Downloaded from YTS.MX
A lapse in intelligence.
There was a sense that we had let the country down.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
A wounded nation hungry for justice.
Their objective was to attack the United States and to destroy it.
(SPEAKS ARABIC)
There was a drive to strike back
against the enemies that had struck us.
And the hunt for Osama Bin Laden begins.
But where to find him?
We were getting lots of false sighting all over the world.
Now for the first time, the CIA reveals
previously classified details of the mission to kill Bin Laden.
We have a way of getting inside Al Qaeda's tent.
This was the best kept secret in my 33 years working for the CIA.
For all the things we tried to do to make sure this went right...
..something wrong was happening.
This is the inside story of the hunt for the most wanted terrorist
on the planet by one of the world's most secret
and powerful organisations, the Central Intelligence Agency.
We're telling the story now because it needs to be told
by people that were directly involved in the hunt for Bin Laden.
It is a moment in history that needs to be captured
while everybody is still here to capture it.
A bright September morning, 2001.
The day the world is plunged into horror
as America faces the worst attack on its homeland in history.
Holy shit!
Terrorists hijack four passenger jets.
Two hit the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.
One slams onto the west wing of the Pentagon.
And a fourth crashes in Pennsylvania.
US President George W Bush, promoting education reform
in Florida at the time, is immediately evacuated.
I was in his small office on air force one.
President looked at me in the eye and said "Michael, who did this?"
I said, "Mr. President,
"I have not seen any intelligence that would take us to a perpetrator
"so you're going to get my best guess.
"There are a couple of nation States that have the capability to do this,
"Iran and Iraq, but I don't think either one of them
"has anything to gain from doing something like this.
"I think when we get to the end of the trail,
"we're going to find Al Qaeda,
"and we're going to find Osama Bin Laden."
A few hours later, the flight manifests
of one of the planes reveal three known operatives from Al Qaeda,
a terrorist organisation led by Osama Bin Laden
and his number two Ayman Al Zawahiri.
This wasn't their first attack on America.
A bomb under the World Trade Center in 1993.
Two simultaneous attacks on US Embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania in 1998.
And a small boat suicide strike in Yemen
against the destroyer USS COLE in 2000.
Years before 9/11, Al Qaeda was tracked by CIA analysts
to anticipate this ongoing threat.
They really began to conclude
there's a threshold somewhere,
but they hadn't reached it yet,
where they could hit the United States,
kill Americans and there'd be essentially no retaliation.
Their objective was to attack the United States and to destroy it.
Pretty grandiose plan. It was like an expanding terrorist universe.
Their propaganda and their recruitment drives
were having some effect.
They were getting recruits from all over the world,
including the United States, Britain, France.
We had an innate feel that this train was running over us.
We were preparing for something like this, we expected it.
For us, it wasn't a question of if it's going to happen,
it's when it's going to happen.
Though the CIA attempted to alert the policy makers
about the imminent threat of a terrorist attack on US soil,
they failed to thwart the 9/11 attack.
We had been able to warn, at a strategic level,
clearly in the summer of 2001.
Al Qaeda was getting prepared for something,
but that very elusive tactical threat,
specifically what and where, we were unable to do.
There was a sense that we had let the country down.
For CIA officers at the time, it was a humiliation.
This was a very emotional moment,
besides the fact the country had been hit,
but that the CIA had not been able to prevent it.
There was a drive to strike back against the enemies
that had struck us, and to deliver vengeance and justice
to those that had killed so many.
It was highly personal for many people.
The day after the attack,
President Bush gathers his closest advisers.
He wants to strike back fast and hard.
He needs to quickly decide who will lead America's response
to the Al Qaeda attack...
..and the hunt for its leader Osama Bin Laden.
President goes around the room and says, "What do we do?"
And nobody has any answers except CIA.
We were ready to go and nobody else was.
Two men present the CIA plan to the President...
..George Tenet, director of the CIA,
and Cofer Black, director of the Counterterrorism Center.
The strategy is to send a few officers to Afghanistan,
where the Taliban had created a haven for Al Qaeda.
The officers will recruit Northern Alliance fighters,
opponents of the regime,
to help the United States defeat the Taliban and find Osama Bin Laden.
We had to convince the President that we could do this.
We're a civilian intelligence agency.
We're not exactly known for leading the nation's counterattack
into a remote corner of the world against an entrenched enemy.
The order of battle is something like 400 to one.
I underscored that, you know,
this is not going to be a bloodless activity.
But by the time we're done, enemy's going to have flies
walking across their eyeballs.
I had to make absolutely sure he understands
that there's going to be casualties in this.
People are gonna die.
And he stared ahead for like 10 seconds.
And he just said, "Cofer, can you really do this?"
And I said, "There's no doubt in my mind."
And he said, "That's what I'm talking about. Go get him."
The Directorate of Operations,
which runs the CIA's most sensitive covert campaigns,
recruits the key players for this high-risk assignment.
Two days after the 9/11 attacks, the CIA set up
a makeshift headquarters in Langley for this top-secret mission.
Seven members are selected.
The team is called "Jawbreaker"
and comes under the direct authority
of the CIA Counterterrorism Center.
Team leaders are Gary Schroen, 59,
one of the best Afghanistan experts of the CIA,
and Phil Reilly, former US Army special forces,
one of the most respected CIA paramilitary officers.
Gary Schroen spoke the language of the area,
he had been there before.
He had also had a relationship with the Northern Alliance,
and we then identified other teammates to come on board,
including one of the best field medics in the CIA
and the best field communicator.
Besides gear and food, the team is equipped with AK 47s,
9mm automatic pistols,
and $3,000,000 in cash in $100 bills, packed in three boxes.
The money will ultimately be used to recruit allies on the ground.
After a last meeting in Camp David with the National Security Council,
President Bush greenlights the CIA plan...
..declaring war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime.
In Langley, the Jawbreaker team assembles.
None of them were nervous.
They came in to make sure that their insurance forms were done,
that their records are up to date,
wills were processed. There weren't a big party.
There wasn't a farewell speech.
They just left and went to do what they're supposed to do.
We deployed initially to Germany and from there,
we then moved forward on CIA air assets
in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and then Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
We used a Soviet helicopter, it was the only airlift we had
that had been used previously to go into Afghanistan.
So, we had the means to get in.
CIA has many ways to infiltrate people,
and we could have used other things, but this was perfect.
It had a large internal auxiliary fuel tank.
It was packed with all the gear that we would need,
as well as $3 million that we brought with us.
Two weeks after 9/11, the Jawbreaker team deploys.
Next stop, Afghanistan.
We had to fly in over what was called
the Anjuman Pass, about 15,000 altitude.
It was a large, heavy helicopter.
You breathe a sigh of relief when you were able to clear that pass
as to descend into the Panjshir Valley.
One of the benefits of flying in the Russian helicopter
was that the Taliban also had some Russian airframes.
As we flew in, we flew over a Taliban patrol,
and they looked up at us.
They didn't raise their weapons, and I have to assume
they were thinking, "We're not sure whose helicopter that is."
Had it been a Black Hawk or an obvious US military helicopter,
they would have engaged it.
So, they didn't take a shot at us,
and that's fine and we were able to get in.
As soon as they land in the middle of the Panjshir Valley,
the team starts its mission, meeting new allies
against the Taliban and funding them to conduct the fight.
The Northern Alliance needed funds to do certain things,
and that's what the cash was for.
In addition, we were making contact with other Afghan allies
that we thought we could deal with.
Be it Uzbeks, be it other Pashtuns in the South.
Part of the message was, "You're on our team now."
It was also to say, "You're now going to accept
"additional CIA personnel and us military personnel into your ranks."
After Jawbreaker paves the way, the US military enters the fight.
The US Army Green Berets 5th special forces group,
also called the 5th Legion,
is selected to bring the fight to Afghanistan.
My mission was to destroy the Taliban regime
and render Afghanistan unsafe as sanctuary for Al-Qaeda.
It was both daunting and intimidating,
and it was also like, "Wow, this is a classic Green beret mission."
I mean, how many times do you get told, "Go take down a country"?
By the end of October, 100 special ops
and CIA officers are on the ground,
trying to raise thousands of local soldiers
to fight alongside the US forces.
You're in the middle of hundreds of people
that you've never seen before, that all have AK's or RPGs.
You don't know how many of them would just as soon cut your throat,
or maybe this warlord will accept a bunch of money
from Bin Laden, and they'll turn on us.
We were dressing like locals.
Everybody started growing their beards.
I have the blanket on that covered up my military equipment.
If you are someone far off, trying to do an ambush or a sniper,
it would take you longer to figure who I was.
So, it'd give me that little bit more time and survivability.
In October, President Bush launches operation Enduring Freedom,
deploying the power of the United States Air Force to the region.
Bombers and fighter aircrafts
stand ready to blitz the Taliban positions.
On the ground, the Special Forces and CIA teams
identify targets one by one,
using advanced laser designators to identify GPS coordinates.
It was a bit of Mad Max meets Star Wars.
We were fighting, in some cases, very primitive battle
on the ground, and yet we're using
state-of-the-art technology in other areas,
and our ability to bring air power decisively
and very precisely was critical.
F14's, F16's, F15's, B52's, B1's, everything in the US arsenal
that was available that was dedicated to the fight
could drop a bomb.
In the White House,
George Bush's intelligence briefer Michael Morrel
keeps the President informed of the state of the mission.
I started showing the President, you know,
these large military maps where the Northern Alliance forces were,
where the Taliban forces were, what's the intelligence
on where Bin Laden is.
And I remember, the president's frustration
with how slow it was going.
So, the president would push George Tenet almost every morning.
"George what's going on here? How come these guys aren't moving?"
But once they did start moving,
they just cut through the Taliban like butter.
The CIA's plan is extremely effective.
The Northern Alliance takes all the main cities of Afghanistan.
The campaign in many ways came together
almost like water flowing around a stream bed
on how the teams could inform us, like a stain spreading.
Once that air campaign started, they really did start to evaporate.
The enemy just dissipated, just went away.
Those that stayed in fight died.
For Osama Bin Laden, the end of the Taliban regime
leaves only one safe place, the mountains.
In November, the CIA intercepts a radio message
identifying Osama Bin Laden's voice
coming from a cave complex named Tora Bora,
located south of the city of Jalalabad
and less than 10 miles from the Pakistani border.
We knew that it was almost impregnable,
but everyone was super excited.
I mean, this was the whole purpose.
This was the man behind 9/11.
In the final week of November, a few Americans,
supported by Afghan guides,
leave Jalalabad to creep into the mountains around Tora Bora.
These were the steepest mountains I'd ever seen. And it was brutal.
And here we were on this knife ridge,
and we knew we were, at that time, the closest Americans
to where we thought Bin Laden was.
We were going to try to soften up Al Qaeda
and get them to hole up in their caves.
We hoped we might be able to get some caves to collapse on them
and to kind of pin them in so that the main force of Afghans
with some Americans could come up the valley
and then go search the caves and kill or capture
whoever was in the caves.
During the first two weeks of December,
up to 100 airstrikes a day are called in by troops
on the ground.
With reinforcements of special forces and local fighters,
the net around Tora Bora tightens.
The Pakistani government deploys 4,000 frontier troops
to the border to intercept anyone trying to flee.
Osama Bin Laden and his closest associates
seem trapped in their stronghold.
But a ground assault on Tora Bora is risky.
The US wasn't in position to suddenly fly
over battalions or brigades worth of US Marines
or soldiers to come into Tora Bora and take it.
And to plan that would have taken forever.
It really looked, initially, like that
if Bin Laden was going to make his final stand,
that it was going to be very bloody and very costly in US lives.
General Tommy Franks, commander of operation Enduring Freedom,
decides on airstrikes to decimate the Al Qaeda forces.
But by mid-December 2001,
the radio signals from Osama Bin Laden stop.
The leader of Al Qaeda has escaped.
They were there, in this very constrained area,
and if you don't block them and engage them, they can escape.
It would have been really an elegant end to this
if we had ended it right there.
We should have. I'm bothered by that.
But you know, I'm an intelligence officer.
I'm not a four-star general.
It's kind of like an end piece.
He was there and from that point, he was gone.
I was the first person to tell the president
that Bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora.
The president said, "Is there anything new this morning?"
And I told him that Bin Laden has escaped.
And he shot the messenger. And he was very angry.
He said, "How could you have let this happen?
"What is your plan going forward?"
After the failure of Tora Bora,
Al Qaeda operatives who were hiding with Osama Bin Laden
escaped to Pakistan, Iran,
Yemen, or South-East Asia.
Coordinated by the CIA and backed by allies
from foreign intelligence services, the new war on terror goes global.
This infrastructure was far more sophisticated
than we would have suspected.
It was chilling to see what was being planned and organised.
New arrivals in the camps were registered
and had to fill in a form.
They had to say what they were prepared to do
and give details of their background.
They had pooled on communities in Europe, to find recruits
who had been brought to those training camps
and essentially weaponised.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
"There were French people in Bin Laden's organisation.
"We discovered that these people were more than ready
"to take action.
"And we knew that they would be used primarily to strike
"in their own country, France.
"So, all the intelligence services focused on learning
"new techniques apart from traditional espionage.
"They had to neutralise the people who had been involved
"in September 11, and they also had to anticipate
"new acts of terror."
This was the birth of a sort of industrialisation
of counter-terrorism techniques, focused on developing
the intelligence that might disrupt whatever was going to come next.
All of the allied services will have been contributing into that effort.
In a period of 12 months,
we quadrupled the size of the Counterterrorism Center.
It was the biggest entity in the directorate
of operations within one year.
We were carrying weapons more than we ever have in our history.
Our budget went through the roof, over a billion dollars.
We needed to restructure the Counterterrorism Center
and we needed to go after the Al Qaeda leadership
one at a time, wherever they may have gone.
For the US administration, the fight against this new
and unpredictable enemy becomes priority number one.
Military leaders and intelligence leaders were saying,
"We need to bring all parts of the government
"to bear on this, putting them into a combined joint task force
"effort against Al Qaeda and the highest targets."
The FBI agents wanted to contribute so, we really brought
our forensic skills, our investigative skills,
and we were looking for information and intelligence
that would lead us to high value targets.
The incident on the American Airlines flight
is prompting a new FAA security directive
to all airlines, ordering them to take specific precautions.
By the end of 2001, a second wave of attacks
on American soil seemed imminent.
On December the 22nd, Richard Reid,
member of Al Qaeda, is arrested, attempting to detonate a bomb
hidden in his shoe on a flight from Paris to Miami.
Fear of another terrorist strike grows.
Even worse, intelligence suggests that Al Qaeda
has an Anthrax program in place,
and is developing weapons of mass destruction, including dirty bombs.
The feeling in late 2001, 2002,
was that any day could be the next attack.
And we would literally say to each other,
"Is today the day we get attacked again?"
We were at war. There's no doubt about it.
The president of the United States told us,
"Do not allow this to happen again."
We were under tremendous pressure.
It's hard for us to imagine now because the CIA leadership
had the weight of preventing a future terrorist attack
on their shoulders.
And they were hearing it from politicians,
from members of Congress who just saying, "Whatever you have to do.
"Don't tell us, just stop another attack from happening."
In March 2002, a joint operation
of the CIA and Pakistani authorities captures Abu Zubaydah,
a potential high value target within Al Qaeda
who could provide information about future attacks
or about Osama Bin Laden.
This was someone that we needed to interrogate ourselves.
Because nobody was going to take care of our national security
as we were going to take care of our national security.
We needed to actually set aside the risks
and the political correctness
and interrogate him away from the public light.
If we had brought him to the US, he would lawyer up
and he would go through the whole criminal procedure thing,
and we needed to get intelligence on the plans and intentions
of Al-Qaeda for these different threats that were coming at us.
Our interest was not in building a case
so we could charge him with a crime.
Our interest was to prevent another major attack on the US.
The CIA brings Abu Zubaydah to what will become known as a black site.
A secret prison in a foreign country
where prisoners can be interrogated away from the US laws.
During this initial period,
he gave us a couple of nuggets of information.
One of them, he confirmed that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed
was the architect of 9/11.
But then, he stopped talking. He would not talk anymore.
The president was asking us,
"What's he saying about these other threats?"
Well, he wasn't saying anything.
And that's when we came up with the enhanced interrogation program.
Enhanced interrogation program.
A list of authorised techniques
the CIA could use to convince prisoners to talk.
Among them, dietary manipulation.
Slapping. Sleep deprivation.
And waterboarding, which consists of pouring water
on the prisoner's towel-covered face...
..to induce the perception of drowning.
The whole objective was to get them psychologically
to understand that they had no hope.
They have no control whatsoever of anything,
their sleep, their food, nothing.
And we would increase the pressure until they finally agreed
to cooperate with us, until they became compliant.
So, we went to the Justice Department
and asked for a binding legal opinion in writing
that said that the 10 techniques that we were going to use
were legal, and we did not move a finger until we get it.
These techniques against Al Qaeda prisoners
will later raise endless debate around the world,
launching dozens of commissions,
thousands of pages of reports and scathing articles in the press.
For many people,
Enhanced Interrogation is nothing less than torture.
Every meeting I was at, we said, "This isn't gonna read well,
"it'll eventually leak out," but the mission had to be done.
We also knew that there was no other option.
All the people who were briefed in it,
and there was a significant number, no one said, "Oh my gosh, stop it."
In 2002, the Bush administration
officially states that the Geneva Convention
on the treatment of prisoners of war does not apply
to the conflict with Al Qaeda.
The president approved the program,
and the National Security team approve the program.
The congressional committees are briefed.
Everybody was on board for this.
This enhanced interrogation program was not just CIA's program.
This was America's program.
Today, the debate still rages.
A US Senate committee stated that the CIA Interrogation Program
violated US law.
Didn't produce any valuable intelligence.
And probably resulted in false answers.
On the other side, most of the officers involved
want to defend enhanced interrogation
by declassifying all the intelligence
gathered through the program.
They remain adamant, they simply had no choice.
We were the ones in the arena.
We were the ones responsible for protecting the country
and for saving American lives.
We did not hesitate to act, we all recognised the risk involved.
I definitely believe that at that moment,
that was the only move because these people were not going to talk.
So, we needed this, and we needed it urgently.
Somebody had to do this.
The CIA develops its interrogation program
and establishes black sites in six countries
to debrief Al Qaeda detainees.
These became the little nodes of information collection
where high-value targets would be brought, so often blindfolded,
put in airplanes, carried for long distances
and dropped into these places where they could be pressured
to try to give up information.
Information is crucial to preventing new attacks.
Working with the Counterterrorism Center,
a new class of CIA analysts called "targeters" join the hunt.
They collect intelligence on every suspect.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's number three man
and mastermind of the 9/11 attack is arrested in 2003.
Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, his successor in 2005.
The global hunt for Al Qaeda leadership is on.
But while many Al Qaeda members are eliminated,
the top leader is still on the run.
Osama Bin Laden has simply vanished.
The analysts sat down and said,
"We think there's four vectors to Bin Laden."
One is his family.
Maybe somebody in his family will slip up
or we can follow someone from his family.
The second was couriers. Bin Laden was relying
on human beings to get those letters to his lieutenants.
So maybe we can detect him, you know, via a courier.
The third was his leadership.
Maybe they will know where he is and won't be as careful as he is.
And the fourth one was, he's making videos
and audio tapes. Maybe with technology,
we can distil at least a location that will narrow our search.
The CIA analysts use advanced analytical software
to sift through the reams of intelligence gathered.
Among the thousands of names recorded
in the interrogation reports, the analysts extract the name
of one individual who hasn't been deeply investigated yet.
They believe he might hold the key.
His name, "Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti", an unidentified member of Al Qaeda.
We first hear about this guy named Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti in 2002
from a detainee who's in the detention
of a North African country.
And this detainee says that Abu Ahmed Al Kuwaiti
might be a courier for Bin Laden, but he was a ghost.
We didn't know his true name. We didn't know where he was.
We didn't know anything about him.
So now we ask every detainee, both those in our own custody
and those in the custody of other countries
about this guy named Abu Ahmed.
One of those individuals tells us
that not only might he be a courier for Bin Laden,
but he might even be the kind of guy who could be living with Bin laden.
So that took it up a notch.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed,
mastermind of 9/11, gets questioned about Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti.
We have all these other detainees, saying,
"Yeah, we knew Abu Ahmed,"
and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed says,
"Never heard of the guy, don't know him."
He was a tough guy.
All these people have huge egos, and there are certain things
they're not going to tell you.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed was not going to tell us anything
about where Bin Laden was.
But he had a system of communicating
with the other prisoners held at the black site.
He would pass messages hidden in books that they were reading.
We discovered it, and we made the decision to let it run
so we could read their mail.
And he told them to not say anything about Al-Kuwaiti.
Nobody talk about the courier.
So now our interest in Abu Ahmed goes sky high.
Later, Hassan Ghul, another member of Al Qaeda,
gives valuable information about Al Kuwaiti.
He basically said to us that Al Kuwaiti
was the person that delivered the letter to Abu Faraj Al-Libbi
from Bin Laden, appointing him as the new chief of operations.
That's a big decision.
It's an executive decision, coming from Osama Bin Laden.
So, we knew we were onto something.
For years, the CIA analysts will work on the Al-Kuwaiti lead,
trying to determine his real name and where they could find him.
But in the meantime, the war against terrorism still rages.
And Al Qaeda is far from defeated.
The spectre of Osama Bin Laden's call for jihad
brings a suicide bombing in Madrid in 2004.
And in London in 2005.
There's been reports of an explosion.
The latest we're hearing is that several London Underground stations
have been evacuated.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
"Terrorist groups need leaders,
"and the key strength of these characters is their ability
"to recruit, to convince and to gather followers to take action.
"Bin Laden was the supreme symbol of Islamist violence
"against our societies."
On the 7th of July 2005, when we were attacked,
it was lethal, and it shocked us.
7/7 taught us a savage lesson.
You can't look at terrorism as an isolated or domestic problem.
You've got to look at it as a network.
People are streaming out of Aldgate Tube station,
covered in blood.
That 2005/6/7 time period
was a period of resurgence for Al Qaeda.
There was great concern that there were going to be
another wave of attacks.
Analysts were working hand in glove with the operational folks
who were working with their foreign counterparts to drive
the specific operations that were taking people off the battlefield.
Al Qaeda operatives are targeted one by one.
And the death toll for the terrorist organisation reaches a peak.
But the main target defies detection...
..the untraceable Osama Bin Laden.
We were getting lots of false sightings all over the world.
There'd be these bits and dribbles of intel coming in.
"Oh, we saw him in a market in Peshawar.
"We saw him in Karachi."
We had a guy who said he knows him and saw him in Africa.
"He was doing a deal in Africa."
All these leads have to be run down.
Osama bin Laden had phenomenal operational security,
and he knew it.
In 2009, the new President Barack Obama
appoints Leon Panetta as the new director of the CIA.
By the time I became director of the CIA,
all of the efforts that had been involved in trying to locate
Bin Laden had led nowhere.
Every lead had gone cold,
there was just no real evidence of where he might be located.
Some thought he might be dead.
The analysts won't give up.
As they work on identifying Bin Laden's courier, Al-Kuwaiti,
a new asset catches their attention.
A mysterious blogger using the pen name of Abu Dujana Al-Khorasani.
He was a doctor.
And he had a hobby on the side, which was to be kind of
an online rabble rouser for the cause of jihad...
..and became a very prominent voice
within the Jihadi community, with many followers around the world.
He was urging them to do acts of violence to attack American targets.
The Jordanian Intelligence services, faithful ally of the CIA,
uncover the identity of this online jihadist.
Humam Khalil Al-Balawi.
They arrest him and pressure him to become a double agent.
They go to his house, pull him out,
take him to a cell, interrogate him for several days.
And this doctor, having never been arrested before,
flips fairly quickly and agrees to become an informant
for the Jordanians, and by extension for the Americans.
For several months, Al Balawi gives information about Al Qaeda
to his Jordanian handlers, who pass it to the CIA for assessment.
It was clear to the CIA that the information
from this new informant was best stuff they'd seen in years.
This unknown informant becomes a rockstar because he starts
to deliver real-time information
that the CIA knows about and can check.
And Balawi himself actually raises the possibility
that he could go to the tribal areas of Pakistan,
volunteers as a medical worker, and perhaps learn things there.
The Federally Administrated Tribal Area, or The FATA...
..is a region of Pakistan where Al Qaeda has found a safe haven
and that the Pakistani government doesn't even try to control anymore.
We were constantly trying to figure out
how do we gain access and insight into those regions,
and if you want to understand and learn
what's happening in a place like the FATA,
you have to find people that have a reason to be in the FATA,
whether they live there, they travel there,
they have family members there, and all you need is one,
but the likelihood that you're going to get that one
that has the direct access that you need is really hard.
For the CIA, the chance to have eyes and ears in this region
is invaluable and impossible.
Until now.
It occurs to everyone at Langley
that we've got a really important asset.
And this search for Bin Laden
that has gone so cold for so long has new potential.
We have a way of getting inside Al Qaeda's tent.
A plan was devised to bring Balawi into a meeting with the Americans
because he had never met any of the CIA officers at all.
So, it seemed imperative to bring him to a place
where he could be debriefed, examined, questioned.
And then give him a mission.
Once we find out what his capabilities truly are,
then you can arm him, do something important.
You can have him bring us to Bin Laden himself.
The meeting will take place in the CIA station
inside Camp Chapman, a high security US military base
in the Afghan city of Khost, 10 miles from the Pakistani border.
The plan is for Al Balawi to secretly drive across the border
to avoid being spotted by Al Qaeda members.
Khost is a remote, rugged, difficult place.
Everybody knows everybody in that region.
And so, if you're new to that area, you're going to stand out
and there's not too many reasons to pop up in Khost Afghanistan.
Balawi said he was nervous.
He didn't want to be identified by local informants.
And so, he set the terms that he'd not be searched,
that no one manhandle him
as he was being escorted into the base to meet his CIA handlers.
From the CIA's point of view, he was a very vulnerable person.
They acknowledged that the legitimacy of his worry
that he might be recognised by someone.
There could be a Taliban informant
inside the base that would see him and betray him.
That was a real concern.
And so, they were willing to put aside
some of the normal protocols and precautions
because this guy was so important,
and they really wanted to protect him.
When you're developing a relationship
with a potential source, you always weigh risk versus gain.
The risk of course is that source could lie to you.
But the urgency of getting the information
when it looks as if you can pinpoint a person like Bin laden
or Al Zawahiri, clearly propels you to weigh on the side of gain.
The first meeting with AL Balawi is set for the end of the afternoon.
The CIA Station officers,
protected by CIA security personnel,
gather outside, waiting for his car to arrive.
Our first meeting with a potential source is critical.
You get a chance to look at his body language,
to see how he talks, how he responds to questions.
You also want to probe his motivation a little bit.
How sincere is that motivation?
A crucial part of a meeting with a source like that
is that you also want to establish some rapport.
It's not a hostile interrogation. It's a debriefing.
As the CIA agreed, the director of base security
instructed his team to waive the usual security protocols
for this unknown vehicle entering the base.
He went through one checkpoint,
the guards turned the other way and didn't look at him.
He went through a second one.
To a third one.
Got a pass to get into the CIA inner sanctum.
And at no point was searched,
examined, questioned until he was in the presence
of the large group of CIA officers who were eager to meet him.
The intelligence officers gathered around his car.
When he got out, the security people noticed something wrong.
They told him to raise his hands.
And he set off a suicide vest.
It's believed to be one the deadliest attacks
in the agency's history.
The bomber apparently just walked up to them on the base
and detonated his suicide vest.
How did this bomber get past three layers of security?
The quiet doctor, online jihadist,
and new recruit to spy on Al Qaeda for the CIA,
was in fact a triple agent, ready to die for his cause.
The one thing you learn in this business is that intelligence people
really do have to put their lives on the line.
Of course, it's risky. Were mistakes made in the security process?
Probably.
But bottom line is they had the courage to basically go through
with that meeting, take the chances that they had to take.
Every one of the families of those who had died said,
"Please continue the mission that our loved one was involved with."
They paid with their lives, but in many ways,
they did not die in vain because their death inspired others
to keep fighting for the mission.
The Camp Chapman ambush must not go unpunished.
Al-Kuwaiti is the CIA's last hope of finding Osama Bin Laden.
And the analysts are closing in.
Over the years, they've gathered information
from detainees and foreign services
about the mysterious courier. Al-Kuwaiti speaks Pashto.
He has seven brothers.
His nom de guerre refers to the fact
that his parents have Pakistani roots but now live in Kuwait.
By cross-referencing this intelligence
with the gigantic database on Al Qaeda members,
they have narrowed down the identity of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
The prime suspect now has a name, Ibrahim Saeed.
Those people worked for years to try to find the right lead.
Linking those two names together
based upon what CIA knew about the courier was a work of art.
But no one knows where to find Ibrahim Saeed.
The CIA keeps Saeed's family under constant surveillance in Kuwait.
Phones are tapped. Conversations recorded.
Saeed uses several phones which he randomly activates and deactivates.
They are geolocated in Northern Pakistan,
sometimes in Rawalpindi, other times in Peshawar.
Until one day.
During one of those conversations, he says something to the effect
that "I'm working with people I used to work with before."
That's when the lead starts to knit together
that Ibrahim and Al-Kuwaiti are the same person.
Ibrahim Saeed's short, innocuous comment
might be the first mistake he's made in nine years.
The CIA launches its full resources to find him.
Teams deploy undercover in Pakistan
where Al-Kuwaiti often makes his phone calls.
A CIA surveillance team, now permanently stationed
in Peshawar, patiently wait for Al-Kuwaiti to turn on his cellphone.
It isn't easy just to just put people on the ground.
They have to do it secretly, right?
You don't want to be found.
And you certainly don't want the target to see you.
For several weeks, the CIA team lays low. Waiting.
They didn't know exactly what Al Kuwaiti looked like.
They didn't know what kind of vehicle they'd been.
Until one day, Al Kuwaiti activates his phone very close to them.
When the phone turns on of course,
they try to get closer to the source of the phone.
The issue was to find the signal
and find somebody on the phone close to the signal.
Nine years after 9/11, the CIA is finally about
to identify the one man who might lead them to Osama Bin Laden.
And ultimately, they identify the vehicle the target is using,
a white Suzuki kind of Jeep thing.
And Al-Kuwaiti was in the vehicle.
The CIA now has a face to put with the name.
They confirm that Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed is Al-Kuwaiti.
And now they've got eyes on him.
They followed this little white SUV with the courier
from Peshawar to Abbottabad
which is near the Capital in Pakistan.
And the SUV pulled into a compound.
Abbottabad is a city of two million people.
The compound, in a residential area,
is not even two miles from the Military Academy of Pakistan.
The CIA sets up a surveillance team.
It was clear that we had found something unique,
in the existence of this compound.
It involved the couriers who had served Bin Laden in the past.
And it was clear that they were conducting their pattern of life
each day with high security.
They would travel 90 miles away in order to make a phone call.
And as you piece together each of these elements,
I think at that point, deep down, I felt just maybe,
for the first time in over 10 years...
..we may be close to finding Bin Laden.
The compound had 12-foot walls
and in some places 18-foot-high walls.
It had large field on one side of it, very open.
The design of the compound itself had a driveway
with walls on either side so if you were stood in
even in the gate and looked in,
you couldn't see laterally into the courtyards.
It had balconies that had seven-foot-high walls on them,
so if you're looking at the balconies,
you couldn't see the people sitting on the balcony
or standing on the balcony.
They burn their trash inside the compound.
Further collection against the target
did not reveal any electronic signals coming off the target.
And the compound itself cost a lot of money to build.
The next step obviously was to continue surveillance
on the compound try, to determine whether or not Bin Laden
was really there, but it was important enough
to ask for a meeting with the President.
And we went to the White House and we described what we had found.
And I remember the president giving us two very clear orders
at the end of that meeting.
Number one, "Leon, Michael,
"find out what the hell is going on inside that compound.
"Number two, don't tell anybody.
"Nobody else knows about this, except us."
It would take only one leak, only one,
that we might be on to Bin Laden, and he'd be gone.
This was the best kept secret in my 33 years working at CIA.
For months, the CIA analysts struggle to collect
more intelligence on who lives in the compound.
At the end of 2010,
overhead surveillance reveals an unidentified man.
They nickname - the pacer.
He would come into the yard, walk in circles, you know,
maybe 10 or 12 times,
and then go back inside like a prisoner.
I said, "For goodness sakes, this could be Bin Laden.
"It looked like an old gentleman, get me a picture,
"a facial identification.
"Give me a camera, give me a telescope, you know,
"give me something."
And I remember saying to them,
"Look, I've seen movies where the CIA can do this."
And we all laughed, but, to their credit,
they tried everything they could to try to identify who this person was.
We tried to get a fix on his height, and the answer that came back
from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency was,
"He's somewhere between five and seven feet tall."
So not exactly helpful.
Despite the efforts, the pacer will never be clearly identified.
It turns out though that we learned that there's a third family
living in the compound,
and that that third family never leaves the compound.
How do you learn this? I can't tell you.
We assess that that third family is what we would expect to be
with Bin Laden at that point in his life,
number of wives, age of the kids.
We learn that Abu Ahmed is still working for Al-Qaeda.
So one of our concerns was maybe this guy doesn't work
for Al-Qaeda anymore, maybe this is a drug dealer
who lives in this place, or an organised crime boss
and Abu Ahmed is working for him.
But we learn that Abu Ahmed is still working for Al Qaeda.
And how do you learn that? I can't tell you.
How the CIA collected this crucial intelligence is still classified.
But for the analysts, it made the case more solid.
We got enough information that it added a level of confidence
that tipped the balance.
Very seldom in intelligence you get perfect knowledge,
in fact you'd never get perfect knowledge.
How much more could we do without the risk of alerting the people
in the compound to the fact that we were operating in this area?
How long can you keep it secret?
Ultimately inside CIA, we did a conference to ask for assessments.
And they asked me, and I said,
"Well, I'm 95% sure he's there, and we can't leave Hitler in his bunker.
"We've got to take him."
For me there was enough intelligence there to act.
The CIA briefs the President.
We said, "We think Bin Ladin is there."
he asked us, "How would you go about getting this guy?."
And we realised pretty quickly that we need the military's help here,
and the president authorised us to bring the military in.
I was asked to assist in developing operational options
with some CIA planners, if we were to be asked for that
from the president...
..and to bring in Admiral Bill McRaven,
who would command the operation,
a three-star Navy Admiral and a Navy seal by profession.
The President and his closest advisors evaluate two main options,
an airstrike on the compound,
or a special forces raid by helicopter.
The airstrike seems the safest choice but has major downsides.
The challenge with a big air strike on the house
was that there would be collateral damage.
All the other occupants of that house would be killed too,
and there were some 22 other women and children.
The magnitude of the air strike
would also kill people in immediately adjacent areas.
And you don't know in the aftermath
of whether you killed Bin Laden or not.
The president rejects the airstrike,
and chooses to send a team of commandos via helicopter.
The unit chosen by the Joint Special Operations Command
to conduct the assault is Seal Team 6.
Often considered the best of the best.
The assault squadron that was chosen to go
was Red Squadron at Seal Team 6.
They showed up and they realised that, hey,
they weren't there for an exercise, they were there to go after
Bin Laden, and then we began training immediately.
The plan was two helicopters coming in.
The one that was hovering between the main building
and the kind of ancillary building
where one of the couriers was living,
that group of 12 guys, half went to the bottom floor
of the main compound.
And the other half went to deal with that courier.
The second bird came in fast roped onto the roof.
And those guys were to make their way down
where Bin Laden was, and they would sandwich him if you will.
After three weeks of training,
Admiral Mac Raven confirms to the President
and the CIA director that the Squadron assault team
is "mission-ready."
The Seals are cleared to deploy to the US military base
in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
In Washington DC, it's time to make the final decision.
Pursuant to our constitution, the President of the United States
at that time, Barack Obama was the commander in chief.
So it was his decision on whether or not
we were going to go forward with the raid to hopefully bring
to justice the person who was behind the attack at 9/11.
It's huge because you don't want a world war,
you deal with other countries, it could impact your allies.
We had to send US forces across a nation state border,
into their country, armed, to try to effectuate
an arrest of an internationally known terrorist.
After the five months of reviewing the information,
there really weren't any more Republican
and Democrat ideas about this.
I'm a Republican, the president was a Democrat.
To me it didn't matter.
We understood the weight of this decision.
My best role was if something goes wrong, I will stand next
to the president and say that I thought this was the right decision.
Almost 10 years after the 9/11 attack,
only a few people in Washington know that the hunt
for Osama Bin Laden might end in the next few hours.
Barack Obama has made his crucial decision.
In the morning, Tom Donilon, the National Security Advisor,
called Leon Panetta and said,
"The President has approved the mission.
"It's a go. All the details are in Admiral McRaven hands."
I got a phone call from Panetta, and he said,
"You know, that thing we've been working on,
"well, it's going to happen this weekend. Goodbye."
That was it. I'll never forget the phone call again.
The night has fallen on the US military base in Jalalabad.
The Seals are ready to launch this very special mission,
probably one of the most important since World War 2.
The mission was a kill mission.
We were not supposed to capture Bin laden.
It was the order from Bill McRaven,
but it was also signed off by the President of United States.
At that level, the President's got to agree to it.
Every other mission we do is kill or capture,
and this time we're going to tell them
it's essentially an assassination.
But it came down to, do we want to take him back,
have him stand trial and expose possibly the sources
and means that were used to find him?
And that wasn't worth it. And I totally agree with that.
President Obama and his national security council
gather in the White House situation room.
The CIA team monitors the operation in Langley.
We had a direct connection with Bill McRaven,
and he was giving us a blow by blow of what was happening.
The helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Regiment,
known as The Night Stalkers,
leave Jalalabad airbase at 10 pm local time.
Two modified Black Hawks with a very low radar signature
will carry the Seal Team, while two larger chinooks
will serve as a quick reaction force in case the Seals need backup.
The helicopters flew to a ground lager site
where they dropped the quick reaction force.
And from that point, the helicopters made
that Southern leg into the target.
And it was about two minutes out when they came out
of the mountains, and at that point, could be seen by Pakistani radar.
A few minutes before the helicopters reach the target,
the CIA intercepts a signal.
In the compound, a cellphone the CIA had not identified before
is activated.
We heard the communications coming off of that.
And the last communication was one brother calling another brother
and he said, "They've come from above."
And those were effectively his last words that were recorded.
They were now going to be awake.
So, it was more likely to be a gunfight than anything else.
That was my concern.
The other concern as well was if a call has gone
to wake up Bin Laden, the Pakistani military
knew that something was going on in their own backyard there.
The timer is on, and from the time that call came,
we figured the guys had 30 minutes
until the Pakistanis would mount a response.
The two helicopters reach the target at midnight.
We were able to follow those helicopters into Pakistan
and we had a surveillance over the compound itself
when the helicopters arrived.
We actually saw the helicopter kind of wobble.
As we're watching those birds coming over the compound,
for me, in slow motion.
The one that was between those two houses is supposed to stop.
You know, when you fast rope, the helicopter stops,
out goes the ropes, guys slide down the rope.
It never stopped.
There were walls, and it did not allow the air to disperse.
It drove that dirty air,
as helicopter pilots call it,
back up into the rotors and it lost power.
And, when it loses power,
it's just sliding off the target and then turns slowly clockwise,
and then you see it sit down there in the animal pen.
And I remember, at that very moment,
you have that sense, "What's happening?."
There was a shock in everybody's face.
It's that moment when you're thinking
for all the planning, for all the work, for all of the things
we tried to do to make sure this went right,
something wrong was happening.
Is it going to destroy the mission?
The pilot avoids a crash, landing the helicopter
in the animal pen near the main house.
The Black Hawk is destroyed, but everyone is safe.
I asked McRaven, who I was in radio contact with,
"What the hell is going on, Bill?"
And he didn't miss a beat. He said, "There's no problem.
"We're going to continue with the mission.
"I've got backup helicopters coming in, they're going to breach
"through the walls and they're going to go in
"and complete the mission."
And I said, "God, bless you. Let's go!"
There was no time to be concerned
because the helicopter lands,
and the guys are out of there instantly.
When the helicopter went down hard,
the neighbourhood woke up, so people were turning on
their lights, people were coming out wondering what's going on here.
So, it was a race against time at that point.
The second helicopter basically sees his buddy
had issues and said, "Uh oh" and went immediately
to his alternate landing site which was outside the compound.
And the guys jumped out of the helicopter
and ran to the door that they were going to use
as an alternate entry point, then recognise that that door
had been blocked up from the inside.
So, you had the team outside and the team inside.
The team inside still had to come over the wall
that separated the animal pen from the, from the houses.
So, they came over to that wall.
The team outside, couldn't get in.
So, the senior operator on the ground said, "Hey, I got you,"
walked right up to those double doors,
opened the doors from the inside.
And the guys came flooding in, and then everybody of course
had to go through the ground floor door and make their way to the top.
The one team that went to the courier
that was living in the outside house got into a gunfight.
Al-Kuwaiti is down.
Guest house secured. One tango kilo.
The team enters the main house from the ground floor.
On the first floor, the second courier was there.
When the operator entered, up came his gun,
his wife jumps in front of him, and the wife took the first round.
And the courier took the second round.
That is not the way we like to do business,
but we recognise that those things happen.
We're able to hear what's going on. We hear gunfire.
They're breaching through the walls
and then going through the walls, so we know something's going on.
It's obvious they've run into opposition.
The guys then had to breach the doors,
they would drop off to cover dead spaces,
places that you can't see behind where somebody might be hiding.
A heavy metal door blocks the stairwell
between the ground floor and the 2nd floor,
impeding access to the upper floors.
Khalid? Khalid?
Bin Laden's son came down the steps.
They shot him there.
The Seals can now secure the 2nd floor.
In the bedrooms, they find children
and two women who they search and detain.
2nd floor secured.
The seals approach the 3rd floor
where Osama Bin Laden should be hiding.
Osama. Osama.
Bin Ladin came out onto a landing.
They took a shot at him which hit him in the side.
They made their way up the steps.
The first guy entered the room, did not engage Bin Ladin.
The second guy enters the room,
and Bin Laden is just standing there,
There is an AK 47 close to him,
but he has no intention of reaching for it.
And he took the shot from just a few feet away.
Compound secured. Geronimo.
The people at CIA headquarters in Langley
hear on the radio feed the Seals declaring... Geronimo.
..the code word to indicate that Bin Laden has been killed.
And then McRaven says, "I think we have a Geronimo,"
and I'm not sure what's going on then.
It's about 15 minutes, the longest in my lifetime.
And I was waiting and basically saying,
"Do we or don't we have Geronimo?"
And then McRaven came back and said, "We have a Geronimo."
We had Bin Laden.
Target acquired. Osama Bin Laden is dead.
But the mission isn't quite over.
On the ground, the timer is ticking.
The seals need to leave before the Pakistani Authorities show up.
Chinooks from the quick reaction force race to the exfiltration site.
But first, the crashed helicopter must be destroyed.
It was important to blow up the helicopter
because it had the stealth technology on the skin.
We did not want the Pakistanis to hand it over to the Chinese.
The other part of the team
was gathering as much information as they could,
digital information, all the papers,
and stuff that they found. As they were calling in
those helicopters to come and get them for their extraction.
The two helicopters came in,
landed approximately in the same place
where the helicopter that didn't crash
landed outside the compound.
The guys made their way out of the compound
and into those two helicopters and then took off from there.
They actually stayed on target, 38 minutes,
so eight minutes longer than we had planned.
The Pakistani Airforce won't react fast enough
to intercept the helicopters.
The Seal team can fly back to Jalalabad airbase
without being targeted.
Once they're back in Afghanistan, the Seals are safe.
And now the issue is, was it Bin Laden or not?
You had a resemblance to Bin Laden, but he was shot in the face.
Being shot in the face is not like it is on TV with a small hole.
There's not much of the face left, so you can't clearly identify him.
But the president wanted to be sure.
So, CIA did some facial recognition and DNA analysis.
We were able, at that point,
to actually confirm that it was Bin Laden.
So, at that point the President felt confident enough
to go out and tell the nation.
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.
Honestly 10 years later,
any of us talking about this, I can still feel
all of the ups and downs, the nerves, the fears,
the elation that maybe we had a lead,
the fact that, "Oh wow they're actually going to do this."
Last August, after years of painstaking work
by our intelligence community,
I was briefed on a possible lead to Bin Laden.
A small team of Americans carried out the operation
with extraordinary courage and capability.
So that night, in my small way, I was part of this.
I've done an awful lot in my career
and cool stuff and important stuff, but rarely is it public.
Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth
or power, but because of who we are, one nation, under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Narrator: Right after Barack Obama's announcement,
outside the White House and in cities and towns across the United States,
people gathered to celebrate this historic moment.
Everybody's shared this moment,
almost as we did after the bombing of 9/11,
where the whole country, coming together
and feeling that justice had been served.
There had been a concluding chapter
to this terrible event in American history.
To be able to walk outside and hear people yelling "USA, USA",
the first sense was tremendous pride,
in what the intelligence officers and the military officers
had accomplished.
And that we had accomplished something that I thought
was really important, not only to the families
of all of those that had lost their lives on 9/11,
but I thought it was a really important message
to send the world - that nobody attacks our country
and gets away with it.
This is probably the greatest accomplishment
that the CIA has done in its history.
I think in many ways, it was not just healing
for the country, it was also healing for the CIA.
The people at the CIA are extremely resilient.
"Yes, we're going to mourn.
"Yes, we're going to bury our dead and honour them,
"and then we're gonna honour them by finishing the fight."
That's what CIA is in business to do.
We take risks, steal secrets,
do things that other people can't do.
But I'm not a hero.
I did my job and did it as well as I could.
The heroes are the people that died at Khost...
..the heroes are the people that are on the wall at CIA.
Heroes died on 9/11. They're heroes.
Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.tv