Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

In Washington, trust in the Pakistanis had long since plummeted. “They were very hot on the ISI,” said a member of a Pakistani delegation that visited the White House toward the end of the Bush presidency. “When we asked them for more information, Bush laughed and said, ‘When we share information with you guys, the bad guys always run away.’ ”

The lack of trust notwithstanding, policy on Pakistan did not appear to change. Better to do nothing and have some cooperation, the thinking in the new Obama administration seemed to be, than come down hard and get none. In early 2011, on Fox News, former government officials called on the administration to take a tougher line with Pakistan.

Obama had vowed during his campaign for the presidency, “We will kill bin Laden.… That has to be our biggest national security priority.” In office, he made no such public statements. The hunt for bin Laden, meanwhile, seemed to be getting nowhere—and not to be a high priority. In retrospect, though, there was a trickle of fresh information that suggested otherwise.

General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was asked on Meet the Press in 2010 whether it was now less necessary to capture bin Laden. “I think,” he replied, “capturing or killing bin Laden is still a very, very important task for all of those who are engaged in counterterrorism around the world.”

For those who doubted that bin Laden was still alive, late fall 2010 brought two new bin Laden audio messages. There had been intercepts of al Qaeda communications, CIA officials told The New York Times , indicating that he still shaped strategy. Then, within weeks, CNN was quoting a “senior NATO official” as saying that bin Laden and his deputy Zawahiri were believed to be hiding not far from each other in northwest Pakistan, and not “in a cave.” The same day, the New York Daily News quoted a source with “access to all reporting on bin Laden” as having spoken of two “sightings considered credible” in recent years—and even of “a grainy photo of bin Laden inside a truck.” The sources were vague, though, as to where bin Laden might have been. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for his part, was at pains in an ABC interview to suggest that it had been “years” since any hard intelligence had been received on bin Laden’s likely location.

In late March 2011, out of Hong Kong, came a story suggesting that the CIA had “launched a series of secret operations in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush … consistent reports have established that Osama bin Laden has been on the move through the region in recent weeks.”

It is a fair guess that much if not all of this was disinformation, planted to suggest to the quarry that U.S. intelligence had lost the scent, had no strong lead as to where precisely bin Laden might be, and had no plan for an imminent strike against him.

At 10:24 P.M. on the night of Sunday, May 1, 2011—an improbable hour—this bulletin came over the wires:

Breaking News Alert: White House says Obama to make late-night statement on an undisclosed topic.

Soon after, there was this from

The Washington Post:

Osama bin Laden has been killed in a CIA operation in Pakistan, President Obama will announce from the White House, according to multiple sources.

At 11:35 P.M., the President appeared on television screens across the globe to say:

Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda and a terrorist who’s

responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.…

The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory.… And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly three thousand citizens taken from us.…

Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the border into Pakistan.… Shortly after taking office I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of the war against al Qaeda.… Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.… I met repeatedly with my security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action.…

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation.… A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage.… No Americans were harmed.… After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

It was a momentous victory. Jubilant Americans thronged in front of the White House, in Times Square, and at Ground Zero. For many days, there was wall-to-wall coverage in newspapers, television, and radio. The Internet hummed with information.

In its haste to break the news to the world, apparently before personnel involved in the strike against bin Laden had been fully debriefed, U.S. government officials put out information that would turn out to have been inaccurate. An initial claim that bin Laden had used a woman as a human shield, and that she had been shot dead as a result, proved to be unfounded. A woman did die in the assault, but elsewhere in the compound.

Contrary to an early statement giving the impression that bin Laden was armed and died fighting, presidential spokesman Jay Carney later said he had been unarmed. “Resistance,” Carney said, “does not require a firearm.” The al Qaeda leader had been in his nightclothes when confronted, it was reported later, clothing that could conceivably have concealed a weapon or explosives. The U.S. commandos involved, said CIA director Leon Panetta, “had full authority to kill him.”

The rush to get the story out, albeit raw and insufficiently checked, had not been merely for maximum impact. U.S. officials had in part rushed to get their version out, it was reported, “before the Pakistanis pushed theirs.”

The version of events that emerged from Pakistan was indeed different. A twelve-year-old daughter of bin Laden, who survived, was quoted as saying her father had been “captured alive and shot dead by the U.S. Special Forces during the first few minutes … in front of family members.” That provocative quote, significantly, was sourced as coming from “senior Pakistani security officials.”

Pakistan was compromised by the strike, for bin Laden had been living—by all accounts for years, comfortably housed and well protected—in not just any Pakistani city. He had been living in the pleasant town of Abbottabad, where many serving and retired military officers live, and within shouting distance of the nation’s most prestigious military academy—the equivalent of America’s West Point. The ISI also had a presence there.

Officials in Washington did not mince their words when these facts became public. The Pakistanis, CIA director Panetta said, had been either “involved or incompetent.” The President’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, thought it “inconceivable” that bin Laden had not had a “support system” in Abbottabad. On CBS’s 60 Minutes , Obama himself speculated “whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, [supporting bin Laden] … that’s something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

Bin Laden, Pakistan’s President Zardari said helplessly, “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be.” The ISI, long the principal object of U.S. suspicion, denied that it had shielded the terrorist or had known where he was. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul, the veteran supporter of jihad, declared it “a bit amazing” that bin Laden could have been living in Abbottabad incognito.