The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

9. Glitter

Spring 2011

Finding and killing Osama bin Laden was an extraordinary accomplishment. President Obama had ample reason to be proud. But whose accomplishment was it? In his speech that night, Obama credited the “countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals” who had labored over the past decade and more, spanning three presidential administrations. He also thanked the SEALs who had risked their lives in the raid, and who had pulled it off seamlessly. He also thanked allies who had cooperated for years in hunting down and interrogating al Qaeda figures, including, even with its violated sovereignty and the insult of not having been consulted, Pakistan. But the president reserved a large share of the credit for the accomplishment for himself.

“And so, shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta…

“I was briefed… I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed…

“I determined… and authorized…

“Today, at my direction…”

And all of this was true. Obama did deserve credit for making the search for bin Laden a top priority of his administration, for cautiously laying the groundwork for a raid that avoided killing outright innocents and minimized disruption in Abbottabad, and for shouldering a big risk, not just to the men who carried out the mission, but to his own presidency and legacy. Perhaps it is only fair that having accepted the very large potential downside of a raid gone wrong, Obama should now fully reap the rewards for it having gone right.

But his White House team soon began hyping and spinning a story that really did not need to be spun. They did what political professionals exist to do; they began working the story to their own benefit.

Small falsities began to accrue around the story like splashes of glitter. It started almost immediately. Sitting on the couch in Carney’s office after the president’s remarks, John Brennan told reporters, “The American team engaged in a firefight… Osama bin Laden did resist.” He went on to say that the men in the compound “certainly had used women as human shields.” The next day he went further, saying that bin Laden himself had used his wife as a shield, as part of an effort to paint the al Qaeda leader as cowardly and hypocritical—“Here is Osama, living in a million-dollar compound, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. It speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years… he’s putting other people out there to wage jihad while he is secure in his luxury compound.”

In future interviews, Obama’s oft-voiced conviction that al Qaeda was the appropriate enemy and his direction to his intelligence chiefs to move finding bin Laden to the “top of the list” would be portrayed as the impetus that led to finding him, after the previous years of futility. In conversations with me, a number of top administration officials used the expression “limited bandwidth” to describe how even high priorities within administrations can be pushed aside or even forgotten—specifically, how Bush’s two wars had crowded out the bin Laden hunt. Obama had made similar comments in his speeches, particularly as a candidate in 2007 and 2008, when he argued that President Bush had “taken his eye off the ball.”

Early on in the planning, Obama had insisted that the SEAL team be prepared to fight its way out of Pakistan rather than defend the compound and wait for the United States to negotiate its exit. This was a risky call, made for the right reasons. The president was placing the safety of American soldiers above concerns for preserving diplomatic ties with Pakistan. Approaching the mission this way, which had not been Admiral McRaven’s suggestion, might have meant leaving in its wake dead Pakistani soldiers and police and downed Pakistani fighters. Making that decision had altered the planning for the mission, requiring the addition of more backup forces and other options. Members of Obama’s staff, after the fact, would point to this decision as critical to rescuing the mission after the first Black Hawk crashed. Only because the president had insisted on a beefed-up backup plan, they argued, did McRaven have the ready recourse of a Chinook loaded with a Quick Reaction Force.

In the weeks after the raid, analysis of the documents seized at the compound revealed, as CIA and administration officials presented it, that bin Laden had not been the isolated, irrelevant figure some said he had become, but, rather, had been actively steering his organization from his hiding place, hatching assassination plots against Obama and Petraeus, for example, and setting in motion further attacks on the U.S. homeland.

Then there was Vice President Biden, with his special gift for the self-aggrandizing overstatement, now in the service of his boss, who would call the raid “the most audacious plan in five hundred years.” Biden said that Obama had made this gutsy call after being roundly advised not to, suggesting that only Leon Panetta had been clearly in favor of it. He said Obama had “a backbone like a ramrod.”

Versions of all this appeared in accounts of the raid and its aftermath. It was not a coordinated effort, just a cumulative one. Pulling all of it together, the official glitterized version of the tale could be summarized thusly. A bold new president resorted national defense priorities to go after bin Laden. At his direction, the moribund hunt was revitalized, and a new lead to the al Qaeda leader was found and developed. It discovered bin Laden living not in a mountain cave but, rather, like a millionaire in a “luxury” compound in a polite Pakistani suburb. Steered by the president in strict secrecy, the military was emboldened and directed to alter its plan to, in effect, surrender to Pakistani authorities if discovered, and instead to prepare sufficient backup forces to confront any resistance head-on—to be ready to fight its way out. It was this advice that saved the mission, because when a Black Hawk crashed, a backup helicopter was at hand. Surrounded by advisers who either were opposed to launching the raid or expressed deep misgivings, the president overrode them to order one of the boldest military actions in human history. The brave SEALs then killed Osama bin Laden in a firefight inside the compound, despite his effort to shield himself behind his wife. Documents seized at the compound revealed that bin Laden had been a hands-on leader of the terror organization, not just a sidelined recluse.

There is some truth to this version, but only some.

Start with Obama’s direction to Panetta and Mike Leiter in May 2009, summoning them to that impromptu huddle in the Oval Office. The newly elected president did make it clear that he regarded the hunt for bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as the top national security priority of his administration. But did that really change anything? One senior intelligence official told me that it did not.

“This did not represent a big change,” he said. “We were already doing everything we could, and had been for years.”

Obama’s urgency did have an effect, he said, forcing the various bin Laden team leaders to prepare regular progress reports. He also said that having Director Panetta so actively interested “tends to focus people… I think that requiring regular updates pushed our guys even harder, but I doubt that was the reason for the breakthrough. The resources available didn’t change at all. Our focus on AQ senior leaders never suffered from a lack of resources, certainly not the hunt.”

Viewed dispassionately, it appears that the trail to Abbottabad resulted not from redirection but from a slow grind. Each of the critical “breaks,” such as learning the pseudonym “Ahmed the Kuwaiti” from several sources, finding out his true identity in 2007, locating him in 2010, and tracking him to Abbottabad, came as the result of steady, patient, unremarkable effort over many years. None of the breaks was even recognized as significant until the compound started raising eyebrows. Until then, Ahmed the Kuwaiti was just one of many, many thousands of possible leads, stored in a growing catchall database. The more remarkable achievement was connecting these disparate facts, and even then the sum of them led only to the residence of a man suspected of once acting as a courier and aide to bin Laden. It was because the CIA had been following every lead for nine years that the compound was found, and because its analysts had been thinking long and hard about how bin Laden might be living—without heavy security, surrounded by his wives and family, with only one or two trusted aides—that they found the configuration of the compound so compelling. So the argument that it was Obama’s redirection of effort in 2009 that led to bin Laden is true only insofar as every step on the road to success turns out to have been the right one. It was a factor. Obama deserves credit for it. The larger truth is that finding bin Laden was a triumph of bureaucratic intelligence gathering and analysis, an effort that began under President Clinton and improved markedly after 9/11 under President Bush. The effort was going to continue for as long as it took. It took just under ten years. It is hard to find one man in the wide world when he is smart about not being found.

It should also be noted this effort did involve torture, or at the very least coercive interrogation methods. The first two mentions of Ahmed the Kuwaiti were made by Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Mohammed al-Qahtani in coercive interrogation sessions. The third, the misleading characterization of the Kuwaiti as retired by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, came during one of his many waterboarding sessions. Hassan Ghul verified the Kuwaiti’s central role during secret interrogation sessions at an undisclosed CIA detention center. It is not known what methods were used on Ghul, but the agency did seek permission from the Justice Department to employ coercion. There is no simplistic narrative of a hard-pressed detainee coughing up a critical lead, but there is also no way of knowing if these disclosures would have come without resorting to harsh methods. In the case of Qahtani, in particular, given his long nd stubborn resistance, it seems unlikely. Torture may not have been decisive, or even necessary, but it was clearly part of the story.

Efforts to characterize bin Laden as living a cushy life in a “luxury” compound were not just false—they missed a far more telling point. The compound in Abbottabad was large for the neighborhood, but it housed four adult couples and nearly twenty children. By all indications, bin Laden’s lifestyle, by choice, was a far sight below an American middle-class citizen. There are prisons in the United States with better accommodations—although none allow cohabitation with three wives. Far more revealing was his need to hide from everyone, even his own family and closest neighbors. Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, the most notorious criminal of his time during the 1980s and early 1990s and a fugitive from his own country and U.S. special forces, lived and moved openly for most of that time in his home city of Medellin, where he was revered by many. There are men the United States considers terrorists living right now in regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan who are revered in their own tribes and regions, and who live openly in them. Bin Laden had no place in the world where many revered him. Al Qaeda was not a popular movement in his home country of Saudi Arabia or anywhere else in the Arab world or the Middle East. It had its adherents, enough to turn out an angry crowd when provoked by, say, the publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet, or a public demonstration of Koran burning by a buffoonish Florida pastor, but compared to the millions of Arabs who took to the streets to demand the vote in the spring of 2011, al Qaeda was nothing more than a small and violent cult. Bin Laden’s “Nation” of like-minded Muslims was pure fantasy. If he had dared show his face in Pakistan, a Muslim country, someone would have turned him in, if not because it was the right thing to do then for the $25 million reward. It is possible that someone did, since the CIA has not told the whole story and will not say whether anyone has collected the reward.

Obama’s decision to beef up the assault force, to plan for the possibility that the SEAL team would have to fight its way out of the country, did not save the raid. No JSOC mission like this one would proceed without a Quick Reaction Force close by. McRaven would have brought two Chinooks into Pakistan for backup and fuel anyway. The larger force commissioned by Obama, the soldiers and aircraft that would have been summoned if there were a significant response by Pakistani forces, stayed parked in Afghanistan throughout. They were not needed.

The president’s decision to equip the force with enough backup strength to fight its way out of Pakistan, if necessary, said a lot about the deteriorating state of relations with that country. As one of the principals pointed out at the April 28 decision meeting, if the ties were so weak that this raid would break them, then they were not going to last long anyway. Coming off bitter negotiations to free CIA contractor Raymond Davis, Obama clearly did not relish the idea of negotiating for the release of two dozen SEALs—or, as he put it to me, “I thought the possibilities of them being held, being subject to politics inside of Pakistan, were going to be very, very difficult.” McRaven had been running occasional raids into North and South Waziristan for years, raids that were officially forbidden but privately winked at by Islamabad, so he had every reason to believe that if his men were discovered in Abbottabad and confronted, something could be worked out. In weighing the repercussions of a mission gone bad, he made the entirely reasonable decision that dead Pakistanis would be more harmful to America’s interests than a team of SEALs discovered to be someplace they didn’t belong. The president felt differently. As it happens, the skill of the raiding force made such considerations moot.

When Obama decided to launch the raid, he was not acting against the advice of his top-level advisers. There was near unanimity for taking action at the April 28 decision meeting, with only Biden urging the president to wait, and with Cartwright and Leiter preferring to strike bin Laden with a small missile fired from a drone. Gates preferred the drone option at the meeting but had reversed himself by the following morning. All of the other top aides and advisers, principals, deputies, and staffers, particularly those closest to the analysis and planning process, unequivocally supported the raid. And as for Biden’s “five hundred year” boast, it says less about the audacity of the mission than it does about the vice president’s appreciation of military history.

It is worth noting one far more daring effort, thirty-one years earlier, if only because it is rarely appreciated as such. When President Carter rolled the dice on a long-shot mission to free more than fifty American hostages in Iran, even the men who went gave themselves only a 20 percent chance of success. The consequences of its failure—eight dead, another nine months of captivity for the hostages, Carter’s loss of a second term—painfully illustrate how much of a gamble it was. Nevertheless, a year after the bin Laden raid, Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2012 election, would take a gratuitous slap at Carter in diminishing the significance of Obama’s decision, arguing that “anyone in the Oval Office would have made the same call, even Jimmy Carter.” A stronger argument could be made that Romney himself would not have ordered the raid, since he had criticized Obama in 2007 for even considering to do such a thing.

Of all the exaggerations that followed the raid, perhaps the most interesting was Brennan’s initial insistence that bin Laden had been killed in a “firefight” and had used women as “shields.” The White House subsequently backed off these statements, and the most obvious explanation for them appears to be a combination of three things: genuine confusion in the first hours, a completely unnecessary desire to boost the heroism of the SEALs, and the eagerness of an old warrior to paint his longtime enemy in an unfavorable light. Brennan had been on bin Laden’s case for almost fifteen years, ever since he had worked as a CIA officer in the Middle East in the 1990s, and the success of the raid was as much of a personal triumph for him as anyone. So he gloated a little, before a worldwide audience. His comments proved to be an embarrassment.

Contrary to initial reports, there was no firefight at the compound. Based on my own reporting and the published account of one of the SEALs, it appears that after an initial burst of inaccurate rounds from Saeed, all of the shooting was done by the SEALs. It is important to note that the SEALs were fired upon initially, even if only briefly and ineffectually. The gunfire confirmed that at least some occupants of the compound were armed and resisting. Having taken this fire, the team had to expect to be fired upon again until the entire compound was secured. None of the other five adults shot in the raid—four killed and two injured—were armed. The raiders were discerning. None of the children were harmed, and only one of the three women shot was killed. It is difficult to second-guess men risking their lives in the rapid takedown of a residence harboring implacable enemies who had fired on them, in the dark, but available evidence suggests that if the SEALs had wanted to take bin Laden alive, they could have.

The Sheik had been upstairs for nearly fifteen minutes as the men approached. If the house had been rigged with explosives for a final suicide blast—and the presence of children argued against it—there would have been ample time for him to detonate before he was confronted in the upstairs bedroom. Amal’s wounding and the need to move her away from the fallen bin Laden apparently prompted the claims of a human shield. According to published accounts and my sources, bin Laden was killed by several shots, one to his head, which knocked him down, and the others to his chest as he lay on the floor, apparently dying. Bin Laden was not actively surrendering, but he was not actively resisting either. It is reasonable to argue, under the circumstances, that if the SEALs’ first priority had been to take him alive, he would be in U.S. custody today, and Obama would have his “political capital” for the criminal prosecution of the 9/11 ringleaders.

What is more likely is that the SEALs had no intention of taking bin Laden alive, even though no one in the White House or chain of command issued such an order. Indeed, it would have taken a strong directive to capture him to forgo the chance to shoot him dead. The men who conducted the raid were veterans of many raids, hardened to violence and death. Their inclination would have been to shoot bin Laden on sight, just as they shot the other men they encountered in the compound.

It is worth imagining, however, the alternative scenario. Bin Laden at the defendant’s table before a judge and jury might have been considerably less inspiring to his followers than bin Laden the martyr. He might have proved implacable in interrogation, but often the more powerful, elder figures in an illicit organization are more amenable to compromise than their underlings. If he chose to talk to his interrogators, he possessed more information than anyone about al Qaeda, its organization and finances, its personnel and methods, its history and ideology, its ongoing projects. Having him in custody would have posed legal and political challenges, but as the president explained to me, he felt such a coup might have worked to his benefit. So as satisfying as it was for millions of Americans to learn that the world’s most notorious terrorist was dead, and that his last sight on Earth was of a Navy SEAL leveling an automatic rifle, a live de-mythologized bin Laden might well have been a better outcome.

The documents seized at the compound revealed bin Laden to be a determined and hectoring correspondent, still dreaming of mass murder in America, but also clearly isolated, frustrated, and out of touch with his group’s remaining capabilities. The currents of history had left him behind; he just hadn’t accepted it yet.

All in all, these efforts to massage the facts about the killing of bin Laden were nothing on the order of President Bush’s showboat landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, and his speech beneath the giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, which set a standard for presidential hotdogging that will long stand and will no doubt embarrass Bush until his dying day. In that case the mission—the U.S. invasion of Iraq—was still decidedly unaccomplished, and would remain so for another long and bloody eight years. In his memoir Decision Points, Bush suggests that the message conveyed by that event was not the one intended, but nevertheless concludes: “It was a big mistake.”

There was nothing on that scale from the Obama White House. Nevertheless, its handling of success illustrates the folly of straining to take credit. Harry Truman said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” The flip side of that observation ought to be: “It is amazing how much credit flows to the deserving who don’t claim it.”

Obama has apparently received lasting credit from the American people. His poll numbers jumped almost 10 percentage points after his Sunday evening announcement, and a year later had leveled off to a point slightly higher than where they were before. Killing bin Laden did diminish the perception of Obama as inauthentic, despite the efforts of his Republican opponents. The president’s popularity remained high even among those who were disappointed in his policies. It also took away any hopes they had of portraying him as a pacifist. Having ended America’s military involvement in Iraq and begun the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he might have been vulnerable to charges of “softness” on national security. Killing bin Laden placed Obama’s commander in chief credentials on secure footing. It boldly underscored his punishing pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership. Even as this effort spread to Yemen, the number of terror attacks attributed to al Qaeda’s various franchises has declined steadily. By 2012 the United States was increasingly targeting midlevel fighters, and the overall number of U.S. drone strikes steadily fell. There is no way to know for sure, but the numbers suggest a dwindling number of targets. U.S. intelligence capabilities have not themselves diminished.

Three days after the raid, in an interview on 60 Minutes, the president said, “It was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for my presidency, but I think for the United States since I’ve been president. Obviously bin Laden had been not only a symbol of terrorism, but a mass murderer who had eluded justice for so long, and so many families who had been affected I think had given up hope. And for us to be able to definitively say, ‘We’ve got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who has been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world,’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of.”

Killing bin Laden was not a feat of leadership comparable to launching armies across the English Channel or staring down Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War, but it was a clear military victory in an age that produces few of them. For Americans, it supplied the right hard ending to the story of 9/11, and will likely mark the symbolic end of al Qaeda, if not the real one. The organization itself was already reeling when its founder died, as much from the unfolding revolutions in the Arab world as the constant pounding of American drones and special operators, which is why bin Laden’s death, or martyrdom, did not act as a spur to recruitment. Whatever romantic appeal his cause once had, and it never had that much, has been superseded. The popular election of Islamist governments in Egypt and Tunisia may worry the West, but the ability to effect change through legitimate means has undercut the pull of violent extremism. Bin Laden himself was wrestling with this problem in the weeks before his death. The group’s methods had already alienated it from even like-minded Muslims. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s new leader, was still at large in mid-2012, but he exhibits little of the talent to inspire or organize.

Almost a year later, the president told me, “I think, internationally, it reminded the world that the American military is head and shoulders above anybody else, and that we can do things really well that nobody else can do. I think it reminded the American people that there are at least aspects of our government that can do things really well, and that when we put our mind to something we can pull together and fulfill our commitments.

“When I went up to New York for that small ceremony after bin Laden was killed, to talk to those guys at the fire station who had lost half their unit, and to meet with the children of those who had been killed in 9/11, and the widows and the widowers, and to just understand how fully they appreciated that America hadn’t forgotten about them and what happened, the feelings were profound. The mission created some difficulties for us. I think it strained our relations with Pakistan, and we already had strained relations there, and so laid bare this tension, the fact that there are still safe havens inside the country. And so managing that has been a challenge over the last year. But this is one of those times where you make a decision, you’re not sure that it’s going to work out and, in retrospect, you can say that it did work out.”

America’s troubled relationship with Pakistan badly worsened for a time, and then worsened still more after a “friendly fire” incident in November 2011 killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. But the relationship, which, as Hillary Clinton noted, has long been based more on mutual need than on friendship and trust, has endured. In return for many U.S. dollars, Pakistan reopened supply routes to U.S. forces in Afghanistan in July 2012, and American drone strikes in Waziristan continued.

Pakistan held bin Laden’s wives, children, and grandchildren for nearly a year and then deported them to Saudi Arabia. Under interrogation by intelligence agents there and by the CIA, the women revealed that bin Laden had been living in Pakistan for seven or eight years. He had moved four times before settling into the Abbottabad compound, and had fathered four children. If accounts from Pakistani authorities are to be believed, the al Qaeda founder’s domestic arrangements were less than blissful. The eldest of the three wives with him, Khairiah, especially resented the youngest wife, Amal—so much so that she was accused by Siham, the third wife at Abbottabad, of betraying their husband to the CIA. If so, I found no evidence to support it. None apparently had any useful information to disclose about al Qaeda’s surviving leadership. The compound was destroyed in February 2012.

The Pakistani doctor who worked with the CIA in an effort to obtain a DNA sample from the bin Laden children, Shakil Afridi, was arrested and tried for treason. He is serving a thirty-three-year sentence. Pakistan claims the conviction was for charges unrelated to assisting the CIA, but the doctor’s imprisonment was roundly condemned by the United States and American authorities continue to work for his release.

“This is the man’s passion, keeping children healthy,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official. “He sets up clinics throughout Pakistan to inoculate children. We offered him money to set up an inoculation clinic in Abbottabad, not a fake one, but a real inoculation clinic. The money we paid him was put back into his program. He had no idea why we were interested.”

A Senate panel voted to cut $33 million in aid to Pakistan in retaliation, a million for every year of the doctor’s sentence. Senator John McCain called his work for the CIA “the furthest thing from treason.”

On the Friday after the raid, Obama flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to meet with the SEAL team and chopper pilots. Initially, the president asked to meet with the SEALs, and McRaven suggested that if he traveled to Campbell he could also thank the Night Stalker pilots based there, whose unit had not received the same recognition as the mission’s shooters.

“We can bring all the players to Fort Campbell,” the admiral told Donilon, and suggested that in addition the president could then also meet with the 101st Airborne Division, which had just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan. So Obama attended four events there that day, ending it with a speech to more than two thousand soldiers.

The first event was with the SEAL team and pilots from the actual mission. They assembled in a drab classroom on the base. Obama was struck by how “ordinary” the group was. With only one or two exceptions, the men did not resemble the bulked-up heroes of Hollywood action films, but a group of fit-looking men who ranged in age from their late twenties to early forties. There were some with gray hair. Dressed differently, he thought, they could have been bankers or lawyers. It wasn’t their physical skills that distinguished them, he realized, it was their hard-earned experience and wisdom.

In the front of the classroom was a model of the compound. McRaven had said they would walk the president through the mission in detail. They would tell him everything, except which of them had shot bin Laden. That secret would stay with the team. The president did not ask, and the team did not offer.

Then the helicopter pilot who had so skillfully crashed his Black Hawk inside the compound stood up to speak. He was a tall, thin man with dark hair, who appeared unused to speaking before a group, especially one that included the president of the United States. He described exactly what had happened with his chopper, and how deliberate his crash had been. He explained that once he realized it was going down he maneuvered it to catch the tail on the wall so that it would land upright.

“Was the weather a factor?” Obama asked.

“Yes,” the pilot said. The air had been warmer and less dense than the mission plan had anticipated, and then he explained in detail the aerodynamics that brought the Black Hawk down.

When he was finished the SEAL team commander spoke. He was dead serious and perfectly at ease addressing the group. He began by thanking the chopper pilot. “I am here today,” he said, “because of the amazing work that this guy did.” He then gave a long account of exactly how their successful mission had been “ten years in the making.” The capability he and the other men in the classroom represented had been honed over all those years of combat, he said. Their skills and tactics had been purchased with the lives of many men who had served with them. He mentioned the operating bases in Afghanistan that were named in honor of these men. Every one of them, along with everyone else they had served with over the years, was, in effect, a member of the team. Then he explained how the raid’s success had depended on every member of the team present in the room, and gave examples. He cited the skill of the pilot setting the falling chopper down upright. He cited the middle-aged translator who was able to turn away the curious people outside the compound.

“I don’t know what we would have done if all those people had just started rushing the compound,” he said.

He cited others. He even mentioned Cairo, the dog.

“You had a dog?” the president asked, surprised.

“Yes, sir, we always have a dog with us,” the commander said.

“Well,” said Obama, “I would like to meet that dog.”

“Well, Mr. President, then I would advise you to bring treats,” said the commander sternly.

The men in the room laughed.

The commander then walked the president through details of the raid. When he made reference to some of the errors and controversy in the press about the details, Obama dismissed them.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the president. “That’s just Washington, that’s just media, that’s just noise.”

Again, the men laughed.

The commander described how going through the house and encountering bin Laden had happened quickly and without complication, from his perspective. He said he and the men had been surprised by how much potentially valuable material was upstairs, and how they had just begun rapidly stuffing it into bags. Perhaps the most complicated part of the mission, he said, had been herding the wives and children to a far corner of the compound while the downed chopper was rigged with explosives, making sure that no one was hurt when they blew it up.

When the commander finished, the president stood and thanked them. He described how, among his advisers, there had been a wide range of estimates about whether bin Laden was in the compound.

“But early on in this process I came to terms with the fact that there was always going to be a fifty-fifty case on the intelligence side,” he said. “I made the decision I did because I had one hundred percent confidence in your capability.” He called them “the finest small fighting force in the history of the world.”

Rhodes looked around the room and thought that the claim, while extreme, might actually be true. Here was the cream of JSOC, handpicked for this mission. Given the previous ten years of constant fighting, it was not likely there had ever been such a group of experienced assaulters, at least not in modern times. The president had earlier presented McRaven with a gift, a gold-plated tape measure, because he had not had one the night he tried to measure bin Laden’s body. Now he presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation, the highest honor the nation bestows on an entire military group. He then shook every hand in the room. He was startled and moved when the team presented him with a gift, a flag they had taken on the mission and had framed, signed on the back by all the team members. He hung it in his residence on the second floor of the White House.

When I spoke with the president in the Oval Office, he reflected on how drones represented the most remarkable new tool he had in fighting al Qaeda, and how the nature of drone warfare posed unique dangers for someone in his position.

“I think creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and for my successors for some time to come—partly because that technology may evolve fairly rapidly for other countries as well, and there’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems.”

But nearly as remarkable, he said, was the evolution of small, highly skilled teams of warriors like those SEALs.

“I think with Special Forces, the dangers [of using them too liberally] are smaller because the human element is still there. Those are still somebody’s dad, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son. When you send them in, you know they may not come back. And for me at least, as commander in chief, I don’t think about that any more casually than I do when I’m sending some green kid off to Kandahar. I think there’s just a solemnity and caution that that instills in me that probably won’t go away. I do think that just from a broader military strategy perspective, that we can’t overstate what Special Forces can do. Special Forces are well designed to deal with very specific targets in difficult terrain and oftentimes can prevent us from making the bigger strategic mistakes of sending forces in, with big footprints and so forth. And so when you’re talking about dealing with terrorist networks in failed states, or states that don’t have capacity, you can see that as actually being less intrusive, less dangerous, less problematic for the country involved.

“But ultimately, none of this stuff works if we’re not partnering effectively with other countries, if we’re not engaging in smart diplomacy, if we’re not trying to change our image in the Muslim world to reduce recruits [to extremism]. It’s not an end-all, be-all. I’m sure glad we have it, though.”

Taken together, these capabilities, this weapon forged to fight the latest kind of war, has all but done the job. I asked what the impact of bin Laden’s death had been on al Qaeda.

“It was what we anticipated,” he said. “They are without focus, without effective leadership. And when you combine that with the degradation of their operational personnel, they’re on the way to strategic defeat. But again, you can’t overstate the importance of these other elements of American power, because even before bin Laden was killed, we had already seen the operational capacity of al Qaeda shift to AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and Yemen. We had already seen al Qaeda metastasize into al Qaeda in Maghreb. And so the need for vigilance and stick-to-it-ness is critical.

“And what we’ve also seen is the capacity of lone-wolf terrorists to do damage—not the kind of damage we saw on 9/11, but damage that is still obviously painful, and we’ve got to do something about. So it [killing bin Laden] didn’t solve all our problems, and we didn’t expect it to. But it was a big piece of business. And I’ll always be grateful for both the intelligence and the military personnel who were involved in it. They deserve all the credit.”

In the days after the raid, an album of photographs was delivered to the White House, a series of shots of the dead bin Laden. There would be much discussion that week about whether these photos should be made public, as proof of death, but the president had firmly decided that they would not. The decision was made easier because no one disputed the fact of bin Laden’s death. America was not, the president said, going to “spike the football.”

As the White House had worked that Sunday night to get the message out, stumbling on the presentation but basking in the country’s exhilarated response, Admiral McRaven’s men were, in the early hours of Monday morning, at work preparing for the disposal of the Sheik’s body.

After much discussion and advice, it had been decided that the best option would be burial at sea. That way there would be no shrine for the martyr’s misguided followers. So the body was washed, photographed from every conceivable angle, and then flown on a V-22 Osprey to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson cruising in the North Arabian Sea.

As a formality, the State Department contacted Saudi Arabia’s government and offered to deliver the body to his home country, but bin Laden was as unwanted there in death as he had been in life. Told that the alternative was burial at sea, the Saudi official said, “We like your plan.”

Procedures for a simple Muslim burial were performed on the carrier. The body was wrapped in a white shroud with weights to sink it.

The last sequence of color photos in the death album were not grotesque. They were strangely moving. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight Monday morning, May 2. One frame shows the body wrapped in the weighted white shroud. The next shows it diagonal on a flat board, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water with a small splash. In the next it is visible just below the surface, a ghostly torpedo descending. In the next shot there are only circular ripples on the blue surface. In the final frame the waters are calm.

The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.