SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (23 page)

The WikiLeaks documents and the events of the past thirty-six months suggest first, Saddam did
not
destroy his chemical arsenal. And second, Al Qaeda is manufacturing its own chemical weapons using legacy materials from Iraq’s stockpile as well as material produced in their own clandestine laboratories. Instead of preventing Weapons of Mass Destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq has accelerated the acquisition, manufacture, and use of chemical weapons by Al Qaeda.

In a scathing article in the British magazine
The Spectator,
dated April 2, 2007, journalist Melanie Phillips summed up the entire WMD mess:

The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralize the danger of Iraqi WMD. The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.

If the purpose of the American intervention in Iraq was to remove the threat of Saddam’s WMD it has backfired, dreadfully.

Clearly, there is a major disconnect between public perception, media reporting, government admissions, and truth on the ground. For the administration and the media, the mantra “we didn’t find any” remains preferable to the admission “we have armed the enemy.”

History is marked by military turning points: the battles at Cannae, Waterloo, the German Blitzkrieg through Europe, and America’s defeat in Vietnam stand as examples. In each case, a radical, epoch-making change in tactics led to the defeat of a world power. On May 16, 2003, in al Baya, Iraq, the world changed forever. Until that day, weapons of mass destruction had been the sole prerogative of superpowers.

Al Qaeda has chemical weapons. This nightmarish fact is why the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on for more than a decade. Osama bin Laden, an ascetic, religiously self-educated multimillionaire, had declared war on the United States, and he meant to see it destroyed root and branch. His was no idle boast—Osama bin Laden had financed and directed the most horrific acts of terrorism in history. At his behest Al Qaeda had bombed embassies, beheaded journalists, and plotted the assassinations of President Clinton and Pope John Paul. He had sent airliners hurtling into the World Trade Center, and watched gleefully on a satellite dish as three thousand people were incinerated. Now he had chemical weapons—and he intended to use them against the United States.

Only one thing stood in his way: SEAL Team Six.

NEPTUNE’S SPEAR

CONTINUE TO PLAN, PLAN TO CONTINUE

ON A COLD JANUARY MORNING
in Virginia Beach, the STE telephone rang in Scott Kerr’s office at SEAL Team Six. It warbled three or four times a day, direct from JSOC’s headquarters, and it usually meant that someone was going somewhere. When the SEAL officer detailer notified Scott that he would be the new CO of SEAL Six, he was delighted: it was the most coveted command in the SEAL community—the top of the heap. He had now been on the job seven months, and had started to wonder occasionally if it had been such a great idea to come aboard. Six was engaged worldwide, and doing some seriously cool stuff, but he was stuck most of the time in Virginia Beach. Scott used to kid his wife, Martha, that he’d been hired as a travel agent.

The caller, JSOC’s chief of staff, asked Scott to fly down for an afternoon meeting.
Right now?
But before he could ask for a postponement, the chief of staff made the issue moot.
The meeting size is at three,
he said,
you, the admiral, and some guy from the agency
. Scott leaned back in his chair. The admiral meant William McRaven, the boss of JSOC, and the agency, perennial and spreading as rapidly as poison ivy, was the CIA. This was important, and Scott found a starchy uniform shirt on the back of the private shower adjoining his office and called for his briefcase. Buck Buckwalter stuck his head into the office. Buck was the master chief of the command, its senior enlisted man. He functioned not only as Scott’s direct liaison to the troops, but his right hand for operations and planning. Sometimes he also played butler.

“What do you need in the briefcase, Skipper?” Buck asked. “What’cha want me to draw?” Buck was referring to contingency plans, of which the command had a thousand. What-ifs for everything from presidential kidnapping to how to take an embassy back from rioters in Estonia.

“No subject,” Scott said. “Not yet.” Scott buttoned up his uniform blouse, checked the shine on his jump boots, and found his starched Navy cover. “Just fill me up with the admin flight, so I can do some tree killing on the way down.”

Travel to and from headquarters was so routine that Scott Kerr had a special briefcase prepared for what he called “the admin flight”—work he could do as the helicopter traveled between bases. It was the stuff that made him feel like a travel agent: reports on fuel and ammunition consumption, travel orders, per diem and rental car receipts, performance evaluations, and the reams of paper that torture commanding officers in every branch of the service. As the Team’s blue and silver Hughes 500 flew over Albermarle Sound, Kerr rarely looked out the window as he signed, edited, and “chopped” has way through an Augean stable of administrative horseshit.

The conference room at JSOC is three stories underground, and sits behind a foot-thick, soundproof steel door with both an electronic card reader and an old-fashioned combination lock, like a bank safe in a spaghetti western. Actually there are about six of these rooms at JSOC, but Scott was heading for the one called “Flag”—the one deepest underground and closest to the admiral’s office.

At JSOC, no one calls any of these places “conference rooms,” unless a civilian has been invited. Civilian invitees are usually senators, or secretaries of defense or deputy directors of the CIA or occasionally the FBI or Department of State. Everyone else, everyone military, calls them “the vaults.”

These steel doors outnumber regular doors in the intricately connected basements of JSOC headquarters. All of the conference rooms and most of the working offices have the same gray, oppressive, electronically secured doors. The most important vaults, like Flag, also have an armed guard standing in front of them.

The first hint Scott had that something was afoot was when he walked into Flag A and found only two attendees: Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, JSOC’s commanding officer, and a short, thin-lipped man whom the admiral introduced as Walter Youngblood, an intelligence officer from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The admiral and the agency man each had a pair of thick folders in front of him.

When the guard closed the vault door a red light panel switched on:
BRIEFING IN PROGRESS
. When no one else came into the room, Kerr knew this was going to be interesting. The room was locked and guarded and would stay that way until their meeting was over. Kerr sat when the admiral did. He had known Bill McRaven for more than twenty years, and the six-foot three-inch Texan was known throughout the community for his poker face. The CIA guy was an unknown. He was keeping his expression a near blank, but unlike McRaven the man from Langley was showing a giddy sort of happiness under the surface, like a school kid who’d brought a frog to school in his lunch box. Kerr thought he might have seen the agency guy before, at some conference or another, but he didn’t place him right away.

The admiral came right to the point, “We’re going to need some of your guys for a while. To set up a planning cell.”

“How many?” There were never enough Jedis to go around, and CIA was famous for wanting Team guys to advise their own “experts” on a host of tactical matters. The job was so routine and disliked that the shooters had long ago christened the trips to Langley as “Pet SEAL” operations.

“It looks like we’ve got a line on a high-value individual. And a location this time. It’s firming up, and I want to have an immediate action plan in hand if he looks like he’s going to move.”

Scott Kerr didn’t blink. High-value individual didn’t necessarily mean Osama bin Laden. But the fact that there were only three people in this brief added a lot of gravity. Osama had been the most hunted man in the world for almost a decade—and the SEALs had been close more than once: In September 2008, Scott had participated in a raid launched deep into Waziristan, to a one-goat town called Angoor Ata. CIA provided intel stating that Osama was in residence, but the SEALs came up empty. Since the 9/11 attacks, Osama had been seen everywhere from Tehran to Tripoli. One lady clairvoyant kept sending perfumed letters to JSOC, stating that she had “visions” of Osama hiding out at the Ritz in London.

Clairvoyants aside, there was some very serious speculation within JSOC that Osama was dead. No one thought anymore that Osama was hiding out and living on Pashtun hospitality. There was a $25 million bounty on his head. Hospitality or no hospitality, for $25 million most people will turn in their grandmothers. Many people in JSOC thought that Osama was being sheltered by a government, either dead or alive. The “He’s Dead” theory went that Osama had been murdered by the Pakistani ISI, and that they had concealed his death to make sure that the “boogeyman” of international Jihad kept the money flowing to the Pakistani armed forces. It was starting to make sense to a lot of people, especially since more and more of Al Qaeda’s intercepted communications indicated a simmering power struggle between Osama and Ayman Zawahiri. Zawahiri had turned back up in late 2003, crossing into Pakistan. Like Bin Laden, he was figured to be in the tribal areas, or maybe southern Iran.

Scott Kerr looked across the table to the CIA guy, a perfectly anonymous-looking person in a suit that you wouldn’t remember either. That’s where he remembered him from—Angoor Ata.

“All right,” Kerr said. “Tell me what’s up.”

Kerr knew better than to ask exactly where they thought this high-value individual might be. Operators know better than to ask noun-verb-object questions when they are first being “written in” on a project. They listen first. And strange as it might seem, for most of Kerr’s intents and purposes, exactly where the HVI might be located was irrelevant. If this was Osama, his geospatial location mattered only to the extent that it affected a SEAL Team’s insertion and extraction. McRaven knew, and Walter had a pretty good idea how SEAL Team Six conducted actions at the objective.

McRaven was leaning back in his chair and had one hand on the edge of the table. Kerr noticed he wasn’t touching the files yet. The admiral said, “I talked to the DCI yesterday, he wants us to open the file and start the planning cycle.”

The DCI, director of Central Intelligence, was Leon Panetta. McRaven dropped this name as an overture to what Walter would now tell Scott Kerr. It made Scott pay attention, perhaps more than he normally would to another CIA theory on Bin Laden’s secret hiding place.

“There’s a compound,” Walter said. “We’ve had it under surveillance for a couple of weeks now. We’re certain there’s a high-profile individual inside.”

Maybe they weren’t talking about Osama at all.

“How high profile?” Kerr looked at the admiral.

“He’s in a walled compound,” McRaven answered. “Maybe an acre and a half, photographs are in the target folder. The best we can tell, he’s in there with about two dozen people. There’s no telephone lines into the building, and no Internet. These guys burn their own trash, keep their gates locked, and homeschool their kids.”

“How many kids?”

“A dozen. Something like that,” Walter said.

That complicated things immensely. It’s one thing to hit a high-value target—that’s pretty straightforward. But to hit a target that is also an elementary school would be a lot different.

“How heavily defended is this place?”

Walter spoke. “There doesn’t seem to be much overtly defensive behavior.”

Kerr looked at McRaven again. “Overtly defensive behavior” was not a term in the SEAL Team lexicon.

McRaven’s voice was even. “We haven’t seen any armed guards, uniformed or not. The defenders keep a low profile. That doesn’t mean people aren’t in there with guns. There are at least five military-aged males in the compound and the guesthouses. They are certainly armed.”

Walter said, “What we’ve been seeing are some women and children in the compound. We think they are all related. Multiple families.”

“How many people total?”

“Twenty or so. Twenty-five.”

“There’s a structure on the roof of the main building. A three-sided box, open at the top. It looks like it was built for some antiaircraft equipment, a machine gun probably. The gun isn’t mounted now and they haven’t seemed to be putting it up at night. It’s not impossible that there are some Strela missiles in there.”

“That’s not good,” Kerr said aloud. Strelas were helicopter killers.

“CIA is going to start putting some assets in on the ground. They’re going to start seeing if we can get a make on the occupant.”

Scott Kerr looked at his boss. In the days of digital camouflage uniforms with slant pockets and Velcro, Bill McRaven still wore an old school green woodland-pattern battle dress uniform. It made a statement about how he approached special operations. That’s not to say he wasn’t innovative— fresh tactics and out-of-the-box thinking are what make special operations succeed. Bill McRaven’s Naval Postgraduate School thesis had blossomed into a three-hundred-page survey of ten of the most important special operations in military history. Like most other SEAL officers, Scott had read the admiral’s book. Bill McRaven generally knew what he was talking about.

“So is this Bert or Ernie?” Kerr asked.

Over the last couple years, SEAL team intelligence analysts had christened Osama bin Laden as “Bert” and Ayman Zawahiri, his second in command, as “Ernie.” One was tall and taciturn and the other was a short, round yapper. They were named after the famous Muppet characters on
Sesame Street
. Some wag in intel had come up with the handle, and it stuck.