What
Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?
The
history of Obama’s most important foreign-policy victory is still being
written.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/magazine/what-do-we-really-know-about-osama-bin-ladens-death.html?mwrsm=GooglePlus&_r=0
By
JONATHAN MAHLEROCT. 15, 2015
Mark
Bowden was watching a ballgame — the Phillies versus the Mets — on the night of
May 1, 2011, when the network cut away to President Obama in the East Room of
the White House. “Tonight,” the president said, ‘‘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.’’
Five
minutes or so after the president wrapped up his brief remarks, as thousands of
Americans gathered in front of the White House and at ground zero chanting
‘‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’’ Bowden’s cellphone rang. It was Mike Stenson, the president
of Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Bowden had worked with Bruckheimer on the film
adaptation of his 1999 best seller, ‘‘Black Hawk Down.’’
‘‘Mike
said, ‘Look, Mark, Jerry wants to make a movie about this bin Laden thing, and
he wants to put together all of the people who made ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ’’
Bowden told me over lunch recently. ‘‘ ‘He
wants to know: Would you be willing to write the script?’ ’’
Bowden
said absolutely, count him in.
He
quickly reached out to Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary at the time, to ask
for an interview with the president. Bowden was friendly with Carney from a
profile he wrote of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for The Atlantic. Still,
he was surprised to hear back from him almost right away. It was an encouraging
response, especially given the deluge of requests Bowden knew the president
must be receiving. Carney said that he couldn’t make any promises but that he
would definitely advocate on his behalf.
The
next day, Stenson called back: Bruckheimer had changed his mind.
Bowden
considered for a second and decided he would write a book instead. In some
ways, it was a perfect match of author and subject. Bowden specializes in
chronicling covert operations. In addition to ‘‘Black Hawk Down,’’ which told
the story of a 1993 raid in Somalia by U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force teams
that went disastrously awry, he has written books about the failed mission to
rescue the American hostages in Iran in 1980 and the long manhunt for the
Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
His
method in those books was to combine exhaustive reporting with vivid
storytelling. It helps that Bowden tends to write about historical events a
long time after they take place. People are typically eager to sit down with
him, and they are usually able to speak freely. One interview subject leads to
another, who leads to another, and so on. It’s a process that can take years.
The
bin Laden book proved to be a very different sort of undertaking. Bowden was
trying to tell the story just months after it happened. And only a small number
of people — a handful of senior administration and military officials and the
Navy SEALs who carried out the operation — had been privy to the events of that
evening. There was virtually no paper trail for Bowden to follow; the
government had classified all the documents relating to the raid, including the
record of the C.I.A.’s search for bin Laden. Bowden had to request interviews
through official administration channels and hope for the best.
His
book, ‘‘The Finish,’’ was published in the fall of 2012, and the story it tells
is one that is by now familiar. The C.I.A., working in the shadows for many
years, had identified a courier whom agency officers eventually traced to a
large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Agents studied this compound for months
via distant satellite cameras but couldn’t be certain that bin Laden was
inside. If he was — a 55/45 percent proposition, Obama said later — the
president did not want to let him slip away. The safe play was to reduce the
compound to dust with a bomb or missiles, but this would risk civilian
casualties and also make it impossible to verify the kill with any certainty.
Obama instead sent in a team of 23 Navy SEALs in two Black Hawk helicopters.
The whole mission almost fell apart when one of the helicopters had to
crash-land near an animal pen inside the compound. But the SEALs adapted on the
fly and were soon making their assault, breaching gates and doors with C-4
charges and, eventually, killing their target. Before leaving, they blew up the
damaged Black Hawk. As they flew off, a giant fire raged inside the compound.
The Pakistani government was none the wiser until the SEALs were long gone.
This
irresistible story would be told in many different forms in the months and
years that followed. Bowden’s was one of several books, but there were also
countless newspaper articles, magazine features, television news programs and
ultimately the 2012 movie ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’ which billed itself as the
narrative of ‘‘the Greatest Manhunt in History.’’ In this sense, the killing of
bin Laden was not only a victory for the U.S. military but also for the
American storytelling machine, which kicked into high gear pretty much the
moment the terrorist leader’s dead body hit the floor.
Last
spring, Bowden got another unexpected call on his cellphone. He was on his way
home to Pennsylvania from a meeting in New York with his publisher about his
next book, the story of the Battle of Hue in the Vietnam War. On the other end
of the line was Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter.
Hersh
was calling to ask about the photographs of bin Laden’s burial at sea — carried
out, the U.S. government said, in accordance with Islamic custom — that Bowden
had described in detail at the end of ‘‘The Finish,’’ as well as in an
adaptation from the book that appeared in Vanity
Fair. ‘‘One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud,’’ Bowden had
written. ‘‘The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In
the next frame, the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just
below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only
circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were
gone for good.’’
Hersh
wanted to know: Had Bowden actually seen those photos?
Bowden
told Hersh that he had not. He explained that they were described to him by
someone who had.
Hersh
said the photographs didn’t exist. Indeed, he went on, the entire narrative of
how the United States hunted down and killed bin Laden was a fabrication. He
told Bowden that he was getting ready to publish the real story of what
happened in Abbottabad.
Bowden
said he found Hersh’s claims hard to believe. Hersh tried to sympathize.
‘‘Nobody likes to get played,’’ he said, adding that he meant no offense.
‘‘I
said, ‘No offense taken,’ ’’
Bowden recalled. ‘‘I told him that he was, after all,
Seymour Hersh, and that he ought to do whatever he thought best. But that in
this case,
I feared he was mistaken.’’
It’s
hard to overstate the degree to which the killing of Osama bin Laden
transformed American politics. From a purely practical standpoint, it enabled
Obama to recast himself as a bold leader, as opposed to an overly cautious one,
in advance of his 2012 re-election campaign. This had an undeniable impact on
the outcome of that election. (‘‘Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is
alive,’’ Joe Biden was fond of boasting on the campaign trail.) Strategically,
the death of bin Laden allowed Obama to declare victory over Al Qaeda, giving
him the cover he needed to begin phasing U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. And it
almost single-handedly redeemed the C.I.A., turning a decade-long failure of
intelligence into one of the greatest triumphs in the history of the agency.
But
bin Laden’s death had an even greater effect on the American psyche.
Symbolically, it brought a badly wanted moment of moral clarity, of unambiguous
American valor, to a murky war defined by ethical compromise and even at times
by collective shame. It completed the historical arc of the 9/11 attacks. The
ghastly image of collapsing towers that had been fixed in our collective minds
for years was dislodged by one of Obama and his senior advisers huddled tensely
around a table in the White House Situation Room, watching closely as justice
was finally brought to the perpetrator.
The
first dramatic reconstruction of the raid itself — ‘‘Getting
bin Laden: What Happened That Night in Abbottabad’’ — was written by a
freelancer named Nicholas Schmidle and published in The New Yorker just three
months after the operation. The son of a Marine general, Schmidle spent a
couple of years in Pakistan and has written on counterterrorism for many
publications, including this magazine. His New Yorker story was a cinematic
account of military daring, sweeping but also granular in its detail, from the
‘‘metallic cough of rounds being chambered’’ inside the two Black Hawks as the
SEALs approached the compound, to the mud that ‘‘sucked at their boots’’ when
they hit the ground. One of the SEALs who shot bin Laden, Matt Bissonnette,
added a more personal dimension to the story a year later in a best-selling
book, ‘‘No Easy Day.’’ Bowden focused on Washington, taking readers inside the
White House as the president navigated what would become a defining moment of
his presidency. And then there was ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’ which chronicled the
often barbaric C.I.A. interrogations that the agency said helped lead the
United States to bin Laden’s compound.
The
official narrative of the hunt for and killing of bin Laden at first seemed
like a clear portrait, but in effect it was more like a composite sketch from
multiple perspectives: the Pentagon, the White House and the C.I.A. And when
you studied that sketch a little more closely, not everything looked quite
right. Almost immediately, the administration had to correct some of the most
significant details of the raid. Bin Laden had not been ‘‘engaged in a
firefight,’’ as the deputy national-security adviser, John Brennan, initially
told reporters; he’d been unarmed. Nor had he used one of his wives as a human
shield. The president and his senior advisers hadn’t been watching a ‘‘live
feed’’ of the raid in the Situation Room; the operation had not been captured on
helmet-cams. But there were also some more unsettling questions about how the
whole story had been constructed. Schmidle acknowledged after his article was
published that he had never actually spoken with any of the 23 SEALs. Some
details of Bissonnette’s account of the raid contradicted those of another
ex-SEAL, Robert O’Neill, who claimed
in Esquire and on Fox News to have fired the fatal bullet. Public
officials with security clearances told reporters that the torture scenes that
were so realistically depicted in ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty’’ had not in fact played
any role in helping us find bin Laden.
Then
there was the sheer improbability of the story, which asked us to believe that
Obama sent 23 SEALs on a seemingly suicidal mission, invading Pakistani air
space without air or ground cover, fast-roping into a compound that, if it even
contained bin Laden, by all rights should have been heavily guarded. And
according to the official line, all of this was done without any sort of
cooperation or even assurances from the Pakistani military or intelligence
service. How likely was that? Abbottabad is basically a garrison town; the
conspicuously large bin Laden compound — three stories, encircled by an
18-foot-high concrete wall topped with barbed wire — was less than two miles
from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. And what about the local police? Were
they really unaware that an enormous American helicopter had crash-landed in
their neighborhood? And why were we learning so much about a covert raid by a
secret special-operations unit in the first place?
American
history is filled with war stories that subsequently unraveled. Consider the
Bush administration’s false claims about Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of
weapons of mass destruction. Or the imagined attack on a U.S. vessel in the
Gulf of Tonkin. During the Bay of Pigs, the government inflated the number of
fighters it dispatched to Cuba in hopes of encouraging local citizens to rise
up and join them. When the operation failed, the government quickly deflated
the number, claiming that it hadn’t been an invasion at all but rather a modest
attempt to deliver supplies to local guerrillas. More recently, the Army
reported that the ex-N.F.L. safety Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire, rather
than acknowledging that he was accidentally shot in the head by a
machine-gunner from his own unit.
These
false stories couldn’t have reached the public without the help of the media.
Reporters don’t just find facts; they look for narratives. And an appealing
narrative can exert a powerful gravitational pull that winds up bending facts
in its direction. During the Iraq war, reporters informed us that a mob of
jubilant Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Never
mind that there were so few local people trying to pull the statue down that
they needed the help of a U.S. military crane. Reporters also built Pvt.
Jessica Lynch into a war hero who had resisted her captors during an ambush in
Iraq, when in fact her weapon had jammed and she remained in her Humvee. In an Op-Ed
essay in The Times about the Lynch story in 2003, it was Bowden
himself who explained this phenomenon as ‘‘the tendency to weave what little we
know into a familiar shape — often one resembling the narrative arc of a
film.’’
Was
the story of Osama bin Laden’s death yet another example of American
mythmaking? Had Bowden and, for that matter, all of us been seduced by a
narrative that was manufactured expressly for our benefit? Or were these
questions themselves just paranoid?
‘‘The
story stunk from
Day 1,’’ Hersh told me. It was a miserably hot summer day in Washington, and we
were sitting in his office, a two-room suite in an anonymous office complex
near Dupont Circle, where Hersh works alone. There’s no nameplate on the door;
the walls of the anteroom are crowded with journalism awards. ‘‘I have a lot of
fun here,’’ he said, amid the clutter of cardboard boxes and precariously
stacked books. ‘‘I can do whatever I want.’’
Within
days of the bin Laden raid, Hersh told me, ‘‘I knew there was a big story
there.’’ He spent the next four years, on and off, trying to get it. What he
wound up publishing, this May in The London Review of Books, was no incremental
effort to poke a few holes in the administration’s story. It was a
10,000-word refutation of the entire official narrative, sourced
largely to a retired U.S. senior intelligence official, with corroboration from
two ‘‘longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command.’’ Hersh confidently
walked readers through an alternate version of all the familiar plot points in
a dispassionate, just-the-facts tone, turning a story of patient perseverance,
careful planning and derring-do into one of luck (good and bad), damage control
and opportunism.
Hersh,
who is 78, was reluctant to cooperate when I told him that I was interested in
writing about his article. (‘‘I’ve gotta bunch of problems with your request,’’
his first email to me began.) He wanted me to follow up on his reporting
instead and suggested that I might start by looking into Pakistan’s radar
system, which he said was far too sophisticated to allow two U.S. helicopters
to enter the country’s airspace undetected. (‘‘Those dimwitted third-world guys
just can’t get anything right,’’ he wrote sarcastically, meaning of
course the Pakistanis would have been aware of two military
helicopters flying into the heart of their country.) Hersh, who worked at The
New York Times for seven years in the 1970s, didn’t think the paper would allow
me to take his claims seriously. ‘‘If you did so,’’ he wrote, ‘‘you better be
sure not to let your wife start the car for the next few months.’’ But after a
little prodding, he relented and spent the better part of a day with me,
describing his reporting as thoroughly as he felt he could without compromising
his sources.
Hersh’s
most consequential claim was about how bin Laden was found in the first place.
It was not years of painstaking intelligence-gathering, he wrote, that led the
United States to the courier and, ultimately, to bin Laden. Instead, the
location was revealed by a ‘‘walk-in’’ — a retired Pakistani intelligence
officer who was after the $25 million reward that the United States had
promised anyone who helped locate him. For that matter, bin Laden was hardly
‘‘in hiding’’ at all; his compound in Abbottabad was actually a safe house,
maintained by the Pakistani intelligence service. When the United States
confronted Pakistani intelligence officials with this information, Hersh wrote,
they eventually acknowledged it was true and even conceded to provide a DNA
sample to prove it.
According
to Hersh’s version, then, the daring raid wasn’t especially daring. The
Pakistanis allowed the U.S. helicopters into their airspace and cleared out the
guards at the compound before the SEALs arrived. Hersh’s sources told him the
United States and Pakistani intelligence officials agreed that Obama would wait
a week before announcing that bin Laden had been killed in a ‘‘drone strike
somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.’’ But the
president was forced to go public right away, because the crash and subsequent
destruction of the Black Hawk — among the rare facts in the official story that
Hersh does not dispute — were going to make it impossible to keep the operation
under wraps.
As
if those assertions weren’t significant enough, Hersh went on to make some even
wilder claims. He wrote, for instance, that bin Laden had not been given a
proper Islamic burial at sea; the SEALs threw his remains out of their
helicopter. He claimed not just that the Pakistanis had seized bin Laden in
2006, but that Saudi Arabia had paid for his upkeep in the years that followed,
and that the United States had instructed Pakistan to arrest an innocent man
who was a sometime C.I.A. asset as the fall guy for the major in the Pakistani
Army who had collected bin Laden’s DNA sample.
What
was perhaps most shocking of all, though, was that this elaborate narrative was
being unspooled not by some basement autodidact but by one of America’s
greatest investigative reporters, the man who exposed the massacre of hundreds
of Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai (1969), who revealed a
clandestine C.I.A. program to spy on antiwar dissidents (1974) and who detailed
the shocking story of the abuses at Abu Ghraib (2004). Could the bin Laden article
be another major Hersh scoop?
‘‘It’s
always possible,’’ Bowden told me. ‘‘But given the sheer number of people I
talked to from different parts of government, for a lie to have been that
carefully orchestrated and sustained to me gets into faked-moon-landing
territory.’’ Other reporters have been less generous still. ‘‘What’s true in
the story isn’t new, and what’s new in the story isn’t true,’’ said Peter
Bergen of CNN, who wrote his own best-selling account of the hunting and
killing of bin Laden, ‘‘Manhunt.’’ And government officials were least
receptive of all. Josh Earnest, then the White House spokesman, said Hersh’s
‘‘story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods.’’ Col. Steve
Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was ‘‘largely a fabrication.’’ (There
were ‘‘too many inaccuracies to even bother going through them line by line.’’)
The administration pretty much left it at that, though some of Hersh’s critics
have pointed to classified documents made public by Edward Snowden revealing a
long history of C.I.A. surveillance of the Abbottabad compound as proof that
its location hadn’t simply been revealed by a walk-in.
This
sort of reception is nothing new for Hersh. A Pentagon spokesman at the time of
Abu Ghraib, Lawrence Di Rita, described one of his many (now unchallenged)
articles for The New Yorker on the scandal as ‘‘the most hysterical piece of
journalist malpractice I have ever observed.’’ Still, Hersh got worked up in
some of the interviews he gave after the publication of the bin Laden piece.
‘‘I don’t care if you don’t like my story!’’ he told a public-radio host during
one grilling. ‘‘I don’t care!’’ But with time, his petulance cooled into a kind
of amusement. ‘‘High-camp’’ was one adjective he used to describe the
administration’s version of the events.
At
one point in our conversation, I reminded Hersh that I wasn’t going to offer a
definitive judgment on what happened. I didn’t want to reinterview the administration
officials who had already given their accounts of the events to other
journalists. I saw this as more of a media story, a case study in how
constructed narratives become accepted truth. This felt like a cop-out to him,
as he explained in a long email the next day. He said that I was sidestepping
the real issue, that I was ‘‘turning this into a ‘he-said, she-said’ dilemma,’’
instead of coming to my own conclusion about whose version was right. It was
then that he introduced an even more disturbing notion: What if no one’s
version could be trusted?
‘‘Of
course there is no reason for you or any other journalist to take what was said
to me by unnamed sources at face value,’’ Hersh wrote. ‘‘But it is my view that
there also is no reason for journalists to take at face value what a White
House or administration spokesman said on or off the record in the aftermath or
during a crisis.’’
For
those in and
around the news business, the fact that Hersh’s report appeared in The London
Review of Books and not The New Yorker, his usual outlet, was a story in its
own right, one that hasn’t been told in full before. (Editors and reporters may
not be as secretive as intelligence officials, but they like to keep a tight
lid on their operational details, too.)
A
week or so after the raid, Hersh called The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick.
In 2009, Hersh wrote
a story for the magazine about the growing concern among U.S.
officials that Pakistan’s large nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of
extremists inside the country’s military. Now he let Remnick know that two of
his sources — one in Pakistan, the other in Washington — were telling him something
else: The administration was lying about the bin Laden operation.
One
of The New Yorker’s staff writers, Dexter Filkins, was already planning a trip
to Pakistan for a different assignment. It is rare, but not unprecedented, for
The New Yorker to run double-bylined articles, and the magazine decided to
pursue one. It paired Filkins with Hersh, asking Filkins to report the
Pakistani side — in particular, the notion that Pakistan had secretly
cooperated with the United States — while Hersh would keep following leads from
Washington. But Filkins, who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for The Times
before moving to The New Yorker, spent about a week running the tip by sources
inside the Pakistani government and military with little success.
‘‘It
wasn’t even that I was getting angry denials,’’ Filkins told me. ‘‘I was
getting blank stares.’’ Filkins said the mood on the ground completely
contradicted Hersh’s claim; the Pakistani military seemed humiliated about
having been kept in the dark by the Americans. Remnick told him to move on. He
ended up writing about a Pakistani journalist who was murdered, probably by the
country’s intelligence service, the I.S.I., after detailing the links between
Islamist militants and the Pakistani military.
In
the meantime, The New Yorker published Schmidle’s account of the bin Laden
raid, and, soon after, brought Schmidle on as a staff writer. (In an email,
Schmidle told me his subsequent reporting has only confirmed his initial
account. Regarding the possibility ‘‘that some inside the Pakistani military or
intelligence services knew that bin Laden was living in that house, I think
it’s entirely plausible, though I’ve not seen any proof,’’ he wrote.)
Hersh
plowed ahead by himself, working his sources, trying to flesh out his
counternarrative. Three years later he sent a draft to The New Yorker. After
reading it a few times, Remnick told Hersh that he didn’t think he had the
story nailed down. He suggested that Hersh continue his reporting and see where
it took him. Instead, Hersh gave the story to The London Review of Books.
Hersh
has never been on The New Yorker’s staff, preferring to remain a freelancer.
But he has strong ties to the magazine. He published his first article there in
1971 and has written hundreds of thousands of words for the magazine since
then, including, most recently, an essay
about visiting My Lai with his family that was published only weeks
before his London Review of Books article on bin Laden. (His son Joshua, now a
reporter for Buzzfeed, was a New Yorker fact-checker for many years.) Remnick
has published some of Hersh’s most provocative articles and, for that matter,
plenty of other major national-security stories that the government would have
preferred to keep buried.
But
the bin Laden report wasn’t the first one by Hersh that Remnick rejected
because he considered the sourcing too thin. In 2013 and 2014, he passed on two
Hersh articles about a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria, each of which claimed
the attack was not launched by the Assad regime, the presumed culprit, but by
Syrian rebels, in collaboration with the Turkish government. Those articles
also landed in The London Review of Books. Like the bin Laden article, each was
widely questioned upon publication, with critics arguing that the
once-legendary reporter was increasingly favoring provocation over rigor.
(Hersh still stands by both stories.)
The
media would certainly have treated Hersh’s bin Laden story differently if it
had been published in The New Yorker, which is highly regarded for its thorough
review process. But Hersh insists that the L.R.B. was just as thorough, if not
more so. His editor, Christian Lorentzen, told me that three fact-checkers
worked on the bin Laden article, and he also spoke directly to Hersh’s key
sources, including the retired American intelligence official identified in the
article as the ‘‘major U.S. source for the account.’’
Even
if the fact-checking process at The London Review of Books was as thorough as
Hersh and the magazine say, we are still left trusting his unnamed sources.
Should we? Hersh’s first Abu Ghraib article was based on an internal Army
report, but many of the most important revelations in his work come from midlevel
bureaucrats, ambassadors, C.I.A. station chiefs and four-star generals whose
identities are known to only his editors and fact-checkers. The promise of
anonymity is an essential tool for reporters. It changed the course of history
(in Watergate, most prominently) and helped make Hersh’s illustrious career.
But it also invariably leaves doubts about the motivation of the sources and
thus their credibility.
Hersh’s
instincts — to him, every story stinks from Day 1 — have served him well. But
there are inherent perils in making a career of digging up the government’s
deepest secrets. National-security reporters are almost never present at the
events in question, and they are usually working without photos or documents,
too. Their hardest facts consist almost entirely of what (unnamed) people say.
It is a bedrock value of journalism that reporters must never get facts wrong,
but faithfully reproducing what people tell you is just the beginning. You have
to also decide which facts and which voices to include and how best to assemble
this material into an accurate, coherent narrative: a story. In making these
judgments, even the best might miss a nuance or choose the wrong fact or facts
to emphasize. As Steve Coll, a New Yorker staff writer and the dean of the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told me, ‘‘You’d want an
investigative reporter’s reputation to not be 100 percent right all of the
time, but to be mostly right, to be directionally right.’’
Hersh
may have been
the first journalist to write that a secret informant had steered the United
States to bin Laden’s compound, but he was by no means the only one who had
heard this rumor. Coll was another. ‘‘In my case, it was described to me as a
specific Pakistani officer in the intelligence service,’’ Coll, the author of a
Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the C.I.A. and Afghanistan, told me one
afternoon in his office at Columbia. ‘‘I even had a name that I’ve been working
on for four years.’’
Intuitively,
the notion of a walk-in makes sense. Secret informants have led the United
States to virtually every high-value terrorist target tracked to Pakistan,
including Ramzi Yousef, the first World Trade Center bomber, and Mir Aimal
Kansi, who killed two C.I.A. employees in an attack on Langley in 1993. ‘‘The
idea that the C.I.A. stitched this together, and torture worked and they found
the car and they found the courier, then they found the license plate and they
followed it to the house — that had always seemed to those of us on the beat
like it was very elaborate,’’ Coll said.
But
Coll has never been able to confirm the tipper story. The closest he came was a
conversation with an American intelligence officer who had worked with the man
said to have been the informant. ‘‘I said, ‘Do you know this guy?’ ’’
Coll recalled. ‘‘He said: ‘Yeah, I do know
him. I used to work very closely with him.’ I said, ‘Is this bio that I’ve been
given accurate?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s accurate.’ I said, ‘I’ve been told he
took the $25 million and is in witness protection.’ He paused, and he said,
‘Hmm, that’s the sort of thing he would do.’ ’’
From
the beginning, it seemed hard to believe that high-level Pakistani officials
weren’t aware of bin Laden’s presence in their country; several U.S. officials
even publicly said as much in the aftermath of the raid. Pakistan conducted its
own secret investigation into the matter, which was leaked to Al Jazeera in
2013. The Abbottabad Commission Report, as it was known, found no evidence that
Pakistan was harboring bin Laden. Instead, it concluded that the world’s most
wanted man was able to move freely around the country for nine years because of
widespread incompetence among military and intelligence authorities.
The
most detailed exploration of the question of Pakistani complicity in sheltering
bin Laden appeared in this magazine in March 2014. It came from a book written
by a Times correspondent, Carlotta Gall, who reported that a source inside the
I.S.I. told her that Pakistan’s intelligence service ran a special desk
assigned to handle bin Laden. ‘‘The desk was wholly deniable by virtually
everyone at the I.S.I. — such is how supersecret intelligence units operate —
but the top military bosses knew about it, I was told,’’Gall
wrote.
More
controversial is Hersh’s
claim that Pakistan knew in advance about the SEAL team raid and allowed it to
proceed, even helped facilitate it. This is the starkest departure from the
standard story as it was reported previously. Logically, it would require us to
accept that the U.S. government trusted the Pakistanis to help it kill bin
Laden, and that the humiliation that Pakistan’s military and intelligence
reportedly felt in the aftermath of the raid was either a ruse or the product
of some even deeper U.S.-Pakistani intrigue. Is there any evidence to support
this claim or, really, anything we can latch onto beyond Hersh’s unnamed
sources?
Eleven
days after the raid, an unbylined story appeared on GlobalPost, an American
website specializing in foreign reporting. The dateline was Abbottabad; the
story was headlined: ‘‘Bin
Laden Raid: Neighbors Say Pakistan Knew.’’ A half-dozen people who lived
near bin Laden’s compound told the reporter that plainclothes security
personnel — ‘‘either Pakistani intelligence or military officers’’ — knocked on
their doors a couple of hours before the raid and instructed them to turn the
lights off and remain indoors until further notice. Some local people also told
the reporter that they were directed not to speak to the media, especially the
foreign media.
When
I contacted the chief executive of GlobalPost, Philip Balboni, he told me he
considered trying to aggressively publicize this narrative when he first posted
it. ‘‘[B]ut that would have required resources that we did not possess at the
time, and the information against it was so overwhelming that even we had to
wonder if our sources were right,’’ he wrote me in an email.
Balboni
put me in touch with the reporter, Aamir Latif, a 41-year-old Pakistani
journalist. Latif, a former foreign correspondent for U.S. News and World
Report, told me that he traveled to Abbottabad the day after bin Laden was
killed and reported there for a couple of days. I asked him if he still
believed that there was some level of Pakistani awareness of the raid. ‘‘Not
awareness,’’ he answered instantly. ‘‘There was coordination and cooperation.’’
Latif,
who kept his name off the original post because of the sensitivity of the
subject in Pakistan, said that people in the area told him that they heard the
U.S. helicopters and that surely the Pakistani military had, too: ‘‘The whole
country was awake, only the Pakistani Army was asleep? What does that suggest
to you?’’ Gall has also written that bin Laden’s neighbors heard the explosions
at the compound and contacted the local police, but that army commanders told
the police to stand down and leave the response to the military. The SEALs were
on the ground for 40 minutes, but the Pakistani Army didn’t arrive until after
they had left.
Gall’s
best guess (and she emphasizes that it is just a guess) is that the United
States alerted Pakistan to the bin Laden operation at the 11th hour. ‘‘I have
no proof, but the more I think about it and the more I talk to Pakistani
friends, the more I think it’s probably true that Kayani and Pasha were in on
it,’’ Gall told me, referring to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was then the
chief of the army staff, and Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then the director general
of the I.S.I. As for killing bin Laden, she said: ‘‘The scenario I imagine is
that the Americans watched him and tracked him and never told the Pakistanis
because they didn’t trust them, but when they decided to go ahead with the
raid, I think they might have gone to Kayani and Pasha and said, ‘We’re going
in, and don’t you dare shoot down our helicopters or else.’ ’’
(I should note that not every national-security reporter, including some at
The Times, agrees with Gall about the likelihood of high-level
Pakistani complicity in either harboring bin Laden or helping kill him.)
Following
Gall’s scenario to its logical conclusion, Pakistan would have faced an
unappealing choice after the raid: acknowledge that it had cooperated and risk
angering hard-liners for betraying bin Laden and abetting a U.S. military
operation on Pakistani soil, or plead ignorance and incompetence.
‘‘The
Pakistanis often fall back on, ‘We were incompetent,’ ’’
Gall said. ‘‘They don’t want their
countrymen to know what they’re playing at. They fear there will be a
backlash.’’
Where
does the official
bin Laden story stand now? For many, it exists in a kind of liminal state,
floating somewhere between fact and mythology. The writing of history is a
process, and this story still seems to have a long way to go before the
government’s narrative can be accepted as true, or rejected as false.
‘‘It’s
all sort of hokey, the whole thing,’’ Robert Baer, a longtime C.I.A. case
officer in the Middle East (and the inspiration for the George Clooney
character in the movie ‘‘Syriana’’) told me of the government’s version of the
events. ‘‘I’ve never seen a White House take that kind of risk. Did the
president just wake up one morning and say, ‘Let’s put my presidency on the
line right before an election?’ This guy is too smart to put 23 SEALs in harm’s
way in a Hollywood-like assassination. He’s too smart.’’ Still, none of Baer’s
old friends inside or outside the agency have challenged the administration’s
account.
Over
time, many of Hersh’s claims could be proved right. What then? We may be
justifiably outraged. Pakistan, our putative ally in the war on terror and the
beneficiary of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer aid, would have provided
refuge to our greatest enemy — the author of the very act that prompted us to
invade Afghanistan. The audacious raid on bin Laden’s compound, our greatest
victory in the war on terror, would have been little more than ‘‘a turkey shoot’’
(Hersh’s phrase). Above all, our government would have lied to us.
But
should we really be shocked by such a revelation? After all, it would barely
register on a scale of government secrecy and deception that includes, in
recent years alone, the N.S.A.’s covert wiretapping program and the C.I.A.’s
off-the-books network of ‘‘black site’’ prisons. ‘‘White House public-affairs
people are not historians, they are not scholars, they are not even
journalists,’’ Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy
for the Federation of American Scientists, told me. ‘‘They are representing a
political entity inside the United States government. Telling the whole truth
and nothing but the truth is not their job, and even if it were their job, they
would not necessarily be able to do it.’’
Hersh’s
version doesn’t require us to believe in the possibility of a governmentwide
conspiracy. Myths can be projected through an uncoordinated effort with a
variety of people really just doing their jobs. Of course, when enough people
are obscuring the truth, the results can seem, well, conspiratorial. Hersh is
fond of pointing out that thousands of government employees and contractors
presumably knew about the N.S.A.’s wiretapping, but only one, Edward Snowden, came
forward.
We
can go a step further: The more sensitive the subject, the more likely the
government will be to feed us untruths. Consider our relationship with
Pakistan, which Obama clearly had on his mind in the aftermath of the raid. In
his address to the nation, Obama expressed his gratitude: ‘‘Over the years,
I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew
where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that
our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and
the compound where he was hiding.’’
Either
the line in Obama’s statement wasn’t truthful or the administration’s
subsequent disavowal of it wasn’t. But in either case, it’s hard to imagine
that telling the whole truth was more important to Obama, or should have been
more important, than managing America’s relationship with this unstable ally.
There’s
simply no reason to expect the whole truth from the government about the
killing of bin Laden. If a tipper led the United States to his compound in Abbottabad,
the administration could never say so without putting that individual’s life at
risk and making it virtually impossible for the C.I.A. to recruit informants in
the future. If Pakistan didn’t want us to acknowledge its cooperation with the
raid, we wouldn’t, for fear of igniting the militant backlash Gall mentioned.
Hersh himself has written — in The New Yorker — that there is a credible danger
of extremists inside Pakistan’s military staging a coup and taking control of
its large stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Reporters
like to think
of themselves as empiricists, but journalism is a soft science. Absent documentation,
the grail of national-security reporting, they are only as good as their
sources and their deductive reasoning. But what happens when different sources
offer different accounts and deductive reasoning can be used to advance any
number of contradictory arguments? How do we square Latif’s reporting in
Abbottabad and Baer’s skepticism with the official story that Bowden and many
others heard?
‘‘As
a reporter in this world,’’ Bowden told me, ‘‘you have to always allow for the
possibility that you are being lied to, you hope for good reason.’’
We
may already know far more about the bin Laden raid than we were ever supposed
to. In his 2014 memoir ‘‘Duty,’’ the former secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates,
wrote that everyone who gathered in the White House Situation Room on the night
of the raid had agreed to ‘‘keep mum on the details.’’ ‘‘That commitment lasted
about five hours,’’ he added, pointing his finger directly at the White House
and the C.I.A: ‘‘They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit.’’
The
problem is that amid all of this bragging, it became impossible to know what
was true and what wasn’t. Recall ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’ which grossed $130
million at the box office and was in many ways the dominant narrative of the
killing of bin Laden. The filmmakers, in numerous interviews, went out of their
way to promote their access to government and military sources: The opening
credits announced that the film was based on ‘‘firsthand accounts of actual
events.’’ And, as a trove of documents made public via the Freedom of
Information Act amply demonstrated, the C.I.A. eagerly cooperated with the
filmmakers, arranging for the writer and director to meet with numerous
analysts and officers who were identified as being involved in the hunt for bin
Laden. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, has described the film as ‘‘the first
rough cut of history.’’
This
was a story that was so good it didn’t need to be fictionalized, or so it
seemed. It began with a series of C.I.A.-led torture sessions, which the movie
suggested provided the crucial break in the hunt for bin Laden. Only they
didn’t, at least according to a report conducted over the course of many years
by the Senate Intelligence Committee (and others with access to classified
information). Senator Dianne Feinstein, who oversaw the report as the
committee’s chairwoman, said she walked out of a screening of the film. ‘‘I
couldn’t handle it,’’ she said. ‘‘Because it’s so false.’’ The filmmakers’
intent had presumably been to tell a nuanced story — the ugly truth of how we
found bin Laden — but in so doing, they seem to have perpetuated a lie.
It’s
not that the
truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; it’s that we don’t know it. And we
can’t necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more
answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.’s official
history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don’t know what happened more
than a half-century ago, much less in 2011.
There
are different ways to control a narrative. There’s the old-fashioned way:
Classify documents that you don’t want seen and, as Gates said, ‘‘keep mum on
the details.’’ But there’s also the more modern, social-media-savvy approach:
Tell the story you want them to believe. Silence is one way to keep a secret.
Talking is another. And they are not mutually exclusive.
‘‘I
love the notion that the government isn’t riddled with secrecy,’’ Hersh told me
toward the end of our long day together. ‘‘Are you kidding me? They keep more
secrets than you can possibly think. There’s stuff going on right now that I
know about — amazing stuff that’s going on. I’ll write about it when I can.
There’s stuff going out right now, amazing stuff in the Middle East. Are you
kidding me? Of course there is. Of course there is.’’
Jonathan
Mahler writes about the media for The New York Times and is a longtime
contributor to the magazine.
