The bin Laden kill plan

Barack Obama

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – A pivotal moment in the  long, tortuous quest to find Osama bin Laden came years before  U.S. spy agencies discovered his hermetic compound in  Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In July 2007, then Senator Barack Obama’s top foreign  policy advisers met in the modest two-room Massachusetts Avenue  offices that served as his campaign’s Washington headquarters.  There, they debated the incendiary language Obama would use in  an upcoming speech on national security, according to a senior  White House official.
Pakistan was a growing worry. A new, highly classified  intelligence analysis, called a National Intelligence Estimate,  had just identified militant safe havens in Pakistan’s border  areas as a major threat to U.S. security. The country’s  military leader, Pervez Musharraf, had recently cut a deal with  local tribes that effectively eased pressure on al Qaeda and  related groups.
Days after the Washington meeting, candidate Obama told an  audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for  Scholars: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value  terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden

It was the most carefully crafted sentence in the speech, a  statement no U.S. leader had ever made. (Text of Obama’s  speech: http://link.reuters.com/weg59r)
In the two weeks since President Obama made good on that  threat — in fact, bested it by declining to give Pakistan a  chance to act first — reams have been written about the  painstaking detective hunt that led to bin Laden.
But Reuters interviews with two dozen current and former  senior intelligence, White House and State Department officials  reveal another side of the story.
The 13-year quest to find and eliminate bin Laden, from the  November 1998 day he was indicted by a federal grand jury for  his role in the East Africa embassy bombings, was filled with  missteps, course adjustments and radical new departures for  U.S. security policy. It ultimately led to a fortified compound  in a little known Pakistani city named after a long-dead  British major.
Even with bin Laden buried at sea, the changes to U.S.  security policy could linger for years, or decades.
The mission to destroy bin Laden, and his network, sparked  the creation of a chillingly bureaucratic process for deciding  who would be on “kill lists,” authorized for death at the hands  of the CIA. It revolutionized the use of pilotless drones to  find and attack militants; drove the controversially brutal  treatment of detainees in U.S. custody; and brought the United  States and Pakistan closer together, then wrenched them apart.
(Even in ordering the risky Navy SEAL raid on May 1, Obama  made allowances for Pakistan’s sensitivities. The raid was  carried out by the U.S. military but under CIA legal  authorities and command, partly for deniability if something  went wrong and partly because the United States is not at war  with Pakistan, a U.S. official said.)
But there was one constant in the search for bin Laden. On  Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the 9/11 attacks, President  George W. Bush issued a still-classified “finding” that gave  the CIA “lethal authorities” to deal with the al Qaeda leader  and his top lieutenants. Ever since, there was an expectation  — even a preference — that bin Laden would be killed, not  captured, Bush and Obama administration officials said.
The same day that Bush signed the directive, he publicly  declared bin Laden was wanted “dead or alive.”
Numerous officials said they knew of no explicit command  that bin Laden was not to be taken alive. When he ordered the  SEAL raid, Obama had on his desk a written protocol for what  would happen if the al Qaeda chief were captured and removed  from Pakistan to an unnamed U.S. military installation, the  senior White House official said.
But it was vaguer than the rest of the operational plan,  and the expectation among most of the people who planned and  executed the mission was that bin Laden would be killed. If bin  Laden had surrendered, Obama’s senior advisers “would have to  reconvene and make a decision about what to do with him,” said  one official, who like many requested anonymity to discuss  sensitive national security matters. “It was intentionally left  to be decided after the fact.”
Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state in  Bush’s first term, voiced the view that prevailed through two  presidencies. “I think we took Osama bin Laden at his word,  that he wanted to be a martyr,” Armitage told Reuters.
The U.S. government, he said, would do all it could to help  bin Laden realize that goal.
RABBIT HOLES AND WRONG TURNS

Barack Obama
Barack Obama

The hunt for bin Laden turned out to be riddled with dead  ends, wrong turns and long, desolate periods of frustration.
The 9/11 attacks would push the Bush administration into a  war in Iraq that critics — including candidate Obama —  denounced as a dangerous diversion from al Qaeda and its  Afghanistan/Pakistan nexus. Interrogation techniques such as  “waterboarding,” a form of simulated drowning, were used on a  handful of suspects deemed most dangerous, sparking a debate —  it erupted again on May 2 — over the best way to fight  terrorism.
In Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in December 2001, U.S.  special forces came close to bin Laden — perhaps within 2,000  meters, according to the published recollections of a former  U.S. Army special forces commander who uses the pseudonym  “Dalton Fury.”
Opting to rely on local Afghan allies, the United States  declined to send in the 1,500 U.S. Army Rangers needed to block  bin Laden’s escape route.
It would be more than nine years before U.S. special forces  would get that close again.
In the intervening years, “there were a lot of empty rabbit  holes down which we pursued and ultimately didn’t find any  results. It was very frustrating,” said Juan Zarate, a top  White House counter-terrorism aide from 2005-2009. “I always  had a mantra that I used for myself, both not to get too  discouraged and also with the counter-terrorism community,  which is: these guys are not ghosts. They are flesh and blood  and can be found and we’ll find them.”
With virtually no hard knowledge, U.S. counter-terrorism  officials said they assumed bin Laden was hiding in the  mountainous, lawless Afghan-Pakistan border region. But it’s  now believed that after Tora Bora, he spent some time in  Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province, crossed the border into  Pakistan in late summer or fall 2002, moved to a Pakistani  village in 2003 for a couple of years, and hid in plain sight  in Abbottabad beginning in 2005 or 2006.
Yet even in deadly U.S. failures, there were small  breakthroughs.
On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone struck a group of men  in Arab dress in the Zawar Kili area of eastern Afghanistan.  Among them was a tall man to whom others were acting  deferentially, U.S. officials said at the time.
It turned out not to be bin Laden. Reports quoted local  residents saying it was a group of villagers collecting scrap  metal. But before the episode was over, U.S. intelligence  agencies had received, with help from the Saudi government, a  DNA sample from bin Laden’s extended family that would clinch  identification if he were ever found.
FROM CAPTURE TO KILL
It was President Bill Clinton who launched the hunt for bin  Laden. After the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and  Tanzania, Clinton signed what some former U.S. officials called  the first “covert action finding” authorizing CIA operations  against al Qaeda, then regarded as a marginal Islamic militant  faction with an eccentric, Saudi-born leader.
But some Clinton aides, led by attorney general Janet Reno,  were concerned about the legality of killing bin Laden, former  top intelligence and counter-terrorism officials said.  Clinton’s orders permitted U.S. forces to kill bin Laden in  self-defense, but the prime directive was to capture him and  bring him to justice in the United States.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington and  Pennsylvania instantly made such scruples seem anachronistic.
Bush’s Sept. 17, 2001, order, which is still highly  classified, authorized the CIA to use all methods at its  disposal — explicitly including deadly force — to wipe out al  Qaeda and its leaders.
Presidential covert action findings never expire unless a  president issues a new written order suspending or revoking  them, current and former U.S. national security officials told  Reuters. So Bush’s nine-and-a-half-year-old order remained a  key legal authority under which Obama launched the commando  raid that led to bin Laden’s death.
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that partisans of both men  and their political parties would claim the lion’s share of  credit for bin Laden’s demise.
Bush’s order was both sweeping and general in the powers it  granted to the CIA to launch operations against al Qaeda.
As Armitage and others recalled, 9/11 rapidly accelerated a  program that had progressed only fitfully in the Clinton  administration thanks to CIA-Pentagon turf battles: a scheme to  arm increasingly sophisticated remote-controlled drone aircraft  with missiles that could launch precision strikes.
In Bush’s last months in office, and even more under Obama,  the drone strikes expanded dramatically, rattling relations  with Pakistan. But when it came time to attack the Abbottabad  compound, Obama rejected an option for using drones, fearing  civilian casualties and that proof of bin Laden’s demise would  never be found in the wreckage. (For similar reasons, the  president also rejected an option which would have sent B-2  “Stealth” bombers to destroy bin Laden’s lair.)
In the months after 9/11, the CIA forged ahead with three  other major initiatives to eradicate bin Laden and company:
* A program in which militants captured by U.S. or allied  forces were detained and interrogated either in special U.S.  military facilities or in a network of secret CIA prisons,  where some were subjected to harsh physical interrogation  tactics dreamt up by agency contractors.
* Another program where captured militants were subjected  to what the agency called “extraordinary rendition” and  delivered without judicial proceedings into the custody of  often-brutal security agencies in their native countries.
* A troubled effort to create a secret U.S. capability that  would be similar to the “hit squads” deployed by Israel’s  Mossad and other spy agencies.
To guide the CIA’s new activities, the Bush administration  began drawing up a list of “high value targets,” who were the  top priority for intelligence gathering and who could be  captured or killed depending upon the circumstances in which  they were found.
There had been nothing quite like it before in U.S.  history. Initially, according to former officials familiar with  the process, the lists were compiled and approved by an  interagency committee of lawyers and bureaucrats based on  recommendations from the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
The U.S. spy agencies would propose a name for the  high-value target list and prepare a dossier explaining who the  suspect was and why he ought to be on the list, they said. This  dossier would then be circulated to the interagency committee,  whose members, including lawyers from the Justice Department,  Pentagon and CIA, would review it. If the lawyers deemed the  dossier adequate, the committee would then approve the  individual’s name for inclusion on the “high-value target” list  — subject to capture or death by American spies or soldiers.
The Obama White House approved adding American-born Anwar  al-Awlaki, based in Yemen, to the target list in 2010 because  officials believed the English-speaking Muslim cleric had gone  beyond inspirational rhetoric and become involved in terrorism  operations.
At any one time, the list would contain between 10 and 30  names, the most obvious ones being bin Laden and his Egyptian  deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former officials said. At one  point, Bush’s advisers prepared for him a rogues’ gallery of  about 20 top suspects on the list, which was laminated in  plastic. Bush kept it in his Oval Office desk. When militants  on the chart were captured or killed, Bush would take it out of  his desk and mark them off.
But bin Laden’s name stayed on the list while the young  orphans of 9/11 grew into teenagers.
THE TRAIL BACK

The plan to create CIA hit-squads proved another dead end.  The original concept was to create surveillance and “lethal”  teams under the agency’s paramilitary wing, staffed by former  military commandos and coyly named the Special Activities  Division, according to two former officials familiar with  internal government debates at the time.
That plan was put into cold storage by CIA director George  Tenet, then revived by his successor Porter Goss with a twist:  the agency would use outside contractors for the hit teams, to  give it more deniability. Erik Prince, founder-owner of the  controversial private military contractor then known as  Blackwater and a former Navy SEAL, was invited to participate  in brainstorming sessions. At some point, a former senior  official said, the agency conducted training exercises in the  field.
As one of his first acts, Obama’s CIA chief Leon Panetta  killed the hit squad idea for good, and informed congressional  oversight committees, which had never been told of it.
The trail back to bin Laden began with the militants  detained and interrogated by the CIA. That’s the crucible of  the debate over whether the United States veered badly off  track in its war with al Qaeda, or was on the right course all  along.
Did waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other “enhanced  interrogation techniques,” a phrase critics call a euphemism  for torture, ultimately work? Or did such tactics muddy the  search for bin Laden? Did old-fashioned, persistent  investigation prevail in the end?
The debate is unlikely ever to be settled. But multiple  U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters the real breakthrough  that led to bin Laden came from a mysterious CIA detainee named  Hassan Ghul. Ghul, who was not captured until 2004 at the  earliest, was not subjected to waterboarding, the CIA’s  roughest and most controversial interrogation technique. It had  already been phased out by the time he was captured. But two  U.S. officials acknowledged he may well have been subjected to  other coercive CIA tactics, possibly including stress  positions, sleep deprivation and being slammed into a wall.
It was Ghul, the officials said, who after years of  tantalizing hints from other detainees finally provided the  information that prompted the CIA to focus intensely on finding  Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, pseudonym for the courier who would lead  them to bin Laden.
Much about Ghul remains obscure, including his nationality.  Two U.S. officials told Reuters, however, that at some point  the CIA turned him over to authorities in Pakistan. The  officials said their understanding is that in 2007, Pakistani  authorities released him from custody. The officials said the  U.S. government now believes Ghul has once again become a  frontline militant fighter.
Leaving Ghul aside, it remains unclear whether the brutal  interrogations — which Obama banned upon taking office — were  effective or not.
The available facts, bolstered by evidence from secret  Guantanamo detainee files made public by the WikiLeaks  organization, suggest that some of the first information U.S.  intelligence received about Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti surfaced in  2002, when the harshest elements of the CIA interrogation  program were still in force.
Two high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, alleged 9/11  mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who was waterboarded  repeatedly) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi (who was not), were  questioned about the courier, current U.S. officials familiar  with the intelligence said. Both tried to steer interrogators  onto a different track, which only piqued the CIA’s interest  further, the officials said.
While Ghul’s information brought tighter focus to the hunt  for bin Laden’s most important courier in 2004, it would be  another two to three years before the agency discovered his  true identity and more about his activities. A new president  would take office before the Abbottabad hideout that Abu Ahmed  and his brother are believed to have built for bin Laden was  discovered.
RENEWED FOCUS ON PAKISTAN
To outsiders, it sometimes seemed as if the hunt for bin  Laden languished in Bush’s final years in office. That was not  the case, aides said.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden told Reuters that each  time he went to the White House for his weekly meeting with  Bush, the president would always ask him, “Where are we, Mike?”  Hayden always knew Bush was referring to bin Laden.
But Bush had expended huge resources — military,  financial, diplomatic and political — in Iraq. Obama was  intent on shifting the focus of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts  back to South Asia, specifically to Pakistan.
Former aides to Bush acknowledge that while he took a  tougher line on Pakistan toward the end of his term, the new  Obama team displayed far less concern for fragile Pakistan’s  sensitivities.
“For a long time there was a strong inclination at the  highest levels during our time to work with the Pakistanis,  treat them as partners, defer to their national sensitivities  … There was some good reason for that,” said a former top  Bush aide, citing the need for Islamabad’s help in countering  terrorism, stopping nuclear proliferation and stabilizing  Afghanistan.
Obama and his team “do seem more willing to push the  envelope,” he said.
Would Bush have handled the Abbottabad raid in the same  way? “I really don’t know for sure,” the former aide said.  “There’s no doubt he would have ordered the assault in a  heartbeat. But what would he have done regarding the  Pakistanis? I’m not sure.”
Vali Nasr, a senior State Department adviser on Afghanistan  and Pakistan until last month, said: “Obama was fundamentally  honest that the United States and Pakistan were on different  trajectories in Afghanistan. Under Bush, there was this  pretense that we were all in this war on terror together.”
Obama had no close personal ties to Musharraf, who resigned  shortly before the new U.S. president was elected. Obama’s  aides were increasingly skeptical of Pakistan’s pledges that it  would take care of al Qaeda, a senior White House official  recalled. Most of all, Pakistan was a major player in  Afghanistan, where Obama had pledged to turn around a war he  acknowledged was going badly.
Those views hardened after Obama’s first classified  intelligence briefing in Chicago on a September day in 2008. He  was now the Democratic nominee for president.
The briefing solidified Obama’s view that “this guy was  living inside Pakistan,” the senior official said. “What I  remember in terms of the aftermath of that briefing and into  the transition was just how much the focus became on Pakistan.”  As Obama prepared to take office, Islamist militants rampaged  in the Indian city of Mumbai. There were clear signs they had  help from within Pakistan.
After taking office, Obama instructed CIA director Panetta  to develop options for pursuing bin Laden and pour additional  resources into the effort. While “a lot of good” had been done  in the Bush years, the senior official said, resources for the  CIA’s bin Laden unit “fluctuated over time.”
Obama wanted the effort revitalized and given a  presidential imprimatur. With no public fanfare, the CIA  escalated drone strikes on militants inside Pakistan.   (Video: Musharraf reaction: http://link.reuters.com/xug59r)
ENDGAME
Obama was brought the lead about the Abbottabad compound in  August 2010. Fewer than 10 people within the White House, and  only a handful at the CIA, knew about it. By last month, that  number had grown, as the CIA operators and military commandos  who would execute a raid were read into developing operational  plans.
At what would be a crucial, two-hour meeting on April 28,  Obama, as is his custom, went around the room, asking each of  his principal advisers for their views. At one point, laughter  permeated the tension as each adviser prefaced his or her  comments by saying, “This is a really hard call,” the senior  White House official said.
Obama was presented with four scenarios, some of which  evoked the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” fiasco in Somalia: The team  gets cleanly in and out with bin Laden. The team gets cleanly  in and out, but bin Laden is not there. There’s a messy  situation on the ground, with fighting and casualties, and bin  Laden is there. Worst of all was scenario four: the same as  scenario three, but with no bin Laden in sight.
“There was discussion of catastrophic — that was the word  we used — catastrophic outcomes where you had dead or injured  U.S. personnel or a hostage-taking,” the senior official said.
Obama left the room saying he had not yet made a decision,  but a close aide knew that he had. “I knew with 100 percent  certainty that he was going to decide to do this because I’ve  worked for him for four years. I just knew. He said he’d do  this.”
Three days later, the group gathered in the White House  Situation Room to monitor the raid as it unfolded. A mood of  “tense silence” filled the room as Obama and the advisers  waited for the next pieces of information. Then Panetta spoke  the words U.S. officials had hoped to hear for years:  “Geronimo” — a code phrase meaning bin Laden had been found —  “EKIA.” Enemy killed in action.
Amid a scramble to inform counterparts abroad, especially  the Pakistanis, and to prepare for the release of the  blockbuster news to the public, pizza and chips were brought in  for fortification.
There would be tough questions ahead. Could U.S.-Pakistan  relations be salvaged? Successful once, would Obama authorize  similar raids against other leading militants? (Another top  Obama aide would not “take that off the table.”)
But now, there were at least a few moments for reflection.  After years in the wilderness, literally and figuratively, the  United States had got its man.
Obama walked along the White House colonnade to the East  Room to deliver the news that many in the United States had by  now guessed. He could hear the chants of “USA, USA” from a  rally in Lafayette Park.
As Obama spoke, adviser and speechwriter Ben Rhodes turned  to John Brennan, the president’s top counter-terrorism adviser,  and whispered: “How long have you been going after this guy?”  Brennan immediately replied: “Fifteen years.”
(Video: Obama: http://link.reuters.com/cyg59r)