The Finish (34 page)
Authors: Mark Bowden
“I think with Special Forces, the dangers [of using them too liberally] are smaller because the human element is still there. Those are still somebody’s dad, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son. When you send them in, you know they may not come back. And for me at least, as commander in chief, I don’t think about that any more casually than I do when I’m sending some green kid off to Kandahar. I think there’s just a solemnity and caution that that instills in me that probably won’t go away. I do think that just from a broader military strategy perspective, that we can’t overstate what Special Forces can do. Special Forces are well designed to deal with very specific targets in difficult terrain and oftentimes can prevent us from making the bigger strategic mistakes of sending forces in, with big footprints and so forth. And so when you’re talking about dealing with terrorist networks in failed states, or states that don’t have capacity, you can see that as actually being less intrusive, less dangerous, less problematic for the country involved.
“But ultimately, none of this stuff works if we’re not partnering effectively with other countries, if we’re not engaging in smart diplomacy, if we’re not trying to change our image in the Muslim world to reduce recruits [to extremism]. It’s not an end-all, be-all. I’m sure glad we have it, though.”
Taken together, these capabilities, this weapon forged to fight the latest kind of war, has all but done the job. I asked what the impact of bin Laden’s death had been on al Qaeda.
“It was what we anticipated,” he said. “They are without focus, without effective leadership. And when you combine that with the degradation of their operational personnel, they’re on the way to strategic defeat. But again, you can’t overstate the importance of these other elements of American power, because even before bin Laden was killed, we had already seen the operational capacity of al Qaeda shift to AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and Yemen. We had already seen al Qaeda metastasize into al Qaeda in Maghreb. And so the need for vigilance and stick-to-it-ness is critical.
“And what we’ve also seen is the capacity of lone-wolf terrorists to do damage—not the kind of damage we saw on 9/11, but damage that is still obviously painful, and we’ve got to do something about. So it [killing bin Laden] didn’t solve all our problems, and we didn’t expect it to. But it was a big piece of business. And I’ll always be grateful for both the intelligence and the military personnel who were involved in it. They deserve all the credit.”
In the days after the raid, an album of photographs was delivered to the White House, a series of shots of the dead bin Laden. There would be much discussion that week about whether these photos should be made public, as proof of death, but the president had firmly decided that they would not. The decision was made easier because no one disputed the fact of bin Laden’s death. America was not, the president said, going to “spike the football.”
As the White House had worked that Sunday night to get the message out, stumbling on the presentation but basking in the country’s exhilarated response, Admiral McRaven’s men were, in the early hours of Monday morning, at work preparing for the disposal of the Sheik’s body.
After much discussion and advice, it had been decided that the best option would be burial at sea. That way there would be no shrine for the martyr’s misguided followers. So the body was washed, photographed from every conceivable angle, and then flown on a V-22 Osprey to the aircraft carrier USS
Carl Vinson
cruising in the North Arabian Sea.
As a formality, the State Department contacted Saudi Arabia’s government and offered to deliver the body to his home country, but bin Laden was as unwanted there in death as he had been in life. Told that the alternative was burial at sea, the Saudi official said, “We like your plan.”
Procedures for a simple Muslim burial were performed on the carrier. The body was wrapped in a white shroud with weights to sink it.
The last sequence of color photos in the death album were not grotesque. They were strangely moving. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight Monday morning, May 2. One frame shows the body wrapped in the weighted white shroud. The next shows it diagonal on a flat board, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water with a small splash. In the next it is visible just below the surface, a ghostly torpedo descending. In the next shot there are only circular ripples on the blue surface. In the final frame the waters are calm.
The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.
Acknowledgments
and Notes
On the theory that Osama bin Laden’s command of his native language was comparable to the average English speaker’s mastery of his native tongue, I have taken the liberty of here and there smoothing out the clumsy phrases in the translation of bin Laden’s documents by the CIA. The official translations can be found at the Web site of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center:
www.ctc.usma.edu
.
It has been my practice to compile detailed source notes for my books, but in this case the number of those who did not wish to have specific information attributed to them directly, even when the source seems obvious, would have made the exercise more frustrating than helpful.
This work has been informed by two excellent articles, Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (The New Yorker, 8/8/2011), and (in portions of Chapter Four) Shane Harris’s “Killer App” (The Washingtonian, 1/31/2012). Anyone who writes about Osama bin Laden is indebted to Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (Knopf, 2006), and to the superb reporting of Peter Bergen, who over the last ten years made himself the foremost journalistic authority on the man. This book was paticularly informed by Bergen’s oral history, The Osama bin Laden I Know (Free Press, 2006), and by his Manhunt (Crown Publishers, 2011). In the latter book, Bergen recounts some of the same scenes I have described here, but those passages in this book, like the rest of it, are based entirely on my own reporting and interviewing—in some cases with the same participants.
I would like to especially thank my son Aaron, my cousin David Keane, and their company, Wild Eyes Productions, for help interviewing. I would also like to particularly thank Ben Rhodes, Jay Carney, Dave Moniz, and Preston Golson for helping me set up interviews, and also those at the CIA and in the JSOC who agreed to be interviewed but asked not to be named.
The others I can thank are listed below:
Samira Abdullah Mouhey el-Dein Azzam, Huthaifa Azzam, Tony Blinken, John Brennan, James Clark, Faheem Dashty, Thomas Donilon, Michèle Flournoy, Larry James, Peter Jouvenal, Habibullah Khan, Hamid Mir, Michael Morell, Asad Munir, Barack Obama, William Ostlund, David Petraeus, Samantha Power, Stephen Preston, Matt Flavin, Guy Filippelli, James Poss, Denis McDonough, Nick Rasmussen, Michael Scheuer, Gary Schroen, Kalev Sepp, Michael Sheehan, Michael Vickers, Jamal Ismail, and Ahmad Zaidan.
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Copyright © 2012 by Mark Bowden