There was no way to catch a glimpse of the hidden family upstairs. The walls were high, the windows opaque. Only one member of the family could be seen regularly, a tall man in traditional Pashtun dress and prayer cap who took daily walks inside the compound walls. He walked in brisk small circles around the vegetable garden, part of which had a tarp stretched overhead to shield the patch of ground from direct sunlight—or, perhaps, one could imagine, to shield the walker from eyes in the sky. Overhead cameras were able to get images of him anyway, but they were not very good. The agency did not want to risk putting a drone or observation aircraft directly overhead for fear of tipping off the residents—or the Pakistani government, which it feared would amount to the same thing. The angle or altitude of the standoff cameras made it impossible to get a clear look at the walker’s face. He appeared to be tall and thin. Efforts were made to more accurately gauge the man’s height by measuring his stride and the shadow he cast, but the calculations were only precise enough to confirm what they could see for themselves: he was tall.
Brennan, for some reason he cannot fully explain, and that may have been no more than wishful thinking, felt in his bones that this was bin Laden. They called the man “the Pacer.” Perhaps Brennan was inclined to believe it already, given the extraordinary lengths taken to hide this man, but as soon as he saw an image of the Pacer… he knew. We recognize people by many things other than their facial features and hair color, or their size and shape. We sometimes recognize someone we have seen before at just a glance, a glimpse out of the corner of the eye, something in the way they carry themselves or stoop or tilt their head or swing their arms. Brennan is a big wide man, imposing and stern, a former CIA officer who had been involved in efforts to go after the al Qaeda leader all the way back to when ALEC Station was up and running. He had been based in Saudi Arabia at the time, butting heads with Scheuer over how much or how little the Saudis’ help could be trusted. He had worked closely with the Saudis after the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. And he had seen Predator images of the Sheik taken from overhead in Afghanistan during that period, a tall man in robes surrounded by security, striding confidently. This was a different setting, Abbottabad, and the clothes were different, but here was the same man, the same walk. There wasn’t hard evidence he could show to convince anyone else, but Brennan felt he recognized the Pacer.
Panetta briefed the president periodically through that fall, and in December his deputy Morell, “John,” the head of the CIA’s bin Laden team, and several others met with Donilon and Brennan at the White House. There was no breakthrough to report. The images of the Pacer were not clear enough to remove all doubt. None of their efforts had managed to pierce the compound’s walls. An agency team was now living in a house in Bilal Town. They noted everything they could see, but they couldn’t see much. They watched the comings and goings of the Ahmed brothers. They counted the laundry that was hung out to dry. They had determined that the hidden family was large: three wives, a young man, and ten or more children, several of them teenagers or young adults. The number of wives and children corresponded with their theorizing about who might surround bin Laden on the run. He had always kept most of his family with him. The analysts still could not prove that the mystery man was bin Laden but, then again, there wasn’t a single scrap of information that ran counter to that theory, either. Sometimes when you are looking hard enough at something, when you are ready for anything that might shoot down your hypothesis, and nothing comes… lack of disproof begins to feel like proof.
“We think we have the best intelligence case for the location of bin Laden since Tora Bora,” Morell told Donilon.
So, on December 14, just before Obama left for his annual holiday trip with his family to Hawaii, Panetta visited him in the Oval Office.
Obama listened and weighed the evidence. He was impressed. Now that there were actually “eyes on” the compound the whole prospect seemed more real, and all the new intel fit the puzzle neatly. Obama was struck, just as the others had been, by actually being able to see the mystery man. You couldn’t tell exactly who it was, but something about actually seeing the target moving inside the high walls, hiding from the world, registered with him.
“At this point, you’re saying to yourself, this is all circumstantial, but it’s hard to figure out what the explanation would be for that particular pattern,” said Obama. “And so at that point I think there’s a part of me that’s thinking this might be for real.”
Still, the president was cautious. He told Panetta, “For all we know this could be some sheik hiding from one of his wives.”
He wanted more. He instructed Panetta to get creative, to figure out a way to nail it down. He said to continue keeping a tight lid on it. And he also instructed Panetta to start preparing options for action.
As closely as the secret was held, Bill McRaven had gotten wind of it back in November. Those monitors might have been blacked out for meetings inside the NSC’s offices, and McRaven was now spending most of his time in Afghanistan, but it was hard to keep the JSOC commander completely out of the loop.
He had worked in the White House himself. It was when he was just beginning to work his way back from his severe jump injuries, his body adjusting to the plates and pins that now held his pelvis together. He’d gotten a surprise phone call in October 2001, from Wayne Downing, a former four-star general who had led the Special Operations Command. The two men had gotten to know each other during the years before Downing’s retirement. The general had just been asked by President Bush to unretire and take up a position in the White House as a kind of counterterrorism czar—an ill-defined special assistant role designed to bring some measure of coordination to the multiple agencies and services involved in the new war. Before he even officially accepted the job, Downing called to ask McRaven if he would come to Washington to help.
“You bet,” said the SEAL captain.
A few weeks later, Downing caught up to the still hobbled SEAL as he was driving across the country from San Diego to his new desk job in Norfolk, Virginia.
“Hey, I’ve taken the job,” Downing said. “Can you be here on Monday?” That was just four days away.
“Yeah, I think so,” said McRaven.
When he showed up at the White House in his wheelchair, Downing told him simply, “Figure out what you’re going to be.”
It was a terrific opportunity for any military officer, especially one who had years earlier abandoned the idea of advancement in order to stay in the field, jumping out of planes and working deep underwater. The chance was not lost on McRaven. It seemed clear from the beginning that, in the long term, finding and taking down a furtive terror organization would require the kind of creative, cross-disciplinary skills long practiced by special ops. If every new war demanded that the military rethink how it fights, McRaven was already a few steps ahead. He had written a book on the subject while attending the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, entitled Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice. It was a rare military graduate thesis to be picked up by a commercial publisher—the Presidio Press, which published it in 1995. In the book, McRaven had studied eight special operations missions, from the German attack on the fortress of Eban Emael in 1940, prior to the blitzkrieg of Belgium, to the Israeli raid at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, the raid that prompted President Carter to request creation of a similar counterterrorism unit for the U.S. military. McRaven had visited the sites of these raids, interviewed many key participants, and pieced together his own understanding of why they had succeeded or failed. As he did so, he crafted a way of thinking about such specialized missions. Now he would have a seat at the table, a chance to apply those ideas to America’s newest military challenge.