “They started off abysmally, with a sense of, ‘kill everybody, even in the surrounding area' kind of thing,” the source said. “But as they kept going on and the problems got more and more complex, you could see them self-organize, which is what SEALs do very well, working it out on the ground.”

One contingency that those running the training made sure that the operators were as ready as they could be for was a helicopter crash. “We did so many downed helo drills that [the operators] were just sick of it,” the Team 6 source said. “But they figured out the answers to these downed helo scenarios themselves. Nothing was ever pushed on them.”

Other variations to the plan were considered and discarded. “The initial plan had Agency Ground Branch guys going in on the ground to cut off some of the intersections, but that was ruled out by the Agency as too risky,” a Team 6 source said. While CIA operatives had established a safe house
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and reconnoitered the area previously, by the time of the raid there were no U.S. personnel waiting or watching in the neighborhood, he said. The operators were not particularly intimidated by the tactical challenges or potential threats they might face on the objective. “This target wasn't any more complicated than hundreds of others we'd assaulted over the years,” said Bissonnette. For any other target, the amount of rehearsals would have seemed like overkill. “We had never trained this much for a particular objective before in our lives,” said Bissonnette. However, he added, “the extra preparation helped us mesh, since we'd been drawn from different teams.”
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A big question was how the force on the ground should respond if the Pakistani military showed up and surrounded the compound. According to several published accounts,
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McRaven advised the White House to seek a negotiated solution in that case while the troops strongpointed the compound. But to some operators, it seemed that McRaven told Red Squadron to surrender if they were surrounded. “Then he briefed that to the president,” said a Team 6 source. “Thankfully, the president said, ‘No, they're not going to surrender, they'll fight their way out and we'll go in and get them if we have to.' The guys were thankful for that. They would not have surrendered anyway. They might have nodded to McRaven, but they would not have surrendered.”

The issue of what to do with bin Laden was simpler. “Bin Laden was the first time [we were told], ‘This is a kill mission, not a capture mission, unless he was naked with his hands up,'” said the Team 6 source. (In this respect, U.S. policy had not changed since Tora Bora almost a decade previously, when, according to Delta officer Tom Greer, “it was made crystal clear to us that capturing the terrorist was not the preferred outcome.”) In planning meetings with the CIA, Team 6 officials had argued that their normal rules of engagement were sufficient. “But they [the CIA] were adamant: kill him,” the source said. “That message came from [CIA director Leon] Panetta.” One thing the task force didn't have to worry about, a CIA analyst assured them, was Pakistani jets chasing the helicopters. “[He's] telling us that there's no way in hell the Pakistanis can scramble their jets, not at night, not going to happen,” the Team 6 source said.

About a week before the end of April, the operators departed Dam Neck to stage at the task force's Jalalabad base. The president had still not approved the mission. Around the time that the bin Laden mission force arrived in Afghanistan, Kurilla and others in the Afghanistan task force were briefed on the operation. They provided the quick reaction force as well as combat jets flying along the border, ready to race to Abbottabad and provide close air support if the assault force needed it.
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On April 29, the president told his national security team he had decided to authorize the mission, but left the final call on timing to McRaven, who was in Afghanistan. D-day was set for May 1. But later that night McRaven pushed the mission a day to the right, as the forecast said there would be excessive cloud cover over Abbottabad on April 30.
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By now the operation had a name: Neptune's Spear.

In one of the final staff meetings with McRaven at Jalalabad, two days before the mission, Colonel John Thompson, the 160th commander, made a final effort to dispense with the stealthy Black Hawks, according to a source in the room. “Sir, I really think we need to use the 47s for this and not these 60s,” he told McRaven, noting the success the Chinooks had enjoyed against the Pakistani radar array in Nevada. The admiral was not amused at this late attempt to change the plan, the source said. “McRaven went off on him,” he said. “Embarrassed him, belittled him … I felt bad for the guy.” McRaven disputed this version of events, saying nobody advised him “against any facet of the UBL raid” and that he did not “chew anyone out publicly.”
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*   *   *

At 11
P.M.
on May 1 the stealth Black Hawks took off from Jalalabad, along with three Chinooks carrying a quick reaction force and the gear and personnel for a forward arming and refueling point. The Chinooks were going to set down north of Abbottabad, ready to go to the assistance of the assault force if need be. The plan was for the Black Hawks to refuel there on the way back into Afghanistan. The flight passed uneventfully, the operators dozing in the helicopters until the first shout to alert them that they were nearing the objective: “Ten minutes!”

The operators shook themselves alert and rechecked their gear for the last time. The helicopters had wheeled around to approach Abbottabad from the south. In what was either a fortuitous coincidence or a piece of the operation never publicly acknowledged, the neighborhood in which the compound sat was swathed in darkness from what appeared to be one of the rolling blackouts that regularly afflict Pakistani towns.

With the helicopters a minute or two out, a curious thing happened: someone tried to call a phone associated with one of the two brothers who lived with bin Laden as his aides and couriers. This was unusual because it was the middle of the night and they didn't normally take phone calls there at any time. The call wasn't answered.
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Then, with the helicopters hovering over the compound, the operation suddenly teetered on the edge of disaster. As the SEALs got ready to fast-rope out of one of the Black Hawks, it suddenly pitched and seemed to slide toward the ground. The pilot wrestled with the controls, as operators scrambled to get clear of the door so that their legs didn't get crushed when the helicopter hit the earth. Unable to keep the aircraft aloft, the pilot nonetheless managed to slow its descent to such an extent that Bissonnette, who was in the stricken helicopter, said he didn't even notice the impact. “If not for his skill as a pilot it could have been a lot worse,” a Team 6 source said.

The cause of the crash was a phenomenon called vortex ring state, or settling with power, which occurs when a helicopter's rotors cannot get the lift required from the turbulent air of their own downwash. It is rare for Black Hawks to settle with power, but these were no ordinary Black Hawks. The problem resulted in part from an oversight in the construction of the mock-up compound at Harvey Point: whereas the Abbottabad compound was surrounded by a brick wall, the Harvey Point replica made do with a chain-link fence. “That air bled out through that chain-link fence” in North Carolina, said the Team 6 source. “But in reality the compound had those solid walls and that bad air just came right back up into the rotor blades and that thing just lost power.”

As soon as they touched dirt the operators streamed off the helicopter. Although the crash landing had upset their plans, they were now on familiar ground, in the sense that they were taking down a compound just as they did almost every night in Afghanistan. And unlike some Afghan compounds, this one was not particularly well defended, or at least, not by armed men. But the operators still ran into repeated problems trying to clear the compound. Even with a sledgehammer, Bissonnette and a colleague couldn't bust in the solid metal door to the gatehouse in which they believed bin Laden's courier lived with his family. In a furious exchange of fire the SEALs killed the courier while they were still outside the gatehouse. Operators sighted the other brother and killed him and, accidentally, his wife as she threw herself in front of him.

Climbing the outside staircase to the compound's second story, a SEAL saw a clean-shaven young man put his head briefly round the corner. The operator recognized him as bin Laden's son, Khalid. They called to him. “Khalid!” The youth stuck his head around the corner again and the SEAL shot him dead. “We had planned for more of a fight,” Bissonnette said. As Bissonnette and two other SEALs moved past Khalid's corpse to ascend to the third tier, they knew they had killed three of the four men they expected to find on the compound. They had now been on the ground about fifteen minutes, plenty of time for bin Laden to prepare a defense. The point man got to the top of the stairs and saw a head poking out of the bedroom. He fired two rounds and the person disappeared back into the room. The point man moved slowly, keeping his rifle trained on the open door of the room. As he came around the door he saw two women screaming over the body of a man who had taken a bullet through his left eye. The round had continued on, taking a chunk off the top of his head. He was still twitching in his death throes. Bissonnette and a third SEAL, Robert O'Neill, fired several rounds into his chest. Three children sat bunched together in the corner.

Osama bin Laden was dead.
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The SEALs turned their attention to dealing with the women and children, collecting as much material of intelligence value as possible—after all, this was the Al Qaeda leader's home and office—and figuring out what to do with the crashed helicopter.

Under pressure to depart before Pakistani security forces realized what was up, the operators were forced to leave a large amount of potentially valuable material on the objective. Bin Laden, it turned out, was something of a pack rat. “There were things piled up along the walls,” said a Team 6 source. “You basically walked in paths to get through the house. So who knows what was in all those boxes.” The operators grabbed as much as they could of the potentially priceless intelligence material, stuffing computers and other digital devices into the trash bags each had brought for that purpose, “but they simply couldn't carry it all,” he said. “We left drawers unopened,” Bissonnette said. “The hallway on the second deck had stacks of boxes untouched. We usually did a better job, but we just ran out of time. We were perfectionists, and while the rest of the operation went smoothly after the crash, the SSE [sensitive site exploitation] wasn't up to standards.”
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The contents of the material left on the objective would remain one of the mission's enduring mysteries.

As their colleagues filled trash bags with Al Qaeda's secrets, other operators set charges to destroy the helicopter that had crashed. The pilots weren't sure such drastic measures were required. They thought they could fly the aircraft out of the compound empty. “But it had already been rigged to blow and [the squadron commander] said, ‘No, blow it in place,'” a Team 6 source said.