CIA officers located at Khost
were very excited about the possibility
of being able to get a source that might lead us to bin Laden.
And so he wasn't searched. He was basically waved through.
There is the entire CIA team,
contractors, special forces, analysts, case officers.
They've all come outside to be there for his arrival.
This is a potentially very big deal.
There is so much tension.
He got out on the other side of the car,
and our security people went around and said,
"Take your hands out of your robes."
And they got very concerned because he wouldn't do it.
They didn't understand that the asset was the bomb.
I was sitting on my family room floor,
and I get a phone call.
She's like, "Tracy, there was a big explosion."
I was like, "What are you talking about?"
I… I don't think I even had the TV on.
Right? Like, I didn't know what had happened.
Now to Afghanistan.
Tonight, there are startling new facts about the suicide attack
that killed seven CIA officers.
The attacker was invited to enter that base,
and he was not searched.
This is for you.
It's not watch. It's detonator.
You will be sent to the hell.
Here's a man who had never been seen by the Americans,
and yet they let him get into this very secure CIA base.
Then he is able to… to explode this device.
The flag at CIA headquarters flew at half-staff today
for seven of its own.
Director Leon Panetta said they died far from home and close to the enemy.
Too close, it turned out.
My colleague Jennifer Matthews was the CIA base chief
in Khost, Afghanistan.
We were like a cadre.
I had been working with Jennifer on al-Qaida
since before we knew it was al-Qaida.
Then Gina called me and told me Jennifer had been killed.
It was so hard to hear.
And I remember going to church,
and the standard prayers, everybody who served in the military.
I'm like, "What about us?"
"What about Jennifer?"
It was just hard to hear the stream of people from her childhood,
you know, her kids, talk about her
'cause of course, they didn't know what she did.
Mm-mm.
I remember going to the funerals of every single one of the CIA officers.
And I noticed that, as we were driving in very, very cold weather,
I saw a family standing on their front porch
with a sign that they were holding that said,
"Thank you for keeping us safe."
I remember
talking to their family members.
The parents I talked to said,
"Don't give up on the mission
that cost our loved one their life."
"Don't give up on it."
And the mission, obviously, was to continue the search for bin Laden.
I say to the American people
that, God willing, we will continue to kill you.
If al-Qaida thought that the Khost attack was gonna weaken us,
they were dead wrong.
It had directly the opposite effect.
It steeled our resolve.
Khost made it personal.
Made it very personal.
We're getting closer and closer to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11,
and there's an increased demand and desire to find bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden is still wanted, still continuing to haunt Americans.
A $25 million bounty remains hanging over his head.
We've supposedly got spies and strike teams
all over the place looking for him.
How could this guy still be out there?
We had had our heart broken so many times
with all these terrible leads and almost thinking we were there.
"He's in this location, in that location."
The military spun up more than once trying to potentially capture him,
but it never panned out.
House is clear. Go ahead.
It was…
…so frustrating.
It also begs the question of just how intelligent
our intelligence agencies really are.
The CIA at that point was under political attack
from both parties, really.
Isn't it a failure of your administration? You haven't captured him.
You don't seem to know where he is.
Well…
It, um…
I… I think
capturing or killing, uh, bin Laden would be extremely important
to our national security.
There was an immense amount of pressure
on CIA and the intelligence community as a whole to do more.
Double down on bin Laden and al-Qaida.
On the day of 9/11, I was working at the Pentagon.
On my branch, I was the only, sole survivor.
I was badly burned,
but I was able to bounce back and keep fighting every day thereafter.
-How do you feel? -I'm feeling great.
Thank God.
In 2009, a friend reached out to me and said,
"Kevin, we could really use your help to be part of the bin Laden team."
"As its one and only mission, find bin Laden."
I told my team, "Every week, I want you to come into my office and report to me."
"What you're looking at, what you're finding,
what clues do you have, what possible evidence do you have?"
Where could he have gone if he fled Afghanistan? Where did he go?
Is he still alive? You have all these questions the whole time.
And so, when he made an appearance on television,
it would be analyzed to death.
We started focusing on every aspect of bin Laden's media statements.
We would listen to bin Laden's tapes to see whether or not
you could pick up the sound of something that might tell you
where he might be located.
The sound of a bird or the sound of industry.
Is he sending hidden messages?
What's in the background that might give away where he might be?
We also tried to trace how his videos were delivered to the news.
He had to have a way of getting messages in and out of wherever he was.
They were not trusting any electronic devices
or phones or anything,
so they're probably going by hand, by couriers.
If we could find and locate, track a courier,
that would potentially lead us to bin Laden's location.
CIA followed every lead.
This lead about the courier starts way back in 2002.
We knew there was an individual who was a trusted bin Laden courier,
and great efforts were taken to identify that name.
Detainees provided fake names.
Some said there was no courier,
and others said there was a courier, but he had retired.
It was extremely difficult to unravel the lies about the courier.
And then, in late 2002, there was an al-Qaida operative
in the custody of a North African government
who had been arrested
and was being interrogated about what he knew, who he knew.
And in that interrogation,
he mentioned that an individual, who he said worked with bin Laden
prior to 9/11
and worked with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed post-9/11
and who was a courier between the two…
And he said the name of the courier was…
Abu Ahmed.
That information, of course, we were very interested in.
We asked KSM,
still being detained in a secret CIA prison,
"What do you know about Abu Ahmed?"
KSM had undergone enhanced interrogation techniques.
He was telling us pretty much anything we wanted to know.
He told us, "Yeah, I heard of Abu Ahmed, but he's not with al-Qaida anymore."
He goes back to his cell, which we have bugged,
and he told all the other al-Qaida operatives
who were with him,
"Nobody… nobody talk about the courier."
KSM was doing everything he could to protect the courier
because he knew that Abu Ahmed could take us to bin Laden.
So we are zeroed in on trying to find Abu Ahmed.
Bin Laden and KSM couldn't have picked a better person.
He was exhibiting a lot of good operational security
that made it very difficult to find him.
Eventually, we figured out he was Kuwaiti.
We pursued every possible lead, and we had no idea what he looked like.
He was an enigma.
It was a long, hard, steady strain to try to determine his pattern of life,
his movements, where he would travel to,
what type of communications he was using, how he was using those communications.
We were worried about making mistakes
that would inadvertently tip him off
to the fact that we were looking for him.
So all of that goes from 2002 to 2010.
Eight years to find him, you know, on the planet.
In the summer of 2010, we had a breakthrough moment.
We tracked his phone to a town in Pakistan called Peshawar…
and we were able to pick up a phone call.
He was talking to somebody who knew him from the past.
His friend was asking him, "What are you doing now?"
"I haven't heard from you. I haven't seen you."
"Uh… what are you doing?"
And he kept trying to say,
"You know, I'm just… I'm staying busy. I'm working."
And his friend just didn't give up.
He said, "Well, yeah, but… but what are you doing?
"What exactly are you doing?"
And there was a moment of silence.
And then he said, "I'm doing what I did before."
Immediately, the friend said, "Then go with Allah."
It was clear that what he had done before is to work for bin Laden.
We needed to have human intelligence on the ground.
People think about intelligence work as analysts reading reports.
I mean the people on the street.
As a task force commander,
I was based in Kabul, and then I had places all over the region.
We need intelligence that validated all the information.
What do we think we know?
What do we know we don't know? What do we see?
We watch the courier get into a little white SUV.
There are a lot of white SUVs in Pakistan.
And our CIA officers followed it from Peshawar
to a town called Abbottabad.
Finally, the vehicle pulled into this large house.
A bunch of indicators strongly suggested
that there's something going on in this house.
This was very different from anything that we had seen.
What we saw was a compound that was much larger
than any compound in the area.
We learned that the courier, Abu Ahmed,
had purchased the house in 2005,
in an expensive part of Abbottabad, with no visible means of income.
There were walls that were 12 to 18 foot high,
topped with barbed wire,
and there was a balcony…
…with a privacy wall.
Abbottabad is known to be a tourist area because of the mountains.
So why would you put an eight-foot wall on the third floor?
The security of the top floor is just weird.
You know, you start putting these pieces together.
This is someone who didn't wanna be seen at all.
This was highly suspicious,
set off alarm bells across the team.
It was pretty clear
that somebody of high value was located there.
I immediately went to the President of the United States
and briefed him on what we had found.
We first briefed
senior Department of Defense official Mike Vickers,
and Head of Counterterrorism at the White House, John Brennan.
Michael Morell called me the day before and let me know that this was gonna be
very sensitive information that was gonna be passed to President Obama.
From this first meeting with the president,
Leon Panetta comes in and said,
"We were able to geolocate bin Laden's courier
and then follow him back, and then here's this compound."
I said, "Mr. President, we had a very high suspicion
that bin Laden might possibly be located there."
President Obama was cautiously optimistic that this might in fact be something
that we had never seen before as far as an actual lead.
At the end of the briefing, the president gave us two orders,
and Barack Obama was not the giving orders type.
The first was, "Leon, Michael,
find out what the hell is happening in that compound."
And number two, "Don't tell anyone."
"This is the circle of trust, right here."
"Nobody else in our government is to know about this."
We began constant surveillance,
looking at everything that went on in that compound.
It's very difficult to get intelligence.
There was no phone and no internet.
The cell phones Abu Ahmed used,
he didn't put the batteries in until he was well away from Abbottabad.
He practiced extraordinary operational security.
Director Panetta came up with his own ideas for collecting intelligence.
Like, "Can't we put cameras in those trees?"
Others thought, "What if we could collect their garbage
for possible clues?"
But they would never allow their garbage to be taken out.
They basically burned their garbage.
We were working with a doctor to go to the compound,
provide polio shots,
and get a sample of the blood.
Our hope was to be able to use that to verify that it was bin Laden's family.
The couriers refused to allow them to come in.
Over time, we began seeing women and children
coming in and out of the compound,
so we start tracking them, monitoring them.
And what we discovered
was that there were two families living at the compound,
Abu Ahmed and his brother.
But when we looked very closely at the satellite photography…
we learn that there's a third family in the house.
It never leaves the compound.
The children did not go to school,
unlike all the other kids in this particular part of Pakistan.
We identified, by looking at the clothesline,
how many members of the family were living there.
We did have enough of a count of children and the adults
to create a high degree of suspicion on who this third family might be.
At one point, we saw an individual who was a little older
who would come out of the house
and walk in circles, like a prisoner in a prison yard.
Every day, he would come out and walk in the garden.
Every day.
We called him the Pacer.
Using what's called mensuration,
we see a person, the sun is shining this way,
it casts a shadow.
Measure the size of the shadow,
figure out the precise height of whatever's making the shadow.
And the precise height was about the same height as Osama bin Laden.
Literally, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
"Oh my God, we may have found him."
I had seen many of the other leads to bin Laden.
They were nothing in terms of the same caliber of this one.
I remember saying, "For goodness' sakes, this could be bin Laden."
"Do whatever you need to do in order to get me a facial."
And they said, "You know, it's very difficult to do, Director."
"We got 18-foot walls on one side, 12-foot walls on another side."
"We can't get a good shot."
And I remember saying to them, "You know,
I've seen movies where the CIA can do this."
And we laughed. Everyone laughed.
But they weren't able to get a clear picture.
Director Panetta puts an immense amount of pressure
on the Counterterrorism Center to learn more.
One day, I was asked to come to the bin Laden unit at the CIA
and give a briefing on interviewing Osama bin Laden.
And I'm like, "Mmm, it's kind of an old story, but okay."
I did the bin Laden interview in 1998.
And it was the only interview I've ever done in my lifetime
that kept getting bigger afterwards.
Now I'm sat down with the CIA going through the footage.
And I think they're gonna be interested in,
"What was the security like around bin Laden?"
"How did he move in? How did he move out?"
Radio communications.
So I'm going through it in a good deal of detail,
and they say, "Do you have any extra footage of him walking around?"
Why would they want more film of him walking around?
I had no idea at the time,
but it turns out that they wanted footage to determine if the gait, the slight limp,
the posture of the Pacer
matched bin Laden's walk
from the closest footage that anybody had of him walking,
which was him coming to that meeting with me in 1998,
for comparison.
But I had no idea about that.
Although Miller's footage showed there were similarities,
it wasn't conclusive evidence that bin Laden was there.
Of course, I'm thinking that that could be bin Laden.
Everyone was thinking it.
It's a matter of proving it to the degree
that a decision maker felt confident enough to take some action on that.
Every week, they would report to me.
Sometimes they would come in and say, "We haven't found anything new."
And I said to them,
"That's not good enough. That's not good enough."
As a survival mechanism for what you're dealing with at work,
you become so detached from emotion.
It was hard on so many levels.
I was building these movies of memories of my son,
because he was getting ready to graduate from high school,
and all these movies of things that he had done
that I didn't remember.
I had no memory of these events in my son's life.
And
I remember going into work that night angry.
I had to really kind of grapple with,
I chose to keep doing it.
There was always a sense of, "We're not doing enough,"
you know, working weekends,
you know, missing family members.
And then my mom passed away
during the middle of the hunt.
And…
I had told her before she died…
You know, I said, "I'm working on something really important."
You know? "And hopefully, you'll…"
"Hopefully, you'll end up seeing it."
And so when she died of cancer,
the only thing that got me through my grief
was having a really big responsibility.
I knew we were making progress.
But I was obsessed with building the intelligence case
that bin Laden was in that compound.
At that point, the chances of being able to acquire 100% certainty
that he was there were extremely unlikely.
There was also the fear that bin Laden could realize that he'd been discovered.
Bin Laden could leave that compound at any moment,
and so it was too much of a risk to continue to collect.
We were getting closer to making a decision
about taking action against the compound.
So the president wanted to know what were the prospects
for us getting more intelligence,
being able to confirm bin Laden's presence there.
We did not have 100% evidence that bin Laden was truly there.
It was a circumstantial case.
There was not a single piece of direct evidence that he was there.
I said, "Mr. President, you need to know
that the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction…"
"…is stronger than the case that bin Laden is at Abbottabad."
You could've heard a pin drop in that room.
This is a major national security decision.
His political advisors told him that, if this was a failed operation,
that his public image would be diminished significantly.
So that… that, to me, was the greatest political risk,
is an operation that could kill a bunch of US service members.
A kind of Carter rerun.
When the Islamic Revolution happened in Iran, embassy gets overrun,
a whole bunch of hostages get taken.
President Carter ordered the helicopters into Iran to rescue the hostages,
and they crashed in the desert, and a lot of people died.
And it just made him look weak. It made the US look weak.
The Carter comparison was like, "If this is a botched operation,
the year before an election…"
Carter didn't get reelected.
I heard President Obama say, "I don't care about the politics."
"It's been too long
that bin Laden has been able to escape the hands of US justice."
The president said,
"I would like you to prepare operations to go after this compound."
He says, "I haven't decided to do this,
but if we do, we're gonna do it sooner rather than later."
"Prepare the plan."
A phone rang.
It was the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He says, "Look, the CIA thinks they have a lead on Osama bin Laden."
His eyes lit up. This is a SEAL.
This is like a dream come true.
The business I'm in is hostage rescue
and raids on terrorist organizations.
But this was the biggest mission, uh, certainly in my career.
A year earlier, I'd been diagnosed with cancer,
chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
But the cancer had not evolved to the point
where it was, uh… it was taking away from my ability to command.
As unfortunate as it was, it gave me cover for action,
meaning that I had a plausible reason for going back to the States.
So I flew back to DC and I met with the director of CIA, Leon Panetta,
and he told me about this compound.
And I said, "Look, what I need you to do
is to come up with an operation
to go after this compound."
We're gonna pick the best people to do the job
for the United States of America.
We're gonna bring the SEALs in for the mission.
SEAL Team 6 is the Tier 1 unit in the Navy.
First, we had SEAL Team 1, SEAL Team 2, and then around 1980,
Commander Richard Marcinko commissioned SEAL Team 6.
And the reason he named it 6 is because he knew the Russians would say,
"There's SEAL Team 1, SEAL Team 2, and there's SEAL Team 6."
"Where the hell are 3, 4, and 5?" Which is good counterintelligence, right?
I say, "It's not just a hat rack, my friend. We're thinking."
We'd just gotten back from Afghanistan,
and we're in Miami, Florida,
to do some diving and get a little bit of liberty
so we can hang out with the boys on the beach.
We're out there on the patio one night, and we get a call
that we're being recalled to Virginia Beach, and we didn't know why.
It was disappointing because the… the spin-ups never turn into anything.
You just get briefed on a bunch of nonsense
that doesn't have anything to do with me.
And it just… it sucks, man.
We've been looking forward to Miami since I was in, uh… in Jalalabad.
When I first brought them in, I brought them in off leave,
and I could tell from their body language they weren't happy about this.
They thought they were involved in an exercise.
We pulled up to a spot that was unimpressive.
It was like a small schoolhouse, a one-story building.
Armed guard outside. We go in and sit down.
And it's simply set up like a classroom. Like, there's some whiteboards.
We brought 'em into the briefing room. The CIA briefer comes out.
He explains to them they'll have to sign these nondisclosure agreements,
which, again, wasn't unusual, because we did some pretty sensitive training.
When the officer for the CIA stood up there
and I heard her say the word "Abbottabad…"
And I'd never heard of the city Abbottabad.
It almost gives me goosebumps right now.
Like, this is a city in a different country you've never heard of.
Then the commanding officer of SEAL Team 6 walked up,
as nonchalant as ever, and just said…
"Gentlemen, we're going after Osama bin Laden."
"This target is Osama bin Laden."
Most wanted terrorist in history.
I thought, "This is the most important mission in modern history."
"What an honor. What a great team to be a part of."
One thing they said, though, was "This is time sensitive."
"We've got a couple weeks until there's 0% illumination
in the lunar cycle, and we're gonna launch on one of those two days."
"Gentlemen, this is not an exercise."
"We've got a job to do, and let's get out and start preparing."
Our job was preparing them for what they're about to do.
Um, it's giving them the tools to do what they have to do.
And in this case, we did something a little bit different.
We determined that we could literally build the compound as it exists
for them to practice.
The CIA built us a mock-up.
The exterior looked like Osama bin Laden's compound.
So that we could have the SEALs come in and rehearse
through their tactical movement on the objective.
Helicopter pilots rehearsed their profiles.
SEALs could fast rope down onto the top of the three-story building
and into the courtyard.
We did that so much over and over, the wrists are starting to hurt.
You're getting tendinitis. It was almost to the point where,
"Look, we've proven we can fast rope. We don't need to keep doing this."
We knew the shape of it. We knew where the buildings were.
What we didn't know is, what did it look like inside?
Was it an open space, or did you walk into a corridor
with a room on the left and a room on the right?
So the structure was modular.
-I'm in. -Room clear!
It changed every time they went through.
Here.
They were so good about it that they could break the compound down every single night
just in case enemy satellites were flying over the top.
The number of times they did their training
numbers over a hundred.
You plan, and you plan, and you plan, and you rehearse, and you rehearse,
and you rehearse, and you look at every single contingency.
Everything that seems simple,
like "Where in the helicopter are you gonna sit?"
"What are you gonna sit on? Are you using this kind of a chair?"
"Where does the dog go? Let's simulate that a car left."
"Let's simulate the fast rope didn't work."
"What happens if this guy gets shot?"
"What happens if this room blows up?"
"What happens if we're down from 24 guys to 12 guys?"
I can tell you they destroyed things that had to be fixed.
Back out!
And we would then go back in and… and rebuild that.
"What did we do good? What did we do bad?"
Twelve hours a day, maybe longer than that, rehearsing and planning.
Then, we'd go back to the barracks where we were staying,
and we'd stand around the model, and we'd talk about it.
"Was there gonna be some sort of ridiculous contraption
with a slide that comes out of the top floor into the alley?"
"Can someone climb out of the sewage system?"
And one night, one of the bosses said,
"What's the worst thing that could happen?"
The youngest guy in the room said,
"The helicopter could crash in the front yard."
And we're kind of looking at him like, "Wh…
"Why would you jinx us like that?"
The main staging base for the operation
was in Jalalabad, on the Afghanistan side of the border.
Between those 350 kilometers are all kinds of problems.
Risks were significant. You're flying in Pakistani airspace.
The compound was right near Pakistan's West Point, its military academy,
and other important military installations.
So they were training military officers there in Abbottabad.
A lot of care must be taken because, if a threat is detected,
who knows what they will do?
President Obama was clear that we're not going to inform the Pakistanis,
because Pakistani intelligence has worked both sides of the fence for many years,
and they had relationships
with a lot of the militant terrorist groups in the area,
including with al-Qaida.
And so we could be in a war with Pakistan.
With an army, special forces, an intelligence service, an air force,
an armored force, nuclear weapons.
Can we get those 162 miles undetected?
So we take a look at where all the Pakistani radar systems are,
and what the swath of the radar looks like, and you're gonna try to avoid that.
There were so many variables flying into Pakistan.
From getting shot down on the way in to getting shot down on the way out.
Even joking around, I remember talking to guys like,
"We need to take this more serious. This is a one-way mission."
"We're not comin' back from this. This is the last mission we're gonna do."
And then we walked around a corner in a hangar, and we saw these helicopters.
We had two classified forms of helicopters
that were harder to detect by radar.
We were kind of laughing. I remember the conversation was,
"Well, our chances of surviving increased just now
because, you know, we didn't know we were going to war on Transformers."
This would be the first mission with these new helicopters.
I'm not sure how much testing they'd done, but we knew we had serious technology.
All these operations are very scary. It's why we bring machine guns.
It's very high risk, it's extremely dangerous,
and it has to work.
Admiral McRaven came up with the idea
that "We're gonna send you guys to Jalalabad, Afghanistan,
in case you get a green light."
"You'll be ready to rock and roll."
It was always hard to say goodbye to the kids.
And unfortunately, being a SEAL Team 6, that was something we were used to.
That's just something I did with my kids.
From the time they were babies till the time that I left the Navy,
you gotta say goodbye. You gotta rip the Band-Aid off,
and at some point, you just gotta give them that last kiss,
turn around, and that's it.
Did they know you were saying goodbye and you may not come back?
Yeah, they were smart enough to know,
and they had friends that their dads never did come home, so they knew.
The moment came to brief the National Security Council.
I know Obama very well.
That was kind of one of my jobs, was to be the guy that knew Obama.
You could kind of feel his body language,
like he was going to be taking a gamble on this, you know?
He was so dialed in to this whole thing.
The president polled all of the principals
about whether they thought we should go ahead with the raid or not.
A lot of mixed views.
A lot of people raised questions.
Secretary Clinton came out in support of it.
Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence,
and I were very supportive of it as well.
When it got to me, I just said, "Yeah, you always said you'd do this."
But there were a lot of arguments against it.
The vice president voted no.
He did not think the intelligence was good enough,
and he was concerned about the impact on US-Pakistani relations.
And Bob Gates, the Secretary of Defense,
was concerned about the safety of the force.
Bob Gates, who was in the US government when we did Desert One,
his opposition to doing the raid was a Desert One-style helicopter crash.
So, Gates said this, and I was like, "Oh God, don't say it out loud,"
because what if that happened and then these meetings all get out, right?
Look, I'm just here talking to you. Like, you know.
It would have gotten out that, you know, someone raised this,
and "Oh my God, you know, uh, Obama ignored it."
The president listened to all of that,
but said, "Let me take it into consideration."
President Obama said that he would make a final decision
and wanted to think about it more overnight.
The next morning, I remember it very clearly,
I was at headquarters,
and Tom Donilon, the National Security Advisor, called me,
said, "The president's decided to go with the mission."
This is a big bet.
We're betting that bin Laden's there,
and we're betting that we can pull this off,
but this is the best shot we… we're ever gonna have on bin Laden.
Yes. Let's go.
24 hours before the raid itself,
there was a major event in Washington,
the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
And so we all decided that we would show up,
otherwise, if we didn't, questions would be raised.
Going to the White House Correspondents' Dinner that night
was one of the strangest experiences in my life.
The President of the United States.
People who were involved in this, from the president on down,
understood the importance of secrecy.
And so the Correspondents' Dinner, I think,
was in some respects a good cover…
…because it was business as usual.
It's wonderful to be here at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
-Whoo! -What a week.
It was difficult.
I had tremendous respect for his ability
to basically play the part…
…of President of the United States.
It's good to be back with so many esteemed guests,
essential government employees…
Non-essential government employees.
You know who you are.
And then a comedian got up and made jokes about the bin Laden issue.
People think bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Kush,
but did you know that every day, from four to five,
he hosts a show on C-SPAN?
Everybody laughed.
And we all kind of deep down thought,
"If only you knew
what I knew."
And what was gonna happen the next day.
The most classified operation
in the last 20 years.
Thank you and good night.
The next morning was Sunday morning, so I went to Mass,
and used that opportunity to pray a great deal
about what was gonna happen that day.
Prayed that, hopefully, we'd be successful.
I left church and went directly to the CIA.
The day of the raid. It's time.
A lot of the preparations in the Counterterrorism Center
in the United States were made in silence.
We were all on edge.
My role for this was to be a communication relay.
Tina was in the cubicle next to me.
I didn't sleep the night before.
It was tremendous pressure.
It was the first time that I felt a shade of doubt.
Having worked this lead and we're now sending troops
potentially in harm's way,
all of us felt a responsibility.
It all became much more real.
We were either going to have an incredible success
or a horrible failure.
The SEALs were family men.
My job was to make sure I put them in a position to be successful.
And that's all I was worried about.
We'd done the things with the wills, with the powers of attorney,
to make sure your family's taken care of in the event you die.
But this mission is one where we're probably not gonna make it,
so I need to handwrite letters to everyone.
And I remember handwriting letters to my kids, and it was more of, um…
"I'm sorry that I wasn't there for this," with tears hitting the page.
I got to the White House very early.
During the weekend, you will have individuals coming in for tours.
But we canceled each of them
because it would have sparked a lot of concern
if people walking through the halls
saw a lot of senior officials coming in on a Sunday.
Many of us convened in the White House Situation Room early.
You're anxious. You're… you're worried. You're nervous.
It really had the feel of a command center.
Obama's sitting at the head of the table.
Then he's got, basically,
his senior cabinet-level people sitting around the table.
Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton.
You had Leon Panetta on one screen.
He's at the CIA in kind of their version of a situation room
with a bunch of people.
And then on the other screen is Admiral McRaven, who's in Jalalabad.
It was tremendous anticipation.
The commander in chief, he's the one who gave the order.
He's the one who had the most on the line.
There's a look on his face. It is, like, really intense.
But you could tell he was a little nervous too.
We have connectivity with Admiral McRaven in Jalalabad,
which is where he is.
I didn't get a lot of sleep before.
This was a potentially historic moment. I just didn't want anything to go wrong.
I had told the guys, "Okay, we got a job to do. Let's go get the job done."
Bin Laden's code name is Geronimo. That was agreed to in advance.
There is so much tension that something could go wrong.
And what if bin Laden is not there?
I remember the call out that the helos were launched and thinking,
"Here we go."
No one's ever flown in these before. How do I keep my mind off it?
"Think of something simple. I know how to count. I'll count."
"One, two, three, four."
So I'm counting.
And then around 557, I just remember saying,
"Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward,
and freedom will be defended."
That's what President Bush said on 9/11. I don't know how I remembered that.
But I'm like, "Forget counting. I'm gonna say that again."
"Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward,
and freedom will be defended."
That's when it's like, "All right, I'm on this mission."
"This is the team, and we're gonna kill him."
They leave Jalalabad,
and there's a period of time where they're flying in Afghan airspace,
and you're breathing easy.
And then there's a moment when they cross the border into Pakistan,
and your worry level goes way up.
When does the Pakistani military detect them?
The Pakistanis had shot at us before, a number of times.
There was no doubt in my mind that if the Pakistanis picked up the helicopters
and they thought it was a US force coming in, they would engage us.
It was so tense. We were listening very closely
to see if there's any indication that they'd been detected.
And now, we're at a point where
this is where we find out if the technology works.
While these guys are in the air for this hour-plus helicopter ride
in Pakistani airspace,
there's this kind of interregnum sitting in a room in Washington
because there's literally nothing to do.
So Obama takes a break. He says, like, "I'm gonna go upstairs."
You know, "Let me know when I need to come back," basically.
He goes up there to play cards.
He compulsively played spades when he… he was nervous
or just needed to distract himself.
We're all just kind of sitting around, and
we started to just chat about 9/11.
People standing up, drinking coffee, like,
"Yeah, you know, this is what I was doing, and…"
There was this natural reversion to that day.
You realize that, kind of, we were all somehow
there because of bin Laden.
And then Obama comes back,
and right across the hall,
there's a small conference room with a general monitoring this operation.
And Obama, he goes in there,
and so then, everybody kind of starts to fill in
to this tiny little conference room.
And McRaven basically just starts narrating.
He's the… the voice of God for this whole operation.
A real anxious moment was about two minutes out from the target.
That was a huge point of vulnerability,
because the Pakistani West Point was in close proximity,
and it was a couple of miles from the major infantry battalion.
So we could have hundreds of soldiers attack the SEALs.
We would be surrounded by Pakistanis.
The president was very clear that, if you get in that situation,
be prepared to fight your way out.
We didn't want to have some type of hostage situation
of our forces being held by the Pakistanis.
The air crew guy reaches over, and he opens the door.
We're looking out the window, two minutes away from bin Laden's house.
We're not in a training area anymore. This place has electricity.
We're in a resort part of Pakistan.
The perfect plan is, they'll hover, we'll drop guys off.
My team's going to the roof. We'll hit 'em like this.
That's the perfect plan, and that's when all hell broke loose.
As the helicopters were settling over the compound…
one of the helicopters, it… it kind of quivered.
It falls hard.
It crashes.
It's that moment when
your stomach comes up to your mouth.
I was only a few feet away from Obama.
He had this look of profound shock and concern.
It was like, "Oh. The Desert One thing is happening."
I thought, "Oh my God, we may have lost people
as a result of… of this lead that we've been pursuing."
Everyone's on pins and needles waiting and waiting
to see if there was going to be any type of response.
Ultimately, the people in the neighborhood are responding. Lights are coming on.
And in that moment,
the operation was compromised on social media.
A lot of people knew a helicopter crashed.
They didn't know it was American.
They assumed it to be a Pakistani helicopter.
From a counterintelligence perspective, that's a fail.
That's an indicator and a warning also for Pakistani intelligence.
You could see the mission in danger.
I said to Bill McRaven, "What the hell's going on?"
I knew the guys were okay.
I could see them getting out of the helicopter quickly.
But what happened was, when the helicopter came in,
the down blast from that helicopter hit that 18-foot-high wall
and created a vortex, and the helicopter lost lift.
Swings over and then hard lands into the animal pen.
Bill didn't miss a beat. He said, "I've called in a backup helicopter."
"We're gonna breach through the walls. We're gonna continue the mission."
And I said, "God bless you. Let's do it."
The guys moved from the downed helicopter.
The second helicopter comes in immediately after that.
I didn't know the first helicopter had an issue.
My team is supposed to drop some guys off, and then my team's going to the rooftop.
So we drop our guys off, just like in training.
We lift up, and then go right back down.
The second helicopter, the pilot didn't know what had happened.
So to be cautious… He didn't know whether they had taken gunfire.
So he… he lands outside the compound.
And so the pilot is telling us to get out.
Well, now the guys aren't anywhere where they're supposed to be,
based on plan A.
I'm to be on the roof.
And I remember thinking, "Okay. I guess we just start the war from here."
The good news is we had plan B, plan C, and plan D.
They're trying to get in the compound.
On the outside wall, there was what appeared to be a door.
So as I'm watching, a demolition charge goes against the door.
I see the explosion…
But they're not moving.
Turns out there is a false door on this four-foot concrete wall.
He looked back and goes, "All right, failed breach, this is bad."
And I said, "No, this is good. That's a fake door."
"Nobody does that. He's in there."
We know that the carport off to our right,
that definitely opens 'cause we've seen cars come in and out.
We'll just go blow that door.
So I came over the radio. "Failed breach, northeast corner."
"We're gonna blast the carport."
And somebody said, "No, no, no. Don't blast it. We'll open it."
And so the door opens,
and a glove came out with a thumb that I recognize.
We walk in there.
Then, within a few minutes,
everybody is inside the main area of the compound.
It's dark. Guys got night vision goggles on.
Clearly, the adrenaline is pumping.
You could see the laser target designators on their guns. You could see them moving.
You could see the guys sweeping the compound looking for threats.
And then, you know, I could see guys enter the three-story building.
And then that's all I could see.
There is so much tension.
God knows what the hell's gonna happen now.
This is the moment when everything you've planned,
everything that you've hoped for
in terms of being able to get bin Laden,
is on the line in the next 20 minutes.
It's gonna tell you whether or not this is a success or a failure.
There was 20 minutes of silence.
Probably the longest 20 minutes of my life.
During those 20 minutes, the SEALs on the ground…
…first ran into Abu Ahmed,
and they shot and killed him.
So then we get in this house on the first floor,
and one of my guys shot one of the couriers and his wife.
She jumped in front of him.
The women are effectively turning into human shields.
That's another indicator. He's here.
We're going up the stairs. We run across locked doors,
called the breacher up, and the breacher blasted that door.
So I'm about six guys back on what we call a train,
and we're moving up the stairs.
The guy in front saw bin Laden's 20-year-old son, Khalid bin Laden.
Khalid jumped behind a banister.
The guy in front,
I heard him whisper a few things to Khalid to confuse him.
Come here. Come here.
He said, "Come here, come here," in two different languages,
and it confused Khalid, and Khalid kind of came out…
And then he shot him and killed him.
So we're on the second floor, and we wanna go to the third floor.
That's where bin Laden's gonna be.
But we need to clear that second floor before we start moving.
The guys start to peel off.
So they're all moving out in front of me, and now I'm the last guy,
which turns me into the number two man.
So the one man's job is to point up the stairs,
the two man's job is to tell him when we have enough guys.
I want four guys, and I'm lookin' around.
We had 23 dudes on the ground, several different houses,
several different stories.
You're gonna run outta guys, and we just did. We were down to two.
There's a curtain above the stairs to the third floor,
and there are people moving behind it, and the number one man can see 'em.
He's like, "They could be suicide bombers, but we can beat 'em, but we gotta go now."
"Okay. We're gonna go meet a suicide bomber. I'm tired of thinking about it."
"Let's get it over with." I squeeze him and we went up the stairs.
So we went up to the top of the stairs.
And the number one man opened this curtain. People standing there.
He tackled them.
He's gonna take the blast.
So because he went this way, I turned this way,
and standing in front of me, two feet away, is Osama bin Laden.
It was one of those moments in life where it did slow down.
He's taller than I thought. He's skinnier than I thought.
His beard was gray, white, but I recognized his nose.
This is definitely him.
He's not surrendering.
He's a threat, not just to me, but my entire team.
He has to die.
As time went by, it was so tense.
We were waiting and waiting to hear any type of response.
There was hushed silence,
waiting to hear.
Uh, in some respects, it reminded me of a waiting room of a hospital
when somebody is going to give birth.
You know, you're anticipating. You're worried.
It was a long 19 minutes.
And then I get the call from the ground force commander.
The ground force commander said over his radio,
"For God and country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo."
"We got him."
We know that means
Osama bin Laden has been killed by US forces.
It's like, "Holy shit." And, like, I just… Like, nobody really says anything.
There was no applauding.
It was a very, very silent room.
The silence is broken by Obama, who didn't move from this chair,
and he just says, "We got him."
When I heard that, tears welled in my eyes,
and I looked over at my colleague who was up there with me.
We just looked at each other.
Hearing that inside the space was surreal.
For me, there was some closure there. Justice delayed, not denied.
We got him.
I thought, "Oh my God, you know, this is it."
I hoped that my mom knew, wherever she was.
It was just a… a real sense of relief
after a decade of effort to get bin Laden.
Events that day are forever etched in my mind.
It was emotional,
but it only lasted for a couple seconds
'cause, in the heat of that moment,
we were still focused on the SEALs and the helicopters getting back safely.
Obama still looked pretty stressed out,
and he stood up, and he said,
"I want you to tell me the minute they're out of Pakistani airspace."
The mission wasn't over, because we still had to get the guys
out of Pakistan and back to Afghanistan.
No one takes a deep breath until these things are done.
I'm there, I look over, bin Laden's body's right there.
One of my guys comes up to me, and he goes, "You good?"
And I said, "What do we do now?"
He said, "We find the computers. Come on, man."
I said, "You're right. I'm back. Holy shit."
Call from the ground force commander. He says,
"Look, we have found a treasure trove of intelligence on the second floor."
We're in offices with everything from old-school tower hard drives
to compact disks.
I said, "Okay, get as much as you can. We need to start gettin' out of here."
By this time, outside the compound,
people were showing up because there was a disturbance in the neighborhood.
We had an agency colleague who was the linguist.
He was on the periphery of the compound.
He was trying to keep them at bay.
My buddy, who was a sniper outside, was like,
"I'm fully prepared to engage these people, so you better talk 'em out of it."
And I had told the guys, "Look, I… I don't wanna kill anybody
unless you feel like, you know, you are threatened."
I was having a lot of anxiety. I said, "Can we pick this up a little bit?"
Make no mistake about it.
We didn't take our eyes off the Pakistani radars.
We're finding so much good stuff.
We wanted 32 minutes on the ground, but now we're pushing 40, we're 45 minutes.
The closer we cut it to the edge, we might save a lot more lives.
We might save an American city
or London because of stuff we find, something they're planning.
So we gotta just stick it out to the end.
The amount of time on the ground was longer than anybody would want.
At the time, a large crowd had formed.
He says, "Nothin' to see here."
"Pakistani exercise. Don't worry about it. Get back to your homes."
Now we gotta get bin Laden's body in a body bag. We're bringing him back.
They come out with bin Laden's body
to get in the helicopter and the backup helicopter,
and they leave.
And they blow up the downed helicopter,
'cause it had some sensitive material on it.
Watching that unfold was right out of a movie.
We're leaving. The pilot's up front, flying as fast as we can.
Pakistanis gotta know we're there.
We see radar turned on. We start seeing their silos open.
They launched a couple of F-15s,
trying to intercept our helicopters on the way back.
An F-16 against a 47 is not a good fight. They could shoot us down.
So I just start my watch, and I gotta get to 90.
And 90 minutes means we cross the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan,
and we can no longer be shot down
because we've got F-15s on the border that can protect us.
All right, cool. Ten minutes. We gotta get to 20 minutes.
Helicopters moving at low speeds across the terrain.
We're getting call-outs from the ground
of how far out they were from returning to base.
30 minutes. Gotta get to 90.
All of us inside that center were kind of pushing the helicopters
to fly as fast as they could.
It's been 60 minutes, gotta get to 90. Now it's 70 minutes.
I'm trying to keep my mind off of everything.
I start thinking about, in 1980, the Olympics in Lake Placid.
The excitement and tension building.
The Olympic Center filling to capacity.
The greatest hockey team ever assembled in the Russians.
They haven't lost a gold medal since, like, the '50s.
They're playing these young Americans who are just out of college,
no business being on the ice, but now they're winning.
Four to three, third period. You can hear the crowd.
Ten, nine… We could still screw this up. They're nervous.
Eight. Seven.
Six. Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
And then the pilot came over 85 minutes into the flight,
and he said, "Gentlemen, for the first time in your lives,
you're gonna be happy to hear this."
"Welcome to Afghanistan."
Do you believe in miracles? Yes!
Unbelievable!
When the helicopter makes it across the Pakistani border,
the Pakistanis turn around.
There's a huge sigh of relief 'cause they're safe.
It's just surreal just to succeed
because, again, we'd accepted death on this mission,
but it's nice to live.
When those helicopters landed back at Jalalabad in Afghanistan,
that was the moment where all of us around the table said,
"Mission accomplished."
Everything we had done, all of the planning,
all of the work,
had paid off
in achieving something I thought…
we never thought we would be able to do,
which was to bring bin Laden to justice.
And we hugged each other and congratulated each other.
-Good job, National Security Team. -Sir.
-Thank you. -Yes, sir.
-Yeah, I'm proud of you. -Thank you.
-Your guys did a great job. -They did.
When the President of the United States tells you you've done a good job,
you never forget that.
You never forget that moment.
The day of the raid,
my daughter was a senior in high school.
It was her last concert.
And my wife is saying, you know, "Where are you?"
Um…
And I said, "I can't."
And she said, "You can't? You can't take an hour?"
"What you're doing is more important than your daughter?"
And I said, "I gotta go," and I hung up.
The rest of the day, she's sitting on the sofa
trying to figure out, "How does this divorce thing work?"
I've been working so many hours,
seven days a week,
no days off.
My marriage was in deep, deep, deep trouble.
When the president decides he is gonna tell the nation,
I call her, and I say, "Turn on the TV…
and you'll understand."
And she said, "You got him."
Breaking news, President Barack Obama
is expected to make a surprise announcement.
We do not know what it's about,
but we do expect it to be a huge announcement
because this is very unusual.
I'm home, and I'm in bed with my daughter,
and I'm reading her bedtime stories.
Emily comes in, my wife, and she says, "All the phones are ringing."
I'm like, "I'm reading this story."
She's like, "No, all the phones are ringing." That's never good.
Uh, the White House called,
uh, informing each news…
uh, news organization individually tonight
that there would be a statement sometime…
Obama's like, "Well, I need a speech."
And I hadn't written it.
And so I was like, "Oh shit."
I turn around, and I'm like, "I need five minutes!"
And I'm like, "Oh shit. You don't talk to the president like that."
You certainly don't talk to him like that in front of, like, his whole cabinet,
But I was like… And he's like, "I got you."
So we came up and talked a bit about, "What do you want in the speech?"
I've written thousands of speeches in my life.
Nothing remotely approached the feeling of writing that.
I think, when I wrote that first sentence,
the enormity of what I had the opportunity to do kind of hit me.
Like, "I'm telling the world about this."
It was frantic, but I was used to frantic finalizing speeches with Obama.
He likes to edit to the end.
Literally, I've got his written edits on a draft,
and I had to sprint to the teleprompter operator
to beat Obama walking behind me, you know?
But then what was eerie is
you know, there's a very small group of press that's assembled for this.
And then, there's a handful of us, but it's this huge, empty room.
And so what you see on TV
is just Obama walking down the long, red hallway to the podium.
And what he's speaking to is just some cameras, you know?
Like, there's not an audience.
And we're just kind of sitting there at the back of the room.
Good evening.
Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world
that the United States has conducted an operation
that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida.
I hear President Obama say "Osama bin Laden."
I looked at Osama bin Laden, and I thought,
"How in the fuck did I get here from Butte, Montana?"
And then we kind of get back, and he's talking,
and guys around me are like, "Say it. Say that no one was hurt."
A small team of Americans carried out the operation
with extraordinary courage and capability.
No Americans were harmed.
I looked at Brennan as Obama's talking, and I was like,
"How long have you been trying to get bin Laden?"
And, like, without missing a beat, he's like, "15 years." You know?
Like, he knew it exactly in his head.
You know, Sudan to Afghanistan.
And… and that was the kind of feeling of like,
"Oh my God, like, there's so many people that have tried to get this guy."
It was nearly ten years ago
that a bright September day was darkened
by the worst attack on the American people in our history.
And on nights like this one,
we can say to those families who have lost loved ones
to al-Qaida's terror,
justice has been done.
Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence
and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly
to achieve this outcome.
The American people do not see their work, nor know their names,
but tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work…
and the result of their pursuit of justice.
Thank you.
And may God bless the United States of America.
After he gave his speech,
I went back down to my office,
and as I started to make my way out of the West Wing,
I could see that outside it was lighter than usual
for that time of night.
And I could see throngs of people converging on Lafayette Park,
and they were chanting, "USA, USA."
People were sharing in the joy of what had happened,
and I realized at that point,
we'd not only brought justice to bin Laden,
but in many ways, we had really brought justice
to all of those victims whose families had died
in the Trade Towers and elsewhere.
I go downstairs, and I grab a beer from the fridge,
and then I thought, "This is probably more than a beer thing,"
so I grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet.
And I started to head to the porch,
and I stopped and grabbed a cigar from the box in the den
'cause I thought, "Well, this is gonna be a good night."
Thank you, USA!
And now I'm ready, and I'm thinking,
"Here you are about to celebrate, you know, the…
the death of another person in a violent way,
and aren't we more civilized than that?"
And I thought for just one more second, I said, "You know what? Fuck him."
"He died the way he was supposed to die."
The president was concerned
about what we would do with bin Laden's body.
The decision was that we would transfer the body
to an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean,
and he would receive the last Muslim rites,
uh, but that he would be buried at sea
so that it would not be located someplace that could become a shrine.
The thing that I'll never forget is the military put together
this photo album of the journey of bin Laden's body.
It started with him… just shot, you know,
and then back in Jalalabad,
then face cleaned up.
What I remember so powerfully about it is not, like,
the picture of bin Laden's face shot off,
it was the naval vessel.
There's his body wrapped in a shroud
being lowered into the water,
just slipping under the water.
I remember being very affected by that.
After all these world events,
this human being
is just somewhere in the Indian Ocean
wrapped in a white shroud.
The United States definitely won the battle after 9/11.
No more attacks on the homeland at scale.
Capture, killing
of the entire al-Qaida senior leadership that was responsible for 9/11.
But I fear bin Laden may have won the war.
I think bin Laden weakened America.
The trillions of dollars we spent on counterterrorism,
the lengthy war in Afghanistan,
the war in Iraq divided Americans.
It's still playing out today.
I was beyond impressed with everyone
who was involved in getting us to that point.
But…
Uh, I don't know.
I want
someone who deserves
to suffer
to suffer in the way that they fear the most.
I wanted him to die an old man,
completely forgotten,
to live to know that no one cared about him
or thought about him or knew who he was.
That, to me, was the worst thing you could do to him, to any terrorist.
I just think people don't understand
the power we have to destroy terrorism by not being influenced by it,
by not being afraid of it, by not making decisions because of it.
That is the greatest way you can neutralize it and destroy it.
Just to say, "F you," you know?
"You are not changing who we are or what we do."
You see the turmoil of the world stirring that pot again,
where it will, um, cause tragedy,
anger, excite emotions,
and someone else will come along
and exploit that.
It's not the end of the story,
but it's the end of this chapter,
the bin Laden chapter.