The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military
leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and
General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never
informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position
despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by
Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times
correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a
‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden
was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials,
and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama
(2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and
Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to
four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held
local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had
knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when
a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early
1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that
the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been
hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was
that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right
time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if
you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand
him over to the United States.’
This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had
learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin
Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since
2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made
sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could
cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did
not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the
White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior
Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for
much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama
did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other
aspects of the administration’s account were false.
‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will
be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people
have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official
mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger,
but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is
essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a
fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said,
he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic
community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had
alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his
killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.
The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior
intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial
intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy
to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various
after-action reports. Two other US sources, who had access to
corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special
Operations Command. I also received information from inside Pakistan
about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership –
echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public immediately
with news of bin Laden’s death. The White House did not respond to
requests for comment.
*
It began with a
walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer
approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy
in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in
return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are
assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s
headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the
test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in
Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?’ was the CIA’s worry at
the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.
The US initially kept what it knew from the
Pakistanis. ‘The fear was that if the existence of the source was made
known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to another
location. So only a very small number of people were read into the
source and his story,’ the retired official said. ‘The CIA’s first goal
was to check out the quality of the informant’s information.’ The
compound was put under satellite surveillance. The CIA rented a house in
Abbottabad to use as a forward observation base and staffed it with
Pakistani employees and foreign nationals. Later on, the base would
serve as a contact point with the ISI; it attracted little attention
because Abbottabad is a holiday spot full of houses rented on short
leases. A psychological profile of the informant was prepared. (The
informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in
the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.)
‘By October the military and intelligence community were discussing
the possible military options. Do we drop a bunker buster on the
compound or take him out with a drone strike? Perhaps send someone to
kill him, single assassin style? But then we’d have no proof of who he
was,’ the retired official said. ‘We could see some guy is walking
around at night, but we have no intercepts because there’s no commo
coming from the compound.’
In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. His response was
cautious, the retired official said. ‘It just made no sense that bin
Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was just too crazy. The president’s
position was emphatic: “Don’t talk to me about this any more unless you
have proof that it really is bin Laden.”’ The immediate goal of the CIA
leadership and the Joint Special Operations Command was to get Obama’s
support. They believed they would get this if they got DNA evidence, and
if they could assure him that a night assault of the compound would
carry no risk. The only way to accomplish both things, the retired
official said, ‘was to get the Pakistanis on board’.
During the late autumn of 2010, the US continued to keep quiet about
the walk-in, and Kayani and Pasha continued to insist to their American
counterparts that they had no information about bin Laden’s whereabouts.
‘The next step was to figure out how to ease Kayani and Pasha into it –
to tell them that we’ve got intelligence showing that there is a
high-value target in the compound, and to ask them what they know about
the target,’ the retired official said. ‘The compound was not an armed
enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.’ The
walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001
to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains,
and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people
to betray him.’ (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere in Pakistan
during this period.) Bank was also told by the walk-in that bin Laden
was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the
ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army,
to move nearby to provide treatment. ‘The truth is that bin Laden was an
invalid, but we cannot say that,’ the retired official said. ‘“You mean
you guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?”’
‘It didn’t take long to get the co-operation we needed, because the
Pakistanis wanted to ensure the continued release of American military
aid, a good percentage of which was anti-terrorism funding that finances
personal security, such as bullet-proof limousines and security guards
and housing for the ISI leadership,’ the retired official said. He added
that there were also under-the-table personal ‘incentives’ that were
financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency funds. ‘The intelligence
community knew what the Pakistanis needed to agree – there was the
carrot. And they chose the carrot. It was a win-win. We also did a
little blackmail. We told them we would leak the fact that you’ve got
bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies’ – the
Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan – ‘would not
like it.’
A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired
official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep
since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s
presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the
Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew
we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us
about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were
dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned
that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden.
The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all
hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s
imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’
Despite their constant public feuding, American and Pakistani
military and intelligence services have worked together closely for
decades on counterterrorism in South Asia. Both services often find it
useful to engage in public feuds ‘to cover their asses’, as the retired
official put it, but they continually share intelligence used for drone
attacks, and co-operate on covert operations. At the same time, it’s
understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that
maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside
Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISI’s strategic aim
is to balance Indian influence in Kabul; the Taliban is also seen in
Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan
against India in a confrontation over Kashmir.
Adding to the tension was the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, often
depicted in the Western press as an ‘Islamic bomb’ that might be
transferred by Pakistan to an embattled nation in the Middle East in the
event of a crisis with Israel. The US looked the other way when
Pakistan began building its weapons system in the 1970s and it’s widely
believed it now has more than a hundred nuclear warheads. It’s
understood in Washington that US security depends on the maintenance of
strong military and intelligence ties to Pakistan. The belief is
mirrored in Pakistan.
‘The Pakistani army sees itself as family,’ the retired official
said. ‘Officers call soldiers their sons and all officers are
“brothers”. The attitude is different in the American military. The
senior Pakistani officers believe they are the elite and have got to
look out for all of the people, as keepers of the flame against Muslim
fundamentalism. The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against
aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States.
They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us.’
Like all CIA station chiefs, Bank was working undercover, but that
ended in early December 2010 when he was publicly accused of murder in a
criminal complaint filed in Islamabad by Karim Khan, a Pakistani
journalist whose son and brother, according to local news reports, had
been killed by a US drone strike. Allowing Bank to be named was a
violation of diplomatic protocol on the part of the Pakistani
authorities, and it brought a wave of unwanted publicity. Bank was
ordered to leave Pakistan by the CIA, whose officials subsequently told
the Associated Press he was transferred because of concerns for his
safety. The New York Times reported that there was ‘strong
suspicion’ the ISI had played a role in leaking Bank’s name to Khan.
There was speculation that he was outed as payback for the publication
in a New York lawsuit a month earlier of the names of ISI chiefs in
connection with the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. But there was a
collateral reason, the retired official said, for the CIA’s willingness
to send Bank back to America. The Pakistanis needed cover in case their
co-operation with the Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became
known. The Pakistanis could say: “You’re talking about me? We just
kicked out your station chief.”’
*
The bin Laden compound
was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy, and a
Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters was another mile or so
away. Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela
Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility
where those who guard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal are trained.
‘Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place,’
the retired official said, ‘to keep him under constant supervision.’
The risks for Obama were high at this early stage, especially because
there was a troubling precedent: the failed 1980 attempt to rescue the
American hostages in Tehran. That failure was a factor in Jimmy Carter’s
loss to Ronald Reagan. Obama’s worries were realistic, the retired
official said. ‘Was bin Laden ever there? Was the whole story a product
of Pakistani deception? What about political blowback in case of
failure?’ After all, as the retired official said, ‘If the mission
fails, Obama’s just a black Jimmy Carter and it’s all over for
re-election.’
Obama was anxious for reassurance that the US was going to get the
right man. The proof was to come in the form of bin Laden’s DNA. The
planners turned for help to Kayani and Pasha, who asked Aziz to obtain
the specimens. Soon after the raid the press found out that Aziz had
been living in a house near the bin Laden compound: local reporters
discovered his name in Urdu on a plate on the door. Pakistani officials
denied that Aziz had any connection to bin Laden, but the retired
official told me that Aziz had been rewarded with a share of the $25
million reward the US had put up because the DNA sample had showed
conclusively that it was bin Laden in Abbottabad. (In his subsequent
testimony to a Pakistani commission investigating the bin Laden raid,
Aziz said that he had witnessed the attack on Abbottabad, but had no
knowledge of who was living in the compound and had been ordered by a
superior officer to stay away from the scene.)
Bargaining continued over the way the mission would be executed.
‘Kayani eventually tells us yes, but he says you can’t have a big strike
force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him, or
there is no deal,’ the retired official said. The agreement was struck
by the end of January 2011, and Joint Special Operations Command
prepared a list of questions to be answered by the Pakistanis: ‘How can
we be assured of no outside intervention? What are the defences inside
the compound and its exact dimensions? Where are bin Laden’s rooms and
exactly how big are they? How many steps in the stairway? Where are the
doors to his rooms, and are they reinforced with steel? How thick?’ The
Pakistanis agreed to permit a four-man American cell – a Navy Seal, a
CIA case officer and two communications specialists – to set up a
liaison office at Tarbela Ghazi for the coming assault. By then, the
military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a
secret former nuclear test site in Nevada, and an elite Seal team had
begun rehearsing for the attack.
The US had begun to cut back on aid to Pakistan – to ‘turn off the
spigot’, in the retired official’s words. The provision of 18 new F-16
fighter aircraft was delayed, and under-the-table cash payments to the
senior leaders were suspended. In April 2011 Pasha met the CIA director,
Leon Panetta, at agency headquarters. ‘Pasha got a commitment that the
United States would turn the money back on, and we got a guarantee that
there would be no Pakistani opposition during the mission,’ the retired
official said. ‘Pasha also insisted that Washington stop complaining
about Pakistan’s lack of co-operation with the American war on
terrorism.’ At one point that spring, Pasha offered the Americans a
blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Laden’s capture a
secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI role to remain secret: ‘We
needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaida and the Taliban,’ Pasha said,
according to the retired official. ‘The ISI was using bin Laden as
leverage against Taliban and al-Qaida activities inside Afghanistan and
Pakistan. They let the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership know that if they
ran operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI, they would
turn bin Laden over to us. So if it became known that the Pakistanis had
worked with us to get bin Laden at Abbottabad, there would be hell to
pay.’
At one of his meetings with Panetta, according to the retired
official and a source within the CIA, Pasha was asked by a senior CIA
official whether he saw himself as acting in essence as an agent for
al-Qaida and the Taliban. ‘He answered no, but said the ISI needed to
have some control.’ The message, as the CIA saw it, according to the
retired official, was that Kayani and Pasha viewed bin Laden ‘as a
resource, and they were more interested in their [own] survival than
they were in the United States’.
A Pakistani with close ties to the senior leadership of the ISI told
me that ‘there was a deal with your top guys. We were very reluctant,
but it had to be done – not because of personal enrichment, but because
all of the American aid programmes would be cut off. Your guys said we
will starve you out if you don’t do it, and the okay was given while
Pasha was in Washington. The deal was not only to keep the taps open,
but Pasha was told there would be more goodies for us.’ The Pakistani
said that Pasha’s visit also resulted in a commitment from the US to
give Pakistan ‘a freer hand’ in Afghanistan as it began its military
draw-down there. ‘And so our top dogs justified the deal by saying this
is for our country.’
*
Pasha and Kayani
were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan’s army and air defence
command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the
mission. The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with
co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at
their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters;
the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border
patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. The initial
plan said that news of the raid shouldn’t be announced straightaway. All
units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent
secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that
the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven
days, maybe longer. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be
issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden
had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side
of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and
Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was
understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would
be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis
– and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the
Pakistani army publicly disgraced.
It was clear to all by this point, the retired official said, that
bin Laden would not survive: ‘Pasha told us at a meeting in April that
he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know
he’s there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about
the mission. He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors
of the air defence command and to a few local commanders.
‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there
under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they
would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and
absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led
and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade,
assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow
the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan
is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do
these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. We’re going to commit
a murder.”’ The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden
had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those
who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted
assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite
widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin
Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.
*
At the Abbottabad
compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin
Laden and his wives and children. They were under orders to leave as
soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. The town was dark:
the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours
before the raid began. One of the Black Hawks crashed inside the walls
of the compound, injuring many on board. ‘The guys knew the TOT [time on
target] had to be tight because they would wake up the whole town going
in,’ the retired official said. The cockpit of the crashed Black Hawk,
with its communication and navigational gear, had to be destroyed by
concussion grenades, and this would create a series of explosions and a
fire visible for miles. Two Chinook helicopters had flown from
Afghanistan to a nearby Pakistani intelligence base to provide
logistical support, and one of them was immediately dispatched to
Abbottabad. But because the helicopter had been equipped with a bladder
loaded with extra fuel for the two Black Hawks, it first had to be
reconfigured as a troop carrier. The crash of the Black Hawk and the
need to fly in a replacement were nerve-wracking and time-consuming
setbacks, but the Seals continued with their mission. There was no
firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone.
‘Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like
those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were
no weapons in the compound,’ the retired official pointed out. Had there
been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable.
Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with
the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin
Laden’s quarters. The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy
steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor
landings; bin Laden’s rooms were on the third floor. The Seal squad used
explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. One of bin
Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray
round – struck her knee. Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other
shots were fired. (The Obama administration’s account would hold
otherwise.)
‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the
right,’ the retired official said. ‘Go straight there. Osama was
cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and
opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.’
Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial
insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired
official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced
with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The
house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell with bars on the
window and barbed wire on the roof. The rules of engagement were that if
bin Laden put up any opposition they were authorised to take lethal
action. But if they suspected he might have some means of opposition,
like an explosive vest under his robe, they could also kill him. So
here’s this guy in a mystery robe and they shot him. It’s not because he
was reaching for a weapon. The rules gave them absolute authority to
kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets
were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The
squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We
kicked his ass and took his gas.”’
After they killed bin Laden, ‘the Seals were just there, some with
physical injuries from the crash, waiting for the relief chopper,’ the
retired official said. ‘Twenty tense minutes. The Black Hawk is still
burning. There are no city lights. No electricity. No police. No fire
trucks. They have no prisoners.’ Bin Laden’s wives and children were
left for the ISI to interrogate and relocate. ‘Despite all the talk,’
the retired official continued, there were ‘no garbage bags full of
computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and
papers they found in his room in their backpacks. The Seals weren’t
there because they thought bin Laden was running a command centre for
al-Qaida operations, as the White House would later tell the media. And
they were not intelligence experts gathering information inside that
house.’
On a normal assault mission, the retired official said, there would
be no waiting around if a chopper went down. ‘The Seals would have
finished the mission, thrown off their guns and gear, and jammed into
the remaining Black Hawk and di-di-maued’ – Vietnamese slang for leaving
in a rush – ‘out of there, with guys hanging out of the doors. They
would not have blown the chopper – no commo gear is worth a dozen lives –
unless they knew they were safe. Instead they stood around outside the
compound, waiting for the bus to arrive.’ Pasha and Kayani had delivered
on all their promises.
*
The backroom argument
inside the White House began as soon as it was clear that the mission
had succeeded. Bin Laden’s body was presumed to be on its way to
Afghanistan. Should Obama stand by the agreement with Kayani and Pasha
and pretend a week or so later that bin Laden had been killed in a drone
attack in the mountains, or should he go public immediately? The downed
helicopter made it easy for Obama’s political advisers to urge the
latter plan. The explosion and fireball would be impossible to hide, and
word of what had happened was bound to leak. Obama had to ‘get out in
front of the story’ before someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would
diminish the political impact.
Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the
most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan
had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger:
Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to
tell the American people what had just happened, I reminded everyone
that the techniques, tactics and procedures the Seals had used in the
bin Laden operation were used every night in Afghanistan … it was
therefore essential that we agree not to release any operational details
of the raid. That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say.
Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment
lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and
CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts
were often wrong … Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I
was outraged and at one point, told [the national security adviser, Tom]
Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?’ To no avail.
Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said,
and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message
that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security
bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would
create chaos in the weeks following. Obama said that his administration
had discovered that bin Laden was in Pakistan through ‘a possible lead’
the previous August; to many in the CIA the statement suggested a
specific event, such as a walk-in. The remark led to a new cover story
claiming that the CIA’s brilliant analysts had unmasked a courier
network handling bin Laden’s continuing flow of operational orders to
al-Qaida. Obama also praised ‘a small team of Americans’ for their care
in avoiding civilian deaths and said: ‘After a firefight, they killed
Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.’ Two more details now had
to be supplied for the cover story: a description of the firefight that
never happened, and a story about what happened to the corpse. Obama
went on to praise the Pakistanis: ‘It’s important to note that our
counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden
and the compound where he was hiding.’ That statement risked exposing
Kayani and Pasha. The White House’s solution was to ignore what Obama
had said and order anyone talking to the press to insist that the
Pakistanis had played no role in killing bin Laden. Obama left the clear
impression that he and his advisers hadn’t known for sure that bin
Laden was in Abbottabad, but only had information ‘about the
possibility’. This led first to the story that the Seals had determined
they’d killed the right man by having a six-foot-tall Seal lie next to
the corpse for comparison (bin Laden was known to be six foot four); and
then to the claim that a DNA test had been performed on the corpse and
demonstrated conclusively that the Seals had killed bin Laden. But,
according to the retired official, it wasn’t clear from the Seals’ early
reports whether all of bin Laden’s body, or any of it, made it back to
Afghanistan.
Gates wasn’t the only official who was distressed by Obama’s decision
to speak without clearing his remarks in advance, the retired official
said, ‘but he was the only one protesting. Obama didn’t just
double-cross Gates, he double-crossed everyone. This was not the fog of
war. The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no
contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong
– that wasn’t even discussed. And once it went wrong, they had to make
up a new cover story on the fly.’ There was a legitimate reason for some
deception: the role of the Pakistani walk-in had to be protected.
The White House press corps was told in a briefing shortly after
Obama’s announcement that the death of bin Laden was ‘the culmination of
years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work’ that focused on
tracking a group of couriers, including one who was known to be close
to bin Laden. Reporters were told that a team of specially assembled CIA
and National Security Agency analysts had traced the courier to a
highly secure million-dollar compound in Abbottabad. After months of
observation, the American intelligence community had ‘high confidence’
that a high-value target was living in the compound, and it was
‘assessed that there was a strong probability that [it] was Osama bin
Laden’. The US assault team ran into a firefight on entering the
compound and three adult males – two of them believed to be the couriers
– were slain, along with bin Laden. Asked if bin Laden had defended
himself, one of the briefers said yes: ‘He did resist the assault force.
And he was killed in a firefight.’
The next day John Brennan, then Obama’s senior adviser for
counterterrorism, had the task of talking up Obama’s valour while trying
to smooth over the misstatements in his speech. He provided a more
detailed but equally misleading account of the raid and its planning.
Speaking on the record, which he rarely does, Brennan said that the
mission was carried out by a group of Navy Seals who had been instructed
to take bin Laden alive, if possible. He said the US had no information
suggesting that anyone in the Pakistani government or military knew bin
Laden’s whereabouts: ‘We didn’t contact the Pakistanis until after all
of our people, all of our aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.’ He
emphasised the courage of Obama’s decision to order the strike, and said
that the White House had no information ‘that confirmed that bin Laden
was at the compound’ before the raid began. Obama, he said, ‘made what I
believe was one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent
memory’. Brennan increased the number killed by the Seals inside the
compound to five: bin Laden, a courier, his brother, a bin Laden son,
and one of the women said to be shielding bin Laden.
Asked whether bin Laden had fired on the Seals, as some reporters had
been told, Brennan repeated what would become a White House mantra: ‘He
was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the
house he was in. And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite
frankly don’t know … Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these
attacks … living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding
behind women who were put in front of him as a shield … [It] just speaks
to I think the nature of the individual he was.’
Gates also objected to the idea, pushed by Brennan and Leon Panetta,
that US intelligence had learned of bin Laden’s whereabouts from
information acquired by waterboarding and other forms of torture. ‘All
of this is going on as the Seals are flying home from their mission. The
agency guys know the whole story,’ the retired official said. ‘It was a
group of annuitants who did it.’ (Annuitants are retired CIA officers
who remain active on contract.) ‘They had been called in by some of the
mission planners in the agency to help with the cover story. So the
old-timers come in and say why not admit that we got some of the
information about bin Laden from enhanced interrogation?’ At the time,
there was still talk in Washington about the possible prosecution of CIA
agents who had conducted torture.
‘Gates told them this was not going to work,’ the retired official
said. ‘He was never on the team. He knew at the eleventh hour of his
career not to be a party to this nonsense. But State, the agency and the
Pentagon had bought in on the cover story. None of the Seals thought
that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid. The
Special Forces command was apoplectic. They prided themselves on keeping
operational security.’ There was fear in Special Operations, the
retired official said, that ‘if the true story of the missions leaked
out, the White House bureaucracy was going to blame it on the Seals.’
The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every
member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in
southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations
Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by
the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a
lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The
Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept
quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC.
‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but
he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he
knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When
Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble
around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck
holding the bag.’
Within days, some of the early exaggerations and distortions had
become obvious and the Pentagon issued a series of clarifying
statements. No, bin Laden was not armed when he was shot and killed. And
no, bin Laden did not use one of his wives as a shield. The press by
and large accepted the explanation that the errors were the inevitable
by-product of the White House’s desire to accommodate reporters frantic
for details of the mission.
One lie that has endured is that the Seals had to fight their way to
their target. Only two Seals have made any public statement: No Easy Day,
a first-hand account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, was published in
September 2012; and two years later Rob O’Neill was interviewed by Fox
News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden.
Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their
stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it
came to the need to kill or be killed as the Seals fought their way to
bin Laden. O’Neill even told Fox News that he and his fellow Seals
thought ‘We were going to die.’ ‘The more we trained on it, the more we
realised … this is going to be a one-way mission.’
But the retired official told me that in their initial debriefings
the Seals made no mention of a firefight, or indeed of any opposition.
The drama and danger portrayed by Bissonnette and O’Neill met a
deep-seated need, the retired official said: ‘Seals cannot live with the
fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to
be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going
to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to
happen.’
There was another reason to claim there had been a firefight inside
the compound, the retired official said: to avoid the inevitable
question that would arise from an uncontested assault. Where were bin
Laden’s guards? Surely, the most sought-after terrorist in the world
would have around-the-clock protection. ‘And one of those killed had to
be the courier, because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him. The
Pakistanis had no choice but to play along with it.’ (Two days after
the raid, Reuters published photographs of three dead men that it said
it had purchased from an ISI official. Two of the men were later
identified by an ISI spokesman as being the alleged courier and his
brother.)
*
Five days after
the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of
videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a
large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as
many as 15 computers. Snippets from one of the videos showed a solitary
bin Laden looking wan and wrapped in a blanket, watching what appeared
to be a video of himself on television. An unnamed official told
reporters that the raid produced a ‘treasure trove … the single largest
collection of senior terrorist materials ever’, which would provide
vital insights into al-Qaida’s plans. The official said the material
showed that bin Laden ‘remained an active leader in al-Qaida, providing
strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group … He was
far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of
the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was
described as a command-and-control centre in Abbottabad. ‘He was an
active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our
nation’s security,’ the official said. The information was so vital, he
added, that the administration was setting up an inter-agency task force
to process it: ‘He was not simply someone who was penning al-Qaida
strategy. He was throwing operational ideas out there and he was also
specifically directing other al-Qaida members.’
These claims were fabrications: there wasn’t much activity for bin
Laden to exercise command and control over. The retired intelligence
official said that the CIA’s internal reporting shows that since bin
Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006 only a handful of terrorist attacks
could be linked to the remnants of bin Laden’s al-Qaida. ‘We were told
at first,’ the retired official said, ‘that the Seals produced garbage
bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence
reports out of this stuff. And then we were told that the community is
gathering everything together and needs to translate it. But nothing has
come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be
true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.’ The retired official
said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the
US by the Pakistanis, who later razed the building. The ISI took
responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was
made available to the US for questioning.
‘Why create the treasure trove story?’ the retired official said.
‘The White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still
operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him? A cover story was
created – that there was a network of couriers coming and going with
memory sticks and instructions. All to show that bin Laden remained
important.’
In July 2011, the Washington Post published what purported
to be a summary of some of these materials. The story’s contradictions
were glaring. It said the documents had resulted in more than four
hundred intelligence reports within six weeks; it warned of unspecified
al-Qaida plots; and it mentioned arrests of suspects ‘who are named or
described in emails that bin Laden received’. The Post didn’t
identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s
previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet
connection. Despite their claims that the documents had produced
hundreds of reports, the Post also quoted officials saying that
their main value wasn’t the actionable intelligence they contained, but
that they enabled ‘analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait
of al-Qaida’.
In May 2012, the Combating Terrrorism Centre at West Point, a private
research group, released translations it had made under a federal
government contract of 175 pages of bin Laden documents. Reporters found
none of the drama that had been touted in the days after the raid.
Patrick Cockburn wrote about the contrast between the administration’s
initial claims that bin Laden was the ‘spider at the centre of a
conspiratorial web’ and what the translations actually showed: that bin
Laden was ‘delusional’ and had ‘limited contact with the outside world
outside his compound’.
The retired official disputed the authencity of the West Point
materials: ‘There is no linkage between these documents and the
counterterrorism centre at the agency. No intelligence community
analysis. When was the last time the CIA: 1) announced it had a
significant intelligence find; 2) revealed the source; 3) described the
method for processing the materials; 4) revealed the time-line for
production; 5) described by whom and where the analysis was taking
place, and 6) published the sensitive results before the information had
been acted on? No agency professional would support this fairy tale.’
*
In June 2011, it was reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post
and all over the Pakistani press that Amir Aziz had been held for
questioning in Pakistan; he was, it was said, a CIA informant who had
been spying on the comings and goings at the bin Laden compound. Aziz
was released, but the retired official said that US intelligence was
unable to learn who leaked the highly classified information about his
involvement with the mission. Officials in Washington decided they
‘could not take a chance that Aziz’s role in obtaining bin Laden’s DNA
also would become known’. A sacrificial lamb was needed, and the one
chosen was Shakil Afridi, a 48-year-old Pakistani doctor and sometime
CIA asset, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis in late May and
accused of assisting the agency. ‘We went to the Pakistanis and said go
after Afridi,’ the retired official said. ‘We had to cover the whole
issue of how we got the DNA.’ It was soon reported that the CIA had
organised a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad with Afridi’s help
in a failed attempt to obtain bin Laden’s DNA. Afridi’s legitimate
medical operation was run independently of local health authorities, was
well financed and offered free vaccinations against hepatitis B.
Posters advertising the programme were displayed throughout the area.
Afridi was later accused of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison
because of his ties to an extremist. News of the CIA-sponsored programme
created widespread anger in Pakistan, and led to the cancellation of
other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover
for American spying.
The retired official said that Afridi had been recruited long before
the bin Laden mission as part of a separate intelligence effort to get
information about suspected terrorists in Abbottabad and the surrounding
area. ‘The plan was to use vaccinations as a way to get the blood of
terrorism suspects in the villages.’ Afridi made no attempt to obtain
DNA from the residents of the bin Laden compound. The report that he did
so was a hurriedly put together ‘CIA cover story creating “facts”’ in a
clumsy attempt to protect Aziz and his real mission. ‘Now we have the
consequences,’ the retired official said. ‘A great humanitarian project
to do something meaningful for the peasants has been compromised as a
cynical hoax.’ Afridi’s conviction was overturned, but he remains in
prison on a murder charge.
*
In his address
announcing the raid, Obama said that after killing bin Laden the Seals
‘took custody of his body’. The statement created a problem. In the
initial plan it was to be announced a week or so after the fact that bin
Laden was killed in a drone strike somewhere in the mountains on the
Pakistan/Afghanistan border and that his remains had been identified by
DNA testing. But with Obama’s announcement of his killing by the Seals
everyone now expected a body to be produced. Instead, reporters were
told that bin Laden’s body had been flown by the Seals to an American
military airfield in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and then straight to the
USS Carl Vinson, a supercarrier on routine patrol in the North
Arabian Sea. Bin Laden had then been buried at sea, just hours after his
death. The press corps’s only sceptical moments at John Brennan’s
briefing on 2 May were to do with the burial. The questions were short,
to the point, and rarely answered. ‘When was the decision made that he
would be buried at sea if killed?’ ‘Was this part of the plan all
along?’ ‘Can you just tell us why that was a good idea?’ ‘John, did you
consult a Muslim expert on that?’ ‘Is there a visual recording of this
burial?’ When this last question was asked, Jay Carney, Obama’s press
secretary, came to Brennan’s rescue: ‘We’ve got to give other people a
chance here.’
‘We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an
appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions
that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’ He said ‘appropriate
specialists and experts’ were consulted, and that the US military was
fully capable of carrying out the burial ‘consistent with Islamic law’.
Brennan didn’t mention that Muslim law calls for the burial service to
be conducted in the presence of an imam, and there was no suggestion
that one happened to be on board the Carl Vinson.
In a reconstruction of the bin Laden operation for Vanity Fair,
Mark Bowden, who spoke to many senior administration officials, wrote
that bin Laden’s body was cleaned and photographed at Jalalabad. Further
procedures necessary for a Muslim burial were performed on the carrier,
he wrote, ‘with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a
white shroud. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight,
Monday morning, May 2.’ Bowden described the photos:
One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud.
The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the
next frame the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just
below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there
are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama
bin Laden were gone for good.
Bowden was careful not to claim that he had actually seen the
photographs he described, and he recently told me he hadn’t seen them:
‘I’m always disappointed when I can’t look at something myself, but I
spoke with someone I trusted who said he had seen them himself and
described them in detail.’ Bowden’s statement adds to the questions
about the alleged burial at sea, which has provoked a flood of Freedom
of Information Act requests, most of which produced no information. One
of them sought access to the photographs. The Pentagon responded that a
search of all available records had found no evidence that any
photographs had been taken of the burial. Requests on other issues
related to the raid were equally unproductive. The reason for the lack
of response became clear after the Pentagon held an inquiry into
allegations that the Obama administration had provided access to
classified materials to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty.
The Pentagon report, which was put online in June 2013, noted that
Admiral McRaven had ordered the files on the raid to be deleted from all
military computers and moved to the CIA, where they would be shielded
from FOIA requests by the agency’s ‘operational exemption’.
McRaven’s action meant that outsiders could not get access to the Carl Vinson’s
unclassified logs. Logs are sacrosanct in the navy, and separate ones
are kept for air operations, the deck, the engineering department, the
medical office, and for command information and control. They show the
sequence of events day by day aboard the ship; if there has been a
burial at sea aboard the Carl Vinson, it would have been recorded.
There wasn’t any gossip about a burial among the Carl Vinson’s
sailors. The carrier concluded its six-month deployment in June 2011.
When the ship docked at its home base in Coronado, California, Rear
Admiral Samuel Perez, commander of the Carl Vinson carrier
strike group, told reporters that the crew had been ordered not to talk
about the burial. Captain Bruce Lindsey, skipper of the Carl Vinson, told reporters he was unable to discuss it. Cameron Short, one of the crew of the Carl Vinson, told theCommercial-News
of Danville, Illinois, that the crew had not been told anything about
the burial. ‘All he knows is what he’s seen on the news,’ the newspaper
reported.
The Pentagon did release a series of emails to the Associated Press.
In one of them, Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reported that the service
followed ‘traditional procedures for Islamic burial’, and said none of
the sailors on board had been permitted to observe the proceedings. But
there was no indication of who washed and wrapped the body, or of which
Arabic speaker conducted the service.
Within weeks of the raid, I had been told by two longtime consultants
to Special Operations Command, who have access to current intelligence,
that the funeral aboard the Carl Vinson didn’t take place. One
consultant told me that bin Laden’s remains were photographed and
identified after being flown back to Afghanistan. The consultant added:
‘At that point, the CIA took control of the body. The cover story was
that it had been flown to the Carl Vinson.’ The second
consultant agreed that there had been ‘no burial at sea’. He added that
‘the killing of bin Laden was political theatre designed to burnish
Obama’s military credentials … The Seals should have expected the
political grandstanding. It’s irresistible to a politician. Bin Laden
became a working asset.’ Early this year, speaking again to the second
consultant, I returned to the burial at sea. The consultant laughed and
said: ‘You mean, he didn’t make it to the water?’
The retired official said there had been another complication: some
members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they
had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains,
including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown
into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad,
some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so
the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did
not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few
hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there
would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing.
Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White
House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US
forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We
need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified
bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up
with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial
following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom
of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons
of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly
constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the
slighest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a
plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at
sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first
accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin
Laden to put into the sea in any case.
*
It was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash.
‘We’ve had a four-year lapse in co-operation,’ the retired official
said. ‘It’s taken that long for the Pakistanis to trust us again in the
military-to-military counterterrorism relationship – while terrorism was
rising all over the world … They felt Obama sold them down the river.
They’re just now coming back because the threat from Isis, which is now
showing up there, is a lot greater and the bin Laden event is far
enough away to enable someone like General Durrani to come out and talk
about it.’ Generals Pasha and Kayani have retired and both are reported
to be under investigation for corruption during their time in office.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA
torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of
official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s
courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and
other forms of torture. The report led to international headlines about
brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal
feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of
detainees who were believed to be withholding information. Despite the
bad publicity, the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding –
that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had
already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade.
Another key finding – that the torture conducted was more brutal than
Congress had been told – was risible, given the extent of public
reporting and published exposés by former interrogators and retired CIA
officers. The report depicted tortures that were obviously contrary to
international law as violations of rules or ‘inappropriate activities’
or, in some cases, ‘management failures’. Whether the actions described
constitute war crimes was not discussed, and the report did not suggest
that any of the CIA interrogators or their superiors should be
investigated for criminal activity. The agency faced no meaningful
consequences as a result of the report.
The retired official told me that the CIA leadership had become
experts in derailing serious threats from Congress: ‘They create
something that is horrible but not that bad. Give them something that
sounds terrible. “Oh my God, we were shoving food up a prisoner’s ass!”
Meanwhile, they’re not telling the committee about murders, other war
crimes, and secret prisons like we still have in Diego Garcia (where the Malaysian flight MH370 was brought after its disappearance on the way to China; note, George). The goal also was to stall it as long as possible, which they did.’
The main theme of the committee’s 499-page executive summary
is that the CIA lied systematically about the effectiveness of its
torture programme in gaining intelligence that would stop future
terrorist attacks in the US. The lies included some vital
details about the uncovering of an al-Qaida operative called Abu Ahmed
al-Kuwaiti, who was said to be the key al-Qaida courier, and the
subsequent tracking of him to Abbottabad in early 2011. The agency’s
alleged intelligence, patience and skill in finding al-Kuwaiti became
legend after it was dramatised in Zero Dark Thirty.
The Senate report repeatedly raised questions about the quality and
reliability of the CIA’s intelligence about al-Kuwaiti. In 2005 an
internal CIA report on the hunt for bin Laden noted that ‘detainees
provide few actionable leads, and we have to consider the possibility
that they are creating fictitious characters to distract us or to
absolve themselves of direct knowledge about bin Ladin [sic].’ A
CIA cable a year later stated that ‘we have had no success in eliciting
actionable intelligence on bin Laden’s location from any detainees.’
The report also highlighted several instances of CIA officers, including
Panetta, making false statements to Congress and the public about the
value of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in the search for bin
Laden’s couriers.
Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of
2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement
with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support
of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying
nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret
prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain
of command, and cutting out those who might say no.
Read also the Seymour Hersh interview with the Guardian:
***
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