Downloaded from YTS.MX
(man on radio) Anybody know what the smoke is in Lower Manhattan?
(man 2) I'm sorry, say again?
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
‐ It's coming outta the top
of the World Trade Center building,
a major fire.
‐ If you do us harm,
justice will be done.
‐ The number one priority was finding bin Laden.
‐ Over ten years, every possible lead led nowhere.
‐ This was the best lead they'd had.
‐ How could he have lived there in that compound
without anybody knowing?
‐ Every one of you have wished you were the man
going on the mission to get bin Laden.
Well, you are the men, and this is the mission.
‐ Obviously it was a very dangerous operation.
‐ If Pakistani forces got there, they had to fight their way out.
‐ We probably wouldn't be making it back
‐ This is what I was born for.
This is it. We're doing this for 9/11.
♪
(Condoleezza Rice) In many ways, it was just a normal day.
It was a Tuesday morning and I was standing at my desk.
And so when my young assistant came in
and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center,
I thought, my God, that's a strange accident.
And I talked to President Bush and he said, keep me informed.
(Letitia Long) I was the deputy director of naval intelligence.
In the OP center conducting our morning meeting,
we, like the rest of the world, thought it was an accident.
‐ My SEAL team had just finished work in Kosovo.
We saw the North Tower was hit and it was smoking.
And the television analysts were saying that it sounds like
a small plane hit the North Tower.
We're like, that's a huge hole with a lot of smoke,
that's not a small plane.
And we were sitting there discussing it,
a handful of Navy SEALs and a few intelligence people.
And then we‐‐ we saw the second plane.
(Charles Allen) And I saw the South Tower be hit.
And I said, that's al‐Qaeda. That's Osama bin Laden.
I thought to myself, my God, how could we have been so wrong?
How could we have missed so much?
‐ And went back up to my office,
and about ten minutes later,
the plane hit the Pentagon.
Right where I had been,
right where I left my folks.
And naval intelligence lost eight people that day,
eight of our finest.
‐ United 93, have you got information on that yet?
‐ Yeah, he's down. ‐ He's down?
‐ Yes. ‐ Why didn't she land?
‐ She did‐‐ she did not land.
‐ Oh, she's down?
‐ Nobody knew what was happening.
Nobody could have imagined
four aircraft attacking...
US cities.
(SEAL #2) I remember watching the Twin Towers go down
in the library of my high school.
It definitely strengthened my belief in what I wanted to do
to join the military and serve my country.
(Robert Gates) This was of an order of magnitude the country
hadn't seen anything equivalent to since Pearl Harbor.
(Leon Panetta) These people did not hesitate to kill
almost 3,000 people in 9/11.
(Robert Cardillo) It called into question
who we were.
And how strong we really were.
America does not forget
that we are resilient,
that if you do us harm, justice will be done.
‐ This nation stands with the good people
of New York City,
and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of
thousands of our citizens.
(man) We can't hear you.
‐ I can hear you.
(laughter, cheering)
I can hear you,
the rest of the world hears you,
and the people who... (cheers and applause)
And the people who knocked these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.
(cheers and applause)
(chanting) USA! USA! USA!
♪
(Redacted) Bin Laden was unusual among terrorists in that
his top priority was major attacks
in and against the United States.
When 9/11 happened, there was the horrible feeling
that something else could be coming right down the pike.
And we knew, we had intelligence,
we knew the enemy was indeed trying
to generate additional attacks.
(narrator) On September 26, 2001,
a small team of CIA officers arrived in Afghanistan.
They are the first Americans deployed in what will become
a long war against al‐Qaeda
and the Taliban‐led Afghan government
which was harboring Osama bin Laden.
(Redacted) The number one priority was finding bin Laden,
destroying al‐Qaeda and other terrorist associates.
My job there was to try to collect intelligence.
Where were they hiding?
There was battlefield intelligence.
(narrator) Soon after, a US‐led military coalition launches
a massive assault to bring down the ruling Taliban government
which refused to hand over bin Laden.
As ground forces advance in Afghanistan,
American intelligence picks up bin Laden's trail.
(Charles Allen) We knew he had fled Kandahar,
and then we had reporting he was in Kabul and Jalalabad.
(narrator) By December 2001, the hunt moves to the Tora Bora cave complex
in the White Mountains, an area where bin Laden
had taken refuge years before during the Soviet Afghan war.
And then we heard bin Laden leading a prayer
in Tora Bora with his leaders when he was there.
♪
‐ The geography in the White Mountains,
the Tora Bora mountains, is just‐‐
you have to set foot on it to understand the enormity of it,
the scale, the depth of it,
and the ability for people to disappear in that mass.
I mean, there are literally more caves here
than we are capable of counting.
‐ The trail went cold.
By February, it had gotten very chilly,
and by early March, it was cold.
(narrator) With no leads left to follow,
intelligence agencies take up the hunt.
♪
(Charles) We had about
40 or 50 analysts devoted full‐time
to working al Qaeda and the hunt for bin Laden.
They were all sorts of imagery analysts, CIA officers.
We involved, people from NSA, people from DIA,
people from NGA.
We had a lot of rumors,
a lot of clandestine reporting that was not accurate.
‐ There were a number of bin Laden sightings,
and you were always really required
to kind of run that to ground.
‐ We called it a Bigfoot sighting.
You know, a supposed bin Laden sighting.
(Government Interpreter) Some people were just making up stories
and telling us that I saw
bin Laden at such and such place.
And we had to follow all the leads,
although we knew that probably it's nothing.
‐ The source would just say anything in order to get paid.
‐ George W. Bush didn't want another memo saying
we really don't know where he is,
but we have some reporting that suggests he may be there.
And I can understand the president in his frustration.
(NGI Analyst) Various policymakers at various times in this cycle
would be ruffled about the fact that there was nothing new.
That's the same thing you told me last month,
six months ago, and a year ago.
How can there be nothing new?
And that feedback comes back
to the interagency analytic team,
well, we can't tell you what we don't know.
(narrator) While intelligence analysts press for new leads,
bin Laden's organization, al‐Qaeda, orchestrates a series
of brutal attacks around the world.
For the intelligence community,
the hunt for bin Laden becomes part of a deeper effort
to understand the inner workings of al‐Qaeda
and disrupt their deadly planning.
‐ Our goal wasn't just to get Osama bin Laden,
it wasn't just to get al‐Qaeda,
it was to do that in such an intense fashion that we were not
going to take another 9/11 along the way.
‐ So the goal was basically put al‐Qaeda on the run
so that they can no longer generate those major operations.
They're focused more on their survival.
(narrator) The intelligence community moves their analysts
to the front lines, integrating with military units,
leading the fight against al‐Qaeda.
The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency,
or NGA, plays a key role.
‐ So what does NGA provide?
They provide the imagery of the battlefield.
If a compound is going to be raided,
what's the compound look like?
Are there blind spots in the compound?
So when the assault team, or when the troops go in,
what are they going to be expecting?
‐ You go conduct the operation,
you collect all the intel you can,
you come back, you turn over
all of that information to your intelligence team.
They start putting all that together,
connecting all the dots.
‐ If the analysts didn't have the information there,
they would reach back to Langley, FBI headquarters,
NSA or wherever they needed to
to get the information and make it readily available to us.
‐ We understood how they operated,
their up tempo, and we fit right into that.
(SEAL #1) The sooner you can hit the next target,
you can catch them when they're not prepared for it
and just keep going that way, start building your web,
getting to the higher level enemy.
(Tina) In pulling them out and detaining them,
you're neutering bin Laden's organization by taking out
his most seasoned, competent lieutenants.
‐ We knew that we had to generate an onslaught
against the enemy, to take the initiative.
(Adm. McRaven) The forces on the ground were working
generally 20 hours a day,
sometimes 24 hours a day, several days in a row.
When you're running that many missions,
the ground forces are just very, very good at what they do.
(narrator) In spite of these efforts,
al‐Qaeda's leader remains at large.
Seven years, four months, and nine days after 9/11,
a new president takes up the hunt.
‐ I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear...
I had committed to reinvigorating
what appeared to have been a stalled approach
to getting bin Laden.
I assigned Leon Panetta, our CIA director,
to mobilize all the assets that had already worked on it
and take a fresh look at it.
‐ The president made clear to me
the importance of going after bin Laden
and I not only agreed with him,
but I said that effort was in many ways responsible
for my desire to become head of the CIA.
‐ Finding bin Laden was always a priority
for both President Bush and President Obama.
They never let us forget that it was a high priority.
But in truth, not much was going on.
You know, CIA was trying to find him,
but we weren't having much luck.
When President Obama came in,
he obviously wanted a more intensified search.
Frankly, I thought it was a little bit like
asking Michelangelo to paint faster.
(Tina) I'd been working al‐Qaeda for several years,
working on threats mostly to the homeland
and US interests overseas, trying to disrupt plots.
Working threats every day that there wasn't an attack
was success, right?
You knew you had done your job.
I started working on bin Laden specifically,
right around 2007.
When you're moving into a manhunt scenario,
every day that nothing happens is a failure.
(narrator) Driven by the potential costs of the failure to find bin Laden,
intelligence officers accept greater personal risk
in the intensifying hunt.
‐ You have to have the human intelligence.
If you don't, your war is going to be longer, much more costly,
the outcome much less certain, which means at some point
you are gonna have to put your people in the company
of members of a terrorist organization.
(narrator) Towards the end of 2009,
the intelligence community mobilizes around
a possible lead to bin Laden.
‐ The Jordanians had suggested that they had their hands on
a possible spy who had some medical training,
and that they thought there was a good chance you might be able
to go into Afghanistan, but also Pakistan,
and see if he could locate Zawahiri,
who was bin Laden's second in command.
‐ We sent about a dozen of our best officers out to a base
in eastern Afghanistan so that we could vet him.
(narrator) On December 30th, 2009,
the CIA sets up a meeting with the possible spy,
Dr. Humam al Balawi,
at Forward Operating Base Chapman,
named for Sergeant Nathan Chapman,
the first American soldier to die in Afghanistan.
‐ Chapman sits in kind of a bowl.
Some people call it the coast bowl,
where you have mostly mountains around you,
and in the middle there's the city.
This is literally the end of the line.
‐ Director Panetta had briefed the president,
had briefed the National Security Council
about this important, tantalizing lead.
And we all waited for that meeting to occur.
(narrator) At a remote base on the front lines in Afghanistan,
American intelligence officers wait to meet a man
they believe might lead them to the highest levels of al‐Qaeda.
‐ The day of, we're all grouped together,
waiting for the arrival.
Everybody's excited to do the job that they needed to do
and to get the information they needed to get.
(Panetta) The car pulled up, and this individual,
instead of getting out on the side where people
were all standing, got out on the other side.
That spooked the security officers
who immediately went up to him,
and they noticed that he had a hand inside of his cloak.
‐ With any sensitive operation like this,
there's already risk involved.
And that's the nature of that business.
Unfortunately, to learn about bad people,
you have to meet with bad people.
‐ And they told him, get your hands up,
get your hands out of your robe, and he refused to do that.
But by the time they had a chance to do anything,
he had pulled the pin on a suicide vest
that was extremely powerful.
♪
‐ It sent metal shrapnel.
And not to mention the rocks that were under his feet
became shrapnel, it just sent it all out.
And I ended up with eight‐‐
eight shrapnel wounds in my legs,
but one in the forehead.
And the last thing I remember
is being loaded onto the helicopter.
And then I woke up maybe a week later in Bethesda, Maryland.
‐ That vest killed seven of our CIA officers
and security individuals,
it wounded at least another four or five others.
(Redacted) The bombing at FOB Chapman
was one of the most terrible days
we've had a long time.
Personal friends of mine, people that I loved died there.
(Letitia Long) I believe that had a real impact for all
of the intelligence community,
While all of us certainly knew theoretically
that this could occur as folks are deployed forward,
until it actually happens, it's not real.
And, that said, we still had volunteers lining up
to deploy forward.
(Redacted) I've heard people say there's no piece of intelligence
that's worth the life of one of our officers.
I disagree.
I think there are times when you, a single person,
can get intelligence that might save another person
another two people, a car full of people,
an embassy full of people,
an airplane full of people,
a city full of people.
‐ It was tragic what happened,
and the lives that were lost,
but that incident created an even greater impetus
within the CIA,
particularly those involved with the hunt for bin Laden.
‐ Something that I noticed in CIA is when we suffer a loss,
you know, in the line of duty, there is always, every time,
an increase in resolve on the part of everyone
to do their job better.
And I think people realize
that you can grieve while you work.
You can grieve while you work harder.
(military drumming)
(Barack Obama) Nine years have now passed.
In that time, we have shed
more tears than we will ever know.
And though it must seem some days as though the world
has moved on to other things, I say to you today,
that your loved ones endure in the heart of our nation
now and forever.
‐ The question that people were constantly asking us was,
where's bin Laden?
So we were constantly looking for locations.
As time goes on, you start to realize, well,
there's an infinite number of possibilities on
where bin Laden could be.
We have to be smarter about how we approach it.
We flipped the question and the strategy from, you know,
where's bin Laden to who is harboring bin Laden,
because that's a more limited number of possibilities.
You don't have millions of people
who could be harboring bin Laden,
you've really got, you know, two dozen at best.
‐ We had already sort of understood that
he would be likely to be with his family.
And so, you know, that sensationalized story
that he's with 100 fighters in a cave in Afghanistan
really doesn't start to look very likely.
‐ We had a strategy where we had individuals on a list,
and these are the people that we need to go after
in order to find bin Laden.
Abu Ahmed was in many ways qualitatively different
than some of the other leads we would get.
It just made a lot of sense.
He was a Pashtun,
he was a Pakistani who grew up in Kuwait.
So he spoke native Pashto and he spoke native Arabic.
He also, as we would learn very quickly into the hunt,
he worked for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
who was the gatekeeper for bin Laden.
He can operate in Pakistan as a Pakistani,
but he has kind of an Arab mindset, right?
That's somebody that, you know,
would be a great harborer for bin Laden.
(narrator) Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, known as Abu Ahmed al‐Kuwaiti,
had a history of working for senior al‐Qaeda leaders.
In August 2010, American intelligence locks on
to the cell phones of al‐Kuwaiti and his brother
in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
Their movements indicate they may be acting as couriers.
‐ The couriers were taking their cell phones
well away from the compound then activating them,
then making the calls home, then turning them off
and then going back to the compound.
‐ The couriers were talking discreet.
It was not open talking, like normal talking.
‐ One phone call was from a friend who basically said,
"what are you doing" to the courier.
And the courier kept ignoring it,
trying to dodge the question.
And he said, "No, no, tell me what you're doing.
"I haven't seen you in a long time.
What are you doing?"
And there was a pause, and he said,
"I'm doing the same thing I did before."
And there was suddenly silence,
and the person on the other end of the line said,
"Go with God."
Surveillance tracked these couriers
who had a little white SUV,
and they tracked this little white SUV
from Peshawar to a place called Abbottabad,
which is near the capital.
‐ There was an understanding
that this was far more real
than anything else that we had been presented with in the years
since I had been working it.
‐ I remember the meeting in August of 2010.
An officer who we call Gary
opened the binder and he said,
"Director, we have something new to report."
And he said, we have been tracking two brothers
who historically were couriers for bin Laden,
and we have followed them.
We have located them, and we have followed them
up to a town called Abbottabad,
which is north of Islamabad,
down the end of a dead end street.
And at the end of that dead end street,
there's a large home there that looks like a fortress.
And I'll never forget, Director Panetta looked up
from his briefing materials and he said, "A fortress?
Tell me about that fortress."
‐ It had 18 foot walls on one side,
12 foot walls on the other side,
barbed wire at the top of these walls.
And on the third floor of this compound,
there was an eight foot wall.
‐ If you're on the third floor, you'd kind of like a view.
There was a privacy wall that was constructed
that limited the view,
or was it to limit the view into the compound?
(Panetta) And my eyes lit up because I said,
well, this is probably the best piece of evidence
we've ever had since Tora Bora.
‐ The land and the compound was registered to two brothers.
And though the value of the compound
was $1 million, they had no visible source of income.
No one really left the compound.
The children didn't leave the compound for schooling.
Everything was done on site.
‐ We looked for a cell phone, we looked for Wi‐Fi.
We looked for other emanations, there were none.
We looked at whether there was a local telephone we could find.
We looked at, also, to the degree that we could,
all local records.
‐ The residents here burned their trash.
No one else burned their trash.
They put it at the side of the road like we do here
in the United States.
‐ There was a vehicle garage
and it was double‐gate secured,
which essentially means that you would be able to
pull a vehicle in from the street without exposing
the interior view of the compound
to anyone who might just be happening to peer in.
(Panetta) There was an individual
who would come out sometimes, you know, every other day
and go into a yard, and walk in circles
very quickly like a prisoner in a prison yard.
Walk in circles, probably about 10, 12, 20 times,
and then immediately go back in.
And I remember telling our people
that could be bin Laden.
It was an older gentleman.
I said, let's get some cameras on the walls.
Let's get some telescopes on the mountains.
I mean, you've got to give me
an ID of this person who's doing that.
(Kelton) We thought about putting cameras up
in the trees that surrounded the compound,
but then they cut down the trees.
Obviously, they, too, were worried about security.
(Letitia Long) We knew it was a high value individual.
We knew it was someone of deference.
There was a level of frustration
that we could never see Osama bin Laden.
We‐‐ we just couldn't.
In September 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta
goes to the White House to inform President Barack Obama
about a suspicious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
(Cardillo) It was around 5:00 pm, and Leon Panetta
taps me on the shoulder and says we need
to go upstairs to brief the old man.
Now, as I walked into the Oval that evening,
I had no idea what topic we were updating the old man on.
One of the analysts rolled out
a very large format photograph.
A satellite image
of a facility I had never seen before.
I recall the president asking a few questions, you know,
clarifying ones, you know, how do we know this,
how do we not know that, et cetera?
I don't feel the meeting went longer than 15 minutes or so.
It was pretty short.
And I remember the president thanking the team.
He said, okay, come back when you have more.
(narrator) Over years of hunting,
intelligence analysts produced a checklist
for the kinds of conditions
they thought bin Laden would want in a hideout.
The more they learn about the Abbottabad compound,
the more confident they become
that this is a critical location.
‐ You would find, no matter who you talked to on this team,
that we were very certain that we were on a place
that required our attention.
None of us believed at any point in time that we were
overestimating the potential importance of this location.
‐ We would press them and we would say, okay,
what's your honest evaluation
of the odds that bin Laden is in that compound?
And among the different analysts,
it ranged from 40% to 80%.
‐ It didn't matter to me too much
what the seniors thought,
what I was more interested in
and what influenced me much more
is what the confidence level
of the working level analysts
that had been working this problem
and what their confidence level was,
which was pretty high.
And so I put a lot of faith in that.
(narrator) Military planners develop options for the president.
Bombing risks extensive civilian deaths
in adjoining homes.
Even if bin Laden is in the compound when it's hit,
how will the US know?
The only way to be sure is to send troops to find him.
‐ I initially favored the raid
if it could be pulled off,
because I thought we would never know if bin Laden were there
if we had used a bomb.
(Clapper) I was in favor of a raid
simply because I thought it'd be better to have
thinking people on the ground who could observe
and make judgments about what to do.
And then there was still ambiguity
as to whether he was there or not.
‐ I mean, I wanted bin Laden as bad as anybody,
but my primary responsibility,
as I saw it, was the war in Afghanistan.
And my worry was that if we flew into Abbottabad,
blew a bunch of stuff up and got back out,
the violation of Pakistani sovereignty
and the embarrassment to their military would be so severe
that they would cut our supply line from Karachi to Afghanistan
and we would lose the war overnight.
(Obama) Obviously it was a very dangerous operation.
There was the diplomatic risks
of going into a foreign country
without their permission.
And we considered the possibility
of tipping off the Pakistani government ahead of time.
But there were also factions within the Pakistani government
that were not as trustworthy,
and we thought it was too risky to give them a heads up.
‐ I had gotten to know Admiral McRaven,
and was not surprised that he made a very compelling case
that he could mount a successful raid.
‐ I wrote my thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School
on special operations.
And what you saw on the successful mission
was simplicity was key.
So as I looked at this, it became pretty simple.
I just decided we will fly directly to the target,
you know, take down the target, get bin Laden and fly back.
Now, that‐‐ when we went to do the detailed planning,
I knew it would not be that easy.
I had an opportunity to brief the president
before bringing in the planners.
And at one point in time, the president asked me,
so can you do this mission?
And I was very candid with him.
I said, Mr. President, I don't know.
‐ We had to worry about the possibilities
of interception by Pakistani Air Forces.
Landing, we had to take into account the possibility
that they would cause a commotion when a bunch
of helicopters land in a community like that.
This is a residential community
just a few miles from a military college.
This is a town in which you have
a whole lot of Pakistani military there.
And so,
could we get in and out safely?
‐ I said I haven't had a chance to bring in
the aviation planners and the SEALs.
I need to do that first before I can come back and tell you
with 100% certainty that we can do this.
And he said, how much time do you need?
Recognizing that we were up against the clock,
I told him I needed three weeks.
‐ We were under a time pressure
just not knowing what bin Laden would do.
If he were there, how long would he be there?
‐ Another factor we considered is, you know,
we delay this, it's bound to leak.
‐ There was a lot of concern that if some action
wasn't taken quickly, we'd be back to square one.
(narrator) In January 2011,
Admiral McRaven begins organizing the raid.
To heightened secrecy,
the mission, known as Operation Neptune Spear,
will be carried out under CIA authority.
‐ The inclusion, if you will, of the special operations forces
to the agency really wasn't anything unusual.
We have for decades, when the time was required,
essentially been secunded to the agency for various missions.
I had one other person that was part of my planning element
for the first several months because the list of people that
the president agreed could be part of this with very small.
‐ Admiral McRaven told me to go over to the agency
and go get a brief.
So that next day, I drove over to CIA headquarters.
They pointed me back to a side closet,
and there were some desks in there,
and there were three guys sitting in there.
And I walked in, I knew two of them,
and they handed me a binder.
They said, go ahead and read through that
and then we can talk.
And upon flipping the binder open,
the first picture that I saw was UBL.
And that's the first time
that I knew that that's what this was about.
(Redacted) As soon as I read through everything,
it just all made sense.
And I bought it, you know, hiding in plain sight.
The measures that were taken by those that were at the facility
were extraordinary, would not have been happening
were there not something very interesting there.
So once we got the direction from the president that,
yes, I want to see more on
what a unilateral military raid would look like‐‐
you know, again, I had been driving this solo, but obviously
we were going to have to call more folks in to do that.
‐ I knew the senior leadership of the raid force.
These were folks that I had worked with off and on,
and I think very positively, since 9/11.
And I knew that they were finest of the finest.
‐ The ground force commander was an experienced operator,
and he had been in command
of his squadron for a while, and had done a couple
of operational deployments with them.
‐ I had exceptional confidence in this particular officer.
He had worked for me for many years,
had a tremendous amount of combat experience,
very heroic in combat,
very level‐headed, would not rush to failure.
‐ The aviation lead is very quiet,
but he had a tremendous amount of flying experience
and had been involved in a number of operations
and had flown me a number of places
and flown all of us a number of places.
You needed somebody who not only knew how to fly the bird,
but understood everything else about terrain masking
and enemy radars.
‐ I was brought into this small room of less than
a dozen individuals and was given a piece of imagery
in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
And I'm looking at a ground force commander
who I have risked my life for, for him and his teams.
And when they told me that we're going after bin Laden,
my only reaction is like, let's go.
And I looked at the map, and I looked at the distance
on the map, I looked at the capability,
and my first reaction is absolutely, we can do this.
But there's going to be risk and we need to reduce that risk.
‐ It looked like an awful lot of other raids we have done
except the the distance was a long way.
So the helicopter piece was very complicated.
‐ You're still trying to fly at 130, 150 miles an hour,
you know, 100 or 200 feet off the ground,
looking for wires, looking for birds,
looking for antennas and towers.
Looking for the terrain, you're still flying the aircraft
while you're managing the electronic spectrum
that's trying to search and find you.
(Lead Planner) Anything we asked for, we got.
If we needed an analysis of all of the radars
in the entire region, then we got that.
We got the best analysts for whatever radars were required.
‐ Am I gonna be heard,
am I going to be seen visually, electronically?
How noisy am I in that country?
(narrator) But radar's not the only concern.
If the American helicopters are discovered,
can the Pakistani Air Force track and shoot them down?
‐ For example, the training
of those that are flying F‐16s
or other helicopters in a specific country,
you would want to know how proficient are they.
Even though they have the equipment
on board that airframe, do they know how to use it?
Do they know how to operate it in day
and equally as proficient at night?
(Lead Planner) Given the geography
of the part of the country where the mission was going to be,
we had learned over the years operating that
the MH‐47 Chinooks were the best platform for the elevation
and for the types of weather
that we would need to fly through.
Their ability to carry a larger number of people
was also important.
So from the beginning, we saw it as a 47 mission,
as a mission for the Chinooks.
(Aviation Planner) The Chinook is very loud.
It's very big, it's visible across all spectrums.
‐ As the briefs went through the chain of command,
there was a sensitivity expressed on exposure to radars
and discovery of the helicopters as the force was infiltrating.
And that shifted the conversation to using
the Black Hawks that had some of the capabilities
to defeat radar.
And that assuaged the concerns at the national level.
‐ Black Hawks can get in and out
of certain areas quicker than a Chinook can.
(narrator) Though the Black Hawks are more maneuverable
and better shielded from radar detection,
they cannot carry enough fuel for the round trip,
and will need to be refueled inside Pakistan.
‐ The contingent part of the planning was that
we would need refueling helicopters.
We would need the 47s to fly in and park on the way back out
so that the Black Hawks could refuel.
And they would set up a ground refueling site,
Black Hawks would land, take fuel on,
and then everybody would fly out.
‐ I'd been in the White House almost exactly 30 years earlier
for the Iranian hostage rescue mission,
which failed due to problems with helicopters.
So in those discussions about the raid on Abbottabad, I said,
I think you need to add another helicopter or two
to your plan just in case something goes south.
(narrator) Ultimately, two Black Hawks
carrying the primary assault force will lead the way,
followed by two larger Chinooks
with a fuel supply and a contingency force of SEALs.
‐ It was in the end the president that added
the extra helicopters to the force
to be able to give them the possibility of fighting out.
I mean, part of our worst nightmare would have been
one, we don't get him,
and two, we have US military personnel
who are captured inside Pakistan.
(narrator) For all the detailed planning involved
in sending Navy SEALs after Osama bin Laden,
nothing can change the greatest risk of
Operation Neptune Spear.
American forces will be deep inside Pakistan
without permission.
To improve the odds of success, the SEALs focus on the ways
the mission could fail and how to prevent a disastrous outcome.
(Adm. McRaven) Normally on a compound this size,
we probably would have had a SEAL force of,
you know, 25 guys, just the assault element,
and then probably another 30 or more Rangers
that would be kind of the outer security element.
Well, I had to make do with just the 24 SEALs
and our one interpreter and the dog.
That was the maximum I could fit on the helicopters based on
the altitude of Abbottabad, and the heat at the time.
(Aviation Planner) The hotter it gets,
the higher the density altitude is
and the less people we can bring to an objective.
That's really what it boils down to.
So May really was the last comfort zone.
Beyond that, we were gonna start incurring more risk,
'cause June, it gets very hot, it's in the hundreds for a high.
‐ Everybody who was on that mission was handpicked.
Everyone on that mission had combat experience,
a lot of combat experience.
‐ It was the three of us, me, the squadron commander,
and the squadron master chief sitting and going through.
And the primary criteria we used
was could the operator
snap right in and just do the op?
And that doesn't necessarily have to do with your seniority,
your experience level, what we wanted was temperament.
‐ There's multiple teams at home
and different levels of readiness
on standby and preparation.
We were kind of the most off the grid squadron
because we had just got home, it shouldn't have been our time
to rotate back over for many more months.
‐ We'd finished a few weeks of leave with our families,
and then we started training again.
So guys split up in the typical training cycle.
‐ I got recalled when I was at Free‐Fall Jumpmaster School.
‐ I think we were in lock picking school or something.
All of a sudden things started spinning up,
they said, hey, we need these people back.
‐ You know, there's obviously luck involved,
but they picked the most experienced guys
of the available guys in the search spot they wanted.
‐ Nobody knew where these guys were, they just assumed
they were on leave with their family,
or Disneyland or someplace.
So that gave me three weeks of kind of cover for action.
We actually brought these 25 guys in
to this undisclosed location
and briefed them.
‐ We're traditionally set up in different troops,
and they pulled the 24 most senior guys from the squadron.
So it's a little different, but, okay.
‐ I wasn't a very senior guy.
The reason I got chosen for the mission was because
I was a dog handler and I had Cairo.
The dog would be very valuable in smelling
any sort of explosive, finding any escape tunnels,
safe rooms, crowd control.
‐ We were just talking about why are we back?
What kind of stupid training exercise
did they just come up with us to do?
And they brought us in a room
and they told us it wasn't a training exercise,
this is definitely real, but we just have to go get something
and bring it back to them so they can see it.
‐ It was pretty vague
to say that they needed us for something.
A couple rumors were flying around.
‐ Then we just started assuming
what it could be around the world,
but no one thought bin Laden off the bat.
They drove us down to a base south of Virginia,
and the boss came in and just said, all right, guys,
the reason that you're here is because this is as close as
we've ever been to Osama bin Laden.
‐ And immediately, game faces were on
and they began to to plan and rehearse the mission.
We only had three weeks to do that.
♪
(Long) As part of any operation,
NGA develops three dimensional models
that you can fly through to, you know, make you think
like you are actually there,
and we also developed a scale model.
And then that scale model was used to develop
a full scale model.
‐ Whether it's SEALS, whether Delta Force,
we all do this kinda the same way,
everyone gets a say.
Everyone looked at that target.
Everyone had access to the information.
‐ We spent all morning standing around the model,
and everybody chalk talking,
hey, how we would tactically take this down?
‐ If you were going to fast rope here, here, here, here.
‐ The plan was straightforward.
Two helicopters flying to the target.
One helicopter would hover
over the roof of the three‐story building,
and a small force would fast rope down onto the roof,
get right down to the balcony,
and come right in on the third floor
where everybody assessed that's where he lived.
The second helicopter would be hovering over the courtyard
and fast rope the majority of the force down onto the ground,
where they would set up sniper positions on the walls
and clear the second building in the compound
and then clear the main building from the ground up.
(narrator) Training for the mission moves
to a facility in North Carolina
where the ground force runs through their raid assignments.
By mid‐April, the training shifts to the mountains of
the western United States, where the weather and terrain
are closer to flight conditions in Pakistan.
(Adm. McRaven) One of the things that
I wanted to do was to duplicate
as best we could the entire profile of the mission.
And there were a number of folks that said, sir,
we know to fly a helicopter, we know how to fly a helicopter
for 169 miles,
we just kind of fly and come into the mockup.
I said, no, no, we are going to fly for 169 miles,
we are gonna go through the exact profile as best we can.
‐ We are being observed by senior members of
the US government military
because they want to make sure that we,
as one of their options, are capable.
But they knew who we were, and I think that a lot of them
just wanted to make sure that helicopters could fly
the way they wanted them to.
‐ The number one contingency that was the most probable
was an aircraft crashing in country.
(narrator) The Western rehearsals focus on
how the Black Hawks will perform.
Though they have been developed for situations
just like this one,
they have never before been flown on an actual mission.
(Commander Master Chief) Very early on when
we got out and saw them fly,
they were unstable, particularly when they came in to hover.
And I said, hey, you know, with all due respect,
I don't think we should use these helicopters.
The time to try something new is not on the most important raid
arguably since World War Two.
(Lead Planner) Another one of the factors
we had to take into account was
that the air crews flying
the Black Hawks had been in a separate program
and didn't have a lot of time flying overseas.
‐ The hot crews were less seasoned,
just the true knowledge of that environment
that those Hawker's just did not have.
And those particular crews had been taken out of the fight
for a while and really had been part of just research.
‐ The closer that we got to the day we're going to launch,
they did decide to forward deploy us to Afghanistan
and that's when it sunk in, like, they're serious about this
and we're probably going to do it.
(Seal #4) They gave us a weekend off,
and I'm in my neighborhood.
There's like, kids running around collecting Easter eggs.
I'm talking to my neighbor, he knows I'm a SEAL
but clearly has no idea what's going on.
And as the kids are running around,
he's sitting there kind of complaining to me
about how stressed he is at work.
"I got this going on next week, and this going on next week.
I'm so stressed," and I remember kind of chuckling
in the back of my mind thinking
you have no idea what I got going on next week.
And a day later, we got the green light and we left.
(narrator) With the SEALs now deployed
in Afghanistan waiting for a green light,
President Obama faces a momentous decision.
Will he send them into Pakistan without knowing
whether Osama bin Laden is really there?
On Thursday, April 28, 2011, the president meets with
his National Security Council.
‐ We had pretty much gone through
all the options, all the data.
We had gone...
at our basic premises and examined them
and turned them over and did our best to break them down.
(Panetta) The president then basically opened it up
and said, what do you think?
What do you think?
I remember a lot of differences.
I'd have to say just...
thinking about this, I think a majority of the people there
were concerned that it was too risky.
‐ There is no assurance that if we wait,
we will get more positive information that he's there.
And the longer it goes on, the more likely it is to leak.
And so that kind of brought it to a head in terms of
we're not gonna get any better information.
So this is what we have,
make your decision based on that.
‐ We thought it would be important to so‐called
"red team" the issue,
which meant having a group go in and ask nothing
but the questions about what are other possibilities.
And they did that, the red team did that.
They basically said, look, you know, we've looked
at the possibility, you know, that it's not bin Laden,
but somebody else.
But the question then becomes,
why are bin Laden's couriers there?
‐ I think that all of us would say that
it was maybe a 55‐45 call.
Effectively, there was no way for us
to absolutely confirm that it was bin Laden,
at least not within a meaningful timeframe.
So it was a judgment call.
It's only after examining every single option militarily
that finally I'm presented with the decision.
And so I left the Situation Room saying, thank you very much.
I'll be making a decision over the next 24 hours.
‐ I worked for President Obama for four years.
And let me just tell you,
I would never play poker with that guy.
Impossible to read.
‐ I said to myself that if I have an opportunity
to get bin Laden and we pass it up,
then that is a huge blow to the cause of justice,
to the families of 9/11 victims that I had met,
and it was worth the risk.
‐ And the word came back in the morning through Tom Donnelly
that it was a go for Saturday night,
Sunday morning, Pakistan time.
But it was pretty clear, I think, by noon
that Admiral McRaven was not comfortable
with the environmental conditions that night.
And so he decided to delay 24 hours.
‐ It was a little bit foggy, and I was a little concerned
about the helicopters going through there.
Not tremendously concerned, but I wanted it to be,
you know, the best conditions I could get,
we knew Sunday would be better.
‐ We're literally sitting in a brief.
Our master chief walks in the back door of the briefing room,
says, hey, guys, green light, we're going tomorrow.
‐ So once that happens, you know, it is what it is.
And, you know, you're just making sure
all your gear's ready, making sure your guns are ready.
Just everything, you know,
your shoelaces don't have a tear in it or anything like that.
You got 24 hours to kind of prepare for what, I mean,
in essence, is probably the rest of your life.
And that's kind of how I felt.
‐ Oh yeah, it was very clear
that we probably would be making it back.
It was‐‐ every guy that was chosen for the mission,
made sure their million dollar life insurance policy
was fulfilled.
I told my parents, or at least I told my father,
I probably would be making it back.
‐ It was the first time I wrote a letter to, you know,
my kid and my wife.
I hadn't done that before.
‐ We had a day, actually, to look over the plan, you know,
one final time, spent some time talking
to the ground force commander and the weather guys,
and we kind of went through our normal day on Saturday.
On Sunday, I actually had a congressional delegation in.
I didn't want to change any of my routine because most of
the people from my command, we were in Bagram,
had no idea we were doing this.
Went through the congressional delegation,
and then very quickly after that,
moved down to our small command center there in Jalalabad.
‐ And the force is ready,
now you're waiting for the green light.
(narrator) On May 1st, 2011,
Operation Neptune Spear sets off on a moonless night
for a residential compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Two Black Hawk helicopters, specially adapted to
avoid radar detection, carry 24 SEALS,
an interpreter, and a combat dog.
The helicopters are so tight on weight
that their standard weapons systems
are taken off and left behind.
‐ We're all mingling, you know, saying hi to your friends
in the other helicopter, just saying, hey,
we'll see you in 90 minutes.
‐ We had all of our stuff stripped.
No jewelry, nothing, no name tags.
‐ There was a sense that this was historic.
What they were about to do was, to the best of their ability,
bring distinction on themselves, their unit and their country.
and they certainly felt that.
‐ I was doing a video teleconference
back with Director Panetta and then the Situation Room.
At the appropriate point in time,
I turned to the SEAL commander, commanding officer,
and I told him, launch the assault force.
(helicopters powering up)
♪
(narrator) The Black Hawks have 169 miles to cover
in a flight of about 90 minutes.
(Aviation Planner) The routing was not direct
by design, the routing for
the Black Hawks was to take the least risked route,
and that's by terrain, population,
wires, cultural, whatever it may be.
It was for them to loop around to reduce the amount of risk
to gain the element of surprise on the objective.
‐ The risk on the helicopter ride, I mean,
that's the one thing that we couldn't control.
I think that was definitely the one thing
I was more worried about.
‐ And we just kinda reflect on everything's gonna happen.
And eventually at some point, it does sink in, though.
It's like, holy crap, we're here, this is us,
and we're doing this for‐‐
we're doing this for Lower Manhattan.
We're doing this for 9/11.
We're doing this for the people who fought on Flight 93,
the first people to actually fight al‐Qaeda
in the War on Terror.
Doing this for the people in the Pentagon.
Stuff like that's kind of sinking in.
And it's‐‐ the fear is not there,
it's more of a, "This is it,
this is what I was born for."
(narrator) Two Chinook helicopters
carrying fuel for the Black Hawks
and a backup force of SEALs leave 45 minutes later.
Capable of flying faster speeds and a more direct route,
the Chinooks will be in position nearby
as the Black Hawks approach Abbottabad.
‐ All of our checkpoints are on time,
we're just completely silent flying through the night.
No illumination, completely dark at 100 feet.
Flying the route to a T.
‐ So in Afghanistan because of the lack of electricity,
it's a very dark country.
Pakistan is very well lit.
People are out and about.
The deeper you get into Pakistan,
it's more structured, much more advanced.
And that's power lines,
antennas, the lights, the densely populated areas.
(narrator) The Blackhawks approached
the compound from the east, using the starker terrain
to muffle the sound of their arrival.
In planning, they had figured that they would be identifiable
for no more than the last two minutes of the flight.
(SEAL #5) The ten minute call is really
when everything starts kind of getting alive in the cabin.
You're double checking your optics,
you're double checking your night vision,
making sure your helmet gets tightened up.
‐ Two minutes, you open the doors.
One minute, you swing your feet out
and let them hang in the breeze.
Um, you're getting your rope ready to go, right?
You're 30 seconds out, now you're in, you know?
At 30 seconds out, I can look out the door,
I can look up, I can see the compound coming.
(narrator) Above the compound,
a drone feeds video back to the command center in Jalalabad,
the US embassy in Pakistan,
CIA headquarters, and the White House.
(Obama) We were able to monitor it in real time.
The iconic picture that Pete Souza's taken
records, essentially, what the atmosphere was like.
We're stuffed into a pretty small room.
‐ We're watching the helicopters come in,
and there is a point at which
I see one of these helicopters begin to shake.
And clearly, there's been a loss of control.
(SEAL #4) Immediately you can tell
something was was off, something was wrong.
We were not hovering like we did in training.
In my mind, it felt like about an hour,
in reality was probably about five seconds.
I'm sitting in the door waiting to push the rope out,
grab the rope, slide down and go to work.
Couldn't get stable, couldn't get stable.
(SEAL #5) Right then we kind of sunk just a little bit,
is what I felt, and then we kind of
turned the tail, kicked out to the left.
Once that happened, then we just started sideswiping left
and losing altitude.
(SEAL #4) Helicopters don't crash
like planes, come skidding in.
They're usually pretty ugly, and we're crashing to the side
at about 40 feet, and I'm in this door.
Now we're crashing, and everybody's wanting
back in and away from the open door.
Instinctually, that's when I started grabbing
the guys in front of me to make sure that they didn't fall out.
‐ Here you are in probably the highest profile mission
in special operations history, maybe the military.
We might lose a whole helo full of tier one operators.
We're a sovereign nation.
The military academy's right across the way.
We're kind of screwed here if this is what we think it is.
(narrator) Just before 1:00 am,
as the first of the two American Black Hawks moves
into position above the compound,
it starts losing lift.
‐ During training, the mock compound had been surrounded by
a chain link fence,
but the actual compound is set inside tall, solid walls.
‐ Chain link allows the wind to push through.
And so it gave a false sensation
of what the lift capability was for those air crews.
(narrator) But another factor may also
have figured in the Black Hawk's problem.
Temperatures are substantially higher
than they had anticipated.
(Aviation Planner) Every degree centigrade
does reduce a significant amount
of lift just based on their density.
And the Hawk crews were believing it was going to be
eight to ten degrees cooler.
‐ They planned against nicer conditions
or lower temperatures, and they got out there
and the aircraft did what would naturally happen
when it doesn't have the ability to perform
under those conditions.
(narrator) As the helicopter falters,
long hours of training kick in.
‐ One of the contingencies we rehearsed numerous times was
if anything happened to that first helicopter,
if the pilot was able to, he would bump over
the enclosed driveway and into what we called the animal pen.
‐ We impacted, there's a large wall
that circles the compound.
Our tail section hung up on the wall,
and we kind of look like a lawn dart stuck over the wall.
The tail section of the helicopter has a wheel
for the load‐bearing section of the Black Hawk.
That wheel landed on top of the wall.
Had that wheel bent eight inches this way or this way,
it would have broken the tail section.
We wouldn't be talking today.
I kind of waited for what I assumed would be next,
was some sort of explosion or something, but that never came.
And now the guys who were sitting behind me,
who were holding me in are now yelling at me,
telling me to hurry up and get out.
(chuckling) God, give me a second.
I gotta take a couple deep breaths here.
(Adm. McRaven) People are moving around the outside.
That says to me that at least some are uninjured
and the helo seems to be upright 'cause I saw people come out
from both sides of the helicopter.
So it hadn't rolled over because I could still
see the rotor blades.
‐ That ground force and crew is living today because
of the expertise and the ability for that pilot to maneuver
that aircraft where it did.
‐ When the helicopter went down at Abbottabad,
I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.
Oh no, not again, not 30 years later.
But the difference in the equipment,
the difference in the training, the difference in the caliber
of the people involved turned what could have been a disaster
into an inconvenience.
‐ That doesn't mean that you didn't get a little knot inside
when we heard that there had been a problem with the tail
of the helicopter hitting the wall.
And we recognized it was going to make extraction
more complicated than originally planned.
(SEAL #4) Chalk two, he's coming in.
He has no idea if we'd been shot down,
a mechanical issue, has no idea what's happened.
In a second after witnessing our helo was down,
he didn't make a radio call,
he didn't try to push the envelope in the wrong way.
He simply hovered his helicopter out outside the compound,
landed him on the ground.
We jumped out, ran around the other side,
underside of the helo, linked up with the guys
on the other side of the bird,
explosively breached one gate, and within about a minute,
we were back into the location
where we would have fast roped into initially.
(SEAL #5) As soon as we funneled into the compound,
we knew exactly where we needed to go
and guys started breaking off and took their responsibilities.
‐ The guy in the south guesthouse was one of theirs.
Go up to the guest house, check the door, right?
It's locked. When you're a bad guy's house
and you've just beat on his front door for about
a minute and a half, what you don't want to do
is stand in front of the door.
And so I was I was on my knee
as low as I could to the side of the door,
put a little explosive charge on it.
‐ Immediately, as they began to move,
we got the call that shots were fired.
(SEAL #4) AK‐47 starts shooting right through the door.
Thankfully, I was on my knee.
My partner and I at the door returned fire through the door.
Everything goes quiet, okay, now what do we do?
Right, we still gotta get in the room,
still gotta figure out what's going on.
Did he take his gun and go into the back room
or did we kill him and is he laying
the other side of the door, I don't know.
This happened very, very quickly.
Door opens up, it was a female holding the little kid.
Like, two or three kids behind her holding her hand.
Her husband was laying there dead inside the door.
(SEAL #1) On the northeast corner,
there's a door we can get into.
One of the breachers went up with a big bomb
and put it on the door, and that one you heard.
The door did open but there's a brick wall behind it.
It was a fake door to fake out people
that might be looking at the compound.
That was the first indicator this is a high value target.
‐ One of our team inside ran to the main gate, opened it up,
and let them in.
They came in and then everybody starts flooding
the main three‐story compound.
‐ Once the SEALs went into the compound,
we no longer saw anything on our screens.
And so we were waiting.
‐ We didn't have helmet cams,
so I wasn't seeing the action unfold.
(gunfire)
‐ There was the other Kuwaiti brother and his wife
killed on the first floor.
He was going for a gun and the female
was trying to protect him.
‐ I was able to see the guys in front of me already
working problems, different breaching problems.
Nobody hesitated.
The entire thing could be rigged to blow up.
If anyone's gonna martyr himself and his whole family
it's Osama bin Laden, but we just continue to move forward.
‐ To go up the stairs, there was a heavy metal door
built into the stairwell
that blocked the upstairs from downstairs.
That was a sign, hey, who has a metal door
at the bottom of their stairs?
We explosively breached that,
and then made our way up to the second floor.
House is pitch black, right?
No electricity, no lights on,
they had coverings on all the windows.
There's a set of stairs that go up,
there's a landing, and then it goes up to the third floor.
‐ Guys were moving upstairs the way we always had
in every shoot house that we'd work through.
‐ By the time I got there, there was a SEAL in front of me
who'd just taken a couple shots.
He's calm enough in this situation to say, okay, well,
I just saw a head peek around the corner.
I'm betting it's Khalid, bin Laden's son.
I'm gonna whisper his name.
Nobody told him to do this, he just dreamed this all up
in the moment, in the middle of the raid,
three minutes after crashing the helicopter and almost dying.
Literally whispers his name.
Khalid pops around the corner and gets shot.
As we moved up the stairs and stepped over Khalid's body,
he had an AK‐47 there, locked and loaded,
round in the chamber, off safe and ready to go.
‐ One guy goes this way, the other guy goes that way.
A handful of guys went over the top of Khalid,
moved to the second floor of the house.
Once the second floor was cleared,
the team moved up the stairs.
Shots fired.
‐ They started going into that room.
‐ You go to the door, you look through the door,
there's an adult male basically twitching
at the bottom of his bed, laying on the ground, done.
There are several females in the room.
Again, part of the Intel brief was, hey,
these women could wear suicide vests.
We'd seen aggressive females downstairs.
So the point man who had whispered Khalid's name
literally rushed into the room, pushed the two women up against
the back far wall in case they had a suicide vest.
He would have taken the blast and protected us.
Like, okay, wow, tha‐‐ that might be him, right?
His hair was‐‐ I remember the bridge of his nose.
I don't know, we all carried photos of him, right?
The photo I had, he had a very gray beard.
Looking down at him, his beard was pitch black.
When I searched his bathroom, guess what I found.
Just for Men hair dye
literally on his little shelf above his sink.
‐ We're listening and a certain amount of time goes by,
and then the next call sign we got was
"Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,"
and that was from the ground force commander.
Geronimo had been the call sign for bin Laden.
‐ They said it three times.
All he needed to do was say it once.
I could just tell when he called that he understood
what he was about to say was going to be momentous
and heard by a lot of people inside the US government.
‐ I had to call back out and said, is Geronimo EKIA?
Of course, they came back quickly
and said EKIA, enemy killed in action.
Everybody in the command post just let out a shout,
and a jump and raised their fist in the air,
and then again, in a quarter of a second, they were back down
in their seats and it was silent and people were just
doing their jobs.
‐ I remember looking at my co‐pilots like, they got him.
They called Geronimo, they got him.
‐ In our particular vault, because there were no
senior policymakers, this was a much more
from the trenches‐‐ immediately celebratory,
but also a lot of just tears and overwhelmed people.
‐ I had the sense, that everybody
was just taking a moment
to savor the fact that
all those people who had been killed on 9/11
had finally been avenged.
‐ There was...
some sense of vindication, although, at that point,
these guys are in a dark building.
They can't be absolutely certain that it's bin Laden,
but there seems to be some confidence that it is.
At that point, immediately, my mind went to, all right,
get these guys out of here as fast as possible.
(narrator) With one Black Hawk disabled,
the Chinook helicopters are no longer flying backup.
They now must lead the way home.
(Aviation Planner) When we first heard
of the aircraft crashing,
it takes a few seconds for it to set in that this is reality.
That was the most rehearsed contingency
that we had planned for.
So it was no longer an unscripted plan.
It was now just the alternate ending to a story
that had already been scripted out.
‐ Once I was told to execute. I mean, my you know, my call.
And we proceeded ourselves kind of back to the northwest
and went up this very large river valley.
It was about 30 miles or so to the northwest.
(narrator) Though one of their helicopters has crashed,
it takes the SEALs only about ten minutes
to secure the compound, killing four men and one woman.
Next, they gather as much intelligence as possible.
Even with bin Laden dead,
the fight against al‐Qaeda will continue.
‐ We're on the clock, right?
We know helos are running out of fuel,
we've got X amount of time
to wrap things up and get out of there.
People running around with bags just stuffing anything you can.
Computers, hard drives, paperwork,
anything you can find, you're stuff in bags.
‐ I just fell into the forensic aspect of it.
Kind of wiped off the face a little bit,
get as much blood off it so we could get some pictures,
you know, get a really good look at
the positive identification of him.
‐ At this point, you know, somebody on the radio
had asked for more time, our master chief was like,
nope, you don't have it, leave right now.
If we don't leave right now, we're gonna miss our ride.
So I remember we come running out,
everybody's carrying bags and bags of intel.
‐ Black Hawk came back in, picked up 12 of the SEALs
without any extra equipment, and they departed
and headed straight up to receive fuel
before I came in to pick up the remaining SEALs
plus all the extra equipment they found on the compound.
‐ As we kind of got finished with our duties
and our responsibilities
upstairs with the DNA collection,
we drug the body downstairs,
got him in a body bag in the courtyard.
‐ We had planned for 30 minutes time on target.
Then we'd given ourselves
an extra ten‐minute window to spare.
‐ Because of the commotion, the gunshots, the helicopter,
it's drawing a lot of attention from the community
regardless of the fact that it's the middle of the night there.
And so, there's also a lot of concern due to the proximity
of the compound to other military installations there.
And so we're monitoring those very, very closely.
‐ I look, people coming out of the houses like they were
running towards us, all of them.
That was the time that I realized
that I have to do something.
So then I called them and I said,
this is a government business.
If you want to stay alive, don't come.
Go back to your house. Please go back to your house.
I was just talking, of course, in Pashto.
There are two guys, they tried to run towards us.
One of the SEALs who were very close to me
and he put dots on them.
So I tapped on the shoulder.
I said, wait, and then I curse them.
And I said, go back, why you are coming here?
And they went back.
They listened. That was the greatest thing.
‐ You could see a lot of people moving in the courtyard.
There were a lot more women and children on the target
than we had estimated.
We have loaded the downed helicopter with demolition.
we were gonna blow it in place.
Any time we lose a helicopter,
we're prepared to destroy the, uh, the crypto gear on board
and the radios and some of the sensitive technology.
‐ The word goes out, blow the helo.
They put it on a timer,
not a remote control detonate, but a timer.
Set the timer, let it click.
Helos, they'll land in one minute.
‐ I was inbound from the southwest,
and that's when one of the soldiers got on the radio
and told me to break away.
The helicopter pilot banks a right.
Boom.
‐ Not but 100 yards away from landing
to pick up the ground force, that aircraft blew up.
And it was a 150 foot, 200 foot mushroom cloud.
And so immediate 360 degree right turn to get up
underneath that cloud and debris
and then come in and land to pick them up.
‐ We were so close that you could feel
the heat from inside the 47.
‐ We were within ten seconds
of blowing our own helicopter out of the sky.
‐ When they blew the helicopter,
then obviously all hell broke loose
and most of the villagers woke up.
The Pakistanis realized that something had happened.
They weren't quite sure what had happened,
but we knew that they had been put on alert.
‐ And we were scared to death the Pakistanis would mobilize
their Air Force and shoot down our helicopters,
which is one reason why we put all that DNA from bin Laden
and the intelligence in one helicopter
and his remains in another helicopter.
So if one of them got shot down,
we still had the evidence that we've got.
‐ The valley was now full of blue lights,
police lights all over the place.
And they were coming closer to the compound.
It was time to get them out of there.
I have a fuel tank, contingency assaulters,
primary SEALs, and I have the air crew
all crammed into an MH‐47.
We put that airframe to its max potential because of
the amount of weight and amount of people had on board,
we were just barely over rooftops.
Above the Pakistani military academy,
the original plan is that we were all going to link up
to refuel and then return home as a flight.
Now that we are in two separate locations
at two separate points in time,
there was no sense in us trying to focus on
consolidating and the return.
(narrator) The first Chinook takes
a direct route back towards Afghanistan.
The surviving Black Hawk heads north
to get fuel from the second Chinook.
‐ I remember all the lights in the helicopter blinking,
and knowing we were low on fuel.
‐ Before the Black Hawk got there,
I don't think we're on the ground more than 15 minutes,
he had to transfer most of his ground force to me
because he took on the fuel he needed to get back.
He absolutely needed the gas to get back to Afghanistan.
But because of the weight that the ground force,
he couldn't climb out of the valley.
‐ Took us about 19 minutes on the ground.
That was probably the longest 19 months of that mission.
(narrator) Refueling complete,
the two helicopters fly back in tandem
with the Chinook in the lead.
‐ When we fly as fast as he can fly, I can leave him,
so he's following me and electronic warfare displays
are very active at this point.
And I'm like, okay, well, we've got stuff out there
looking for us now.
‐ They flew fairly a northern route
outside the populous area, the route we took was
a direct route through low land, populated areas.
If anybody was going to be seen, it was going to be us.
‐ One of the team leaders comes in across radios says,
hey, Pakistan scrambled fighters after us.
‐ So we were getting indications whether it be on the radio
or on board systems that radar systems were up
and we were seen and we're being tracked.
And then lo and behold, before you know it, we had an F‐16 that
was at a nearby base in Pakistan that was searching for us.
And three times, the F‐16 was searching for us,
and then through acquisition,
and the next step was target track.
‐ Honestly, at that point, I started thinking about
my funeral because there's no way that this
ginormous flying bus was going to out‐speed,
outmaneuver a jet
that we probably sold them 30‐some years ago.
‐ We just watched the clock and the maps,
just praying that they would get out of Pakistan airspace in time
before some type of clash ensued.
(narrator) The returning helicopters
face one last hurdle.
Operation Neptune Spear has been kept secret
from American commanders in Afghanistan.
That night, some US forces noticed the approach
of unknown aircraft from Pakistan.
‐ There was an operation near the border,
which we did all the time.
Part of that element picked up
our guys coming across that border.
‐ They were actually escalating just one step shy of them
releasing weapons to shoot us down.
We were trying everything we could.
They finally just had to break radio silence
and tell them to stand down.
‐ I never thought I'd enjoy hearing those words,
"Welcome to Afghanistan," but that was music to my ears.
(narrator) Four hours after setting out,
all of the operators and air crews
who carried out Operation Neptune Spear
are back in Afghanistan.
The first order of business is confirming whose remains
they have brought back with them.
‐ We had touched down in Jabat,
got off the helos, there was guys there
to grab the body, pulled them right into a hangar.
I remember McRaven showing up immediately after.
He's like, all right. let me see him.
‐ I unzip the body bag,
and I pulled the remains out of the body bag.
And of course, we knew that bin Laden was about 6'4.
I saw a young SEAL standing by and I said,
hey, son, how tall are you?
And he looked at me kind of funny, he said,
"Well, sir, I'm 6'2."
Yeah, come here for a minute.
I want you to lie down right here.
And he said, "I'm sorry, sir, what?"
I said, I want you to lie down next to the remains.
So he lay down next the remains.
And sure enough, the remains were a couple of inches.
They put bin Laden's body back in,
and I went five months back‐‐
back to my video teleconference with the president.
And the president asked, "Well, Bill, is it him?"
I said, well, sir, you know, without DNA,
I can't tell you 100%, but certainly looks like him.
You know, all the features are the same.
I said I even had somebody lie down next to him
and the remains were a little bit longer.
And there's a pause on the other end of the screen.
And of course, by this time, the boys are back safely.
The tension of the moment is down.
And the president says, "Okay Bill, let me get this straight."
"We had $60 million for a helicopter,
but you didn't have $10 for a tape measure?"
(narrator) Back in The Situation Room,
President Obama awaits
DNA confirmation of the identity of the remains.
But will the news leak before the president is ready
to announce Osama bin Laden's death?
‐ First reaction was we're gonna hold
We will not announce tonight.
I'm not going in front of 300 million Americans
with a one in 20 chance of being completely wrong.
This is too important.
People were saying this story is not going to hold.
If you wait till morning, it will come out somewhere else.
And the downside of that is bigger than this one.
And so he started to weigh,
do I go with this, do I go with that?
They were passing around photos at the table.
But when he looked at the photo,
I thought I saw a change in his demeanor
that he‐‐ I think he felt when he saw it himself
and he saw the similarities,
that the 95% became higher.
He said we'll go at 10:30 or something like that.
So the speechwriters get cranking,
everybody gets cranking and then we're all waiting
for the president's speech.
‐ Good evening.
Tonight, I can report to the American people
and to the world that the United States
has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,
the leader of al‐Qaeda,
and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder
of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
It was nearly ten years ago
that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack
on the American people in our history.
The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory.
‐ So we had left the White House and we were walking down
the open portico, and we heard this noise
before we went outside and none of us knew what it was.
(all chanting) USA, USA, USA, USA!
USA! USA! USA! USA!
‐ "USA, USA, CIA, CIA."
I never thought I would ever hear a crowd yelling "CIA"
and I think everyone at the CIA
just felt a tremendous amount of pride
that we had been able to work on the operation
and do it successfully.
(Clinton) And it was thrilling.
And it was just the kind of response one would hope for,
particularly from young Americans who might not have
been born or were toddlers at the time of 9/11.
(chanting indistinctly)
(Clapper) It was closure for the country, for the families,
certainly closure for the intelligence community.
I also think it had a profound impact
on al‐Qaeda as a movement,
just the symbolism of this almost semi‐mythical figure,
Osama bin Laden,
and his demise, hugely important message.
‐ It was important for us to get bin Laden,
but not because we thought it would dramatically change
the nature of the war at the time.
I think what was important was this was about justice.
It wasn't revenge, it was about justice.
‐ We had discussed this before the raid ever took place,
if we got him and he got his remains, what do we do with him?
We don't wanna...
have him some place that will become a shrine
for terrorists, there's an obligation to offer the remains
to his family back in Saudi Arabia.
And my recollection, I'm a little vague on this,
but my recollection is
they didn't want anything to do with it.
And so the decision was made that his remains would be taken
to a ship and buried at sea.
‐ One of the clear discoveries from all of the information that
was gathered at the compound was that bin Laden was still very
active and trying to continue the planning effort on future
attacks in this country, that he continued to try
to exert leadership over al‐Qaeda.
‐ I think that the bin Laden operation
is a good example of
government at its best, not just a military action at its best.
You've got all these different agencies who set egos aside.
You have people who are staying focused on mission,
a reminder that we're able to work together
for the common good when we put our minds to it.
And it's something we should try more often.
‐ We jumped on a plane, 19 hours later,
you land back in the States.
I can remember turning on my phone for the first time
and I probably had a hundred text messages
from family and friends and everybody who'd seen the news.
And literally the next morning was trash day,
and I'm taking my trash out
and my neighbor lady across the street,
she knew I was a SEAL,
she didn't know what I did or what I was involved in,
but she had put two and two together
that I was out of town and now I'm back.
And I don't know if she knew I was involved or not.
I'm taking my trash out. I see her come out of her house,
no trash cans, but she's crying.
She walks all the way down her driveway,
walks across the street, gives him a bear hug,
looks at me in the eyes and says, "You never know
what your neighbors do for a living, do you?"