The operation
Code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was carried out in a CIA-led operation with Joint Special Operations Command, commonly known as 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) also known as “Night Stalkers”and operators from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, which recruits heavily from former JSOC Special Mission Units.
“The American team engaged in a firefight. Osama Bin Laden did resist.”
These words, uttered by a senior Pentagon official, summed up the now-historic raid on May 2, 2011, during which SEAL Team Six secretly descended upon a compound in Pakistan, blew down doors and engaged enemy combatants. The goal: kill or capture terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Laden, the founder and first leader of the Islamist group Al-Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, shortly after 1:00 am Pakistani Standard Time by United States Navy SEALs of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group also known as DEVGRU or SEAL Team Six.
Tracking Geronimo
Geronimo was the assigned code name of Osama Bin Laden as given by CIA. Though there were some controversies with the name assigned to Landen, but it stuck till date.
For years, military and intelligence forces had scoured the globe to find Bin Laden’s hideout, and in September 2010, the CIA got the lead they needed when they used surveillance photos and intelligence reports to determine that a known Al Qaeda courier was visiting a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Over the next few months, the CIA used informants, surveillance and other intelligence gathering measures to arrive at the conclusion that Bin Laden and his family were hiding out in the compound, but up until the attack, there was no hard proof that Bin Laden was present, only the best guess available.
President Obama discussed the decision to attack with 60 Minutes following the raid.
President Barak Obama to 60 minues
“This was a very difficult decision, in part because the evidence we had was not absolutely conclusive”
President Obama said he and his team were not surprised to find Bin Laden hiding in plain sight, but were surprised to learn that the compound had been there for so long without information leaking out about it. “I think the image that bin Laden had tried to promote was that he was an ascetic, living in a cave,” Obama told 60 Minutes. “This guy was living in a million-dollar compound in a residential neighborhood.” According to CIA estimates there was only a Fifty Five percent chance that the 9/11 attack mastermind was in the compound. Taking a decisive decision based on such probability is certainly a huge gamble that President Obama and his team took. 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 multi-platform surveillance. According to journalist Seymour Hersh and NBC News, the U.S. was tipped off about Bin Laden’s location by a Pakistani intelligence officer who offered details of where the Pakistani Intelligence Service held him in detention in exchange for cash.
President Barak Obama to 60 minutes
“I think the image that bin Laden had tried to promote was that he was an ascetic, living in a cave. This guy was living in a million-dollar compound in a residential neighborhood.”
The ISI link
In 2010 an ISI official in Pakistan contacted the CIA station chief in Islamabad and offered him Bin Laden’s location in exchange for a sum of $25 million. Raelynn Hillhouse, an American intelligence analyst first broke this news which was then corroborated by two U.S. intelligence officials speaking to NBC News. The ISI official informed U.S. intelligence that Bin Laden had been located by Pakistani ISI in 2006, and held under house arrest near Pakistani intelligence and military centers ever since. The official passed polygraph tests, after which the U.S. began local and satellite surveillance of Bin Laden’s Abbottabad residence. According to the retired senior U.S. intelligence official Laden was ill at this point, financially supported by some within Saudi Arabia, and kept by the ISI to better manage their complex relationship with Pakistani and Afghan Islamist groups. In May 2015 the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was aware that Bin Laden was in Pakistan with the knowledge of Pakistani intelligence services. The BND informed the CIA that Bin Laden was in Pakistan and Bild am Sonntag states that the CIA then found his “precise location” through a courier. Der Spiegel questioned the veracity of the report, produced in the midst of a scandal over BND and NSA collaboration.
The Courier
According to the earlier official version of his identification from a U.S. official, 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 by tracking an associate’s satellite phone.
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 stated that Al Kuwaiti was close to Bin Laden as well as Khalid Sheik 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 Guantanamo 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. 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. The courier and a relative 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, non-computerized 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 final assault
The actual raid on Bin Laden’s compound was called Operation Neptune Spear, after the trident which appears on the U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare insignia. On the night of the infiltration, two dozen SEALs flew in using two helicopters, beneath the radar and varying routes to avoid detection. News reports described Bin Laden’s compound as surrounded with barbed wire and 18-foot walls. There were also seven-foot walls surrounding the balconies. Additionally, the compound was designed to obscure lines of sight from multiple directions. As the raid commenced, the tail of one of the helicopters grazed the compound wall, forcing it into a “soft crash” landing which fortunately did not result in major injuries, although the helicopter itself had to be destroyed so none of its tech would fall into the wrong hands.
Using night-vision goggles (power on the street had been cut off), the SEALs infiltrated the compound, killing anyone who put up resistance, securing the women and children, clearing weapons stashes and barricades, and taking anything that could contain secret information, including hard drives and cell phones. The SEALs quickly made their way up to the third floor, where they found the terrorist leader in his bedroom and killed him….
Secret Ops 