the squadron rather than pull an existing troop.
Mike walked up and saw us in front of the organizational chart. There were twenty-eight names on the list, including an EOD tech. An interpreter and a combat assault dog, named Cairo, rounded out the team.
“Ali is a terp from the agency,” Mike said. “Terp” was short for interpreter. There would also be four alternates in case someone got hurt in training. “We broke everything down into four teams, and I’ve got you down as one of the four team leaders.”
Tom was also listed as a team leader.
“You’ll be on Chalk One for the infil,” Mike said. “Your team is responsible for the guesthouse, C1, to the south.”
C1 was the designation for the guesthouse, a separate structure from the main house in the compound, which was where Bin Laden would most likely be living. Chalk One and Chalk Two referred to the two helicopters that would carry us on the mission.
I noticed Charlie and Walt were also in Chalk One, but on a different team. The mission was organized so that both helicopters had the same capabilities. Chalk One mirrored Chalk Two. I had an officer on my team who would step in if Jay’s bird went down. Mike, our master chief, counted as part of my team, but once on the ground he was there to direct traffic and keep us on the timeline.
The layout of the target was still unfamiliar. I could see a diagram on one wall showing the compound and the arrow-like shape of its walls. I knew the guesthouse was a peripheral assignment; I’d be lying if I told you for a split second I didn’t wish I was going to be part of the team that was tasked with going to the roof of the main building, called A1. If all went as planned they would be the first team to make entry into the third floor, where Bin Laden was thought to be living. That wish quickly faded and I focused on what I was tasked with. There was plenty of action to go around, and I was just happy to be a part of the mission.
“Check,” I said, studying the chart. “Is Will coming back for this?”
Will rounded out my team. He was assigned to our sister squadron, which was already based in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. A self-taught Arabic speaker, Will would be able to communicate with Bin Laden’s family.
“You’ll link up with Will in J-bad,” Mike said. “I’ve got a meeting now, but check out the model. They spent good money on this thing. The rest of the guys should be back from breakfast in a few minutes.”
I walked out of the operations center and poked around the building, sipping a coffee. Our equipment was strewn all over the floor in a room just off the foyer. Pelican cases with weapons were open in one corner. Radios on chargers lined the far wall next to bags of tools. A chart printer was pushed into one corner. Crowding another corner were several white boards and easels with writing pads attached for note taking.
I found the mock-up of Bin Laden’s compound just outside the doors to the main briefing room. It sat on a five-foot-by-five-foot plywood base. It was made of foam; a massive wooden box secured by several padlocks sat in the corner of the room. The box covered the model when it wasn’t being used.
The model showed Bin Laden’s house in amazing detail, right down to the small trees in the courtyard and cars in the driveway and on the road that ran along the north side of the compound. It also had the location of the compound’s gates and doors, water tanks on the roof, and even concertina wire running along the top of the wall. Grass covered the main courtyard. Even the neighbors’ houses and fields were rendered in almost exact detail.
Between sips of coffee, I studied the three-story house.
The one-acre compound was on Kakul Road in a residential neighborhood in the city of Abbottabad. The town, north of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, was named for British major James Abbott. It is the home of Pakistan’s military academy.
My other teammates were still eating breakfast, so I had the model to myself. I was eager to get started, but I was still trying to wrap my head around what I learned that morning. We were finally going after Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden was born March 10, 1957, in Riyadh. He was the seventh of fifty children. His father, Mohammed Awad bin Laden, was a construction billionaire, and his mother, Alia Ghanem from Syria, was his father’s tenth wife. Bin Laden barely knew his father. His parents divorced when he was ten years old. His mother married again, and he grew up with four stepsiblings.
In high school in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden joined an Islamic study group that memorized the entire Koran. In high school, he was exposed to fundamentalist Islam and Bin Laden grew his beard long like the Prophet Muhammad.
Bin Laden married his cousin when he was eighteen years old. They had a son in 1976, the same year Bin Laden graduated. He went to King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah and earned a degree in public administration.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Bin Laden relocated to Peshawar, Pakistan, and later Afghanistan. As a Muslim, it was his duty to fight the invading Soviets, he claimed. He built camps and trained mujahedeen, sometimes using aid from the United States. When the war ended in 1989, Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, but was disgusted by what he considered the corrupt royal government. In 1992, he spoke out against the Saudi government and was banished to Sudan.
A year later, he formed al Qaeda, meaning “the foundation” or “the base” in Arabic. His goal was to start a war with the United States to rally Muslims to create a single Arab country across the Middle East.
His war against the United States started in 1996 when al Qaeda blew up a truck in Saudi Arabia, killing U.S. troops stationed there. Under pressure from the international community, the Sudanese government exiled him, and Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan and the protection of the Taliban.
In 1998, al Qaeda became a household name when his group bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The attacks killed close to three hundred people. He followed up the embassy attacks by bombing the USS
For the last ten years, Coalition forces, including the United States, had been hunting for him along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Besides the 2007 spin-up, all of the intelligence we received had him hiding in Pakistan.
Soon, my teammates started to come in from breakfast. I was still studying the model when Tom walked into the room. He was one of the team leaders on Chalk One, and his team was responsible for clearing the first floor of the main building, called A1.
“They call him the Pacer because he walks for hours. They keep seeing the Pacer there,” Tom said as he pointed to a courtyard on the east side of the compound. “According to what the intel folks are saying, he walks out in the garden area to exercise from time to time. They think the Pacer is UBL.”
Walt and Charlie came in next. They both had big grins on their faces.
“You called it,” I said to Charlie. “How did they find him?”
“One of his couriers,” Charlie said. “He has two guys working for him.”
The day before, the CIA had briefed my teammates on the “Road to Abbottabad,” essentially how they found Bin Laden. In the operations center, there were several booklets full of intelligence about the area and Bin Laden. While we waited for the others to arrive from breakfast, I started to read the briefings. I was a day behind and wanted to get up to speed before the serious planning started.
Public sources later confirmed that the target compound, worth close to $1 million, was built in 2005, close to Pakistan’s military academy. It was much larger than other houses in the area and didn’t have a telephone or an Internet connection. The walls were built higher on the southern side of the compound to prevent people seeing inside the courtyard. Those walls blocked the view of the second and third floors. The windows on both the second and third floors of the main building were blacked out so no one could see in or out.
There was no evidence the Pacer had any contact outside of the compound. The residents burned their trash and had very little contact with their neighbors.
One of the people known to live at the compound was Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
The CIA learned of Ahmed al-Kuwaiti after the interrogation of a man named Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen and the alleged twentieth hijacker on September 11, 2001. Immigration agents barred him from entering the United States in August 2001 because they thought he was trying to immigrate illegally to the United States.
