The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

6. Disguised Uncertainty

Winter 2010–2011

At the White House in the fall of 2010, Ben Rhodes noticed a growing number of meetings to which he was not invited. As with the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Rhodes had become Obama’s go-to writer for speeches and statements explaining his decisions as commander in chief. Rhodes’s official title was “Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting.” His hair had thinned on top, he rarely did anything but work, and he dressed every day in a suit and tie, but at thirty-two he had a job that anyone with his interests would envy. There were not many high-level national security discussions from which he was barred.

His desk was deep in the warren of small offices in the West Wing, just downstairs from the Oval Office and the primary corridors of power. Windowless and closet-like, his and the other offices of the national security staff were as humble as the jobs were important. Rhodes’s space was just big enough for his desk and chair, a waist-high bookshelf, and one more chair opposite the desk. It was as spare as an intern’s quarters at most law firms. Rhodes helped the president craft speeches, shape security policy, and decide how to frame critical issues for the public. He knew that John Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, had been holding frequent meetings now for months, and that Donilon, the president’s national security adviser, often sat in. The mystery sessions were simply called “John Brennan’s group.” Ordinarily there were cameras that monitored the conference rooms so that staffers and secretaries could keep track of where people were, but for John Brennan’s group the monitors went black. Rhodes wondered about that. Was the country about to be attacked again? Was it something serious related to nuclear weapons? There was a very short list of things that would engender that level of secrecy within the basement offices of the White House. One of the thoughts that occurred to him was that maybe they had found bin Laden.

After getting briefed in late summer on the compound in Abbottabad, Obama had left his intelligence chiefs with instructions to nail down who was living in it and report back. These regular reports documented heroic efforts to scrutinize the residence from afar. Using a variety of tools, including agents on the ground and surveillance platforms that were far enough away to avoid any possibility of notice, the agency was now able to flesh out life in the compound in far more detail. Other than occasional visits to the mosque, or taking their own children to the madrassa, the religious school attached to it, the “Khan” brothers kept to themselves. No one except a local handyman was ever invited inside the compound walls. Among the most religious people in Bilal Town—and the Khan brothers were clearly that—it was not uncommon to hide women away behind high walls and locked doors. Longer observation confirmed that the children of the hidden family, the ones who did not attend the madrassa, were seen to leave the compound only when one of the brothers took them to the doctor for a routine visit or treatment for some minor ailment or scrape. This would give the CIA an idea.

There was no way to catch a glimpse of the hidden family upstairs. The walls were high, the windows opaque. Only one member of the family could be seen regularly, a tall man in traditional Pashtun dress and prayer cap who took daily walks inside the compound walls. He walked in brisk small circles around the vegetable garden, part of which had a tarp stretched overhead to shield the patch of ground from direct sunlight—or, perhaps, one could imagine, to shield the walker from eyes in the sky. Overhead cameras were able to get images of him anyway, but they were not very good. The agency did not want to risk putting a drone or observation aircraft directly overhead for fear of tipping off the residents—or the Pakistani government, which it feared would amount to the same thing. The angle or altitude of the standoff cameras made it impossible to get a clear look at the walker’s face. He appeared to be tall and thin. Efforts were made to more accurately gauge the man’s height by measuring his stride and the shadow he cast, but the calculations were only precise enough to confirm what they could see for themselves: he was tall.

Brennan, for some reason he cannot fully explain, and that may have been no more than wishful thinking, felt in his bones that this was bin Laden. They called the man “the Pacer.” Perhaps Brennan was inclined to believe it already, given the extraordinary lengths taken to hide this man, but as soon as he saw an image of the Pacer… he knew. We recognize people by many things other than their facial features and hair color, or their size and shape. We sometimes recognize someone we have seen before at just a glance, a glimpse out of the corner of the eye, something in the way they carry themselves or stoop or tilt their head or swing their arms. Brennan is a big wide man, imposing and stern, a former CIA officer who had been involved in efforts to go after the al Qaeda leader all the way back to when ALEC Station was up and running. He had been based in Saudi Arabia at the time, butting heads with Scheuer over how much or how little the Saudis’ help could be trusted. He had worked closely with the Saudis after the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. And he had seen Predator images of the Sheik taken from overhead in Afghanistan during that period, a tall man in robes surrounded by security, striding confidently. This was a different setting, Abbottabad, and the clothes were different, but here was the same man, the same walk. There wasn’t hard evidence he could show to convince anyone else, but Brennan felt he recognized the Pacer.

Panetta briefed the president periodically through that fall, and in December his deputy Morell, “John,” the head of the CIA’s bin Laden team, and several others met with Donilon and Brennan at the White House. There was no breakthrough to report. The images of the Pacer were not clear enough to remove all doubt. None of their efforts had managed to pierce the compound’s walls. An agency team was now living in a house in Bilal Town. They noted everything they could see, but they couldn’t see much. They watched the comings and goings of the Ahmed brothers. They counted the laundry that was hung out to dry. They had determined that the hidden family was large: three wives, a young man, and ten or more children, several of them teenagers or young adults. The number of wives and children corresponded with their theorizing about who might surround bin Laden on the run. He had always kept most of his family with him. The analysts still could not prove that the mystery man was bin Laden but, then again, there wasn’t a single scrap of information that ran counter to that theory, either. Sometimes when you are looking hard enough at something, when you are ready for anything that might shoot down your hypothesis, and nothing comes… lack of disproof begins to feel like proof.

“We think we have the best intelligence case for the location of bin Laden since Tora Bora,” Morell told Donilon.

So, on December 14, just before Obama left for his annual holiday trip with his family to Hawaii, Panetta visited him in the Oval Office.

Obama listened and weighed the evidence. He was impressed. Now that there were actually “eyes on” the compound the whole prospect seemed more real, and all the new intel fit the puzzle neatly. Obama was struck, just as the others had been, by actually being able to see the mystery man. You couldn’t tell exactly who it was, but something about actually seeing the target moving inside the high walls, hiding from the world, registered with him.

“At this point, you’re saying to yourself, this is all circumstantial, but it’s hard to figure out what the explanation would be for that particular pattern,” said Obama. “And so at that point I think there’s a part of me that’s thinking this might be for real.”

Still, the president was cautious. He told Panetta, “For all we know this could be some sheik hiding from one of his wives.”

He wanted more. He instructed Panetta to get creative, to figure out a way to nail it down. He said to continue keeping a tight lid on it. And he also instructed Panetta to start preparing options for action.

As closely as the secret was held, Bill McRaven had gotten wind of it back in November. Those monitors might have been blacked out for meetings inside the NSC’s offices, and McRaven was now spending most of his time in Afghanistan, but it was hard to keep the JSOC commander completely out of the loop.

He had worked in the White House himself. It was when he was just beginning to work his way back from his severe jump injuries, his body adjusting to the plates and pins that now held his pelvis together. He’d gotten a surprise phone call in October 2001, from Wayne Downing, a former four-star general who had led the Special Operations Command. The two men had gotten to know each other during the years before Downing’s retirement. The general had just been asked by President Bush to unretire and take up a position in the White House as a kind of counterterrorism czar—an ill-defined special assistant role designed to bring some measure of coordination to the multiple agencies and services involved in the new war. Before he even officially accepted the job, Downing called to ask McRaven if he would come to Washington to help.

“You bet,” said the SEAL captain.

A few weeks later, Downing caught up to the still hobbled SEAL as he was driving across the country from San Diego to his new desk job in Norfolk, Virginia.

“Hey, I’ve taken the job,” Downing said. “Can you be here on Monday?” That was just four days away.

“Yeah, I think so,” said McRaven.

When he showed up at the White House in his wheelchair, Downing told him simply, “Figure out what you’re going to be.”

It was a terrific opportunity for any military officer, especially one who had years earlier abandoned the idea of advancement in order to stay in the field, jumping out of planes and working deep underwater. The chance was not lost on McRaven. It seemed clear from the beginning that, in the long term, finding and taking down a furtive terror organization would require the kind of creative, cross-disciplinary skills long practiced by special ops. If every new war demanded that the military rethink how it fights, McRaven was already a few steps ahead. He had written a book on the subject while attending the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, entitled Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice. It was a rare military graduate thesis to be picked up by a commercial publisher—the Presidio Press, which published it in 1995. In the book, McRaven had studied eight special operations missions, from the German attack on the fortress of Eban Emael in 1940, prior to the blitzkrieg of Belgium, to the Israeli raid at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, the raid that prompted President Carter to request creation of a similar counterterrorism unit for the U.S. military. McRaven had visited the sites of these raids, interviewed many key participants, and pieced together his own understanding of why they had succeeded or failed. As he did so, he crafted a way of thinking about such specialized missions. Now he would have a seat at the table, a chance to apply those ideas to America’s newest military challenge.

The very idea of “special ops” had long been regarded critically by the conventional military. The elite, secret units that conducted these operations sucked up enormous resources and key personnel for occasional acts of amazing derring-do. When such missions worked they seemed almost magical, as in the Entebbe raid, where Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles to Uganda, surprised a much larger force, and rescued 102 hostages, killing all of the Palestinian hijackers who had seized a commercial French airliner. When they failed, as in the rescue mission to Iran in 1980, they nearly always seemed harebrained in retrospect. They were daring by definition. The idea was to attempt something bolder than the enemy could reasonably anticipate. The men involved accepted great personal risk, and those in command gambled their reputations and careers on the outcome. And it was in the nature of the work that failures made a huge splash while successes, except in rare instance like Entebbe, were often, by design, unadvertised and unnoticed.

The debacle in the Iranian desert had prompted the creation of JSOC, which is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Much blame for the failure fell on the clumsiness of efforts to borrow from various service branches unused to working together. So the mission had navy helicopters flown by marine pilots carrying army special operators deep into Iran to link up with air force piloted planes and crews. This motley force had left behind a desert staging area littered with destroyed aircraft and incinerated American bodies. Though one of the most spectacular failures in American military annals, the effect was not to kill special ops but to expand it. JSOC was created to integrate elite units from every branch into a smooth fighting force, and to equip them with the kind of vehicles and weapons needed for small, unorthodox missions. It brought together the army’s Delta Force and 75th Ranger Regiment, the air force’s Special Tactics Squadron, and Navy SEAL teams. Since the Iran mission had broken down trying to deliver the force to the target, the Night Stalkers, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was stood up at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where special choppers were designed and tested, and where the military’s best helicopter pilots trained specifically for special ops missions.

McRaven’s thesis, which would become part of the curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School, set out the core concept of special ops: that a small, well-trained force can deliver a decisive blow against a much larger, well-defended one. He defined such a mission as one “conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative.” Refining the key elements to success for such missions, he prescribed, in a nutshell, “A simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly and realistically rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.”

President Bush’s two large wars, each requiring hundreds of thousands of conventional soldiers, gradually proved the point that special ops was the most useful tool against al Qaeda. The tremendous effort and innovation that went into finding and fixing a target relied on men capable of executing the third F in the acronym F3EAD, the finish. The model McRaven had developed in his thesis primarily dealt with assaults on larger, well-entrenched enemy positions, but the principles of the lightning raid—simple, secret, and well rehearsed, executed with surprise, speed, and purpose—would prove devastatingly effective against an enemy that hid itself in a civilian population, in large part because pinpoint raids, as opposed to aerial attacks or direct assaults by conventional forces, avoided killing and injuring innocent bystanders. It also allowed for onsite collection of intelligence, which was essentially for feeding the target engine. Over the next decade, McRaven would get a chance to refine his strategies and put his theories into practice at a pace he had never imagined.

His two years in Washington before returning to a field command enabled him to combine necessary physical rehab with some high-level career rehab, developing the kind of relationships that are necessary to achieve flag rank. Rank was not something McRaven actively sought—indeed, years earlier, even before his accident, he regarded himself as the last person in the navy likely to become an admiral. But in just a few years he was back on his feet, serving in Iraq as deputy to JSOC commander General McChrystal, admiring the fusion of rapid intel and shooters his commander had implemented, and occasionally accompanying his men on night raids—the kind where you could drive or walk to the target. No more jumping out of planes, roping out of helicopters, or long marches in full pack for McRaven. During those years, first under McChrystal and then commanding JSOC himself, the admiral would help forge this new capability into the nation’s premier war-fighting instrument. The JSOC force itself doubled in size, to nearly four thousand men and women. It became, in effect, a fifth branch of the U.S. military, an army within an army. It was global, operating in secret in more than a dozen countries, and had been freed from strict mission-by-mission oversight from Washington. The need for speed trumped the desire for close control, so commanders like McChrystal and McRaven were given the authority to launch at least routine strikes without seeking approval all the way up the chain.

Through the first decade of the century, McRaven and his men had carried out more special ops missions than any such unit in history. He estimated that by the time he was summoned to Langley in January 2011 to be officially briefed on the Abbottabad discovery, he had been personally involved, commanding either remotely or on the ground, in thousands of them.

By early 2011, the CIA had its own small armies in the field. After 9/11, the nation had recovered quickly from its misgivings about spying and covert action. Agency operators, most of them former military, had worked ever more closely with JSOC throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Panetta and Morell returned from the White House meeting with Obama in December, the one where he directed them to start thinking about taking action, the first units they considered were their own.

The two broad options were to bomb the compound or to send a raiding party in. The latter would be far more complicated. It would require planning and rehearsal, and involve a variety of special talents, so the instinct was to develop that option in-house. This had the advantage of keeping the now four-month-old secret contained. Outside the agency, those who knew about the compound, or who were supposed to know, could still be counted on two hands. There was the president, of course, and a few top members of his foreign policy staff, including Brennan and Donilon. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, had been told. At the Department of Defense there were only four people, Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen, Vice Chairman General James “Hoss” Cartwright, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers.

The CIA teams were excited about the mission and were ready to do it themselves… soon. But Panetta and Morell had time. The president had also told them to work harder on identifying the mystery man. Before committing themselves to using their own operators, they wanted to at least consult with McRaven.

All the JSOC commander knew before getting the call was that the CIA had a new lead on bin Laden. He had heard that before over the years, and in each case the lead had failed to pan out. Early in the war in Afghanistan his men had spent a lot of time chasing bin Laden’s ghost. This time he was told that the lead seemed better than most, but McRaven didn’t think much of it until he was summoned to Langley. That had not happened with any of the previous leads. At the conference table in the deputy director’s office, McRaven and one of his top aides met with Panetta, Morell, and the heads of the CIA’s own strike force. He was shown pictures of the compound. No one had glimpsed the inside of the buildings. Everything was heavily couched in maybes. Morell made it clear that they were not certain that bin Laden was really there, and they weren’t sure yet what course the president would decide to take, if any. But on that qualified basis, they launched into a tactical discussion. If you were going to hit that target, how would you do it?

The CIA men had had a head start. They sketched five different options. That fact alone was telling. McRaven could see at a glance that there was really only one way to do it. He had ruled out a bombing option immediately. Whatever the advantages in simplicity and reduced American risk, his educated guess was that it would take upwards of fifty thousand pounds of ordinance to destroy a compound of that size and make sure bin Laden, if he was there, wouldn’t survive. You had to consider the possibility of tunnels or an underground bunker—like the one where Saddam had been hiding. That explosive power would kill everyone inside the compound and quite a few people nearby.

A ground raid, on the other hand, posed relatively few problems. His men had been hitting compounds like this every night for years, often a dozen or more a night. This one was unremarkable. It had a three-story residence, a smaller outbuilding, and high stone walls all around it. The layout and location of the compound clearly indicated to him the right way to assault—a small helicopter-borne force.

He kept this thinking to himself as the CIA unit commanders described the options they had worked up. When it was his turn to comment, McRaven congratulated Panetta and Morell on developing such a strong lead and proceeded to walk them through how JSOC would do it. You would need a team big enough to secure the compound once you were inside. The primary challenge was its location. Abbottabad was in a “denied” space 150 miles from friendly territory, which meant that delivering the force to the target and safely extracting it without triggering a shooting war with Pakistan would be the biggest problem. It was, as the admiral was fond of saying, “sporty,” but doable. It would increase the complexity of the mission, and complexity multiplied the number of things that could go wrong. But those problems aside, how to actually raid the compound and the buildings were old hat. The tactics McRaven’s teams had developed were built on years of trial and error, missions that had worked and those that didn’t. A lot of good men had died perfecting these skills. He ran through for the CIA men how his team would proceed, and why. He even suggested the right man for the mission, his SEAL Team Six commander, who had earned a legendary reputation—he had led the mission that had killed three Somali pirates in 2009, rescuing an American freighter captain. McRaven explained that the most valuable thing his team would bring to the mission was experience. No matter how well the operation in Abbottabad was planned, long experience taught that something would go wrong. Something always went wrong. What you needed were men who could think on their feet and make good decisions under pressure, men who had seen all manner of snafus and survived. No one in the world could rival JSOC’s seasoning. The SEAL team he had in mind had just rotated back to the United States and could get to work on the mission right away.

Morell and Panetta were impressed. Their guys were good, but McRaven’s men were the pros.

“If the president decides to do this on the ground,” Panetta told Morell, “then JSOC are the guys to do it.”

Panetta pushed the agency to come up with creative ways to get a better look inside the compound, without much luck. The agency team spent hours kicking around possibilities. No idea, no matter how outlandish, was rejected without serious discussion. Was there some way to flush the residents out of the compound? A fire? A stink bomb? A summons to emergency prayer? Panetta kept a chart, and every suggestion was logged on to it. A suggestion was not crossed off until it was either tried or seriously discussed.

Was there a way to position a camera closer, say on a tree that could peer down over the walls? What about one farther away on high ground but with better optics? How about sewage lines: could a listening device or a camera be threaded in that way? There was a tree inside the compound. Could they put a small camera or listening device up in it somehow? Some of these ideas were tried but yielded nothing of value. The tree inside the compound was chopped down before anyone could figure out a way to get at it—spooky, because it was as if someone inside the compound had seen the director’s chart. One by one, the schemes either fizzled or were discarded. They were extremely careful not to tip their hand. The compound had clearly been designed to hide the family inside, and designed well. It would not take much to spook them. Any hint that they were under surveillance would blow everything. Morell lived in fear of waking up one morning to discover that, overnight, the compound had emptied.

One creative idea may have grown out of the observation that the only time any member of the hidden family emerged from the compound was when a child was taken to the doctor. The agency got the idea of opening a free hepatitis B vaccination clinic for children nearby. Maybe they could draw some of the hidden children out that way. They found a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, whose passion was setting up such clinics all over the country. He would go door-to-door notifying residents and persuading them to bring their children in for shots. Agents approached Afridi and offered him a substantial sum—something in six figures worth of American dollars—enough to sustain his program for some time. All he would have to do in return was give them the needles he used. They never told him why they wanted the needles, but the plan was to recover DNA from them and analyze it. The CIA had DNA samples from close relatives of bin Laden. If genetic material from one of the hidden children closely resembled it, it would come very close to proof positive that the Sheik was the father. The clinic would be real, the inoculations completely legit. The children of Abbottabad would emerge healthier and the agency might get the confirmation it needed. The agents did not hide their affiliation from Afridi; he was told that the CIA was funding the program.

Over the next few months, as planning proceeded at Langley and in the White House, Afridi set up the clinic. He went door-to-door, inviting everyone to bring in children. He inoculated many. But when he knocked on the door to the big compound in Bilal Town, no one answered.

No one would ever answer.

Planning for either an air or a ground assault on the compound proceeded through February. Despite Panetta’s push for an answer, the CIA was no closer to the identity of the Pacer. McRaven’s man was drawing up detailed plans in an unmarked office on the first floor of the agency’s printing plant, and the air force was plotting out a B-2 mission to obliterate the compound in one blinding strike. All of this required enlarging the circle of knowledge. Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, was read in by her boss Mike Vickers, and she began working closely with General Cartwright. The various deputies were now meeting every week, usually at the White House but sometimes at the CIA, getting updates on the intelligence-collection efforts and discussing every possible permutation of a raid. These “deputies” meetings were usually attended by Cartwright, Morell, Vickers, Robert Cadillo, the deputy director of National Intelligence, and sometimes John Brennan and deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough. Toward the end of the month, McRaven sat in on a few of these sessions, prepping for a March 14 principals meeting with Obama, where they would formally present the president with recommendations.

As usual, the national security agenda was full. An earthquake and tsunami three days earlier had caused widespread death, destruction, and dislocation in Japan, and the U.S. military was mobilizing to deliver humanitarian assistance. There were sweeping popular protests in Egypt, as the “Arab Spring” spread across the Middle East—an inspiring but potentially treacherous period of change in a region whose stability had long been vital to U.S. interests. In mid-February, Obama had called for Egypt’s longtime president Hosni Mubarak to step down, and was now weighing options for some kind of limited intervention in Libya, where dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s long-standing regime was being pressured by increasingly violent protests. And in Pakistan itself, a CIA contractor working out of the Lahore consulate, Raymond Allen Davis, had shot and killed two armed men on the street when he said they had tried to rob him. He was under arrest and facing murder charges, and the United States was having the devil of a time trying to extract him. Local frustration over American policies in Pakistan had warped the incident into a standoff, with demonstrators and some prosecutors demanding that the CIA contractor be prosecuted and punished. So at the same time options were being prepared for various ways of violating Pakistani sovereignty with a raid on Abbottabad, the White House and State Department were engaged in delicate discussions over Davis.

It was in this context that Obama met with the National Security Council to formally consider the CIA’s case. It was time to start making the important decisions. Obama was acutely aware that the longer he delayed, the more people were read in on the secret—and greater became the likelihood that it would leak, or that something critical would change. The group met in the White House Situation Room, where much of the drama over the next two months would unfold.

The Situation Room is a few steps down from the ground floor of the West Wing, the largest in a complex of small meeting rooms, and is hardly what a set designer would imagine as the decision center for the world’s only superpower. Long ago nicknamed “the Woodshed,” it was installed by President Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis to create a secure command center fully wired for global telecommunications. It is windowless and cramped, much smaller than the dining room in most grand residences. Much of the mahogany paneling that gave the room its nickname was removed in a 2007 renovation to make it easier for electronic technicians to get at the cables and wiring. Now its beige walls are hung with flat video screens. The ceiling is low and lined with harsh recessed fluorescent lights. The room is all but filled by a long mahogany table at its center, polished to a high gloss. Around it are thirteen high-backed black leather chairs. The blue carpet beneath has a yellow border around the edges, on which are lined smaller black leather chairs for deputies and staff members. The president sits at the north end of the table beneath the circular presidential seal. There is no chair at the opposite end, which is open to afford a clear view of a video screen that reaches from tabletop to ceiling. There are leather desk pads at each place around the table for the secretaries of defense and state, the national security adviser, the vice president, the director of National Intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the president, and, for nearly all of these sessions, the CIA director and his deputy and various others. Until his work in the field took him away, Admiral McRaven was present.

Above all, one is struck by how intimate the space is. When full, as it was for many of these meetings, the top leadership of the nation can be said, without exaggeration, to be huddled.

By early March the agency had determined that the Abbottabad compound held a “high value target,” and that it was most likely Osama bin Laden. “John,” the team leader at the CIA and the most veteran analyst on the trail, was close to convinced. He put his confidence level at 95 percent.

The president surveyed confidence levels around the room. Brennan felt about the same as “John,” but others were less certain—some far less certain. The opinion had already been “red-teamed” three times—worked over by agency analysts assigned to poke holes in it: at the Counterterrorism Center, by Brennan’s staff, and by a group within the CIA. Four senior leaders at the Directorate of National Intelligence had reviewed the case and written out their own opinions. Most seemed to place their confidence level at about 80 percent. Some were as low as 40 or even 30 percent. Obama then asked Morell, who was seated in a chair against the wall behind him, under the presidential seal.

Morell had come to admire Obama’s decision-making skills. He had worked with President Bush up close almost every day, and he had admired him, too, but the two men were very different. Morell and others who worked closely with Bush believed he was widely underestimated. He was plenty smart. He was not as eager as Obama to ingest written reports, but he did read them, and he was a good listener. He grasped the nut of an issue quickly, asked sharp questions, encouraged lively debate, and then, unhesitatingly, often on the spot, made a decision. Obama, on the other hand, had a level of study and contemplation that he kept private. He liked to pore over written reports and, after initiating a discussion of opposing views, would generally retire before coming back with a decision.

One thing in particular impressed Morell about Obama. Morell had given and sat through thousands of presidential briefings by now, enough to know the in-house tactics of policy makers. Advisers had a way of narrowing the choice to option A or option B, and then steering the president to the one they preferred. It was all in how the issue was framed. This method didn’t have a chance with Obama. He would listen to A and B, ask a lot of good questions, and more often than not propose an entirely different course, option C, which seemed to emerge wholly formed from his head. He had done this just a few days earlier in a widely reported instance concerning Libya. It came during a prolonged policy discussion over what the United States should do about Gaddafi’s apparent intent to slaughter rebels and civilians who were contesting his regime. In that case, option A was just to stand back and not get involved. The consequences would be awful but U.S. military intervention in a third country (Iraq and Afghanistan still being very much live wars) would be hugely unpopular domestically and might, in Libya, where there was no clear idea what would emerge after Gaddafi, end up making things worse. Option B was to intervene militarily on the side of the rebels, essentially do whatever had to be done to prevent them from being systematically slaughtered by the regime. There were strong views on both sides, but the first option was clearly the one favored by most of the staff. Obama then proposed an option C, the course he would eventually pursue. This called for the United States to spearhead air attacks on Gaddafi’s forces for a few days, and then let a coalition of European and Arab countries take over. U.S. forces would step back from most combat missions after the initial thrusts but, through NATO, continue providing critical air support and patrol a no-fly zone. Morell thought it was brilliant.

He now placed his own certainty that the Pacer was bin Laden at 60 percent.

“Okay, this is a probability thing,” said Obama. “Leon, talk to me about this.”

The director explained that ever since the agency’s erroneous call, a decade earlier, that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, a finding that had kicked off a long and very costly war, the CIA had instituted an almost comically elaborate process for weighing certainty. It was like trying to contrive a mathematical formula for good judgment. Analysts up and down the chain were now asked not only for their opinion, but to assign it a confidence level—high, medium, or low. Then they had to explain why they had assigned that level. What you ended up with, as the president was finding, and as he would later explain it to me, was not more certainty but more confusion.

Obama said as much, and then turned in his chair and looked at the deputy director.

“Michael, what do you think?”

Morell had thought a lot about it. He had been personally involved in the finding about Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, and had felt more certain about that than he felt about this.

“People don’t have differences because they have different intel,” he said. “We are all looking at the same things. I think it depends more on your past experience.” He explained that counterterrorism analysts at work on al Qaeda over the past five years had enjoyed a remarkable string of successes. They had been crushing the terror group inside Pakistan, and they had directly or indirectly prevented further terrorist attacks inside the United States So they were very confident. Those who had been at work longer, like him, had known failure. They knew the fragility of even the soundest-seeming analysis. The WMD story had been a bracing lesson. He bore responsibility for it.

“Mr. President, if we had a human source who had told us directly that bin Laden was living in that compound, I still wouldn’t be above 60 percent.” He said he had spent a lot of time on both questions—WMDs and Abbottabad. He had seen no fewer than thirteen analytical drafts on the former question, and at least as many on the latter.

“And I’m telling you, the case for WMDs wasn’t just stronger, it was much stronger,” he said.

This kicked off more discussion about percentage levels of confidence. The president listened, but he had already pretty much made up his mind.

“One of the things you learn as president is you’re always dealing with probabilities,” he told me. “No issue comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. No issue comes to my desk where there’s one hundred percent confidence that this is the right thing to do. Because if people were absolutely certain then it would have been decided by somebody else. And that’s true in dealing with the economic crisis. That’s true in an order to take a shot at a pirate. That’s true about most of the decisions I make during the course of the day. So I’m accustomed to people offering me probabilities. In this situation, what you started getting was probabilities that disguised uncertainty as opposed to actually providing you with more useful information.”

Obama had no trouble admitting it to himself. If he acted on this, he was going to be taking a gamble, pure and simple. A big gamble.

If they were successful, and if the Pacer was bin Laden, then killing or capturing him would mark a clear and central victory in the war al Qaeda had started almost ten years ago. It would deliver on the promise Obama had made campaigning four years earlier, the one where he said he would take a shot unilaterally in Pakistan if he got a good chance, the promise that nearly everyone had criticized, including some, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who were now in the room helping him to decide. That promise in some ways had defined his national security strategy. So success would be a demonstration of justice achieved at great cost and sacrifice, and with tremendous skill. It would be a satisfying achievement for America and the world, an emotional turning point, but more, it would vindicate the determination and skill of everyone who had given of themselves—in some cases all of themselves—to the struggle. On a practical level, it would be the single greatest blow yet to an organization still scheming to take American lives.

If he tried and failed, however—and they had not yet begun to calculate all the spectacular ways it might fail—then some brave American warriors might lose their lives attempting something that might turn out to be a major national embarrassment. Failure would likely be as prestige-enhancing for al Qaeda as Desert One had been for Iran’s mullahs in 1980. Bin Laden’s stature, which had waned considerably since 2001, would get a new boost, the kind that translated into more money, more recruits, and more attacks. Success might bump up Obama’s political standing at home for a few weeks, but failure could brand him as an ineffectual commander in chief, and doom his chances for a second term as surely as Desert One had doomed Carter’s.

Either way, success or failure, there would be an outraged Pakistan to deal with. American relations with that difficult, nuclear-armed nation were already strained nearly to breaking. Whatever he decided, Obama later told me, was going to be a judgment call based on circumstantial evidence, piecing together patterns. There was still a possibility that this was some warlord from Afghanistan who had set up shop, or that this was a drug dealer from the Gulf who valued his privacy or had a mistress or a second family. There were other stories that might have explained the pattern. The calculation the president had to make was whether it was probable enough that bin Laden was there to justify the risks, given the importance to America’s national security.

So as the conversation around him about levels of certainty wore on, the president, who usually did more listening than speaking in these meetings, interrupted.

“This is fifty-fifty,” he said. That silenced everyone. “Look guys, this is a flip of the coin. I can’t base this decision on the notion that we have any greater certainty than that.”

So, if he decided to act, what were his options? Obama was presented with two. The simplest, and the one that posed the least risk to American forces, was to reduce the compound to dust, along with everyone and everything in and around it. To do the job right, the air force had calculated that would mean raining as many as thirty or more precision bombs from a high-flying B-2, or launching a comparable number of missiles. This would be enough to guarantee that anything breathing on, in, or near that plot of earth would be killed. It would vaporize everything above ground and pulverize anything below. There would be minimal worry about encountering Pakistani air defenses—a lone high-flying B-2 Stealth bomber would be long gone before the country knew it had been hit. With no ground forces there was no chance of mixing it up with that nation’s army or police. It would be a mighty, sudden stroke from a dark sky that would leave nothing but a big smoking hole in the middle of Abbottabad—which, wasn’t going to sell very well. Collateral damage would make the Pakistani fury all the more righteous. But it would get the job done.

Obama asked how many people were living at the compound and was informed that there were four adult males, five women, and nearly twenty children. He asked about the houses that were close to the compound in the neighborhood. Those, too, would be completely destroyed, along with every resident man, woman, and child. This really gave the president pause. America was not going to obliterate them on a fifty-fifty chance of also killing Osama bin Laden.

So the president scrapped that plan immediately. He said the only way he would even consider attacking the compound from the air was if the volume and precision of munitions was such that the blast area would be drastically reduced.

Then McRaven explained the ground option for the first time. His team had not yet fleshed out the mission completely. The one thing he could tell the president for sure was that if his team could be delivered to the compound, they could clear it and kill or capture bin Laden with minimal loss of life. The admiral delivered this opinion with the kind of confidence that can come only with long experience. He wasn’t trying to sell it. He had been in these meetings back in the early years after 9/11, and he had seen how various factions or branches or agencies had worked to sell their approach to the president. This was not like that. He was surprised, given the importance of this mission and the risks it entailed, that the discussions were not more rancorous. Panetta and Brennan had set the tone from the beginning. In every meeting he had attended, options were laid on the table and discussed, pro and con. McRaven had told his aide on the project: “We may end up doing this thing, we may not. In the end we’re going to do what’s best for the country. If it’s dropping one bomb on the compound, then that’s what we’re going to do.” So he presented the still-sketchy ground operation as a simple statement of fact. Without bringing any more people into the planning loop, he said, “I can tell you that we can succeed on the raid. What I can’t tell you yet is how I get in and how I get out. To do that requires detailed planning by air planners who do this for a living and assess the air defense capabilities of that country and who can plot and route how we would get in and how we would get out and what obstacles we would face getting in and getting out.

“So I am not recommending a raid,” he told the president. “I am telling you that if I could get in, we could execute a raid. Getting out might be a little sporty. I can’t recommend a raid until I do the homework.”

Even if he had done the homework, the admiral felt no need to push for the raid. He believed everyone in the room would come to that conclusion on his or her own. The facts would steer them to it. He also believed the president would not let this opportunity slip. The bombing option was too loud and messy, too many innocents would be killed, and in the end you would not have any way to prove you had killed bin Laden. After a strike like that, with the big smoking hole in Abbottabad, Pakistan would be understandably furious. There would be no chance that an American team would get the chance to sift patiently through the rubble looking for DNA. Actually getting bin Laden was the only thing that would make the blowback from Pakistan worth it. But you would have to be able to show that’s what you had done. Nothing would accomplish that short of having his corpse or living person in custody. Only that would eliminate any mystery about why you had done it. The risks were greater whenever you sent men in on the ground, but his men were more than capable, and he knew Obama knew it. He had also learned that this president was not unduly risk averse. He had been favorably impressed over the previous two years. Obama had made the final call on almost every major mission JSOC had undertaken in that time, and he was not timid. He would always listen without tipping his thoughts to discussions of the military and political risks, then he would retreat for a time, a few hours or until the next morning, and would generally come back to say, “I gotta go do it.” The only time he said no was when the risks were prohibitively high. Understanding that the president had a broader range of responsibilities than he had as a military commander, McRaven had come to trust Obama’s judgment. The president counted the real risks for the men on the ground more heavily than the political risks, which is what any military officer wants from the commander in chief. In a few cases where even McRaven’s superiors had advised waiting—had said, “It’s a little too risky”—it was the president who had come back to say, “No, okay, let’s go do it.” So the admiral did not voice his own thoughts about which way to go. There was no need.

Panetta had another thought about the raid option. If bin Laden was not in the compound, the SEALs might be able to depart without creating a major disturbance. The people living there and the neighbors would have a story to tell, for sure, but because the mission was conceived as CIA covert action, the United States could simply deny it. Such a denial would hardly fool the Pakistani government, but it would make the thing less of a poke in the eye. Deniability pushed the mission into the gray area that had sustained secret American operations in Waziristan for years.

When the meeting ended, Obama asked the air force to work on developing a more surgical strike, and also some “targeted stand-off options,” which meant missiles or, more likely, drones. But the president also wanted a fuller picture of what a ground raid would look like. Could they deliver the force without setting off alarms? Could they get in and out without the need for going to war with Pakistan’s air defenses?

“Sir, it’s just me and one other guy right now and this concept that we’ve got to come up with,” said McRaven. “I can’t tell you whether or not this will work. I can’t tell you until I pull the team together and we do the rehearsals, and then I can get back to you.”

So McRaven was sent off to do his homework.

This meant running what he called “all the trap lines.” There were a lot of variables. The Abbottabad compound was relatively large at thirty-eight thousand square feet. Bigger meant more people. On a normal-sized compound in Afghanistan, McRaven was used to sending in seventy men. You had to be able to strongpoint the perimeter and every door and window. There was a three-story house and an outbuilding. So you had to get the right force there. You had to get them there without being detected. It was a long way in and a long way out, so you had to be able to refuel before flying back, which meant a staging area somewhere outside the city where you could set down larger choppers carrying fuel and a quick reaction force. The helicopters all had their specifications, depending on altitude and temperature and other factors, so you had to figure out how many men they could carry. At the end of the day it was all about load. Pounds cut into airtime. The more choppers you used, the larger your presence and the greater the likelihood of being discovered, or of mechanical or pilot malfunction—ghosts of Desert One. He wouldn’t have the final calculations until they started rehearsing, but he could tell right away that they were going to have to go in heavier and with fewer men than he would like.

Two weeks later, at the end of March, he was back in the Situation Room with a full plan. McRaven now told the president that he was completely confident that his men could execute the raid. His air planners had worked out entering Pakistan’s airspace without being seen by means of two stealth Black Hawks, secret aircraft specially designed to fly silently and avoid radar detection, followed by two big MH-47E Chinooks carrying fuel and a backup force, which would set down in Kala Dhaka, fifty miles northwest of Abbottabad. The Black Hawks would deliver the “operators” to the compound and, when they had finished taking it down, fly them out to the Chinooks and refuel before flying back to Afghanistan. He said it was likely they could do this without tripping any alarms. McRaven said that if his men could get on and off the compound within thirty minutes, there was a good chance that they would encounter no organized Pakistani defense. There was always a possibility that a small armed police unit—a couple of guys armed with AK-47s—might stumble on them. It was even possible that the compound had its own nearby defenders. But forces that small would not pose a serious threat to his men.

If it happened this way, then the obstacles were minimal. But what if the Pakistanis were more alert than they imagined? What if something significantly delayed them at the compound? The admiral was grilled hard at this second meeting. Many in the room were skeptical of the response time he projected for the Pakistanis. Didn’t he realize how close the compound was to the military academy? Less than a mile. That there was an army facility and an Inter-Services Intelligence compound nearby? McRaven was aware. He explained that proximity in this case did not guarantee a speedy reaction. Even if some low-level soldier or cop or agent was awakened or alerted to something fishy going on at the compound, it would still take time for any kind of coordinated response. The Pakistani forces adhered to a rigid command structure, with lower-ranking men rarely acting without permission. It was a command philosophy the U.S. military discouraged but was typical of many militaries around the world. Most young officers would prefer to get in trouble for doing nothing than for doing something wrong. That calculation was built into the thirty-minute estimate. That was about as fast as they could do it, the admiral said. But what if he was wrong? What if the Pakistani forces responded faster than he imagined they could? What if something happened on the compound that slowed his men down?

McRaven explained that if a significant Pakistani force showed up before his men could get out, then there was going to be a gunfight. He didn’t want to get into that gunfight. His men would win it, but in the process lose the war. That scenario would give the Pakistanis the high moral ground. There were big political ramifications whenever American forces killed a single Pakistani soldier or policeman. They didn’t know for sure that bin Laden was there, after all. As soon as the admiral had brought more of his planning team in, he had told them that rule one was they were going to do everything conceivable to avoid killing Pakistanis. It had been a priority at every point in the planning. If they got in and out fast, there would be no problem, but he could readily imagine a scenario that might delay them. If they got on target and were not able to find bin Laden, but they thought he was there hiding from them, behind a false door or false wall—something they had encountered often—then what would they do? Did they just hop on the helicopters and leave? Suppose they had his wives and other key people who confirmed that bin Laden was there somewhere? The answer was no, they would not leave. They had come too far and were too close at that point to give up. At that point, they had to be prepared to strongpoint the compound and start tearing things apart until they found him. Which would mean overstaying their limit. There was a strong potential for that, perhaps even a likelihood, and every extra minute upped the chances of a confrontation with Pakistani troops.

“So at what point in time do you stop trying to find him?” McRaven asked hypothetically. “And now you are surrounded by Pakistanis, what do you do?”

The admiral’s answer was surprising. He recommended that if it came to that, his men would just hunker in and wait for Washington to work things out with Pakistan’s leaders.

“You go to them and say, ‘Okay, guys, this was the one we’ve been telling you about for umpteen years, that if he was there we were coming. Well he’s here. We haven’t killed anybody. We’re holed up. Let’s talk about this.’”

That, McRaven thought, might buy them thirty more minutes. After that, he wouldn’t be dealing with a local response, but with the entire Pakistani chain of command.

Here’s where the thinking of an admiral differed from the thinking of a president. As far as McRaven was concerned, his men could fight their way out of anything. There was a Quick Reaction Force nearby in case things got unexpectedly hairy. So they could fight their way off the compound. But then you had the rendezvous in Kala Dhaka, and then four American choppers flying out of Pakistani airspace, which was patrolled by F-16 fighters. Protecting the helicopters would now involve facing down the Pakistani air force. Again, this was something the U.S. Air Force could handle, with its superior fighters and air-to-ground capability, but… well, the fight would now be very sporty, indeed. The admiral thought this was a scenario to be avoided at all cost. After two years in Afghanistan, where the bulk of his force had moved from Iraq, he was acutely sensitive to the delicacy of the Pakistani relationship. It would not likely withstand a trail of dead Pakistanis and downed fighters and burning ground-to-air stations. So at the point where the raiding force inside the compound found itself surrounded, he suggested they should decline the fight. They would strongpoint the compound, hole up, and wait for Washington to work things out with Islamabad. They were, after all, American soldiers on a mission that Pakistan, ostensibly, supported… apprehending the world’s most wanted terrorist. Someone in the White House or at the State Department would then get on the phone with General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistani army chief of staff, or President Asif Zardari, and explain the situation. Ask, How do we extract ourselves from this without killing a lot of people? We don’t want dead guys; you don’t want dead guys. This is how McRaven imagined the conversation might proceed. The very fact that they preferred standing down to getting into a gunfight demonstrated that they intended no harm to Pakistanis and posed no threat to that nation.

The president saw it differently than the admiral. He was not going to have any such conversation with Pakistani authorities. Counterterrorism adviser Nick Rasmussen would later describe the president’s response to McRaven’s suggestion as “visceral.”

“I thought the possibilities of them being held, being subject to politics inside of Pakistan, were going to be very, very difficult,” the president explained to me. “I did not want to put them in a position of that kind of vulnerability.”

If he were going to deal with an outraged Pakistan, which he would have to do in almost any event, he would do it without a force of brave Americans in the middle.

Just days earlier, Obama had finally brought to a close the difficult wrangling over CIA contractor Davis, who had been released only after the United States agreed to pay $2.4 million to the families of the men he had killed. The incident had stirred up a small furor in Pakistan, where much of the public and the leadership was already fed up with American intrusions on their sovereignty—publicly, at least. Unofficially, the country’s top leadership was a lot more flexible, but there was only so far you could push them.

Where this mission was concerned, Obama wasn’t going to count on Pakistani goodwill, because there appeared to be little to spare. Like many countries in that part of the world, Pakistan’s leadership was less a coherent hierarchy than a collage of overlapping interests. Part of the art of managing that relationship was in balancing those interests. It was an important relationship. Most of the supplies and fuel for the American war effort in Afghanistan flowed across Pakistan’s border. Even though al Qaeda terrorists had taken refuge in the country’s northwestern territories and had the tacit sympathy of powerful factions in its leadership, the United States depended upon the government’s silent support to continue its drone campaign. And Pakistan was a nuclear power, a thing never to be forgotten. Its stability was vital to the security of not just the region but the world. With tempers in Islamabad already hot, imagine handing the Pakistanis a small force of elite American soldiers. Imagine trying to negotiate their exit with them trapped inside a compound with hostages or dead bodies, one of them quite possibly Osama bin Laden. The SEALs could all end up dead or held hostage. It wasn’t hard to imagine.

“And I also had confidence, based on my subsequent conversations with McRaven, that they could get out of there without engaging the Pakistani military,” the president explained. “There was a good enough chance of them being able to get in and get out, even if something went wrong, even if it wasn’t bin Laden, that they could hold off the Pakistani military, which we anticipated couldn’t respond faster than a certain period of time, so that the likelihood of a firefight erupting between the United States and Pakistani military was very slim. And in that situation, I just wanted to get them out of there, and then we would deal with the fallout knowing that those guys were back here safe.”

So Obama told McRaven that if his SEALs went in, they were coming out. Bin Laden was an imperative that outweighed the relationship. If the Pakistanis sounded an alarm and responded faster than they anticipated, so be it. There would have to be a confrontation. He told the admiral to be fully prepared to fight his way out.

But the president had not decided on the raid yet. The air force came back with a plan for smaller bombs and smaller blast circles. They could hit the compound without harming people living in homes outside its walls, but the lesser assault meant that they could not guarantee taking out anything underground. There would still be a lot of bodies, women and children included, and no way to tell if one of the dead was bin Laden.

But there was another air option, one that appealed especially to Cartwright, one of Obama’s favorite generals. It had been Cartwright who had come up with a middle path the year before when Obama was caught between launching a large counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan and essentially pulling the plug on the American mission. Cartwright had proposed sending a much smaller force than the Pentagon was requesting, one capable of conducting counterterror operations, but not large enough for the nation-building exercise contemplated.

Cartwright’s new proposal for Abbottabad was to target the Pacer alone. Wait for the tall man dressed in shalwar kameez and prayer cap to emerge for his daily exercise around the vegetable garden and shoot him down with a small missile fired from a drone. It would require great precision, but the air force could do it with the equivalent of a sniper drone. There would be no smoking hole in the center of Abbottabad, no dead wives and children, little collateral damage, if any, and there would be no potential dead or wounded SEALs, no chance of a sticky standoff against Pakistan’s armed forces at the compound.

It felt too good to be true. The guys who operated these things felt pretty good, but there was a strong whiff of testing stage about it. And what if it worked and you dropped the Pacer in his tracks? What then? How would you know that you had killed Osama bin Laden? And what if you hadn’t? What if you had dropped some cheating sheik from Dubai? How would you know? It meant that the uncertainty that surrounded this mission would live on, and that in some sense bin Laden would live on, even if it had been him. And it was strictly a one-shot deal. If you missed, the Pacer and his entourage would vanish.

There was one strong clue that Obama had already made up his mind. McRaven had said that his team would be ready to conduct the raid by the first week of May, when the moon would vanish for a few days over Abbottabad and the nights would be black—the way JSOC liked them. No one said anything, but that window seemed to impose a hard deadline. The drone option had no urgency. It was a daylight opportunity, and the Pacer walked every day. You could take the shot whenever you wished. So why did everyone feel that the moon’s cycle was so important?

Obama told McRaven to start full-dress rehearsals and to be ready to go when the nights turned black. He also told Cartwright to get ready to attempt the drone strike. He wanted both options kept alive until he made a decision.

But to those who knew him, there was little doubt which way he was leaning.