Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (26 page)

The third scenario was that the SEALs found bin Laden but got into a firefight with the Pakistani army, or that lots of civilians were killed. Or even worse, there was a firefight and civilian casualities and bin Laden wasn’t even there. This would cause outrage in the Muslim world and severe political backlash at home. Rhodes says, “
So, for all the options that involved him not being there, where it wouldn’t be deniable, a lot of work was put into: How would we explain how we thought this was good enough to do? So we had to come up with a very public version of our intelligence case, because we would have to justify why we took this incredible risk even if he wasn’t there.”

Rhodes started working with CIA spokesman George Little, the only other “communicator” read into the Abbottabad intelligence, to prepare an unclassified version of the bin Laden case that could be made available to the media and the public should the Abbottabad operation no longer be covert. Little, a tall, bespectacled intelligence officer with a PhD in international relations,
worked up a sixty-six-page document that included diagrams of the compound.

In mid-April, John Brennan called Mike Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), on a secure video teleconference
line from the White House and said, “Mike, we want someone to come out and brief you on the compound where we think bin Laden might be.”

“Who else can I tell?” Leiter asked Brennan, masking his irritation that he hadn’t been told about this development earlier.

“No one.”

“What are you looking for me to do, then?” Leiter asked.

“I mostly want you to think about threats to the homeland that could come out of a successful raid,” Brennan said.

Mike Leiter is a blunt, fast-talking former federal prosecutor and naval aviator. When he attended Harvard Law School, he was the
president of the
Harvard Law Review
,
a position Barack Obama had held a few years earlier. Before running the NCTC, Leiter had
worked for the congressional commission that examined the intelligence debacle surrounding the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and had written much of its final report. The experience of delving into the intelligence failures that led to the Iraq War colored Leiter’s reaction to the bin Laden intelligence.

“
I had seen enough failures in this world that I wasn’t going to get excited,” he says. He still remembered when Agency officials had told Obama how pumped they were to have a real lead on Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it turned out instead to be an al-Qaeda double agent/suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees.

After Leiter had been fully briefed, his gut told him that there was a decent chance bin Laden was living in the compound, but
there were aspects of the case that bothered him. It was puzzling that there were no guards at the compound. And some of the women and children living there occasionally traveled for extended periods around Pakistan to visit family members. When the women and children traveled from Abbottabad, they carried their cell phones,
which seemed a significant breach of bin Laden’s otherwise stringent operational security.

In Leiter’s mind, the bin Laden case was far from a “slam dunk.” Leiter was also not persuaded by the claimed regularity with which things occurred or didn’t occur at the compound. Some officials were saying that there was no phone communication in and out of the compound, but when you drilled into the details of the case, the NSA was finding new cell phones at the compound. And Leiter was also concerned by the gaps in the “coverage” of the compound. There were no eyes on the compound 24/7, either by the Pakistani agents on the ground or by the spy satellites high above it.

On Saturday, April 23, Leiter went to the White House to meet with Brennan, enumerated the gaps that he saw, and suggested that he put together a Red Team of analysts who would be tasked to come up with alternative explanations for the intelligence that had been gathered. Brennan pointed out that a Red Team of analysts from the CIA had already analyzed the data. Leiter countered that these analysts were too invested in the case to be completely dispassionate.

“
I don’t think that is sufficient if this is successful or a failure,” he said to Brennan. “Certainly if this is a failure, John, you want a record that this was really done well. And even if it is successful, you still want to be able to stand up and say, ‘We did this really carefully.’ John, you don’t want to have a WMD commission come back and say, ‘You didn’t red-team this one.’ I wrote that chapter, John.”

Brennan agreed that the Red Team was a good idea, instructing Leiter, “Talk to Michael [Morell], and if you guys agree, great. If not, come talk to me.”
Leiter then went to see Tom Donilon, the national security advisor, a disciplined and demanding lawyer who ran a tight ship for Obama at the National Security Council. Closing the
door to his office, Donilon asked Leiter, “So, what do you think?” Leiter replied, “The thing you can’t predict is, you can always have some aircraft accident. I was an aviator. Flying at night in a new place—that is where you are going to have a problem.” Leiter then walked Donilon through the concerns he had about the intelligence case. Donilon was also puzzled by the women and children leaving the compound and was more dubious about the case than Brennan, who was by now convinced that bin Laden was living at the compound. If this operation went wrong, Donilon was ultimately going to have to take much of the heat for it; he was enthusiastic about the Red Team concept.

Leiter also stopped by the office of his friend Denis McDonough. McDonough, the deputy national security advisor, had worked as Obama’s foreign policy advisor back when Obama was the junior senator from Illinois. McDonough told Leiter that if Obama green-lighted the operation in Abbottabad, it was scheduled to go down the next weekend, on Saturday night. That happened to be the same night that Leiter was getting married to Alice Brown, in front of 250 guests at Meridian House, fifteen blocks north of the White House. “
Denis, are you fucking kidding me?” exclaimed Leiter. “This weekend? This weekend!” McDonough, a taciturn Minnesotan, assured him he wasn’t kidding.

The ideal time to do the helicopter assault was when there was no illumination from the moon. That would help to ensure that the Night Stalkers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, who would fly the choppers over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border using night vision goggles (NVG), could do so without the Pakistanis noticing. A moonless night would also give the SEALs a considerable advantage, as they would be wearing NVGs as they stormed the compound. There would be no moon at all over Pakistan on the following Saturday, April 30. A Saturday night seemed
ideal because it was the time of week when the CIA observed the lowest level of Pakistani military activity. The next moonless night would not be until June 1, and by then the weather would be significantly hotter, which might affect how well the choppers could fly. Even more pressingly,
the longer they waited, the greater the possibility of a leak.

At 7:00 a.m. on Monday, April 25, Leiter talked to Michael Morell at the CIA. Before Leiter could even get to why they needed a Red Team,
Morell said, “Absolutely, I think it’s a great idea. We need to do it.”

Leiter selected two analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center with deep knowledge of al-Qaeda: Richard (a pseudonym), who had more than two decades of counterterrorism work under his belt and was widely respected in the intelligence community, and Rose (a pseudonym), an in-the-weeds analyst in her mid-thirties. Two CIA analysts who had played no role in developing the bin Laden intelligence were also added to the group. Leiter told them
they had forty-eight hours to come up with alternative hypotheses about who could be at the compound, supported by the best arguments they could come up with.

Leiter’s team explored three alternative hypotheses about the Abbottabad compound: First, it was associated with bin Laden, but he wasn’t there now. Second, the compound was the residence of a leader in al-Qaeda, but not bin Laden. Third, the Kuwaiti had long since left al-Qaeda and was now working for some unidentified criminal.

The analysts found that the first hypothesis was the most likely. The likelihood that the compound was home to a high-value target (HVT) in al-Qaeda other than bin Laden was significantly lower, because bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was not known to be living in this part of Pakistan, while the Kuwaiti had never
had any connection to Zawahiri, nor did the number of wives and children in the compound match up with what was known about Zawahiri’s family. Could it be some other al-Qaeda HVT who was not known to the intelligence community? Leiter says this was considered unlikely. “
We actually thought we had a pretty good handle on all the HVTs. This is what everyone was doing for ten years.” The possibility that it was a criminal unconnected to al-Qaeda living at the compound was also considered unlikely, given the historical connections that the Kuwaiti had to al-Qaeda’s leader.

At the end of this exercise, Richard was on the low end of the Red Team analysts, with only 40 percent confidence that bin Laden was living at the compound, while one of the CIA analysts was on the high end, with an estimate in the 60 percent range. Still, all the analysts concluded that
none of the alternative hypotheses was as likely as the theory that it was bin Laden at the compound.

As the Red Team was finalizing its work on Wednesday, April 27, the White House
posted online the president’s long-form 1961 birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. So-called birthers, including the publicity-hungry billionaire Donald Trump, had made a political issue out of Obama’s citizenship, claiming that he was not actually born in the United States, which would make him ineligible to be president. Obama said he had released the document to try to end the “silliness” about his place of birth, which was distracting the country from more serious issues. The day before the release of Obama’s birth certificate,
the SEAL teams had already left their base on the coast of Virginia to fly to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Michèle Flournoy and Mike Vickers decided to make a last-ditch effort to get Robert Gates to back the raid. In Gates’s office at the Pentagon, Flournoy and Vickers walked their boss through the raid and its risks and the measures that had been taken to mitigate those risks. Gates seemed to be persuaded, but after four and a half decades
in government, he had long mastered how to play his cards close to the vest.

On the other side of the world, the CIA spies on the ground in Abbottabad contacted their bosses in Virginia with the news that the Kuwaiti’s wife, Mariam, as well as their four children, had just returned from one of their frequent trips around Pakistan to visit family, and they were all now back at the Abbottabad compound. Some intelligence officials continued to puzzle over this: If bin Laden was really there, why would he risk letting these folks visit their relatives?

O
N
THURSDAY, APRIL 28
, the day following the release of Obama’s birth certificate, Leiter presented the findings of the Red Team to the president and his war cabinet. “
Bottom line is, the Red Team did not find anything or conclude anything revolutionary or new from what the previous team had,” Leiter told them.

For those who were in favor of the raid, such as Michèle Flournoy and Mike Vickers, the Red Team findings didn’t alter their views. “
It really didn’t change anything,” explains Vickers. “People’s estimates before this ranged from maybe sixty to eighty percent believing that bin Laden was there. And then the Red Team, a couple of them came back and said sixty percent, and one guy said forty percent, but he said his forty percent was better than any other explanation.”

Leiter addressed Obama directly, saying, “
Even if you’re at the forty percent low end of this range, Mister President, that’s still about thirty-eight percent better than we’ve been for ten years.”

Still, that one estimate of 40 percent was discomfiting to some.
John Brennan recalls, “Some of us thought, ‘Whoa!
We thought the prospects were higher that he was in there.’ And the president recognized that when people were saying, ‘Well, there’s only 40 percent of a chance,’ that some people were going to get a little bit soft on this.”

Ben Rhodes says, “
There was a deflation in the room, because what you’re looking for as you’re getting closer to the call is greater certainty, not less. So essentially it played into all the fears that people had about what could go wrong. Is it worth the risk?”

Similarly, Tony Blinken says, “I think,
if anything, the Red Team actually brought down the level of certainty; the positive ID percentage was higher before the Red Team got done. So I think we went from maybe seventy/thirty or sixty-five/thirty-five to fifty-five/forty-five or even fifty/fifty.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had spent more than four decades in the intelligence business, says the discussion of exact percentages gave the impression of precision, but “in the end it was subjective. It didn’t matter whether the percentage of confidence was 40 percent or 80 percent. It seemed like the closer you were to working the problem, the in-the-trenches analysts who were really doing the legwork here, doing the grunt work, were very confident. And as you got concentric circles away from them, the confidence sort of went down.” Clapper personally felt “it was the most compelling case we had had in ten years. And sure, it would’ve been nice to have somebody inside the compound—the maid or the cook we could’ve recruited—someone who could say, ‘Yeah, that’s him and that’s who’s there.’ Well, we didn’t have that.”

For those who were inclined to oppose the raid, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Red Team analysis confirmed their doubts. Gates said, “
I think this Red Team is really an outstanding
piece of work, and I find it very persuasive.” Persuasive, in other words, that bin Laden might well not be living in the Abbottabad compound.