Original subtitles

[narrator] They are top-secret missions

manned by specially trained intelligence and military elite.

Covert operations using unconventional tactics

outside the standard protocol.

But behind the clandestine activities

and state-of-the-art training are secrets.

Secrets so deceptive...

Don't go to the Bin Laden raid

if you think what you saw on the news has any correlation with what happened.

[narrator] ...so elusive....

[Ronald Kessler] The CIA is violating the laws of foreign countries.

That has to be kept secret.

[narrator] ...so life-threatening...

Lord knows keeping secrets matters when your life is at stake.

[narrator] ...that they've been kept hidden from the public until now.

[Heben] I'm not going to be anyone's prisoner of war.

You're going to have to kill me.

Because I'll chew your face off if I don't have any ammunition left.

[narrator] There are those who believe in the existence of a book.

A book that contains the most highly guarded secrets

of the United States of America.

A book whose very existence

is known to only a select few.

But if such a book exists,

what would it contain?

Secret origins?

Secret missions?

Secret lies?

Does there really exist

America's Book of Secrets.

[narrator] January 24, 2012.

Moments before President Barack Obama was to begin

his State of the Union address,

he commended the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.

[Obama] Good job tonight. Good job tonight.

[narrator] But why?

Kept secret from those outside the Defense Department

was the knowledge that, only minutes earlier,

an elite group of American special forces

known as SEAL Team Six

had stormed a Somali compound in a daring rescue mission.

In a matter of minutes, two hostages were extracted

unharmed and President Obama confirmed the rescue with their families.

It is the same elite unit, which only eight months earlier,

carried out an ultra-secret, highly classified mission:

Operation Neptune Spear.

Thirty eight minutes after U.S. helicopters set down

at a secret Abbottabad, Pakistan compound,

the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden,

was dead.

The United States has conducted an operation

that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda.

[narrator] Within hours, news of the clandestine Black Operation

or Black Op, spread across the globe,

proclaiming the men of SEAL Team Six as American heroes.

But just who are the elite soldiers behind these top-secret operations,

and what exactly makes a mission a Black Op?

Black Ops is a euphemism for unconventional operations.

And Black Operations include

everything from unconventional attacks against the enemy.

Today it's even cyberattacks.

All the way through hostage rescue operations,

surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence-collecting.

Those are the kinds of activities that we refer to today as Black Ops.

The primary function of Black Ops

is to do something expeditiously

that's got to be done right away

without anybody else knowing that it's going on.

Nowadays during warfare, we need a scalpel rather than a hammer.

[Mike Hayden] That's covert action. That's action taken

on behalf of the United States government,

in which the hand of the United States government

is intended to remain hidden,

and activities which the United States government does not intend to acknowledge.

It's that world between war and peace.

[narrator] While the U.S. government refuses to acknowledge their existence,

top-secret Tier One missions

can only be designated at the highest levels of government

and planned by the Central Intelligence Agency.

What makes a mission a Tier One Mission?

It's a determination made at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

and inside the Pentagon.

[Baer] These operations normally start with the CIA.

We collect all the intelligence

for these guys to go into a place.

We're there first on the ground.

Like Afghanistan, it was the CIA went in first,

Special Forces came in later.

The CIA works with Delta Force and the SEALs every single day.

A lot of the people inside the CIA

had at one time been in Delta Force or the SEALs.

[narrator] While Navy SEALs and Army Delta Force

are the most recognized,

the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines,

all have elite Tier One units

under the control of a unified combatant command.

Special Operations Command, which is the big umbrella

that SEALs and Delta

and Rangers and Air Force Special Operations fall under.

They comprise about 60,000 individuals.

Of those 60,000 individuals,

there's 20,000 operators or shooters or door-kickers.

What makes SEAL Team Six different

and makes Delta Force different

is they're Tier One counterterrorist units,

which means they can go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.

When there's a situation in the world that threatens Americans' lives,

the President wants to know a few things right away.

Where's the nearest aircraft carrier, where's the nearest SEAL team?

Where's the nearest Delta squadron?

How soon can I point the needle in the right direction?

[narrator] Special Operations units are trained

in areas of direct action,

psychological operations, intelligence,

surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Many consider the Navy SEALs

to be the best fighting force on Earth,

and they are often tasked with conducting the most harrowing

and dangerous missions.

SEAL actually stands for "Sea, Air, and Land."

It's the elements from which we operate.

The sea, the air.

We can sky-dive in, fast-rope in from a helicopter.

And of course land we could patrol in.

So "Sea, Air, and Land" is what forms the acronym SEAL.

[Heben] SEALs are described as the brain surgeons of shooting.

You also have a guy that can use his hands or any number of edged weapons.

So a guy can stab you, slash you, jab you, poke you,

shoot you, render you unconscious, or straight out kill you with his hands.

That's a deadly combination.

[cheering]

[narrator] It was the failed American invasion of Cuba

in April 1961, known as the Bay of Pigs,

that compelled President John F. Kennedy

to create a special force outside the CIA.

One that would be capable of conducting unconventional operations.

He began to see the duplicity involved

with what he was being told about the Bay of Pigs invasion.

It became more and more clear to him

that the CIA was not properly accountable.

He became so angry at this

that he actually declared that what he wanted to do

was to destroy the CIA,

break it into a thousand pieces and cast it to the wind.

[narrator] May 25, 1961.

During his famous "Man on the Moon" speech to Congress,

President Kennedy made public his desire for a special fighting force.

I am asking the Congress

for an additional $100 million

to expand existing forces

for the conduct of non-nuclear war,

paramilitary operations and sub-limited or unconventional wars.

[Wasdin] The Navy SEALs was originally formed by John F. Kennedy in 1962.

President Kennedy had the foresight to realize that wars of the future

would be low-intensity conflicts

that would spring up real quick,

and we needed the guys to send in to do that job.

[narrator] April 24th, 1980.

President Jimmy Carter orders an ultra-clandestine mission,

Operation Eagle Claw,

in an effort to rescue 52 U.S. embassy employees

held captive in Iran for nearly six months.

Eagle Claw. Well-documented, in terms of what went wrong.

We went over and over what could go wrong, and damn it, something went wrong.

So, a sandstorm kicks up.

It got to the filters of the helicopter that couldn't lift off enough.

Hit the wing tank of the C-130. End of mission.

[North] That operation was the reason why

the entire special operations community was reorganized in the aftermath.

It was the direct consequence of the failure of that mission.

[narrator] Following the Eagle Claw debacle,

where eight U.S. service men died,

the Department of Defense commissioned Vietnam veteran Richard Marcinko

to build a top secret counterterrorism unit.

Navy SEAL Team Six.

[Marcinko] The consequence of Eagle Claw was, of course,

got me to build SEAL Team Six,

which I consider my thesis of my military career.

One of the secrets about Six is that when I built it, I called it Six,

but there was only two.

We still had the Cold War going on, so I said,

"Let them figure out where three, four and five were. I'll go to six."

I think that Eagle Claw, for being a failure,

certainly has a plus, in that Congress mandated

the establishment of Joint Special Operations Command.

And now you have a bona fide staff

that does nothing but keep track of terrorism

and special operations around the world.

We now have this Tier One capability

that won't let a failure like that happen again.

[narrator] Tier One special operators like the Navy SEALs

must conduct high-risk counterterrorism missions

with surgical precision in a matter of minutes.

Let's go! Move!

[narrator] But what training process can prepare a solider

for these life and death covert missions?

And what skills really separate a Navy SEAL

from other Tier One operators?

[North] What does it take to become a black operator?

First of all,, you got to be a volunteer

to one of the branches of the armed forces.

Second, you have to qualify.

And that means a very rigorous selection process.

[all] Hey, up!

[Heben] When you look at the numbers,

active duty military personnel is about 1.4 million,

which represents .001 percent of our population.

So when you look at SEAL teams,

there's only about 1,200 SEALs

that are actually what we call door kickers, shooters or operators.

So not only are you .001 percent of the military,

but you're like .00005 percent of the entire nation.

Nobody's recruited in the SEAL teams.

To be a Navy SEAL, you have to volunteer.

You've got to go through screening, physical, mental.

There are three key characteristics in the SEAL teams.

Aptitude one, very, very intelligent people.

Physical fitness. And the biggest key of all is mental toughness.

That is the key thing that separates a Navy SEAL

from anybody else on the planet.

- [instructor] Fired up! - [trainees] Fired up!

The attrition rate with respect to SEAL training is pretty high.

It's never been lower than 85%,

which means 85% of the people

that try out, don't make it.

Matter of fact, the first day, they say,

"Look to the left, look to the right, look behind you.

Ten months from now, only one of you is going to be here."

[narrator] For Navy SEALs,

secret training exercises

can be more rigorous and intensive

than battlefield operations.

[Heben] We train aggressively as SEALs.

One of our mottos is "The more you sweat in peace,

the less you bleed in war."

BUDS training is an acronym

that stands for "Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL" training.

That's the initial forging process that every SEAL has to go through.

[Wasdin] If you're going through BUDS

and you don't at least think about quitting, something's wrong with you.

People die in BUDS of hypothermia.

People die at all SEAL training.

Get down in the mud and start crawling!

[Wasdin] Parachuting accidents, diving accidents, fast-roping accidents.

When you get to that level of training,

everything you do is inherently dangerous.

That's the price you pay for sharpening that spear.

[narrator] Before Navy SEAL candidates can graduate

to the next level of training,

they must survive the most anticipated and feared part of BUDS training:

Hell Week.

For a grueling six days,

these men must push themselves

beyond their limitations

or they will go home.

Hell Week starts on a Sunday afternoon

and it culminates the following Friday.

It's a nonstop evolution from swims to obstacle courses

to running all over the place with boats on your heads.

There is a rotating shift of instructors who are all SEALs themselves.

[instructor] Into the water.

[Heben] So every eight hours you get a fresh crew of these guys

that are ready to stick their foot up your backside.

The number-one quality of every SEAL

is just a general overall state of perseverance.

We are not quitters.

We would rather die than quit.

I'm not going to be anyone's prisoner of war.

You're going to have to kill me because I'll chew your face off

if I don't have any ammunition left.

[Wasdin] BUDS is just the screening-out process.

Now you have to prove you have the aptitude

to do the demolition, the skydiving,

the diving, the IED work,

hostage rescue, whatever it is that may be required.

So that's another six-to-ten months of intensive training

that's worse than BUDS.

[narrator] For the elite 15% who actually survive Hell Week,

an even more harrowing experience awaits:

closed quarters battle.

CQB is an acronym for "Closed Quarters Battle."

It's the toughest type of battle.

Closed quarters could be on a ship, could be on an airliner.

It's basically non-conventional warfare, not open terrain.

You're in confined spaces, close order.

And not is it that, but you're firing amongst each other.

So you're now going through a room where you have ricochets,

you have the hostages,

you've got friendly assets in there,

and you have bad guys in there, and you're all firing.

Close quarters combat is a myriad of combat techniques

that are slammed together in this homogenous mixture of ass kicking.

If you don't have the physical skills or the mental skills

to shift gears and quickly figure out a solution to that problem

that's right in front of you,

you're going to die.

[narrator] For Tier One operators,

special closed quarters resources are available 24 hours a day,

seven days a week.

These facilities are aptly named "Kill Houses."

A kill house is a training house for CQB.

You can arrange good guy, bad guy targets.

You have the capacity of changing the furniture around,

changing the entry points,

modifying it and electronically scoring it so there's no,

"Oh, I would have had it."

Being able to shoot a 3x5 index card about this big,

and being able to put two bullets into that every single time.

If I come wake you up at two o'clock in the morning, tell you to gear up,

and we go do a kill house run,

you've got to be able to make those killing shots every single time.

Once I got to SEAL Team Six,

I realized that I didn't know what I didn't know.

These guys have CQB down to a science.

You only think you know CQB

unless you are SEAL Team Six.

[whistle blows]

In the training process, you're basically given

the qualities of a world-class athlete.

Right from the very beginning,

you're taught the importance of teamwork.

They train together, they work together, they get committed together.

And they become part of a remarkably effective

special operations unit in the process.

[narrator] Once SEAL tactical training is completed,

the few Navy SEALs that make it receive the SEAL Trident.

But to the men of the Navy SEALs,

it's more than just a badge of honor.

The SEAL Trident is the insignia that SEALs wear on their uniforms.

The head of our eagle is bowed in deference to the nation,

we are at service to our nation.

The second symbol is an old flintlock pistol.

The hammer is cocked,

which is indicative of a constant state of readiness.

Also, there's King Neptune's trident on there,

which represents our mastery and command of the sea.

This is, like, the biggest, baddest and gaudiest piece

of chest equipment anybody wears.

And every SEAL that gets one of these has that buried into his chest, literally.

They're punched in by your commanding officer,

your team leader and everybody in your platoon.

You have to literally pull it out of your chest after you earn that.

I made up my mind.

I'm either going back to Wayne County, Georgia with a trident on my chest,

or they've got to mail me back in a box.

[narrator] For the United States, top-secret Black Ops missions

are a necessary, yet extremely costly endeavor.

Billions of dollars are invested in training, equipment, weapons,

transportation and operational support.

But just how do covert operations get funded

by a government that denies their very existence?

A black budget is essentially monies allocated

for the maintenance, resourcing,

logistics of our covert operations team.

Now, it's not open book.

That's the reason it's clandestine and covert.

If it's not, you might get out of the game.

[Kessler] The money for black budgets, it's all done secretly.

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees

have closed-door sessions where they approve these black budgets.

[Baer] The CIA has a separate funding from Congress.

The military has Black Ops that are under special access programs.

You have to keep it secret.

[Marcinko] It takes a lot of money to train the operators.

It takes a lot of money to equip the operators.

When I started with 100 shooters in 1980,

my training allowance for bullets was larger

than the allowance for the whole Marine Corps.

That's a lot of bullets.

But when you're saying, "I'm coming to save you,"

you don't care about the cost of those bullets.

You have the ability to buy cutting-edge equipment.

Cutting-edge gear from clothes that you're wearing

to weaponry, to optics

to even experimental types of food

that we're looking at to give guys more sustainable energy in the field.

The very fact that the federal government

denies their preservation of a so-called black budget,

this is a kind of a game being played with the American people.

[narrator] With billions in funding secretly appropriated

to Black Ops every year, just who is signing the checks?

Could there be a secret chain of command,

as some believe, that stretches all the way

to the White House?

I know there's a lot of inquiry about how does that chain of command work?

And, quite frankly, I am not at liberty

to take the risk I'm going to divulge something I shouldn't.

[Marcinko] The chain of command of that Tier One

is working for the National Command Authority.

National Command Authority, by definition,

is the President of the United States

and the secretary of defense. That's it.

Managed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But in essence, you're talking about the president saying,

"I want," Secretary of Defense says, "Go do it,"

and the chief says, "Troops, be there."

That is not a normal military function,

so that allows you direct line for funding,

direct line for intelligence,

direct line for action, and everybody's on a short tether.

They sell you secrecy in the name of, "The enemy will know.

We've got to have some secrecy."

And then it grows and grows and grows and grows,

and expands and expands and expands.

It never ends.

And we're just gobbled up by the National Security State.

[narrator] But how is the president shielded

from domestic and international accountability

when a covert operation is exposed?

Just how much, or little, is the president aware of?

Plausible deniability has been written

into the substructure of covert operations.

Under the National Security Act of 1947,

anything that is being done that is illegal,

immoral, unethical or potentially embarrassing

must be plausibly deniable by people at the highest levels.

Many times the people involved

don't even know exactly what they're doing.

That way, if things go wrong, they can be cut loose.

Plausible deniability.

[Baer] Secrecy is always a good thing.

The problem with secrecy is when it covers up incompetence.

We're talking about the United States government.

There's a lot of incompetence.

And when that's the purpose of secrecy, it doesn't serve this country.

[narrator] Spring, 1984.

Prior to the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California,

Deputy Chief of Naval Operations James A. Lyons, Jr.

voiced concerns about vulnerabilities

on America's military bases both at home and abroad.

Determined to expose potential weaknesses in America's defense systems,

Vice Admiral Lyons enlisted the mastermind behind SEAL Team Six,

Commander Richard Marcinko,

to create and conduct an ultra-secret Black Op

known as Red Cell.

[Marcinko] So I pulled some SEAL Team Six members.

And I hired a group of cameramen,

and we went around saying,

"Which one of your bases would you like us to attack?"

He would pick it.

And I would go out there and we would attack the base.

I'd attack it for nine to ten days.

And every day, I would brief the senior officer

on what I had done the night before

and what I got away with and presented him with a film

that said, "Gotcha."

[narrator] Commander Marcinko's Red Cell did, in fact,

expose security weaknesses on American military compounds.

But just how vulnerable were they?

[Marcinko] In New London, Connecticut, I was able

to get on board nuclear submarines.

When Reagan was president, I got a truckload of 500-pound bombs

alongside Air Force One.

That proved the vulnerability and policy lines had to be resolved.

[narrator] But did the findings of the Red Cell mission

also expose other secrets?

Ones that would threaten Commander Marcinko's very future?

[Marcinko] How'd I get in trouble? I conspired with myself.

I didn't know you could do that, but apparently I did.

I was already retired.

And Naval Investigate Service

they spent a lot of money

to find out how I did all the things I did.

I was guilty of a grenade contract that I said I needed.

The Army was the contracting service.

I had nothing to do with it, but I was the one that went to jail,

because I didn't say it cost too much.

I spent time in a federal camp for a little over a year.

Landed in a manure pile and came out smelling like a rose.

[narrator] Did Marcinko violate the chain of command

or was the former SEAL Team Six Commander

a victim of his own covert mission?

Did the government create Red Cell

as a means to orchestrate an even larger secret agenda?

Red Cell had a duality to it.

It was testing out American installations,

but it was also simultaneously building a database

that is going to allow us to move

in a Black Ops fashion all over the world,

and assemble an assault team somewhere without anybody knowing.

[narrator] Undoubtedly, the most secretive

and highly classified of all Black Ops missions

originate within the cloak and dagger world

of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Many CIA operatives spend their entire careers

shrouded in a clandestine existence,

operating behind enemy lines,

spying against foreign countries, stealing secrets,

and conducting counterintelligence.

When you look at CIA, we are the nation's first line of defense.

We go where others cannot go,

and we accomplish what others cannot accomplish.

We spy, we conduct espionage, we steal secrets.

We do it through human sources.

We conduct analysis.

The actual number of analysts we have is a classified number,

but it's the largest collection of intelligence analysts

in the American government by far.

You have several affiliated organizations within the CIA

that aren't necessarily based at Langley.

It's very highly classified how they do it,

where they do it, when they do it.

Very few of those are actually publicly acknowledged.

[Kessler] Everything that the CIA does does have to be done secretly,

because when CIA officers go into foreign countries

to collect intelligence,

they are violating the laws of those countries.

[narrator] Nearly 160 miles away from CIA headquarters

in Langley, Virginia, tucked into the countryside,

is an ultra-clandestine training facility, Camp Peary,

where new CIA operatives prove themselves.

While the U.S. government refuses to acknowledge its existence,

insiders simply refer to it as The Farm.

The Farm is a training base.

It's an old naval base which we're not allowed to name,

but you can say The Farm.

They train you on all sorts of stuff.

They train you on weapons,

high-speed driving, how to run somebody off the road

at 70 miles an hour,

parachute training,

secret writing...

short-range agent communication,

communicating with satellites,

rendezvousing with a submarine

in the Atlantic in the middle of the night.

You know, useful skills like that.

The skill set that a Special Operator employs is astounding.

It's communications.

It's explosives.

It's demolitions. It's explosive ordnance disposal.

It's every kind of weapon that you can imagine.

We can go to CVS and I can make a bomb

between now and midnight that will take this hotel down.

How are you going to stop that?

[narrator] From The Farm,

an operative will be dropped in a major U.S. city

and must maintain his or her cover in a real-life game of spy hunter.

The CIA training never stops.

They put you on the streets of Washington

and have constant surveillance.

Even use FBI agents.

You're supposed to detect them.

You're supposed to be able to put down dead drops

even under observation. You're going 18 hours a day.

What they're trying to do is break you down

to see at what point you make mistakes.

What they want to do is find people that can live overseas,

live under the pressure of a foreign government watching them.

You learn it as part of your life.

Every single room you assume is wired.

You assume you're under surveillance all the time.

[narrator] Former CIA Operative Bob Baer,

whose covert exploits inspired the 2005 thriller Syriana,

was in charge of the CIA in Iraq

during the years following the Persian Gulf War.

His Black Op mission,

to organize opposition against one of the most brutal dictators

in modern history, Saddam Hussein.

[Baer] An Iraqi general came to me and said

he can get rid of Saddam.

He had a tank company near Tikrit,

and our plan was to cause a diversion in Baghdad.

Start shooting so that Saddam would move to Tikrit

and then once he was there,

our colonel was going to move these 12 tanks

on his compound near Tikrit,

and ask him to resign or we'd kill him.

[narrator] In 1995, Baer informed the Clinton Administration

that the opportunity existed to neutralize

the man known as The Butcher of Baghdad,

but inexplicably, they refused.

[Baer] I was called back by the FBI

and investigated for murder and attempted murder.

I figured once your employer's starting to think

about putting you in jail, it's time to move on.

[narrator] But why would the government stop Baer's Black Op

and investigate its highest-ranking CIA operative working in Iraq?

[Baer] When I went into the CIA, it was a very black and white world.

We were worried about the Soviet Union.

Was Moscow going to launch an attack on the United States?

The people that were doing counterterrorism

leading up to 9/11 had moved off accounts on the Soviet Union.

So you had a guy that was very good at counting tanks,

and then all of a sudden, you're doing Bin Laden.

These people had never set foot outside the Beltway,

didn't speak Arabic, didn't quite know who Bin Laden was.

What was al Qaeda?

[narrator] And what would be the ultimate consequence

as the antiquated CIA struggled to modernize?

[narrator] September 11, 2001.

America fell victim to a covert attack

at home.

[Baer] When 9/11 happened, I was in Washington D.C.

Someone called me on the phone

and said, "Turn the TV on."

The second plane hit.

Then the Pentagon hits.

I can see the Pentagon burning from my house.

My first reaction is,

"All right, we're going to finally get serious about this."

[narrator] The events of 9/11 galvanized the intelligence community

and Tier One Special Forces with one unified Black Op mission:

to hunt down and kill the mastermind

behind the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden.

[Heben] The events of 9/11 almost served

as an opening of a floodgate for special operations.

It's almost like having this rottweiler that's been in a cage

with a choke chain on it,

and all of a sudden, they open up the cage,

they take the choke chain off, they open up the gate and say,

"Go bite some people."

[narrator] August, 2010.

White House intelligence officers call a top-secret meeting

with President Obama.

Nearly ten years after 9/11,

President Barack Obama gave the orders to launch the Black Op

to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Operation Neptune Spear.

On May 2, 2011, at 1:15 a.m.,

an American military transport departed Bagram, Afghanistan,

where two dozen elite warriors from SEAL Team Six

arrived at an airbase in northwest Pakistan

and boarded two Chinook helicopters.

Their destination: a multi-level Abbottabad compound,

fortified by 12-foot walls and armed guards.

[Heben] We'd been watching that place for years,

in the months leading up to the actual operation,

we had constructed a mock compound.

The SEAL Team Six guys, they knew every square inch of that compound,

much like you or I would know the details in our kitchen.

[Mike Baker] There were eight or nine years of work,

credibly labor-intensive, painstaking work carried out

by the CIA and others that led eventually

to landing on that site and taking out bin Laden.

[narrator] Escorted by a pair of stealth Black Hawk helicopters,

the SEALs, equipped with night vision goggles

and M4 carbine rifles, rappelled into the compound.

[Heben] They had a lot of details of the compound,

but the door they thought was a door was a false door, it was a façade.

They ended up having to explode their way through one of the walls.

[narrator] While the SEALs entered the house,

a previously unreported stealth helicopter was forced to land.

We were told publicly that it was a Special Operations helicopter

that was damaged and then partially destroyed.

We wouldn't have known about that special helicopter if it hadn't crashed.

[narrator] As the SEALs stormed inside,

they rely on their close-quarters combat training,

clearing room after room.

[Heben] They climbed up that three-story inner compound,

that's where they found Osama bin Laden.

They took him out as he was reaching for a weapon.

[narrator] In a matter of seconds,

the world's most notorious terrorist was dead.

[Heben] The entire operation

happened in under an hour, about 38 minutes,

but the actual defining moments wherein they were able to locate Osama

and put rounds into his body happened in under a minute.

Thirty eight minutes is a very long time.

It becomes even longer if people are shooting back at you.

It becomes even longer if you crash a helicopter,

you have to breach through a wall

and you don't know if somebody else is coming for reinforcements.

[narrator] Sunday May 1, 11:35 p.m.

President Obama addresses the nation.

Good evening.

The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,

the leader of al Qaeda.

[narrator] But within hours,

conflicting details of the raid spread worldwide.

And over the next several days,

the official statement from the United States government

would change multiple times.

In the first week after that raid,

we were told so many conflicting stories that have never been resolved.

Why, really, they disposed of the body so quickly.

Whose orders it was to assassinate him,

rather than to take such a high-value intelligence target in for questioning.

[Wasdin] Nobody outside the team that hit the compound

in Abbottabad knows what went on in that compound.

I find it laughable for people to think

that anybody's got any insider information

about what really went on inside the op to kill bin Laden and stuff like that.

You're going to hear a lot of propaganda.

You're going to hear a lot of propaganda out of the White House.

Then you got the SEALs that don't want to talk about it at all.

[North] Quite frankly, I was stunned at how much was revealed

about the operation to get bin Laden.

What we know is that the administration announced

that a SEAL Team carried out a raid in which bin Laden was killed.

And bin Laden was then taken out

to a ship and his body was given a Muslim burial at sea.

[narrator] The death of bin Laden

marked the War on Terror's greatest victory.

So why would the United States government

be so eager to revise its accounts of the bin Laden raid

and refuse to release any photos?

Every warrior in those kinds of units

understands that divulging information,

even about an operation that may have taken place years ago,

can jeopardize those who are on the next mission.

That old axiom "Loose lips sink ships," they get that.

[narrator] For highly classified, covert missions

secrecy is paramount,

but could the clandestine nature of Black Ops,

like Operation Neptune Spear,

spawn conspiracy theories and fuel mistrust in the government?

[Baker] With that kind of misinformation,

you don't really know whether in fact the operation went as characterized.

In fact, you don't even really know, there's no proof,

that Osama bin Laden was ever even there.

[Jones] Upwards of 90% of warfare today

is psychological in nature or a Psy Op.

And I cannot stress enough how integral and how key this is

to the overall system.

[Baker] Psy ops, or psychological operations,

are an attempt to influence hearts and minds.

It's an attempt to convince people of certain things.

Some of them true, some of them not true.

[narrator] Beyond propaganda, rumors and conflicting accounts,

one thing remains clear.

The escalation of black budgets may point

to one of America's greatest military secrets:

that the future of American warfare

and the global War on Terrorism lies largely in Black Ops

and the elite warriors who are prepared to sacrifice their own lives

for the safety of their nation.

I've had people ask me, "Is it true

that most Black Ops don't live to see their 30th birthday?"

When I got into SEAL Team Six,

if you'd have told me that I would live to be 40,

I would have thought you were crazy.

[Heben] The secrets we keep are very, very necessary.

We don't like people to know where we've been,

where we're going, where we've come back from.

[Wasdin] I was an elite warrior in the modern world,

and that's all I cared about.

We had a saying at SEAL Team Six called

"Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse."