Killing of Osama bin Laden

• 1. Introduction

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  Sohaib Athar, a resident of Abbottabad in Pakistan, typed a short message at 12:58 a.m. local time on the 2nd of May 2011. It read, "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)." He had no idea he was describing the killing of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda and the man who orchestrated the September 11 attacks.

  Nine years of hiding in Pakistan, according to a later Pakistani inquiry, ended in a walled house on a quiet road. American commandos flew in from Afghanistan and left with his body. By the time the sun rose, one of the longest manhunts in modern history was over.

  The story raises hard questions. How did investigators find a man who had stopped using phones? Why did a president choose a risky helicopter raid over a bombing? What happened inside those walls, and why do the accounts of the final minutes disagree? And why do arguments over the evidence, the burial and the law remain unsettled?

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• 2. The Courier Trail

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  December 2001 is where the trail begins. Bin Laden slipped away from the Battle of Tora Bora into Pakistan, allegedly with Pakistani support. American forces had been hunting him since the war in Afghanistan began, and for years they found nothing.

  One habit shaped the whole search. Bin Laden was known not to use phones after August 1998, when American missile strikes on his bases in Afghanistan succeeded by tracking an associate's satellite phone. Interrogators at CIA black sites and at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp therefore made couriers an early priority.

  By 2002, interrogators had heard unconfirmed claims about a courier using the kunya Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. One came from a detainee named Mohammed al-Qahtani, who placed the man in al-Qaeda's inner circle. In 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational chief of al-Qaeda, said he knew al-Kuwaiti but described him as inactive.

  A prisoner named Hassan Ghul shifted the picture in 2004, according to a U.S. official. Ghul said al-Kuwaiti was a trusted courier, close to bin Laden, to Mohammed and to Mohammed's successor Abu Faraj al-Libbi. Al-Kuwaiti had not been seen in some time, so officials suspected he was traveling with bin Laden. Mohammed kept to his original story.

  Abu Faraj al-Libbi was captured in 2005 and transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006. He told interrogators that the courier was a man named Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan, and he denied knowing al-Kuwaiti. The CIA never found anyone with that name and concluded that al-Libbi had made it up. Because both prisoners played down al-Kuwaiti, officials guessed he sat close to the center.

  In 2007, officials learned al-Kuwaiti's real name, though they said they would reveal neither the name nor how they learned it. Pakistani officials said in 2011 that he was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, from Pakistan's Swat Valley. A wiretap on another suspect in 2010 picked up a conversation with al-Kuwaiti. CIA paramilitary operatives located him in August 2010 and followed him back to a compound in Abbottabad.

  That is the account given by the White House and by CIA director John Brennan, and others differ. Nelly Lahoud, in her book The Bin Laden Papers, studied the huge number of documents taken from the compound. They show that Ibrahim, bin Laden's security guard, did receive messages. They also show several other courier links to the outside world, and discovering some of these partly led investigators to Ibrahim and the compound.

  After the raid, locals described the courier and his brother as Pashtuns named Arshad and Tareq Khan. Arshad Khan carried an old Pakistani identity card naming a village called Khat Kuruna near Charsadda. Pakistani officials found no record of an Arshad Khan there and suspect both men lived under false identities.

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• 3. A House Built to Hide

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  In September 2010, the CIA concluded that the Abbottabad compound had been custom-built to hide someone of significance, very likely bin Laden. The three-story house dated from 2004. Officials surmised that he lived there with his youngest wife and family.

  The house stood at the end of a narrow dirt road northeast of the city center. Abbottabad sits about 100 mi from the Afghan border and roughly 20 mi from India. The compound lay 1.3 km southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy.

  Its plot was eight times larger than those of the nearby houses. A concrete wall between 3.7 and 5.5 m high, topped with barbed wire, surrounded the grounds, and two security gates controlled entry. The third-floor balcony had a 2.1 m privacy wall, tall enough to hide a man who stood 6 ft 4 in.

  The house had no Internet and no landline telephone. Its residents burned their refuse, while their neighbors set garbage out for collection. Local people called the building the Waziristan Haveli, because they believed the owner came from Waziristan. The Pakistani government demolished it in February 2012.

  The CIA rented a home in Abbottabad, and a team staked out the compound from there for a number of months. Officials told The Washington Post that the effort was so extensive and costly that the agency went to Congress in December 2010 for authority to shift tens of millions of dollars between budgets. The team also used informants and a widely criticized fake polio vaccination program. The safe house was abandoned the moment bin Laden died.

  The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built three-dimensional renderings of the house and charted the traffic patterns of its residents. It assessed the number, height and gender of the people inside, analyzed data from an RQ-170 drone, and helped the Joint Special Operations Command build mission simulators for pilots. Meanwhile the National Security Agency's Tailored Access Operations group let it collect intelligence from mobile phones used by al-Qaeda operatives.

  The CIA also tested its own certainty through a process called red teaming. An administration official said, "We conducted red-team exercises and other forms of alternative analysis to check our work. No other candidate fit the bill as well as bin Laden did."

  Despite that concentrated effort, no U.S. spy agency ever photographed bin Laden at the compound. None recorded the voice of the mysterious man whose family lived on the top two floors. The decision to act would rest on inference alone.

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• 4. Choosing the Plan

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  The official code name was Operation Neptune Spear, a direct nod to the U.S. Navy SEAL Trident insignia. In Roman mythology, Neptune is the god of the sea, and his weapon is the three-pronged spear. Whether the mission was meant to capture or to kill was a separate matter.

  The Associated Press quoted two U.S. officials calling it a kill-or-capture mission, since the U.S. does not kill unarmed people trying to surrender. Leon Panetta, then CIA director, told PBS NewsHour, "The authority here was to kill bin Laden." He added that SEALs were to capture him if he surrendered and posed no threat. An unnamed national security official told Reuters, "This was a kill operation." A 2016 article in Political Science Quarterly concluded that the capture option was mainly there for appearance's sake and to meet international law.

  In January 2011, the CIA briefed Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, about the compound. He had published a thesis on special operations in the 1990s. It argued that such missions work best when run by special operations professionals, and when they rely on simplicity, security, rehearsals, surprise, speed and a narrow purpose.

  McRaven judged a commando raid fairly straightforward, but he worried about the Pakistani response. He assigned a Naval Special Warfare Development Group captain, known only as "Brian", to work with a CIA team at Langley, Virginia. Brian set up an office in the printing plant there and, with six other officers, began planning.

  Planners looked at several options. They considered a helicopter raid, an attack by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, a joint operation with Pakistani forces, and a drone-fired small munition aimed at bin Laden as he paced the vegetable garden. Obama ruled out the Pakistanis. A senior adviser told The New Yorker, "There was a real lack of confidence that the Pakistanis could keep this secret for more than a nanosecond."

  Obama met the National Security Council on the 14th of March, worried that the mission would be exposed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military officials doubted that bin Laden was in the compound, and doubted a raid was worth the risk. By the end of the meeting the president seemed to lean toward bombing.

  Two Air Force officers then studied that option. The CIA could not rule out an underground bunker beneath the compound. Destroying one would take 32 bombs of 2000 lb fitted with JDAM guidance, and at least one other house would fall inside the blast radius. Estimates put the toll at up to a dozen civilians beyond those in the compound, and any proof of bin Laden's death would have been obliterated.

  At the next council meeting, on the 29th of March, Obama put the bombing plan on hold. He told McRaven to develop a helicopter raid instead. That choice placed American troops on the ground in a country the U.S. was not at war with, so the personnel were temporarily transferred to the control of the civilian CIA.

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• 5. Rehearsal and Countdown

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  Red Squadron, one of the four squadrons that make up the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, supplied the team. McRaven hand-picked its most experienced and senior operators. The squadron was coming home from Afghanistan and could be redirected without attracting attention. Almost all had ten or more deployments to Afghanistan, along with language skills and experience in cross-border operations into Pakistan.

  Around the 10th of April, the team rehearsed at the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity facility in North Carolina, where builders had made a 1:1 version of the compound. On the 18th of April they rehearsed again in Nevada, at 4,000 ft, chosen to test how altitude would affect the helicopters. That mock-up used chain-link fences for walls. The participants therefore stayed unaware of how the real high walls might affect the helicopters' lift. The SEALs were not told the exact nature of their mission.

  Planners believed the SEALs could reach Abbottabad and return without being challenged by the Pakistani military. The U.S. had helped equip and train that military, so its defenses were known. The F-16 Fighting Falcons supplied to Pakistan, for example, had to stay at a base under 24-hour U.S. surveillance. If bin Laden surrendered, he would be held near Bagram Air Base. If Pakistanis discovered the SEALs mid-raid, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would call Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to negotiate their release.

  When the National Security Council met again on the 19th of April, Obama gave provisional approval. He still worried that the plan for dealing with the Pakistanis was too uncertain, and he asked McRaven to equip the team to fight its way out. McRaven and the SEALs then left for Afghanistan to practice at a one-acre, full-scale replica of the compound at Camp Alpha, a restricted area of Bagram. The team flew from Naval Air Station Oceana on the 26th of April in a C-17, refueled at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and landed at Bagram. They moved to Jalalabad on the 27th.

  On the 28th of April, Admiral Mullen explained the final plan to the council. To strengthen the fight-your-way-out scenario, Chinook helicopters with additional troops would wait nearby. Most advisers supported going ahead. Vice President Joe Biden laid out the risk of things going wrong and of a confrontation with Pakistan. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes recalled it as less a firm objection than an effort to point out the downsides from Pakistan's perspective, giving Obama room to decide. Gates, who had favored the drone-missile option, switched to the helicopter plan the next day.

  Obama wanted to speak directly to McRaven first. He asked whether anything since arriving in Afghanistan had shaken the admiral's confidence. McRaven said the team was ready and that the next few nights would have a waning moon, good conditions for a raid. At 8:20 a.m. EDT on the 29th of April, Obama gave the final go-ahead. That evening he learned that cloudy weather would delay the operation by one day. On the 30th, he called McRaven once more to wish the SEALs well and thank them.

  That same evening the president attended the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, hosted by comedian and television actor Seth Meyers. Meyers joked that people think bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Kush, but that he actually hosts a show on C-SPAN every day from four to five. Obama laughed, knowing what was coming.

  On the 1st of May at 1:22 p.m., Panetta, acting on the president's orders, told McRaven to move forward. Shortly after 3 p.m., Obama joined national security officials in the Situation Room. They watched night-vision images from a Sentinel drone, while Panetta appeared in a corner of the screen from CIA headquarters and narrated. Brigadier General Marshall Webb, assistant commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, ran a live drone feed on a laptop in an adjoining office.

  Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, was in the room. She later wrote, "Contrary to some news reports and what you see in the movies, we had no means to see what was happening inside the building itself." Two more command centers followed the raid, at the Pentagon and at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. McRaven reported that just before launch, Command Sergeant Major Chris Faris quoted the British SAS motto to his men, "Who dares wins."

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• 6. Night Over Abbottabad

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  Roughly two dozen SEALs from Red Squadron flew in two modified Black Hawk helicopters, launching from the Afghan city of Jalalabad, about 120 mi from the target. According to The New York Times, a total of "79 commandos and a dog" took part. The dog was a Belgian Malinois named Cairo, a combat-wounded veteran who had been rehabilitated. His handler was Will "Cheese" Chesney. Cairo was meant to track anyone who tried to escape, warn of approaching Pakistani security forces, and help find hidden rooms or doors.

  The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, provided the two Black Hawks. They were previously unseen stealth versions, quieter and harder to detect on radar than conventional models. Because of the extra weight of the stealth equipment, their cargo was calculated to the ounce, with the weather factored in. Two Chinooks waited on the ground about two-thirds of the way from Jalalabad, with two more SEAL teams of roughly 24 operators as a quick reaction force. Other Chinooks carrying 25 more SEALs stood just across the border in Afghanistan.

  The raid was timed for a night with little moonlight. The helicopters used hilly terrain and flew low to the ground to stay off Pakistani radar. The flight from Jalalabad to Abbottabad took about 90 minutes. The plan called for the first helicopter to hover over the courtyard while its SEALs fast-roped down. The second would fly to the northeast corner and deploy an interpreter, the dog and handler, and four SEALs to secure the perimeter.

  Then the plan broke. Hovering over the target, the first helicopter fell into a hazardous airflow condition called a vortex ring state. Higher-than-expected air temperature made it worse, and the high compound walls stopped the rotor downwash from dispersing. The tail grazed a wall and damaged the tail rotor, and the helicopter rolled onto its side. The pilot buried the nose to keep it from tipping over. Nobody was seriously hurt, and the aircraft came to rest against the wall at a 45-degree angle.

  The second helicopter landed outside the compound, and its SEALs scaled the walls. They breached walls and doors with explosives and moved through the house. Two adult males lived on the first floor of the main building, and bin Laden's family lived on the second and third floors, the last parts to be cleared. One report described small knots of children on every level, including the balcony of bin Laden's room. The interior was pitch dark because CIA operatives had cut power to the neighborhood, but the SEALs wore night-vision goggles.

  Accounts of what happened next conflict. Matt Bissonnette's book No Easy Day describes a short firefight before the team reached bin Laden. An intelligence official told journalist Seymour Hersh in 2015 that no firefight took place. In earlier versions, al-Kuwaiti fired an AK-47 from behind the guesthouse door and lightly injured a SEAL with bullet fragments, and the SEALs killed him. His wife Mariam was allegedly shot in the right shoulder. His brother Abrar and Abrar's wife Bushra were reportedly killed on the first floor, and a young adult son of bin Laden was shot on the staircase. An unnamed senior defense official said only al-Kuwaiti, of the five killed, was armed.

  On the third floor, the SEALs found bin Laden unarmed, in a loose local tunic and trousers known as a kurta paijama. Two phone numbers were sewn into the fabric. He peered through his bedroom door at the Americans coming up the stairs, and the lead SEAL fired. Reports differ on where the first shots landed, though they agree he was eventually hit in the body and head.

  Journalist Nicholas Schmidle reported that bin Laden's wife Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah motioned as if to charge, and the lead SEAL shot her in the leg. Robert J. O'Neill, who later identified himself as one of the shooters, says he pushed past the lead SEAL and shot bin Laden twice in the forehead and once more as he fell. Bissonnette says bin Laden was already mortally wounded from the stairs. Journalist Peter Bergen found that most of the SEALs present favored Bissonnette's version.

  The SEAL team leader radioed, "Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo," and then, when McRaven asked for confirmation, "Geronimo EKIA," meaning enemy killed in action. Watching in the Situation Room, Obama said simply, "We got him." The SEALs restrained the women and children with plastic handcuffs or zip ties. Afterward they moved the survivors outside for Pakistani forces to find. The bodies of the four other dead were left behind and later taken into Pakistani custody.

  Who was inside is still a matter of dispute. U.S. officials first said 22 people were present. Later information put the number at twenty-eight, including five adults who died, four women who survived and nineteen children. Four of the children were bin Laden's grandchildren. Pakistan's ISI gave its own, different counts of survivors.

  The raid was meant to take 40 minutes, and the time inside the compound was 38 minutes. According to the Associated Press, the assault itself was finished in the first 15. The rest went to clearing weapons stashes and barricades, including a false door, and searching for information. The Americans took ten computer hard drives, documents, DVDs, almost a hundred thumb drives and a dozen cell phones. The SEALs also found a large amount of opium in the house.

  The crashed helicopter could not fly. To safeguard its classified equipment, including an apparent stealth capability, the pilot smashed the instrument panel and radio, and the SEALs blew up the aircraft. One of the reserve Chinooks carried part of the team and bin Laden's body out of Pakistan. A crowd of locals gathered outside, curious about the noise. An Urdu-speaking American officer told them through a megaphone that it was a Pakistani military operation and to keep their distance.

  Neighbors watched from their roofs. One recalled soldiers advancing toward the house, and said some of them instructed the neighbors "in chaste Pashto" to turn off their lights and stay inside. Another heard shooting and screams, then an explosion that broke his bedroom window. A local security officer said he entered shortly after the Americans left and saw four bodies and a woman who was injured. Witnesses disagreed about the blackout, and one journalist concluded after interviewing residents that it was a routine rolling blackout.

  An unnamed Pakistani security official said one of bin Laden's daughters told investigators that her father was captured alive and shot in front of the family. The U.S. account disputes this. The body went from Bagram to an aircraft carrier in a V-22 Osprey escorted by two F/A-18 fighter jets, a journey of over 850 mi to the Arabian Sea.

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• 7. Burial and Proof

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  Aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea, Muslim religious rites were performed within 24 hours of bin Laden's death. U.S. officials said a sea burial was chosen because no country would accept his remains. Before disposing of the body, the U.S. called the Saudi Arabian government, which approved a burial in the ocean.

  Preparations began at 10:10 a.m. local time, and the burial was complete by 11 a.m. The body was washed, wrapped in a white sheet and placed in a weighted plastic bag. An officer read prepared religious remarks, translated into Arabic by a native speaker. The body was then laid on a flat board, which was tilted until the body slid into the sea.

  Leon Panetta tells it differently in his memoir Worthy Fights. He wrote that the body was draped in a white shroud and given final prayers in Arabic. It was placed in a black bag loaded with 300 lb of iron chains. The bag was put on a white table at the rail, and when the table was tipped, the bag did not slide. It took the table with it, and the table bobbed on the surface while the weighted body sank.

  Before the burial, U.S. forces used several methods to confirm the identity. One was height. The corpse measured 6 ft 4 in, the same as bin Laden, but the SEALs had no tape measure, so a SEAL of known height lay down next to the body for comparison. Obama quipped, "You just blew up a $65 million helicopter and you don't have enough money to buy a tape measure?"

  A photograph sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, produced a 90 to 95 percent likely match in facial recognition analysis. One or two women from the compound, including one of bin Laden's wives, identified the body. A wife also called him by name during the raid, inadvertently helping the U.S. forces on the ground.

  DNA testing gave the firmest answer. Reports said that tissue and blood samples from bin Laden's sister, who had died of brain cancer, allowed a comparison. A military medic took bone marrow and swabs from the body. Separate Department of Defense and CIA laboratories analyzed the samples against a profile built from his extended family. The probability of mistaken identity was approximately one in 11.8 quadrillion. A Defense Department official added that personal correspondence and some video footage from the compound would only have been in bin Laden's possession.

  Several prominent Islamic clerics criticized the sea burial. Under Islamic tradition, it is considered inappropriate when other, preferred forms of burial are available. Mohamed Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of Al-Azhar University in Egypt, called it an affront to religious and human values. Mohammed al-Qubaisi, Dubai's grand mufti, said, "They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam."

  Defenders pointed to a stated advantage of sea burial, which is that the site cannot easily be found and turned into a "terrorist shrine." Egyptian analyst and lawyer Montasser el-Zayat replied that an unmarked grave on land would have done the same. Khalid Latif, a chaplain at New York University's Islamic Center, called the burial respectful. Leor Halevi of Vanderbilt University noted a dispute within the Muslim world over whether a mass murderer of Muslims deserved the same rites as mainstream Muslims. Omar bin Laden, a son, published a complaint on the 10th of May 2011 that the burial deprived the family of a proper funeral.

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• 8. Reaction and Secrecy

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  Around 9:45 p.m. EDT on the 1st of May, the White House announced that the president would address the nation later that night. At 10:24:05 p.m., Navy Reserve intelligence officer Keith Urbahn made the first public leak. Dwayne Johnson followed on Twitter 47 seconds later. By 11 p.m. many major news sources reported bin Laden's death, and David E. Sanger called the number of leaks "voluminous."

  At 11:35 p.m., Obama appeared on the major television networks and said the United States had conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden. He said that finding bin Laden had been his top priority on taking office, and called the death the most significant blow to al-Qaeda so far. He also reaffirmed that the U.S. was not at war against Islam. "To those families who have lost loved ones to al-Qaeda's terror," he said, "justice has been done." The line echoed President Bush's promise to Congress after September 11 that "justice will be done."

  Before the announcement was official, large crowds gathered outside the White House, at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon and in Times Square. A small crowd gathered outside City Hall in Dearborn, Michigan. During Obama's speech, 5,000 tweets per second were posted on Twitter. At a Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets game, "U-S-A!" cheers began as the news spread through the crowd.

  Over 90% of the American public supported the raid. The United Nations, the European Union and NATO welcomed it, and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said he was "very much relieved." Two-thirds of the Pakistani public condemned it. Palestinian leaders split, with Mahmoud Abbas welcoming the death and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh condemning what he called the assassination of an "Arab holy warrior." In India, Home Minister P. Chidambaram said bin Laden hiding deep inside Pakistan was a matter of grave concern.

  Al-Qaeda confirmed the death through posts on militant websites on the 6th of May and vowed revenge. Pakistani militant groups, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, vowed retaliation against both the United States and Pakistan for failing to stop the raid. Pakistanis were also angry that their air force failed to detect or intercept any incoming American aircraft.

  U.S. officials said Pakistan was told nothing until the raid was over. Admiral Mullen phoned General Kayani at about 3 a.m. local time. The Pakistani foreign ministry said the operation was conducted entirely by U.S. forces. ISI officials called it a joint operation, which President Asif Ali Zardari flatly denied. Foreign secretary Salman Bashir later said Pakistan scrambled F-16s once it learned of the attack, but they arrived after the helicopters had left.

  Prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told his parliament that the people were rightly incensed by the violation of sovereignty. He then formed a commission, led by Senior Justice Javed Iqbal. Its Abbottabad Commission Report blamed a "collective failure" of Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies. The government classified the report, but Al Jazeera published a leaked copy on the 8th of July 2013.

  The legal questions were just as sharp. Congress had passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists after September 11, and the Obama administration relied on it. John Bellinger III, a former State Department lawyer, called the killing a legitimate military action rather than a prohibited assassination. David Scheffer noted that bin Laden had been indicted in 1998 in New York, which normally means capture and trial. Amnesty International questioned the failure to take an unarmed man alive.

  Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the operation was an act of national self-defense and that bin Laden made no attempt to surrender. Steven Ratner of the University of Michigan said much depends on whether bin Laden was a combatant in a war or a suspect in a mass murder. Former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz said killing a captive who poses no immediate threat is a crime under military law. Two UN special rapporteurs asked for more information about how he died.

  Proof was a separate fight. Obama decided not to release photographs of the body. In an interview aired on the 4th of May on 60 Minutes, he said, "We don't need to spike the football." On the 11th of May, selected members of Congress were shown 15 photographs. Judicial Watch, the Associated Press, Reuters and others filed Freedom of Information Act requests. On the 26th of April 2012, Judge James E. Boasberg held that the Defense Department did not have to release any evidence.

  A draft report by the Pentagon's inspector general said McRaven ordered the Defense Department to purge its computer files on the raid after first sending them to the CIA. The final version dropped any mention of this. The Pentagon said it protected the identities of the SEALs, and a CIA spokesman said the records belonged to the CIA. The National Security Archive called the transfer a move into a "FOIA black hole."

  The same draft report said Panetta disclosed classified information to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, including the unit that conducted the raid and the ground commander's name. A will attributed to bin Laden, written shortly after the September 11 attacks, was also reported. In it he urged his children not to join al-Qaeda and not to continue the Jihad.

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