The Finish (29 page)

McRaven sat in a large rectangular windowless room with plywood walls, surrounded by manned computer stations and looking up at a wall of video monitors. One monitor would show video of the raid itself—the Sentinel feed—but there was nothing to watch there yet. Another had a graphic display showing the location of the choppers. There was some tension as the two smaller choppers crossed into Pakistan, followed about fifteen minutes later by the two Chinooks, but none of them tripped alarms at that country’s air defenses. With the full array of national security assets at his disposal, McRaven was able to monitor
exactly
what the Pakistanis were doing
. . .
and as the minutes went by it became clear that they were doing nothing. The task force had entered Pakistani airspace before, on covert missions into the tribal areas, so they had been confident they could slip in unnoticed, but it was nevertheless a relief when it had been done. The admiral had precalculated a point where, even if the Pakistanis woke up, the mission would proceed. Soon enough they had passed even that point. Now, as the blacked-out choppers moved toward Abbottabad, there was nothing to do for about an hour but wait.

At that point, McRaven knew he would have decisions to make only if something went wrong.

Up on the big screen in the White House Situation Room, Panetta read out occasional updates on the choppers’ progress. One of Obama’s aides said, “Mr. President, this is going to take a while, you might not want to sit here and watch the whole thing unfold.”

“No, I think I’m going to go ahead and watch,” said Obama. In Chicago, nine and a half years earlier he had watched 9/11 unfold in a crowded basement room, now he would watch the final act of that drama from another.

Biden was typically restless, moving in and out of the room, and when he noticed that the live feed of McRaven and the Sentinel were up in the side room, he went in and sat down to watch there. Webb was hunched over his laptop at the head of the table.

In Jalalabad, McRaven’s sergeant major was sitting alongside the admiral, communicating on a chat line with Webb and others in the command loop. He looked up.

“Hey, sir,” he said. “General says the vice president just walked in.”

Secretary of Defense Gates was not far behind.

McRaven knew that the drumming chop of the approaching Black Hawks would be faintly audible about two minutes before they reached the target. The helicopters were stealthy, designed to avoid being spotted by radar, and quieter than standard models, but they still created racket when they were directly overhead. Approaching the compound from the northwest, the Black Hawks were now visible in the grainy overhead feed from the Sentinel.

After that, things happened very fast.

Everyone watched with shock as the first chopper, instead of hovering over the compound to drop the SEAL team from ropes and then moving off, as planned, abruptly wheeled, clipping the compound wall with its tail and hitting the ground. This clearly wasn’t good.

The Night Stalker pilot had tried to bring his Black Hawk to a hover, but the chopper wouldn’t perform the maneuver. It “mushed,” or began to skid uncontrollably. An after-action analysis would conclude that because the compound was encircled by stone walls, whereas the mock target in Nevada had only had a chain-link fence, the air beneath the hardworking Black Hawk warmed more rapidly than anticipated. That meant the air density was insufficient for the precisely calculated weight of the aircraft. The chopper could stay airborne only if it kept moving, so when the pilot halted its forward progress it fell.

The pilots of the 160th train for frantic moments like these. The pilot of the faltering Black Hawk moved with practiced speed. He found a plot of flat ground to execute a hard, controlled crash. It was in the compound’s western corner near an animal pen. He swung the craft’s tail in that direction and deliberately used it to clip the top of the western wall. This pitched the chopper forward and into the ground. The landing was hard, but upright, which was key. In those seconds the pilot’s maneuver had prevented the Black Hawk from pitching over on its side, which is a disastrous way for a helicopter to crash. If its still-spinning rotors strike the ground, the body of the chopper could be thrown or violently rolled. Instead, the nose was in the dirt. The SEALs were strapped in and were on seats designed to absorb a hard landing like this. One second the craft was skidding, and the next it was still, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, its tail rotor hung up on the top of the wall.

No one watching the small screen in the White House, viewing the scene from far overhead, could see exactly what had happened, or even tell that the chopper was pitched forward with its tail hung up on the wall. They could see only that it was down inside the compound. They knew that was not the plan.

Excruciating moments passed as McRaven sought word from the scene. Every discussion of what could go wrong on this mission had referenced the helicopter that clipped the plane and exploded in the Iranian desert in 1980, and the helicopters that had crashed in crowded Mogadishu in 1993. Here in the first seconds of the mission, they had a Black Hawk down.

Obama had been following Donilon’s advice up to this point, receiving mission updates secondhand, talking with Panetta via the video hookup in the Situation Room, and letting others monitor the video feed and chat lines in the side room, but when the chopper went down he abruptly got up and crossed the hall.

Clinton, standing over the food tray in the adjacent room with Ben Rhodes, watched him go.

“Ben, do you think it’s a good idea for the president to watch this?” she asked.

“He’s not going to be directing anything,” Rhodes said. “It’s just a feed.”

Sitting at the head of the small conference table, Webb stood up to surrender his seat when he noticed Obama enter. The president waved him back down.

“I’ll just take this chair here,” he said, sliding into the corner. “I need to watch this.”

The president’s entrance was noted by Webb on the chat line.

In Jalalabad, McRaven’s sergeant major said, “Sir, the president just walked into the room.”

Clinton followed and took one of the remaining chairs at the table. Other staffers began crowding into the small room to see what would happen next.

In Jalalabad, McRaven was understandably preoccupied. He didn’t have time to worry or watch the screen, or to explain things to Washington. He quickly ascertained that no one on the chopper had been hurt. They were already preparing to assault the target house from their downed position. All of these men had long ago proved their talent for adapting quickly to setbacks. This is why they had been picked. Setbacks were commonplace. It was the rare plan that survived even the first minutes of an assault. McRaven had lost helicopters before, and he had options at his fingertips.

Watching on the screen at Langley with Panetta and the other top CIA officials and bin Laden team members, Michael Morell felt a moment of panic when the chopper went down but was immediately reassured, as was everyone watching, by McRaven’s manner. The admiral did not seem ruffled or even particularly surprised.

“Mr. Director, as you can see, we have a helicopter down in the courtyard,” he said to Panetta. “My men are prepared for this contingency and will deal with it.”

At the White House there was still no explanation of what was going on. Obama’s face was etched with worry. A White House photographer snapped a picture of the now-crowded side room that would become famous: Webb at the center in his blue uniform, head down, intently monitoring the video feed and chat line on his laptop screen, trying to figure out what had happened; Obama seated in the corner with furrowed brow; Donilon standing behind Webb with his arms crossed, flanked by Admiral Mullen and Bill Daley; Clinton with her hand to her mouth; Gates and Biden looking glum; staffers lining the walls—all fixated on the screen off-camera.

Obama was as nervous as he had ever been. He knew the stakes were huge, mostly for the men in that chopper, but also for the country, for his administration
. . .
for him. He had persuaded himself that he was willing to accept failure, but to be staring at it in real time on the screen
. . .
he would later say that these were the longest minutes of his life, with the possible exception of waiting for word from doctors when his youngest daughter was hospitalized with meningitis.

When the first chopper went down, the second Black Hawk diverted from its planned course and landed outside the compound walls in a newly planted field. The mission had called for it to hover briefly outside to drop the translator, the dog, and four SEALs, and then move directly over the three-story house to drop the rest of the team on its roof. It seemed to the viewers that the entire assault plan had gone awry.

Then, abruptly, SEALs began streaming out of both choppers, inside the compound and out. The assault was on. The downed chopper had caused only a momentary delay. To their relief, those watching in Washington concluded that whatever had happened the mission was proceeding. In his flat Texas twang, McRaven ordered one of the two Chinooks waiting on the riverbed at Kala Dhaka to move up.

The team from the crashed chopper moved quickly along the inside wall of the compound, pausing only to blow open a metal door that led to the house. The team from the chopper outside the wall blasted in through another entrance. There were flashes of light on the screen. The men were moving on the house itself now, and then were inside.

Upstairs in that house, according to accounts given by bin Laden’s family, the household had been startled awake by a loud crash. One of bin Laden’s adult daughters ran up from the second floor to the third and was told to go back down. Bin Laden instructed his wife Amal to leave the lights off. They would not have been able to turn them on anyway, because CIA operatives had cut off electricity to the entire neighborhood in advance of the assault—darkness favored the SEALs. The Sheik waited upstairs with Amal in the dark.

One group of SEALs entered the garage area of the guesthouse. Teams like this had hit houses that were wired to explode, and had encountered people wearing explosives. When they encountered men, they were inclined to shoot on sight. There was a single brief spray of gunfire as they approached, but it was wild and ineffective. It had most likely come from the courier Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed—Ahmed the Kuwaiti. The SEALs returned fire, killing Ahmed and wounding his wife in the shoulder.

Another part of the team moved on the main house, clearing it methodically. Abrar Ahmed, the courier’s brother, was in a first-floor bedroom with his wife Bushra. Both were shot dead.

They cleared the first floor room by room, encountering no further gunfire. They passed through two large storage rooms and a kitchen. No one knew the layout of the interior. When they encountered a locked metal door in the rear sealing off a stairway to the upper floors, they slapped on a small C-4 charge, blew it off its hinges, and moved up the stairs. Bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, a slender bearded man wearing a white T-shirt, was shot dead at the top. There were wailing women and children on this floor, none of whom posed a threat. The team didn’t know it yet, but there was only one adult male left in the compound, and he was in the third-floor bedroom.

Originally, half the assaulting SEALs were to have come down through the balcony into the third floor, in which case bin Laden would have been encountered immediately, at about the same time the Ahmed brothers were being shot downstairs. Instead, the Sheik had about fifteen long minutes to wait in the darkness as the SEALs methodically approached. Their rifles had silencers, and if none of the victims had fired he would not have heard the blast of gunfire by Ahmed and then shouting and crying and the sound of the metal doors being blown open. He might also have heard the muted pop of the SEALs’ silenced weapons. The only windows on his secure third floor looked north, out over the compound walls. The downed chopper was in the western corner of the compound and the other had landed to the south, so he could only have surmised who was coming for him. He might have thought it was a Pakistani force. The assaulters blew off the door barring the third floor and he would have heard men ascending, coming for him.

Three SEALs came up those stairs, scanning different angles, searching while protecting each other. According to one of the SEALs,
*
the first man up spotted a tall, bearded, swarthy man in a prayer cap wearing traditional flowing Pakistani clothes, the knee-length shirt worn over pajama-like bottoms. One or more of the SEALs fired at him. The man retreated quickly into a bedroom, and the SEALs followed. In the bedroom they found two women leaning over a fatally wounded bin Laden, who had been shot in the head. The first SEAL violently moved the women out of the way and the other two stood over him and fired several more shots into his chest.

*
An account of this killing scene by one of the three SEALs, calling himself “Mark Owen” was published after the first edition of The Finish went to press. He was the first of the raiding party to offer his version of the shooting, and as of this writing is the only member of the team to have done so. It differed in several details from the one I had pieced together in interviews with sources at JSOC. My original account had bin Laden being chased from the top of the stairs into a bedroom, where he was first shot in the chest, and then, once his wife Amal was pushed aside, shot in the head by a SEAL standing over him. The version in the above text is based on the “Owen” account, which, given the source, I assume to be more correct. I had been in discussions with “Mark Owen” early in the reporting of this book, but he opted not to tell me his story and instead pursued a contract to coauthor his own account, called No Easy Day.