On May 2, 2011, the United States conducted Operation Neptune Spear, in which SEAL Team Six shot and killed Osama bin Laden at his "Waziristan Haveli" in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden, who founded al-Qaeda and orchestrated the September 11 attacks, had been the subject of a United States military manhunt since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, but escaped to Pakistan—allegedly with Pakistani support—during or after the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. The mission was part of an effort led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating the special mission units involved in the raid. In addition to SEAL Team Six, participating units under JSOC included the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) and the CIA's Special Activities Division.
Approved by American president Barack Obama and involving two dozen Navy SEALs in two Black Hawk helicopters, Operation Neptune Spear was launched from about 120 miles (190 km) away, near the Afghan city of Jalalabad. The raid took 40 minutes, and bin Laden was killed shortly before 1:00 a.m. Pakistan Standard Time (20:00 UTC, May 1). Three other men, including one of bin Laden's sons, and a woman in the compound were also killed. One U.S. helicopter crashed during the insertion operation without casualties. After the raid, the operatives returned to Afghanistan with bin Laden's corpse for identification and then flew over 850 miles (1,370 km) to the Arabian Sea, where he was buried for a mix of political, practical, and religious reasons.
Al-Qaeda confirmed bin Laden's death through posts made on militant websites on May 6, and vowed to avenge his killing. Additionally, Pakistani militant organizations, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), vowed retaliation against the United States and against Pakistan for failing to prevent the American raid. The raid, which was supported by over 90% of the American public, was also welcomed by the United Nations, the European Union, and NATO, as well as a large number of international organizations and governments. However, it was condemned by two-thirds of the Pakistani public. Legal and ethical aspects of the killing, such as the failure to capture him alive in spite of him being unarmed, were questioned by Amnesty International. Also controversial was the decision to classify any photographic or DNA evidence of bin Laden's death. There was widespread discontent among Pakistanis with regard to how effectively the country's defences were breached by the United States, and how the Pakistan Air Force failed to detect and intercept any incoming American aircraft.
After the killing of bin Laden, Pakistani prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani formed a commission led by Senior Justice Javed Iqbal to investigate the circumstances of the assault. The resulting Abbottabad Commission Report reported that the "collective failure" of Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies had enabled bin Laden to hide in the country for nine years. The report was classified by the Pakistani government but was later leaked to and published by Al Jazeera Media Network on July 8, 2013. Various artifacts from the raid are housed at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, with other artifacts such as the American flag which the Navy SEAL team used during the raid being housed at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
Search for bin Laden
Accounts of how bin Laden was located by U.S. intelligence differ. The White House and CIA director John Brennan stated that the process began with a fragment of information unearthed in 2002, resulting in years of investigation. This account states that by September 2010, these leads followed a courier to the Abbottabad compound, where the U.S. began intensive surveillance.
Identity of courier
Identification of al-Qaeda couriers was an early priority for interrogators at CIA black sites and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, because bin Laden was believed to communicate through such couriers while concealing his whereabouts from al-Qaeda foot soldiers and top commanders. Bin Laden was known not to use phones after 1998, when the U.S. had launched missile strikes against his bases in Afghanistan in August of that year by tracking an associate's satellite phone.
The U.S. official had stated that by 2002, interrogators had heard uncorroborated claims about an al-Qaeda courier with the kunya Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti (sometimes referred to as Sheikh Abu Ahmed from Kuwait). One of those claims came from Mohammed al-Qahtani, a detainee who told interrogators about a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who was part of the inner circle of al-Qaeda. Later in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational chief of al-Qaeda, said he was acquainted with al-Kuwaiti but that the man was not active in al-Qaeda, according to a U.S. official.
According to a U.S. official, in 2004 a prisoner named Hassan Ghul revealed that bin Laden relied on a trusted courier known as al-Kuwaiti. Ghul said al-Kuwaiti was close to bin Laden as well as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohammed's successor Abu Faraj al-Libbi. Ghul revealed that al-Kuwaiti had not been seen in some time, which led U.S. officials to suspect he was traveling with bin Laden. When confronted with Ghul's account, Mohammed maintained his original story. Abu Faraj al-Libbi was captured in 2005 and transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. He told CIA interrogators that bin Laden's courier was a man named Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan and denied knowing al-Kuwaiti. Because both Mohammed and al-Libbi had minimized al-Kuwaiti's importance, officials speculated that he was part of bin Laden's inner circle.
In 2007, officials learned al-Kuwaiti's real name, though they said they would disclose neither the name nor how they learned it. Pakistani officials in 2011 stated the courier's name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, from Pakistan's Swat Valley. He and his brother Abrar and their families were living at bin Laden's compound, the officials said. The name Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan appears in the leaked JTF-GTMO detainee assessment for Abu Faraj al-Libbi, but the CIA never found anyone named Maulawi Jan and concluded that the name was an invention of al-Libbi. A 2010 wiretap of another suspect picked up a conversation with al-Kuwaiti. CIA paramilitary operatives located al-Kuwaiti in August 2010 and followed him back to the Abbottabad compound, which led them to speculate it was bin Laden's location.
Al-Kuwaiti and his brother were killed in the May 2, 2011, raid. Afterward, some locals identified the men as Pashtuns named Arshad and Tareq Khan. Arshad Khan was carrying an old, noncomputerized Pakistani identification card, which identified him as from Khat Kuruna, a village near Charsadda in northwestern Pakistan. Pakistani officials have found no record of an Arshad Khan in that area and suspect the men were living under false identities.
The actual story of how Bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad was discovered has been elaborated by Nelly Lahoud in her book The Bin Laden Papers, in which she relies on her research into the huge number of documents retrieved by the US forces during their raid on the compound. These reveal that although Ibrahim, Bin Laden's security guard, did have a role in receiving messages, there were also several other links of couriers to the outside world, and it was partly the discovery of these that led to Ibrahim and to the compound.
Bin Laden's compound
The CIA used surveillance photos and intelligence reports to determine the identities of the inhabitants of the Abbottabad compound to which the courier was traveling. In September 2010, the CIA concluded that the compound was custom-built to hide someone of significance, very likely bin Laden. Officials surmised that he was living there with his youngest wife and family.
Built in 2004, the three-story compound was at the end of a narrow dirt road located 4.0 kilometres (2+1⁄2 miles) northeast of the city center of Abbottabad. Abbottabad is about 160 km (100 mi) from the Afghanistan border on the far eastern side of Pakistan (about 30 km or 20 mi from India). The compound is 1.3 km (3⁄4 mi) southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy. Located on a plot of land eight times larger than those of nearby houses, the compound was surrounded by a 3.7-to-5.5-metre (12 to 18 ft) concrete wall topped with barbed wire. It had two security gates, and the third-floor balcony had a 2.1-metre-high (7 ft) privacy wall, tall enough to hide the 1.93 m (6 ft 4 in) bin Laden.
The compound had no Internet or landline telephone service. Its residents burned their refuse, unlike their neighbors, who set their garbage out for collection. Local residents called the building the Waziristan Haveli, because they believed the owner was from Waziristan. Following the American raid and killing of bin Laden, the Pakistani government demolished the compound in February 2012.
Intelligence gathering
The CIA led the effort to surveil and gather intelligence on the compound; other critical roles in the operation were played by other United States agencies, including the National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and U.S. Defense Department. U.S. officials told The Washington Post that the intelligence-gathering effort "was so extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December [2010] to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it."
The CIA rented a home in Abbottabad from which a team staked out and observed the compound over a number of months. The CIA team used informants and other techniques—including a widely criticized fake hepatitis B vaccination program— to gather intelligence on the compound. The safe house was abandoned immediately after bin Laden's death. The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency helped the Joint Special Operations Command create mission simulators for the pilots, and analyzed data from an RQ-170 drone before, during and after the raid on the compound. The NGA created three-dimensional renderings of the house, created schedules describing residential traffic patterns, and assessed the number, height and gender of the residents of the compound. Also involved in the intelligence gathering measures were an arm of the National Security Agency known as the Tailored Access Operations group which, among other things, is specialized in surreptitiously installing spyware and tracking devices on targeted computers and mobile-phone networks. Because of the work of the Tailored Access Operations group, the NSA could collect intelligence from mobile phones that were used by al-Qaeda operatives and other "persons of interest" in the hunt for bin Laden.
The CIA used a process called "red teaming" on the collected intelligence to independently review the circumstantial evidence and available facts of their case that bin Laden was living at the Abbottabad compound. An administration official said, "We conducted red-team exercises and other forms of alternative analysis to check our work. No other candidate fit the bill as well as bin Laden did."
Despite what officials described as an extraordinarily concentrated collection effort leading up to the operation, no U.S. spy agency was ever able to capture a photograph of bin Laden at the compound before the raid or a recording of the voice of the mysterious male figure whose family occupied the structure's top two floors.
Operation Neptune Spear
The official mission code name was Operation Neptune Spear, a direct nod to the U.S. Navy SEAL Trident (the Special Warfare insignia). In Roman mythology, Neptune is the god of the sea, and his weapon is the three-pronged spear, or trident.
The Associated Press reported at the time two U.S. officials as stating the operation was "a kill-or-capture mission, since the U.S. doesn't kill unarmed people trying to surrender," but that "it was clear from the beginning that whoever was behind those walls had no intention of surrendering." White House counterterrorism advisor John O. Brennan said after the raid: "If we had the opportunity to take bin Laden alive, if he didn't present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that." CIA director Leon Panetta said on PBS NewsHour: "The authority here was to kill bin Laden. ... Obviously under the rules of engagement, if he in fact had thrown up his hands, surrendered and didn't appear to be representing any kind of threat, then they were to capture him. But, they had full authority to kill him." A U.S. national security official, who was not named, told Reuters that "This was a kill operation." Another official said that when the SEALs were told "We think we found Osama bin Laden, and your job is to kill him," they started to cheer. An article published in Political Science Quarterly in 2016 surveyed various published accounts and interpretations of the objective of the mission and concluded that "the capture option was mainly there for appearance's sake and to fulfill requirements of international law and that everyone involved considered it for all practical purposes a mission to kill."
Planning and final decision
The CIA briefed Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), about the compound in January 2011. The admiral was both a student and practitioner of special operations, having published a thesis on the subject during the 1990s. His theory held that special operations had the potential to be very effective in achieving their goal if they were organized and commanded by special operations professionals rather than being subsumed into larger military units or operations. He believed that such actions required that "relative superiority" be gained during the operation in question via characteristics such as simplicity, security, rehearsals, surprise, speed, and a clearly-but-narrowly defined purpose.
In this case, McRaven said a commando raid would be fairly straightforward but he was concerned about the Pakistani response. He assigned a captain from the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) to work with a CIA team at their campus in Langley, Virginia. The captain, named "Brian", set up an office in the printing plant in the CIA's Langley compound and, with six other JSOC officers, began to plan the raid. Administration attorneys considered legal implications and options before the raid.
In addition to a helicopter raid, planners considered attacking the compound with B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. They also considered a joint operation with Pakistani forces. Obama decided that the Pakistani government and military could not be trusted to maintain operational security for the operation against bin Laden. "There was a real lack of confidence that the Pakistanis could keep this secret for more than a nanosecond", a senior adviser to the president told The New Yorker.