The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

3. Taking Up Arms

Late Summer 2010

“Mr. President, Leon and the guys at Langley think they may have come up with something.”

Tom Donilon brought this up at the end of President Obama’s morning briefing one day in August. Instead of being briefed on sensitive national security issues by a CIA analyst, as President Bush had been, Obama preferred to be briefed by Donilon, his deputy national security adviser. Donilon would continue this practice even after he stepped into the top National Security Council job a few months later. It was that time of year when not much was going on in Washington. Heat and humidity drove everyone from the capital except the most determined tourists and those who had to stay.

“Something related to bin Laden,” Donilon said. “We don’t know yet what this is, but I think you need to have them in here for a briefing.”

Donilon had been with Obama ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign, when he was summoned to reprise a role he had played for President Clinton, coaching the candidate for a series of formal debates with his Republican rival. The Bush years had been a long break from government service for Donilon, who had continued with his work as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae for several years and had then moved on to become a partner in the D.C. law firm O’Melveny & Myers. But his heart was still in politics and governance, and when he was invited to help prep Obama for his face-off against Republican candidate Senator John McCain he leapt at it. He believed in the importance of presidential debates. They not only gave the public a better sense of the candidates, but they forced those running to examine the weaknesses in their own thinking and policy prescriptions, and to confront them, before an audience of millions. One of the first recommendations he made to Obama, which was adopted, was that he debate McCain on foreign policy issues first, precisely because it was an arena in which the veteran senator and war hero was thought to have a strong advantage. McCain’s storied military service in Vietnam, where he was held prisoner for five years after his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down over Hanoi, and his twenty-six years in Congress, weighed impressively against Obama, who, twenty-five years younger than McCain, had never served in the military and had yet to complete his first Senate term. On paper, McCain had stronger qualifications for the job. But presidents were not hired, they were elected, and even the most distinguished résumé counted for little next to the impression the candidates made on the public. Donilon felt that if Obama could be seen on national television holding his own in a national security debate with McCain, voters could better begin to imagine him as their president. And better for that to happen sooner than later. He believed this is what Obama accomplished.

His role in prepping the candidate meant confronting him with the cracks in his thinking before he stepped onstage. In that sense, Donilon was one of the only people around Obama whose job it was to kick him, so to speak—to ruffle the candidate’s famous cool. He worked at tripping Obama, poking holes in his reasoning, challenging his facts, pushing him beyond his stump-tested applause lines and polished talking points.

“All right, that’s what you say on the campaign trail,” he would say, “but if you are pressed on it, what do you really mean?”

Or, “I’ve heard you say that, but are you willing to live with it as president?”

Or, sniffing disagreeably at one of the candidate’s typically long-winded responses, “And how do you explain that in ninety seconds?”

The candidate must have liked this sort of thing, because he had kept his tormentor close ever since. Donilon found him to possess a fine mind and a deep knowledge of American history and the law. It was hard to get the better of him in argument. To engage him fully meant being fully prepared; otherwise you were likely to come away humiliated. A physically expressive man, Obama had a way of shooing away an ill-founded argument with an amused smile or a more subtle expression like a raised eyebrow and dismissive tilt of his head. Donilon worked hard to avoid that look. He was rarely seen outside the corridors of the White House, a rumpled creature of the cramped warren of offices occupied by the National Security Council leadership downstairs. He was rarely interviewed by the press and seemed egoless. Obama drove his inner staff hard, but Donilon, if anything, drove himself harder. He graded his performance every day—high or low. After the election, Obama asked him to chair his State Department transition team, and had then placed him under General James Jones on the NSC staff. Jones, a former Marine Corps commandant, had been recruited in part as a bridge to the U.S. military, with which Obama had virtually no firsthand experience, and he had agreed from the start to stay in the job for only a year or two. From the beginning of the term Donilon was seen as Jones’s likely successor.

It particularly pleased him to have something new for the president about bin Laden. There had been no scent of the world’s most infamous terrorist for more than seven years, ever since he had slipped away from the mountain outpost of Tora Bora during a botched siege by allied troops. The Bush administration had said for years that he was somewhere in the mountainous regions of northwest Pakistan but, in truth, they had no idea. There had not been a lead or a sighting in years. Obama had taken office determined to resurrect the hunt.

On May 26, 2009, four months into his presidency, he had ended a routine national security briefing in the Situation Room by pointing to Donilon, Leon Panetta, his newly appointed CIA director, Mike Leiter, director of the National Counter Terrorism Center, and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff.

“You, you, you, and you,” he said. “Come upstairs. I want to talk to you guys about something.”

The four followed Obama up a short flight of stairs and through the warren of narrow West Wing hallways to the Oval Office. Afternoon sun poured through the windows from the Rose Garden. They didn’t sit down. This was something quick that the president had been thinking about and wanted to impress on them personally. They had been on the job now long enough to have taken hold of America’s vast intelligence apparatus… time enough to have eased fully into their new roles.

As Donilon would tell me, Obama said: “Here’s the deal. I want this hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to come to the front of the line. I worry that the trail has gone cold. This has to be our top priority and it needs leadership in the tops of your organizations. You need to ensure that we have expended every effort to take down the top leadership of al Qaeda, especially these two individuals. And I want regular reports on this to me, and I want them starting in thirty days.”

Donilon followed up and drove the point home with a memo, which the president signed. He sent it to each of those present. It read: “In order to ensure that we have extended every effort—directly provide to me a detailed operational plan for locating and bringing to justice Osama bin Laden.”

That brief huddle in the Oval Office had not been scheduled, as virtually every minute of the president’s day was, and Obama had not discussed it beforehand with Donilon. The president had plenty of other things to think about. He was beginning to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and was reevaluating the future of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. He had authorized a covert cyberwar on Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and he was trying to assemble a coalition to apply economic pressure on that country to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons. He had vigorously expanded the secret program to target al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan and other countries with drones, putting unrelenting daily pressure on the organization. He was trying to counter a Chinese military buildup by reorienting the nation’s military forces toward the Pacific Rim. So there was plenty on the agenda every time his national security team sat down with him. But as the president would later tell me, he wasn’t hearing enough about bin Laden to convince him that everything was being done, that every effort was being made. He wanted to make sure the right people knew what a big priority this was for him. And in the months that had followed, in between those monthly reports, he brought the matter up again and again. It was one of several things he raised at nearly every security meeting. He would always ask about cybersecurity efforts and he would always ask about Osama bin Laden.

Obama’s leadership style was to enumerate clear, consistent priorities, and stay focused on them until they were accomplished. About twice a year he would meet with the national security team for several hours with nothing else on the agenda. He would bring in a legal pad on which he had listed his priorities in handwriting so small and meticulous that from across the room it looked like type.

“Hey guys, these are the three most important things we’re working on right now,” he’d say. “And this is where I want your efforts.”

He’d go through his list item by item and they would discuss and critique their performance: where they had made progress and where they had not. Often he would move things up or down on his list or add things, but when he was done everyone had a clear understanding of where they should be spending their time and resources. Always, from the first such session, finding bin Laden had been at the top of that list.

As far as Obama was concerned, getting him was more than just symbolic. He had long been critical of Bush’s “War on Terror.” The way he saw it, America was not at war with something amorphous, like a concept or a tactic. It was at war with specific individuals who had attacked the country and continued to threaten it. When he took office in 2009 al Qaeda and its affiliate organizations remained the first clear and present danger, even after two long, bloody wars and the unceasing efforts of America’s intelligence and special ops soldiers.

Obama had been sternly warned about this by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Brookings Institution scholar whom he had called at home just days after the inauguration and asked to conduct a sixty-day review of American policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Eight days before he had pulled his intelligence chiefs into the Oval Office, Riedel had briefed him on his findings in a long meeting aboard Air Force One. He had told Obama that, in his estimation, al Qaeda was more dangerous today than it had been on September 11.

As Bob Woodward would report in his 2010 book, Obama’s Wars, Riedel said, “Some al Qaeda watchers would argue that bin Laden, hiding in Pakistan, is irrelevant. He’s stuck in a cave somewhere, and yes, he puts out these audiotapes once in a while, but he’s more of a symbol than the commander of a global jihad. What I learned is that’s just not true. He communicates with his underlings and is in touch with his foot soldiers. His troops believe they are getting his orders, and we know from good intelligence that they are… These guys are serious. They are clever, and they are relentless. Until we kill them, they’re going to keep trying to kill us.”

As Obama saw it, there was no way to defeat al Qaeda so long as its founder and spiritual leader remained at large. He was the soul of the organization. The president believed that bin Laden wasn’t just evil, he was charismatically evil.

“He understood that with technology and modern media, the potential impact of a big event can magnify and leverage the power of even a small group,” the president told me. “In that sense, although the notions of terrorism hadn’t obviously developed or started with him, I think he had an understanding of the West and where our potential vulnerable points were that made him a singular figure, somebody who was uniquely capable of doing great damage to us.”

Despite the simple life he preferred and his romantic notions of the past, bin Laden understood modern media and exploited it, Obama said. It gave him an influence far beyond the reach of his actual following. The September 11 attacks had shaken the world.

President Bush had felt the same way. Unable to squelch his Texas swagger early on, he had said he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.” But in the view of the Obama administration, the two wars Bush had launched gradually became usurping priorities. There is, as Donilon would put it, “limited bandwidth” in the White House. In the final years of the Bush administration, even though the man at the top still badly wanted bin Laden, the effort to find him was publicly downplayed in the way Riedel explained. It was said that bin Laden was out of touch. That he had been effectively sidelined and, so far as operations were concerned, rendered irrelevant. Unable to find him, the Bush administration had de-emphasized the importance of finding him.

The way Obama saw it, this was a mistake. America’s war-making bureaucracy was vast, and without determined pressure from the White House, without an enumerated list of priorities that kept coming back and coming back until each item was crossed off, even urgent concerns got lost. Just keeping track of all the missions under way on any given day was more than a full-time job. There were U.S. troops on the ground in more than 150 countries around the world. When those missions turned hot, as they had in Afghanistan and Iraq, they devoured not just men and resources but the time and attention of the decision makers atop the chain of command. The essence of leading any very large enterprise was maintaining priorities, and while bin Laden had never slipped from the top during the Bush years, the list itself had become very crowded. The bottom line, as Obama put it to Panetta and Leiter, was that bin Laden’s trail had gone cold. The president wanted it warm again.

Now, more than a year later, the agency finally had something to report. It had found an unusual compound just outside Abbottabad while looking for an al Qaeda figure who went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, “Ahmed the Kuwaiti,” a man known to have been a trusted aide and courier for bin Laden. Along with family, known associates, financial webs, and other networks, couriers had long been seen as potential cracks in the walls around the fugitive Sheik. Too wary to use cell phones or Internet links, bin Laden relied on couriers to distribute by hand his letters, poems, and occasional video and audio pronouncements. Reversing the paths to media outlets taken by these tapes or thumb drives always ended one or two steps short of their origin. The Kuwaiti might be one of those final links, perhaps even the courier who dealt with the Sheik directly. The search for him had lasted eight years. It had taken the CIA five just to learn his real name, which was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. And then the trail had led them to this very curious residence.

Panetta brought two of the agency’s bin Laden team leaders with him to the Oval Office. The lead analyst, who would become known as “John” (his middle name), was a tall former college basketball player, now middle-aged, who had devoted himself to the hunt for most of the previous ten years. He had a broad chin and a big-featured face and looked more like an athlete than someone who spent most of his time before a computer monitor. At Langley, he reported to Michael Morell, who had risen to deputy director in the years since he had been briefing Bush.

The agency men handed around classified pictures and maps and analytical material, and walked the president and Donilon through their thinking in great detail—the reverse engineering that had helped them identify “Ahmed the Kuwaiti” and the suspicious nature of the compound itself. Panetta compared Abbottabad to a well-to-do northern Virginia suburb. The compound was eight times larger than any of the surrounding residences. Unlike most, it did not have any Internet or phone connections. The walls that surrounded it were built unusually high, topped by two feet of barbed wire. There were even walls around a patio at the back of the third floor. There was no way to see inside the house itself, from the ground or above. The windows were made of reflective glass or had been coated to achieve the same effect. The agency first learned that not only Ahmed and his family lived there, but also his brother Abrar and his family. They went by assumed names in the neighborhood, Ibrahim called himself Arshad Khan and his brother went by the name Tareq Khan. Both had been born in Kuwait, but ethnically they were tall, fair-skinned, bearded Pakistani Pashtuns. They had never been wealthy, but their compound appeared extremely pricey. And in addition to the high walls, it seemed the brothers observed extraordinarily strict security measures. They even burned all of their trash on-site. Other than to attend the local religious school or to visit a doctor, none of their children left the compound. In telephone calls to other far-flung family members, always made from locations distant from the compound itself, they lied about where they were living. The CIA had been known to misinterpret many things, but one thing it knew inside out was high operational security.

The agency had been investigating the compound quietly, snapping pictures from above and spying on it with agents on the ground—who couldn’t see inside but who asked casual questions of those living nearby, always careful not to appear too curious. Who lives in that big place? I wonder what the people who live there do? That and telephone intercepts had produced two discoveries in recent weeks that the agency considered greatly significant, and persuaded Panetta that he ought to bring the discovery to the president.

The first was that living inside the compound on the upper two floors of the big house was a third family. No member of that family ever left the grounds. Its children did not even leave to attend school with the others. Neighbors in Abbottabad who knew of the Khan brothers and their families were not aware of this third one. And there were signs that the brothers, who ostensibly owned the place, served this hidden family. One or the other brother was always present, so the third family was never left alone. Ibrahim Ahmed and his family occupied the guesthouse on the grounds, and his brother Abrar and his family lived on the first floor of the main house.

The second discovery was that Ibrahim Ahmed was apparently still working for al Qaeda. Though he was known to have been close to bin Laden years earlier, the agency had no proof that he had retained the connection. Some of the detainees interviewed about him over the years had said that he had left the organization, in which case he might now be working for anyone with a need to lie low: An organized crime figure? A rich man with political enemies? A Saudi millionaire with a mistress or hidden second family? But in a telephone conversation with an old friend that summer, a call that the United States monitored, Ahmed was peppered with the standard questions—“What are you doing now? What are you up to?” At first he didn’t answer. He dodged the questions. But his friend was insistent, and so he finally gave in, albeit cryptically. “I’m with the same ones as before,” he said. His friend seemed to know immediately what that meant and, after uttering “May Allah be with you,” dropped the subject. That suggested that whomever Ahmed and his brother were minding in Abbottabad belonged to al Qaeda.

These were the details presented to the president.

“This is the best lead we’ve had on bin Laden since Tora Bora,” said “John.”

Obama was familiar enough with bin Laden’s background to have long ago stopped picturing him crouched in a cave or living in some sparse mountaintop camp. But to find him in a sprawling compound in an affluent neighborhood known for golf courses and cool summer breezes—they were all surprised by that. Still, the president wasn’t especially hopeful. He knew he had been leaning hard on the CIA to come up with something, and demanding updates, so he had to expect they would bring him every scrap. This was a scrap. He found the information intriguing, but only in a general way. The connection to bin Laden was tenuous at best. He encouraged Panetta to press on. He wanted the identity of the hidden family nailed down. He also wanted a “close hold” on the lead, meaning it was not to leave his office. No one else in the military or intelligence chain was to be brought in yet. And they were not to seek help from Pakistan or tip their interest in the compound there… yet. The president left open the option of going to his purported Pakistani allies for help once they knew more. In the meantime, he wanted regular progress reports.

“Just emotionally,” Obama told me, “I was not particularly optimistic about it. I mean, I think my general view was, okay, these guys are carrying out my orders to pursue every lead. Did I think at that stage that we had the goods? I think I was pretty guarded about not letting myself get overly excited about the prospects.”

At that point, the president had been ordering drone hits and special operations raids to kill al Qaeda leaders for nearly twenty months. The skills of America’s intelligence and military, honed over nine years of war, had given him tools no president had ever had. National Security Council meetings in this presidency were not just policy discussions. They regularly concerned matters of life and death for specific individuals. The capability developed over the previous decade armed the president with immediate choices about these prospective targets—people who had been found and identified and were now in the nation’s crosshairs. They could be killed on his orders without placing a single American in jeopardy. There had been fifty-three drone strikes in Pakistan alone in the first year of his term. In 2010 there had been more than twice that number: 117. The numbers of strikes in Yemen, while fewer, had been steadily increasing every year, from two in 2009 to four in 2010. There would be ten the following year. Nearly every day the president faced immediate, deadly choices. Should this specific person be killed? Would killing him possibly involve killing others—others less culpable, perhaps others completely innocent?

Decisions like this had always come with the office, and sometimes had concerned questions of life and death for thousands, or even hundreds of thousands—one thinks of President Harry S. Truman making the decision to drop the atom bomb. But how many of these decisions concerned taking a single life? It gave the commander in chief a strangely direct role in the war. There were precedents. During World War II, American forces decrypted a Japanese message revealing that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese fleet, would be making an inspection tour of the Solomon Islands. His plane was intercepted and shot down, and he was killed. President Kennedy had notoriously plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro during the early 1960s. But these incidents were rare, and were undertaken at great risk. Toward the end of his second term, President Bush, and now Obama, had what was, in essence, a sniper rifle pointed at men regarded as significant terrorists. Obama was routinely presented with a brief on the target: who he was, how important he was, how dangerous he was, how much it might matter to be rid of him, and who else might die as a result. He had only to decide to pull the trigger. This was something new.

This war had demanded something new. After the 9/11 attacks, the two most obvious ways of fighting back had both been defensive: prevent the most dangerous kinds of attacks and prepare to cope better with smaller ones when they occurred. So the United States had spent billions on efforts to block known or obvious avenues of attack, and to improve emergency response. This is what the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration had been all about. Another step was to secure materials worldwide, such as plutonium, surface-to-air missiles, and toxic biochemicals, that could be used to create especially powerful weapons. This approach is what had led, in part, to President Bush’s invasion of Iraq—to secure Saddam’s supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

As for offensive strategy—going after al Qaeda itself—this became immeasurably more difficult once the organization had scattered from its safe havens in Afghanistan. In solving this problem, the United States would bring to bear enormous resources of talent, wealth, and technology. The story of the previous ten years of war, viewed in this broad sense, had been the story of developing the right tools to destroy a terror network. It was still a work in progress in 2010, but it had come a long way. With the military’s typical disdain for ordinary English, it had slapped an acronym on this capability. It was called “F3EAD” (Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate). It stood for a remarkable fusion of instant global telecommunications, drones, computer-data storage, cutting-edge software, experienced analysts, stealth helicopters, precision munitions, and the operational skills of pilots and shooters who could execute strikes with great surprise and skill virtually anywhere in the world.

When Obama took office he inherited this unprecedented and still-evolving capability. The tool—particularly the use of drones—was proving to be lethal to al Qaeda. As much as it troubled those concerned about potential abuses—pinpointing and killing people by remote control was a scary futuristic concept—it was also, paradoxically, a fundamental advance in the humane pursuit of war. The three basic principles of lawful warfare had long been necessity (violence as a last resort), distinction (targeting the right people), and proportionality (not killing the wrong people). Very few would argue that the nation was not justified in using force to protect itself from Osama bin Laden and his movement, bent on suicidal acts of mass murder. Drones uniquely enhanced compliance with distinction and proportionality. The ability to soundlessly observe a target for days, weeks, or months before deciding to attack greatly improved the odds of hitting appropriate targets and avoiding inappropriate ones. There was no comparison with ground combat or even very precise bombs and missiles. If it was necessary to fight, then drones killed far fewer civilians than any previous war-fighting method, and they did so without placing American fighters at risk.

Obama had kept this capability on a tight leash. In most cases, he alone made the final decision to kill. In some cases, the decision was made by the CIA director. They would review the case against the targets and decide whether to shoot. Obama had directed the Justice Department and the CIA’s legal staff to draw up secret guidelines that would mark the first step toward institutionalizing those controls, so that whoever succeeded him in office would inherit clear rules, clear precedent, and clear constraints. The administration had not made these guidelines public, which troubled many who were concerned about the growing use of drones. There was no doubt that within those strictures, whatever they were, Obama had proven himself willing to pull the trigger regularly.

This surprised many. Bush had brought to the White House a light dusting of military experience—he had served as a pilot in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War period—but he was nevertheless seen by the military as one of them, a president who openly admired the armed forces and who was, to a fault, quick to authorize their deployment. He spoke their can-do vocabulary with a Texas drawl. His father had been a war hero and had served as the CIA director—the headquarters building at Langley was even named after George Herbert Walker Bush. Obama, on the other hand, was strictly civilian. His father was Kenyan. He was a liberal Democrat with an international upbringing—an academic and an intellectual. He had been an early, consistent, and outspoken critic of invading Iraq, which he had called a “dumb war.” Indeed, he had initially geared his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008 as an antiwar candidate, attacking his foes in the primaries, Hillary Clinton in particular, for her early support of the conflict. Obama had also criticized the more controversial tools of the war—coercive interrogation methods, extraordinary rendition, military commissions, and indefinite detention—arguing that the nation’s security should never trump its values. He talked a lot about the need for negotiating with enemies and the virtues of mutual understanding—not the kind of talk that rouses the troops. Much of what most Americans heard from him during his scant twenty months in the Senate concerned hastening America’s withdrawal from Iraq and spelling out his desire for a clearly defined exit strategy from Afghanistan. They had expected an all but pacifist president.

But the number of drone strikes in his first two years would be more than four times the total in Bush’s two terms in the White House. And Obama’s appreciation and enthusiasm for the Special Operations Command was clearly genuine. He seemed to fully embrace General Patraeus’s line about going to bed each night with more friends and fewer enemies—with particular emphasis on the “fewer enemies.”

Those who had been paying close attention to Obama were not surprised. He had been spelling out for years, in increasing detail, his willingness to wage war in general, and, in particular, his intent to wage war on al Qaeda. Just over a year after the September 11attacks, as President Bush was gearing up to invade Iraq, Obama, still largely unknown outside of his Chicago district, was invited to speak at an antiwar rally in Chicago. He was one of the lesser speakers, and his talk wouldn’t even get a line in the account in the next morning’s Chicago Tribune. It was received with lukewarm applause. In his book The Bridge, David Remnick captures Obama’s discomfort at the overall tenor of the rally, listening to the plaintive strains of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” and leaning to one of the event organizers, Bettylu Saltzman, to ask, “Can’t they play something else?” Giving a rousing speech that would excite the gaggle of tired lefties in Federal Plaza might make for a feel-good moment and some admiring local press, but it could also hurt his chances statewide. He had conferred with the consultants helping him prepare for his Senate run, trying to hone a message that, as Remnick wrote, “would express his opposition to an invasion of Iraq without making him seem disqualifyingly weak on terror.” His advisers wanted him to speak—any African-American seeking statewide office in Illinois would need the Chicago vote. But he also had to transcend that audience.

So Obama’s speech was very carefully thought out. It was an early effort at speechmaking and shows it. The speech was overly dramatic and derivative, echoing the famous “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr. It showed careful political calculation but, given what we would see years later, it also expressed conviction. It also showed how far his thinking on the subject had evolved since his comments to the Hyde Park Herald the year before. His first words were: “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.”

Obama took note of the Civil War, “one of the bloodiest in history,” which had driven “the scourge of slavery” from America. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he said. He noted his grandfather’s service in World War II. “He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain,” he said, and then repeated, “I don’t oppose all wars.”

He would continue to repeat that line as a refrain, imitating King’s famous and stirring repetition of the line “I have a dream.” It took cheek to borrow the most famous rhetorical device ever employed by King, the great practitioner of nonviolence, to proclaim his belief in the necessity of war.

“After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars.”

He went on to denounce the pending invasion of Iraq as a “dumb war,” and a “rash war,” but what those listening that day most remembered was his affirmation of war as just and necessary. His belief that some wars were worth fighting. The one against al Qaeda was one of them. It was a doubly bold speech for someone contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate, because it not only ran counter to the blanket antiwar sensibilities of his immediate audience but also bucked the decidedly pro–Iraq War sentiment of Illinois voters, most of whom were far to the right of the small group of protesters in downtown Chicago. Where the Iraq invasion was concerned, Obama was once more out of step with the nation, but where al Qaeda was concerned, he was no longer calling for some sort of global-welfare campaign. He was ready to “take up arms” himself in that war. In a more direct manner than he could have imagined, he would get his chance.

Three years later, after his victory in the 2004 Senate race and rapid ascent to national prominence, Obama was running for president. In August of 2007, he was still struggling. There had been excitement for him when he announced his candidacy in February, but things had quickly leveled off. He was running well behind Hillary Clinton, considered by many to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, and also behind John Edwards, who was thought to be next in line in the unlikely event that Clinton stumbled.

At the time, the strongest thing Obama had going for him seemed to be that 2002 speech. Here was an attractive, smart, antiwar candidate at a time when America’s patience for its adventure in Iraq was at an all-time low. Every Democrat in the race was opposed to continuing the war. They vied now only over who was more emphatically opposed to it. Obama had not been in the Senate when votes were cast to authorize the war so, unlike Clinton and Edwards, he could claim ideological purity on the issue. And the Chicago speech put him on record as having spoken out against it from the start. He was the premier antiwar candidate, and that’s how he presented himself. The simple thrust of his attack on Clinton, in particular, was that she had gone along with Bush on the war, while he had taken the unpopular, principled stand and had been proved right. Over the course of the campaign Obama would be forced to spell out his thinking in more detail, and the picture would become more complex.

His rise was so meteoric that many felt it had come too fast. His opponents were both baffled and annoyed by the messianic luster that he and his campaign encouraged. The best way to push back was to convince voters that he was in too big a hurry. At age forty-five, with only half of his Senate term behind him… well, even if he was destined to be America’s first black president, he wasn’t ready for the job yet. He was one of the youngest men to ever seek the presidency.

So experience was the hammer, and Clinton lowered it whenever Obama gave her a chance. He gave her one after a CNN/YouTube debate on July 23, when he was asked if he would consider meeting with America’s enemies without preconditions. The questioner, whose face was projected on a big screen, approvingly cited Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat’s courageous (and ultimately fatal) decision, in 1977, to initiate peace negotiations with Israel, and asked if any of the candidates would be willing, in the first year of their tenure, to meet without preconditions the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in an effort to “bridge the gap that divides our countries.”

It was an easy question to dodge: Negotiation is terribly important… I wouldn’t rule it out… we have a history with these countries that didn’t begin yesterday… But Obama didn’t dodge it. Up on the glitzy stage before glowing red, white, and blue screens, behind a spare, modernist podium of steel and plastic, he was the first of the eight candidates asked to respond.

“I would,” he said.

A gasp rose from the studio audience, no doubt partly because of the directness of his answer. They were used to more maneuvering.

“My reason is this,” he explained. “The notion that, somehow, not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this [George W. Bush] administration, is ridiculous… We may not trust them, they may pose an extraordinary danger to our country, but we have the obligation to find the areas where we may potentially move forward, and I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them.”

Clinton, who answered next, promptly said that she would not. She explained that a lot of groundwork went into negotiations with unfriendly nations; that one did not rush into them. But, perhaps startled like everyone else, she didn’t hit Obama too hard onstage. On reflection, however, and no doubt after her campaign strategists weighed in, she returned more harshly to the point the next day in interviews, labeling Obama’s answer “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

This was strictly politics. The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy—“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate”—to Richard Nixon’s opening with China, to Ronald Reagan’s famous “walk in the woods” with Mikhail Gorbachev. Obama’s position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush’s post–9/11 policy—“You are either for us or against us”—was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs. It made no sense whatsoever for a savvy internationalist like Clinton to ignore the opportunity every newly elected president has to reset relations with hostile nations. Still, conventional wisdom held that you didn’t admit such things. It made you sound soft. And naive was a word that worked against Obama.

It worked because many believed he lacked substance. He had yet to really define himself in detail on foreign policy or anything else. He had given a foreign policy address in April in line with his antiwar image, primarily calling for renewed internationalism, a greater willingness to seek consensus, and cooperation from other countries in pursuit of our national security goals. His remark about negotiating with enemies without preconditions made it easy for his critics to paint him as a complete pushover. It also suggested that Obama was a man who did not think things through carefully.

The “naive” label was troublesome. Soon enough the word had attached itself to him. TV pundits seemed unable to mention him without repeating it. Over the next few weeks his standing in the polls continued to fall as Clinton’s rose.

Obama’s staff fretted. Some wanted him to back off from his position, but he refused. “The thing is that I am right about this,” he insisted in a meeting with his advisers Denis McDonough and Robert Gibbs. “Why would we not want to get into any negotiation that we could?” He asked them to schedule a national TV interview to reiterate his position, to underline it. It was, he felt, precisely the kind of message he wanted to send. He was offering to break with the past, to look at these foreign policy issues in a new way.

And he was just getting started. Obama was not about to let others substitute their analysis for his own. His approach to a problem was to look for a new solution, an original one. He believed much of the way America thought about defense issues was cast in archaic molds—the old divisions of left vs. right, conservatives vs. liberals, hawks vs. doves that had been set by the debate over Vietnam. He had been thirteen years old when that war ended. Much of the voting-age population of the country had not even been born. Nothing had shaken up that old dynamic as much as 9/11. Young people in particular were hard to classify in this regard. They tended to be far more liberal than their parents on most social issues—hence more likely to support Obama—but were also strongly supportive of robust military and intelligence efforts. As the candidate saw it, he was as hawkish as any American about defeating al Qaeda, but some of the tools traditionally associated with doves—tools such as negotiation and international cooperation—weren’t just means of appeasing an enemy. They were essential to defeating this one.

A few weeks earlier, according to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in Game Change, Obama had brought one of his close friends and old law professors, Chris Edley, to Chicago to lambaste his inner campaign circle for failing to let him do things his way. They were not giving Obama time and space in his frenetic campaign schedule to lay out his ideas in more detail.

“This is a guy who likes to think, he likes to write, he likes to talk with experts,” said Edley, whose work on past Democratic campaigns and in White House service lent authority to his words. “You folks have got to recognize what he’s in this for. He’s in this because he wants to make contributions in terms of public policy ideas, and you’ve got to make time for him to do that… With all due respect to all you here, you should just get over yourselves and do what the candidate wants.”

So in the days after the fallout from his negotiate without preconditions promise, it was decided that Obama would give another major national security speech. He did so at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, in Washington, D.C., on August 1, outlining his thinking on national security in some detail and in the process correcting the impression that he was “naive” or, worse, “soft” on national defense.

A National Intelligence Estimate that spring suggested al Qaeda had actually grown stronger in the previous six years. It noted that Pakistan had become the new safe haven for the terror group after the fall of the Taliban. All Democratic candidates had pledged change, but beyond promising to pull the plug on Iraq and end some of the more controversial intelligence-gathering methods (most of which had ended already), none had clearly articulated an approach to national security that differed significantly from Bush’s.

Former Congressman Lee Hamilton introduced Obama at the Wilson Center gathering before an audience of a few hundred, many of them journalists. The speech had engaged all of Obama’s foreign policy advisers, and every word in it had been weighed carefully. Tapped with the task of drafting it was Ben Rhodes, the former NYU graduate student who had watched from the Brooklyn waterfront as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. He was now a top-level campaign worker with prematurely thinning black hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Instead of setting to work on a first novel, he had joined Hamilton’s staff just as the congressman was named cochair of the 9/11 Commission. Rhodes had helped draft policy proposals for the Commission Report and helped write the chapter entitled “What to Do?” One of the subheads in that chapter had been “Attack Terrorists and Their Organizations,” and its first proscription was “No Sanctuaries.” Of all the most likely places in the world to play host to terrorist groups, first on the list was Pakistan. Rhodes eventually helped Hamilton and his cochair, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, write a book about the commission’s work. After serving Hamilton on the Iraq Study Group, which the congressman also cochaired, Rhodes joined Obama’s Senate staff as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter. He had helped draft some of Obama’s talks about Iraq in the Senate, and had then signed on as a speechwriter in Obama’s Chicago office. This was the first campaign speech he had been asked to draft, and it was a big one. It also returned him to a familiar theme.

In a telephone conference with Rhodes, McDonough, Samantha Power, and various other national security aides, Obama outlined seven points he wanted to make in the speech. These were distilled to five by Rhodes and Power. One of them concerned efforts to destroy al Qaeda. As for the issue of safe havens, Rhodes would remember Obama telling him, “Let’s come up with the most forward-leaning formulation to make it clear that we are going to go after these guys, because that’s the whole argument.”

Before the crowd at the Wilson Center, Obama began by relating his own experiences on 9/11—hearing the first report on his drive into Chicago, standing on the sidewalk in the Loop eyeing the Sears Tower, watching the towers fall on TV. In the six years since then, the stirring sense of national unity and purpose engendered by the attacks had been squandered, he said. The Bush administration had started well, toppling the Taliban and chasing al Qaeda, the real enemy, from its bases in Afghanistan. But then it had dropped the ball. Instead of going after the architects of 9/11, who were on the ropes and on the run, the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, a move that had quickly absorbed the nation’s primary military and intelligence resources. The move had been “rubber-stamped” by Congress, he said, sideswiping his Democratic primary opponents. It was, he said, “A misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies, ties down our military, busts our budgets, increases the pool of terrorist recruits, alienates America, gives democracy a bad name, and prompts the American people to question our engagement in the world.” Obama pointed to the new Intelligence Estimate as proof that al Qaeda had only changed its home address.

Once again, he pledged to end the Iraq War, not out of any pacifist conviction, but in order to refocus on the real enemy. His focus, he promised, would be on crushing al Qaeda. This was the mission 9/11 had compelled, a national priority that trumped peaceable relations with Pakistan or any other country. The enemy had been too broadly defined by the Bush administration, he said, a failing that not only had diminished the impact of our response but had fed into al Qaeda propaganda that America was at war with the entire Muslim world. The necessary war called for a much smaller focus: to find, target, and destroy the terror organization. To underscore his determination, Obama said he would respect no sanctuary and zeroed in specifically on Pakistan.

“Al Qaeda terrorists train, travel, and maintain global communications in this safe haven,” he said. “The Taliban pursues a hit-and-run strategy, striking in Afghanistan, then skulking across the border to safety. This is the wild frontier of our globalized world. There are wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains. There are tribes that see borders as nothing more than lines on a map, and governments as forces that come and go. There are blood ties deeper than alliances of convenience, and pockets of extremism that follow religion to violence. It’s a tough place. But that is no excuse. There must be no safe haven for terrorists who threaten America. We cannot fail to act because action is hard. As president, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan. I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear, there are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered three thousand Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

That final line was the very last one inserted in the speech. Much deliberation preceded it. Rhodes had originally written, “If we have targets [in Pakistan] and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” It was in keeping with the candidate’s instruction to be as “forward leaning” as possible. But the issue of Pakistan was delicate. That unstable nation was critical to the war effort in Afghanistan. It was a nuclear power in one of the world’s most volatile regions, and yet elements of its government, particularly its powerful intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), were known to be in bed with all manner of Islamist radicals. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf had been walking a narrow line with the Bush administration, providing enough cooperation to avoid being branded an enemy but falling well short of routing extremists holed up in Pakistan’s lawless northwest. Threatening to go after “targets” without Pakistan’s cooperation made Obama’s national security team nervous.

Nobody had been happy with the line in a pre-speech review at Obama’s Washington headquarters. Present were Robert Gibbs, Susan Rice, Jeh Johnson, Rand Beers, and Richard Clarke, the campaign’s premier consultant on security matters.

“Look, that is not how you talk about these things,” said Clarke. He explained the importance of working with the tribes in Pakistan’s northwest territories.

But the candidate was resolute. He wanted the line in. It said exactly what he thought, and what he planned to do as president. I do not oppose all wars. He was going to go after the real threat. So the discussion focused on the wording. Two caveats were added: “If we have actionable intelligence” and “high-value targets.” This was to make it clear that Obama was talking about acting only in an exceptional circumstance, and only in a specific, limited way.

No matter. The careful phrasing was ignored. Obama had covered a lot of ground in the speech, reiterating his plan to get troops out of Iraq, pledging to reinvest in the effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and promising to give a major speech somewhere in the Middle East, within his first hundred days as president, to redefine the U.S. mission for that region. He also promised to close the prison at Guantánamo and to end Bush-era programs that “tracked” American citizens. But the line about going after targets in Pakistan got nearly all of the press. There was heat from every quarter.

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times reported that Obama had “vowed to dispatch American soldiers to eradicate terrorist camps” in Pakistan.

The subhead on the story in the Los Angeles Times said, “He says he’d reserve the right to invade,” and reporter Paul Richter wrote, “Senator Barack Obama said Wednesday that the United States should reserve the right to invade the territory of its Pakistani allies and withdraw U.S. financial aid if it believed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was failing to do enough to stop terrorists.”

Liberals accused Obama of embracing the Bush administration’s cowboy mentality. Conservatives faulted Obama for a supposed lack of sophistication: Didn’t he understand the delicacy of our relationship with Pakistan? Even if that was his plan, didn’t he understand that you don’t talk about things like this?

Liberal blogger Jerome Armstrong was disappointed. “For progressive Democrats who want a more peaceful leadership in the world… [Obama’s speech] fails the threshold of getting us out of picking fights in the Mideast, and discarding the Bush doctrine of preemptive attacks.”

Conservative columnist William Kristol wrote that Obama was “frantically suggesting that he would invade Pakistan” in order to shore up his tough-guy credentials against Hillary Clinton.

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh mocked Obama. He noted that Osama bin Laden had been exhorting his followers to overthrow Musharraf, and now Obama—“I get these guys confused,” he said—had threatened to “invade Pakistan.” Limbaugh added, “Poor Musharraf is going to get it on both ends if Obama is elected.”

“It’s a very irresponsible statement, that’s all I can say,” said Pakistan’s foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri. “As the election campaign in America is heating up we would not like American candidates to fight their elections and contest elections at our expense.” Kasuri said that President Bush had called to privately reassure Musharraf, terming Obama’s comments “unsavory” and prompted by political considerations “in an environment of electioneering.”

“I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to attack an ally of ours,” said former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who was then a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. “I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort.” He said, U.S. troops “shouldn’t be sent all over the world,” and called the comments “ill-timed” and “ill-considered.”

Again, some in Obama’s camp wanted the candidate to issue an explanation, but once again he refused. He had meant what he said. Obama told his staff that their public posture on the comment should be to shoot down any talk of an “invasion,” but to stand behind his willingness to act unilaterally in Pakistan if the right occasion presented itself.

“I am not going to be lectured about foreign policy by the same people who were responsible for this catastrophic war in Iraq,” he maintained, in response to some of the criticism. It illustrated, he said, his willingness to “think outside the box.” The campaign released a memo by Power, reiterating the candidate’s promise: “Conventional wisdom would have us defer to Musharraf in perpetuity. Barack Obama wants to turn the page. If Musharraf is willing to go after the terrorists and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a base of operations, Obama would give him all of the support he needs. But Obama made clear that as president, if he had actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan—and the Pakistanis continued to refuse to act against terrorists known to be behind attacks on American civilians—then he will use highly targeted force to do so.”

Despite this effort to explain, the supposed call to “invade” Pakistan quickly entered campaign lore… and evolved. Obama’s eventual Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, would claim that Obama had threatened to “bomb” Pakistan.

“The best idea is to not broadcast what you’re going to do,” McCain said the following February. “That’s naive. The first thing that you do is you make your plans and you carry out your operations as necessary for America’s national security interest. You don’t broadcast that you are going to bomb a country that is a sovereign nation and where you are dependent on the goodwill of the people of that country to help you in the war—in the struggle against the Taliban and the sanctuaries which they hold.”

So in 2007 and early 2008, on the question of going after Osama bin Laden, Obama’s call for direct, unilateral action was roundly condemned. It remained his plan, however, and as soon as he was elected he acted on it. As Obama settled into the job, his determination to pursue al Qaeda’s leadership was plain. If bin Laden had empowered himself, or had felt chosen by God, Obama had been elected. He had sought and had been chosen by the people of the United States to make these life-and-death decisions.

The new president immediately began shifting resources from Iraq, where he was determined to systematically draw down U.S. involvement, to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Large numbers of drones began leaving Iraq and flying missions over the steep mountains of eastern Afghanistan and the lawless regions of northwest Pakistan. The Joint Special Operations Command, which had been operating out of Balad Air Base, in Iraq, relocated in the summer of 2009 to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, beefing up bandwidth at the new encampment to retain links between intelligence computers and analysts in Washington. And as we have seen, the number of drone attacks spiked. America’s relationship with Pakistan grew more troubled.

When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October of 2009, just as he was deciding to send thirty thousand more American troops to Afghanistan, Obama had a chance to fully articulate once more his thinking about war.

Again Rhodes was pressed into service. This time Obama presented him with a handwritten first draft, which had three quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian who argued strongly for the necessity of war and who rejected pacifism as a sure prescription for tyranny. The emergence of fascism in Germany and Japan, and communism in Russia, had prompted Niebuhr to famously renounce his lifelong pacifism. That movement had enjoyed a resurgence after World War I, with its seemingly senseless slaughter of millions. Now, with the world teetering on the brink of an even larger catastrophe, pacifists, who included a good many Christian thinkers in Europe and America, argued that if enough people refused to serve in armies, states would be unable to wage war ever again. Niebuhr did not believe it. The passages Obama quoted were from Niebuhr’s 1939 essay, “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” in which the theologian argues, “If we believe that if Britain had only been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent of conscientious objectors to military service, Hitler’s heart would have been softened and he would not have dared to attack Poland, we hold a faith, which no historical reality justifies.” Niebuhr believed that just as men were imperfect, so, too, were states, and just as men must struggle to defeat evil in themselves, they must also struggle to defeat evil at large.

Obama had pronounced his willingness to “take up arms” years earlier. Now, armed with more military power than anyone in any other country, he was not just prepared to use it, he felt morally obligated to do so. Just as he had done before the antiwar audience in Chicago seven years earlier, he would use this pacifist platform to argue his belief in the moral use of violence. The Nobel Peace Prize itself had grown out of the same pacifist movement Niebuhr turned against in 1939. It was one of the award categories established by Alfred Nobel at the behest of his friend Bertha von Suttner, a well-known nineteenth-century Austrian novelist, pacifist, and eventual peace prize recipient. So it is not surprising that Obama looked back to Niebuhr’s arguments as he prepared to accept the prize himself in Oslo.

His speech there was a brief lecture on the necessity of war, and a tribute to the use of force—American force above all—as the only practical means of achieving the peace prize committee’s high ideals. He saluted two of the twentieth century’s most famous practitioners of nonviolence, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi, but said, “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have stopped Hitler’s armies. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

Evil does exist in the world. As president, Barack Obama had been given an opportunity to take up arms against the enemies of the United States in a more direct way than had any previous holder of that office. He welcomed it. He did everything he could to push the matter. The CIA had long called whoever was in the White House the “First Customer,” and on this issue there was no confusion about what the customer most wanted.

High in his seventh-floor office at Langley, overlooking the Potomac, Michael Morell had felt the same way for a long time. In his climb to the post of deputy director, he had run the agency’s analysis division, and he knew that, despite their lack of success, they had never lost the sense of urgency. He still remembered flying around with President Bush on 9/11, the uncertainty and fear in the country, the way he had felt looking in on his daughters sleeping when he finally returned home. Even with two wars to fight, there had never been a want of manpower or of resources for finding bin Laden.

Still, he felt, Obama’s push might have some effect. Morell’s new boss, Panetta, for one, was now demanding those regular progress reports: at least one a month. In any large organization a demand for progress reports has an effect. No one wants to file a progress report showing no progress.