The phone call that led Obama to Osama

Bob Woodward
May 8, 2011

IT SEEMED an innocuous, catch-up phone call. Last year Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for a Pakistani known to US intelligence as the main courier for Osama bin Laden, took a call from an old friend.

''Where have you been?'' inquired the friend. ''We've missed you. What's going on in your life? And what are you doing now?''

Kuwaiti's response was vague but heavy with portent: ''I'm back with the people I was with before.'' There was a pause, as if the friend knew that Kuwaiti's words meant he had returned to bin Laden's inner circle, and was perhaps at the side of the al-Qaeda leader himself. The friend replied, ''May God facilitate.''

When US intelligence officials learned of this exchange, they knew they had reached a key moment in their decade-long search for al-Qaeda's founder. The call led them to the unusual, high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

''This is where you start the movie about the hunt for bin Laden,'' said one US official briefed on the intelligence-gathering leading up to the raid early last Monday.

The exchange and several other pieces of information, other officials said, gave President Barack Obama the confidence to launch the mission to capture or kill bin Laden, a decision he took despite dissension among his advisers and varying estimates of the likelihood that bin Laden was in the compound. The officials spoke on condition that they not be named.

US agencies had been hunting for Kuwaiti for at least four years; the phone call gave them his mobile phone number. Using a vast number of human and technical sources, they tracked Kuwaiti to the compound.

The main three-storey building, which had no telephone lines or internet service, was impenetrable to eavesdropping technology. US officials were stunned to realise that whenever Kuwaiti or others left the compound to make a call, they drove some 90 minutes away before even placing a battery in a mobile phone. Turning on the phone made it susceptible to electronic surveillance.

As intelligence officials scrutinised images of the compound, they saw that a man emerged most days to stroll the grounds for an hour or two. The man walked back and forth, day after day, and soon analysts began calling him ''the pacer''. The imagery never provided a clear view of his face.

The pacer never left the compound. His routine suggested he was not just a shut-in but almost a prisoner.

Was the pacer bin Laden? A decoy? A hoax? A set-up?

Bin Laden was at least 190 centimetres tall, and the pacer seemed to have the gait of a tall man. The White House asked the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to determine the pacer's height. The agency said the man's height was somewhere between 170 centimetres and 200 centimetres, according to one official.

Another official said the agency provided a narrower range for the pacer's height, but the estimate was still of limited reliability because of the lack of information about the size of the building's windows or the thickness of the compound's walls, which would have served as reference points.

In one White House meeting, CIA director Leon Panetta told Mr Obama that the general rule in gathering intelligence was to keep going until a target, such as the Abbottabad compound, ran dry.

Mr Panetta said that point had been reached, arguing that those tracking the compound were seeing the pacer nearly every day but could not conclude with certainty that it was bin Laden.

Mr Obama and his advisers debated the options. One was to fire a missile from an aerial drone. Such a strike would be low-risk, but if the result was a direct hit, the pacer might be vaporised and officials would never be certain they had killed bin Laden.

If the attack missed, bin Laden or whoever was living in the compound would flee and the US would have to start the hunt from scratch.

Mr Panetta designated Vice-Admiral William McRaven, head of Joint Special Operations Command, to devise a boots-on-the ground plan that became known as ''the McRaven option''.

His decision to assign the operation to the Navy SEALs was critical. SEALs have a tradition of moving in and out fast, often killing everyone they encounter at a target site.

A ''pattern of life'' study of the compound by intelligence agencies showed that about a dozen women and children periodically frequented it.

Specific orders were issued to the SEALs not to shoot the women or children unless they were clearly threatening or had weapons. (During the mission, one woman was killed and a wife of bin Laden was shot in the leg.) Bin Laden was to be captured, one official said, if he ''conspicuously surrendered''.

The longer such raids take, the greater the risk to the SEALs. One senior official said the general philosophy of the SEALs was: ''If you see it, shoot it. It is a house full of bad guys.''

Several assessments concluded there was a 60 to 80 per cent chance that bin Laden was in the compound. Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Centre, was much more conservative. During one White House meeting, he put the probability at about 40 per cent.

When a participant suggested that was a low chance of success, Mr Leiter said: ''Yes, but what we've got is 38 per cent better than we have ever had before.''

Officials said Mr Obama's advisers were not unanimous in recommending he go ahead with the McRaven option. The president approved the raid at 8.20am on Friday.

During the assault, one of the Black Hawk helicopters stalled, but the pilot was able to land safely. The hard landing forced the SEALs to abandon a plan to have one team rope down from a Black Hawk and come into the main building from the roof. Instead, both teams assaulted from the ground.

The White House initially said bin Laden was shot and killed because he was engaged in a firefight and resisted. Later, White House spokesman Jay Carney said bin Laden was not armed, but Mr Carney insisted he resisted in some form. He and others have declined to specify the exact nature of his alleged resistance, through there reportedly were weapons in the room where bin Laden was killed.

SEALs scooped up dozens of thumb drives and several computer hard drives that are now being scrutinised for information about al-Qaeda, especially an address, location or phone number for Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second-in-command.

But officials said the delicate process of sifting this intelligence bonanza was made more challenging because of worries that using the wrong passwords could trigger a planned erasure of digital information.

In the White House situation room on Sunday night, the President and his national security team watched a soundless video feed of the raid.

When bin Laden's corpse was laid out, one of the Navy SEALs was asked to stretch out next to it to compare heights. The SEAL was 184 centimetres. The body was several centimetres taller.

When Mr Obama heard this, he turned to his advisers and said: ''We donated a $60 million helicopter to this operation. Could we not afford to buy a tape measure?''

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/world/the-phone-call-that-led-obama-to-osama-20110507-1edeo.html