In this week’s magazine, Nicholas Schmidle describes the mission to get Osama bin Laden. The names of the covert operators in the story were changed to protect their identities. To help you keep track of who’s who, here is a quick guide to the players and the plan. You can also poke around our interactive annotated map of the compound (above), available only through our iPad app.
The organizations:
Naval Special Warfare Development Group: A part of the Navy SEALs that is also known as DEVGRU or Team Six.
Red Squadron: One of four squadrons in DEVGRU.
The players:
Leon Panetta: The director of the C.I.A. until July 1st, when he became the Secretary of Defense. In August, 2010, Panetta told President Obama that C.I.A. analysts had reason to believe that bin Laden’s courier—and potentially bin Laden—was in the large, concrete compound in Abbottabad.
Vice-Admiral Bill McRaven: The SEAL in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command, whom Panetta contacted in late 2010, after receiving an order from the President “to begin exploring options for a military strike on the compound.”
“Brian”: A JSOC official and former DEVGRU deputy commander with “the all-American look of a high-school quarterback,” whom McRaven asked to put together a raid plan. In February, 2011, Brian “moved into an unmarked office on the first floor of the C.I.A.’s printing plant, in Langley, Virginia,” and began work with “half a dozen JSOC officers.” They “were formally attached to the Pakistan/Afghanistan department of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, but in practice they operated on their own.”
“James”: Commander of Red Squadron. “A broad-chested man in his late thirties,” James “does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower.” Along with Mark, he was one of the first two people from the squadron that Brian let in on the operation.
“Mark”: The master chief petty officer of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron. Along with Brian and James, he “spent the next two and a half weeks considering ways to get inside bin Laden’s house,” then selected a team of two dozen SEALs from Red Squadron and brought them to North Carolina, on April 10th, to train. Initially, “none of the SEALs, besides James and Mark, were aware of the C.I.A. intelligence on bin Laden’s compound.”
“Ahmed”: A Pakistani-American translator who was pulled from a desk job for the mission.
Cairo: A Belgian Malinois (which is, for non dog-lovers, a dog).
“Crankshaft”: The name that JSOC had given bin Laden.
The timing:
The moon: The team had a several-day window when there would be “virtually no moonlight over Abbottabad—the ideal condition for a raid. After that, it would be another month until the lunar cycle was in its darkest phase.”
Weather: On the first night, April 30th, that the attack could have been carried out, there was excessive cloud cover.
Leaks: Although waiting until the next dark phase of the lunar cycle would give the C.I.A. more time to insure that bin Laden was inside the compound, it would also increase the risk of a leak, “which would have upended the thing,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, told Schmidle.
The equipment:
Two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, named helo one and helo two.
Four MH-47 Chinooks, some of which President Obama requested at the last minute so that he could feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan” if necessary. Two were outfitted with a pair of M134 Miniguns; one carried fuel bladders.
The SEALs carried CamelBaks, for hydration; gel shots, for endurance; laminated maps of the compound; booklets with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside; and an M4 rifle or Heckler & Koch MP7, according to their choice.
The teams:
In helo one: Mark and eleven other SEALs.
In helo two: James, ten other SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo.
The plan:
As Schmidle describes,
Diagram courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense.
