SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (11 page)

He watched, they all watched. Seconds ticked. The lifeboat heaved up and down as it breasted the swells. Mel knew, they all knew, that the Sea Fox package was coming, and with it, a great clamoring, jet-powered helicopter. The bad guys were jacked up and had been shooting off rounds. They wanted their friend back. If they heard a helicopter, or saw the boats …

Mel pressed his legs apart, renewing contact, touch, with his shooters.

“Who has?”

“Bravo has.”

“Charlie has.”

Then Bubba Holland said firmly, “Delta has.”

Mel saw them all, locked them all in his eyes, and as he opened his mouth the lifeboat lurched over the top of a cross swell and wallowed sharply. The towline jerked taught and above them it gave an audible twang.

The heads in the pilothouse disappeared.

The words strangled off in Mel’s throat.

“No joy!”

“Nada.”

The bow of the lifeboat went deep and then bobbed up nearly vertically. Still square in the hatch, Delta pitched forward, bent at his waist. Holding his rifle in one hand, the other sprawled out, fingers clutching at the bow cleat, Erasto managed barely to keep upright. Now he was visible, objective Delta, but in the pilothouse the other heads vanished.

Half a minute passed, an eternity.

“Who has?”

“
^______
”

“
^______
”

Only Bubba whispered: “Delta has.”

A vile string of blasphemy unspooled in Mel’s head. No one on the planet can string obscenity like a master chief petty officer in the United States Navy. But nothing came out of his mouth, not a sound.

Mel glanced to the left, outside of the light of his scope. He looked east, to the place in which the moon would eventually rise. It was gray-black darkness. Mel saw nothing, but he knew two HSACs were ripping toward them. He knew they were trailed by a Seahawk helicopter flying not higher than six feet off the water. He prayed a sinner’s prayer:
Don’t let them be seen,
and then,
Please God, please, don’t let me fuck this up.

The lifeboat wallowed and then lifted its bow like a horse that had stumbled. Out of the bow hatch Erasto was still fully visible. He turned around, back turned toward the ship, looking back at the pilothouse windows. Behind the lifeboat’s windscreen, one head came up. Then another.

Mel had his scope zoomed on the bow. He could see Delta’s face so clearly he could see that his pupils were dilated. Erasto was staring into the night, gawking after shadows, his eyes cranked open to maximum. Two silhouettes in the pilothouse. Just two.

Then, Mel saw Delta jerk to his right. He saw Erasto lift his hand and point off to the east, point away from the destroyer’s starboard quarter. Mel tried to force away the thought that they had seen the HSACs, or that they had heard or seen the helicopter.

There was no time anymore, no seconds or minutes, everything was slow, moving as it does when the slack is taken out of a trigger, when the weapon is against your shoulder and you’ve done everything to stalk and aim and it comes down to an even, straight pull.

Delta was lifting his AK-47. He had a hand on the pistol grip and his fingers were closing over the forestock. Delta was aiming at something off the right side of the lifeboat. Behind the windshield the two shadows moved together, both of them now on the starboard side, one slightly in front of the other.

Mel kept his voice dead flat and even; his breath automatically controlled. Delta was aiming his rifle, but it did not matter, Mel and his boys were at cool zero.

“Who has?”

“Bravo has.”

“Charlie has.”

“Delta has.”

They were flush. Mel keyed the microphone and said over the tactical net: “Fire.”

Three bullets. Three kills. It was over. The pirates who had taken
Maersk Alabama
were dead, and Captain Richard Phillips was free.

BIN LADEN’S ROAD TO ABBOTTABAD

THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

AT 8:46 A.M., ON THE MORNING OF
September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 tore through the ninety-third floor of the World Trade Center’s building number one. There was not a cloud in the sky, and not one person in America’s counterterrorism apparatus, no one from the FBI director to the newest field agent, no one from the CIA director to the first tour case officer, analyst, or technician,
no one
thought it could be an accident.

From the first terrible instant of the 9/11 attacks American intelligence agencies knew that they had been had.

In the weeks and months prior to 9/11, the FBI and CIA had received and processed dozens of explicit warnings—these included both raw reports from officers and assets in the field, as well as polished memoranda and white papers from foreign intelligence services. Some warned of a general attack, others stated specifically that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda intended to crash hijacked airliners into American targets.

But all these reports, both foreign and domestic, were ignored.

The information had filtered up through the ossified bureaucracies of two equally dysfunctional organizations. This intelligence crossed the same gray, government-issued desks at both the CIA and FBI. At both places, officers and analysts had their workspaces arranged into cubicle plantations where one anonymous, vindictive, or lazy person could derail an investigation, kill a lead, or spike a report. At the CIA, especially, such lethal office politics had been raised to an art form. And things were nearly as bad at the FBI, where a newly appointed director had surrounded himself with careerist survivors marking time until retirement.

No one who lived through 9/11 will ever forget where they were, what they were doing, or what they felt when they heard the news. The entire country ground to a halt under a staggering series of blows. It was an epoch-changing moment—one of the darkest in American history. The bloody hijackings, the crashes, the fires, the senseless deaths, the constant dread that even worse was to come, made the events all seem like a blur. Even now, America struggles with a sort of posttraumatic shock about 9/11.

There was chaos on the streets of Manhattan, and fear in the power corridors of Washington, D.C.

But America’s day of heroism and sorrow was only beginning.

At 9:37 a.m., a third set of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing all aboard and 137 people on the ground, most of them civilians.

Five minutes before 10:00 a.m., passengers aboard the fourth hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 93, rose against the men who intended to murder them. After a protracted and bloody struggle, passengers used a drink cart to batter their way into the cockpit. As these brave men and women fought terrorists for control of the aircraft, the 767 rolled onto its back, went into a dive, and crashed into a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The fifty-one passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 had proven that they, like New York’s brave firemen and police officers, were willing to sacrifice themselves for people that they had never met. The selfless bravery of these average Americans saved the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of additional victims. It is believed that Flight 93’s intended target was the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

In Florida, President Bush returned by motorcade to Air Force One, then parked on a secured taxiway at the Sarasota airport. Using wartime emergency departure protocols, Air Force One rocketed quickly to 45,000 feet and began a meandering cross-country trip that would take the commander in chief across fourteen states and parts of the Gulf of Mexico, only returning to Washington eight hours after every other aircraft flying over the United States had been forced to land.

September 11 was the most catastrophic intelligence failure in America’s history. For both the CIA and FBI, a series of small, almost inconsequential mistakes in analysis, investigation, and intelligence collection melded together. The systems were broken. But the major malfunctions were at the top.

*   *   *

On the morning of September 11, 2001, CIA director George Tenet stood at the windows of his seventh-floor office and watched the cloud of smoke rising from the wreckage of the Pentagon, a mere ten miles away. Tenet had come to the directorship of the CIA after the abrupt resignation of John Deutch in December 1996. Tenet, a political appointee, had zero field experience; he had drifted into intelligence by working as a senator’s assistant. After serving on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Transition Team, Tenet found himself appointed first to the National Security Council, and then, after two years as deputy director of the CIA, he became DCI, director of Central Intelligence. His career at the CIA was marked by miscalculations, mistakes, and staggering screwups.

In 1998, Tenet’s CIA had failed to prevent twin truck bomb attacks on the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. On May 7, 1999, during the Kosovo war, CIA-provided targeting data put five precision-guided JDAM bombs through the roof of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Three Chinese diplomats were killed and more than a dozen people were wounded. On January 3, 2003, CIA officers in Yemen were clueless about a suicide bomb attempt against the American destroyer USS
The Sullivans
. In a farcical comedy of errors, Al Qaeda’s first plot failed when their speedboat, overloaded with explosives, sank in the harbor. CIA’s boots on the ground in Yemen were so oblivious that Osama bin Laden’s operatives were able to salvage the explosives and use them nine months later in a successful attack against the USS
Cole.

But Tenet’s CIA had even more breathtaking acts of incompetence left in it.

Twenty-four months after the African embassy bombings, Tenet had presided over another catastrophic failure of intelligence, his sixth. Manhattan was in flames, the Pentagon was burning, American airliners were falling out of the sky—but whatever else he did that morning, George Tenet managed to cover his backside and hang on to his job.

He was nothing if not a survivor.

Across town, at FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, Director Robert Mueller watched on CNN as the south tower fell. Like his archrival across the Potomac, Mueller was shocked to discover that his agency, too, had presided over an intelligence disaster of the first order.

If Tenet was a creature of Democratic party politics, Robert Mueller proved that incompetence was a bipartisan thing. Mueller shared with Tenet a résumé that was long on political connections and spotty on basic skill. Mueller was a Republican Beltway insider with no prior experience in either counterintelligence or basic law enforcement. Mueller had been at his job for less than a week when 9/11 struck, and it might be argued that he was less culpable for the failure of his agency to predict or prevent the attacks.

One could try to make that point, but the FBI, too, had ignored a litany of detailed warnings.

When Mueller called a meeting of FBI deputy directors that morning, he was sickened to discover that for the last year and a half, FBI headquarters had disregarded repeated entreaties from field agents warning,
specifically,
that airborne terror attacks were being planned.

Within a half hour of the first impact, the CIA and FBI began dueling exercises in damage control. Incredibly, both Mueller and Tenet would manage to burrow deep into the carpet and hold on to their jobs. But there was plenty of blame to go around.

Following the attacks, Condoleezza Rice said, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that … they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

She knew, or should have known, that the threat was real. Warnings that Al Qaeda might use passenger airliners to attack ground targets came as early as 1999. These were written predictions, and they were unambiguous. A report prepared by the National Intelligence Council stated explicitly: “Suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida’s Martyrdom Battalion [sic] could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency or the White House.”

Intelligence doesn’t usually get much more specific than that.

Five months before 9/11, the National Intelligence Council had named the attackers, and also listed the targets and means of attack.

The inability of the American government to predict or prevent the attacks of 9/11 was not a failure of intelligence collection, but was the result of egregious failures in leadership and analysis.

The events of 9/11 revealed that the upper echelons of the FBI and CIA were paralyzed by cronyism, political correctness, and staggering incompetence. On the seventh floor, it didn’t matter what you knew, or even if you knew what you were doing—what mattered was whom you knew in elected office. Senior positions in both agencies were passed out as political plums. Added to this “close to the boss” attitude was a poisonous culture of middle management. Both organizations had surrendered daily operations to a cadre of bureaucrats, who waged intramural combat with memos, performance reviews, and budget documents. New ideas were promptly stepped on. Innovations were referred to committee and quietly smothered. Special agents and intelligence officers who did not knuckle under were reassigned or transferred out.

Before 9/11, the FBI and CIA seemed to exist in some kind of parallel universe. Some of their gaffes—both at the top and in the middle—were so grotesquely unprofessional that it is hard to understand how such people ever managed to find employment in the first place—much less earn and maintain a security clearance.

In the period between 1999 and 2001, the FBI and CIA picked up literally hundreds of detailed, specific warnings that Al Qaeda was planning an airborne attack. In 1999, the FBI learned that Ihab Mohammed Ali, a participant in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, had been sent for pilot training in Oklahoma. In September 2000, federal prosecutors revealed to a grand jury that an associate of Ali’s had attended a meeting as early as 1993 where Al Qaeda members discussed Western air traffic control procedures, with the intent of obscuring the movements of hijacked passenger planes. On July 10, 2001, eight weeks before the 9/11 attack, Special Agent Kenneth Williams cabled FBI headquarters from the Phoenix field office. He did not mince his words: “The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges.”