The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

7. “Adhering to These Precautions”

April 2011

In what would prove to be the final weeks of his life, events had overtaken the Sheik. There were popular uprisings throughout the Middle East. The tectonic shifts of what would be called the Arab Spring were remaking his world, country by country, but the revolutions bore little resemblance to his visions or his methods. The insignificance of al Qaeda in these events was widely noted. This worried him.

He had much to worry him that April, and he spelled it all out in another of his long letters, dated April 26 but likely begun well before then, again to “Mahmoud,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. The letter would never be sent. This was his sixth spring confined in Abbottabad. His caliphate had shrunk to the confines of his high compound walls, to the cramped and crowded space of the house’s upper two floors. On the upper floor, when he stood with his prayer cap on, his head was just inches from the ceiling. His days and nights followed very familiar routines, rarely broken: meals, his seven daily prayer sessions, his readings, his brisk daily walk around the vegetable garden, teaching poetry to his children and grandchildren, and the regular sermons and lectures to his three wives.

Much of the rest of the day, he was in front of his TV, absorbing the startling news by satellite from all over the world. Tyrants had been overthrown or were besieged in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. There were rumblings elsewhere. It was a groundswell of Arab pride, Islamic fervor, and passion for democracy that no one had foreseen, and that certainly he had not foreseen. Bin Laden felt sidelined, felt it like some kind of punishment, and was troubled. The great awakening he had longed for and predicted was happening without him.

“I protest to God so much about my isolation and being alone,” he had written in a different letter, “that I worry people will tire of me and [my ideas] will become old and worn out to them! But I protest only to God.”

He worried. His vision for the Middle East was a return to a model many centuries old, the ancient caliphate, where all true believers would be united in a single holy nation, a strict Islamist state run according to principles of the Koran as interpreted by Qutb, by himself, and by other like-minded religious scholars. His methods, the suicide attacks on infidels designed to spread fear and confusion, had been superseded by popular, mostly nonviolent, mass movements, crowds of joyous, angry, brave protesters singing and chanting defiantly, demanding freedom and change. He had a lot to say about all of this, tapping at his computer keyboard with his long, thin fingers in his tiny third-floor office alongside a crude wooden bookshelf, or pacing and dictating. He had recently dyed his beard and donned more elegant robes to record a new video statement that would go out with this packet of letters. In one to al-Rahman he raced to catch up with the Arab Spring, to interpret the events in light of his own immutable beliefs, and to instruct his followers on how to think about the changes and what posture to take toward them. He saw the revolutions as a partial fulfillment of his prophesies—he dubbed them “half solutions”—but potentially hazardous to the ultimate goal, insofar as much of the popular support came from young Arabs “tainted” with softer notions of Islam, or, even worse, Western secular views of tolerance, human rights, and democracy. He still spoke of “the Nation” as his vision of a unified Muslim empire.

“To start, I want to talk about this most important point in our modern history, the launching of the Nation’s revolution against the tyrants, which I ask Allah to make the impetus for a revival of the dignity of the religion and its glory. What we are witnessing in these days of consecutive revolutions is a great and glorious event, and it is most probable, according to reality and history, that it will encompass the majority of the Islamic world…”

The influence and control of the United States was being cast out.

“And the Americans worry about that, which is great; the secretary of state indicated in her visit to Yemen that, ‘We worry that the region will fall into the hands of the armed Islamists.’… the fall of the remaining tyrants in the region became certain, with the will of Allah, and it was the beginning of a new era for the whole nation. These events are the most important events that the Nation has witnessed for centuries… and it is known that comprehensive popular movements inevitably change conditions, so if we redouble the efforts to direct and educate the Muslim people and caution them from half solutions, while taking care in providing good advice to them, the oncoming stage will be for Islam, Allah willing.”

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for instance, troubled him, because the organization was not, as he saw it, purely devoted to his brand of strict and violent jihad. He was hopeful that the group was coming around, noting news reports of growing militancy within it, especially among the young. “So the return of the Brotherhood and those like them to the true Islam is a matter of time, with the will of Allah. The more attention paid to explaining Islamic understanding, the sooner their return is, so preserving the Muslim movements today and adjusting their direction requires effort and attention, keeping in mind the necessity of being kindly to the sons of the Nation who fell under misguidance for long decades.”

The role of al Qaeda now, he explained, would be “the duty of guidance and advice, which is connected to the fate of the Nation.”

The Sheik complained that his recommendation years earlier to establish “a number of scholars and wise men” to guide the emergence of the caliphate had been ignored, and that this now helped explain why the Arab Spring was progressing along improper paths. Now, at this “pivotal moment,” he wrote, “it is incumbent on us, the mujahidin, to fulfill that duty and to plug that gap as much as we can, which became one of the utmost duties after faith, so that the Nation is liberated with the will of Allah and the religion regains its glory. There is no doubt that the duties of the mujahidin are numerous, except that this great duty should take the main share of our efforts so that we do not shortchange it, and expose the Nation’s shake-up today to what the revolutions against Western occupation got exposed to in the past.”

In the past, such revolutions had been co-opted by corrupt, Westernized, secularized dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, or had, as in Afghanistan, been toppled by Western intervention. Bin Laden argued that he and his followers were the ones with the right vision, with the God-inspired vision to lead the changes. Contrary to interpretations of the Arab Spring that claimed al Qaeda was irrelevant, the Sheik argued that it had been his efforts that prepared the way. It was al Qaeda that had “bled down the head of international apostasy”—that is, America—“and emboldened their Muslim brothers to rise up against the regimes it had propped up for much of the last century. The most important thing for now was to end conflict between Islamist factions, at least temporarily, and for every Muslim to join this great rising tide.

“So we have to get into expanding the programmed and directed media, and our efforts in directing the Nation’s research and deciding on a specific plan that we all discuss, as the oncoming stage is important and very dangerous and does not tolerate the apparent differences in our directions,” he wrote. “Initially, I would see that one of the most important steps of the oncoming stage is inciting the people who have not revolted yet, and encouraging them against the rulers and their methods, indicating that it is a religious duty and a logical necessity, so the arrows are concentrated on toppling the rulers without discussing the differences in issues, while paying maximum attention to spreading awareness and correcting the understanding. We should tell the brothers in all the regions to pay attention to spreading the book Misunderstandings About Islam by Sheik Muhammad Qutb. Please inform Sheik Yahya [Abu Yahya al-Libi, who would be killed in a drone strike in little more than a year] and the other brothers who have expressive abilities… and inform me of their opinions without missing any of them, as every voice that can contribute in this stage should not be excluded.”

Bin Laden now set down a list of “general points,” asking that a video statement he had recorded on a thumb drive about the Arab Spring, and which he would enclose, be given to Al Jazeera for broadcast, and seeking advice about an essay he had written on the same subject. As for the al Qaeda brothers in various countries undergoing dramatic change, he wrote, “It would be nice to remind [them] to be patient and deliberate, and warn them of entering into confrontations” with other Islamist factions. He foresaw, correctly, that the newly elected governments in most states would “belong to the Islamic parties and groups, like the Brotherhood and the like, and our duty at this stage is to pay attention to the call among Muslims and win over supporters and spread the correct understanding, as the current conditions have brought on unprecedented opportunities… The more time that passes and as the call increases, the more the supporters will be of the people [who agree with al Qaeda’s goals], and the more widespread will be the correct understanding among the coming generations of Islamic groups.”

The Sheik had a lot to say in this letter. He moved from sweeping political commentary and advice to a host of detailed instructions for the far-flung branches of his organization. He had read or heard that some members of al Qaeda in Yemen were experimenting with the use of poison gases, which worried him. He advised that they proceed only with great care, alluding to his concern about tactics that killed Muslims as well as infidels. He expressed worry over “the political and media reaction against the mujahidin and their image in the eyes of the public.” He wondered why he had not heard anything from “the brothers in Iraq” and instructed those touting an al Qaeda affiliation in Somalia (whom he had opposed granting official status) to release a female hostage and some of the others they held, and then wait to kill the remainder until after the revolution in Libya had resolved itself, and until after national elections were held in France. He wanted the “brothers in Somalia” to concentrate more on economic development in that ravaged country, and to temper strict enforcement of the harsher measures prescribed by shariah law. Citing the Prophet, he said, “Use doubts to fend off the punishments.”

The letter went on and on, offering guidance for safely moving specific members of the organization from country to country, about the travel of his twenty-year-old son, Hamza, and other things.

And in this same letter the Sheik found time to hammer home some advice about staying hidden. After more than nine successful years on the run, he considered himself to be an expert on the subject.

“It is proven that the American technology and its modern systems cannot arrest a mujahid if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him,” he wrote. “So adherence to security precautions makes their advanced technology a loss and a disappointment to them.”

As troubled as he was by world developments, he personally felt safe, very confident in his security methods. But he knew that not everyone was capable of his discipline. There were those who could stay hidden and those who could not.

“There is a percentage of people who cannot do that, and those need to be handled in a different manner than the others, and it may be better to provide them with an opportunity in the field,” he wrote. In other words, these people were disposable. “As for those whom you have observed as being disciplined and capable, you arrange homes for them on the outskirts of the city… and they will be with trusted companions, and the companions will have some work as cover, as if they lived from it, especially for those who live close by and have observing neighbors.”

He was describing his own situation, his compound just outside Abbottabad, and his trusted followers the Ahmed brothers, who, under their assumed names, Arshad and Tareq Khan, said they worked in the transportation business. To evade the Americans, it was best to live exactly as he lived. There was, however, one constant problem. Children.

“One of the most important security issues in the cities is controlling children, by not getting out of the house except for extreme necessity like medical care, and teaching them the local language; and that they do not get to the yard of the house without an adult who will control the volume of their voices, and we with the grace of Allah have been adhering to these precautions for nine years…”

Nine years since 9/11.

He had five more days to live.

As the Sheik was writing this letter, his last, as he was boasting of his security prowess, adhering to his precautions—albeit with the problem posed by children and grandchildren—he was in the crosshairs of the United States. In the terms used by the American military, he had been “found and fixed.”

For the finish, President Obama had ordered the two remaining options to be more fully developed and wanted both to be ready by the first week of May. The ground option was time sensitive. In addition to there being no moon in the first few days of May, it was also mid-spring, which meant nighttime temperatures at four thousand feet were still cool enough to avoid overheating the choppers. The Black Hawks would have to maneuver and hover over the target after having flown low and fast for an hour and a half en route from Jalalabad. They would arrive hot and heavy.

Four choppers would make the trip into Pakistan: the two Black Hawks to deliver the twenty-four-man raiding party directly to Abbottabad and two much bigger MH-47E Chinooks to haul fuel bladders and a twenty-four-man Quick Reaction Force to a remote spot outside of the city. A fifth chopper carried a larger reserve force, Plan C, in case the forward troops needed more help—this force was even larger now that the president had ordered McRaven to be prepared to fight his way out. It would remain just inside the Afghan border ready to launch if needed. All of the choppers were outfitted with stealth and sound-damping technology. The loads had been finely calibrated to get the most performance at Abbottabad’s altitude and expected air temperature. Waiting a month would push the mission into early summer and warmer weather, which would up the stress on the aircraft and probably require changes—more choppers or fewer men. McRaven had moved this force into position in Jalalabad, and they would be ready to go on Obama’s command.

The other alternative was called the “air option,” and it had been reduced to Cartwright’s advocacy of a one-shot try—a single shot from a drone. That could be done whenever the Pacer showed himself and the order was given.

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this mission, not just to America—getting Osama bin Laden would be like closing an open wound—but to Obama’s presidency. He would formally announce his run for a second term in early April, and it was by no means a sure thing. A stubbornly sluggish economy had steadily eroded his popularity. His relationship with Congress, never good, had been at an impasse ever since the November elections had erased the Democratic majority in the House and substantially reduced it in the Senate. He had been labeled a big-spending, old-fashioned liberal, even a socialist, at a time when the United States had accumulated massive debts and Republicans were signing oaths to oppose any tax increases, promising to finally end the era of “big government.” Obama the bridge builder—what he’d said he hoped to be on taking office—had become a deeply polarizing figure.

Much of the negative assessment was still grounded in the notion that he was somehow inauthentic. He was not really an American. For some, the suspicion was quite literal. They argued that his Hawaiian birth certificate had been faked. Or that he was not a Christian, as he professed and that his twenty years of churchgoing affirmed. No, he was secretly a Muslim. Most people didn’t buy these stories; there was overwhelming evidence they were false. But such beliefs colored or swayed the perceptions of even sensible voters, who suspected subtler shades of inauthenticity—who suspected that Obama, with his lefty, Harvard elitist, internationalist, interracial background, was not fully committed to bedrock national principles. He was less a believer in personal liberty than government power. That he was not a true believer in the American experiment, in the Constitution, but was more in the mold of European social democrats, who preferred a society and economy managed by government, by smart people like him. The president’s famously “cool” personal style still hurt him, too. His attempts to halt the 2008 financial collapse had unloosed a flood of federal spending, and although that approach had simply continued the policies of his Republican predecessor, and were believed by most experts to have at least partly worked, the economic recovery was slow, people were discouraged, and budget deficits were scarily large, with the president seemingly bent on making them larger still. His biggest legislative triumph, national health care, had seemed to hurt him politically more than it helped him. It had cemented the perception of Obama as a closet socialist, or at least a traditional big government, big spending, big taxing liberal. National health care added a whole new social program to the roster of those already bankrupting the country, his critics claimed. It was denounced as unconstitutional, proof of Obama’s secret, un-American agenda. His shrillest political opponents had created so much doubt over his unusual ancestry and upbringing that the president had found it necessary to release the complete 1961 file from the Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu in order to prove that he possessed the most basic qualification for the White House, citizenship by birth. It satisfied all but fringe critics that he was truly American, but it didn’t persuade many that he wasn’t engaged in a plot to turn America into a European-style state.

Perhaps the most effective counter to this suspicion of inauthenticity was his performance as commander in chief. Obama had effectively and aggressively defended America. During the campaign he had skillfully associated his rise with that of another young, charismatic, tough-minded Democrat a half century earlier. He had cultivated the family of John F. Kennedy, winning the endorsement of Senator Ted Kennedy in the months before Kennedy’s death, even orchestrating a powerful endorsement from Caroline Kennedy, who compared him with her father. But now Obama was in danger of being too much in the model of JFK, a spellbinding orator and stylish young leader with only a callow grasp of national leadership. It had been President Lyndon Johnson, after all, who had come along after the assassination to shore up Camelot’s legacy; it had taken his hardheaded mastery of power, of Congress, to enact the signature legislation Kennedy himself had been unable to achieve. Killing bin Laden would be one accomplishment that even Obama’s worst critics would acknowledge. Here was the one arena where a president could decide and act without outside political interference, especially given the covert nature of the enterprise. Within that arena differences of opinion were strictly subject to his judgment and decision. The most significant criticism of his performance as commander in chief had come from his own former supporters. After promising to close the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, a symbol of the Bush administration’s presumed abuses of power, Obama had failed to overcome congressional opposition to transferring detainees to prisons in the United States. On the big issues he had kept his campaign promises. He had ramped down and would soon end America’s involvement in Iraq, and in this he had broad public support. While initially boosting American forces in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops, he had concluded that efforts to build a functioning central government there were unlikely ever to succeed and had quietly reversed direction. He was determined to end America’s large-scale military commitment there, too. He had been criticized for not decisively jumping into the Libyan revolution, and then for not doing so more directly, but the NATO–led intervention on behalf of the rebels—what Obama’s critics had termed “leading from behind”—was already starting to look like a smart strategy. In a country weary of two long wars, there was little or no opposition to Obama’s minimalist, pragmatic approach to using America’s military power. Even the Republican candidates already battling for the chance to unseat him in 2012, who missed no chance to fault Obama, rarely spoke of national security concerns.

Getting bin Laden would be the capstone. It would be a milestone emotionally and strategically.

“I thought it would be cathartic for the American people to know that we stay with something,” the president told me. “We don’t let it slip. I thought that was important. Once I got into office, we were making significant progress against high-value targets in al Qaeda below bin Laden—the lieutenants, the captains, the field generals, we were taking them out pretty systematically—so there was a sense that we understood that the organization was getting hollowed out, and that if we could get the guy at the top, then we might be in a position to strategically defeat the organization. As long as bin Laden was still out there, though, even if we were making a whole bunch of progress at the lower levels, their capacity to reconstitute itself, I thought, would still be pretty significant.”

It would inevitably have political benefits, too. No one involved with Obama’s handling of the bin Laden effort saw the slightest hint that politics shaped his thinking, but there’s no question that success would help, and that a public failure would hurt. It was the thing that President Bush, for all his bluster, had been unable to do. Obama was a skilled politician. There was not a move he made that did not include a measure of calculation, even if only in understanding the stakes. No one understood the stakes better. Killing or capturing the author of 9/11 would register with every American, of every political stripe. It would be a thing that transcended politics in an age where very little else could. There were very few things he might accomplish as president that would compare. Getting bin Laden would not completely destroy al Qaeda or end the threat of terror attacks, but it would be a huge step in that direction. It would slam shut the door on a painful national trauma. It would feel… perfect. He had argued from the beginning that it was the correct military response. It was the thing he had promised to do if he got the chance. So while Obama had not yet officially made up his mind about the compound in Abbottabad, and had tipped his hand to no one, those close to him believed he would go for it. He was leaning that way, and because of his confidence in McRaven he was leaning toward doing it on the ground.

Raiding the compound was the riskiest option. It posed a slew of hard questions that the air option did not. One of the most interesting was what to do if bin Laden was not killed but captured. The success of Obama’s drone war had meant that very few high-value targets ever found themselves in American custody any more. It had prompted speculation that this president was less interested in capturing al Qaeda figures than in killing them, or even that JSOC was under orders to avoid taking prisoners.

“Our basic attitude was that, given his dedication to his cause, the likelihood of surrender was very low,” the president explained. “We also knew that there would always be the possibility of him strapping on explosives and trying to take out a team with him. So I think people’s general attitude was, if he’s going to surrender, he better be naked and on the ground. Had that occurred, then we would have arrested him and held him. I won’t go into all the details of what those various steps would have been, but ultimately, we would have brought him to justice. We would have brought him back here.”

This, too, had to be thought through. Did they want a captured bin Laden? If they had him, what would they do with him?

What to do with high-profile terrorists had been a hot political issue for years. Congress had done nothing to resolve the problem. Bush had locked most of them away—like Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah—at Guantánamo, and talked about military tribunals somewhere down the line. But some, like the shoe bomber Richard Reid and the would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad—the latter of whom had betrayed his citizenship oath, an idea that troubled the Sheik—had been arrested and tried in federal courts and were now serving life sentences. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announced intention to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan had generated so much political protest that the administration had been forced that very month to back down and announce that he would instead face a military tribunal at Guantánamo.

In the unlikely event that bin Laden surrendered, Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial.

“We worked through the sort of legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article Three,” the president told me. “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”

Bin Laden in custody might give him the political capital he had lacked with Khalid Sheik Mohammed. It might be the very thing to end all the confusion over what to do with top-level terrorist detainees, and to end it in the right way. Obama believed that placing these terrorists before a judge and jury in a criminal court, affording them the full rights of criminal defendants, would showcase America’s commitment to justice for even the worst of the worst. It would present bin Laden to the world not as a heroic holy warrior but as the ill-informed fanatic and mass murderer he was. The president had to do more than just imagine these scenarios. It was one more outcome that needed to be thought through completely and planned for.

Obama added, “I think it’s important to emphasize, having made those plans, our expectation was that if, in fact, he was there, that he would go down fighting.”

McRaven’s men did their first rehearsal on April 7. They worked on an isolated acre deep inside the sprawling wooded grounds of Fort Bragg, where a faithful mock-up of the three-story Abbottabad house had been built. Chairman Mullen and Michael Vickers were among those who came down from the Pentagon and CIA to watch.

For the first practice session, the SEALs rehearsed the critical piece of the mission: hitting the compound and target house at night. They approached aboard two Stealth Black Hawks. One unit roped down to the roof of the building and assaulted it from the top down. The other roped into the compound and assaulted from the ground floor up. This part of the operation took only about ninety seconds to complete. The delivery choppers moved off while the men did their work, and then swooped back in to pick them up. The speed and coordination were impressive. They did this twice.

In part, McRaven was putting his men through this demonstration in order to impress. They had done this sort of thing so many times they could almost do it blindfolded. McRaven had handpicked shooters from SEAL Team Six. It was a Dream Team: men who, in the thousands of raids he had overseen, had shown they did not rattle, had shown they could handle themselves coolly and intelligently not just when things went according to plan, but when things went wrong. Those situations required quickly assessing the significance of the error or malfunction or whatever unexpected event had occurred, and then making the necessary adjustments to complete the mission. The core talent required was the ability to adapt, to think for yourself and make smart decisions. These were men who had proved it over and over in combat. They did not really need to rehearse, but rehearsals have other uses. McRaven wanted the assembled brass to see how good they were, how fast, how certain. He wanted them to witness the speed and coordination firsthand, to hear the sounds of the rotor blades and of the flash-bang explosions and of the weapons being fired, and to be able to imagine themselves on the receiving end of it. He wanted them to meet the men, touch their equipment and weapons, talk to them, get a sense of how professional, how experienced, and how confident they were, and then to carry that experience back to the White House—“Mr. President, they just did a rehearsal that will knock your socks off!”

SEAL Team Six had rotated home not long before. The men on these elite special operations teams went to war in shifts. For most of the last ten years they had been regularly deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan for three to four months, where they maintained a very high tempo, going out on missions every night, sometimes two or three times a night. Each unit had its own embedded combat support, administrative staff, and logistical teams that traveled together, every one of them handpicked. When deployed they lived for the most part sequestered from conventional troops, either at their own forward operating bases or on a portion of a larger base that was sealed off. The work was deadly serious. The men would spend the day getting their rest, cleaning their weapons, working out, and getting ready to go back out. They had their own TV and Internet access, but under rules that were far more restrictive than for most soldiers. Their pace and discipline were severe. They would blow off steam for a few months at home and then go back. When they were deployed, it was all business.

It was a demanding but extremely satisfying way of life. The men who achieved membership in these units tended to stay. Many found it hard to adjust to doing anything else. The skills required were not readily applicable to other kinds of work. And when you have been part of life-and-death operations for years—adrenaline-pumping missions where you risked your life, shot to kill, and where some of your good friends gave their lives—and when you believe that your work is vital to the security of your country, it is hard to find anything else that compares. When you work every day with people who are the very best at what they do, and when you enjoy the silent admiration of everyone you meet, even if they had only a vague idea of what you do—well, there is nothing quite like it.

On average, the operators were a decade or more older than most soldiers. Most were in their early thirties, veterans of several tours in regular units or “vanilla” special forces teams, as opposed to “black ops.” Some were in their forties, which skewed the average age to thirty-four. Some of the men in these units would joke that their biggest worry wasn’t so much getting shot by the enemy as it was throwing their back out. They excelled at a lot of things, but particularly at doing exactly what would be called for in Abbottabad: hitting a target fast and hard, making correct split-second decisions about whether to shoot or not to shoot, and distinguishing between friend and foe, combatant and noncombatant. They usually did their work in the dark, wearing night-vision devices, but had in recent years been mixing it up with day raids, partly to vary the pattern and partly just because of the demand to move quickly on fresh intelligence—staying inside the information cycle of the enemy.

Being called in like this to begin rehearsals after just rotating home was enough to tip them off that the mission was special. When they were told that they were going after bin Laden, the men cheered.

They reassembled for a second week of rehearsals in Nevada, where the heat and altitude—about four thousand feet—were similar to Abbottabad’s. Again chairman Mullen and Vickers and the others came out to watch. This time the rehearsals were designed to duplicate the conditions they would be flying in. On the real mission the helicopters would have to fly ninety minutes before arriving over Abbottabad. They would be flying very low and very fast to avoid Pakistani radar. Mission planners had to test precisely what the choppers could do at that altitude and in the anticipated air temperatures. How much of a load could the choppers carry and still perform? Originally they had thought they might be able to make it there and back without refueling, but the margins were too close. The choppers would have been coming back on fumes. So the refueling area was necessary. In Nevada they went through the entire scenario. The mock-up of the compound was much cruder. They had already practiced storming it again and again at Fort Bragg. This time the buildings were just Conex containers, and instead of stone walls around the compound there was a chain-link fence. The purpose of this rehearsal was not to duplicate the storming of the compound. The purpose here was to simulate the stresses on the choppers. It came off smoothly. The Black Hawks handled the job well.

Again, McRaven wanted Mullen and Vickers and the others to be impressed, because he wanted his own confidence in his men and the mission to be fully conveyed to the president. The best way to do that was not just to tell him about it. He understood that confidence was key if the SEALs were going to get the job.

Because the alternative, the drone strike, was tempting. It was so much less risky. The air option offered a kind of magic bullet, in the form of a small guided munition that could be fired from a tiny drone. No one involved with planning the mission would discuss its particulars, but the weapon sounded very much like a newly designed Raytheon GPS-guided missile about the length and width of a strong man’s forearm. General Cartwright was its chief advocate in the White House. Designed to help reduce the collateral damage that had always been an inevitable consequence of air strikes, the missile could strike an individual or a single vehicle without damaging anything nearby. Called simply an STM (small tactical munition), it weighed just thirteen pounds, carried a five-pound warhead, and was fired from under the wing of a drone that itself was no larger than a model airplane, small enough to escape the notice of any country’s air defenses. It was a “fire-and-forget” missile, which meant you could not guide it once it was released. It would find and explode on the precise coordinates it had been given. Since the Pacer tended to walk in the same place every day, Cartwright believed the missile would kill him, and likely him alone. It placed no American forces at risk. If the missile missed, or if the Pacer turned out not to be bin Laden, well, then it would just be an unexplained explosion in Abbottabad. No one need be the wiser. And if the missile did kill bin Laden, any Pakistani anger over an unauthorized U.S. drone strike would likely be offset by the embarrassment of revealing that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living safely not just in Pakistan, but only a short drive from Islamabad and less than a mile away from its national military academy.

The weapon had yet to be used in combat, although the technologies involved—drones and missiles—were hardly new. The only difference with this one was its size. Still… did you want to hinge such a critical opportunity on one shot, with a missile that had never been fired in anger? The drone option also robbed the strike of certainty. To his followers and to those who thought as he did, bin Laden still had tremendous influence, even though he had not been seen in years. If there was no proof he was dead, the organization could theoretically keep issuing statements and pronouncements to the faithful, raising contributions, urging and planning future attacks as if he were alive. And Obama would become the third U.S. president to have let him slip through his fingers. Arguments in favor of the drone kept coming back to these two things. What if the missile missed? And, if it killed bin Laden, how would you know for sure?

It was clear that the only way to know for sure was to send in a team of operators and bring him out, dead or alive.

But there were so many things that could go wrong. Recent history was littered with examples of how badly things could turn out. The failure of Desert One was an obvious caution. With its long insertion, desert refueling rendezvous point, and the target inside an urban area surrounded by potential enemies the situation was so similar it was eerie. The Iran disaster had shaken the military to its core, embarrassed the nation, and ended a presidency. And the long firefight that had followed the shooting down of two helicopters in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, had so rattled the Clinton administration that it had shied away from using military force for years afterward, with some disastrous consequences such as the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda in 1994. In Iran, the mission had been an abject public failure; in Mogadishu, the mission had actually been a success but had prompted a bloody eighteen-hour firefight that effectively pulled the plug on the American mission to Somalia. One or the other of these missions, or both, had come up at nearly every meeting to discuss options.

There was only one “ground option” scenario that wouldn’t cause trouble. If bin Laden was not there, the SEALs might be able to exit without hurting anyone and without setting off any alarms. No one would be the wiser. All the other outcomes had a big downside. Even perfect success—killing or capturing bin Laden without mixing it up with Pakistani forces—would exact a price: it would certainly trigger outrage and poison relations between the two countries for the foreseeable future. The list of worse outcomes was scary: dead SEALs, dead Pakistanis, embarrassment, a propaganda triumph for bin Laden and al Qaeda, a blow to the reputation of the U.S. military and the CIA.

So confidence was the key. If the president decided to go with McRaven, it would be because the admiral’s confidence was contagious.

The final meeting was held in the Situation Room on the afternoon of Thursday, April 28. Popular accounts of this decisive session have portrayed Obama facing down a wall of opposition and doubt among his top advisers. In fact, there was overwhelming support for launching the raid.

Filling the black leather chairs around the table were Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen, Vice Chairman James “Hoss” Cartwright, John Brennan, Thomas Donilon, DNI James Clapper, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Panetta’s deputy, Michael Morell. McRaven did not participate. He and the SEAL team had relocated to JSOC’s base in Jalalabad, to be ready to launch in two days. Throughout this series of meetings, the rule was that if you were not in town, you were not involved. Hooking up a satellite link for videoconferencing opened up the discussion to too many people. Technicians that could listen in would be involved on both ends, which compromised secrecy. Most of the president’s national security team—including Ben Rhodes, who had been informed weeks earlier—started considering how to announce the mission to the world. Top staffers of the principals ringed the room on the smaller leather chairs.

All sensed that the secret had held about as long as it could. As the planning had progressed over the previous four months, the circle of knowledge had grown. There were now hundreds of people in on it. No secret survived numbers like that for long. It was inevitable that at least one of those hundreds would screw up, let something slip. Somebody was bound to confide in someone else untrustworthy, or might decide for their own reasons to leak it. If they missed the new moon this weekend, they would have to wait a month for another. So for the raid option it was time to decide.

The week had been full for the Pentagon and the CIA. The day before Obama had announced, pending congressional review, that General David Petraeus, who had been commanding allied forces in Afghanistan since the previous July, would leave the army after thirty-seven years to head the CIA, and that Panetta, who had spearheaded this effort to find bin Laden, would become the new secretary of defense, replacing Bob Gates, who had announced months earlier that he would be stepping down. Petraeus had been read in on the bin Laden secret only recently, because the beefed-up rescue force Obama demanded required air and ground forces from his command. Weeks earlier—in fact the day before McRaven’s team performed its first rehearsal at Fort Bragg—the president had awarded the admiral his fourth star and promoted him to lead the Special Operations Command.

The president was juggling the usual array of responsibilities. The U.S. military was still helping with massive relief operations in Japan, enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in cooperation with European allies, and monitoring various stages of revolution or protest in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and Jordan. That week the president had unsuccessfully lobbied India to award an $11 billion contract for fighter planes to American firms. An outbreak of tornadoes in the Midwest had torn through Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee, requiring federal disaster assistance. On the day before this meeting, the president had held a press conference to deal with what he called the “silliness” over the place of his birth, releasing that “long form” birth certificate.

In the week before this session, Brennan had asked the Counterterrorism Center director, Mike Leiter, to assemble a team to perform one last “red teaming” of the intelligence on Abbottabad. So the final meeting began with Leiter’s findings, which were deflating. Leiter told the president that his group could arrive at only 40 percent certainty that bin Laden was in the compound. One of those on that red team, an experienced analyst, had estimated the chances at only 10 percent, a number so far below any they had heard, and coming so late in the game, that it drew nervous laughter in the crowded room. “I think you guys are telling yourselves something you want to hear,” was that analyst’s opinion. Still, 40 percent, the team’s estimate, was “thirty-eight percent better than we’ve been for ten years,” said Leiter. This was hardly confidence boosting. Obama asked if the estimate was based on anything new or different. It was not. This team had looked at the same information as everyone else. The president asked Leiter to explain the disparity. Why was their confidence so much lower than, say, that of “John,” the leader of the CIA’s bin Laden team, whose confidence had been 95 percent all along? Leiter could not explain to the president’s satisfaction, and so this new assessment was effectively dismissed. As far as Obama was concerned, the level of certainty was the same as it had been all along, fifty-fifty. So other than dampening the mood, this last red teaming had little influence on the final deliberations.

One by one, the principals around the room were asked to choose one of the three options: the raid, the missile strike, or doing nothing—and then to defend their choice. The president said that he would not make a decision himself at the meeting, but he wanted to hear everyone’s final judgment. Nearly everyone present favored the raid.

The only major dissenters were Biden and Gates and, by the next morning, Gates had changed his mind.

Biden was characteristically blunt. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go,” he said. “We have to do more things to see if he’s there.”

The vice president was never shy about political calculations. He believed that if the president decided to choose either the air or the ground option, and if the effort failed in any of the many ways it could, Obama would lose his chance for a second term. Biden felt strongly about it, and never hesitated to disagree at meetings like this, something the president had encouraged him to do. In this case he even disagreed with his top adviser on such matters, Tony Blinken, who was not asked for an opinion at this meeting but who had earlier made it clear to the president that he strongly favored the raid.

Gates spoke with quiet authority against it. He favored taking the shot from the drone. He acknowledged that it was a difficult call, and that striking from the air would leave them not knowing whether they had killed bin Laden, but he had been working at the CIA as an analyst in 1980 when the Desert One mission failed. He had, in fact, been in this very Situation Room when the chopper collided with the C-130 at the staging area in the desert and turned that effort into a gigantic fireball. It was an experience he did not want to revisit. He had visibly blanched the first time he had heard that McRaven was planning a helicopter-refueling stop in a remote area outside Abbottabad, similar to the one inside Tehran in 1980. The contours of this mission looked so much like the earlier failure that it rattled him. He had more of a personal sense for what another disaster like it would mean. He also mentioned the Black Hawk Down episode. He remembered how painful the loss of life and loss of face had been for the previous presidents Carter and Clinton, and he smelled the same potential here. As defense secretary, he also had a deeper appreciation than anyone else in the room for logistics, for the importance of sustaining the huge daily flow of fuel and matériel from Pakistan necessary to the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Blowing up the always dicey relationship with Pakistan would likely short-circuit that vital artery. There was so much to lose, he said, and the intelligence indicating bin Laden’s presence in the compound was still so flimsy—strictly circumstantial. Leiter’s presentation had driven that home for him. A raid gone wrong would have a huge downside: loss of the SEAL team or a potential hostage situation, a complete break with Pakistan, attacks on the U.S. embassy in Islamabad… So he told the president that he would choose the drone. If bin Laden was the Pacer, then they stood a very good chance of killing him. If not, if they missed or they were wrong, it would be disappointing, but the cost would not be so great. That was his advice, and it hung heavily in the room. It carried the weight of long experience and Gates’s own formidable reputation.

Cartwright agreed with Gates, but that was expected. He had put the drone option on the table, and after further testing he was more confident than ever that the small missile would do the job. It was the simplest and least risky way to go. The missile also won the endorsement of Leiter. He had expressed relatively low confidence that the Pacer was bin Laden but endorsed taking a killing shot at the fellow anyway.

Everyone else favored sending in the SEALs. At first it didn’t seem like Clinton would. She had famously faulted Obama years earlier for asserting that he would take a shot in Pakistan unilaterally if there was a good chance of getting bin Laden, and now, as secretary of state, she would bear the brunt of the diplomatic fallout if he did. Presenting a detailed assessment of pros and cons, she outlined the likely dire consequences for the U.S.-Pakistan relationship but wound up concluding that, because it was built more on mutual dependence than friendship and trust, it would likely survive. Someone pointed out that if going after bin Laden was enough to destroy the relationship, it was probably doomed anyway. Suspense built as Clinton worked her way around to her surprising bottom line. They could not ignore a chance to get Osama bin Laden. It was too important to the country. It outweighed the risks. Send in the SEALs.

Admiral Mullen, the president’s top military adviser, gave a detailed PowerPoint presentation before delivering his verdict. McRaven’s rehearsals for him and the others had achieved the desired effect. Mullen said he had such high confidence in the SEAL team that he advocated launching the raid.

Brennan, Donilon, Clapper, Panetta, and Morell all agreed. Brennan had long believed in his bones that it was bin Laden hiding in the compound, and if they indeed had found him, he argued, they had to go after him. The CIA director felt particularly strongly about it, which was not unexpected. This had been his project all along, and the analysts who worked for him were so eager to go in that they would have felt betrayed by their boss if he hadn’t supported them. The former congressman told Obama that he ought to ask himself, “What would the average American say if he knew we had the best chance of getting bin Laden since Tora Bora and we didn’t take a shot?” And going in on the ground would give them the proof they needed to make the mission worthwhile, or, possibly, gave them a chance of slipping out if bin Laden was not there.

Not all of the advisers present were asked for their opinions during this meeting, but they had all made their feelings clear in the previous weeks. To a man and woman they favored the raid. And soon the man who had made the most convincing argument against the raid would reverse himself.

At the Pentagon, when Gates’s undersecretaries Michael Vickers and Michèle Flournoy learned what he had recommended, they were distressed. No one knew yet what the president would decide, but they had every reason to believe that their boss’s opinion would weigh heavily. They briefly debated confronting him with how they felt, wondering if they would be overstepping, whether it would anger him, and they both decided it was their duty. So they went into his office first thing Friday morning, sat with him at a conference table, and went to work on him for a full hour.

“Boss, we think you’re wrong,” said Flournoy.

Like most of the other principals, she explained, he had been brought into the loop fairly late. She and Vickers had spent a lot more time working through the questions about the mission than he had. They believed he didn’t fully understand how well thought through McRaven’s plan was. They again outlined for him the raid’s plan, the backup plan, and the plan that backed up the backup plan, to demonstrate how carefully the mission had been designed. They sang McRaven’s praises. They had dealt with generals and admirals who rightly saw themselves as experts in their field, and who tended to bristle when a civilian bureaucrat second-guessed them, or expressed doubts about their well-laid plans. McRaven had approached this effort utterly without ego or emotion. He had understood from the start that the significance of this mission meant that he would have a lot of people at the Pentagon and White House and CIA looking over his shoulder asking questions, looking for flaws. Flournoy admired a quality in McRaven that was not always evident in the top brass: a willingness to admit that he didn’t know everything. He would sometimes respond to a good question with, “You know, I haven’t thought about that but I need to. Let me get back to you about it.” And he would. He was unusually open to suggestion, and had made substantial revisions to his plan based on the president’s concerns and those of everyone else involved. Flournoy and Vickers had also seen how carefully McRaven picked the members of his team, choosing men coming off fresh deployments who had honed their skills night after night for months. Gates had not, as Vickers had at the rehearsals, met those men and talked to them and obtained a sense of their maturity and experience. Gates had not been as close to any of this as they had, so he did not have their level of confidence.

They also argued that he had not adequately considered the downsides of the drone strike, the alternative he advocated. They questioned the idea that this was a clean, virtually risk-free alternative. First of all, neither Flournoy nor Vickers bought Cartwright’s optimism about the small missile hitting the target. The target, after all, was moving. The missile could not be guided. It had never been fired anywhere but on a testing range. You get one shot, they reminded Gates, and if you miss, that’s it. Bin Laden escapes again. Imagine the criticism that would follow: You got the chance of a lifetime and you blew it with something untried?

At the end of the hour, Gates phoned Donilon at the White House and asked him to tell the president that he had changed his mind. Obama would not learn of Gates’s change of heart until after he had made the decision—but when he did hear, it strengthened his resolve. In the end every one of the president’s top advisers except Biden was in favor of taking immediate action. Two—Cartwright and Leiter—wanted to use the drone. Everyone else backed McRaven.

The Thursday meeting ended early in the evening, and with the opinions of the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs still weighing heavily against those calling for the raid, the president’s choice seemed anything but certain.

“You’ll have my decision in the morning,” Obama said.

In truth, as the president told me, he had all but made up his mind when he left the Thursday meeting. He had been thinking about it for months. The advantages of the raid were obvious and, to his way of thinking, outweighed the risks. A missile might go astray and, unlike taking a shot from a drone, the raid offered certainty. If bin Laden was there, they would know it and they would bring him out, dead or alive. Getting him without being able to prove it—worse, without knowing it—would forfeit a big part of the accomplishment. Here was a chance to bring closure to the great tragedy of 9/11 and strike a mortal blow to al Qaeda. Add to that Obama’s trust in McRaven, and the near-unanimous support of his advisers, and the decision was clear.

There was another compelling reason to send in the SEAL team. If this had been bin Laden’s hideout for years, it might hold a trove of valuable information, perhaps the kind that would enable the United States to further dismantle al Qaeda. Obama knew the logic behind F3EAD. The only way to exploit bin Laden’s personal data was to send in men who could collect it.

No matter how compelling it was to attempt the raid, the risks were great for the men he ordered in, for the alliance with Pakistan, for the reputation of the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and for his own presidency.

He reviewed the process over and over again in his mind Thursday night into Friday morning. Just as had been the case ten years ago, when he was a state senator in Illinois, his habit was to stay up much later than Michelle and his girls. They had turned in at ten o’clock. He was up another three hours pacing and thinking in the Treaty Room, the upstairs room that functioned as the family’s living room and also the president’s private office. The room displays Henry Ulke’s portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, Théobald Chartran’s large painting of William McKinley signing a peace treaty with Spain, and George P. A. Healy’s depiction of Abraham Lincoln conferring with his military advisers near the end of the Civil War. History bears down on you in a room like that.

“It was a matter of taking one last breath and just making sure, asking is there something that I haven’t thought of?” Obama explained to me. “Is there something that we need to do?”

The questions stayed with him even as he tried to sleep that night. He believed that waiting longer would not accomplish anything, and might risk everything. They were not likely to get better intelligence, that had been clear. In the end, it boiled down to his confidence in McRaven. He had met him first in 2008 when touring Iraq with several other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. David Petraeus had hosted a dinner in Baghdad and had invited the JSOC commander. He had dealt with him a lot more as president, particularly in these last four months.

“I just felt as if I’d gotten to know McRaven,” Obama said. “I had gotten to know the SEALs. I had obviously been monitoring their capacity to carry out night raids consistently in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had mocked up the compound. We had experimented with it. They had run it… McRaven—he inspires confidence. And I had pressed him hard. And at that point my estimation was that we weren’t going to be able to do it better a month or two months or three months from now. We weren’t going to have better certainty about whether bin Laden was there, and so it was just a matter of pulling the trigger.”

On Friday morning, before getting the phone call from Gates, before he walked out to the South Lawn to board a helicopter on a trip to the southern states to view tornado damage, he sent an e-mail to Donilon asking him to meet him in the Diplomatic Room at eight o’clock.

Donilon, McDonough, and Chief of Staff Bill Daley were waiting in the large formal room when Obama entered, wearing a dark blue Windbreaker. The view from the room is one of the most dramatic in the White House, over the sloping back lawn, with the Washington Monument in the distance. They could see the waiting presidential helicopter.

“It’s a go,” said Obama. “We’re going to do the raid. Prepare the directives.”