I was also concerned that the case for Bin Laden being at the compound was entirely circumstantial. We did not have a single piece of hard evidence he was there. As we probed the analysts about how confident they were Bin Laden was in the Abbottabad house, the estimates ranged from 40 to 80 percent. As a former CIA analyst, I knew those numbers were based on nothing but gut instinct. As the president said at one point, “Look, it’s a fifty-fifty proposition no matter how you look at it.” From my vantage point, we were risking the war in Afghanistan on a crapshoot.
Our discussion of the raid was influenced by the arrest in late January of a CIA security officer named Raymond Davis in Lahore, Pakistan. His car was full of weapons, spy gear, and pictures of Pakistani military installations when he was stopped by two motorcyclists who pointed guns at him. Davis shot and killed both. He was arrested at the scene. By mid-March, a deal had been struck, payments were made to the families of the two men Davis had shot, and Davis was released. But white-hot public anger in Pakistan at the United States had not abated. Another such infringement on Pakistani sovereignty would almost certainly get very ugly. And we were thinking about a beaut.
There were three possibilities for a strike at Abbottabad—a special operations raid, bombs, and a limited, small-scale strike from a drone. The advantage of the last two options was that they posed the lowest risk of a Pakistani reaction. One big disadvantage was that we would not know if we had actually killed Bin Laden. The military planners initially proposed a massive air strike using thirty-two 2,000-pound bombs. Even though we persuaded them to scale that down, there was still a high likelihood of civilian casualties in the surrounding residential neighborhood. The drone attack was attractive because any damage could be confined to the compound, but it still would require a high degree of accuracy and, importantly, the drone had not been fully tested. The special operations raid, the riskiest option, also offered the greatest chance of knowing for sure we had gotten Bin Laden and offered an opportunity for gathering up all the intelligence about al Qaeda operations he might have with him. I had total confidence in the ability of the SEAL team to carry out the mission. My reservations lay elsewhere.
I laid out my concerns in detail at a meeting with the president on April 19. Succeed or fail, the raid would jeopardize an already fragile relationship with Pakistan and thus the fate of the war in Afghanistan. I said that while I had complete confidence in the raid plan, I was concerned that the case for Bin Laden’s presence in the compound was purely circumstantial. “It is a compelling case,” I said, “for what we want to do. I worry that it is compelling because we want to do it.” I worried that Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was aware of where Bin Laden was and that there might be rings of security around the compound that we knew nothing about or, at minimum, that ISI might have more eyes on the compound than we could know.
The worst-case scenario was that the Pakistanis could get a number of troops to the compound quickly, prevent extraction of our team, and take them prisoner. When I asked Vice Admiral McRaven what he planned to do if the Pakistani military showed up during the operation, he said the team would just hunker down and wait for a “diplomatic extraction.” They would wait inside the compound and not shoot any Pakistanis. I then asked what they would do if the Pakistanis breached the walls: “Do you shoot or surrender?” I said that after the Davis episode, and given the high level of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, negotiating the release of the team could take months or much longer, and meanwhile we’d have the spectacle of U.S. special operators in Pakistani custody and perhaps even show trials. Our team couldn’t surrender, I said. If the Pakistani military showed up, our team needed to be prepared to do whatever was necessary to escape. After considerable discussion, there was broad agreement to this, and as a result, additional MH-47 helicopters and forces were assigned to the mission. McRaven later expressed his appreciation to me for raising the issue.
I expressed caution about the operation based on personal experience and the historical record. I recalled the Son Tay raid in 1970 to rescue some 500 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam; despite a well-executed mission, the intelligence was flawed, and no U.S. prisoners were at the camp. I had been executive assistant to CIA director Stansfield Turner in the spring of 1980 when the attempt was made to rescue the hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. Operation Eagle Claw, a failure in the desert that left eight American servicemen dead, was aborted because of helicopter problems and then became a disaster when a helicopter crashed into a C-130 refueling aircraft on the ground. I had gone to the White House with Turner the night of the mission, and it was a searing memory. I remembered a cross-border mission into Pakistan by U.S. forces in the fall of 2008 that was supposed to be a quick and clean in-and-out, but the team ended up in an hours-long firefight and barely made it back across the border into Afghanistan. The Pakistani reaction had been so hostile that we had not undertaken another such operation since. In each case, a great plan, even when well executed, had led to national embarrassment and, in the case of Eagle Claw, a crushing humiliation that took years for our military to overcome.
I believe Obama thought from early in his presidency that my long experience in the national security arena was an asset for him. Now I told him in front of the rest of the team that perhaps in this case my experience was doing him a disservice because it made me too cautious. He forcefully disagreed, saying my concerns were exactly what he needed to take into account as he weighed the decision.
No one thought we should ask the Pakistanis for help or permission. In every instance when we had provided a heads-up to the Pakistani military or intelligence services, the target was forewarned and fled, or the Pakistanis went after the target unilaterally, prematurely, and unsuccessfully. We all knew we needed to act pretty quickly, whatever we did; everyone was scared to death of a leak. There was considerable discussion about whether to wait and see if CIA could get more proof that Bin Laden was at the compound, but the experts told us that was highly unlikely.
Who should have overall authority for executing the raid was never in question. If it was carried out under Defense Department authority, the U.S. government could not deny our involvement; CIA, on the other hand, could. To preserve at least a fig leaf—granted, a very small leaf—of deniability, we all agreed that when the time came, the president would authorize Panetta to order the operation. Defense periodically would loan—“chop”—forces to CIA for operations, so this was a familiar practice.
The final meeting was on April 28. The plan, if approved, was to launch the raid two days later. Most of us, including the president, were scheduled to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that night, one of Washington’s springtime rituals in which press, politicians, and officials all dress up and pretend to like one another for at least a few hours. Someone raised the question of how it would look if all of us rose from our tables and left at the same time because of something that had happened relating to the raid. The point was also made that yukking it up when our servicemen were risking their lives in a daring operation was not desirable. Hillary was forceful in saying there should be no change in the plan and those of us going to the dinner should do so. The president strongly agreed. (As it turned out, weather forced delay of the raid by a day, and we would all later get credit for our poker faces at the dinner.)