How Obama Got Bin Laden: A Detailed Account From ‘Showdown’ by David Corn

During the 2008 campaign, when Barack Obama bluntly vowed “we will kill bin Laden,” he did not know that one of the most consequential moments of his presidency would be deciding whether to make good on that vow. In fact, his fierce campaign pledge to resort to unilateral action to get Osama bin Laden, should he be hiding in Pakistan, was slammed by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain as reckless talk. But Obama took the promise seriously. Five months into his presidency, he sent a memo to Leon Panetta, then the new CIA chief, signaling that he considered finding bin Laden a high-priority task. He requested a detailed operation plan for locating and “bringing to justice” the mass-murderer. Yet for a year, Panetta did not have much to report to Obama on this front. Then in the summer of 2010, the agency informed Obama there was a lead: bin Laden might be in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, about 35 miles north of Islamabad. He could be within Obama’s reach.

For months, however, there was not much for the president to do, as the spies gathered more intelligence. In mid-February 2011, Obama and the small number of White House aides tracking the CIA’s effort concluded that the intelligence was strong enough to start thinking about a mission to nab or kill bin Laden. Panetta brought Vice Admiral William McRaven, the commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, into the picture and asked him to start cooking up options for an assault. Now the bin Laden mission had become a matter of presidential decision-making.

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In mid-March 2011, Obama convened a series of National Security Council meetings on a possible bin Laden operation. At the first, on March 14, Panetta presented Obama with the three basic course of action—COAs, in the parlance of military planners—that McRaven and a small team had devised: a massive bombing strike in which B-2 stealth bombers would drop dozens of 2,000-pound GPS-guided bombs and obliterate the compound; a helicopter raid mounted by U.S. commandos; or a joint assault with Pakistani forces, who would be informed of the operation only shortly before its launch. According to a participant, the president had “a visceral reaction” against the bombing strike because collateral damage would likely extend beyond the compound into the surrounding neighborhood. The CIA had already determined that the compound contained a number of women and children.

Another drawback of such an attack was that it would leave behind only rubble—and the remains of 20 or so people mixed in with the concrete and steel. In all that wreckage, could they find a piece of bin Laden—hair or flesh—for DNA analysis?

“The question was, would you accrue the strategic benefits of getting bin Laden if you couldn’t prove it?” Ben Rhodes, a national security aide, recalled.

“And what could be worse,” Nicholas Rasmussen, the White House senior director for counterterrorism, later noted, “than OBL survives and comes out and says, ‘The United States failed to kill me’?”

Obama all but scratched this option off the list. He did ask the military to consider a surgical strike targeting the specific person living within the compound whom intelligence analysts suspected was the al Qaeda leader. The analysts had dubbed him “the pacer,” for he would stride around the compound as if for exercise.

Inside Bin Laden’s Hideout

CIA / AP Photo

The CIA had not been able to obtain physical evidence that confirmed this man was bin Laden. But the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes overhead imagery, had determined the fellow was between 5 feet 8 and 6 feet 8. Far from definitive. And he might be a decoy.

The president appeared to be leaning toward an assault. He pressed McRaven on the details. How much training time would a squad need? How could the commandos make a positive identification of bin Laden?

Defense Secretary Bob Gates and others, though, were skeptical— or, as one participant later recalled, “keenly focused on the risks associated with a helicopter raid.” Gates had been at the CIA during Desert One (the failed mission President Jimmy Carter had approved to rescue American hostages held in Tehran in 1980) and Black Hawk Down (the 1993 operation in Somalia that fell apart and resulted in the deaths of eighteen U.S. troops). Another high-risk helicopter raid—this time flying undetected a hundred miles into another country—was worrisome to him.