There was laughter.
“Yes, Michele,” he said. “This is how it starts.”
Great care was taken to preserve the appearance of normalcy on Sunday. President Obama left for his weekly golf outing at Andrews Air Force Base, but this time he would play only nine holes. Arrival times at the White House for all of the top staffers and cabinet members were staggered. The principals were instructed to keep their security details at a distance—a thick herd of black SUVs arriving at the gates always attracted attention. They were told not to park in their usual spaces. The West Wing tours normally booked for Sunday had been canceled, which raised the suspicion of ABC TV’s George Stephanopoulos, who understood the rhythms of White House life from his years on President Clinton’s staff. He got wind of the cancellations and asked Chief of Staff Bill Daley what was going on. He was told there was a “plumbing issue.” The Sunday tours were popular with the executive department staffers, who had a chance to show off their access by escorting family members and friends through the White House. Out-of-town guests sometimes planned visits around such perks, so the cancellations caused some disappointment. Obama’s personal secretary had planned one for that day, intending to show around the cast members of the hit movie The Hangover, who had come to town for the previous night’s gala. Rhodes got a phone call from her that morning.
“Can I just come in as an exception with these guys?” she asked.
“No,” said Rhodes. No exceptions.
The National Security Council staff convened at eight o’clock that morning. The deputies met at nine.
Halfway around the world, it was already late in the afternoon in Jalalabad. McRaven had timed the strike to hit the target in Abbottabad at one o’clock in the morning, Pakistani time, looking for the moment when things would be quietest at the compound and in Bilal Town, and when his men would have the longest stretch of darkness possible to finish up the work, fly north to Kala Dhaka for refueling, and get out of the country. That meant they would depart from the base in Afghanistan at about eleven o’clock at night, local time—the force would pick up a half hour on the clock flying east into Pakistan, so they would fly for an hour and a half and arrive at the targeted time. That meant the mission would launch at two-thirty p.m. Washington time and hit the compound at about four in the afternoon. McRaven kept an iPad in front of him throughout the night displaying multiple time zones just to help keep things straight.
So as the assault force readied, the White House pulled itself together. Some key Obama staffers were being called in and informed of the mission for the first time. Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, was on an outing with his children and didn’t notice the e-mail on his phone from Rhodes until an hour after it was sent. He forwarded the note to Dan Pfeiffer, the communications director.
“Do you know what this is about?” he asked.
Pfeiffer said that he had received the same summons, and, no, he didn’t know what was happening, either.
In the Situation Room and the complex of small meeting rooms around it, staffers worked on setting up the videoconferencing. Panetta, who would officially command the mission from his conference room at Langley, would be up on the big screen relaying the running commentary of McRaven, who would be at his post in Jalalabad. High over Abbottabad, much too high and too small to attract attention, was an RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealthy drone with a high-powered lens, which would provide a live video feed of the assault. In his blue uniform, Air Force General Marshall “Brad” Webb, a broad-faced man with a crew cut and a chest full of ribbons, was testing the video links to it and to Admiral McRaven in one of the small conference rooms. When Donilon learned that he planned to move himself and the feeds into the Situation Room, he put a stop to it. Donilon did not like the prospect of Obama communicating directly with McRaven and watching the mission live. It might appear that he was micromanaging the raid. Webb would have to confine these direct links to the smaller conference room.
The principals convened at noon for a final review of the plans and the president dropped in briefly, wearing his white golf shirt and blue Windbreaker. Each of the principals was given the plans for four possible outcomes, and each was tasked with making certain phone calls, depending on what happened.
Anticipating a long day and night, the table in one of the smaller side conference rooms was covered and topped with a heaping Costco plate of sandwiches, chips, and baby carrots and a tub of sodas and bottled water on ice. The NSC staff spent most of the early afternoon reviewing their “playbook,” a large three-ring binder developed for an even broader range of possibilities. If something goes awry, who calls whom? How much of the intelligence case should be laid out after the fact, to explain why the action was taken? If trouble developed, which countries would they contact for support? Who would be the best person to reach out to, which Pakistani leader? Who had the best personal relationship? For instance, Admiral Mullen had a very good relationship with General Kayani. Who were the right people to leverage if the men on the raid found themselves in a bad spot? Did they want to put the president on the phone with the leader of a foreign country if this went badly? Whatever happened, there would be a lot of explaining to do with Pakistan: Here’s why we took the extraordinary step of not sharing this information with you. Here’s why we didn’t work with you.
Success scenarios were easier. There were many more pages devoted to failure.
The president returned at two-thirty p.m., still wearing the white golf shirt and blue Windbreaker.
In Kabul, General Petraeus paid a surprise visit to the JSOC situational awareness room.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked Colonel Bill Ostlund, who was JSOC’s liaison there.
“Yeah, we’ve got nine operations going on right now and a few more that I think will happen tonight,” said Ostlund. His center monitored operations being run out of task force headquarters in Jalalabad, in case problems developed that needed the attention of higher command—typically a helicopter accident or an issue involving civilian casualties. The activity he described was the normal nightly pace.
The colonel knew nothing about the bin Laden raid but had suspected for a few days that something big was in the offing. McRaven had come up from Jalalabad for a short visit and before stopping in to see the commanding general had asked the colonel when Petraeus’s office had last been swept for listening devices.
“Sir, I don’t know if it has ever been swept,” said Ostlund, and joked about the relative openness of the conventional army’s habits compared to their own. “General Petraeus will probably have his window open and an Afghani right outside the window.”
McRaven laughed and told Ostlund that he wanted him to stay outside while he met with the commander. This was unusual, since Ostlund had been in on every meeting with the admiral up until that point, even the most sensitive ones with the CIA station chief and Petraeus. So he knew something especially interesting was afoot, and since Petraeus rarely stopped by his ops center, he figured tonight must be the night.
“Why don’t you ask the rest of your folks to leave?” the general asked Ostlund. “And then we can talk.”