The one thing that was not often in their conversation but always in their thoughts was danger. There were small FOBs all over Afghanistan named after team members who had been killed on raids, friends of these men who had gone about their work with the same skill and care but who had been sent home in an aluminum box. Inside the FOBs there were memorials posted on walls or bulletin boards, displaying photos of the dead, and special operators were disproportionately represented. Their photos contrasted with the faces of the other fallen, the eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old regulars who had been killed by roadside bombs or in mortar attacks or on routine patrols. The special operators were older, and in the pictures they were often bearded and dressed in local civilian attire. Either that or they appeared in official portraits wearing uniforms decked with ribbons and stripes and medals. They were war-fighting professionals. For most it was their chosen career and, unlike younger men who tended to find reasons why this or that soldier had been hit and they had not—a poor decision, a perceived weakness, a fatal lapse in quickness… —these men knew better. You trained and practiced and then you performed with a team made up of men every bit as good as you were, and sometimes in spite of all of this you got killed. This mission, targeting Osama bin Laden, was one nearly everyone in the force had imagined being on since 9/11. It was the raid all of these men believed would someday come, and that they had hoped would include them.
Behind this initial force were the men and choppers and planes that McRaven hoped he would not need. There were three MH-47E Chinooks, big as tractor trailers with flat rotors front and back. Also on alert were the fighters and combat-control aircraft that might be needed to fend off Pakistani fighters and ground-to-air defenses. If it came to that, command of the operation would shift from McRaven’s Joint Operating Center in Jalalabad to the theater command center in Kabul, where General Petraeus presided.
Petraeus himself hadn’t known about the mission until just weeks earlier, when he had been informed about it in general terms by General Cartwright and by the CENTCOM commander. His resources would not be used at all unless the mission went badly, so he had not been fully briefed by McRaven until a few days earlier. No one on his staff knew about the raid. His history with bin Laden went back a dozen years, to when Petraeus had stood on the tarmac at Pope Air Force Base as the bodies of American servicemen killed in al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole were flown home. He had been in on the earlier discussions during the Clinton administration when it had decided to launch the cruise missiles at targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan. He would have a ringside seat for this raid, but if all went well he would have nothing to do but watch.
On Saturday afternoon, McRaven took a call from the president. Obama told the admiral that his confidence in him and his men could not be higher.
“Godspeed to you and your forces,” Obama said. “Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service.”
He added something that went without saying.
“I will personally be following this mission very closely.”
Hours later, on Saturday afternoon Washington time, Ben Rhodes sat down in his small White House office before his keyboard… and froze. At some point, the president was going to have to speak to the United States and the world about what had happened, or was happening, inside Pakistan. Rhodes’s job would be to have draft remarks ready for success or failure.
George Little, a CIA press officer, had just spent a few hours with the president’s staff reviewing every outcome the agency could imagine. They had gone through the various press guides and public-messaging guides for each contingency—which heads of states needed to be informed and in what order, how statements should be made. They roughed them all out. There was one for a clean in-and-out, the best case. If they went in and bin Laden wasn’t there and they got out without setting off any big alarms, then they planned to just deny it. It was to remain a covert operation: that is, officially it would not have happened. But what if things got messy? There were a number of those possibilities: messy with bin Laden dead, messy with bin Laden captured, messy but no bin Laden. They went through pages and pages of public-messaging options.
After all that, his head spinning with possibilities, Rhodes sat down to begin drafting something. He planned to start with the best-case scenario, and got as far as the first line, but then stopped. I can’t, he thought. I might jinx this. If he wrote a speech about them getting bin Laden, and they didn’t, that was going to be an awful document. If he wrote one about not getting bin Laden… well, his heart wasn’t in it. If he had to do it, he would, but he wasn’t going to do it unless he had to. So he didn’t write anything. He gave up and got ready to attend the correspondents dinner.
There had been some conversation the evening before about the timing. The dinner was the major black-tie social gala of the year in Washington: televised, and attended by celebrities from Hollywood and the sports world, and by all of the most prominent government leaders and journalists. The main attraction was always the president of the United States, who typically delivered a stand-up comedy routine poking fun at himself and the press. If Obama chose the raid, it would likely take place at the same time as the dinner. How would it look for the president to be making jokes at a podium while the men were risking their lives? And what if something went wrong and everyone had to suddenly leave the party? Every journalist in Washington would realize something major was up. Then again, if they all decided simply not to go, it would alert every news organization in the world that something big was happening.
When someone floated the idea of asking McRaven to postpone the mission for a day, Clinton had heard enough.
“We are not going to let a White House correspondents’ dinner drive an operational decision,” she said.
That ended it. Obama told Donilon, “Tom, if it turns out that’s when we decide to go, you’ll just tell them I have a stomachache and I have to bow out.”
The question of what to do about the dinner became moot when McRaven’s weather experts predicted fog in the Abbottabad area for Saturday night. He decided to push the mission back one day. They would launch on Sunday night.
So in this tense moment, the most suspenseful of Obama’s presidency, he and his staff dressed for a formal party.
Rhodes was so nervous that at first he decided not to go, but then he changed his mind. He figured if he stayed home he would just pace and obsess. The dinner would be a distraction. But it was strange. There were maybe a dozen people among the many hundreds in attendance who shared the secret. They were all throwing themselves into the party in an effort to forget the strain for a few hours, and succeeding somewhat, except when they would see someone else who knew. When Michael Morell spotted Rhodes in the crowd he gave him a slight pained smile that made him laugh.
Obama lived up to his reputation for cool. If he was anxious about the next day’s mission, he didn’t show it, garnering laughs as he poked fun at the long-running dispute over his origins and his own sometimes messianic public image, offering a supposedly never-before-seen video of his live birth, which, he said, he himself had never seen. It turned out to be a clip from the Disney movie, The Lion King, showing the birth of the future king on the plains of Africa—the clouds part and a shaft of heavenly light beams down on the uplifted cub. “Back to square one,” Obama joked. Then he took pains to explain to the “Fox TV table” that the video was a joke, a “children’s cartoon,” he said. “If you don’t believe me, you can check with Disney, where they have the long-form version.” He skewered New York real estate magnate, publicity hound, reality TV star, and sometime presidential candidate Donald Trump, who for weeks had been loudly demanding proof of Obama’s citizenship. The president then gratuitously suggested that Representative Michele Bachmann, a vocal critic and Republican presidential aspirant, might have actually been born in Canada.