The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

8. The Finish

May 1–2, 2011

McRaven’s men were in Jalalabad, poised. After the president’s order was conveyed Friday afternoon—Afghanistan is eight and a half hours ahead of Washington—they knew the earliest they would go would be early the following evening, Saturday, April 30.

Most of the twenty-four handpicked team were members of Red Squadron of SEAL Team Six. In the more than a year that has elapsed, only one of the men has spoken publicly about it. None were interviewed by me. My account of the raid is based on interviews with the president; senior officials at CIA; sources at JSOC, the White House, and the Pentagon; on interviews with SEAL team members who did not participate directly, and on the account published by the former SEAL under the pseudonym “Mark Owen.”

The SEALs were selected primarily because their commander was available, and the corresponding commander of the army’s Delta Force was not. With its expanding numbers, JSOC had been divvied up three years earlier by McRaven, with Delta assigned to continue operating in Iraq and the SEALs working from Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) throughout the most contentious regions of Afghanistan. Part of the reasoning for choosing the SEAL team, according to several top Pentagon officials, was that in recent years it had successfully conducted about a dozen secret missions inside Pakistan. They were used to conducting these raids with high-level commanders looking over their shoulders, linked by live audio and video—the men called it “General TV.” Sometimes their remote commanders got carried away, steering them around like figures in a video game—“Turn left! Turn right!”

The actual commander, the man they would follow into the target compound, was a short, thickly built, brown-haired naval officer in his late thirties who had chiseled features—if Hollywood were looking for someone to play the role they would be hard-pressed to improve on the original. He had become something of a legend even in these elite ranks, with ten years of experience leading them into combat. It had become so routine for him that he spoke about the job the way an experienced foreman might talk about a construction project. He had a strictly deadpan way of talking; when he cracked a joke, which didn’t happen often, there was usually a delay before anyone noticed. Some of the men he commanded were older than him, but not many. Going in with them would be a Pashto translator and a highly trained dog—a Belgian Malinois named Cairo. The translator, a middle-aged man who had to learn how to rope out of a chopper for this mission, and the dog would help keep the curious away from the compound while the SEALs did their work. As they did before every mission, the men spent time readying their gear and weapons, oiling and cleaning and testing laser sights and night-vision devices, and adjusting straps on harnesses and helmets. The barracks at Jalalabad were familiar to all of them; it had been home away from home for years.

The one thing that was not often in their conversation but always in their thoughts was danger. There were small FOBs all over Afghanistan named after team members who had been killed on raids, friends of these men who had gone about their work with the same skill and care but who had been sent home in an aluminum box. Inside the FOBs there were memorials posted on walls or bulletin boards, displaying photos of the dead, and special operators were disproportionately represented. Their photos contrasted with the faces of the other fallen, the eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old regulars who had been killed by roadside bombs or in mortar attacks or on routine patrols. The special operators were older, and in the pictures they were often bearded and dressed in local civilian attire. Either that or they appeared in official portraits wearing uniforms decked with ribbons and stripes and medals. They were war-fighting professionals. For most it was their chosen career and, unlike younger men who tended to find reasons why this or that soldier had been hit and they had not—a poor decision, a perceived weakness, a fatal lapse in quickness… —these men knew better. You trained and practiced and then you performed with a team made up of men every bit as good as you were, and sometimes in spite of all of this you got killed. This mission, targeting Osama bin Laden, was one nearly everyone in the force had imagined being on since 9/11. It was the raid all of these men believed would someday come, and that they had hoped would include them.

Behind this initial force were the men and choppers and planes that McRaven hoped he would not need. There were three MH-47E Chinooks, big as tractor trailers with flat rotors front and back. Also on alert were the fighters and combat-control aircraft that might be needed to fend off Pakistani fighters and ground-to-air defenses. If it came to that, command of the operation would shift from McRaven’s Joint Operating Center in Jalalabad to the theater command center in Kabul, where General Petraeus presided.

Petraeus himself hadn’t known about the mission until just weeks earlier, when he had been informed about it in general terms by General Cartwright and by the CENTCOM commander. His resources would not be used at all unless the mission went badly, so he had not been fully briefed by McRaven until a few days earlier. No one on his staff knew about the raid. His history with bin Laden went back a dozen years, to when Petraeus had stood on the tarmac at Pope Air Force Base as the bodies of American servicemen killed in al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole were flown home. He had been in on the earlier discussions during the Clinton administration when it had decided to launch the cruise missiles at targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan. He would have a ringside seat for this raid, but if all went well he would have nothing to do but watch.

On Saturday afternoon, McRaven took a call from the president. Obama told the admiral that his confidence in him and his men could not be higher.

“Godspeed to you and your forces,” Obama said. “Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service.”

He added something that went without saying.

“I will personally be following this mission very closely.”

Hours later, on Saturday afternoon Washington time, Ben Rhodes sat down in his small White House office before his keyboard… and froze. At some point, the president was going to have to speak to the United States and the world about what had happened, or was happening, inside Pakistan. Rhodes’s job would be to have draft remarks ready for success or failure.

George Little, a CIA press officer, had just spent a few hours with the president’s staff reviewing every outcome the agency could imagine. They had gone through the various press guides and public-messaging guides for each contingency—which heads of states needed to be informed and in what order, how statements should be made. They roughed them all out. There was one for a clean in-and-out, the best case. If they went in and bin Laden wasn’t there and they got out without setting off any big alarms, then they planned to just deny it. It was to remain a covert operation: that is, officially it would not have happened. But what if things got messy? There were a number of those possibilities: messy with bin Laden dead, messy with bin Laden captured, messy but no bin Laden. They went through pages and pages of public-messaging options.

After all that, his head spinning with possibilities, Rhodes sat down to begin drafting something. He planned to start with the best-case scenario, and got as far as the first line, but then stopped. I can’t, he thought. I might jinx this. If he wrote a speech about them getting bin Laden, and they didn’t, that was going to be an awful document. If he wrote one about not getting bin Laden… well, his heart wasn’t in it. If he had to do it, he would, but he wasn’t going to do it unless he had to. So he didn’t write anything. He gave up and got ready to attend the correspondents dinner.

There had been some conversation the evening before about the timing. The dinner was the major black-tie social gala of the year in Washington: televised, and attended by celebrities from Hollywood and the sports world, and by all of the most prominent government leaders and journalists. The main attraction was always the president of the United States, who typically delivered a stand-up comedy routine poking fun at himself and the press. If Obama chose the raid, it would likely take place at the same time as the dinner. How would it look for the president to be making jokes at a podium while the men were risking their lives? And what if something went wrong and everyone had to suddenly leave the party? Every journalist in Washington would realize something major was up. Then again, if they all decided simply not to go, it would alert every news organization in the world that something big was happening.

When someone floated the idea of asking McRaven to postpone the mission for a day, Clinton had heard enough.

“We are not going to let a White House correspondents’ dinner drive an operational decision,” she said.

That ended it. Obama told Donilon, “Tom, if it turns out that’s when we decide to go, you’ll just tell them I have a stomachache and I have to bow out.”

The question of what to do about the dinner became moot when McRaven’s weather experts predicted fog in the Abbottabad area for Saturday night. He decided to push the mission back one day. They would launch on Sunday night.

So in this tense moment, the most suspenseful of Obama’s presidency, he and his staff dressed for a formal party.

Rhodes was so nervous that at first he decided not to go, but then he changed his mind. He figured if he stayed home he would just pace and obsess. The dinner would be a distraction. But it was strange. There were maybe a dozen people among the many hundreds in attendance who shared the secret. They were all throwing themselves into the party in an effort to forget the strain for a few hours, and succeeding somewhat, except when they would see someone else who knew. When Michael Morell spotted Rhodes in the crowd he gave him a slight pained smile that made him laugh.

Obama lived up to his reputation for cool. If he was anxious about the next day’s mission, he didn’t show it, garnering laughs as he poked fun at the long-running dispute over his origins and his own sometimes messianic public image, offering a supposedly never-before-seen video of his live birth, which, he said, he himself had never seen. It turned out to be a clip from the Disney movie, The Lion King, showing the birth of the future king on the plains of Africa—the clouds part and a shaft of heavenly light beams down on the uplifted cub. “Back to square one,” Obama joked. Then he took pains to explain to the “Fox TV table” that the video was a joke, a “children’s cartoon,” he said. “If you don’t believe me, you can check with Disney, where they have the long-form version.” He skewered New York real estate magnate, publicity hound, reality TV star, and sometime presidential candidate Donald Trump, who for weeks had been loudly demanding proof of Obama’s citizenship. The president then gratuitously suggested that Representative Michele Bachmann, a vocal critic and Republican presidential aspirant, might have actually been born in Canada.

There was laughter.

“Yes, Michele,” he said. “This is how it starts.”

Great care was taken to preserve the appearance of normalcy on Sunday. President Obama left for his weekly golf outing at Andrews Air Force Base, but this time he would play only nine holes. Arrival times at the White House for all of the top staffers and cabinet members were staggered. The principals were instructed to keep their security details at a distance—a thick herd of black SUVs arriving at the gates always attracted attention. They were told not to park in their usual spaces. The West Wing tours normally booked for Sunday had been canceled, which raised the suspicion of ABC TV’s George Stephanopoulos, who understood the rhythms of White House life from his years on President Clinton’s staff. He got wind of the cancellations and asked Chief of Staff Bill Daley what was going on. He was told there was a “plumbing issue.” The Sunday tours were popular with the executive department staffers, who had a chance to show off their access by escorting family members and friends through the White House. Out-of-town guests sometimes planned visits around such perks, so the cancellations caused some disappointment. Obama’s personal secretary had planned one for that day, intending to show around the cast members of the hit movie The Hangover, who had come to town for the previous night’s gala. Rhodes got a phone call from her that morning.

“Can I just come in as an exception with these guys?” she asked.

“No,” said Rhodes. No exceptions.

The National Security Council staff convened at eight o’clock that morning. The deputies met at nine.

Halfway around the world, it was already late in the afternoon in Jalalabad. McRaven had timed the strike to hit the target in Abbottabad at one o’clock in the morning, Pakistani time, looking for the moment when things would be quietest at the compound and in Bilal Town, and when his men would have the longest stretch of darkness possible to finish up the work, fly north to Kala Dhaka for refueling, and get out of the country. That meant they would depart from the base in Afghanistan at about eleven o’clock at night, local time—the force would pick up a half hour on the clock flying east into Pakistan, so they would fly for an hour and a half and arrive at the targeted time. That meant the mission would launch at two-thirty p.m. Washington time and hit the compound at about four in the afternoon. McRaven kept an iPad in front of him throughout the night displaying multiple time zones just to help keep things straight.

So as the assault force readied, the White House pulled itself together. Some key Obama staffers were being called in and informed of the mission for the first time. Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, was on an outing with his children and didn’t notice the e-mail on his phone from Rhodes until an hour after it was sent. He forwarded the note to Dan Pfeiffer, the communications director.

“Do you know what this is about?” he asked.

Pfeiffer said that he had received the same summons, and, no, he didn’t know what was happening, either.

In the Situation Room and the complex of small meeting rooms around it, staffers worked on setting up the videoconferencing. Panetta, who would officially command the mission from his conference room at Langley, would be up on the big screen relaying the running commentary of McRaven, who would be at his post in Jalalabad. High over Abbottabad, much too high and too small to attract attention, was an RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealthy drone with a high-powered lens, which would provide a live video feed of the assault. In his blue uniform, Air Force General Marshall “Brad” Webb, a broad-faced man with a crew cut and a chest full of ribbons, was testing the video links to it and to Admiral McRaven in one of the small conference rooms. When Donilon learned that he planned to move himself and the feeds into the Situation Room, he put a stop to it. Donilon did not like the prospect of Obama communicating directly with McRaven and watching the mission live. It might appear that he was micromanaging the raid. Webb would have to confine these direct links to the smaller conference room.

The principals convened at noon for a final review of the plans and the president dropped in briefly, wearing his white golf shirt and blue Windbreaker. Each of the principals was given the plans for four possible outcomes, and each was tasked with making certain phone calls, depending on what happened.

Anticipating a long day and night, the table in one of the smaller side conference rooms was covered and topped with a heaping Costco plate of sandwiches, chips, and baby carrots and a tub of sodas and bottled water on ice. The NSC staff spent most of the early afternoon reviewing their “playbook,” a large three-ring binder developed for an even broader range of possibilities. If something goes awry, who calls whom? How much of the intelligence case should be laid out after the fact, to explain why the action was taken? If trouble developed, which countries would they contact for support? Who would be the best person to reach out to, which Pakistani leader? Who had the best personal relationship? For instance, Admiral Mullen had a very good relationship with General Kayani. Who were the right people to leverage if the men on the raid found themselves in a bad spot? Did they want to put the president on the phone with the leader of a foreign country if this went badly? Whatever happened, there would be a lot of explaining to do with Pakistan: Here’s why we took the extraordinary step of not sharing this information with you. Here’s why we didn’t work with you.

Success scenarios were easier. There were many more pages devoted to failure.

The president returned at two-thirty p.m., still wearing the white golf shirt and blue Windbreaker.

In Kabul, General Petraeus paid a surprise visit to the JSOC situational awareness room.

“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked Colonel Bill Ostlund, who was JSOC’s liaison there.

“Yeah, we’ve got nine operations going on right now and a few more that I think will happen tonight,” said Ostlund. His center monitored operations being run out of task force headquarters in Jalalabad, in case problems developed that needed the attention of higher command—typically a helicopter accident or an issue involving civilian casualties. The activity he described was the normal nightly pace.

The colonel knew nothing about the bin Laden raid but had suspected for a few days that something big was in the offing. McRaven had come up from Jalalabad for a short visit and before stopping in to see the commanding general had asked the colonel when Petraeus’s office had last been swept for listening devices.

“Sir, I don’t know if it has ever been swept,” said Ostlund, and joked about the relative openness of the conventional army’s habits compared to their own. “General Petraeus will probably have his window open and an Afghani right outside the window.”

McRaven laughed and told Ostlund that he wanted him to stay outside while he met with the commander. This was unusual, since Ostlund had been in on every meeting with the admiral up until that point, even the most sensitive ones with the CIA station chief and Petraeus. So he knew something especially interesting was afoot, and since Petraeus rarely stopped by his ops center, he figured tonight must be the night.

“Why don’t you ask the rest of your folks to leave?” the general asked Ostlund. “And then we can talk.”

As the others filed out, Petraeus said, “They don’t need to come back for a while.”

When the others were gone, and they were sitting alone, Petraeus asked, “So, what do you think is going on?”

Ostlund guessed that either they were going to do a raid to try to free Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier taken captive by the Taliban almost two years earlier, or they were going after bin Laden. He wanted to add Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s Number Two, but he couldn’t remember how to pronounce the name.

“Yeah, it’s the latter,” said Petraeus.

They sat side by side in the large windowless room, at the head of a U-shaped table lined with now-empty computer stations, facing a wall with eight different plasma screens. They received no video feed from the bin Laden raid because the CIA was running it, but both men could monitor the live chat from JSOC headquarters, the CIA, and the White House.

Petraeus commandeered Ostlund’s keyboard and began tapping out questions to the various principals. At one point he directed a question to Admiral McRaven, calling him “Bill,” which alarmed Ostlund. Petraeus’s comments were being conveyed on the colonel’s line, and he was not used to addressing his commanders by their first names.

He asked, “Sir, could you let them know that this is coming from you?”

With a final order from Panetta—“Go in there and get bin Laden; and if he isn’t in there, get the hell out!”—McRaven launched the raid.

The two Stealth Black Hawks lifted off from the airfield at Jalalabad precisely at eleven p.m. local time. They were blacked out and both carried a full, minutely calculated load. Each of the SEALs was in full kit: desert camouflage, helmet, night-vision goggles, gloves (for fast roping), and hard knee pads (better for dropping to a knee for shooting). Each carried a booklet with photos of the people they expected to find in the compound. They were armed with various pistols and short-barreled automatic rifles outfitted with silencers. They carried only light arms because the compound was not heavily defended. While they might encounter armed men once on the ground, there would not be many. Attacking loud and fast in darkness, with finely choreographed moves, able to operate in the night as if it were day, the SEALs would have an overwhelming advantage.

About ten minutes into the flight the choppers rose above a series of rugged peaks and crossed into Pakistan. As soon as they did, the three big Chinooks lifted off from Jalalabad. One would set down just inside the border on the Afghan side. The other two would proceed to the staging area north of Abbottabad by a different route. The Black Hawks eased down into the wide Mardan Valley, flying well north of Peshawar, moving fast and hugging the terrain.

The special operators of JSOC like to see themselves as “the point of the spear,” and these two helicopters racing east in darkness were unquestionably that. Here was the final thrust of an enormous effort that stretched back over nine and a half years—further if you considered the whole modern history of special ops. The post–9/11 effort to find Osama bin Laden and his small band of zealous killers had engaged two presidential administrations and many thousands of people in America’s military and intelligence communities: the analysts working in shifts, the CIA officers rebuilding human spy networks, and the combined satellite and aerial and electronic surveillance efforts of an alphabetical jumble of agencies and branches, developing drones and secure live telecommunication links, creating computer software, and honing strategy and tactics. If a nation must learn how to fight each war anew, borrowing from its existing arsenal, adapting, and innovating to meet the threat, then the SEALs on these Black Hawks were, in effect, America’s response to the challenge of 9/11, closing in at last on the war’s ultimate target.

McRaven sat in a large rectangular windowless room with plywood walls, surrounded by manned computer stations and looking up at a wall of video monitors. One monitor would show video of the raid itself—the Sentinel feed—but there was nothing to watch there yet. Another had a graphic display showing the location of the choppers. There was some tension as the two smaller choppers crossed into Pakistan, followed about fifteen minutes later by the two Chinooks, but none of them tripped alarms at that country’s air defenses. With the full array of national security assets at his disposal, McRaven was able to monitor exactly what the Pakistanis were doing… and as the minutes went by it became clear that they were doing nothing. The task force had entered Pakistani airspace before, on covert missions into the tribal areas, so they had been confident they could slip in unnoticed, but it was nevertheless a relief when it had been done. The admiral had precalculated a point where, even if the Pakistanis woke up, the mission would proceed. Soon enough they had passed even that point. Now, as the blacked-out choppers moved toward Abbottabad, there was nothing to do for about an hour but wait.

At that point, McRaven knew he would have decisions to make only if something went wrong.

Up on the big screen in the White House Situation Room, Panetta read out occasional updates on the choppers’ progress. One of Obama’s aides said, “Mr. President, this is going to take a while, you might not want to sit here and watch the whole thing unfold.”

“No, I think I’m going to go ahead and watch,” said Obama. In Chicago, nine and a half years earlier he had watched 9/11 unfold in a crowded basement room, now he would watch the final act of that drama from another.

Biden was typically restless, moving in and out of the room, and when he noticed that the live feed of McRaven and the Sentinel were up in the side room, he went in and sat down to watch there. Webb was hunched over his laptop at the head of the table.

In Jalalabad, McRaven’s sergeant major was sitting alongside the admiral, communicating on a chat line with Webb and others in the command loop. He looked up.

“Hey, sir,” he said. “General says the vice president just walked in.”

Secretary of Defense Gates was not far behind.

McRaven knew that the drumming chop of the approaching Black Hawks would be faintly audible about two minutes before they reached the target. The helicopters were stealthy, designed to avoid being spotted by radar, and quieter than standard models, but they still created racket when they were directly overhead. Approaching the compound from the northwest, the Black Hawks were now visible in the grainy overhead feed from the Sentinel.

After that, things happened very fast.

Everyone watched with shock as the first chopper, instead of hovering over the compound to drop the SEAL team from ropes and then moving off, as planned, abruptly wheeled, clipping the compound wall with its tail and hitting the ground. This clearly wasn’t good.

The Night Stalker pilot had tried to bring his Black Hawk to a hover, but the chopper wouldn’t perform the maneuver. It “mushed,” or began to skid uncontrollably. An after-action analysis would conclude that because the compound was encircled by stone walls, whereas the mock target in Nevada had only had a chain-link fence, the air beneath the hardworking Black Hawk warmed more rapidly than anticipated. That meant the air density was insufficient for the precisely calculated weight of the aircraft. The chopper could stay airborne only if it kept moving, so when the pilot halted its forward progress it fell.

The pilots of the 160th train for frantic moments like these. The pilot of the faltering Black Hawk moved with practiced speed. He found a plot of flat ground to execute a hard, controlled crash. It was in the compound’s western corner near an animal pen. He swung the craft’s tail in that direction and deliberately used it to clip the top of the western wall. This pitched the chopper forward and into the ground. The landing was hard, but upright, which was key. In those seconds the pilot’s maneuver had prevented the Black Hawk from pitching over on its side, which is a disastrous way for a helicopter to crash. If its still-spinning rotors strike the ground, the body of the chopper could be thrown or violently rolled. Instead, the nose was in the dirt. The SEALs were strapped in and were on seats designed to absorb a hard landing like this. One second the craft was skidding, and the next it was still, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, its tail rotor hung up on the top of the wall.

No one watching the small screen in the White House, viewing the scene from far overhead, could see exactly what had happened, or even tell that the chopper was pitched forward with its tail hung up on the wall. They could see only that it was down inside the compound. They knew that was not the plan.

Excruciating moments passed as McRaven sought word from the scene. Every discussion of what could go wrong on this mission had referenced the helicopter that clipped the plane and exploded in the Iranian desert in 1980, and the helicopters that had crashed in crowded Mogadishu in 1993. Here in the first seconds of the mission, they had a Black Hawk down.

Obama had been following Donilon’s advice up to this point, receiving mission updates secondhand, talking with Panetta via the video hookup in the Situation Room, and letting others monitor the video feed and chat lines in the side room, but when the chopper went down he abruptly got up and crossed the hall.

Clinton, standing over the food tray in the adjacent room with Ben Rhodes, watched him go.

“Ben, do you think it’s a good idea for the president to watch this?” she asked.

“He’s not going to be directing anything,” Rhodes said. “It’s just a feed.”

Sitting at the head of the small conference table, Webb stood up to surrender his seat when he noticed Obama enter. The president waved him back down.

“I’ll just take this chair here,” he said, sliding into the corner. “I need to watch this.”

The president’s entrance was noted by Webb on the chat line.

In Jalalabad, McRaven’s sergeant major said, “Sir, the president just walked into the room.”

Clinton followed and took one of the remaining chairs at the table. Other staffers began crowding into the small room to see what would happen next.

In Jalalabad, McRaven was understandably preoccupied. He didn’t have time to worry or watch the screen, or to explain things to Washington. He quickly ascertained that no one on the chopper had been hurt. They were already preparing to assault the target house from their downed position. All of these men had long ago proved their talent for adapting quickly to setbacks. This is why they had been picked. Setbacks were commonplace. It was the rare plan that survived even the first minutes of an assault. McRaven had lost helicopters before, and he had options at his fingertips.

Watching on the screen at Langley with Panetta and the other top CIA officials and bin Laden team members, Michael Morell felt a moment of panic when the chopper went down but was immediately reassured, as was everyone watching, by McRaven’s manner. The admiral did not seem ruffled or even particularly surprised.

“Mr. Director, as you can see, we have a helicopter down in the courtyard,” he said to Panetta. “My men are prepared for this contingency and will deal with it.”

At the White House there was still no explanation of what was going on. Obama’s face was etched with worry. A White House photographer snapped a picture of the now-crowded side room that would become famous: Webb at the center in his blue uniform, head down, intently monitoring the video feed and chat line on his laptop screen, trying to figure out what had happened; Obama seated in the corner with furrowed brow; Donilon standing behind Webb with his arms crossed, flanked by Admiral Mullen and Bill Daley; Clinton with her hand to her mouth; Gates and Biden looking glum; staffers lining the walls—all fixated on the screen off-camera.

Obama was as nervous as he had ever been. He knew the stakes were huge, mostly for the men in that chopper, but also for the country, for his administration… for him. He had persuaded himself that he was willing to accept failure, but to be staring at it in real time on the screen… he would later say that these were the longest minutes of his life, with the possible exception of waiting for word from doctors when his youngest daughter was hospitalized with meningitis.

When the first chopper went down, the second Black Hawk diverted from its planned course and landed outside the compound walls in a newly planted field. The mission had called for it to hover briefly outside to drop the translator, the dog, and four SEALs, and then move directly over the three-story house to drop the rest of the team on its roof. It seemed to the viewers that the entire assault plan had gone awry.

Then, abruptly, SEALs began streaming out of both choppers, inside the compound and out. The assault was on. The downed chopper had caused only a momentary delay. To their relief, those watching in Washington concluded that whatever had happened the mission was proceeding. In his flat Texas twang, McRaven ordered one of the two Chinooks waiting on the riverbed at Kala Dhaka to move up.

The team from the crashed chopper moved quickly along the inside wall of the compound, pausing only to blow open a metal door that led to the house. The team from the chopper outside the wall blasted in through another entrance. There were flashes of light on the screen. The men were moving on the house itself now, and then were inside.

Upstairs in that house, according to accounts given by bin Laden’s family, the household had been startled awake by a loud crash. One of bin Laden’s adult daughters ran up from the second floor to the third and was told to go back down. Bin Laden instructed his wife Amal to leave the lights off. They would not have been able to turn them on anyway, because CIA operatives had cut off electricity to the entire neighborhood in advance of the assault—darkness favored the SEALs. The Sheik waited upstairs with Amal in the dark.

One group of SEALs entered the garage area of the guesthouse. Teams like this had hit houses that were wired to explode, and had encountered people wearing explosives. When they encountered men, they were inclined to shoot on sight. There was a single brief spray of gunfire as they approached, but it was wild and ineffective. It had most likely come from the courier Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed—Ahmed the Kuwaiti. The SEALs returned fire, killing Ahmed and wounding his wife in the shoulder.

Another part of the team moved on the main house, clearing it methodically. Abrar Ahmed, the courier’s brother, was in a first-floor bedroom with his wife Bushra. Both were shot dead.

They cleared the first floor room by room, encountering no further gunfire. They passed through two large storage rooms and a kitchen. No one knew the layout of the interior. When they encountered a locked metal door in the rear sealing off a stairway to the upper floors, they slapped on a small C-4 charge, blew it off its hinges, and moved up the stairs. Bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, a slender bearded man wearing a white T-shirt, was shot dead at the top. There were wailing women and children on this floor, none of whom posed a threat. The team didn’t know it yet, but there was only one adult male left in the compound, and he was in the third-floor bedroom.

Originally, half the assaulting SEALs were to have come down through the balcony into the third floor, in which case bin Laden would have been encountered immediately, at about the same time the Ahmed brothers were being shot downstairs. Instead, the Sheik had about fifteen long minutes to wait in the darkness as the SEALs methodically approached. Their rifles had silencers, and if none of the victims had fired he would not have heard the blast of gunfire by Ahmed and then shouting and crying and the sound of the metal doors being blown open. He might also have heard the muted pop of the SEALs’ silenced weapons. The only windows on his secure third floor looked north, out over the compound walls. The downed chopper was in the western corner of the compound and the other had landed to the south, so he could only have surmised who was coming for him. He might have thought it was a Pakistani force. The assaulters blew off the door barring the third floor and he would have heard men ascending, coming for him.

Three SEALs came up those stairs, scanning different angles, searching while protecting each other. According to one of the SEALs,* the first man up spotted a tall, bearded, swarthy man in a prayer cap wearing traditional flowing Pakistani clothes, the knee-length shirt worn over pajama-like bottoms. One or more of the SEALs fired at him. The man retreated quickly into a bedroom, and the SEALs followed. In the bedroom they found two women leaning over a fatally wounded bin Laden, who had been shot in the head. The first SEAL violently moved the women out of the way and the other two stood over him and fired several more shots into his chest.

* An account of this killing scene by one of the three SEALs, calling himself “Mark Owen” was published after the first edition of The Finish went to press. He was the first of the raiding party to offer his version of the shooting, and as of this writing is the only member of the team to have done so. It differed in several details from the one I had pieced together in interviews with sources at JSOC. My original account had bin Laden being chased from the top of the stairs into a bedroom, where he was first shot in the chest, and then, once his wife Amal was pushed aside, shot in the head by a SEAL standing over him. The version in the above text is based on the “Owen” account, which, given the source, I assume to be more correct. I had been in discussions with “Mark Owen” early in the reporting of this book, but he opted not to tell me his story and instead pursued a contract to coauthor his own account, called No Easy Day.

The engagement was over in seconds. Amal had been shot in the leg. Bin Laden had weapons on a shelf in his bedroom but had not picked them up. His identity was unmistakable, even with the grotesque hole through his right forehead. The architect of 9/11 had become the most infamous face in the world.

McRaven heard “for God and Country, pass Geronimo. Geronimo. Geronimo.” The word “Geronimo” was part of a coded “mission execution checklist.” It meant the critical milestone of the raid had been passed successfully, securing bin Laden. McRaven conveyed the report immediately to Panetta, and it began to spread waves of excitement through the CIA and White House, and in Kabul where Petraeus and Ostlund were listening in. Petraeus pumped his fist with satisfaction.

In the White House, in the corner of the small crowded conference room, Obama heard “Geronimo ID’d.”

The president knew the ID was still tentative, so he didn’t let himself fully believe it. To whatever extent he felt relief or excitement or satisfaction… he fought those feelings down. To him it meant the SEALs could now start extricating themselves, which meant they might soon be fighting their way out. There had been a chopper crash and explosions at the compound. If the United States was going to have to defend the raiders on their way out—and there were fighters ready—it meant the worst part might still be ahead. Hearing the report, the president thought, Get the hell out of there now!

But after McRaven had passed that along, it occurred to him that he had not asked specifically whether bin Laden had been killed or captured.

So he asked, “Find out whether it’s Geronimo EKIA [Enemy Killed In Action].”

The answer came back, “Roger, Geronimo EKIA.” So McRaven passed that on to Panetta and the White House.

“Looks like we got him,” said Obama, only half believing it.

The delay between these two reports would cause some confusion in later accounts, which suggested that the SEALs had first found bin Laden, chased him, and then, a few minutes later, killed him. The finding and the shooting had happened in the time it took the three SEALs to crash into his room. Eighteen minutes had elapsed since the choppers had arrived.

McRaven told Panetta: “Look, I’ve got a Geronimo call, but I need to tell you it’s a first call. This is not a confirmation. Please keep your expectations managed a little here.” He explained that the adrenaline of operators was sky high on these raids. They were looking at everything through night-vision goggles. They were professionals, but… “Let’s not count on anything until they get back and we have some evidence.” Echoing the president’s thoughts, McRaven reminded Panetta, and everyone else watching, “We’ve still got SEALs on the ground without a ride.”

The video on the screen now showed SEALs emerging from the house, herding the uninjured women and children to one corner of the compound, away from the downed chopper. Some of the men came out carrying a body bag—bin Laden’s body had been dragged feet-first down the stairs, leaving a bloody trail. One of his daughters would later say that she remembered her father’s head banging each step on the way down. The SEALs eventually zipped it into a nylon bag. The assaulters moved deliberately, and Obama felt they were taking too long. Everyone was waiting for the Pakistani response at this point. The president just wanted them in the air.

But the commotion at the compound had, in fact, attracted little interest in the neighborhood, or the country. The translator, wearing a Kevlar vest under his traditional long Pakistani shirt, shooed away the few residents who came out for a look. His training to fast rope was for naught, since his helicopter had instead landed outside the compound. The dog Cairo was enough to convince most to back off. The translator told them sternly in Pashto to go back to their houses, that a “security operation” was under way. People obliged. Monitoring the Pakistani defense forces carefully, McRaven saw no sign that the country’s defenses had been aroused.

There was much to do yet at the compound, inside and out. Upstairs, SEALs were hastily bagging bin Laden’s papers and computer, discs, flash drives, anything that might contain useful intelligence—the site’s pocket litter. Bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal, wounded, was helped down the stairs and outside, haranguing the Americans in Arabic. All four of the men who had lived in the compound, along with one woman, were dead. The surviving women and children were flex-cuffed. The women assumed they were going to be taken away. Questioned by an Arabic-speaking SEAL, the women confirmed that they had killed “The Sheik.” One of the children confirmed that it was Osama bin Laden.

The Chinook summoned by McRaven now landed noisily outside the compound walls. Men were working on planting explosives on the downed Black Hawk and destroying its secret avionics with a hammer. A medic from the Chinook unzipped bin Laden’s body bag, took swabs of blood, and inserted needles to extract bone marrow for DNA testing. Twenty more minutes elapsed before the body bag was carried out to the Black Hawk. One of the bone marrow samples was placed on the Chinook. The intelligence haul was likewise distributed between the two choppers.

Finally, the White House audience saw the downed Black Hawk explode with the set charges. The demolition team scurried to the Chinook and the choppers lifted off, leaving behind a huge blaze, a stunned collection of cuffed women and children, and four bodies. A photo purporting to be the bloody corpse of Khalid bin Laden would turn up on the Internet in the coming days.

Even with the choppers airborne, the tension didn’t lift. They first flew north to Kala Dhaka to rendezvous with the second Chinook and to refuel the Black Hawk. Twenty-five minutes later they took off for the flight back to Jalalabad. All of it without any Pakistani response. When that country’s air force did scramble two F-16s into action, the raiding party was safely across the border.

The choppers landed back in Jalalabad at three a.m. local time. None of the men who went on the raid had been hurt. They had lost a helicopter but they had avoided Pakistan’s defenses completely. And they had killed Osama bin Laden.

The SEALs were certain of it, but the White House and the world would demand more proof. McRaven signed off on his narration for about twenty minutes to go out and meet the men on the tarmac as they lowered the body bag from the chopper. It was unzipped, and photos were taken and transmitted immediately to Washington and Langley. The man had been dead for an hour and forty minutes, and he had taken a shot to the head, so the face was swollen and distorted.

McRaven called Langley with a question for the bin Laden team.

“How tall is this guy?” he asked.

He was told, “Between six-four and six-five.”

The dead man was certainly tall, but no one had a tape measure, so one of the SEALs who was exactly six feet four lay down next to it. The body was roughly the same height.

The president had gone back upstairs while the choppers were in flight and asked to be summoned when they landed. Early Sunday evening in Washington, he surveyed the first photos with other members of the team.

When Rhodes saw the picture he recognized bin Laden immediately, even with the wound. Here was the man who had called a press conference to declare war on the United States fifteen years ago, and who had inspired a trail of blood ever since. Rhodes thought, this is either bin Laden or a six-foot, four-inch, slender, dark-skinned man with a long beard who looked exactly like him, and who had been living in hiding surrounded by bin Laden’s family, protected by a known al Qaeda intimate. It was bin Laden.

When McRaven returned to his command center, Obama asked him, “What do you think?”

“Well, without DNA I can’t tell you I’m a hundred percent sure,” the admiral said. “But I’m pretty damn sure.” He said that the men were just beginning to be debriefed, but that there was some indication from the women interviewed at the compound that they had killed the right man. He reiterated, “Mr. President, I have fairly high confidence that we have killed bin Laden here.”

Still, the president was inclined to be cautious. What would be worse than to announce that you had killed the founder and leader of al Qaeda only to be proved wrong? When Panetta, Morell, and “John,” the bin Laden team leader, arrived at the White House, Morell walked the president through the details of the agency’s facial analysis, which had concluded with 95 percent certainty that the dead man was bin Laden. The president asked about DNA analysis, which would be even more conclusive, but Morell told him that the earliest they would get those results would be Monday morning.

Wouldn’t it be best then to wait? Why take chances? It was now early Sunday evening. From his command seat in the Situation Room, Obama asked if they should announce bin Laden’s death that evening or wait for the DNA results. Would the secret hold? Everyone agreed that the secret would not hold, not with Twitter and e-mail and the Internet and cable TV, not with the mini-conflagration and dead bodies at the compound in Abbottabad, with bin Laden’s wives and children in Pakistani custody, and with word now spreading happily from Jalalabad to Kabul and outward. If the White House said nothing, then who knew what version of the story would come out or what kind of conspiracy theories would take root.

“It won’t really be true until we say it’s true,” said Obama. “So I’m not worried about it leaking out. We should confirm it when we are in a position to confirm it, but not feel pressured to do so.”

No matter when the White House chose to make an announcement, it had to contact Pakistan and explain. No one knew how that country would react. The raid had been a clear violation of its sovereignty, and the fact that the United States, an ally, had not sought its help or consulted with it beforehand was deeply insulting. Still, as Obama explained to me later, “It would be easier for them to manage the fallout if it was definitive that it was bin Laden, as opposed to there being ambiguity out there for two or three days, in which case the whole issue of Pakistani sovereignty would be magnified.”

So Admiral Mullen called General Kayani. The Pakistani army chief by then knew, of course, that there was a downed American helicopter in Abbottabad, but in those early hours of the morning in Islamabad, no one had yet sorted out what had happened. Mullen told him that the United States had conducted a mission and had killed Osama bin Laden.

“Congratulations,” said Kayani.

The conversation went downhill from there. There was going to be trouble ahead between the two countries, for sure, but the general immediately helped resolve the question over when to make the announcement.

“Look, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “There are all these stories about American helicopters and a raid inside Pakistan, all without a good explanation. It would be very helpful if you would stand up and say what happened.”

That decided the matter. They would make the statement that night. Rhodes went to work drafting the comments he had not been able to bring himself to write the day before. Other principals picked up the playbook for a successful raid, each assigned to telephone a different world leader. Obama got on the phone to inform former presidents Bush and Clinton, who had hunted bin Laden during their terms, and British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country had been America’s staunchest ally during the effort.

Jay Carney went to work assembling the White House press corps for a special announcement. He and his staff started contacting reporters, mostly by e-mail. He told them, one after another, “Look, you’ll want to be here, but I can’t tell you why.” Most guessed that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed—one of the Libyan dictator’s sons had been killed the day before. No one guessed bin Laden.

But the news did break out. Twitter users from Abbottabad had been buzzing for hours about helicopters and strange explosions. A Pakistani computer technician named Sohaib Athar filed a report just as the SEAL choppers arrived over the compound, writing “Helicopter is hovering over Abbottabad at 1 a.m. (is a rare event).” Minutes later he reported a loud bang that shook the windows where he was staying nearby. There were other reports like this, but no one knew exactly what had happened until Keith Urbahn, a former chief of staff to Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.” Urbahn quickly followed with, “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.” This was an hour before Obama appeared in the East Room to make the announcement, and the news was quickly everywhere.

In the White House, Carney was alerted to ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast of a game between the Phillies and the Mets in Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park. The sellout crowd was chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” It was 10:45 p.m. The game announcers interrupted to deliver the news that there were reports that bin Laden had been killed.

Still, as Obama had predicted, it would not be true until the United States confirmed it. So he sat behind his desk in the Oval Office making last-minute changes to the speech Rhodes had drafted, and then he walked over to the East Room to give it. There were already crowds across the street in Lafayette Square celebrating and chanting “USA! USA! USA!”

It was 11:35 p.m. when the president appeared on television striding up the red carpet toward a podium, and began: “Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”

He spoke about the attacks on 9/11, which were, he said, “the worst attack on the American people in our history,” and which were “seared into our national memory.” He spoke of how long bin Laden had eluded American forces. The president felt proud of his own contribution to the effort, citing his instruction to Panetta soon after taking office to move the priority of the top al Qaeda leaders “to the front of the line.” He mentioned the national effort to oust the Taliban, but did not mention Iraq. He believed part of his own contribution had been to alter the misguided priorities of President Bush.

“Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden,” he said. “It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

He noted that the threat of attacks from this group had not ended, and pledged a continued effort against them, and he emphasized once more that the United States was not at war with Islam, pointing out that President Bush had also labored to make that clear. He accused bin Laden of the very thing the Sheik had worried about, his unwanted legacy: “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”

The president thanked “the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who have worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.

“We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country. And they are part of a generation that has borne the heaviest share of the burden since that September day.”

The president closed by invoking the spirit of unity that the nation experienced after the 9/11 attacks, and was reexperiencing briefly that night.

“Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.”

The night was not over for the White House. In Carney’s West Wing office, Michael Morell, Mike Vickers, and John Brennan held a group telephone conference with reporters. Morell, who had been with President Bush on the day of the attacks and at the center of efforts to catch bin Laden ever since, now declined to answer most of the detailed questions about the hunt, but he did offer a convoluted summary off the top of his head about finding Ahmed the Kuwaiti.

“It was multiple detainees debriefed over a number of years,” he said. “And then it was a composite picture of the courier network and this particular courier that we were interested in—that led us to this compound, and that came out of a composite picture and then was developed further through other intelligence means.”

Morell saluted the cooperation between CIA and the military.

“You know, this CIA-U.S. military operation was obviously a major success, and it’s a sign of the tremendous partnership that has existed between the intelligence community and the military in the years since 9/11. And it is a testament that the CIA is immensely grateful to those in the military who participated in this operation… We understand that the fight against al Qaeda continues, and that fight continues even as we mark the death of Osama bin Laden.”

It was very early in the morning when they were done. Morell left the White House at about half past midnight. He heard the large crowd across the street chanting “USA! USA! USA!” and then heard something that this lifelong agency man never thought he would hear. The crowd began chanting, “CIA! CIA! CIA!” He walked out to his car for the drive home to his family. For the last two months he had been working sixteen-hour days and he hadn’t been able to tell his wife why. Just that afternoon their daughter, who he had peeked in on at the end of that long day nine years earlier, had been in the last choral concert of her high school career. When he had left at six that Sunday morning, his wife had asked if he could make it.

“I can’t come,” he’d told her.

“It’s her last,” she said.

“I just can’t,” he’d replied, unable to explain why. She had not been happy about it.

Earlier that evening, when the president decided to make the announcement, he had phoned her at home, the concert long over.

“Turn on the TV,” he’d told her. “You’ll understand why you haven’t seen me in the last two months.”

Now he was eager to get home.

Carney and Rhodes didn’t leave the White House until after two in the morning. The press secretary had some beers in the refrigerator in his office, and they had celebrated by drinking them. They heard the chants across the street, still going at that hour, and were surprised to learn that the crowds had grown so large that White House security at first would not let them drive out. So Rhodes walked home.

It felt like New Year’s Eve. There were crowds of people dancing and chanting and singing. The streets were full of honking cars. Young women were standing up in the sunroofs waving their arms and cheering. It brought back all of his memories of 9/11, watching in horror from the Brooklyn waterfront as the towers fell. Most of the people celebrating on this night were of college age, in their late teens or early twenties, likely students from nearby Georgetown or George Washington University, which meant they had been children on the day of the attacks.

Rhodes himself was now thirty-two. Al Qaeda and bin Laden had been a dark shadow over all their lives. Now the shadow was lifted. In his own way, he had been involved in that fight from the start. He was not a soldier. He had not risked his life in the battle as so many in his generation had. He was not a shooter like the brave SEALs who had executed the raid, but he had brought his own talents fully to the effort. He had redirected his life, from deciding to work for Lee Hamilton instead of writing fiction, to helping to write the 9/11 Commission Report, to going to work for Obama—working to shape and articulate his thinking about the war, about who was the right enemy, and why fighting them was not only critical to the nation’s safety but just and honorable. From that day in Brooklyn, to sketching out the president’s remarks that night about bin Laden’s death, the killing of bin Laden formed a full circle for Rhodes. It was the story of his own young life. And that night, walking home, he felt like he had won.