The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (22 page)

* * *

The question of whether to conduct a raid was hotly debated by the handful of senior officials privy to the intelligence. Some people thought that the risks were too high. The vice president was unconvinced about the intelligence and concerned about what a failed mission would do to our relations with Pakistan. And Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, a career CIA officer and former CIA director, also said that he felt the intelligence was too weak and he thought the risks to US forces going in were too high. He noted that something almost always goes wrong in this kind of military operation. He repeatedly brought up the tragedy of “Desert One,” the failed
Iranian hostage rescue attempt during the Carter administration. He told us how he had sat around a conference table in that same Situation Room thirty years before as that tragedy played out. The secretary’s view was that if we took action, we should go the UAV route. Hoss Cartwright was also opposed to the raid, seeing the UAV option as a better choice as well.

Beyond those three, however, the national security team came down on the side of going ahead. But even as the consensus seemed to be building to conduct a strike, there was a school of thought that advocated waiting until we had more definitive intelligence. Panetta and I responded with three points: (1) there was no guarantee that more time would deliver more intelligence; (2) the number of people who were aware of the intelligence reporting and analysis was growing and a leak could happen at any moment, thereby tipping off Bin Ladin; and (3) even without receiving some warning, there was nothing to say that Bin Ladin might not decide it was time to pull up stakes and move somewhere else, as we did not know whether this was a long-term or a short-term residence for the al Qa‘ida leader. Without round-the-clock surveillance, which was simply not available, either of the latter two scenarios would force us to start all over again.

Panetta made perhaps the strongest argument—something that everyone knew but was unwilling to say. Stepping out of his role as a provider of intelligence only and not advocating policy, Panetta said at one meeting that “I’ve always operated by a simple test—what would the American people say?” He added, “There is no doubt in my mind that if they knew what we know—even with the range of confidence levels we have—that they would want us to go after the man responsible for all those deaths on 9/11.” It was a powerful argument.

There was a final Mickey Mouse meeting in the Situation Room, where the president polled the principals on whether they would recommend going ahead with the mission. The vice president and
Bob Gates voted no; everyone else voted yes. But the next morning three of Gates’s top people—Admiral Mike Mullen, Mike Vickers, and Michèle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy—all came to Gates in an effort to convince him that he should support the raid. After the nearly hour-long meeting Gates called Tom Donilon and told him that he was changing his vote to yes. I have great admiration for Bob Gates for many reasons, and his willingness to be open-minded and to listen to what his subordinates are telling him is one of those reasons.

* * *

Throughout the entire process, two things were a constant—the attempt to get more intelligence and the questioning about the analysts’ confidence that Bin Ladin was there. Try as we might, we were unable to get much additional intelligence to help the president decide whether to take action against the Abbottabad compound or not.

On the analytic side, there would be one more red team before the final “go” decision. In April 2011, Brennan quite appropriately wanted to consider how al Qa‘ida might retaliate against us should we get Bin Ladin. To think through that problem he needed the help of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). In addition to focusing on the task at hand—possible retaliation—the organization’s head, Mike Leiter, suggested to Brennan that NCTC do a formal red team on the CIA analysts’ conclusion that Bin Ladin was at Abbottabad.

Brennan and Leiter both asked me what I thought. I was aware of the alternative analysis that the CTC itself had done and the red teaming that the director of CTC had ordered. And while I thought it was overkill, I said, “Why not?” For a decision of this magnitude you could not be too careful. So Leiter put together a team of two NCTC analysts and two CIA analysts on assignment to his unit
to review the intelligence again. Those four analysts did not reach a consensus. They had a wide range of views. One of them put the probability at 60 percent that Bin Ladin was there (which was also my level of confidence). Two others came down at around 50 percent, and one gave it only a 40 percent chance, which I took to mean that he did not think Bin Ladin was there. Each analyst did think that the Bin Ladin theory was the best explanation for what we were seeing at the compound. Still, when Leiter briefed his team’s conclusions to the president, it was a replay of my earlier Iraq WMD comment—a sobering reminder of how thin the case was for Bin Ladin’s presence in Abbottabad.

* * *

On April 29, just one day after the final meeting with the president, the secure phone rang in Director Panetta’s office. It was National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. He informed us that the president had ordered the mission to proceed. Panetta, sensing that it was a historic moment, wrote out a memo for the record in longhand. It read:

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1. The decision is to proceed with the assault. The timing, operational decision making, and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The direction is to go in and get Bin Ladin and if he is not there, to get out. These instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at 10:45 a.m.

It is impossible to fully convey the size of the knot you feel in your stomach when you are among the few people on the planet who know that such a major event is about to occur, and when the outcome is so uncertain. Just an hour or so before the raid, as we
two were alone in his office, Panetta asked me what I thought in my heart of hearts: “Is he there?” “Sir,” I said, “I will not be surprised if we find him there—and I will not be surprised if we don’t.” Panetta simply answered, “Me too.” It was a roll of the dice.

After the raid was conducted, media commentators talked about the president’s “gutsy decision.” My view was that the decision to take action had not been the tough part. The case was strong enough to take action; in fact, the case was strong enough that the president had to take action. Had he not, and had it later become known that CIA had thought Bin Ladin was there, it would have been extraordinarily damaging to his presidency and to US credibility. No, to me, the gutsy part was the president’s decision about what kind of action to take. By putting US boots on the ground and placing American lives at risk, he made a difficult, but ultimately correct, decision. The easy way out would have been to obliterate the compound with munitions from a couple of B-2 bombers. As a result of his decision, we limited the collateral damage significantly, knew for certain that we had gotten Bin Ladin, and obtained a treasure trove of intelligence from the compound.

As it turned out, the debate about launching a raid on the night of the correspondents’ dinner was moot—the weather was bad in Pakistan and McRaven elected to postpone the operation for one day.

* * *

The CIA director’s wood-paneled conference room, across a narrow hallway from my office and that of Leon Panetta, had been turned into a makeshift command center. The long, polished table was stacked with computer terminals manned by CIA and JSOC personnel in constant touch with Admiral McRaven’s headquarters in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and monitoring various sensors around the region. A handful of senior CIA officials were there, but nowhere near all of them.

Many senior CIA personnel, all with the highest security clearances possible, were still unaware that we thought we had found Bin Ladin, unaware of the history that was about to be made. In keeping the information from Agency officials, cabinet officers and the like, we were not signaling any measure of distrust. It is simply that in a mission of this magnitude, every additional person briefed on the operation increases the possibility of an unintentional leak that might scuttle the operation. In the days that followed the raid, I would have to explain (if not apologize) to a lot of people who wished they had been clued into the operation in advance.

The extraordinary operational security had also given me some trouble much closer to home. A friend of mine had offered tickets to the Washington Capitals hockey play-off game against the Tampa Bay Lightning on May 1. And since the raid was called off on April 30, I thought there was a chance that bad weather would postpone it again the next day and that I would be able to go to the game. So I accepted the tickets.

By midmorning D.C. time on May 1, however, it was clear that the weather in Pakistan was cooperating and the mission would be a go. Not wanting the tickets to go to waste, I called Mary Beth and asked her to pick them up so someone else could put them to use. As the wife of the deputy director, Mary Beth had her own CIA pass and could normally drive onto the compound and come into the headquarters building without an escort. But if she came to my office on May 1 she would have seen the extraordinary beehive of activity in the adjoining conference room and would have figured out that something was up. She too was among the many who did not have a “need to know.” So I told my security detail to meet her “downstairs” and “under no circumstances should she be allowed upstairs.” But they went a step further than that and decided to meet her at the Agency’s front gate a quarter mile away from the main entrance to the building. They simply said, “Ma’am, here are
the tickets,” with a tone and look that said, “This is as far as you go.” She already hadn’t been too happy with my working schedule over the past several months, and now the frosty reception from the security detail was a big push toward the edge.

But what really angered her was something else. She called me later that morning and said that clearly I should be able to stop working for a short while and dash to Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, where our daughter Sarah was about to have her last high school choral performance. “It will just take an hour,” she said. “Whatever you are doing can’t be that important.” She was quite insistent. “I’m sorry,” was all I could muster. “I can’t. I can’t. Gotta go.” Mary Beth subsequently told me that she spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening furious with me. By about eight p.m.—after I had been “radio silent” for nearly eight hours—she sat on the couch and asked herself, “So, how does this divorce thing work?” It was only after the president made the decision to inform the American people about the raid that I was able to call her. I still did not tell her what we had done, but I said the president would be talking to the nation in a bit and that she would understand and hopefully forgive me. She asked, “Did something terrible happen?” I said, “No, it will be good news.” “You got him?” she asked. Mary Beth had been on the fringes of the al Qa‘ida story long enough to correctly decipher what “good news” meant. I only responded, “Love you, gotta go.” At least my marriage was saved.

* * *

A little bit earlier in the day, Director Panetta and I had monitored the raid from the outfitted CIA director’s conference room. We were sitting in the middle of the large conference table, connected by secure video teleconference to both Admiral McRaven in Afghanistan and the White House. The director was technically in charge, but in reality he and I had little to do with the actual operation. We
were spectators, not participants. And it felt like it. The next day the director held an all-hands meeting in the CIA auditorium to talk about the raid and at one point mentioned to the workforce that, since this had been a covert action, he had been in command of the operation. He paused for a few seconds and said, “OK, that is total bullshit. I was not in charge of anything.” He and the entire audience exploded in laughter.

But there was no laughing going on when the raid was taking place. Our hearts were in our throats when one of the raid helicopters crashed while hovering a short distance over the grounds of the compound during the raid. My first thought was for the safety of the SEALs on board. This was quickly followed by my second thought: “Shit, Bob Gates might have been right to warn as much as he did about bad things happening on a mission like this.” I also thought, “So much for operational security.” That was sure to wake up everyone in Abbottabad. Agency officers noted that nearby residents were starting to stir, but thankfully there was not an immediate security response that might have doomed the raid.

During the helicopter crash, I did note that Admiral McRaven remained completely composed and collected. He calmed me down by his demeanor. I have great admiration for McRaven. I think he is one of the greatest warriors ever produced by the US military. I have been impressed with him on many occasions, but never more so than when that helicopter went down. Only moments after the crash, McRaven would announce that no one was hurt, that the mission would continue, and that a backup helicopter was being brought up to replace the damaged helo. The extra helicopter was in place in part because of the president’s earlier insistence on supplying a backup in case the team needed to fight its way out.

The actual attack has been more than adequately depicted by both reporters and participants, so I will not attempt to do a play-by-play here. Among the things not fully understood by the
public, however, is that even in the immediate aftermath of the raid we were not certain that we had gotten Bin Ladin.

After the departing mission helicopters cleared Pakistani airspace, Panetta and I went to the White House to meet with the president and his senior national security team to discuss next steps. The last thing anyone wanted was for the president to come out and declare Bin Ladin dead only to have him pop up very much alive sometime later. The SEALs on scene said they
thought
the man they’d killed on the third floor looked like Bin Ladin, and that when they’d questioned some of the women and children in the house one of them had said the dead man was “Sheikh Usama.” Still, that was hardly enough evidence. Once the body was back in Afghanistan, McRaven had it laid out on a hangar floor while one of his taller troops lay down alongside it to estimate the height of the dead man to see how it compared to Bin Ladin’s known six-feet-four-inch frame; the height looked right. CIA’s Science and Technology experts employed facial recognition technology and told us they were 90 to 95 percent sure we had our man, and I briefed this analysis to the president. But still he was not sure he should inform the American public if there was any uncertainty. There was discussion of possibly waiting till the next day, when we would have preliminary DNA analysis, or even the day after, when the final DNA analysis would be completed. That all changed when Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called his counterpart in Pakistan, General Ashfaq Kayani. Before Mullen could say anything, Kayani told Mullen that we had gotten Bin Ladin. With this, and with the certainty that news would start getting out, the president felt it safe to make his announcement to the world.