What happened that night in Abbottabad

You can wait for the August 8th issue of The New Yorker, or you can read the press release below and follow the link at the very bottom to the online version of Nicholas Schmidle's exclusive story, "Getting Bin Laden."  Leave a comment if you would like me to email you the .pdf.

Image credit: The New Yorker

What Happened That Night in Abbottabad

In the August 8, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, in “Getting Bin Laden” (p. 35), Nicholas Schmidle gets an exclusive look behind the scenes of the covert mission that killed Osama bin Laden. In a riveting account, culled from the recollections of those who planned the May 1st raid, Schmidle gives a play-by-play of the events leading up to, and culminating in, the killing of the elusive Al Qaeda leader. The mission was executed by Navy SEALs from Team Six—which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU—and their target name for bin Laden was “Crankshaft.” Much time was spent mulling over different ways to get inside bin Laden’s house, Schmidle writes. “The President’s military advisers were divided. Some supported a raid, some an airstrike, and others wanted to hold off until the intelligence improved. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” and he reminded his colleagues that he had been in the Situation Room of the Carter White House when military officials presented Eagle Claw—the 1980 Delta Force operation that aimed at rescuing American hostages in Tehran but resulted in a disastrous collision in the Iranian desert, killing eight American soldiers. “They said that was a pretty good idea, too,” Gates warned. In addition to the two MH-60 Blackhawk helicopters that were employed for the mission, Schmidle writes, there were also four MH-47 Chinooks that launched from the same runway in Jalalabad—two of which flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side, and two of which proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision after President Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.” Schmidle describes the moment that the master chief petty officer and the ranking noncommissioned officer on the operation who was inside the lead helicopter, knew, as the Blackhawk passed over the compound, that they were going to crash; after they crashed into the animal pen inside of bin Laden’s compound, the pilot in the second Blackhawk ditched his original plan to hover over the compound’s roof and landed in a grassy field across the street from the house. “The teams had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course,” Schmidle writes.

On April 10th, a team of SEALs from DEVGRU’s Red Squadron gathered in a densely forested site inNorth Carolina for what they were told was a training exercise. None of the SEALs besides the commander of the Red Squadron and the ranking noncommissioned officer on the operation were previously aware of the intelligence on bin Laden’s compound. The team spent the next five days practicing on a replica of the compound, and then flew to Nevada—where the elevation was equivalent to Abbottabad’s and where an extant building served as bin Laden’s house—for another week of rehearsals. “This wasn’t a hard op,” a special-operations officer who is very familiar with the bin Laden raid, tells Schmidle. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”—the upscale Virginia suburb ofWashington, D.C. On April 26th, Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. A counterterrorism official tells Schmidle that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,” and adds, “This was a circumstantial case.” On April 28th, Panetta and the rest of the national-security team met with the President and several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis, and “their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent,” Schmidle writes. “Obama adjourned the meeting just after 7 P.M. and said that he would sleep on it.”

On the morning of the mission, “White House officials cancelled scheduled visits, ordered sandwich platters from Costco, and transformed the Situation Room into a war room,” Schmidle writes. Brigadier General Marshall Webb, the assistant commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, opened multiple chat boxes on his laptop that kept him, and the White House, connected with the other command teams. The office where Webb sat had the only video feed in the White House showing real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed RQ 170 drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad. “The JSOC planners, determined to keep the operation as secret as possible, had decided against using additional fighters or bombers.” “It just wasn’t worth it,” the JSOC officer tells Schmidle,” and so, Schmidle writes, “the SEALs were on their own.” Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad. Obama stood up. “I need to watch this,” he said, stepping across the hall into the small office and taking a seat alongside Webb. Vice-President Joseph Biden, Secretary Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed him, as did anyone else who could fit into the office.

Minutes after hitting the ground, SEALs blew through two gates and stepped into a courtyard that faced the guesthouse where Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s courier who had been tracked by the C.I.A. for several months, lived. They spotted Kuwaiti running inside to warn his wife and children; Kuwaiti grabbed a weapon and was coming back outside when the SEALs opened fire and killed him. Meanwhile, the remaining SEALs broke into three-man units for clearing the inner courtyard in the compound. They suspected that several more men were in the main house: Kuwaiti’s thirty-three-year-old brother, Abrar; bin Laden’s sons Hamza and Khalid; and bin Laden himself. Abrar appeared almost immediately, with an AK-47, at the house’s front entrance; he was shot in the chest and killed, as was his wife, Bushra, who was standing, unarmed, beside him. Outside the compound’s walls, a Pakistani-American translator patrolled the dirt road in front of bin Laden’s house, as if he were a plainclothes Pakistani police officer. When a few curious Pakistanis approached to inquire about the commotion, Ahmed said, in Pashto, “Go back to your houses. . . . There is a security operation under way.” The locals went home, Schmidle writes, “none of them suspecting that they had talked to an American.” Once inside the house, the SEALs came across a number of security precautions, one of which was a locked metal gate that blocked the base of the staircase leading to the second floor, “making the downstairs room feel like a cage.” SEALs blasted through the gate and three of them marched up the stairs; midway up, they saw Khalid. At least two of the SEALs shot and killed him; three SEALs shuttled past his body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor.

Schmidle writes, “On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL sensed immediately that it was Crankshaft.” In the bedroom, the first SEAL came across two women—one of whom was bin Laden’s wife—who placed themselves in front of bin Laden. “Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, [the SEAL] stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside.” A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. After the SEAL fired two rounds—one in bin Laden’s chest, one just above his left eye—he reported into his radio, “For God and country. Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo”—the code name that signified bin Laden had been found—and “Geronimo E.K.I.A”—that is, “enemy killed in action.” Hearing this at the White House, Obama said solemnly, to no one in particular, “We got him.” Almost immediately, two SEALS ran upstairs with a body bag, into which they placed bin Laden’s body. When the rescue Chinook arrived, a medic injected a needle into bin Laden’s body and extracted two bone-marrow samples; one went into the Blackhawk, and the other went into the Chinook, along with bin Laden’s body. The pilot of the damaged Blackhawk destroyed the vehicle: “armed with a hammer that he kept for such situations, [he] smashed the instrument panel, the radio, and the other classified fixtures inside the cockpit. Then the demolition unit took over,” Schmidle writes. In the Situation Room, Obama said, “I’m not going to be happy until those guys get out safe.”

On May 6th, President Obama—accompanied by Biden, Tom Donilon, and a dozen other national-security advisers—met with and was briefed by the DEVGRU unit and the pilots who pulled off the raid. “Everything we have done for the last ten years prepared us for this,” the squadron commander told Obama. The President was “in awe of those guys,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser who travelled with Obama, tells Schmidle. “It was an extraordinary base visit,” he says. “They knew he had staked his Presidency on this. He knew they staked their lives on it.” Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, “but he left one thing unsaid,” Schmidle writes. “He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.” 

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