Osama bin Laden’s final night began with a group of four helicopters slicing
through the night skies over Pakistan, making their way toward Islamabad
from a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan. The mission, approved by President
Obama on Friday morning, had been set for early Sunday local time, but was
delayed by poor weather. Pakistani officials did not know they were coming.
The small, elite force flew low and fast, using terrain-following radar to
hug the folds and valleys to avoid radar detection. It was after midnight
when the team of U.S. commandos descended on the al-Qaeda chief’s Abbottabad
lair.
“The walls around the compound were up to 18 feet high,” a senior U.S.
intelligence operative said Monday. “The balconies had seven-feet-high
privacy walls. There were, in addition to wall heights, barbed wire along
the top of the walls.”The residents of the compound burned their own trash.
There were two gates at the compound, as well, and opaque windows,” he
continued. The White House summed it up more tersely. “It had the appearance
of sort of a fortress,” said John Brennan, President Obama’s homeland
security chief.
About two dozen Navy Seals and CIA enablers swooped down on the suburban
compound in a pair of choppers, leaving a second pair lurking nearby in case
they were needed. They came under fire almost immediately, giving U.S.
forces all the justification they needed to amp up their firepower.
Helicopters can be ungainly machines, easily downed by rocket-propelled
grenades or a flurry of small-arms fire. In addition to the choppers,
heavier guns — perhaps AC-130 gunships — were likely on station overhead to
rain down suppressive fire as U.S. forces moved in aboard specially
outfitted CH-47 and UH-60 choppers.
7,000 miles away, U.S. officials could also only watch as the operation
unfolded. At the White House, President Obama sat stone-faced in the
Situation Room as some of his aides paced. Long periods of silence passed as
the small, trusted national security team huddled around the video monitors.
Intelligence professionals say they did not know for sure that bin Laden was
in the compound. The case was good, but circumstantial. The likelihood,
officials told the President, was between 50% and 80%.
