The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden by Peter Bergen

Author:Peter Bergen [Bergen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

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McRaven assembled his team to begin rehearsals in North Carolina on April 7. Captain Perry “Pete” Van Hooser, the commander of SEAL Team Six, told two dozen of his best men from Six’s Red Squadron that they were going after bin Laden.

At one point, the SEALs asked a lawyer who was attending the rehearsals if the bin Laden operation was an assassination mission. The lawyer replied that “if he is naked with his hands up, you’re not going to engage him.”

Before the final rehearsal a SEAL officer asked McRaven, “Sir, what are we going to call this operation?”

McRaven had given some thought to this question. The name Neptune Spear seemed appropriate for a Navy SEAL mission, since Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, is usually portrayed carrying a trident spear, the symbol of the SEALs.

The SEALs also rehearsed the entire mission in Nevada—where the elevation and temperature were similar to that of Abbottabad—from nighttime takeoff to the return to base more than three hours later. The rehearsals showed that the operation on the ground in Abbottabad could be conducted in under thirty minutes, which was the window of time the SEALs would likely have before they were interrupted by the arrival of Pakistani security forces. Half an hour was also the window that McRaven had learned from his study of multiple successful Special Operations raids that was the optimal amount of time to perform a mission. After half an hour the element of surprise had largely dissipated and by then enemy forces typically had gathered their wits sufficiently for a counterattack.

Meanwhile, the CIA was still trying to gather additional intelligence about the inhabitants of the Abbottabad compound. The agency recruited Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani doctor, to mount a hepatitis B vaccination program around Abbottabad. The idea was to get access to the compound, take samples of the residents’ blood, and then match those with samples of bin Laden family DNA that were in the CIA’s possession. Dr. Afridi himself had no idea he was involved in the hunt for bin Laden. Afridi spoke to one of bin Laden’s bodyguards at the compound, who told him that no one was home and the plan fizzled.

Despite the lack of any concrete evidence that bin Laden was living on the Abbottabad compound, by April, “Maya,” a CIA analyst who had an encyclopedic knowledge of al-Qaeda, was 95 percent certain that bin Laden was living there, while her manager was at 80 percent.

When CIA deputy director Morell briefed Obama he put the odds at 60 percent.

Obama asked, “Why do people have different probabilities?”

“Intelligence is not an exact science,” Morell explained. “Those analysts who are at eighty percent have been tracking al-Qaeda in recent years. The folks at the lower end of the range are those who lived through intelligence failures, particularly the Iraq WMD issue.” Morell told the president that when it came to the sheer volume of data, “the circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.

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