Finally, the president went around the table and asked each person for his or her recommendation. Biden was against the operation. Cartwright and I supported the drone option. Panetta was in favor of the raid. Everyone else acknowledged it was a close call but also supported the raid. The president said he would make a decision within twenty-four hours.
The next morning Undersecretaries Michèle Flournoy and Mike Vickers came to my office to try to persuade me to support the raid option. There were no two people whose judgment I trusted more, so I listened closely. After they left, I discussed the raid with Robert Rangel. I then shut the door to my office to think about everything the three of them had said. After a few minutes, I called Donilon and asked him to inform the president that I now supported the raid. The president had made the decision to go ahead an hour or so earlier.
Midday on Sunday we gathered in the Situation Room. We were all tense, bantering nervously. The stakes involved were enormous, and yet at this point, we all knew we were just spectators. For such a sensitive operation, it seemed to me there were a lot of people in the room. Panetta remained at CIA to monitor the action. Across the hall, in a small conference room, Air Force Brigadier General Marshall Webb was monitoring a video feed of the Abbottabad compound, and an Army sergeant was keeping a detailed log of audio reports he was hearing over headphones. Someone had told the president about the video feed, and he crossed the hall to the small room, grabbed a chair, and sat in a corner, just to Webb’s right. As soon as the rest of us realized where he had gone, we joined him. Biden, Clinton, Denis McDonough, and I sat at the table, with Mullen, Donilon, Daley, John Brennan, Jim Clapper, and others standing around the edges.
When early in the raid a helicopter went down, I cringed as I remembered the attempted Iranian rescue mission thirty years before. At first, we feared disaster, but the pilot skillfully managed the crash-landing, and all the SEALs aboard were okay; the mission continued. We could track every move until the team entered the house, and then in the most critical moments of the raid, we could see and hear nothing. After an unimaginably long fifteen or so minutes, we heard the message “Geronimo—EKIA,” enemy killed in action. McRaven had told us earlier that the only way Bin Laden would be taken alive was if he greeted the SEALs naked and with his hands up. Other than a shared sigh of relief, there was little reaction in the room. The SEAL team still had to get out of the compound and get back across the border to Afghanistan, which involved a helicopter-refueling stop in a dry streambed.
After nearly forty minutes, the SEALs were headed out of the compound, some escorting women and children beyond the walls for safety as others took time to plant explosives and blow up the downed helicopter. It was a huge blast, and we could be confident not many Pakistanis anywhere close were now still asleep. And then the team was on its way, one helicopter carrying the remains of Bin Laden, another carrying the forensic evidence that proved who he was—and what turned out to be a mound of intelligence. Even after the helicopters had returned safely, there was no celebration, no high-fives. There was just a deep feeling of satisfaction—and closure—that all the Americans who had been killed by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and in the years before, had finally been avenged. I was very proud to work for a president who had made one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House.
As on nearly all such dramatic occasions, there was a light moment. When the SEALs got Bin Laden to the base in Jalalabad, McRaven wanted to measure his height as part of making sure we had the right man. When no one had a tape measure, he had a six-foot-tall SEAL lie down beside the body. The president would later quip that McRaven had no problem blowing up a $60 million helicopter but couldn’t afford a tape measure. He would later present the admiral with one attached to a plaque.
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 and elsewhere in hunting down terrorists and other enemies. 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, including details in the first press briefing. Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and, at one point, told Donilon, “Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?” To no avail.
Soon after the raid was over, the White House released the now-famous photo of all of us watching the video in that small conference room. Within hours, I received from a friend a Photoshopped version with each of the principals shown dressed in superhero costumes: Obama was Superman; Biden, Spiderman; Hillary, Wonder Woman; and I, for some reason, was the Green Lantern. The spoof had an important substantive effect on me. We soon faced a great hue and cry demanding that we release photos of the dead Bin Laden, photos we had all seen. I quickly realized that while the Photoshop of us was amusing, others could Photoshop the pictures of Bin Laden in disrespectful ways certain to outrage Muslims everywhere and place Americans throughout the Middle East and our troops in Afghanistan at greater risk. Everyone agreed, and the president decided the photos would not be released. All the photos that had been circulating among the principals were gathered up and placed in CIA’s custody. As of this writing, none has ever leaked.
The Pakistani reaction was bad, although not as bad as I had feared. There were public anger and demonstrations, but probably the biggest impact was the humiliation of the Pakistani military. The one respected institution in the country was considered by many Pakistanis to have been either complicit in the raid or incompetent. The fact that our team had penetrated 150 miles into Pakistan, carried out the raid in the middle of a military garrison town, and then escaped without the Pakistani military being the wiser was an awful black eye. Pakistani investigations of the raid focused far more on who in Pakistan had helped us than on how the world’s most notorious terrorist had lived with impunity on their soil for five years. The supply lines to Afghanistan remained open.
Four days after the raid, I visited the SEAL team that had carried it out, and they gave me a detailed briefing. (It was my second meeting with many of them.) I congratulated them and said I had wanted to thank them in person for their extraordinary achievement. I told them that earlier in the day I had encountered the mother of one of the seventeen sailors who had been killed in the al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole. She had told me that if I met with the SEAL team, she wanted me to thank them for avenging her son. I did so. The SEALs shared with me their concerns about the leaks, particularly the fact that reporters were nosing around their communities trying to find them. They were worried about their families. I said we would do whatever was necessary to protect them—although I thought to myself that a reporter who approached one of these guys’ families likely would find himself in the middle of his worst nightmare.
I shared with them my respect for the president’s courage in making the decision to go forward with the mission. I reminded them that President Carter had perhaps gambled his presidency on such a mission in 1980, and it had failed. Obama had taken a significant risk, and thanks to those in that room, he had succeeded. I said I knew they had just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan a few months before the raid and would be heading out again in the summer. I thanked them and asked them to thank their families for me for “supporting you and your service.” I concluded by saying that the SEALs in that room truly gave meaning to George Orwell’s observation that “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”