President Obama, VP Biden, and national security team watch Operation Neptune Spear, 1 May 2011. White House / Pete Souza.↗
On May 2, 2011, 23 Navy SEALs landed in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. The operation took 38 minutes. Getting to that moment took almost ten years.
The intelligence chain that led to Abbottabad was built over years from a single thread: the nom de guerre of a courier known to be a trusted intermediary for bin Laden. CIA analysts spent years tracing that courier through informant reports, electronic intercepts, and surveillance until in 2010 they identified him and followed him to a large compound in Abbottabad—a Pakistani military garrison town, 35 miles north of Islamabad, incongruously housing a compound with high walls, no phone lines, and a practice of burning its trash rather than putting it out for collection.
CIA Director Leon Panetta presented President Obama with four options: do nothing, strike with B-2 bombers, conduct a unilateral helicopter raid, or cooperate with Pakistan. The Pakistani option was immediately dismissed—ISI cooperation with bin Laden's protection was a live hypothesis. The B-2 option was dismissed because the bomb load required would have leveled much of the surrounding neighborhood. The raid was chosen—knowing that if Pakistan's military detected the helicopters and scrambled fighters, SEAL Team Six would be on its own in Pakistani airspace.
Two Black Hawks and three Chinooks launched from Jalalabad at 11:00 PM on May 1. One Black Hawk, its lift degraded in the compound's confined space, clipped the compound wall and made a hard landing. No one was injured; the mission continued. SEALs cleared the compound from the bottom up. On the third floor, a tall man retreated into a room; SEALs followed and shot him twice. He was identified by height, build, and facial recognition as Osama bin Laden.
The 38 minutes from insertion to extraction included the recovery of computers, hard drives, documents, and cell phones that produced one of the largest counterterrorism intelligence hauls in history. Bin Laden's death did not end al-Qaeda, which had evolved into a decentralized franchise model not dependent on his operational leadership. But it removed the symbolic and inspirational center of a movement that had organized the deaths of approximately 3,000 people on September 11, 2001.
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