How they got him

Discovery Channel recreates the operation that led to bin Laden’s death. Veenu Sandhu gets a sneak peek

On the morning of April 29, as the world watches the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, US President Barrack Obama picks up the phone and calls his top advisors. When he meets them, he gets straight to the point. “Let’s do it,” he says. Two days later, a crack US team storms into a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, kills America’s most-wanted terrorist and flies away with his body. The night before, Obama had been at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner coolly rattling off one-liners which had the guests in splits. Nobody could guess that the only thing on top of the President’s mind that evening was an operation which has been America’s top national security priority for the last 10 years — one that could lead it to Osama bin Laden. “I would never want to play poker with President Obama,” an official later remarks.

 

Tomorrow at 9 pm, when Discovery Channel premieres Death of Bin Laden, a one-hour programme with minute details of the operation to reach the 9/11 mastermind, many such accounts will give an insight into the minds that conceived and carried out the operation. From the time four helicopters, including the two specially-modified Black Hawks carrying teams of US Navy SEALS, described as “the elite of the elite force”, took off from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to the time bin Laden’s body was buried in the North Arabian Sea after a DNA test, it was less than 12 hours. The assault at bin Laden’s house was over in 38 minutes flat. On the face of it, Operation Neptune Spear appeared effortless, almost simple. But it also left a lot unsaid and unknown.

Through dramatic animation, reconstruction, earlier videos and interviews with people who were involved or have first-hand knowledge of how a mission of this scale would be carried out, Discovery recreates the entire action beginning from 2002-03 when intelligence agencies got the first lead to Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man who could hold the key to bin Laden. Piecing the story together are, among others, Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, former CIA officials, former Black Hawk pilots and a former SEAL team six officer.

While there are no new visuals — the commandos involved in the operation had cameras to record the raid, but that video has not been released — Discovery brings new details of the stunning range of technology used to pull off the mission. Spy satellites capable of beaming 3D images and “eavesdropping” satellites had the house under surveillance 24x7. Unmanned drones, especially the “Beast of Kandahar” which is less visible to the radar, telephoto lenses, night vision goggles and highly-sophisticated laser beams that could pick up vibrations from the window and convert them into full sentences were all put on the job. Images of the people living in the house fitted the profile of bin Laden’s family. The images also showed a tall man who seemed more privileged than the others and was often seen walking in the compound. The investigators nicknamed him “The Pacer”. Bin Laden, too, was tall — six feet four inches. In the end, the odds that bin Laden was in the house were 60:40. But then this was the closest America had got to even a whiff of bin Laden in ten years. There was lack of agreement on the assault, but Obama chose to pull the trigger.

Getting the Black Hawk helicopters to the compound undetected by the Pakistan military was also no mean task. The aircraft were modified to evade detection, and the 160-mile flight path from Jalalabad to Abbottabad was painstakingly mapped using natural terrain to hide them from the radar. A former Black Hawk pilot narrates how the aircraft would have flown so low to the ground that they would be literally flying around trees.

With a strong script and sharp editing, Discovery recreates the stunning story of a spectacular mission, although the men who actually got the “job well done”, as Obama later complimented them, remain anonymous. The story does not end with bin Laden’s death. It looks into what this could mean for the war on terror. Experts on the programme say that for the short term, at least, Al Qaeda will be more worried about covering its trail because along with bin Laden, the US team recovered a wealth of intelligence on Al Qaeda’s structure, its sources of funds, insights into the location of Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, and the group’s potential terror plots. A critical discovery indeed.

(“Death of bin Laden” premieres on Discovery Channel on June 5, 9 pm. Repeat on June 6 at 8 pm)