One the questions on many minds last night and today has surely been, “How the hell — after all these years — did they finally find Bin Laden?” Already, details are beginning to emerge on the events that led up to the Bin Laden killing after a decade long manhunt, and it’s all nothing short of fascinating.
According to a report this morning by the New York Times, U.S. intelligence officials became suspicious when it dawned on them that the lavish, well-fortified house a Bin Laden associate had been living was just too lavish and well-fortified for someone of his low status — a house that sat on the top of a hill and was surrounded by a 12-foot concrete fence with barbed wire on top. They figured something was up, that someone far more important was inside of the $1 million mansion constructed in 2005. So for months they watched it, and eventually determined that a family fitting the description of the Bin Laden family was living inside.
Reports the Times:
A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.
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Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.
Still, it was not until August that they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour’s drive north of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
C.I.A. analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound. A senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had decided that there was a “strong possibility” that Bin Laden himself was hiding there.
The Times notes that Obama and his national intelligence team began planning the raid on the compound in mid-March. Finally, on Friday morning, the president signed off on the plan for the raid. Not trusting them and no doubt fearing some sort of leak, Obama intentionally kept Pakistani leaders in the dark about the plan. Hilariously, a Pakistani official interviewed on CNN this morning claimed that if Obama would have just told them something, they could have carried out the raid and taken down Bin Laden themselves. Yeah, whatever fella.
And so it came to be that an attack was carried out by the Navy SEAL Team Six unit, which belongs to a group of elite black ops task forces that report directly to the president. National Journal’s Marc Ambinder culled together some interesting details.
From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.
After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap — boom, boom — to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell National Journal.
Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.
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DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story — generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code.
How did the helos elude the Pakistani air defense network? Did they spoof transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out with Pakistan Air Force equipment? If so — and we may never know — two other JSOC units, the Technical Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were responsible. These truly are the silent squirrels — never getting public credit and not caring one whit. Since 9/11, the JSOC units and their task forces have become the U.S. government’s most effective and lethal weapon against terrorists and their networks, drawing plenty of unwanted, and occasionally unflattering, attention to themselves in the process.
And that’s how it all went down.
(Photo via Vice)