Breakthrough in August led to a house in Pakistan

MARK MAZZETTI; HELENE COOPER
International Herald Tribune
05-03-2011
Breakthrough in August led to a house in Pakistan
Byline: MARK MAZZETTI; HELENE COOPER
Section: The Death Of Bin Laden
Type: News

What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by U.S. military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Osama bin Laden.

After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came in August.
A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden's whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound about 55 kilometers, or 35 miles, north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of U.S. counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.

What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden early Monday and concluded one of history's most extensive and frustrating manhunts.

American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him. Bin Laden was identified both visually and through DNA tests that confirmed his identity with 99.9 percent certainty, officials said.

The Qaeda leader's body was flown to Afghanistan, and then was transferred to the Carl Vinson, a U.S. carrier cruising in the North Arabian Sea. Muslim burial rites were conducted, including a ritual washing of the body and a reading in both English and Arabic. A military official said the body was placed in a white sheet and then inside a weighted bag.

Finally, Bin Laden was placed on a board, tipped up and "eased into the sea," the official said.

For nearly a decade, U.S. military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden's most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.

Detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier's pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protege of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

U.S. intelligence officials said that they finally learned the courier's real name four years ago, but that it took two more years for them to learn the general region where he operated.

Still, it was not until August that they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour's drive north of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

Analysts with the Central Intelligence Agency spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound, and drew up composite portraits. A senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had decided that there was a "strong possibility" that Bin Laden himself was hiding there.

At some point, special operations teams began training for the mission, using the satellite photos as a guide to their mission. It was not clear whether a mock-up of the compound was constructed, though in so high-profile an operation that would seem likely.

The compound was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as Bin Laden's hiding place. Rather, it was a mansion on the outskirts of the town's center, set on an imposing hilltop and ringed by concrete walls measuring 3.5 meters, or about 12 feet, high and topped with barbed wire.

The property was valued at $1 million, but it had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. Its residents were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather than putting it on the street for collection the way their neighbors did. U.S. officials said they believed that the compound, built in 2005, was designed for the specific purpose of hiding Bin Laden.

Months more of intelligence work would follow before American spies felt highly confident that it was indeed Bin Laden and his family who were hiding there -- and before President Barack Obama determined that the intelligence was solid enough to begin planning a mission to go after the Qaeda leader.

On March 14, Mr. Obama held the first of what would be five national security meetings in the course of six weeks to go over plans for the operation. The meetings, attended by only the president's closest national security aides, took place as other White House officials were scrambling to avert a possible government shutdown over the budget.

Four more similar meetings to discuss the plan followed, until Mr. Obama gathered his aides one final time last Friday. At 8:20 that morning, Mr. Obama met with Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser; John O. Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser; and other senior aides in the Diplomatic Room at the White House. The president was traveling to Alabama later that morning to witness the damage from last week's tornadoes. But first he had to approve the final plan to send operatives into the compound where the administration believed that Bin Laden was hiding.

Mr. Brennan said at a White House briefing Monday that on the eve of the mission there was still no absolute certainty that Bin Laden was in the mission. Mr. Obama then made "what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory," Mr. Brennan said.

Describing the wait in the White House, Mr. Brennan said that officials there were able to monitor the operation "in real time," and that it was an incredibly "anxiety-filled" time.

"The minutes passed like days," he said.

Even after the president signed the formal orders authorizing the raid, he chose to keep Pakistan's government in the dark about the operation.

Mr. Brennan said it was "inconceivable" that Bin Laden did not have a support system in the country, but he would not speculate on any official Pakistani support.

It is no surprise that the administration chose not to tell Pakistani officials. The United States never really believed the Pakistanis' insistence that Bin Laden was not in their country. American diplomatic cables in recent years show constant U.S. pressure on Pakistan to help find and kill Bin Laden.

Early Monday, the small team of U.S. military and intelligence operatives poured out of helicopters for their attack on the heavily fortified compound.

American officials said that a fire fight broke out shortly after the commandos arrived, reportedly in large Sea Knight helicopters.

The fight lasted 40 minutes, as the American operatives worked their way up toward the rooms on the second and third floors where Bin Laden and his family were taking refuge.

Bin Laden died toward the end of the fire fight, officials said. They offered no details on the precise circumstances of his death, except to say that he had tried to "resist the assault force." They would not say whether it was he or someone else who had used a woman as a human shield. The woman was killed.

"If we'd had the opportunity to take him alive, we would have done that," Mr. Brennan said in the White House briefing, while adding, "We were not going to put our people at risk."

In all, four males were killed -- Bin Laden, a son and two couriers. Two women were wounded. And an unspecified number of women and children were taken into what officials called protective custody.

Officials said that one of helicopters went down during the mission because of mechanical failure, but that no Americans were hurt.

The Americans collected Bin Laden's body and loaded it onto one of the remaining helicopters -- they quickly scoured the compound for evidence, seizing at least two computers and what officials said was a large amount of other material -- and then the assault force hastily left the scene.

It was 3:50 Eastern time on Sunday afternoon when Mr. Obama received the news that Bin Laden had tentatively been identified.

The United States was known to have collected samples of his family's DNA for years, which would have provided the needed match.

The Qaeda leader's body was flown to Afghanistan, the country where he made his fame fighting and killing Soviet troops during the 1980s.

From there, American officials said, the body was transferred to the Carl Vinson and then buried at sea.

Copyright International Herald Tribune May 03, 2011