Jason Burke on the extraordinary operation that led US forces to Bin Laden's hideout
Some time in April last year, Osama bin Laden started writing one of the long, winding letters that had become his chief means of communicating with the fragmented and battered organisation he had helped found 13 years before. Now in his mid 50s, he was not a particularly contented man. For the last several years he had been confined to a three-storey house on the outskirts of the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad. Not only was his home a long way from the frontlines of Afghanistan, where he had once lived the intense life of a "mujahid"; it was even further from his homeland of Saudi Arabia. Though three wives and around a dozen grandchildren and children lived with him – he delivered a paternal lecture on religious life, the world and household discipline every day – Bin Laden knew he was out of touch.
"I protest to God so much about my isolation and being alone," he had noted shortly before. "I worry people will tire of me and [my ideas] will become old and worn out to them. But I protest only to God."
Bin Laden was right about his own marginalisation. Chief among his concerns in the weeks before he died was the role of al-Qaida in the Arab uprisings which, through street protests and largely non-violent activism, had deposed secularist dictators in Egypt and Tunisia and looked set to up-end regimes across the region. In a few short weeks these spontaneous revolts had thus achieved a key aim of his own efforts over previous decades. He also worried about the evident failure of his overarching strategy which, by the use of spectacular violence against carefully picked targets, was supposed to mobilise tens of millions under al-Qaida's banner, but had not done so.
One thing he did not appear to be worried about, however, was being the subject of the biggest, most expensive and most advanced manhunt in the history of the world. "It is proven that the American technology and its modern systems cannot arrest a mujahid if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him," he wrote.
Even as Bin Laden was drafting these words, the US president was considering which of the various options presented by his top security officials would be the best way to kill "High Value Target Number One". In American military terminology, Bin Laden had been "found and fixed". All that remained was "the Finish", the title of this book. Barack Obama chose the most risky option – a raid by a team of helicopter-borne special forces. Shortly after midnight on 2 May 2011 an American Navy Seal fired a bullet that removed much of the left half of Bin Laden's skull, almost certainly killing him instantly.
The death of the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks is a fantastic story. It has goodies and baddies, a long, slow build to the climax, exotic locations and lots of hardware. It is no wonder that it has already spawned half a dozen books and a Hollywood film.
Mark Bowden comes to this story with impressive credentials. He is the author of Black Hawk Down, the much-admired account of a special forces mission that went badly wrong in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993. The book led to a film, but also set a standard for narrative description of combat that has rarely been rivalled since, despite Bowden's many imitators.
It is no surprise, then, that The Finish rattles along at a good pace. The narrative starts, slightly surprisingly, with the discovery of a large cache of documents in Iraq in 2007; runs through the story of the CIA operation that identified the courier, who eventually led the hunters to the Abbottabad hideout; describes the decision-making in the White House in detail; and finally takes us through the operation itself. It ends with Bin Laden's remains sliding off a plank, wrapped in a shroud, from a US aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean.
This story is one of the most heavily reported in recent history, and it is understandable that Bowden did not dig up much that was new. Bin Laden's letters, found in the raid, were released in full and immediately picked over by journalists. Though Bowden makes provocative points about the possible utility of torture in extracting the information that led to Bin Laden and thoughtfully discusses President Obama's own intellectual evolution on the question of military force, war and ordering effective assassinations, there is no scoop. The author quotes at length from his own interview with Obama, who reveals that he would have preferred Bin Laden taken alive than dead, but there's little else that we do not already know.
What Bowden does do, however, is to show how success in the raid last May was the culmination not just of a decade of often tedious data-crunching by the CIA and other analysts, but of a vast and ongoing effort within the American security establishment and government to develop a new range of capabilities. These included the software needed for the supercomputers that collated all the myriad fragments of information that led to the identification of the courier, the new drone technology that allowed continued surveillance of the Abbottabad compound and the skills of the men who stormed Bin Laden's home. Even if the US had successfully located al-Qaida's leader several years earlier, it would have been impossible to launch such a raid – the capacity to execute it simply did not exist. Bowden also stresses that, if in retrospect the trail that led to Abbottabad seems clear, the lead that finally turned out to be the right one was in fact indistinguishable from the tens of thousands of others that were being chased down. Even the litter picked up in recently vacated militant camps in Afghanistan in 2001 – notebooks, diaries, photos from wallets – was all poured into a vast human and electronic data-processing operation that eventually came up with the right combinations. When Obama sent in the Seals, the identification of the target was still only "50-50".
Back in 2001, I can remember standing on a wintry hillside in Afghanistan and watching B-52s futilely bombarding caves from which Bin Laden had fled days before. How the Americans finally got their man is an extraordinary tale and Bowden does it justice.