1
The Killing of Osama bin Laden
Itâs been four years since a group of US Navy SEALS assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obamaâs first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistanâs army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administrationâs account. The White Houseâs story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaidaâs operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.
The most blatant lie was that Pakistanâs two most senior military leadersâGeneral Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISIâwere 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 March 19, 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that sheâd been told by a âPakistani officialâ 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 heâd spoken to four undercover intelligence officers whoâreflecting a widely held local viewâasserted 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 âquite possibleâ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, âbut 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 quoâif you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.â
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 Ladenâs 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 administrationâs account were false.
âWhen your version comes outâif you do itâpeople in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,â Durrani told me. âFor 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 youâve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.â As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by âpeople in the âstrategic communityâ who would knowâ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Ladenâs presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the USâs 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 Ladenâs presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the SEALSâ 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 leadershipâechoed later by Durraniâover Obamaâs decision to go public immediately with news of bin Ladenâs 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 CIAâs 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 agencyâs headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. âSo now weâve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?â was the CIAâs worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.
The US initially kept what it knew from the Pakistanis. âThe 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,â the retired official said. âThe CIAâs first goal was to check out the quality of the informantâs information.â 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.)
âBy 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 weâd have no proof of who he was,â the retired official said. âWe could see some guy is walking around at night, but we have no intercepts because thereâs no commo coming from the compound.â
In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. His response was cautious, the retired official said. âIt just made no sense that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was just too crazy. The presidentâs position was emphatic: âDonât talk to me about this any more unless you have proof that it really is bin Laden.ââ The immediate goal of the CIA leadership and the Joint Special Operations Command was to get Obamaâs 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, âwas to get the Pakistanis on board.â
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 Ladenâs whereabouts. âThe next step was to figure out how to ease Kayani and Pasha into itâto tell them that weâve got intelligence showing that there is a high-value target in the compound, and to ask them what they know about the target,â the retired official said. âThe compound was not an armed enclaveâno machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.â 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 âthe ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.â (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. âThe truth is that bin Laden was an invalid, but we cannot say that,â the retired official said. ââYou mean you guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?ââ
âIt didnât take long to get the cooperation 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,â the retired official said. He added that there were also under-the-table personal âincentivesâ that were financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency funds. âThe intelligence community knew what the Pakistanis needed to agreeâthere 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 youâve got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemiesââthe Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistanââwould not like it.â
A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Ladenâs upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. âThe Saudis didnât want bin Ladenâs 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 moneyâlots 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 Ladenâs imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.â
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 âto cover their asses,â as the retired official put it, but they continually share intelligence used for drone attacks and cooperate on covert operations. At the same time, itâs 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 ISIâs 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 âIslamic bombâ 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 itâs widely believed it now has more than a hundred nuclear warheads. Itâs understood in Washington that US security depends on the maintenance of strong military and intelligence ties to Pakistan. The belief is mirrored in Pakistan.
âThe Pakistani army sees itself as family,â the retired official said. âOfficers call soldiers their sons and all officers are âbrothers.â 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.â
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 âstrong suspicionâ the ISI had played a role in leaking Bankâs 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 CIAâs willingness to send Bank back to America. The Pakistanis needed cover in case their cooperation with the Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became known. The Pakistanis could say: âYouâre talking about me? We just kicked out your station chief.ââ
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 Pakistanâs nuclear weapons arsenal are trained. âGhazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place,â the retired official said, âto keep him under constant supervision.â
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 Carterâs loss to Ronald Reagan. Obamaâs worries were realistic, the retired official said. âWas bin Laden ever there? Was the whole story a product of Pakistani deception? What about political blowback in case of failure?â After all, as the retired official said, âIf the mission fails, Obamaâs just a black Jimmy Carter and itâs all over for re-election.â
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 Ladenâs 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. âKayani eventually tells us yes, but he says you canât have a big strike force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him, or there is no deal,â 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: âHow can we be assured of no outside intervention? What are the defences inside the compound and its exact dimensions? Where are bin Ladenâs 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?â The Pakistanis agreed to permit a four-man American cellâa Navy SEAL, a CIA case officer and two communications specialistsâto 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 Pakistanâto âturn off the spigot,â in the retired officialâs 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. âPasha 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,â the retired official said. âPasha also insisted that Washington stop complaining about Pakistanâs lack of cooperation with the American war on terrorism.â At one point that spring, Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Ladenâs capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI role to remain secret: âWe needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaida and the Taliban,â Pasha said, according to the retired official. âThe 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.â
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. âHe answered no, but said the ISI needed to have some control.â The message, as the CIA saw it, according to the retired official, was that Kayani and Pasha viewed bin Laden âas a resource, and they were more interested in their [own] survival than they were in the United States.â
A Pakistani with close ties to the senior leadership of the ISI told me that âthere was a deal with your top guys. We were very reluctant, but it had to be doneânot because of personal enrichment, but because all of the American aid programs would be cut off. Your guys said we will starve you out if you donât 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.â The Pakistani said that Pashaâs visit also resulted in a commitment from the US to give Pakistan âa freer handâ in Afghanistan as it began its military draw-down there. âAnd so our top dogs justified the deal by saying this is for our country.â
Pasha and Kayani were responsible for ensuring that Pakistanâs 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 coordinating 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 shouldnât be announced straightaway. All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and P...