Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (33 page)

As was expected, on May 6, just days after bin Laden’s death,
al-Qaeda officially confirmed the death of its leader in a message posted to jihadist Internet forums where the group’s media arm had regularly posted its propaganda in the past. The message promised revenge for bin Laden’s “martyrdom.” Al-Qaeda asserted that bin Laden’s blood was “more precious to us and to every Muslim than to be wasted in vain.… We call upon our Muslim people in Pakistan, on whose land Sheikh Osama was killed, to rise up and revolt … to cleanse their country from the filth of the Americans who spread corruption in it.” Very few people, including Pakistanis, paid any attention to this call. Indeed, the protests in Pakistan that followed bin Laden’s death were minor, numbering at most a few hundred people.

The same day that al-Qaeda confirmed bin Laden’s death, Obama and members of his national security team traveled to Ft. Campbell,
Kentucky, home to the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment that had flown the choppers on the bin Laden mission. Over the course of
half an hour, in a small classroom on the base, the president was briefed by the men who had carried out the operation.

First to speak was the helicopter pilot who had flown the Black Hawk that went down. “These types of things have happened before,” he said. “You can never account for exactly what the environment’s going to be.”

“Did the weather play a role?” Obama asked.

“The weather can impact the flight plan, and the weather was a little warmer than anticipated,” said the pilot.

The SEAL team ground commander used a model of the compound and a red laser pointer to explain what had gone right and what had gone wrong on the mission from start to finish. The biggest problem was not correctly matching the wall that surrounded the compound in the life-size mock-ups they had used for rehearsals. The solid walls of the actual compound had caused turbulent aerodynamics for the first Black Hawk when it hovered to drop the SEALs into the courtyard, and had necessitated the chopper’s “hard landing.”

The SEAL commander said, “We’re alive today because of what the helicopter pilot did. An incredibly difficult thing to do, to deal with this machine and get everybody out safely.” He went on to say, “This is the end result of a ten-year effort. We’ve been at this for a decade, and we’ve gotten better over the course of ten years at doing this. We’ve done it in Afghanistan, we’ve done it in Iraq.” The SEAL commander then reeled off a list of forward operating bases in Afghanistan that had been named after SEAL team operators who had died in the past decade. Then he turned to the Abbottabad operation,
describing everyone’s role, including that of the interpreter, who yelled at neighbors in Pashto and Urdu to stay back:
“If it weren’t for that guy, who knows what could’ve happened.” The commander went on to say, “If you took one person out of the puzzle, we wouldn’t have the competence to do the job we did; everybody’s vital. It’s not about the guy who pulled the trigger to kill bin Laden, it’s about what we all did together.”

The president didn’t ask any of the SEALs who had taken the shot that had killed bin Laden, and no one volunteered the information. He simply said, “This small group of people in this room is the
finest fighting force in the history of the world.”

The president asked to see Cairo, the dog that had accompanied the SEALs on the raid. The SEAL team commander warned the commander in chief, “
Well, sir, I strongly advise you to have a treat, because this is a tough dog, you know.” Cairo was presented to Obama, although a presidential petting was discouraged and the dog was wearing a muzzle.

To patch up matters with the Pakistanis, Senator John Kerry, one of the few American politicians with any credibility in Pakistan because of his role in pushing for aid for civilian projects in the country, traveled to Islamabad in mid-May. During a several-hour conversation with Generals Kayani and Pasha, Kerry
discussed all the areas of tension between the two countries: Pakistan’s support for elements of the Taliban, CIA operations in Pakistan, and the raid in Abbottabad. Kayani and Pasha demanded a halt to the CIA drone program in Pakistan. Kayani also told Kerry of the deep sense of betrayal he had felt over the Abbottabad operation and the enormous risks he had taken in embracing the Americans. Kerry told them that an end to the drone program was not in the cards and that no president in his right mind would have outsourced the bin Laden operation to another country after the failure to capture al-Qaeda’s leader at Tora Bora.

Kerry was able to negotiate the return of the tail of the downed
ultrasecret stealth helicopter from the raid. He also arranged for the CIA to get access to the Abbottabad compound and to question bin Laden’s wives.
While Kerry was still in the air on his way home, the CIA launched another drone strike into Pakistan’s tribal regions. This seemed to be the Agency’s not-so-subtle way of reminding both the Pakistanis and Kerry that it still ran the show in Pakistan.

The Pakistanis used female interrogators to debrief bin Laden’s ultrareligious wives, but they said very little about their lives on the run or in Abbottabad. The leader of the wives was the oldest, sixty-two-year-old Khairiah. Investigators described her as “
very hard, very difficult.” Despite the comfortable house they were placed in, the wives told their Pakistani jailors they just wanted to go home. And when CIA officials finally interviewed bin Laden’s wives, all three women were quite hostile to the Americans. At this point in the tortured U.S.-Pakistani relationship, there were very few things that both sides agreed upon; one of them was just how difficult bin Laden’s wives were to deal with. Almost a year after bin Laden was killed, the Pakistani government announced that his three widows had been charged with “illegal entry” into Pakistan, for which they could be jailed for up to five years.

President Obama visited CIA headquarters in northern Virginia on May 20 to thank the intelligence community for its work on the bin Laden mission. Obama met privately with about sixty CIA officers and analysts who had been integral to the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader, and then spoke to some one thousand employees who jammed the lobby of the Agency’s headquarters. “The work you did and the quality of information you provided made the critical difference,” he said. The president also noted wryly, “And we did something really remarkable in Washington—
we kept it a secret.” The audience erupted with laughter, applause, and cheers.