explained how the raid’s success had depended on every member of the team present in the room, and gave examples. He cited the skill of the pilot setting the falling chopper down upright. He cited the middle-aged translator who was able to turn away the curious people outside the compound.
“I don’t know what we would have done if all those people had just started rushing the compound,” he said.
He cited others. He even mentioned Cairo, the dog.
“You had a dog?” the president asked, surprised.
“Yes, sir, we always have a dog with us,” the commander said.
“Well,” said Obama, “I would like to meet that dog.”
“Well, Mr. President, then I would advise you to bring treats,” said the commander sternly.
The men in the room laughed.
The commander then walked the president through details of the raid. When he made reference to some of the errors and controversy in the press about the details, Obama dismissed them.
“Don’t worry about it,” said the president. “That’s just Washington, that’s just media, that’s just noise.”
Again, the men laughed.
The commander described how going through the house and encountering bin Laden had happened quickly and without complication, from his perspective. He said he and the men had been surprised by how much potentially valuable material was upstairs, and how they had just begun rapidly stuffing it into bags. Perhaps the most complicated part of the mission, he said, had been herding the wives and children to a far corner of the compound while the downed chopper was rigged with explosives, making sure that no one was hurt when they blew it up.
When the commander finished, the president stood and thanked them. He described how, among his advisers, there had been a wide range of estimates about whether bin Laden was in the compound.
“But early on in this process I came to terms with the fact that there was always going to be a fifty-fifty case on the intelligence side,” he said. “I made the decision I did because I had one hundred percent confidence in your capability.” He called them “the finest small fighting force in the history of the world.”
Rhodes looked around the room and thought that the claim, while extreme, might actually be true. Here was the cream of JSOC, handpicked for this mission. Given the previous ten years of constant fighting, it was not likely there had ever been such a group of experienced assaulters, at least not in modern times. The president had earlier presented McRaven with a gift, a gold-plated tape measure, because he had not had one the night he tried to measure bin Laden’s body. Now he presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation, the highest honor the nation bestows on an entire military group. He then shook every hand in the room. He was startled and moved when the team presented him with a gift, a flag they had taken on the mission and had framed, signed on the back by all the team members. He hung it in his residence on the second floor of the White House.
When I spoke with the president in the Oval Office, he reflected on how drones represented the most remarkable new tool he had in fighting al Qaeda
“I think creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and for my successors for some time to come—partly because that technology may evolve fairly rapidly for other countries as well, and there’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems.”
But nearly as remarkable, he said, was the evolution of small, highly skilled teams of warriors like those SEALs.
“I think with Special Forces, the dangers [of using them too liberally] are smaller because the human element is still there. Those are still somebody’s dad, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son. When you send them in, you know they may not come back. And for me at least, as commander in chief, I don’t think about that any more casually than I do when I’m sending some green kid off to Kandahar. I think there’s just a solemnity and caution that that instills in me that probably won’t go away. I do think that just from a broader military strategy perspective, that we can’t overstate what Special Forces can do. Special Forces are well designed to deal with very specific targets in difficult terrain and oftentimes can prevent us from making the bigger strategic mistakes of sending forces in, with big footprints and so forth. And so when you’re talking about dealing with terrorist networks in failed states, or states that don’t have capacity, you can see that as actually being less intrusive, less dangerous, less problematic for the country involved.
“But ultimately, none of this stuff works if we’re not partnering effectively with other countries, if we’re not engaging in smart diplomacy, if we’re not trying to change our image in the Muslim world to reduce recruits [to extremism]. It’s not an end-all, be-all. I’m sure glad we have it, though.”
Taken together, these capabilities, this weapon forged to fight the latest kind of war, has all but done the job. I asked what the impact of bin Laden’s death had been on al Qaeda.
“It was what we anticipated,” he said. “They are without focus, without effective leadership. And when you combine that with the degradation of their operational personnel, they’re on the way to strategic defeat. But again, you can’t overstate the importance of these other elements of American power, because even before bin Laden was killed, we had already seen the operational capacity of al Qaeda shift to AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and Yemen. We had already seen al Qaeda metastasize into al Qaeda in Maghreb. And so the need for vigilance and stick-to-it-ness is critical.
“And what we’ve also seen is the capacity of lone-wolf terrorists to do damage—not the kind of damage we saw on 9/11, but damage that is still obviously painful, and we’ve got to do something about. So it [killing bin Laden] didn’t solve all our problems, and we didn’t expect it to. But it was a big piece of business. And I’ll always be grateful for both the intelligence and the military personnel who were involved in it. They deserve all the credit.”
In the days after the raid, an album of photographs was delivered to the White House, a series of shots of the dead bin Laden. There would be much discussion that week about whether these photos should be made public, as proof of death, but the president had firmly decided that they would not. The decision was made easier because no one disputed the fact of bin Laden’s death. America was not, the president said, going to “spike the football.”
As the White House had worked that Sunday night to get the message out, stumbling on the presentation but basking in the country’s exhilarated response, Admiral McRaven’s men were, in the early hours of Monday morning, at work preparing for the disposal of the Sheik’s body.
After much discussion and advice, it had been decided that the best option would be burial at sea. That way there would be no shrine for the martyr’s misguided followers. So the body was washed, photographed from every conceivable angle, and then flown on a V-22 Osprey to the aircraft carrier USS
As a formality, the State Department contacted Saudi Arabia’s government and offered to deliver the body to his home country, but bin Laden was as unwanted there in death as he had been in life. Told that the alternative was burial at sea, the Saudi official said, “We like your plan.”
Procedures for a simple Muslim burial were performed on the carrier. The body was wrapped in a white shroud with weights to sink it.
The last sequence of color photos in the death album were not grotesque. They were strangely moving. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight Monday morning, May 2. One frame shows the body wrapped in the weighted white shroud. The next shows it diagonal on a flat board, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water with a small splash. In the next it is visible just below the surface, a ghostly torpedo descending. In the next shot there are only circular ripples on the blue surface. In the final frame the waters are calm.
The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.
Acknowledgments and Notes
On the theory that Osama bin Laden’s command of his native language was comparable to the average English speaker’s mastery of his native tongue, I have taken the liberty of here and there smoothing out the clumsy
