The Operation that Killed Osama bin Laden

morning that's wonderful to see you all this is this is our fourth year of our partnership with the Smithsonian to do this series on intelligence on espionage and every year I have to say we get a bigger and bigger turnout and I'm not sure what to do about that anyway welcome to all of you we're delighted you're here i'm peter ernest the executive director and as a courtesy to the speaker if you'd be kind enough to turn off your your cell phones and other recording devices and so forth very much appreciate that thank you let me just touch on a couple of quick things before we start one is some of you may have noticed in the back of the room there is a display of the compound at ibadah bad where the raid was conducted that brought down as the president said brought Osama bin Laden to justice that those are photographs of the actual compound model used by the CIA in planning the raid the representatives there are from the National geospatial agency not from the foundation but from the agency itself so I think that you may well find them interesting to speak to talk with after the program is done and they will be there through that our speaker will be here afterwards also to sign books today we are very privileged to have I consider one of the absolute top authorities on the subject at issue here and the subject of issue of course is not simply the person of Osama bin Laden but the organization he founded al-qaeda and the movements associated with it as you know this is a very lively issue as we speak here today the issue is very hot there was a white paper that was leaked from the Department of Justice or made available however you choose to word it explaining the justification of targeted killings were if we're not going to be too Orwellian assassinations as you know that has been a very lively subject in our country by the people who are concerned about these issues which should be all of us in addition to that of course tomorrow are the confirmation hearings for the appointment of John Brennan as the director of CIA he has been the president's advisor for four years on terrorism and intelligence matters so that also is very lively as an issue so that said Peter Bergen our speaker today is a well-known and very respected print and in television journalist he currently is the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation here in town a research fellow at New York University's Center on law and security and CNN's national security analyst in 2008 he was an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and he has also been an adjunct professor here at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins he has had many contributions to the field of public knowledge on Osama bin-laden on al Qaeda and on the al Qaeda movement in 1997 as a producer for CNN he produced the bin Laden the first television interview of bin Laden and the first time he declared war on the West Peter Bergen was part of that interview and actually did interview bin Laden he has written a number of books on the subject under discussion today I might say his most recent is manhunt which we have here to finish on Peter this is his latest book the other books he's done the longest war Osama bin Laden I knew holy war inside the secret world of bin Laden have been all virtually all New York Times bestsellers they have been recognized and put in for awards and in most cases a TV documentary has been made of them he's currently by the way a member of the national security preparedness group which is a successor to the 9/11 Commission so at this time and considering the nature of the subject we could not have a better speaker please help me welcome Peter Bergen thank you Peter Ernests for the introduction thank you to the spy museum for this invitation thank you all for coming today so you know it's interesting that the second in the series of these talks is how the Messiah captured Eichmann because as I was thinking about the hunt for bin Laden before he was captured I started read Neal Bascomb's very good book I'm on the hunt for Eichmann and I think one of the takeaways from that book is that you know you can hide but as human beings you're likely to make a mistake which will eventually lead to your being found and that's not always the case after all Mengele the angel of death at Auschwitz probably died in Rio de Janeiro in a drowning accident in 1970 I believe but in the case of Eichmann he must have thought that he he done a pretty good job of disappearing as you know he lived in Argentina for many many years but what gave him away was his as I recall is his son was sort of boasting to his girlfriend that his dad was sort of an important Nazi and she communicated this to her father who then called a friend of his who was a judge in Germany who had an interest in hunting down Nazi war criminals somehow Mossad got hold of this information and went into Buenos Aires and and as you know kidnapped Lightman and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial in 1962 so the reason I mentioned all that is in the context of the hunt for bin Laden people that the agency started looking at other manhunts for you know because they basically they didn't have any who's about where bin Laden was so they were looking at sort of broad lessons of other main hunts and Eichmann's certainly was one of the main hunts that they examined and again one of the big lessons here is that you know family may be the key to finding a fugitive often fugitives don't take their families with them in nights magnums case he did and in bin Laden's case he took three wives and a dozen kids and grandkids which is not a sort of typical kind of thing that a fugitive would take with him so you know blonde before bin Laden was captured I was interested in the hunt for bin Laden I was very aware that the hunt had basically it you know had basically that there were no leads I mean I in 2003 I talked to people involved in the hunt for bin Laden and they said various versions of you know the trails run cold we've hit a brick wall we just don't have anything and I was increasingly convinced over time that that story remained true in fact in 2010 I wrote a piece of the Washington Post basically saying the lead you know the hunt for bin Laden has you know it's going nowhere well unbeknownst to me and only known to a very few people at the CIA and the White House the hunt for bin Laden had actually sort of begun to pick up in August of 2010 and of course we all know the outcome of the hunt and when I started to sit down to write my book about the hunt a I had rather limited time to write it and report it which actually was good because I think it kind of gives an energy to the whole book because I didn't have a luxury of saying hey can I take another year which I've done in past books I sat down on may 2nd or may third and thought you know what are the big ideas that need to be communicated in this book what are the big questions that people would want to have the answers to and I thought there were five or six sort of themes that needed to be addressed you know obviously always bin Laden doing after 9/11 was kind of a big theme and of course much of that was hard to disentangle how is al-qaeda doing after 9/11 and to what extent was bin Laden involved in directing them the Agatha Christie story at the CIA about how bin Laden was found and as a sort of sub part of that the extent to which coercive interrogations were were not useful in the hunt for bin Laden coercive interrogations by the CIA the evolution of Joint Special Operations Command the Special Forces essentially Delta Force u.s. Navy SEALs the helicopter Special Operations Army helicopter regiment and because it's not at all clear that in 2002 that the operation could have gone as readily smoothly as it did with the Special Operations community at that time the evolving nature of the us-pakistan relationship because as you will recall us-pakistan relations in the time period that the m the raid on apt Avadh happened were at an all-time low and also obviously you know President Obama as a decision-maker because at the end of the day he made the decision and so I mean I begin the book you know there's a problem trying to tell a story that everybody knows the end of yeah and so I was trying to think how do I begin the book in a way that might sort of draw people in and be a little unexpected and so I begin the book with what was bin Laden what was Balaam's life and like in Abbottabad in the five and a half years he was living there what was his life like on the run as the world's most wanted man and the picture that you develop and I was able to actually get inside the compound where bin Laden lived before I didn't know it was going to happen two weeks later the Pakistanis demolished it I was the first outside observer to get in to look at it the the picture is you know bin Laden has always been a very careful with money like like a lot of not like some children of very rich families he's always being pretty careful with money but he was also running out of money during this time period so money was tight I examined the gas and electricity bills for this compound they were paying maybe $50 a month in a compound that has 24 people in a place that is quite cold in the winter and quite hot in the summer there was no air conditioning there was very rudimentary heating bin laden's three wives the oldest wife Korea who's from Saudi Arabia has a PhD she was 62 at the time of the 2011 she had recently done a fairly extraordinary things she'd been living in exile in Iran in 2010 she travelled from Tehran through Waziristan to AB divide - to rejoin her husband who she hadn't seen in nine years that's a 1500 mile journey across some of the most most difficult terrain in the world she's described as a pretty tough customer the other wife was the 54 year old also Saudi PhD bin Laden's third wife she was also living in this compound and then he was young his youngest wife the Yemeni who was 29 at the time Amal is her name she had married bin Laden when he was when she was 17 and he was I believe 44 and he had described her as a to his other wives as a you know highly educated 30 year old while she turned out to be him sort of uneducated 17-year old and there was a little bit of tension in the beginning but at the in the house they all lived in some sort of relatively harmonious life because all the wives had signed up for two things that most people wouldn't necessarily sign up for one they all signed up for a life married to a jihadi war hero that was their motivation the oldest wives married bin Laden in the mid 80s when he was already developing reputation as a war hero fighting the Soviets and the youngest wife married bin Laden a couple of years before the 9/11 attacks when he was developing a refugee a sort of global jihadist s' and that was one of the key motivations they had for marrying him also all these wives were second third fourth fifth wives so they all went into the marriage knowing was a polygamous arrangement and in fact not any nothing it was a policeman but believing that this is sanctioned and and desirable according to God so they lived in relative harmony they were growing their own crops in the house and in the in the compound garden they were raising cattle for milk they were raising chickens for eggs they were raising they had bees to make honey it was a kind of you know pretty self-contained which of course had a security aspect to it because they didn't have to go out that much to get things you know occasional trips to the doctor's when the kids got ill and they were buying some household products I noticed for instance in bin Laden's bedroom that he had a just for man hair dye Pakistani version so he they were he was dying his beard and he was now at 54 and and and quite vain about his public appearances and so they were occasionally going out to buy things but they were mostly able to live in this compound without going out and of course bin Laden never it not didn't it's not either didn't leave the compound he very rarely left the second and third floor the main house he would do occasionally you would take a walk in the garden but even then it was under a tarpaulin that prevented satellites you getting a clear picture of him so he was being very careful and he built the house in such a way in 2005 that it was designed to prevent easy surveillance from almost any angle bin Laden lived on the third floor here basically his bedroom with his youngest wife a tiny toilet about the size of this lectern obviou was one of those sort of squat toilets so not nothing very you know sophisticated and then a small kitchen and then next to that was his study and he had windows in the study which gave onto a terrace very small but the terrorists had 7-foot walls so you could not see in at all you also by the way couldn't see out very well which on the night of the raid a problem for bin Laden and so he created this sort of prison of his own making it was designed to make sure that people didn't know he was there and it was pretty successful for some period of time his days were spent his his bodyguards the courier you know we print up stuff off the internet bin Laden would spend many of his days writing in one case a 46 page memo to his chief of staff in al-qaeda he would be reading ironically a number of English books one of them a book that he actually published he said he really enjoyed was written by Mike soya who of course ran the bin Laden unit at CIA and Mike Shaw I wrote a book called Imperial hubris with a sort of basic premise that the Bush administration was I think the title speaks for itself and to pro-israel and etc etc etc so bin Laden was reading these kinds of books in English he was composing these lengthy memos to al-qaeda he was lecturing his family on religious matters he was watching al-jazeera we know from those videotapes he was watching old - the video of himself on al-jazeera and you know it was a confining existence on the other hand for the world's most wanted man it was not a bad life and he was with his three wives and a dozen kids and grandkids and I don't think that he ever expected that he would be found which brings us to the question of how was he found which is a long story it begins with Abu Ahmed al-kuwaiti is then it was the alias of the courier who was bin Laden's courier and he didn't require great acts of inductive logic to realize that bin Laden was relying on a courier network because then I'm not just give you a few examples after 9/11 bin Laden released 30 video tapes at least 30 video tapes and audio tapes mostly audio tapes these audio tapes and video tapes would often go to Al Jazeera's Bureau or NS I'm about or Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha not all of them the ones that went to Islamabad were physically taken there by a particular person and handed to Amman said on who is the al-jazeera bureau chief and this happened on two occasions once in the late 2002 and once just before the presidential election in 2004 u.s. presidential election so clearly there were people physically taking these tapes this was not something you needed to be in the CIA tan to understand I'm Ahmed Zidane who I interviewed for a multiple number of my books and he would spend a lot of time with bin Laden you know he was very public about the fact that you know he was in a car park and you could perceive that sort of calm said you know come at a certain time late at night on a Sunday and we're going to we have something for you and it turned out to be a bin Laden audio tape or a bin Laden videotape so bin Laden was communicating by couriers and the CIA in 2005 a female analyst wrote a memo basically you know the program was called it had a title that I'm forgetting for one second eat it had basically outlined it was called pillars and basically said you know given the fact that we don't have any real information about where bin Laden is or any really good leads we need to kind of go back to basics and we need to think about on what pillars are the hunt for bin Laden going to rest and the pillars were for bin Laden's communication with the media including Al Jazeera can we trace back the chain of custody of these tapes back to bin Laden bin Laden's courier Network in general bin Laden's communication with his family and bin lands communications with other leaders within al Qaeda and most of these things didn't really pan out the they could never trace the chain of custody back from a particular al Jazeera delivery to bin Laden bin Laden's immediate family was either actually with him therefore not needing to communicate with him or they were not if they were in Saudi Arabia they were not communicating with him at all and communications with other leaders of Al Qaeda never nothing that was intercepted that could ever lead back to bin Laden so it really became in what general Mike Hayden the former director of the CIA calls a bank shot with the bank shot would be you find the courier and then you'd find bin Laden so it was a matter of trying to assess who was in the courier network now the first time Abu Ahmed al-kuwaiti name seems to have been mentioned what's available on the public record is in and by the way WikiLeaks was very useful for this for the discussion I'm about to give you because WikiLeaks you know WikiLeaks there were hundreds of thousands or millions of documents some of which you know merely because things are secret doesn't mean that true and so and much of it is sort of undigested we're all intelligence and but what is particularly useful for an account like this is in the WikiLeaks sort of dump there were the the summaries of the interrogations of people held at Guantanamo and these summarize summarize you know hunt sometimes you know hundreds of interrogation sessions of one detainee and of course not in the old not all the information may be true but a lot of it is quite interesting and some of it is true so in the case of one particular detainee when you can see this yourself if you go out after this session if you're interested in looking at it the detainee that first seems to have mentioned the courier at least his alias maybe not his role was the real 20th hijacker than the real 20th hijacker was not Zacharias Moussaoui who was tried in Alexandria Virginia and it was in Minneapolis in Minnesota sort of taking flight lessons of making kind of a spectral of himself in the pre 911 time period the real 20th hijacker went to Orlando Airport in the summer of 2001 his name's Mohammed al-qahtani he's a extremely uneducated Saudi in fact so unsophisticated that he continues to believe even as an adult that the that the Sun revolved around the earth so he he was not a sophisticated guy he was basically contracted by al-qaeda to be the 20th hijacker one of the muscle hijackers who would restrain the passengers he was likely going to be on United flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania if he'd been on the flight maybe that would have turned out differently anyway an AI NS officer when Kotani came to immigration there was something suspicious about his story this guy didn't speak English he didn't I had a one-way ticket he had very little money his story about what he plan to do in the States didn't add up and so the officer said sorry you have to go back to Saudi Arabia and this Mohammed al-qahtani got all enraged and said I'll be back and and was sent back to Saudi Arabia he then went from there to Afghanistan he was at the Battle of Tora Bora in December of 2001 where bin Laden also was he crossed the border into Pakistan on December 15th he and quite a number of bin Laden's bodyguards were picked up by the Pakistanis they were then handed over the United States and they were then sent to Guantanamo so in Guantanamo Mohammed al-qahtani initially said that he was in Afghanistan because it is Kenan trust in for canary which was not of course true and he he he was and at a certain point they connected Mohammed al-qahtani the fingerprints of Mohammed al-qahtani to the angry young man in Orlando Airport who was going to be the 20th hijacker he'd been sent back at that point he became the subject robbers of intense interest from interrogators and he was subjected to a series of coercive interrogations that Susan Crawford who was a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan and then was appointed to run that military commissions at Guantanamo by George W Bush said that his treatment amounted to torture and he could never be tried for anything and just to give you a sense of the treatment he was kept up for and this by the way was this is a rare example of actual coercive or the own example of coercive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo usually in there NCI secret prisons rather than the military detention camp at Guantanamo anyway he was kept up for about 44 days straight I mean he was given time to sleep occasionally but he was more or less continuously interrogated he was subjected to cold cold and heat he was he was a strip naked and forefront of females when he was falling asleep he was treated to some especially annoying track by Christina Aguilera and he anyway he was he was definitely abused and he he and he by the way the FBI which was monitoring some of this you know an FBI official wrote a note to headquarters saying this guy is being pushed over the edge he's having delusions he is cowering in the corner he seems to be having some sort of paranoid schizophrenic breakdown so the FBI which was always against these techniques and objected and also said that this guy's you know being being abused in a very serious way at some point and it's not exactly clear when the 20th hijacker Mohammed al-qahtani said the person who trained me on operational security is this guy called Abu Ahmed al-kuwaiti which means the father of Ahmed from Kuwait and that's the first time that the US government came to realize that Kuwaiti played some kind of in a role in al-qaeda now Peter earnest mentioned John Brennan's confirmation hearing tomorrow Dianne Feinstein who will be leading you know as the head of a committee has publicly said the coercive interrogation techniques did not provide provide the leads that led to bin Laden and as you know the Senate Intelligence Committee has been doing a three-year investigation of this question they've written a 6,000 page report none of which has been Declassified although some of its key findings have been publicly explained by Senator Dianne Feinstein she says that there was no evidence that coercive interrogations led to bin Laden I believed her for two reasons or three reasons perhaps first of all I think Dianne Feinstein is a very serious individual extremely unlikely that she would say after it's been a very thorough investigation now certain people in the CIA say look we this this investigation hasn't been found because you haven't talked to the officers involved I actually think that's actually the wrong way around to look at it because I think documents tend not to lie or forget and if you lose it's really the documentary record that is necessary here who said what when and you can get some of that from WikiLeaks but obviously the stuff that is there to be declassified can really give you the kind of the exact chronology of who said what and when because each of these interrogation reports is dated you can see in the WikiLeaks interrogation summaries that every interrogation summary is is dated and named in some way so from what's available in the public record it's not clear if kuwaiti said this if Kuwaitis name came before or after these coercive interrogations but I think it will become clearer and certainly to Senator Dianne Feinstein says that this kind of information came out previously previously coercive interrogation techniques being used although there was a caveat here because the interrogation I'm describing actually didn't happen in a CIA c4 prison it happened in Guantanamo anyway so suffice to say the issue is you know it's it's it's a little complex particularly when so much of what we need to know remains classified and if there's any you know Peter owners before we just had this before I came on the stage we were talking about zero dark thirty and the extent to which you know it's put this issue back into play and I think zero dark thirty is a you know extremely good piece of film I'm not sure it's a particularly good piece of history since it will give most viewers I think the impression that coercive interrogations were critical to the finding of bin Laden they were certainly part of the history of the war on terror but that's a separate issue for about that then were they really useful in the hunt for bin Laden we will know more we may even know some more tomorrow because I think one of the questions that Senator Dianne Feinstein's going to ask Brennan or or Senator Ron Wyden or somebody is what's your opinion about how useful coercive interrogations were and in particular today helped in the hunt for the man because there's no probably no official in the US government who was more involved in that hunt John Brennan himself and I think that will pose an interesting moment for Brennan because he he's in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the leadership which said that these these interrogation techniques were not useful in finding bin Laden yet he's going to be taking over an agency where quite a lot of the people who work there I think that these interrogation techniques were useful and may even be useful and finding finding bin Laden so it'll be interesting to see what he has to say about this issue returning to the story about the hunt so al-kuwaiti ahmed up from kuwait is regarded as somebody important within al-qaeda but you know there are millions of people from Kuwait and lots of them had kids called Ahmed so Ahmed from Kuwait is not a particularly helpful you know it's just it's a beginning but it's not it's a very long way from where you really want to be in 2004 a guy called Hassan Ghul was arrested in Iraq and he's a Pakistani citizen who was carrying a letter between the leaders of al-qaeda in Iraq and the leaders of al-qaeda in Waziristan or in Pakistan essentially he was a letter from Abu Musab al-zarqawi to bin Laden and the letter basically was saying we need to start a sort of sectarian civil war in Iraq in order to get the Sunnis to kind of rise up and kind of join us and against the shield and unfortunately that project worked out all too well but Hassan Ghul was arrested and he was taken into Kurdish custody and at some point again not exactly clear when he said that and then he was taken to a CIA secret prison where he was coercively interrogated but not waterboarded he said that Abu Ahmed al-kuwaiti was one of the Laden's couriers so this is really the first time that you have an association of this guy with the courier network around the same time Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the operational commander of 9/11 and his successor above Raja al Libi who was also captured in 2005 both said that I blew Ahmed al-kuwaiti wasn't important or had retired from Alki which is an unusual kind of not many people usually retire from the group but so and of course that made Abu Ahmed al-kuwaiti of more interest to the agency because at the end of the day they knew that he was a player in al-qaeda the fact that Kaos am how the Sheikh Mohammed and his successor was sort of waving them away kind of increased their interest in this guy now in 2007 the agency found out the real name of the courier and the real name of the courier was Ibrahim Saeed and he wasn't Kuwait he was a Pakistani whose father who had emigrated to Kuwait and like a lot of Pakistanis was sort of second-class citizens in Kuwait could never get citizenship and so this made him particularly interesting to Al Qaeda's leadership because he grown up in Kuwait spoke spoke Arabic fluently he also came from the Northwest Frontier Province in half in Pakistan which of course is where Al Qaeda was then you know headquarters and was a Pashtun and can speak the local languages and blend in so he was in a sense the perfect courier for bin Laden and he also known Ben part of al Qaeda since in the pre 9/11 time period and was somebody they trusted completely so in 2007 it's not exactly clear how but I think the Pakistanis gave the name to the agency and I could never really nail this down they had a real name Ibrahim say but again this is sort of a John Smith name it's not an alias but it's a lot of you know hundred eighty million people in Pakistan twice the size of California it's still a long way from finding bin Laden and then and I pass to this story that I don't know the we're going to keep finding out about in 2010 Ibrahim Saeed the courier a black man al Kuwaiti made a phone call to somebody in the Gulf saying you know how are you and the person the Gulf said are you with the people that you used to be with and there were sort of a pregnant pause and he said yes and then and that was the sum total of the conversation that conversation which NSA or National Security Agency was listening to and it's not clear if they were listening to Syed or the guy in the Gulf or both or what prompted their interest in this call kind of confirmed to the agency a couple of things that were very important it confirmed them something they weren't sure about which is they weren't completely sure that this guy was still in al-qaeda and this phone call seemed to indicate that he was secondly it they were able to geo locate this phone call to Peshawar Pakistan which is a city of several million people in western Pakistan but the courier was practicing very careful operational security not only was he turning his phone off an hour away from where he lived he was also taking the battery out so you really can't track a phone with the battery out and so Peshawar is two and a half hours drive from up to bad where bin Laden was living and so at a certain point the agency put people on the ground to follow this guy or put a tracking device on it's on his vehicle when they could locate it in Peshawar Pakistan and eventually it led them back to this relatively small Pakistani city of AB divide which is about four thousand feet above sea level it's sort of a retirement community for retired Pakistani military officers it's as you know the site of Pakistan's West Point the Pakistan military academy it is a quite a pleasant place it has a very nice Golf Course has views of the mountains Canfield's looks have looked a little bit like Bavaria perhaps with if you kind of squint a little and-and-and it's sort of a tourist destination I mean you know and it people stopped off there on the way up to the CARICOM highway to China it's a definite poor tourist destination for Pakistanis escaping you know the kind of heaving hot some of the Pakistani cities like Karachi or other cities and in fact when Leon Panetta goes the CIA director goes to view of the walk of the Oval Office to brief President Obama about this he he describes it basically a little bit like a retirement community in Virginia to the presidents of 30 miles outside and outside the capital so in August 12 2010 Panetta briefs president he briefs the vice president John Brennan Denis McDonough who's now the chief of staff and Tom Donnell and the national security adviser and this is a very small group of people and basically says you know we think we had its lead on bin Laden in October but it's a you know it's a circumstantially there's a circumstantial case he's there there's no evidence and people are not high-fiving at all at this point because if you recall just a few months earlier arguably one of the biggest CIA you know kind of failures had happened in host and eastern Afghanistan where the Best Lead they'd ever had on Ayman al-zawahri now the leader of al Qaeda turned out to be a Jordanian double agent who wasn't working to expose Ayman al-zawahri he was been being recruited by Al Qaeda and conducted a suicide operation in host which killed seven CIA employees and contractors on December 30 of 2009 and so people were well aware when Panetta came with this information that other lis promising leads had ended very poorly or just simply not panned out I mean there was so many times you know the agency in the elite in the initial years had lots of Elvis sightings which they had to sort of you know follow up and there was a you know every time a story popped up about bin Laden it had to be chased down but over time the agency became more and more convinced that he was living in Pakistan that he hadn't gone to Yemen or some other country and here was Panetta explaining and the case about why bin Laden was living in octopi which was really the case about the courier with that I've already laid out so that became that began a period of sort of intense focus on this compound and who was living there and and you know as time went on the more and more information about the pattern of life of this the occupants the compound came out there were three families living there the third family there was a man who didn't take who didn't go out who they nicknamed the Pacer because he would take these quick walks around the garden under the tarpaulin and it seemed to correspond with what they knew about bin Laden the number of wives a number of kids they did things like observe how many female the male undergarments were on washing lines to get a sense of who was living in a compound they faced a problem about they couldn't do very aggressive surveillance or or knocking on the door of the compound they didn't want to spook the inhabitants Panetta was kept pushing for better information at one point Jeremy bash his chief of staff went to the bin Laden unit at CIA and said you have to convince the boss you're doing absolutely everything in your power to you know get inside the compound in some way come up with 25 ideas of some of them are wacky it's fine but just convince him you're being creative and they came up with a number of ideas some of which clearly were more creative than others one of the idea was was to broadcast in Arabic the voice of Allah sort of demanding that the occupants theory or the compound come out and playing on the presumed religious fanaticism of the inhabitants of the compound another idea was that you know very simple one was to throw a stink bomb into the compound and just get people out that way those ideas of course didn't happen but one of the creative ideas created but certainly ethically dubious was to mount a sort of false flag vaccination program in Abbottabad that would get the DNA that has been Laden kids as you know this is a very sensitive issue in Pakistan we've had multiple multiple polio workers who've been killed recently because of the kind of religious fundamentalist view but this is sort of a CIA plot so unfortunately this idea kind of played into a lot of kind of Pakistani kind of conspiracy theories and in fact it never got the DNA of the kids I mean what happened with the doctor who was recruited dr. Afridi he started he recruited some nurses he then started a vaccination Drive in one of the poorer parts of AB divide in order not to sort of to give this a back story that seemed plausible rather than starting immediately an AB divide but they never they never were able to get people inside the compound to come out and give take the vaccination and acquire the DNA for a potential DNA match with bin Laden DNA held by the US government so CIA you know was Panetta kept pushing we need to improve the intelligence picture and and and it didn't really improve they don't there was a certain level at which it remained steady and at a certain point President Obama probably by January of 2011 began to sort of move on from the question of and are we going to get better intelligence to what do we need to do about this place and basically there were four or five options that were considered at this point there were three people of the Pentagon who knew about this Admiral Mullen the chairman of the Joint Chiefs james Cartwright the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Mike Vickers who's the civilian overseer of special operations now the civilian the lead intelligence official of the panickin at a certain point he bought Michele Flournoy who was the undersecretary for policy and because as they began thinking about planning one of the big things they had to think about was what are we going to do with the Pakistanis are we going to tell them how are we going to deal with this and Flournoy and also by the way parenthetically you know if this all goes sort of if is that if this is a disaster we need to be thinking very carefully about how we supply our troops in Afghanistan almost all our material at that point transited by ground or by air through Pakistani ground or Pakistani airspace and so very quietly they began developing a so-called northern distribution network which basically brought material in from the former the Central Asian states the former Soviet Union it's a much longer route but basically they wanted and there were sound reasons they could publicly say fit but they really want like you know spread our you know spread our bets here essentially but that made the real reason which was an only into Robert Gates and a Michele Flournoy and the handful of people who knew what was going on was that they needed a plan in case the Pakistanis closed down all these routes if the bin Laden raid sort of went wrong in some way so the Pentagon Vickers calls Admiral bill McRaven the head of Joint Special Operations Command and Afghanistan tells him to come to the Washington says we need to tell you something they tell him what they know at the CIA and they show him a compound the model of the compound that is that the National geospatial imagery agency very kindly has brought here and McRaven looked at that compound and the you know you didn't say what he was thinking which is if the plan is to bomb this place that's going to be a pretty big operation I mean this is an acre compound that stretches over an acre and so one of the first options they considered was a b-2 bombing raid well when they did the math it would have been 30 to 500-pound bombs James can't write the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs pointed out that would be like having a small earthquake in a you know sizable Pakistani city and it came fraida with all sorts of problems you couldn't even prove to yourself that you've got bin Laden because of DNA and everything else would evaporate the be knowing intelligence collection you'd be bombing an ally they were absurdly be civilian casualties not in the compound but in surrounding areas and it would have just been it that was quickly sort of dismissed as a bad idea another idea was a joint operation with the Pakistanis now there had been those in the past how the Sheikh Mohammed the operational commander of 9/11 was arrested in royal pindy it was a joint operation but then it-- between the CIA and ISI and the pack mil and you know that went pretty well but of course relations with the Pakistanis were a you know basically an all-time low you recall that Sir Raymond Davis a CIA contractor had killed two Pakistanis in broad daylight in Lahore who he said were robbing him and the US government including the president said all sorts of false things about who this guy was it was pretty obvious that this was not a conventional diplomat who you know was like this very bulked up guy who shot two people in the street and and over time the US government had to admit that actually yes he was a CIA contractor will this played into every kind of conspiracy theory and in fact well-founded fear in Pakistan that their countries awash with CIA spies and and then of course of the drone program which was at its height in 2010 there were 122 drone strikes the most I've ever been in anywhere by the CIA and relations were at a low ebb so Michele Flournoy who was thinking through what to do about the Pakistanis you know there was a serious discussion shall we include them should we tell them after the fact shall we tell them just before and the end they decided to tell them after the fact and in fact I think for the Pakistanis were quite annoyed about this particularly people who dull most directly with the CIA and the top level the I side director and the Chief of Army Staff General Kayani but I think that in them if they sort of thought about it later if they had been told I think it would be problematic for them also because they could truthfully say we had no idea that it's going to happen which made them seem you know sort of out of the loop but on the other hand it didn't make them complicit in operation that lot of Pakistanis didn't like not that they liked bin Laden but they didn't like this sort of abrogation of their national sovereignty in a u.s. Navy SEAL team assault so the second option of doing a joint operation with the Pakistanis was dismissed so it became sort of three options one was a drone strike using a experimental munition that had never been used in combat no one would tell me about exactly what this was but I talked to enough people that realizes it was not a typical bomb the smallest bomb the US Air Force drops is five hundred pounds and then people just what they were describing didn't kind of accord with this and I did you know it's a little bit of internet research and it became clear that Raytheon has been developing a nine pound bomb for the last three years and it seems to correspond very very much to what they were describing Admiral Mullen who spoke to me on the record was very opposed to this idea he said we put too much faith in our technological prowess this is not the right way to go James can't ride whoo though his number two was always in favor of this option or at least for the public it was he was sort of saying we can do this now the drone strike had several it had some downsides and some upsides the downside it might miss which drone strikes and you can actually hit people with a drone and they don't die so there was there was that secondly there was the possibility that it might hit the wrong person and there was also again the possibility you wouldn't have the intelligence collection at the scene you couldn't really be completely certain that you've got bin Laden and and and also this thing had never been used in combat then the fourth operation fourth option of course was the US Navy SEAL operation and the fifth option which is always there was like this just wait let's just kick the can down the road try and gather more intelligence and this is a very natural human reaction to any situation which is let's just wait and see but there were problems with just waiting and seeing because as you began to operationalize the possibility of doing a raid or a drone strike or anything you're bringing more and more people into the tent of knowledge now they don't have to know that it's a bin Laden raid but they know that something's going on at the White House for instance there was as one of the wonderful things they called the cordon on meetings which were meetings where there's no minutes and there's no you can't take a second and the cameras that are on the situation remote turned off and people begin to notice there were all these interesting meetings that they were being excluded from and clearly something was up and so you know there was a real concern John Brennan for instance began to be concerned about a leak and if you know what you know Tom Tom Donnellan has famously said there's one way to keep a secret in Washington don't tell anybody so but more and more people who were key being led into this and so they had a beginning planning for the possibility it might leak and he brought Ben Rhodes as strategic communications advisor in to sort of be able to explain this opera and they needed also to explain the operation whether it went well badly and differently they needed to explain to death this was a sec Satchel case but it was a good one at least in their view particularly if this operation went wrong they needed to be able to plan for some sort of public communication where you know seals were killed or wounded or taken hostage or there was a firefight with a Pakistani military or civilians killed or bin Laden not being there or some combination thereof all of which were quite possible so the final meeting to discuss all this and was Thursday April 28th at 5:00 p.m. in the Situation Room and President Obama went around the room basically said what do you think it wasn't a vote in a conventional sense but it was you know give me your opinion and I'll I'll make my decision and Robert Gates who've been a Stansfield turner's executive assistant aged as a 41 year old case officer 41 year old case CIA official was in the White House the night that Operation Desert Storm Operation Eagle Claw went wrong Operation Eagle Claw of course was the polished effort to rescue the 52 American hostages in the embassy in Tehran in 1980 and everything that could go wrong with that operation as I'm sure you recall did go wrong and and in fact one of the reasons we have a successful bin Laden raid is because of the lack of success of this raid because it came as a result of this bossed operation the four services all want to be part of this heroic operation they'd never done anything like this together it was all in fact I sat next to a vice president Mondale at lunch relevantly and he said you know one of the mistakes that we made was it was also highly secret and compartmentalised a lot of people then really understand exactly you know what the operation was it wasn't sort of so it was it people did there were no rehearsals of any meaningful work manner the Navy didn't maintain the helicopters very well that were used in the operation that was a sandstorm the helicopter on a c-130 crash together killing seven American servicemen it was a complete catastrophe and of course it made it was a contributing a large contributing factor to President Carter being a one-term president and now in every meeting that happened propogates would remind people of this disaster and here was another Democratic president launching a special operations operation on the other side of the world in a country that certainly isn't necessarily conventional Ally and he advised against the raid now we know from our Boden's book this was something I had a lot of problem nailing down in my book which came out I think nine months before bones book he gates change his mind but after the president made his decision President had already authorized the raid gates called Donnellan and said you know at now I'm in favor of the raid for no and Brennan Flournoy and Vickers went to gates the morning that Friday morning and said you hear the reasons we think the raid is a good idea but the bottom line is in the National Security Council meeting where people were giving advice gates said no and it was concern about the lack the intelligence that bin Laden was that a red team had recently come in one of the people on the red team and said there was only probably a 40% chance that bin Laden was in apt abide others said 60 percent at the end of the day President Obama makes the decision belong as either a hundred percent nabbed about or a hundred percent not there's no you know he's kind of yeah it's sort of easy to say these percentages but when you make the decision you're either right or wrong and at one point you know President Obama asked Mike Morell the acting director of the CIA why are people giving me these different percentages and morale said look it's about the weapons of mass destruction fiasco in Iraq anybody who was involved in that including myself is naturally skeptical of a circumstantial case people who've been in on the bin Laden hunt for years they're the people who really are confident that this has been long and and in fact mr. president Mike Morell said in terms of the circumstantial case there was more circumstantial evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction than there is circumstantial evidence that bin Laden was living in occupied so this is a pretty tough decision and so the people in the room on the final National Security Council meeting when the red team came in which was kind of late in the game now this had all been Reb teamed at the CIA before but another red team came in and when they suddenly saying there's a 40% chance now you know people are giving numbers where the possibility of the bin laden's living in apt about is actually going down as the decision has actually been made so that of course life President Biden was against the raid he had become a senator when Obama was 11 Robert Gates started working in the White House for Richard Nixon when Obama was 13 he'd said they're very presidents since that's a pretty serious group of people saying you know we don't we think is to see that SEAL team raid is a mistake James Cartwright the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs also was in favor of the drone strike and then on the other side of the room term Panetta was from the beginning in favor of the raid Admiral Mike Mullen was from the beginning in favor of the raid he actually attended the rehearsals that seals did in Nevada the final full dress rehearsal where they flew in the hour-and-a-half flight they had roughly the same temperature a full mock-up of the compound with one important detail wrong which was the mock-up of the compound had chain-link fencing where the real compound had concrete walls and that was a kind of important detail for what happens that on the night of the raid so Mullen had seen the rehearsals he knew bill McRaven very well he made a point of visiting JSOC headquarters in Afghanistan every time he was in Afghanistan and he was very much in favor of the raid and that's interesting because usually Mullen and gates would have been on the same side of an issue but here they were split and then Hillary Clinton who after all was a Senator in New York at the time the 9/11 attacks happened gave a long and lawyer the presentation of both the pros and the cons and no one knew where she was going at the end she said I'm in favor of the raid and for her I think it was a very emotional kind of decision I mean you know she she'd visited Ground Zero on September 12th when it was you know still smoking and you know many of her constituents had had died in in this in this attack and so I published my book on May 1st 2012 I didn't know that five days later governor Mitt Romney would say any president would have made this decision including Jimmy Carter and well Jim you can't have made a form of this decision which made him a one-term president and it's not at all clear to me Vice President Biden ran for the presidency I mean if you're the President Biden would have made this decision President Robert Gates would have made the citizen decision and it's easy sort of ex post facto say when you know the outcome I would have made his decision to but that wasn't at all clear to the people in the room and as you know things went wrong and one of the reasons that the operation worked as well as it did was the evolution of JSOC which I haven't really addressing very detail but you know it's a very different organization because of the work of General Stanley McChrystal and bill McRaven and Colonel general Flynn who's now the head of DIA it's a very different organization that it was in the pre 9/11 time period a much more you know an organization that does a dozen raids a night that for them the raid map divided from a technical point of view was very routine while wasn't routine was in a 150 200 miles inside a country which with which we have tricky relations so the reason the chain-link fencing is kind of important in the rehearsals is when the helicopters came in the temperature was a little higher than they anticipated these are stealth helicopters which are as far as I know never been used in a combat operation which makes them they're heavier and the EM when they go to the compound that the concrete walls around the compound produced a kind of some kind of wind effect that interfered with the stability of one of the helicopters on the Ray which crashed and it was only the skill of these incredibly skilled pilots who EA was able to sell it down in such a way that no one was even injured as they as the helicopter crashed and when when I don't know anything about these things but I'm reliably informed when a helicopter loses power it drops out of the sky like a stone it's not like a plane which has some you know kind of aerodynamic lift and so obviously what everyone in the White House the famous photograph when they were watching this everybody thought things were going wrong bill McRaven said you know we're going to have to amend the mission he was very low-key you know we for this contingency and and you know they they could see on the from the rq-170 spy spelled stealth drone two miles above the compound that people got out of the helicopter and the raid happened one of the interesting questions is here is you know could be laden had being captured or should have been captured and this is by the way the first question I have I my book has been published in Danish and jeremy's German and Norwegian and I was on a book tour there and the first question a European audience has is why didn't you capture bin Laden this is usually the tenth question in American audience hands though so but you know and I think it's a legitimate question and there was certainly a contingency plan for bin Laden being captured they had a contingency plan for anything they had their playbook which was like this thick with all the different things that could happen and there were branches and sequels so you know a captured bin Laden a captured wounded bin Laden a captured hostile bin Laden a captured compliant bin Laden and there was a team of interrogators FBI CIA high-value detainee interrogators at Bagram Air Force Base Arab linguist lawyers that would have basically taken bin Laden and then he would have been funded if this whole operation remain covert he would have been flown to the USS Carl Vinson cruising off the Arabian Sea where he would be later be buried at sea and he would have been held there for months and he would have been interrogated and it's in international waters and so there was that plan of course that plan never came to fruition bin Laden had 15 minutes of surrender because between the helicopter crashing which is a pretty loud event and him being killed it was 15 minutes he didn't surrender he didn't put up resistance either he had two guns in his room an ak-47 and a Makarov submachine gun pistol he didn't reach for them he didn't do anything and I'm you know unfortunately we can't ask him why not but you know I I think the first thing to say is that the electricity in the house was off the electricity in the neighborhood was off you see and zero dark thirty there all these lights and people that's completely not how it happened I mean obviously in a film you have to have lights otherwise you can't but but in reality it was completely pitch black and there was no moon and of course out that was one of the reasons that they had to make sort of go/no-go decision that we can because then they'd have to wait another month for no moon the seals or wearing night-vision goggles but you know it's a confusing situation it's been a helicopter crash in your house it was a firefight with the courier bin Laden is in a prison of his own making you know I described Howard you know he could no one could see any but he also couldn't see out and yet he may have contemplated that a firefight with the would have killed the look not quite a number of his wives and kids which is true it's a very enclosed space we may have been just paralyzed in surprise which is also true but anyway he didn't put up a fight now and what does it all mean you know it means justice for the victims of 9/11 and their families and restoration of American National Honor on this issue you know al Qaeda itself was was doing pretty poorly at the time of bin Laden's death and as there's no better witness for that than bin Laden himself we've had 17 of these documents from the AB divide compound have been released by West Point and they paint a picture of an organization that well understood its problem and problems al Qaeda bin Laden was advising Al Shabaab the Somali affiliate of al Qaeda don't use the name al Qaeda it's bad for fundraising you'll attract a lot of negative attention so he knew the al Qaeda brand was in deep trouble he was contemplating changing the name of the group to a lot of very uncanny things like the monotheism and jihad group and he had a lot of other potential names for the group but he he also knew they're running out of money he was extremely concerned about the US drone strikes he was suggesting that al Qaeda might have to move to eastern Afghanistan an area called Kuna which is heavily forested and very mountainous and therefore a good place to hide from American drones and satellites he was advocating his one of his sons Hamza to move to Qatar which of course is one of the riches is the richest country in the world per capita and also one of the safest moved from the tribal regions to gutter he he was blue skying about improbable attacks on David Petraeus and President Obama for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and so these documents paint the picture of an organization the picture that I had before reading these documents but it's interesting when people are aware of their own their own problems and balaam the deeply aware of his own problems and there's been a certain kind of impetus I think with the Benghazi attack of September and the attack on the Algerian gas facility in January to say al Qaeda is back which i think is completely nonsensical the idea that somehow an attack on a it's not even a American consulate it's in a CIA listening post in Benghazi Libya that was completely undefended means that al Qaeda and the four Americans that killed very tragically that somehow al Qaeda is back I mean al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans here in the United States in the course of basically one and a half hours on a Tuesday morning these things are orders of magnitude different and in fact there's been no al Qaeda attack in United States since 9/11 there's been no al Qaeda attack in the West since the London attacks of July 7 2005 al Qaeda or groups like it haven't taken over any Muslim country in fact most of their affiliates are in steep decline al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula controlled chunks of southern Yemen they don't anymore Jamar's Lamia they're Indonesian if Lily it was something people very concerned about in 2003 they're mostly out of business al Qaeda in Iraq controlled a third of the country in 2006 they don't they haven't gone away and they've reimbursed to some degree in Syria but they're not where they used to be al Shabab the somalia theory of al qaeda controlled most of southern somalia now it controls and almost nuttin controls no cities and only some rural areas and I mean I can go on giving other examples but the point is is that embedded in the DNA of these groups al Qaeda and affiliates and like-minded groups are the seeds of their own destruction they kill most mostly Muslim civilians which is not impressive for people that present themselves as the defenders of Islam and that was particularly true in Iraq and well reported in the Arab world when they come to power imposed Taliban style rule in the population most people don't want to live under the Taliban you know look at what happened in Mali you know the French until relatively recently Mali was part of their empire it's pretty unusual for your former you know the people that you used to control you to be greeted as liberators which the French Army have been greeted as liberators and people are dancing and singing in the streets for the French in Mali so you know that shows how the jihadi militants who ban singing in a country where thinking very important and smoking and amputated hands I mean how this is how they rule and they did that in Anbar province in Iraq they did that in they did that in Afghanistan pre 9/11 they've done that wherever they've kind of got power they'll try and do that they do that in South southern Yemen in 2011 most people don't want to live under this Taliban utopia and so they kill Muslim civilians they rule like the Taliban they have no answers for the real political and economic problems that beset the Muslim world they may have made a world of enemies there's not a category of institution person or government they haven't said they're opposed to the UN the media every Western government every Middle Eastern government every Muslim who doesn't precisely share their views Jews Christians you know Chinese government Russian government Indian government you know it's not a winning strategy to keep adding to your enemies and finally they weren't engaged in conventional politics and so they won't become Hezbollah Hamas I mean it's they're incapable of engaging international politics first of all because they think is Una's lamech to be involved in elections and secondly because they didn't do anything in al-qaeda Hospital is a oxymoron of the first order so they will not engage in conventional politics all of this is a recipe for either irrelevance or Daffy and you know the prognosis for these groups is very very poor and the death of bin Laden was just a giant punctuation point because he had founded al-qaeda 9/11 was his strategic inception a very bad strategic conception that an attack on the United States would provoke the United States to move out of the Middle East while we're more engaged in the least and we've been in our history we have huge bases and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar we have we just found out today that we have a drone base in Saudi Arabia from the Washington Post and you know we're engaged in sort of low-level war in Yemen and we're engaged in Afghanistan we were engaged in Iraq so his whole strategy was was a failure and you know after 9/11 a lot of people said this is like Pearl Harbor yes of course it was a surprise attack and that there was information in the system that should have perhaps been more seriously taken but it was also al-qaeda's Pearl Harbor and just as Pearl Harbor in a lot to be led to the collapse of Imperial Japan the 9/11 attacks led to the end of al-qaeda and in fact ended in al-qaeda's founder and leaders death so you know it's kind of a good news story it is a good news sort you know this group is they committed essentially a kamikaze attack on the United States they paid a tremendous price for it the al-qaeda means the base in Arabic they never recovered anything like the base they had in Afghanistan and they're left with a sort of a kind of mindless strategy that's never going to work and a tactic which is only violence and it's a sort of form of kneel ISM that is putting them on the wrong side of history and it's well understood around the Muslim world that they're not offering anything of any particular value so I'll take any questions go ahead do you think there was a chance at all to have captured Osama bin Laden in Bora Bora if we you if we would have used conventional US forces instead of relying on the Afghan knees I mean I think the short answer to that is yes or maybe I mean here is you know I get into that in some detail in the book again WikiLeaks was useful because it it kind of filled in some blanks I bent about it I mean to the I've been to the site of the battle bar Tora Bora twice I think if you you know the CIA officers and Delta Force officers who are on the ground I've interviewed the Afghan warlords on whom we relied and you know and then I've also interviewed by email general Tommy Franks who was in charge of the operation overall and you know what happened was Gary Bernsen who was a CIA officer in Kabul and his boss and Crumpton who was the overall special operations commander of CIA operations in Afghanistan both food and requested for a battalion of Rangers to go in there would be 800 Rangers and that was denied by by tommy franks and and why was it denied he says he said in an answer to an email that I sent him basically you know we want to reassure the bin Laden was there the intelligence was sort of mixed that is not I'm unfortunately that isn't the case I mean and you can check this very easy yourself Special Forces have written their own history of the Afghan war which is publicly available and according to the Special Forces history of the war multiple radio transmissions between December 9th and December 14th 2001 indicated bin Laden was in they could hear it maybe they could you know people people listening knew his voice there was a CIA guy on the ground who spent six years listening to bin Laden's forts and bin Laden was saying I'm sorry I've let you down Eve I'm leaving sir bin Laden was definitely that Tony Frank's also said you know we didn't want to make the same mistakes the Soviets you know too many American boots on the ground and that's the opposite you know I think also it's very hard for you to call right now but there was a kind of casualty reverse the environment at this time in the US military the idea that Americans couldn't stand US military casualties which is very strange immediately after 9/11 the last war that United States be engaged gauging in Kosovo war there were no casualties at this point in the Afghan war more journalists had died than American soldiers four journalists had died and one American soldier which was a CIA official which is Mike Spann at NASA Sharif so it all gone so well also you know this kind of using the special forces in the Afghan warlords to overthrow the Taliban they didn't work to get bin Laden now arguing against that let's save a hundred special Rangers have gone in you know Tora Bora of the Hat the mountains rise to 14,000 feet it's winter it's snowing it's December you know this is not an area that's very easy to seal the multiple mountain routes into Pakistan so the pipe the reason then you know the reason I say maybe is that they they didn't try and final point here is there are more journalists than I love Tora Bora than American soldiers which I think sort of speaks for itself you could get there if you wanted to it wasn't tried what about the hunt for bin Laden's number two is a warrior hmm a new preparing notes for your book on that you know I think I think I I think people would be less interested in the book about that because Sawa here is less important he's an important figure he's regarded as sort of divisive and he's released 27 statements since bin Laden's death none of which I think anybody's paying any attention to I think he's going to manage what remains about Qaeda central into the ground you could make an argument actually be good just leave him there because he's his replacement might be worse but yeah so sour here he's out there I'm surprised that he hasn't been found he was taking many more risks than bin Laden he's constantly using video tapes and audio tapes and books and critiques of other jihadists and you know he's but he was more public than Milan but somehow he's managed to escape he was almost killed in a drone strike in January of 2006 in a place called Amidala and the work on them and the tribal regions of Pakistan but yeah I'm sure people are spending 24/7 looking for him but so far there hasn't been any really good lead at one point after 9/11 george w bush was making a speech and someone asked him about bin Laden and he never he said he didn't think about bin Laden very much anymore and other terrorists out there and I thought about that the night of May 1st when bin Laden was killed when Obama made the speech and thousands of young people came from all over the area and Lafayette Square people that were teenagers at the most we're riding their bikes down to you know to be to celebrate and I just the juxtaposition of the president at that time saying he didn't think about him anymore and then all the young people celebrating I think President Bush did think about him a lot and he what he said publicly didn't mean what he thought privately I mean there was very sound reason not to sort of say hey you know the most important thing we have to do is find this guy and our problems will be magically resolved or you know there was a kind of realize you mean they didn't want to talk about him too much because it was embarrassing they hadn't found him but General Mike Hayden who was CIA director for much of the Bush presidency the latter part said that every morning at Thursday at 8 o'clock he would go in for a weekly meeting with the President and President George W Bush would look up from his desk and his glasses and would say how's it going Mike and everybody in the room you how's the game Mike was how's it going finding danlove yeah it wasn't so you know he was very intent on trying to find bin Laden and in fact if you look at the last six months of the Bush presidency the last in the second term the drone strikes I think in the first six months of 2008 there were maybe eight in the last six months of 2008 there were 44 and they killed quite a number of al Qaeda leaders and they were looking you know they basically given up on kind of getting they they decided to take the wall kind of sort of back from kind of a joint us-pakistan thing and more just a certain unilateral us and the drone strikes were designed to try and maybe try and you know either kill bin Laden or his leaders or kind of smoke him out and they I think they were pretty intent finding him at the end of the day the war on terror was really about bin Laden because if there would be no war on terror if the Taliban had handed him over in October of 2001 the invasion of Afghanistan wouldn't have happened the Taliban would still be in power probably in Afghanistan I think the Iraq war would may not have happened a lot of things would have haven't happened differently so I think there was a real focus on getting bin Laden they made some mistakes along the way Tommy Frankie Donald Rumsfeld never asked Tommy Franks do you need more people at the bow of Tora Bora which as the Secretary of Defense is part of his responsibility he never solicited from Franks some kind of alternative to what they were doing and I went back I looked at the public record of what officials were saying about bin Laden being at the battle Tora Bora Wolfowitz on December 11th 2001 said we think he's their Vice President Cheney was on the network saying we think he's there I mean there was a lot of understanding that he was there but they didn't IIIi think they were so the overthrow the Taliban was so successful and so quick that they didn't almost sort of internalize the fact that al Qaeda's leaders were at Tora Bora and we're going to escape or could escape and of course they did wait please it's early evidence that Pakistani government officials were aware of bin Laden's presence and a part of that yeah I mean it's hard to prove negatives but I think no and I thought that even before I started writing the book based on sort of dis logic which is you know I met with bin Laden 97 and we were subjected to an enormous amount of scrutiny just to do a TV interview with him they searched does they followed us they kind of isolated us these guys are very paranoid and secretive and disciplined so it struck me is why would in Laden clue in people in the Pakistani government about it was just unnecessary and secondly you know al Qaeda try to kill President Musharraf on two occasions in December of 2003 they were at war with the Pakistani government Pakistani government was at war with an Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the operational commander was as I said arrested wouldn't join us Pakistani relationship in 2003 so it didn't make sense of bin Laden would tell Pakistani officials now as I did my reporting on the book I found out that one of the adults living in the compound where bin Laden live didn't know he was living there so he was hiding even from some one of the adults on the compound one of the wives of the bodyguards that was protecting him didn't know was bin Laden and then we have these documents that have been recovered from the compound many thousands of them it was a smoking gun a real smoking gun that indicated Pakistani official complicity we probably know about it now I mean it's not like our relations with the Pakistanis are so great that we would keep that a secret so I'm I'm not at all convinced that there was Pakistani official complicity and it's hard to prove negatives but I there's nothing that anybody has seen or sad that and I've asked this crave same question everybody I interviewed in the book ask the same question too and you know very senior people and there was no evidence of Pakistani official complicity if your last statements of your speech are all true about the feelings of the Middle Eastern countries concerning al-qaeda and Taliban do you see you hold any hope that they really might do away with them so that there might be some peace brought to that region or at least a little less I don't think we're going to abolish jihadist violence I mean that's that's a standard which in every other war that we have fought we've never said we are going to kill or capture everybody who has these ideas it's an impossible standard and there will Jadus violence has been around since the dawn of Islam and just think about the assassins who are operating in what is now Iran in the 12th and 13th century who were sending out you know assassins from which we gain that useful noun to go and kill their political enemies so the standard should not be will these people just completely go away the Taliban by the way in certain parts of rural southern Afghanistan are like your neighbors I mean they're not the neighbors I would encourage necessarily but they are you know they reflect extremely conservative rural Pashtun social values pretty well so we're not going to get rid of them either so but you know al Qaeda is the answer to the Muslim world's problems I think very few Muslims think that they're the answer the Taliban is is the answer to Afghanistan's problems in polling across Afghanistan over the last six years huge polls the Taliban never scores more of a ten percent favorable which makes it extremely unlikely that they will come to power in a meaningful way again they may get district governorships or provincial governorships and that's fine if they engage in the conventional political process and I think elements the Taliban are in Parliament has be Islamic Taliban groups but I think our definition of victory to the extent that we can have one is that we've this is kind of a containable nuisance which okay occasionally deadly but think about the Somali pirates I mean once we kind of got ourselves organized around that and we have a lot of countries sort of participating in kind of extirpating this problem I mean it's been largely managed it's not going to go away Somalis have no money and this is one of the few ways you can make money and similarly I think jihadist violence is it's not going to disappear but you know there's we can just make it less and less relevant over time any of their Marxist Leninist here in the United States still that no one pays them any attention it's so we can't astana shouldn't be the total abolition of these ideas that are not useful because there always be some takers for bad ideas our standard should be like have we managed us our own security and in such a way that they're unlikely to impact us and I think we were well past that point and let me just give you some examples you know on on 9/11 there were 16 people on no-fly list now they're 20,000 on 9/11 the FBI and CIA Daddy talk to each other now they're highly integrated the FBI almost had no intelligence gathering function before 9/11 now has 2,000 intelligence analysts when 9/11 that were perhaps five joint terrorism task forces around the country now they're more than 100 when 9/11 there was no TSA when 9/11 there was no DHS on 9/11 there was no National Counterterrorism Center they're now eight hundred and sixty thousand Americans with top-secret clearances they're four and a half million with seek Terrence's and we've created is huge I mean you've made the argument it's not any redundant it sort of over redundant sort of national security apparatus designed to kind of attack this problem and you know it took a long time to the United States that made a lot of mistakes on the way but you know we have kind of learned from our mistakes mostly and we present an incredibly hard target and one of the things I hadn't mentioned very important public knowledge Richard Reid the so-called shoe bomber was disabled by the passengers and in the months after 9/11 when he try to drive a shoe bomb flight between Paris and Miami Abdulmutallab the Nigerian to try to grow up Christmas the Northwest flight to 5-3 on Christmas Day 2009 was disabled by the passengers the guy who tried to blow up an SUV in Times Square on May 1st 2010 was it was a street vendor who pointed out to the police of this SUV was smoking it seemed suspicious so all these things add up to a making I'll cut US the United States in the West in general very hard target and then you throw into that their own weaknesses and their own lack of successes I mean this is a woman yeah they if these are the problems that we should be seriously concerned about we can sleep very soundly every night yeah on the on the raid on seal raid I can understand the helicopters getting in but when they were leaving how come the Pakistani Air Force didn't try to shoot them down okay um Mike Leiter who was at a National Counterterrorism Center who ran the red team to look at the case that bin Laden was living in AB divide was is also a naval aviator and he was in the room the Situation Room the night of the raid and because he's a naval aviator he has a pretty good sense of what it's like he said look trying to find the Pakistan has almost no night-flying capability they have f-16s at scrambles said look trying to find you know to stealth helicopters in a country twice the size of California in the middle of the night it would be extremely hard if you had just all the assets of the American United States AWACS and all these other things looking this was looking for a needle in a haystack and certainly the f-16s did scramble and there was a real concern at the White House that the Pakistan's might interpret this as an incursion by India and that's one of the reasons that you know there was a lot of people who like that saying we need to get on the phone to General Kayani explain what has happened and one of the reasons the reason the President Obama came out that night at 11:35 on a Sunday night which is not a typical time for a president to have a press conference is the Pakistani said to Mullen you know Mullen said look this is what's happened and they said yeah we understand something has happened it's fitting there was a crash we know about it's called one of ours and kyani said a month if you need to really get out and explain to our public and what happened because we can't explain it it was your operation and so the pressure mounted for you know President Obama to go out and make it Obama wanted a wave 100% confirmation it was bin Laden he had 95 percent confirmation because of the two DNA tests one was the kind of quick down and dirty that gave him 95 percent another 136 later I was later gave them to you like 100 100 100 percent so the packs they did they did scramble it was like looking for a needle in a haystack and the people obviously the people in the Situation Room who didn't know much about aviation were concerned when they heard that the packs are scrambled but you know it was a if you knew about their capabilities it was extremely unlikely that they would be able to detect alec objects wait please wasn't clear from the movie but that they have backup helicopters that they brought in young in fact I'm a Mullen was very very insistent to put on the record the following which i think is quite interesting which is bill McRaven came to the came to the White House with a plan and what he had internalized from what had been told was the plan should be a sort of do not piss off the Pakistanis unnecessary plan so calibrated so it's not going to cause some huge ruckus with them as President Obama and everybody was talking about this in the planning phases Obama said actually our premium is not going to be not pissing off the Pakistanis our premium is getting our guys out and so Mullen said to me it was President Obama who basically sort of in any kind of special operations plan like this that would have been back up but he heavy Obama insisted on more backup and so they had the two Black Hawks that did the raid they had two Chinook you know bus-sized transport helicopters inside Pakistan in a very remote area 50 miles north of AB divide and they had another Chinook on the afghan-pakistan border all of this was quick reaction force back up and of course one-third 0.30 for instance if you refer those who watched it there is it was always bothering me to bought the scenes with a Black Hawks there are three black holes which is wrong there were two black holes one went down and then a chin-up came in to pick up you know bin Laden's body the people the seals on the ground they gave me all the stuff they were covered from the compound all the Intel so you know that that the operation the backup was required and President Obama had a role in making it you know the backup larger okay with general here when you met with the bin Laden and looked into his eyes what did you see I stood well he reminded me a tiny bit of you sorry no what did I see you know I saw I didn't know you know I didn't know what I saw I you know because he hadn't done anything when we met with him he was threatening and serious and well-informed and he had a lot of guys and he seemed to be baby involved in the first attack on the Trade Centre in February of 93 which killed six people but you know what what did we see we saw he's very tall then he well informed you know angry serious people around and treated with a lot of deference they called him the Sheikh they were all very heavily armed RPGs Russian and submachine guns you know I saw something he was pretty serious about declaring war in the United States at the same time you know we're sitting in a mud hut in the middle of the night in Afghanistan it's not at all tear how you implement that war and the answer came a year later when they grew up to American embassies simultaneously in Africa in Kenya in Tanzania killing 200 plus Africans and 12 Americans and we lost a huge propaganda revarnished we should have immediately said since most Kenya are in towns in Europe have very substantial within populations is a guy doesn't care about killing with some civilians because polymorphisms died in these attacks and Americans and it was sort of a early indicator of the kind of a modus operandi but so you know there was one side of me who said this guy seems serious and there's other side of mean so you know he hasn't done anything and in fact they invited me to come back in 98 and I was like you know why we're not going to spend the money the risk go to Taliban control that anistar meet with these guys again so just to hear the same old stuff the reason they invited us back is they had their first and only press conference in May of night ninety-eight in which they kind of subtly signaled that they were going to do something big and of course they did when I would take a last question Peter okay gentlemen Bank thanks very much fascinating talk as usual um question what what do we know about where bin Laden was between Tora Bora and if I understood you correctly 2005 when he when he moves into the compound in Abbottabad and related to that it has the intelligence community as far as you know sort of looked back and seen retrospectively odd they were you know we had clues that might theoretically have led us to bin Laden you know during that period or is that truly just a blank spot on the timeline ah you know well I don't know if they look back and said what do we missed but in answer to your question what was he doing WikiLeaks indicates you went to Kunar in eastern Afghanistan after the Battle of Tora Bora which makes sense everybody would expect him to go in on Pakistan instead he doubled back into this very remote area that has no meaningful said government and is very heavily wooded and then his wife gave an interview to Pakistani police officials which is which came out after my book was published which filled in the years 2000 to 2005 traveled to Peshawar in late 2002 then he traveled to a city called hairy paw in Pakistan and then to AB divide you also spent some time in Swat in northern Pakistan so the whole nine years he was in Pakistan also he had four kids while he was on a run which is not a typical thing a fugitive would do two to two of them in a Pakistani hospitals but you know it's not like the dad came to the delivery SATA burger thank you so much for an incredibly informative presentation you you

Channel: IntlSpyMuseum

Views: 122,830

Rating: 4.4594593 out of 5

Keywords: Peter Bergen, Spy Museum, Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Bergen, 9/11, manhunt, CNN, News, terrorism, terrorists, national security

Id: 3tv_dx0UYLk

Length: 91min 54sec (5514 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2013