Original subtitles

Anybody know what the smoke is in Lower Manhattan?

I'm sorry, say again?

‐ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This was of an order of magnitude the country

hadn't seen anything equivalent to since Pearl Harbor.

These people did not hesitate to kill

almost 3,000 people in 9/11.

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.

We can't hear you.

‐ I can hear you.

I can hear you,

the rest of the world hears you,

and the people who...

And the people who knocked these buildings down

will hear all of us soon.

USA! USA! USA!

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.

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.

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.

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.

We knew he had fled Kandahar,

and then we had reporting he was in Kabul and Jalalabad.

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.

With no leads left to follow,

intelligence agencies take up the hunt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

♪

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

♪

The Black Hawks have 169 miles to cover

in a flight of about 90 minutes.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But another factor may also

have figured in the Black Hawk's problem.

Temperatures are substantially higher

than they had anticipated.

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.

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.

God, give me a second.

I gotta take a couple deep breaths here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‐ 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.

With one Black Hawk disabled,

the Chinook helicopters are no longer flying backup.

They now must lead the way home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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?"