“A fortress in Afghanistan, 1 month after 9/11. Two operatives from the CIA’s elite special activities division are hot on the trail of Osama Bin Laden.”
“Those first teams were going into the wildest wild west.”
“This is the Declassified story of how the CIA with elite special forces put down a Taliban uprising, outnumbered 100 to 1. It’s like a scene from Armageddon. We hear from the people on the ground as it happened and reveal their footage from the heat of the battle.”
“What’s happened? There’s a prison uprising.”
“Caught in the crossfire the CIA makes a discovery for which one operative pays the ultimate price.”
“America is under attack.”
“Acting on orders from Osama Bin Laden, teams of hijackers fly aircraft into New York’s World Trade Center.”
“Two more planes are hijacked. One hits the Pentagon, the crashes before it reaches its Washington Target.”
“In under an hour nearly 3,000 people are dead. It’s the worst terrorist atrocity in US history.”
“The nation is in shock. The United States had been caught so off guard by the September 11 attacks, it just seemed inconceivable that two gigantic Towers in the nation’s capital could come under attack by this rag tag group of terrorists from across the world. It was not hard to conceive that there were other attacks underway.”
“President Bush speaks to the nation and to the world.”
“Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very Freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The search is underway for those who are Behind These evil acts. I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.”
“The full operational force of the CIA now focuses on one man and his network of terrorists, finding Bin Laden.”
“Finding Bin Laden was a priority from the outset. The head of the counterterrorism center for the CIA talked about bringing home Bin Laden’s head on a pike.”
“The world turned upside down on 9/11. I mean the next day it was anything you want from Congress from everywhere, anything you want, request whatever you want. We took whole branches from other parts of the agency and expanded rapidly by a factor of like seven. Well, Osama Bin Laden from the beginning was going to be a difficult Target to go after. He was a practiced clandestine operator.”
“The CIA knows Bin Laden is hiding in Afghanistan. He’s found Refuge with a Taliban, the ruling extremist Islamic regime, but they don’t know his precise location. Even so, very quickly they develop a plan, intelligence-driven warfare.”
“For the very first time in American history, President Bush approves a plan using the CIA as a lead element in a war.”
“Operation Enduring Freedom is the invasion of Afghanistan.”
“The aim to overthrow the Taliban regime and flush out Osama Bin Laden.”
“In a matter of just weeks the Taliban are in a full-scale retreat.”
“Thousands are captured by America’s allies, the Afghan Northern Alliance.”
“On the ground from the very beginning, highly trained covert CIA operatives. They’ve been sent in to interrogate captives and gain information on exactly where Bin Laden is hiding.”
“Just 10 weeks into the war, CIA analysts learn of an opportunity, a chance for their men to interrogate individuals who could potentially lead them to their number one target.”
“85 miles outside by the northern Afghan town of Kunduz, Taliban fighters have assembled on the road to Mazar-i-Sharif.”
“Their leaders want to negotiate a truce.”
“Now these guys were fully armed. They had with them AK-47s, PKM light machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades. They had all the normal armaments that Taliban and Al-Qaeda had. These men are not just Afghans; there are also hundreds of foreign Fighters.”
“Now what kind of Fighters are drawn to an international Jihad from overseas? They are by the very nature the most extreme because to do that you have to have some kind of extreme commitment to come and fight in a foreign land.”
“At the CIA headquarters analysts receive intelligence that many of these Hardline fighters are in fact members of Al-Qaeda. Some may be high-ranking commanders, some may even know where Bin Laden is hiding. The CIA decides to send in specialist interrogators. So they turn to an exceptional unit, the CIA’s experts in operating in hostile zones: the Special Activities Division.”
“Outside the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a Twan Special Activities Division team prepares for their mission.”
“Dave Tyson is a Central Asian specialist. He is a fluent speaker of Dari, the language of America’s Ally, the Northern Alliance.”
“With him, Johnny Michael Spann, Mike, a 32-year-old former Marine from Alabama. He’s been with the CIA for 3 years. This is his first field assignment.”
“So those first teams that were going in were going into the wildest wild west that you can imagine. If they got into a firefight with the Taliban there was no Cavalry going to come in. They were on their own at the Tippi-tip of the Spear of American power. The team’s mission to persuade the surrendering fighters to reveal precisely where Bin Laden is hiding.”
“At the same time just a few miles away, the foreign Fighters are taken to Qala-i-Jangi, a sprawling mud-walled 19th-century fort in the desert a few hours West of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.”
“The fort is 600 meters across with massive walls 20 meters thick and 30 meters high. Inside are two enclosed compounds separated by a dividing wall. To the north is the Northern Alliance Headquarters building, to the South the so-called pink house and nearby lies the Armory.”
“Despite its size there is still nowhere truly suitable to house such a huge influx of men.”
“You need a large building large enough to hold and process and house and feed 600 men and you need somewhere which you can secure them in. They didn’t have any prisons, obviously. What alternatives were there?”
“Northern Alliance guards have little choice but to herd the Taliban into the basement of The Pink House, the building in the middle of the compound. This will be their makeshift prison.”
“But the foreign Taliban become Restless after the truce. They had expected to be able to walk free. To these Hardline jihadis, imprisonment comes as a shock. Their frustrations wouldn’t matter but for one thing: their Northern Alliance guards have failed to confiscate all the prisoners weapons and grenades.”
“In Afghan tradition and in Muslim culture as well, if somebody says they are surrendering you are supposed to take that at face value. This is supposed to be an honorable thing, so in the Afghan tradition they weren’t searched. They were processed into the fort very quickly and a lot of these guys had weapons hidden under their clothing.”
“They’re still armed and dangerous, as one Taliban fighter quickly shows.”
“I don’t know the mentality of those Taliban fighters, but I guess it’s an attitude of, ‘Okay, I surrender. I make myself defenseless, but maybe not utterly defenseless. Shall I keep something just in case?’ And that’s probably when one of them or some of them decided to use the grenades that they had hidden.”
“The explosion is the last action of one time Taliban fighters life, a warning of what the Taliban are capable.”
“As a result inside that underground prison the fighters develop a plan. They outnumber their Northern Alliance guards by 5 to 1. They know that just across the compound there is an Armory.”
“It is packed with rockets, RPGs, machine guns and mortars.”
“They decide if they are not released the following morning they will take matters into their own hands. They’ll execute a full-scale breakout. If they do, the CIA’s two covert agents will be caught in the middle.”
“The two undercover agents Mike Spann and Dave Tyson arrive at the Qala-i-Jangi Fort to begin the interrogations. For them, the fighters were a source of intelligence.”
“Let’s get as much as possible intelligence from them and information. This was about two and a half months after 9/11 and I think this put, of course, put the military and especially the CIA under an enormous stress and pressure to deliver the information, the intelligence.”
“Spann and Tyson need information to lead them to Bin Laden or Intelligence on the next planned Al-Qaeda attack.”
“It was, you know, the jobs of these interrogators to a large extent to figure out, ‘Well what were these plans? What was that coming next?’ And there was intense pressure on them to get answers to these questions because there was not going to be another way to get those answers.”
“But the fort is far from an ideal setup for questioning.”
“The CIA interrogation manual sets clear guidelines on how to cross-examine a detainee. Interrogators should have time to memorize a detainee’s history to present files, dossiers, and photographs. They should have time to repeat their questioning or to lure the prisoner into making the first move. Most of all, they should be able to keep the prisoners separate from other captives.”
“In the open air compound of the Afghan Fort, playing it by the book just isn’t possible. The fort is filled with hundreds of Taliban, guarded only by a handful of America’s Northern Alliance allies. If anything goes wrong they are on their own.”
“The question is do they go ahead with the interrogations or do they abandon their mission and pull out? It’s a huge risk but one they feel they must take.”
“They adapt to the situation and improvise a plan. First thing you need to do when you’re trying to gather intelligence and you’ve got 600 prisoners is work out which ones know nothing, which ones might know something, and which guys are the real gems in terms of intelligence. So that first morning they were processing the prisoners through this filter if you like.”
“Mike Spann was leading the questioning, so he was the guy doing the face-to-face with the prisoners. Dave Tyson was stood back with an AK-47 kind of watching over things and then you had a few Northern Alliance soldiers on the battlements or or at the entrance to the prison bringing the prisoners out. But there was very few Northern Alliance guys around, so the security was very light.”
“After 2 hours they noticed one particular captive. He is unusually pale skinned and is wearing items of western clothing. They suspect he speaks English. They realize this could be the one man they can communicate with directly, the one man they can break.”
“But the prisoner refuses to talk. Spann and Tyson have to move on but not before the prisoner’s image is sent back to the CIA’s Langley headquarters and cross-referenced with known Al-Qaeda operatives on the CIA database. But identifying him will take time. He may be what they term a ‘Clean Skin’, an extremist not yet known to the CIA. So for now Spann and Tyson are in the dark.”
“In the basement prison, the Hardline Taliban fighters realize what’s going on. They will not succumb to interrogation.”
“I’m convinced the Taliban, they were not prepared to be questioned by Americans and not by the CIA. There mind you, you’ve now got 600 of the hardest most extreme prisoners in Afghanistan at that time face-to-face with, as they see it, the enemy, and not just any old American enemy. These guys who are questioning them, they know they are Special Forces or CIA. These are the cream of America’s Warriors, these are the people of anyone that they most want to kill, and so you can imagine how explosive that this confrontation is.”
“The Taliban decide the next group to be brought out to the compound will trigger a breakout.”
“On the other side of the fort, a German journalist and his cameraman are in the northern compound headquarters building waiting for permission to interview the prisoners.”
“Smoking a cigarette waiting, beautiful wonderful Blue Sky cool fresh air, a very peaceful setting.”
“And then all of a sudden there were one or two explosions, grenades.”
“A Taliban prisoner detonates his grenade in a suicide attack. Almost immediately after that, heavy Small Arms fire started. It was obvious this is not just a couple of shots being exchanged, this is a real heavy gunfight.”
“And then I grabbed my satellite phone and ran for cover in the main building, which was like 20 yards away from where I had been at the time.”
“CIA operatives Spann and Tyson now realize they are facing a full-scale breakout.”
“Spann then had a decision to make. Marines do not take a back step. They go forward. They go forward in the face of the enemy.”
“Within seconds, Mike Spann is faced with a wave of attacking Taliban. Ambushed and outnumbered.”
“He could have run. He could have run and saved himself, but he didn’t. He stepped forward and he decided to make a stand.”
“Just yards away, Spann’s colleague Dave Tyson is powerless to help his friend. He has no choice but to make a break for it towards the headquarters building.”
“Tyson’s arrival is captured on camera by the German TV crew and relayed around the world. This is actual footage of the event. His undercover status is immediately blown.”
“Instantly Stout suspects Tyson is CIA.”
“I mean to have an armed civilian American dressed like an Afghan on the ground meant something in the field of Secret Service.”
“He is very controlled but you see he’s very upset and nervous at the same time and from, you know, his appearance, I had the very clear impression that something that he had witnessed something horrible.”
“I asked him, ‘What is going on?’ This was my very simple question and he said, ‘There’s an uprising of the prisoners.’”
“‘What happened? There’s a prison uprising.’”
“‘Uprising. Yeah, they had weapons stolen from.’”
“Tyson’s mission is clearly compromised. He has to think of a way of keeping the operation alive, but he is on his own and his weapons are empty.”
“By now, the Taliban prisoners in the basement of The Pink House have killed their Northern Alliance guards. They ransack the Armory.”
“At that stage you had 600 guys armed with AK-47s, mortars, RPGs, PKM light machine guns.”
“Northern Alliance allies take up defensive positions and mount a Counterattack, trying to keep the Taliban at Bay. It’s a vicious firefight.”
“From the shelter of the headquarters building, CIA agent Dave Tyson can hear the battle escalate.”
“Unless he can control the situation, the mission to extract Vital Information from the prisoners will fail and an opportunity to track down Osama Bin Laden will be lost. Agent Tyson uses journalist Stout’s phone to call for backup, but he has a problem. He has no contact number for the US Special Forces quick reaction force stationed locally. He has to improvise.”
“At the time I didn’t know, but later I checked the numbers from our satellite phone. It was the number of the American Embassy at Tashkent, Uzbekistan, that’s where he called from the fort.”
“Just outside Mazar-i-Sharif, Tyson calls a number he believes is his only option. The embassy in Tashkent patches Tyson through to the US Army Central Command at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. McDill route him to the Special Forces local command base at Mazar-i-Sharif.”
“By the time his emergency call reaches a fellow CIA paramilitary officer at base, it has traveled 20,000 miles. Tyson gives a full situation report. This is the actual recording of what he said.”
“‘We control the North End of the fort. The South end of the fort is in their hands. There’s hundreds of dead here at least and I’m not, I don’t know how many Americans are, just need help to free this place up.’”
“Tyson warns that any intervention must be precise. There is hand-to-hand fighting, enemy and allies in close proximity. And he made it very clear; he repeated it like three times saying, ‘You can’t come and bomb the place, can’t hit it from the air, because friends and foes were so close to each other that they might have killed as by bombing.’”
“On the other side of the fort, the heavily armed Taliban have identified the building in which Tyson and Stout are Sheltering. They pound it with mortar shells.”
“It must have been I think a mortar grenade exploding just above the ceiling which made an enormous impact in terms of acoustics. It was so loud and my ear went.”
“In response, America’s allies, the Northern Alliance, drive an old Russian tank onto the northern ramparts and bombard the enemy. Caught in the middle of the battle, all Tyson and Stout can do is hunker down and wait for help.”
“Just 2 hours after the first shot is fired, that help arrives. The quick reaction force of US and British Special Forces that Tyson had requested.”
“I think it’s the Brits who turn out first in a Land Rover wearing Barbour jackets and jeans and they’re all called things like Scruff and Ginge. It’s hilarious and they’re moaning. The driver is moaning; he’s saying, ‘Oh, there’s nowhere to park, you know.’ Meanwhile there’s, you know, I’m taking all this out; it’s just fantastic sort of, you know, the elite of Britain’s Army, you know, moaning while they sort of casually go about sort of organizing this battle. And then the Americans turn up as well and there’s more of them, there’s about eight of them, and they’re much more aggressive: ‘Let’s do this, let’s do that.’”
“The first thing they do when they arrive is they send someone up to put eyes on as in have a peak over and work out what the hell’s going on. What are we facing? How many people? How are they armed?”
“The team’s Commander assesses the situation. He has just 15 men. His Northern Alliance allies number around 50. The enemy has 600.”
“Despite this, the quick reaction force goes in and takes on their enemy.”
“It’s like a scene from Armageddon.”
“You’ve got Tracer rounds going to the sky. You’ve got RPGs firing off.”
“This has kicked off into a major, major firefight, and at the moment you’ve just got a few Northern Alliance soldiers there trying to put down the uprising. It is a hopeless situation.”
“Very quickly the Special Forces realize they’re not going to be able to crush the uprising on their own. They will need to adapt.”
“The special skill that the Special Forces have is that they are able to handle it and that they are able to go in with the plan, and when that becomes impossible they’re able to make another one quite quickly, and that’s the edge that they have. Let’s go, let’s go.”
“Despite the fact that friend and foe are fighting in extremely close quarters, the Special Forces team makes the decision to bomb the Taliban from the air.”
“The one advantage apart from their training and their superlative abilities, the one advantage they can very often rely on is air power, because air power evens up the odds somewhat. You can have a few guys behind enemy lines, but if they can call in air strikes they can have the effect of hundreds.”
“‘Get the air strikes in, get the enemy’s head down.’”
“It’s the shock factor as much as anything else that puts the enemy’s heads down for a few seconds. There’s always a danger when you call in air strikes that, you know, the pilot will get it wrong and drop the ordinance on you. Uh and in any case in this situation they were dropping danger close. They were dropping within a fraction of what the safe distances are. But there was nothing, I mean what else could you do?”
“So the risk of getting hit by their own munitions, the risk of Friendly Fire was significant?”
“Yeah, but I mean they had no option. They had no choice.”
“A Special Forces spotter team provides precise GPS coordinates for a bomber pilot circling over ahead.”
“‘46, 46, this is 1. We’re in position over.’”
“They shine a ranging laser or SOFLAM on the pink house where the Taliban are taking shelter. Above them an F-18 Hornet is armed with guided 500-lb JDAMs, weapons designed to be accurate to within just 12 yards.”
“‘Copy that, here they come.’”
“One bomb after another rips through the southern end of the fort.”
“You hear this sound like a car that’s in high gear sort of decelerated, going ‘wooo’ like that. And you can see this thing it just pops out of the clouds like a javelin coming; looks like it’s coming straight at you. And then sort of it’s obviously off to the side, boom, and everything jumps. The building that we’re on jumps and you black out for sort of, I don’t know, half a second or so and you sort of come to, you know, it’s like you’re rebooting or something.”
“The Taliban Retreat past the bodies of at least a hundred of their fellow Fighters.”
“The respite is only temporary but it gives the Special Forces the opportunity they need to send in a search team to find missing in action CIA agent Mike Spann.”
“It’s a US Navy SEAL maxim: ‘You never leave a man behind.’ And it’s a British military maxim that you never leave your buddies behind mind. There is no other decision to be made: we will go in.”
“After hours of looking and under heavy fire, the Twan Rescue Team reaches the southern compound. There the spotter’s search comes to an end.”
“He scans the southern end of the fort. I guess he wants to see him but he doesn’t want to see him. It’s a horrendous situation to be in. And eventually he sees a guy lying on the ground, and you can see he’s wearing blue jeans and a and a kind of shirt, which is exactly what, you know, CIA sad operatives would wear.”
“The search team confirms they found the body of agent Mike Spann.”
“He is the first American Casualty in the war on terror.”
“Under Fire it’s simply too dangerous to retrieve his body. They can go no further. And so in what must have been the worst moment of the man’s life I would imagine, well for both of them, they have to make the decision to turn around and leave a fellow soldier in the hands of the enemy. They vow to return for him.”
“On the other side of the fort, CIA agent Tyson doesn’t yet know the fate of his colleague. He and reporter Anim Stout are trapped on the roof of the headquarters building.”
“Tyson knows before nightfall he must find a safer place from which to plan a strategy for somehow resuming interrogations. Crossing the roof risks them being picked off by a Taliban sniper. Even then there seems to be no way down, but a Northern Alliance fighter reveals a possible route to safety.”
“There was one wounded Afghan, he had two or three gun wounds, not very serious one, but on his crutches, you know, he crossed the roof. Um someone helped him and he slid down the wall and he disappeared.”
“Using his CIA training Tyson calculates the risks. They must time their run between incoming bullets.”
“‘Hey guys, time to go, huh? It’s time to go.’”
“I remember at one point Tyson just saying ‘it’s time to go’ in the very decisive way and that was the signal for everybody.”
“And then one after the other we we crossed that that roof, we slid down the wall, we ran towards that Clay Road. And there was a van there, you know, like out of nothing. There was a van, as if we had ordered a taxi, you know.”
“Stout is driven through the desert to safety. Tyson can regroup at the CIA’s local base. The fate of his mission to locate Osama Bin Laden Now lies in the hands of the Special Forces and the success of their air strikes.”
“In the basement of The Pink House, the Taliban face their second night in the fort.”
“Some 300 of their original 600 Fighters lie dead.”
“Everyone is convinced that with America’s overwhelming Firepower the battle will be over by morning.”
“But no one has foreseen the determination of the Taliban prisoners to fight to the death.”
“‘Uh are setting up CS right now over.’”
“On the third day, further teams of US Special Forces arrive to assist the CIA’s operation together with reinforcements from the Afghan Northern Alliance. Inside the pink house there is no sign of surrender so the air bombardments continue, despite the CIA’s concerns that friend and foe are simply too close.”
“But this time the bombs used won’t be a standard 500 JDAM. This time they’re four times as big.”
“‘Guys, on the over.’”
“The coordinates are dictated and confirmed.”
“‘East, and a countdown is. G elevation 2 ner, hey M B, they’re about ready to drop. Pull back, pull back.’”
“At this.”
“Journalist Alex Perry joins the Special Forces teams calling in the strikes.”
“You know you hear it that I mean it shoots, you know, 300 yards into the sky down down. Biggest thing we’ve ever seen. This is suddenly a 2,000 pounder. It puts a swimming pool size hole in the wall.”
“The dust Tower is 1,000 ft high but the bomb hasn’t hit the intended target.”
“And we’re thinking that’s where we were, that’s where all those guys are, that’s where the Americans are. They’ve just hit their own people.”
“A 2,000 American bomb has wiped out a Northern Alliance tank position. Up to 30 Alliance men have been killed. Five US and two UK Special Forces men are badly injured.”
“It’s just as the CIA had warned: friend and foe are too close together for air strikes.”
“And you just see all these guys coming out just you know they’re they’re gray with dust, pink eyes and half of them are completely deaf. Um and and and we’re just thinking how many, how many people died?”
“Day after day the battle rages on.”
“Several days went by when you had like massive bombardments or big gun battles or you know maybe 200 guys on a parit firing down to this thing. Nothing could possibly survive, and you go back the next day and it’s the same situation and you’re back to square one and it starts again.”
“Taliban deaths are in the hundreds. Still many fight on. Others regroup in the basement of the pink house. Will any be left for the CIA to interrogate?”
“And if you look down on this quadrant there were hundreds of bodies and you’re like well how you know it looks to me like everybody’s dead and and you could tell that there was almost no one firing back. Maybe one maybe two, so our assumption was everybody’s dead but we were we were wrong.”
“In their Pink House Refuge the remaining Taliban are armed, defiant and still refusing to surrender.”
“I think at some point it was obvious to them they would all die there.”
“The Afghan Northern Alliance are now in charge of the fort but how can they flush out the remaining Taliban? They try firing into the building with guns and RPGs. They pour oil through the tiny windows and set it on fire.”
“This may sound brutal, Okay? This may sound medieval and horrific, but bear in mind they weren’t trying to force them out to kill them, they were trying to force them out to accept their surrender.”
“But the Taliban don’t want to surrender.”
“Eventually the Northern Alliance has just one remaining option to flood the Taliban from their Refuge. They divert a nearby stream directly into the pink house basement.”
“After 20 hours in freezing water yet more of the hardliners perish. Somehow 86 Taliban fighters survive. In the bitter cold of morning they surrender.”
“They were starving, they had been firebombed, they had been shot at, they had been frozen with water. They were half drowning, but they came out of that basement largely to a man full of hatred and full of defiance.”
“To the men of the Special Forces it is mission accomplished, but to the CIA it’s only the beginning. At last they can return to interrogate the Taliban prisoners for Vital Information on Usama Bin Laden’s Hideout. The CIA have to find out if the pale-skinned Taliban Spann and Tyson had picked out 6 days earlier survives.”
“Of the original 600 Taliban only 86 remain and among the survivors is the man the CIA agents have identified as of particular interest. They confirm what they had originally suspected: he speaks English.”
“At first he claims his name is Sulan Alfares but then he reveals he is John Walker Lindh, a 20-year-old student from California.”
“It was a sort of miracle that this guy was alive but he garnered attention you know not least because he was an American and a Taliban and that was just such a shock after 9/11.”
“They couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t believe it. Overnight the world learns that jihadis can be of any race, any color, any nationality. Terror can be homegrown.”
“Under interrogation Walker Lindh confirms he met Osama Bin Laden once at a training camp but can reveal no Intelligence on Bin Laden’s current Hideout. Walker Lindh is charged with consorting with the Enemy and is serving a 20-year sentence with no Prospect of parole.”
“The CIA’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden must continue.”
“In the fort the US Special Forces retrieved the body of CIA agent Mike Spann. It had been booby trapped by the Taliban. A CIA officer for 3 years and father of three, he is the first American Casualty in the war on terror. Buried with full honors as an American Hero.”
“As for his colleague agent Tyson, despite his cover being blown by the TV crew, he remains working at the CIA in operations reports. He has been referred to variously as Dave, Dwain and Olsen. His current identity and whereabouts is known only to a few.”
“‘Yeah, we went to the compound the next day just to say hello, did you get home safely? Um are you okay? Um I gave him my business card. I mean obviously he didn’t give me any.’”
“Only now has the depth of the CIA’s involvement in Operation Enduring Freedom, the invasion of Afghanistan, been revealed.”
“A tiny handful of Special Forces soldiers from the CIA mainly basically managed to roll back the Taliban with air power across the whole of North the country within a matter of weeks.”
“The work of the CIA’s interrogators like Mike Spann and Dave Tyson in those early days provides crucial information in the pursuit of Al-Qaeda and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.”
“This was the main source of Intelligence on this organization for a period of years, was being able to sit across the table in an interrogation booth from somebody who’d been recently captured and then persuade that person to give up as much information as possible.”
“Information that after over a decade of dedication in May 2011 leads the CIA to a private compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan and to the death of America’s Most Wanted Osama Bin Laden.”
“40 heavily armed Islamist terrorists seize a theater and over 800 innocent civilians. Demands are made. Hostages are lined up for execution. The clock starts ticking.”
“There an absolute nightmare situation from the point of view of the security forces. Only the elite special ops Force, Spetsnaz group Alpha, has a chance to defeat them.”
“It’s a Race Against Time as deadlines approach.”
“You got to have people willing to go there. That’s the difference between a soldier and a specialist.”
“There’s no obvious way of preventing the murder of hundreds. Only one very long shot. A secret Russian technology that’s never been tried before stands a chance of saving them.”
“Now on Black Ops we go behind the scenes on one of the most unbelievably risky hostage rescues in modern times. Not a movie, it’s not a reality show. It’s reality, and reality is very unpredictable.”
“The crisis starts on an ordinary evening in an ordinary suburb of Russia’s capital city, Moscow. It’s a wet Autumn night and for 800 Russians a time with friends and family at a popular musical is a welcome Prospect to cheer up a dreary weekday evening.”
“Almost by accident we got to see the musical. We didn’t plan it. The weather on this day was terrible, it was a very rainy day. My granddaughter was very young at the time. She felt really nervous as if something bad was going to happen. She was really crying and she wouldn’t let us go.”
“Tickets are sold out at the popular venue, a huge Soviet era building that had been converted into an art center, a place of peaceful civilized recreation.”
“In some ways what was particularly striking about it was that it was not striking. It was not a particular High Prestige Target.”
“This is the theater’s actual recording of that fateful night’s performance of a romantic comedy set in the 1950s with a plot featuring cheerful Russian soldiers. Just a block away, four vans with a force of 40 heavily armed Chechen terrorists are closing on the theater fast.”
“We were enjoying it after the interval. We went back to the second half and there was dancing and that’s when The Siege started.”
“Now the extremists burst into the theater, rake the foyer with gunfire and spread through the building fast. They’re suicide bombers who for years have been at war with Russia, Islamist jihadis from a breakaway Republic who stop at nothing to get their way. Now they’ve brought their Campaign Of Terror into the midst of Russia’s civilians. The theater’s recording reveals the moments the terrorists take over the building as they seal it off from the outside world.”
“People in military uniform walked around the auditorium and down the aisles and at first I thought it was part of the play.”
“One of the actors was made to sit next to me after the Chechen had stormed the stage and I whispered, ‘That’s an amazing piece of theater.’”
“Slowly the audience realizes that the game has changed. The terror has started and they’re now hostages.”
“Then I saw some of the soldiers hit people with rifle butts and I realized that it was serious and he replied, ‘That’s not part of the play this is for Real real.’ It was then that I realized what danger we were in.”
“Now the terrorists are in control and The Siege has begun. The theater couldn’t be better designed as a place to hold hostages. The auditorium is a perfect prison with few exits that are easy to guard. Every one of the terrorists are radical extremists committed to die for their cause, pitiless and determined.”
“The unique feature of a terrorist threat is that you can never predict how serious their plans are, if they’re just bluffing or if they are really ready to sacrifice themselves. We were inclined to think that they were not joking.”
“With alarm bells ringing in every Security Department in Moscow, the worst possible scenario is now a reality.”
“There an absolute nightmare situation from the point of view of the security forces, it really is last thing they wanted. They knew from past experience that the Chechen terrorists would be if necessary willing to blow themselves up. Amongst the terrorists there would be people who had had experience fighting during the Guerilla war and therefore, you know, they knew how to use their weapons. They were unlikely to listen to humanitarian appeals.”
“It looks like a no-win situation for Russia’s authorities. Their only hope: Spetsnaz group Alpha, an anti-terror unit the Envy of the world. Soldiers built to take on terrorists, hardened by years of confronting Chechen attackers. But even for them a mass suicide bomb attack and 850 hostages is an almost impossible challenge.”
“Within minutes the elite of Russia’s anti-terror strategists are scrambled.”
“It’s clear that conventional tactics won’t work. Their solution: a secret gas technology unknown outside Russia. But there’s a problem: it’s completely untried. If it succeeds it’ll beat the terrorists. If it fails the consequences are Unthinkable.”
“Orders from the Kremlin summon every fire-fighting man in the city and moscow’s Barracks are emptied as hundreds descend on the theater.”
“The Chechen terrorists have some new techniques of their own to add to their advantage, never seen before: female suicide bombers. The so-called black widows, women who’ve lost their loved ones and are willing to die for their cause.”
“At a single command they’ll detonate their bomb belts and trigger a series of massive explosions that will demolish the theater, killing everyone. This is payback for years of suffering in a conflict with Russia that seems impossible to resolve peacefully.”
“A lot of people passionately hate the Russian government and project their hate on all Russians. When your family’s been destroyed you would never go for peace talks, at least until you get some revenge.”
“The government spawned a huge number of sworn enemies, and the black widows who appeared on the TV for the first time were a variation of such sworn enemies.”
“The Chechen make sure the black widows are constantly on display.”
“They appeared in absolutely all footage, in journalistic as well as made by terrorists themselves. All of them were dressed in black and were wearing suicide bombers’ belts. Their main task was to show that they were ready for.”
“The black widows are not just a propaganda tool; they’re also deadly serious. They’ve come to Moscow for one purpose only.”
“Everyone understood that this was not an act. Everyone knew that these women, if they called themselves black widows, were ready to blow themselves up.”
“Finally there are two massive bombs, each too heavy for a single person to lift, placed among the hostages at the center of the auditorium. Their hair-trigger Detonator at the fingertip of a black widow.”
“The Chechen’s Terror tactics are well known to Russia’s authorities. They’re experts at capturing big public buildings and holding large groups hostage. Hospitals and schools have been Targets in the past. Now a theater gives them the perfect platform to get the world’s attention.”
“The main danger was obvious: a very powerful bomb in the auditorium with suicide bombers. I knew Alpha had very little time for an assault and only a very slim chance to destroy the terrorist before they detonated their infernal machine. I’d never known a situation where people were grouped around a giant bomb that could be detonated in one second.”
“Group Alpha have to weigh up the risks very carefully. Their expertise is all about speed in an assault situation. For years their adversaries, the Chechen, have had to devise a solution to the Spetsnaz’s incredible discipline and aggression. Now they think they’ve cracked it and have Alpha in the ultimate strangle hold.”
“It’s not as easy as kicking in the door and shooting someone between the eyes, not when you have 40 people willing and able to shoot back and some of them willing and able to blow themselves up along with a thousand hostages. So the equation is very different from a video game or TV show or a movie. The cost is very different, the consequences, the possibilities are very different, and any hope of a peaceful resolution is very small.”
“The Chechen can only be pacified by The Impossible: the withdrawal of Russian troops from their Homeland. The terrorist agenda was straightforward if ridiculously unrealistic.”
“They wanted basically the Russians to pull out of Chechnya. They wanted an end to the war and they wanted Victory.”
“They were not necessarily stupid. They had, I think, no real expectation that this was going to happen. This was frankly a terror raid rather than a carefully planned political Act.”
“Only one group has a chance of taking them out without setting off the bombs, the elite Spetsnaz group Alpha, among the most experienced and successful anti-terrorist special forces in the world. Group Alpha are Russia’s Navy Seals. Their headquarters: Moscow. The Chechen have brought their War to the home city of Russia’s hardest men.”
“A massive group of people take over in the heart of Moscow, in the heart of Russia. I couldn’t believe it how 30 people got in and managed to take so many people hostage. When I got the call it was very brief: ‘It’s an emergency.’”
“Alpha was formed in the 1970s and has evolved constantly since. During the Cold War the Soviet Union needed ruthless Killers, more Battlefield Heroes, people who could start revolutions and kill heads of state without anyone knowing who was behind it. That meant lightning speed, total stealth, and clinical Precision. These are not negotiators, these are not people who are there to rescue hostages. First and foremost, these are people who go in because they have people to kill.”
“Alpha training is the toughest in the world with levels of brutality and extreme personal endurance that in many armed forces would be illegal.”
“They go through a sort of phenomenally brutal training ratio which culminates in sort of a 12-minute period where they had to take on 12 experienced Special Forces in in hand-to-hand combat. And all they have to do is just basically stay standing at the end of that 12 minutes. Even so a lot of them never get through that. You cannot just wish for it you have to, you have to learn it, you have to ingrain it in people, and there is a method to that madness.”
“But Alpha operatives are trained not just to be physically tough but to be extremely mentally capable as well.”
“Training is the most important part, not the hardware, the toys, the the technical implements. You become a thinking fighter, thinking operator, versus someone who follows the script.”
“The Glory Days of Russia’s Special Forces were Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s. They were sent to Kabul to kill the Afghan president and in the raid lost only two men.”
“But after the Cold War Russia’s biggest problem was terrorism and it was Alpha that answered the call. They are among the world’s great experts in dealing with hostage taking and specialize in extracting people from a massive range of different environments.”
“If you are an Alpha officer specializing in storming airplanes, you would train all day long to storm the plane blindfolded. You’d know where every rivet is, you’d know how to open the aisle cover, how to penetrate the plane through the service doors and so on.”
“But there’s another reason why the Moscow theater Siege mission is special. Alpha’s reputation has been tarnished after being drawn into Russia’s unstable internal Politics.”
“The unit’s reputation reached the ultimate low in 1991 when it was ordered to crush popular support for the government and back a coup by Hardline Communists.”
“There have always been hard times, especially in those moments when we realized that our division was being misused. Our primary objective is fighting terrorists, the Homeland enemies, and we have always perceived and still perceive internal conflicts with suspicion.”
“The attempted coup turned Alpha from the heroes of Afghanistan into the attack dogs of Russia’s secret police.”
“It all came as a real shock. All the officers had a very hard time. We were not prepared to fight our own people. We all saw ourselves as an elite unit whose mission was to save people, and we were seeing through our helmet visor people just like our mothers, sisters, brothers. We had no desire to use special techniques on our own people. Naturally this affected to combat ability. It is one thing to fight your enemy and another thing your own people.”
“Now 11 years later, Spetsnaz group Alpha have their chance to assert their integrity as Defenders of their Nation by taking on its most deadly enemy in the heart of the country. But it’s a chance that comes at a price. It will be the toughest test ever of their formidable skills.”
“Alpha’s Elite planners know they have a challenge from the Chechen terrorists that is uniquely tailored to stop even the fastest assault. The weapons that usually guarantee success, speed and aggression, can’t work in this situation. So careful planning, calculation and timing are crucial to give Alpha every chance of success.”
“They had to act fast but on the other hand they had to prepare as much as possible. They had to try and scope out the area. They had everything from listening devices to using fiber optic vision devices to try and see what was going on. They had to run a few mockup operations just so that their Special Forces had a sense of where they were going and where the targets were. So it’s this balance: on the one hand you don’t want to leave it too long so that something bad happens, but on the other hand you don’t want to rush it.”
“But even with the best planning and timing Alpha is outmaneuvered by the simple fact that suicide bombers only need to press a trigger to inflict Mass casualties. Stopping that is beyond conventional tactics.”
“Moscow has been on high alert for a major terrorist incident for over a year, since 9/11. Already this year there have been attacks on subways and Residential Properties. Now the city is facing a crisis on an unprecedented scale.”
“This wasn’t a standard situation in the history of the Special Forces. This was a first in Moscow.”
“Alpha are specialist Siege Commandos. This is what they train for night and day. The challenge of the suicide bombers’ belts is big enough, each might kill 30 or 40 people, but the giant bombs are powerful enough to kill everyone in the auditorium, all 850.”
“It’s clear that Alpha’s planners have to come up with a radically new solution that will give their men the edge.”
“For the hostages surrounded by suicide bombers vowing to die, an assault by Special Forces is a terrifying thought. Calling their families and the media, they do everything they can to stop Alpha from attacking.”
“Making phone calls saying, ‘Please don’t let them storm the theater, please negotiate peacefully and carefully, and maybe you’ll be able to find a peaceful solution.’”
“To increase the pressure on Russia’s authorities the terrorists have been releasing footage of the hostages and they’re careful to avoid revealing anything that might be useful to attackers.”
“Then they make their first mistake. As an act of Mercy they release some vulnerable hostages, children and sick people. With careful questioning, Alpha’s Intelligence Officers are able to get the first bits of information about the situation inside the theater that the Chechen don’t want known: the total numbers of terrorists, the positions of snipers and ammunition stores.”
“Then hours into the siege a completely unpredictable element enters the equation. A truly bizarre event takes place as unseen by the security guards around the theater a young woman walks right off the street and into the theater. No one knows who she is or why she’s there. She goes into the auditorium and shouts at the audience, telling them to rise up against the Chechen, and then she starts at the gunman.”
“She passed through the aisle screaming, ‘What have you done? You should release all the people.’ She was saying, ‘I’m going to call the police.’ Maybe she was drunk. The Chechen said she was a KGB agent pretending to be a drunk woman.”
“The Chechen show just what they do with anyone who won’t take them seriously.”
“The woman was a 26-year-old local shop assistant, Olga Romanova, with no connection to the hostages or the theater.”
“After the incident with Olga, just after it happened, the whole mood among the audience and terrorists changed. From then on there was a different atmosphere and everyone understood that this was something that might happen again. It was much more serious.”
“All the time as the world looks on in horror, Alpha intelligence is building up a detailed picture of the situation inside the theater and the weaknesses of the terrorists.”
“Mobile phone conversations between the hostages and their families now reveal a much more serious situation. The terrorists have not only wired the auditorium to kill all the hostages, but wired the whole building and packed it with bombs.”
“The security people were 100% convinced the bombs were real and would be detonated. This put the Special Forces in a position where they knew they would almost certainly be killed along with 90% of the hostages. So they were looking for whatever Advantage they could get. That meant they were ruling out nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing.”
“48 hours into the siege and the terrorists decide to turn up the heat. The Chechen Commander, Movsar Barayev, announces he’s going to start executions at midnight, one killing every hour until his demands are met.”
“The victims are selected by Barayev himself.”
“There was a decision to shoot 10 people on either the fourth fifth row and just after this information started to spread around the hostages, one of the Chechen came and sat down at the end of the fifth row wearing a mask, and everyone now expected that at any minute something would happen to the people in the fifth row.”
“Now the Russian authorities face a dilemma: either Alpha goes in and triggers an explosion with mass casualties, or the world watches helpless as the Chechen start killing innocent men, women and children one by one, hour by hour.”
“Alpha’s strategists now have to go for their most radical solution, a long shot so risky it would normally be dismissed as impossible, but this is an impossible situation.”
“For years Russian military scientists have been working on a secret formula for a knockout gas that will stop any aggressor in his tracks. Even today its exact composition is a state secret, and scientists outside Russia can only guess what it really was.”
“As far as we can ascertain, the agent that was used in the theater Siege was a derivative of an opiate called fentanyl. Opiates are very potent and they depress your breathing; they’re normally used in operating theaters. But what they wanted was something that would act very quickly, knock people out, that could be delivered in the air. So this is why they probably chose fentanyl.”
“In complete secrecy, Russia’s military scientists have figured a way to multiply the strength of a powerful medical anesthetic by a factor of several thousand.”
“If this top secret untried chemical can somehow be piped into the theater without anyone noticing, it might just sedate the terrorists enough to stop them from detonating their bombs and give Alpha a chance of taking them out in an assault. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but it’s about to get the green light from President Putin himself.”
“This is absolutely a one-off. Sometimes gases from knockout to tear gas have been used, but never has been used on this scale in these kind of concentrations to flood an entire area with knockout gas.”
“Their logic was that if 90% of the hostages would die anyway and if this gas could help save at least a few, it should be applied.”
“But even if they use the gas there’s a problem: the Chechen leader, Movsar Barayev, is going to start executions at midnight. That’s just 2 hours away.”
“To get the gas equipment inside the building and then fill it up so it knocks people out is going to take far longer. Even with the secret weapon it looks like there’s no way of stopping the executions of innocent civilians.”
“Outside the theater, Special Forces units from all over Moscow gather, knowing they face a formidable enemy who make up in determination or they lack in skill.”
“The Chechen were an interesting mix. They arranged the whole gamut from people who were really experienced fighters who had done their national service in Soviet times, then they had actually gone on to become anti-Soviet Rebels and had fought through the last decade or so of Civil War and Insurgency within Russia. They therefore knew the trade craft of how to fight, and they also had a degree of esprit de corps. And the terrible destruction brought by War in their Homeland means that they will stop at nothing to get even with the Russian authorities.”
“They were on the whole motivated by loss, by anger. There are a certain number who, for example, their own family had been killed. In some cases they had been arrested by the authorities and then were never seen again or turned up in some ditch. So they didn’t necessarily have the same skill, but by God they certainly had commitment and determination to eventually pay the Russians back for what had happened.”
“It isn’t long before the gunmen get a chance to demonstrate once again how ready they are to kill innocent civilians. As an anxious relative decides to take matters into his own hands, a middle-aged man, Gennady V., strides into the theater and demands that the Chechen release his son. And the Chechen waste no time in deciding how to respond.”
“Any doubts that the terrorists mean business and have no difficulties killing Russians whenever it suits them have now been completely discarded. Alpha’s strategists have hours to get the gas working if they’re to prevent the start of executions. The trouble is that simply isn’t possible, and there’s another Factor ramping up the time pressure: days without sleep and massive stress means both hostages and captors are getting jumpy.”
“The sense is that just one individual can do something silly or else just bad luck. You know, for example, let’s say some of the hostages try to take matters into their own hands and it could lead to a massive explosion.”
“The most important thing they’re all afraid of was the psychological fatigue of the terrorists, so everyone was aware that there was a time limit.”
“Alpha badly need two things: more time and anything that will calm the situation down. Then an hour before the deadline the unexpected once again changes the game.”
“Barayev, the Chechen leader, gets a phone call from moscow’s special Envoy to Chechnya, General Victor Kazantsev.”
“He offers to fly to Moscow and negotiate face-to-face with the terrorists with the full authority of the President, Vladimir Putin, behind him. There’s one condition: no executions.”
“The Chechen buy it.”
“They came in looking happy, saying, ‘Tomorrow Kazantsev is flying back to Moscow,’ and at that point the mood lifted. The black widows came across as much more upbeat and started telling us, ‘You see, our Barayev gets things done better than your Putin.’”
“For the Chechen this seems a major strategic breakthrough and they’re Overjoyed.”
“This is the actual wiretapped conversation between Kazantsev and Barayev, cutting a deal to delay the executions.”
“The terrorists’ plan seems to be working. Until now they’ve been ignored, Outlaws from a forgotten conflict. Now the president’s man is coming to plead with them in the heart of the Russian Capital.”
“It was undoubtedly a delaying tactic. One thing that the authorities knew is that they needed time. They needed time to dig out the blueprints of the theater and train their operations forces to make an assault. They needed time to decide just quite what they were going to do.”
“Meanwhile, Alpha uses the precious time bought by the negotiators to maximum effect. Through the night, deep beneath the theater, working in total silence and with utmost care, Engineers secure canisters of the knockout gas in strategic parts of the theater’s air conditioning.”
“The time for it to be released has arrived. Gradually it starts to filter into the auditorium to do its work.”
“Aware that something is happening the Chechen gunmen run from the auditorium and leave the black widows at their posts.”
“But rather than set off the bombs the gunman seemed to want to prolong The Siege and run to the defense of the building, determined to take on their old adversaries, the Spetsnaz, in combat.”
“But there isn’t anyone to fight. Alpha group still has to hold back. If just one black widow is conscious the whole theater could still blow, and every minute that the auditorium fills with the powerful agent agent the danger to the hostages increases.”
“One of the problems is where you release the agent. So you have to use air vents, and you’ve got to ensure that the agent you release will knock everybody out quickly. So this means that you have to pump in huge quantities to reach the people at the far end of the theater. Uh and in pumping in large amounts, what you’re going to end up doing is giving some people at the far end of the theater enough to knock them out, but the people close to the event are going to get many times the lethal dose of an agent.”
“Soon after the release of the gas the first signs of its effects emerge. Semi-rugged hostages manage to escape the auditorium. It’s clear the terrorists are no longer in control. Now is the time to strike. The waiting’s over. The word comes from strategic command to go.”
“When the officers received the order to enter the building and destroy the terrorists, all of them were 100% certain that in the event of an explosion no one would come back alive.”
“It’s our job. If you’re going to think about the mission too much and what will go wrong, it’s not going to happen. You go into zombie mode, autopilot, to fulfill the mission. It may seem cold, but it is necessary.”
“Taking out as many Chechen as possible before the order to detonate is now the top priority. Alpha’s legendary speed cuts down the gunman in seconds.”
“It would have been good to take some terrorist alive to question them, but when you’re there in that situation, you have weapons, they have weapons, and you need to fire before they do. It’s a quick decision.”
“And in the auditorium, Alpha kill every black widow without a second’s pause. Some die before they can detonate their bomb belts, others press the triggers only for the belts to fail.”
“But the theater could still blow at any moment because there’s still one person who can inflict Mass casualties. Now, seconds count in the to stop the Chechen leader, Movsar Barayev.”
“We were expecting Barayev to be in the auditorium with the bombs and he won’t.”
“Movsar Barayev is loose in the building. Now Spetsnaz have to find him and stop him before he puts into action the terrorist’s ultimate sanction: detonation of the bombs. Eventually he’s traced to a store room behind the theater’s cafeteria.”
“Once the officers of Alpha came in, after just a minute and a half, all the terrorists were shut down and none of them managed to trigger a single bomb. The whole operation was not more than 10 minutes in duration. The shooting itself can be counted in just a few minutes.”
“Alpha’s lightning speed prevents the explosions and stops the crisis in its tracks.”
“It is without doubt one of the most successful Alpha operations ever undertaken. Not a single operative or hostage is harmed and all the enemy are taken out.”
“I remember that I thought, ‘Thank God the bombs did not go off.’ I can imagine if the bombs had exploded, no one would have survived.”
“The first hostages are pulled to safety as the whole world watches the extraordinary success of the Elite Force. After 3 days of Agony it looks like Alpha’s reputation has risen From the Ashes.”
“But any hope that the mission’s over is quickly dashed, for even from Beyond the Grave the Chechen have another surprise for the Russians they hate so much. Intelligence reports suggest that there are hidden bombs around the theater on timers that are impossible to find and diffuse in time. If this intelligence is true the theater could still blow at any moment. They have to get the hostages out fast.”
“With extraordinary haste verging on Panic, rescue teams sweep into the building, then task to haul out the unconscious hostages in a Race Against Time with an unknown number of ticking bombs beneath them. But in a Siege beset by surprises and unexpected twists, the greatest of all is about to unfold in front of the world’s TV cameras.”
“The due operation should be divided into two major phases: one which involved Alpha units who did their job, and another one that afterwards. As phase one of the military operation is completed, the job is now to get the hostages out of the theater. Alpha were not essentially tasked with getting the hostages out, there were too few of them, and that’s not really what what they’re about. That would have been the role of other elements within the fire service, within the Ambulance Corp or whatever, and this is really where the operation fell apart.”
“Alpha’s done a brilliant job, a textbook operation that couldn’t have been bettered by any Special Forces team anywhere. But the hostages aren’t out of danger and the mission is about to enter its darkest phase yet.”
“When the first media reports about the completion of the operation and the freeing of the hostages started coming in, of course we were all euphoric, including myself. We saw dead black widows and there was no information on their and then the Stark reality starts to emerge.”
“Sometime after we saw and got the reports that the operation went well, there was no explosion, people were reported alive.”
“And then the tragedy came. Every hour updates began to come of 10, 20, 30, 40 people dead. Everyone was stunned.”
“Hostages that look as if they’re unconscious from the gas are in fact dying and it’s due to the same technology used to rescue them.”
“Some of the police officers that carried people out, they had no idea about the recovery position for people that have a severe respiratory depression, so they just lay them on their backs and people suffocated instead of putting them on their recovery positions on the side where the tongue would relax and they would be able to breathe until the anti was administered.”
“The Brilliance of Alpha’s military operation is now being catastrophically let down by a civilian evacuation, wreaking more havoc in minutes than the Chechen have done in the previous 3 days.”
“If you were going to do something like this thoroughly you would want everybody primed, and for some reason that didn’t happen. The the people who needed to help with a cleanup uh and the protection of individuals who were affected just didn’t know what to do without realizing the terrible damage they’re doing.”
“Paramedics and police are carrying out drugged hostages with their heads of dangerous angles. Lying unconscious faces exposed upwards to the elements, completely helpless hostages are suffocating, choking on their own vomit or gagging to death on their tongues.”
“It was quite clear that the way people were brought out and just dumped when they came out of the theater, that no thought had been given to the fact that people’s breathing might have been compromised. So there was very little coordination. A lot of people who were involved from the medical perspective hadn’t been told that it was fentanyl that was used so they didn’t even know how to treat the individuals concerned, and therefore there was this awful vacuum.”
“Um and that’s frankly where so many of the hostages died or why so many of the hostages died is because at that moment where you needed to have a seamless Handover from, as it were, the killers to the Savers there was in fact a moment of uncertainty, a moment of insecurity, and also again a very classic moment of where in Russian terms security took precedence.”
“That until people were absolutely certain that there were for example no terrorists amongst the hostages none of the hostages could be removed because you had to make sure you got all the terrorists.”
“And it’s not only that the evacuation teams aren’t organized to deal with drugged hostages, they haven’t even prepared enough supplies for the hundreds who need treatment. An antidote to the gas exists but is only available in tiny quantities with a handful of people qualified to administer it.”
“In the hours and days that follow the siege the city’s hospitals struggle to cope and the death toll steadily climbs.”
“People simply didn’t know what to do. They didn’t imagine the scale of what needed to be done and as a result of that some of the hostages that could have been saved were not saved. You know it’s very unfortunate, it’s very sad, but sometimes it’s the fact of war, you know. Things do not go perfect, things don’t go perfect. We wish they did, you know. Yeah, every operator in every military, especially Tier 1 operator, what is his wish in a situation like that? Of course, to save every hostage. Okay, does it work that way every single time? Again, it’s not a movie. It’s not a reality show. It’s reality, and reality is very unpredictable.”
“In all 133 people die in the 2002 Dubrovka theater Siege. Only three at the hands of the terrorists. Nearly all the fatalities are caused by the gas used to rescue them, either overdoses or because the unconscious are mishandled.”
“I think everybody understands that although 133 people died in the circumstances it could have been a thousand. The full scale of the tragedy could have been very different. That was miserable, it was a real tragedy.”
“Because of the tragedy, the Alpha teams involved don’t call the operation a success.”
“The only success was the killing of the terrorists and that the majority of people were still alive. But generally it was not a success because more than 100 people died. It’s not that we didn’t work hard enough, it wasn’t because of bad planning, it wasn’t Alpha fault. We don’t feel proud of what we did because it’s our job.”
“The deaths become all the more poignant when it’s revealed that the giant bombs in the theater were fakes all along, and some of the black widow’s belts were duds. Even though Alpha themselves were unaware of this at the time, it leaves the impression that the use of the gas and the death that it caused had all been for nothing.”
“Media observers start talking about the operation as a tragedy. So, 133 hostages dying is a tragedy, absolutely, huge tragedy to every single family that lost loved one. Uh it would have been a little bit bigger tragedy, thousand of them dying in few huge explosions, and in the long run it would have been even bigger tragedy if a state, a country, succumbs to the demands.”
“And people like that capable to do something like that achieve what they want to achieve.”
“The irony is plain to all that the expertise of the military is only mirrored by the failures of the civilian rescue effort.”
“In the years that follow the Dubrovka theater Siege, the families of the hostages who died and many hostages themselves campaigned for compensation and continue trying to get Justice.”
“The precise details of the gas used have never been revealed despite repeated requests from doctors treating survivors.”
“But Alpha’s achievement remains unblemished by The Siege.”
“It didn’t really tarnish the reputations of the Special Forces themselves. It instead was regarded as, as it were, that they the fighting men did their job. It was the Kremlin, it was the administration, it was everyone else who in effect let them down.”
“Today, in the eyes of most Russians, Spetsnaz group Alpha are the heroes of the Dubrovka theater siege. For the kind of liberal anti-government protesters who are Marching In the Streets of Moscow, it shows how the Kremlin is brutal, heavy-handed, doesn’t mind letting people die as long as it kills its enemies.”
“To be honest though, for the majority of Russians, actually what Dubrovka says is that Russia is still strong and determined, and if you mess with Russia then you can expect a devastating response.”
“The extraordinary achievement of Spetsnaz group Alpha at Dubrovka stands unchallenged as one of the most daring and technically brilliant operations ever undertaken to break a Siege in counterterrorism.”
“Among the world’s Special Forces, Spetsnaz group Alpha enjoy an outstanding reputation. Both the Soviet Legacy and Russia’s unique approach to counterterrorism have created a specialist Force unlike any other, an asset appreciated both domestically and internationally. Alpha remains today the preeminent Russian Special Forces Unit.”
“Beyond any shadow of a doubt, they really are pretty much at the absolute top tier of of the sort of the world Special Forces rankings, particularly when it comes to individual personal combat skills, shooting, killing people with their bare hands, that kind of thing. They really are at the top, and and just in terms of pure individual physical toughness as well.”
“Alpha’s fight to assert its Integrity after years of political interference has triumphed once again. It’s proved itself the defender of the Russian people.”
“A vicious militant is systematically targeting innocent civilians.”
“The guy was so brutal. If you kill everybody else, eventually people stand back and say, ‘Whoa, we got a big guy.’”
“An elite group of special forces are handpicked from across the world to take the terrorists out.”
“You do a series of raids that is devastating.”
“They are led by a Maverick General with radical new methods.”
“If you hit an organization repeatedly enough you could actually cause them to collapse.”
“It’s a Race Against Time. They must stop it before more blood is shed.”
“Nothing’s routine if there is life at risk.”
“Iraq, April 2006. In the dead of night a helicopter lifts off from a desert Airbase. On board is a group of elite soldiers from a secretive unit code named Task Force black. On the way to a mission.”
“I’m often asked, ‘Were you nervous?’ You know, I have time to be nervous because there’s so many things happening. I mean everyone is busy.”
“They are bound for a house in an area known as the triangle of death. Their mission is to arrest a senior member of the deadly terror group Al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
“You should always be expecting the worst. What if we get fire upon? What if the fast rope is in the wrong spot? What if if we get around and the helicopter is downed?”
“Outside the compound, their targets are ready to resist with extreme violence.”
“Almost as soon as they were through the door they were hit by a hail of bullets. The people inside clearly knew somebody was coming, they were armed and they were waiting.”
“The team quickly killed the first militant and move in to clear the rest of the building.”
“There were half a dozen assault rifles, there were dozens of hand grenades, there were at least two, possibly three wearing suicide vests.”
“And at the top of the staircase, one of the suicide bombers steps out of the shadows and detonates his vest.”
“By now the militants are fighting with everything they have.”
“Two more appear on the roof and spray the assault force with bullets.”
“The soldiers of Task Force black are accustomed to this kind of brutal violence. They face it on a daily basis.”
“At the end of the day we’re going to win, uh, and we’ll do whatever it takes to win.”
“Though the Special Forces don’t realize it, this house holds the key to finding the Most Wanted Man in the Middle East. One of their captives tonight will lead them to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
“He has murdered thousands of innocent civilians and spread Terror throughout the region.”
“His campaign of violence is so effective the US has created a Black Ops task with just one Mission: taking al-Zarqawi down.”
“This was a guy who had murdered thousands of people. In fact, he murdered many more people than Osama Bin Laden ever did.”
“To understand how al-Zarqawi Rose to become one of the most feared terrorists on the planet, we must look to the town of Zarqa, Jordan, 500 miles to the west of Baghdad.”
“Al-Zarqawi was born here in 1966.”
“Zarqawi background is he was a criminal, you know. He spent time in a Jordanian prison for sexual assault uh he was a drug dealer uh he was a petty criminal in Jordan.”
“It counts differ as to whether he was actually a sort of hard boozing villain in his hometown, but it’s certainly true that he was involved in some forms of crime and that he probably had some kind of epiphany, some kind of moment when he realized that his life was going the wrong way and that Islam was the answer for him.”
“In 1989 al-Zarqawi travels to Afghanistan to become a freedom fighter against the Soviet occupation. It is here that he meets his mentor and inspiration, Osama Bin Laden.”
“He had come up during the course of the war in Afghanistan. People understood his importance as an operational leader and he was clearly trusted by Bin Laden in the Al-Qaeda senior leadership. He was well-liked by the soldiers in Al-Qaeda, he was well respected by the leadership, he was incredibly capable, he was experienced.”
“Over the next 15 years, partly with Bin Laden’s support, al-Zarqawi grows to become an accomplished terrorist.”
“By 2003 he is in Iraq fighting against the American-led Invasion.”
“The early months of the war appear to be a Swift and stunning Victory as the old regime melts away.”
“But al-Zarqawi is waiting in the shadows to start a new Campaign Of Violence.”
“When he was deployed into Iraq we understood as the American counterterrorism community that this was a significant event. He had that unique combination of skills that would allow him to be a real Force for Al-Qaeda against us inside Iraq.”
“In the months that follow Saddam’s overthrow, chaos envelops the country. Al-Zarqawi takes full advantage of this, actively working to stir up the hatred between Iraq’s two main religious groups, the majority Shia Muslims and the minority Sunnis. He creates a militant group with the aim of killing as many Shia as possible, thus sparking retaliations and creating a brutal cycle of violence. It is called Al-Qaeda in Iraq or aqi.”
“We mistakenly look at these organizations as terrorist groups; this is too narrow. These are revolutionary organizations that want to spread an idea. They don’t want to just spread weapons or explode suicide, the idea is they can return to what they call a caliphate, a 14 centuries-old concept that there’s a pure way to live according to the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. So the idea is where can you find a springboard to do this? Afghanistan, Pakistan, and then you get Iraq.”
“The militant Islamists were prepared to do pretty much anything. And of course quite soon they discovered uh that bombing things like uh the UN offices in uh Baghdad, the international Committee of the Red Cross offices and then moving on to targets like markets, queues outside police stations where the police were recruiting, all those sort of things were actually far easier targets than American convoys or American bases where the tea walls had gone up.”
“The base represented a hard concrete face to the world and you know, yes, if you drove a truck up you might kill the guy on the gate who was checking passes but you were unlikely to achieve a major result.”
“Al-Zarqawi orchestrates numerous suicide bombings. A devastating series of attacks in March 2004 kills close to 200 people at Shia holy site.”
“So they shifted their targeting towards uh the sort of softer targets that could yield more spectacular results, and of course soon they were killing dozens, schools, maybe even sometimes over a hundred people in a single complex attack.”
“On the 11th of May 2004 al-Zarqawi is linked to a new outrage. A video of an American hostage appears on a jihadist website. The American deliberately dressed in a Guantanamo Bay style orange jumpsuit is Nick Berg, a 26-year-old Communications engineer from Pennsylvania. Berg was kidnapped in Iraq a month previously and the video shows his unimaginably horrific death.”
“The video is one of those horror show type of jihadist videos in which a long knife is used to cut his throat and you can even hear the sound of of knife on bone. It’s and the screams; it’s a truly horrific video. But the point is at the beginning of the video in the original form it was released it says, ‘Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American.’”
“The CIA determines that al-Zarqawi himself is the hooded man wielding the knife.”
“The guy was so brutal, so tough. It’s sort of like a Mafia Family operating in New York City. If you kill everybody else eventually people stand back and say, ‘Whoa, we got a big guy, a big dog on the corner in town and we better be careful.’”
“Zarqawi could see that if he publicized himself and what he was doing as a really militant irreconcilable enemy of the Americans, that this would bring him money from the collections in mosques uh for the Jihad. It would bring him volunteers from across the Arab world and in that calculation he was right.”
“He really put the crosshairs on his own head by all these spectacular acts and all the press that that he was receiving.”
“So just the brutality and the effectiveness of his efforts against first the Americans and then the locals, I think people stood back and say, ‘This guy’s a blowtorch, we better let him roll.’”
“What the Iraqi Sunnis started to believe and those people who had joined Al-Qaeda, was that if the Americans can’t kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, can’t stop him, then maybe he was predestined to win the war.”
“Berg’s death is a signal to the world that Al-Zarqawi’s reign of terror is escalating out of control. But secretly the US is planning a series of Black Ops designed to bring him crashing down.”
“In Washington, ending al-Zarqawi’s reign of Terror has become a top priority for President Bush and his inner circle.”
“You come in in the days where you where the momentum you feel like the momentum hasn’t been with you. You start with your thought is really so much so so simple, it’s: ‘Let nothing blow up today. Let me get through today with nothing blowing up.’”
“It wasn’t that we were losing, it was just like when will this end and how will it end?”
“al-Zarqawi seems to have the power to strike at will and yet somehow he remains completely hidden.”
“We really didn’t know what he was doing in Iraq and we didn’t know like did he have wives there? Did he have kids there? Where was he moving? Uh what was his support network?”
“What most counterterrorism officials will tell you is you go through periods where you feel beleaguered, right? You go through periods where you’re making very limited progress and you’re trying to understand why that is. Why does he seem to have momentum behind him? And you’re trying to figure out what can I do to change that Dynamic um but anybody who’s been in this fight will tell you that’s what that’s what happens, you go through these periods and you’ve got to push through it. You’ve got to understand what is it that’s giving him the momentum and how do you take that away from him?”
“No one even has a recent photo of al-Zarqawi, let alone any idea where he is. He doesn’t use a mobile phone for fear it will be tracked. He only meets with a select group of trusted advisers whose own whereabouts are unknown.”
“He really was kind of a ghost for a long time and you would get bits and pieces here but usually by the time you got them they were outdated.”
“In September 2003 a new general arrives in Iraq. His name is Stanley McChrystal. He has radical new ideas for hunting down al-Zarqawi and destroying aqi.”
“McChrystal is one of the most dedicated individuals I’ve ever ever met. He is a driven driven Warrior.”
“He artfully looked at where he could make the most impact.”
“St McChrystal, uh, years of um of experience with our special operations forces uh at all levels uh former Ranger Commander.”
“You get personalities that are that strong, that experienced, that well respected uh the force falls in and uh their operational experience starts to starts to show, and it’s just the type of guy you want in that position.”
“McChrystal is the newly appointed commander of the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC.”
“Certainly in every conflict the JSOC has been there. They were in Grenada, they were in Panama, Gulf One, Gulf Two, Kosovo, pretty much where there’s a conflict you can depend that JSOC has been their first and they’re always the last to leave.”
“Formed in the late 1980s to coordinate the work of America’s Elite troops, JSOC controls the best of the best from across the US military. These are the so-called Special Mission units: Navy SEAL Team Six, Army Delta Force and the Air Force 24th Special Tactics Squadron. Active in every corner of the world, often on highly classified missions. The men of JSOC are experts in precise targeted strikes against hard-to-reach enemies.”
“It was a very secret organization and it was tasked with fighting the most sensitive types of mission against us enemies, obviously in the context post 9/11, terrorist enemies, counterterrorism.”
“At the start of the war JSOC’s Mission had been to find and arrest the leaders of the old Iraqi regime, the men famously depicted on a deck of cards with Saddam Hussein as the Ace of Spades.”
“‘Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.’”
“Within a year even Saddam himself is in custody, but this creates a power vacuum and al-Zarqawi is ready and waiting to step into the breach.”
“In decapitating what some call the Ba’athist or nationalist leadership, they probably assisted the growth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, because by taking away the leadership figures, the sheikhs, the former generals, the key people, the key Ba’athists, they left quite a lot of angry young militant Sunnis with nowhere to go.”
“McChrystal takes a strategic decision to abandon the hunt for ex-members of the old Saddam regime. Instead he will focus almost all of his resources on just one man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”
“Our commander gave us a big speech. The point of the speech was the only way to win the Iraq War and to stop the violence between Sunni and Shia is to find and kill or capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”
“To get to al-Zarqawi himself, McChrystal knows he needs to build a complete picture of his Terror Network, aqi. He sets up a large Command Center at an old Iraqi Airbase in the town of Balad, north of Baghdad. Then he invites all of America’s many competing spy agencies to set up camp there. From now on inter-agency turf wars are banned and everything will be shared.”
“When we started working with Special Forces and I remember General McChrystal is a real hero in this war, I remember him coming into CIA headquarters and saying, ‘You know we need some of your people.’ And as any bureaucrat will, you sit back there and say, ‘All right is this dog going to hunt? What are we trying to do here?’”
“The idea is that every piece of information, however insignificant, will be brought here and fed into a massive database. If McChrystal and his men learn everything they can about aqi, they may be able to quickly find its weakest points and strike.”
“Senior leadership understood that in order to win a counterinsurgency you could not win it by being on the defensive. You had to go on the offensive.”
“You would be shocked at uh one the the focus on the the targets. These are the top 10 here are the Intel collection tasks, this is how we’re moving against them. And as information breaks on each one you see the various forces and the interagency and the allies and in some cases the Iraqis move against that, and it’s it’s an unfolding story every day, it’s constantly updated, it never blinks, it never sleeps.”
“A key part of the plan is to pump each captured militant for as much intelligence as possible, so McChrystal sets up a special Detention Facility right next door to his Command Center.”
“The interrogation unit essentially composed of where we kept the prisoners uh and also our interrogation rooms and then our analysis room and our desk which we called the gator pit.”
“Part of our facility was you know an old Saddam era aircraft hanger, and then the rest of it was just kind of like makeshift built uh additions to a warehouse essentially.”
“Using his huge store of the most up-to-date intelligence, McChrystal unleashes the most dangerous weapon in JSOC’s Arsenal: the Special Mission units of elite Frontline soldiers. These men will also work in an entirely New Way. Historically they ran only one or two major operations per year, now they will conduct multiple raids on a daily basis.”
“I can remember uh visiting uh Iraq and watching them. They didn’t go out once on a night, they went out multiple times. Oftentimes the intelligence operators would go with the Special Forces.”
“It all starts by piling in the back of a Striker vehicle and sitting in a very cramped space that’s very hot and very dark, and then you’re going through the streets, you know, and there’s all types of Hazards, roadside bombs and snipers. Uh and by the time you get to the Target you’re usually already like drenched in sweat uh in your adrenaline’s going.”
“Fired up. You have your game face on, you need to be intense uh because it intensity and momentum are critical uh you know as far as winning the day uh nervous not really nervous.”
“You’re jumping out of the vehicle, you’re running down the street.”
“When it gets really exciting is when you have more than one house. Oftentimes these terrorists, they would run out of one house and jump a wall and into another house. Then you’d have to raid a second house and then sometimes that would end up with a third or fourth house.”
“‘Don’t move.’”
“The critical factor is speed.”
“Every time a militant is captured, the members of aqi around him will try to cover their tracks by reorganizing the entire network.”
“You had information that that they would perish, it was time-sensitive, that sometimes needed to be run down to the ground, and maybe that would be the only chance of preventing a catastrophe or an act that would kill, you know, a US soldier of our Ally.”
“It’s a cat and mouse game. The terrorists constantly change their routines, abandon safe houses, and recruit new men to replace those that have been lost. But if McChrystal’s people can work faster than their enemy, they will destroy aqi before it can regenerate.”
“You take technical information, things like stuff you get off a captured cell phone or a captured hard drive, you take detainee operation, what detainees are saying about the network they just came from, and you put them in a big Hopper and say our software, our analysis, our people have to be good enough so they can put together a picture of what that network looks like. And not only put that picture together, do it well enough so that an operator can conduct a raid within 24 hours. You’re doing it for years on end with people from every agency in town. Incredible, in a way.”
“The most important idea that uh General McChrystal and JSOC brought to this whole thing was that if you hit an organization fast enough, accurately enough and repeatedly enough, you could actually cause them to collapse.”
“JSOC soon develops into a well-oiled machine. Every night four Black Ops task forces spread out through Iraq performing up to a dozen raids at one time.”
“‘Go, go, go, go.’”
“Each group is assigned to take down Targets in a different part of US occupied territory. To the north is Task Force Red, formed from the Army’s 75th Rangers Brigade. To the West, Task Force Blue, made up of US Navy SEALS. The center of Iraq will be the responsibility of Task Force Green, staffed by the US Army’s most elite unit, Delta Force. These soldiers are joined by a team of elite troops from Britain’s Special Air Service, the SAS, operating under the code name Task Force Black.”
“The SAS are the Pioneers in the art of Black Ops such as this daring hostage rescue from the Iranian Embassy in the heart of London in 1980.”
“In particular they are masters of surveillance and intelligence gathering.”
“There was undoubtedly a feeling among many of the American intelligence operators that the SAS and the other British Special Forces had skills that were quite unusual and quite different to the type of skills that Delta Force or the SEALs had. The American training and operational activity had all been based around, if you like, ‘Action Man’ leaping out of helicopters, boarding ships, all this kind of stuff, assault rolls. Whereas the British Special Forces, because of their long involvement, not just in Northern Ireland but in places like the Balkans where they’d been involved in the hunt for war criminals, they had skills to do with the patient nurturing of targets and groups of targets. Now that involved surveillance, it involved creativity, stealth. About how, for example, could you get a remote surveillance camera onto a balcony overlooking a Target you might be interested in? They came up with all sorts of things. They drove around in Baghdad taxis, they disguised themselves, and the American intelligence people saw some of this during the early years in Baghdad and they liked it.”
“McChrystal and his team work through their targets night after night. The supply lines of foreign Fighters are intercepted, bomb makers are taken out of action, mountains of intelligence are captured and analyzed.”
“They would do a raid, they would get what’s called ‘pocket litter’ or hard drives, you know, pieces of paper out of people’s pockets. They’d come back, they’d bring it to analyst back on the base, who would from the CIA, who would go through that information. That would lead to another targeting package and the Special Forces would go out again. That sort of continuous feed, continuous loop is what made them incredibly effective.”
“Despite two years of taking al-Zarqawi’s Network apart, the ultimate objective, the man himself, still eludes them. But the task force is about to find a crucial breakthrough, one that could finally stop al-Zarqawi for good.”
“Strike teams from JSOC, the US Joint Special Operations Command, are staging multiple raids across Iraq every night. This secretive organization joins together elite Special Forces from across the US Military and its allies. They are under the command of a single leader, General Stanley McChrystal.”
“By the start of 2006, their system of Rapid Fire raids and sophisticated intelligence gathering is beginning to pull apart the Network known as aqi.”
“They also getting ever closer to its feared leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”
“‘I’m going to Target each discrete tiny little element, and if I can begin to pull little elements away, suddenly the whole thing falls of its own weight.’”
“Whenever they get close to al-Zarqawi he seems once again to slip through their grasp, yet he still retains the ability to perpetrate devastating attacks, especially against so-called soft targets like Shia mosques, killing hundreds at once.”
“In April 2006 al-Zarqawi releases a video which for the first time in years shows his face.”
“The fact that he was a charismatic militant and tactical leader led to this Larger than Life sort of myth about him. I think it fed his ego as well, he kind of began believing in his own press if you will. You had little kids in the street you know pretending to be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, because he was essentially in invincible.”
“The video urges al-Zarqawi’s supporters to show no mercy against their so-called enemies: Iraq’s Shia community and the US forces. Just as that video hits the airwaves, one element of the JSOC task force is preparing the latest in their long series of nightly raids. It’s a team from the British SAS operating under the code name Task Force Black. They are now concentrating on an area to the south of the capital. It is a militant Heartland and the soldiers call it the triangle of death.”
“The British Special Operations task force conducted a series of operations in the triangle of death in early 2006 and they planned an operation in April 2006 which they called Larchwood 4.”
“For Operation Larchwood 4 is a dangerous and daring raid to arrest a mid-ranking al-Zarqawi henchman, codenamed Abu Haida. McChrystal’s intelligence machine has pinpointed him to a safe house in the town of Yusufiyah.”
“‘We put surveillance on that safe house and we watched it continuously for I think almost a month, uh, and then one day you know we see this meeting happening there, these cars converge. Uh, so we quickly sent a raid team to go out and capture the members in that in that safe house.’”
“The team know that houses like this are often well defended with heavily armed men, some wearing suicide vests. But the house could also contain a number of innocent civilians.”
“‘You’re through a threat, then you engage. If they’re not a threat, then you don’t. You have to be able to make that decision in a snap, that’s what Special Operations trains for, that’s what they’re really, really good at.’”
“But just after 2:00 a.m. Task Force Black sets off in their helicopters for the Target house. Following him is a support group from the British Parachute Regiment, the Paras. They will form a cordon around the house to prevent reinforcements arriving and arrest so-called ‘squirters’, targets trying to make a run for it. A short flight of just 20 minutes puts them within range of the house.”
“The SAS men realized it was not going to be a typical sort of mission. They thought they could hear sounds inside the building. They approached very gingerly and to their surprise and satisfaction found that there was a door just wide open.”
“Almost as soon as they were through the door, they were hit by a hail of bullets. These people were heavily armed and they were prepared to fight to the death in order to prevent the SAS from getting in and taking their man. The team quickly withdraws to a safe distance. They must decide whether or not to resume their attack.”
“Some of these incidents where heavy resistance was encountered, they simply pulled back and dropped a bomb on the building and killed everybody inside for many different reasons. The SAS commander on the ground decided not to do that. They wanted this person alive for intelligence purposes, they felt it was worth trying to fight their way in and that’s what they did.”
“You know, raid compounds, the objective is to keep the opposition on the run and keep him on the defensive.”
“The team encounter their worst nightmare: a suicide bomber.”
“As one of the SAS men went up the stairs, he detonated.”
“The SAS man was blown down the stairs. Fortunately for him he wasn’t seriously wounded, he had cuts and bruises, but of course the suicide bomber had blown himself up.”
“Meanwhile outside the house, more militants join the fight. They rain fire down on the Special Forces.”
“Another man wearing a suicide vest, a squirter, fled out the back of the building and hid under a car.”
“The outer Cordon of paratroopers enters the fight, taking out the two militants firing from the roof. They turn their attention to the suicide bomber hiding under the car, shooting him dead before he can detonate his vest.”
“So at the end of a sort of terrifying 20 minutes there were a whole lot of dead people.”
“Inside the house we captured five senior ranking members of Al-Qaeda.”
“The operation is considered another successful day of the office for Task Force Black. The main target of the raid, Abu Haida, is in custody along with four other detainees.”
“In addition, a treasure trove of intelligence is recovered from the house.”
“They sweep everything up they think might be of relevance: mobile phones, computers, everything else, and they take it away.”
“As a result of Larchwood 4 and subsequent operations that it generated, a huge amount of actionable intelligence came into JSOC’s hands.”
“When a JSOC analyst starts to probe one of the captured computers, he discovers something extraordinary: raw footage of al-Zarqawi himself from his recent propaganda video.”
“Through traces of DNA that were found on it when it was sent back to the US for analysis, they would conclude it was his laptop.”
“The analysts realize that al-Zarqawi must have left the house just out before the SAS arrived.”
“We actually started to get excited that we were close, because Zarqawi was in that house the day before we raided it. And that’s when we we finally had the confidence to think that we were we were hot on this Trail.”
“They had narrowly missed their target but the net is closing in fast.”
“By the spring of 2006 the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has reached a turning point.”
“An elite assault team from the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, has secured a major breakthrough following a daring raid on a terrorist Safe House.”
“The momentum had shifted, the the raids uh of his Network were getting faster and closer to him, and so you had the sense, ‘We’re we’re going to get there.’”
“As well as capturing several senior members of Al-Qaeda in the raid, JSOC soldiers discover a video of Enemy Number One, al-Zarqawi. Hoping to tarnish his fearsome reputation, the Coalition releases the full unedited video to the media. It contains the familiar footage of the terrorist leader parading through the desert, confidently firing a machine gun, but it also shows another side to al-Zarqawi: a slightly overweight, unimpressive figure of a man.”
“Here’s our The Ultimate Warrior trying to shoot his machine gun. It’s supposed to be automatic fire, he’s shooting single shots. No sooner does he figure out how to switch his weapon to fully automatic when it jams and the self-styled holy Warrior can’t get it going again. He looks down, can’t figure it out, calls his friend to unblock the stoppage and get the weapon firing again.”
“He also appears to be going into battle wearing a nice pair of white trainers, hardly the image of a man threatening the might of America.”
“It makes you wonder.”
“Meanwhile deep inside JSOC’s secret Detention Center the task Force’s interrogators get to work on their captives.”
“The men that we brought in, we called the group of five, and we knew that they were five Al-Qaeda members, but we didn’t know what their roles were. And they had this very unbelievable story that they were there to attend a wedding, even though there was no bride or groom. Uh and there were suicide bombers in the house and little by little uh we would get information from one of them uh and then we would take that and turn around and use it against the other four.”
“One member of the group, the senior aqi operative known as Abu Haida, refuses to say anything.”
“He was interrogated uh for about 20 days uh and during that time he just maintained this story that he was just there to videotape a wedding even though it was completely unbelievable.”
“For weeks, rotating teams of interrogators try psychological pressure, pleas for cooperation, subtle threats and subtle promises. Eventually they decide he will not talk and arrange to have him sent to Iraq’s main detention facility, Abu Ghraib prison.”
“I decided that I would go and interrogate him one last time before he left and I didn’t really have permission to do that, but I felt that he could provide very important information towards finding Zarqawi. And that conversation started with nothing about Al-Qaeda, nothing about terrorism, it just started with a friendly conversation about who he was, uh what was his life story, uh how did he come to be sitting in a chair opposite me, and getting to know each other over the course of 5 and a half hours.”
“Matthew Alexander discovers Abu Haida has a fatal weakness: his arrogance. He believes he has beaten the mighty American machine and should be recognized for it. Alexander obliges him.”
“I would constantly stroke his ego, constantly make him believe in this fallacy that in his head, that he was a very important man, that he could affect the future of Iraq. Uh and then in the last 15 minutes uh what I did was essentially offer him a deal. I offered him the chance to work with us instead of Al-Qaeda in a secret program that didn’t exist, uh in which he could be a person who could influence the future of Iraq.”
“And he decided to work with me.”
“Over the next few weeks Alexander visits Abu Haida in his cell at night and coaxes more and more information out of him about al-Zarqawi’s whereabouts, all on the pretext of proving his worth for the non-existent secret program.”
“I said, ‘You’re so close to getting this program. All we need is that one last piece of information that’ll convince my bosses.’ And he said, ‘Every month Zarqawi would meet with his spiritual adviser, who was our detainee’s best friend.’”
“It’s the piece of intelligence that everyone has been waiting for for years. Al-Zarqawi has been a ghost striking with impunity. Now at last JSOC has what it needs to find him and take him out.”
“The intelligence and Military effort that had been put together was beginning to close the noose around his neck. We knew that Zarqawi had a spiritual advisor, we knew that he was going to visit him, it was just a matter of being patient.”
“Using this information JSOC quickly traces the spiritual advisor and begins following him day and night, using high-tech systems like predator drones as well as old-fashioned undercover operatives. They create what McChrystal calls the ‘unblinking eye’. Their target is never out of sight.”
“Abu Haida tells Alexander that if they want to find al-Zarqawi they need to look for one particular sign.”
“We would know when he was going to meet with Zarqawi because he would change cars from a white car to a blue car. And whenever he got in this blue car, that meant he was going to meet Zarqawi.”
“Once again it was a joint US/UK surveillance on a building in Baghdad, and lo and behold they realized by following his movements that every few days this man got into his car.”
“They used Predator and other methods to follow his car as it went up the road to this place in the Palm Groves near Taji, where indeed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself was hiding.”
“By now, pictures from the Drone are being fed live to JSOC’s command center. Everyone, including General McChrystal himself, is watching in silence as al-Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser gets out of the car.”
“Then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself appears.”
“Once the blue car arrived at the house uh helicopters took off immediately to go to that house uh and capture Zarqawi. And it it was about 20 minutes away.”
“A discussion is held in the command center: Is it worth trying to capture al-Zarqawi alive in broad daylight? Is it better to wait until Nightfall and take him when he’s asleep? If they strike now they risk a heavy firefight and numerous casualties. Worse, al-Zarqawi is a master of the last minute Escape. If they wait he could easily slip through the net again. This could be their one and only chance to finish the job.”
“And there was a period of time in which we were just waiting. I was watching it live on a video and we were just waiting, decision.”
“McChrystal believes there is no time to lose. He can’t even wait 20 minutes for the assault Force to arrive by helicopter. He opts for another plan designed to take al-Zarqawi completely by surprise.”
“He calls up two F-16 Fighters patrolling nearby.”
“We are expecting to watch the helicopters land in the raid, which we typically would watch. Uh and instead after about maybe a a 5-minute wait.”
“The house just exploded.”
“They knew he was in the building and they made the decision without losing any time to prosecute the target. So they didn’t even feel there was time to get one of their Special Ops task forces in the air to go and raid the building. They simply decided to hit it with bombs from an F-16, which is what they did.”
“Just minutes after the bombing, Special Forces arrive at the house. Incredibly they find al-Zarqawi still alive in the wreckage.”
“A soldier grabbed him and then Zarqawi died. And it was sort of of a sweet justice, if you will, that Zarqawi’s last image was a US Soldier grabbing him.”
“The day following the raid the US announces to the world that they have their man at last.”
“Good morning.”
“Now Zarqawi has met his end and this violent man will never murder again.”
“Pictures are released of his dead body as Grim confirmation.”
“Zarqawi could be responsible for upwards of almost 100,000 deaths by starting the civil war in Iraq. Uh and so I don’t think the world’s going to miss him.”
“It’s a devastating blow to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The man who was thought to be Invincible is dead. But the work is not over. With the intelligence that was collected from the smoldering remains of al-Zarqawi’s compound, another series of raids is launched and aqi starts to fall like a stack of dominoes.”
“There was, you know, a good deal of chaos inside the organization. And what you do is, you know, when you’re targeting Zarqawi you’re also collecting intelligence on the network. And so what that allows you to do is, the minute he’s dead they’re far more vulnerable, the the people around him, than they realize.”
“Killing him undoubtedly had an impact. There was a lot of uh exploitation from the raid, a lot of material was recovered, and we can see that little by little through 2006 through to the early part of 2007, they did successfully take them down.”
“So Zarqawi, Zarqawi, if you like, was evidence of a bigger strategy that was really getting seriously effective by that point. And certainly by the summer of 2007 Al-Qaeda in Iraq had largely been smashed. And so you do a series of raids that is devastating and they never really came back from his death.”
“Today, the Joint Special Operations Command is the group of Special Forces operators that is tasked with planning and executing dangerous and secretive missions for the United States. The Black Ops it conducts have continued to strike at the heart of Al-Qaeda and other Terror groups around the world.”
“In 2011 it was JSOC that planned and executed the mission to take down the World’s Most Wanted Man, Osama Bin Laden.”
“‘You have to win and and at the end of the day when the heat is on um you’re going to do whatever it takes to win.’”
“He’s the most Wanted terrorist in the world.”
“After almost a decade, US intelligence has finally tracked Osama Bin Laden down to a compound in Pakistan.”
“SEAL Team Six, a US Elite Special Forces Unit, is tasked with a now historic capture or kill Mission.”
“They had been waiting for this call for years. This is the inside account of one of the most famous black op missions of all times.”
“‘It gets more excitement in the air and everybody starts getting a lot more serious. For the Hilos, we’re definitely going now. We’re going in, it’s going in at night.’”
“How SEAL Team Six planned this high-risk raid and how it almost failed.”
“Now on Black Ops: Taking down Bin Laden.”
“Operation Neptune Spear. Two Blackhawk helicopters carrying a team of US Navy Seals are approaching a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They believe Osama Bin Laden is hiding there. But then: disaster.”
“It’s rare an op ever goes like it’s planned. There’s always something that comes up without expecting. One of the helicopters hits a sudden draft causing it to hit the compound wall and crash land.”
“The town’s wake, and so they’re thinking any minute now we can be run down with you know a lot of enemy forces coming at us.”
“The Seals have lost the element of surprise. Every second is now critical. The Special Forces team must quickly adapt and respond to the change situation.”
“What you’re expected to do is make a determination whether the occupants are a threat or not a threat. They blow their way into the compound and you have to react in an instant.”
“‘If through a threat, then you engage.’”
“This Elite unit has trained for every scenario.”
“This is the last chapter in the hunt to bring Bin Laden to Justice, a hunt which began more than a decade earlier.”
“On 9/11, 2001, the US endure the worst attacks on its soil in modern history.”
“Almost 3,000 people are dead.”
“President Bush vows to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda’s leader and the Mastermind of the attacks, and bring him to Justice.”
“There’s an old poster out west as I recall that said ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’”
“In December 2001, US forces chase Bin Laden to the caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, but he manages to slip away.”
“We were always on the hunt. We were using every form of intelligence gathering, whether it was human intelligence, signals intelligence.”
“For the next 10 years Bin Laden manages to elude US forces.”
“We still haven’t killed or captured Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist Cadre uh. Do you happen to know where he is?”
“He may be dead, he may be seriously wounded, he may be in Afghanistan, he may be somewhere else.”
“Bin Laden learns very early on uh that he can’t trust anything electronic. He almost dies in Tora Bora in the mountains of Afghanistan from using cell phones, and so one of the first things he does is basically gets rid of anything electronic that could be traced back to him.”
“Minimizing the use of communication technology allows Al-Qaeda’s leader and his close deputies to operate under the radar.”
“We saw his name crop up so little because very little communication. I think very few people in the organization knew where he was.”
“Bin Laden seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. The only Clues come from videotapes he releases taunting the US.”
“You were looking at things as simple as the foliage and the the light and the the terrain to try and figure out where it may have been taped. Um, we looked at his health. Did he use particular words? Was it possible that what looked like just a sort of message to followers might have had some embedded message?”
“Bin Laden has found a way to still control the organization. He basically becomes reliant on a series of individuals, couriers in particular, who bring him information, uh be it the latest uh battle reports. They then in turn take his directives back out to his lieutenants.”
“In this way, over the decade, the US does make some progress. Senior Al-Qaeda figures are captured and interrogated.”
“The importance of getting the big players in the organization, the archetypal plotter in the Al-Qaeda organization, was partly trying to learn locational information: ‘Where’s the man?’ So the first question you might ask him might be things like, ‘Where’s Bin Laden?’”
“Despite these successes, Public Enemy Number One remains at large.”
“By the time President Obama takes office in 2009, most people believe he’ll never be caught.”
“There are fewer, of course, fewer and fewer sightings of him. Bin Laden is making fewer videos, although still some, and when he does make a video there’s a spike in interest of course within the government.”
“But if the CIA, some analysts are still looking for new Clues. The bits and pieces are things like talking to detainees, how does the network operate, watching them move?”
“Case officers suggest studying the structure of Al-Qaeda’s network: who does Bin Laden use to pass messages? Allowing him to remain undetected. The analysts believe the answer to this question will lead them back to Bin Laden.”
“Somebody says something here, somebody says something there. Over the course of years you accumulate those grains and slowly a picture comes into Focus.”
“After years of frustration, the analysts believe they’ve got something.”
“When we started looking at terrorist organizations, and if you look at them historically, they’re not Western hierarchies. When you sit at the threat table for example, you’re talking about a facilitator here, a fundraiser there. The organization itself as you go up to the top, they don’t always talk to each other. It’s very diffuse. It’s more like fabric than a hierarchy.”
“They knew there was probably a courier out there, and it was from some of these initial interrogations that Guantanamo Bay and other prisons that they learned of one courier in particular. How, as detainees reveal, the Courier Bin Laden trusts is someone who’s known as Al-Kuwaiti, the man from Kuwaiti. Digging deeper they find his real name: Sheikh Ahmed. If they find him, they may be able to find his boss.”
“Through intercepts of his cell phones as he traveled throughout the Gulf in Pakistan, they figured out that he seemed to still be in touch with the highest ranks of Al-Qaeda, and they started tracking him on the ground in Pakistan.”
“As they track him, CIA operatives notice a highly suspicious pattern to Al-Kuwaiti’s behavior.”
“They found this very strange thing he would do was to turn off his cell phone and then drop off the map for a while. Things that made the Americans think, ‘This is the kind of extraordinary measure that the most hunted terrorist in the world might take. Let’s follow this guy.’”
“The Breakthrough comes when the agents manage to follow the Courier’s car. To their amazement it is headed towards a residential compound in the outskirts of Abbottabad, a Pakistani army town about an hour and a half drive from the capital, Islamabad. It’s the home of Pakistani’s West Point, one of its top military schools. It’s a Garrison town.”
“The CIA starts watching the compound. Surveillance reveals that Al-Kuwaiti The Courier lives there with his brother and their families, but they are not alone. Hidden behind unusually high walls there are other residents, perhaps even another family living on the top floor of one of the buildings.”
“Once they had a place to focus on, you can bring kind of the full technological weight on this compound. And so there was really no expense spared. Satellites were shifted, you’re basically using every technological mean, every covert mean on the ground.”
“Initial analysis of the surveillance reports is encouraging. They still don’t know who’s in the compound of course in Abbottabad, but they suspected somebody quite senior uh either in Al-Qaeda or one of the other terrorist organizations.”
“Finding out who that mysterious senior person is will not be easy.”
“Abbottabad was teaming with military officials, likely intelligence officials, security officials to protect the Pakistani military. So it was a very difficult operating environment.”
“It’s so difficult that at first the CIA is focusing the effort on surveillance from space.”
“You had satellites peering down, uh night and day, trying to get us an image of whoever was working in there. You had electronic eavesdropping equipment that was trying to pick up any signals, be it emails, uh text messages, cell phone conversations. And you had this new stealthy aircraft that was flying high over Pakistan trying to get a glimpse of.”
“After weeks of satellite imagery the efforts pay off. US intelligence teams managed to identify a figure who occasionally takes walks around the courtyard but appears to never leave the compound. The analysts are convinced they have found an HVT, a high value Target. They call him the Pacer.”
“The Pacer is very tall. Benin Laden is about 6’4.””
“It’s a tantalizing clue, but any attempt to get closer and confirm it is indeed Bin Laden is fraught with risk.”
“The challenge became: we think we have someone important here, but is it someone high enough on the ranks to risk a man mission into the country that could completely upset the relationship with Pakistan for years to come?”
“To try and confirm they have the right man, the CIA activates agents on the ground.”
“They had a safe house overlooking the compound where they had Pakistani agents, people spying for the CIA trying to establish what they call a ‘pattern of life’: who goes in, who goes out, how many people live there, who’s interacting with the compound? There were women and children that would leave, come and go uh from the compound. They would go shopping. Uh the children however seemed to be mostly uh stayed inside, but they never saw the individual, the tall individual, the Pacer as they called him. They never saw him leave the compound itself. So that raised even more suspicions.”
“The agents soon report on the unusual behavior patterns of the residents.”
“The house itself had no real connections to the outside world. There was a satellite dish, but there were no phone lines. There were no hard wires beyond some electricity wires going in and out. It’s as if these people wanted to live off the grid.”
“My first reaction when they described the compound in Abbottabad was that we had something that was very unusual.”
“Neighbors say the compound’s residents keep to themselves.”
“Occasionally they have visitors.”
“Strangely they burn their trash.”
“In Washington, the analysts are still trying to determine who is the high value Target in the compound, but it’s decided there was enough to brief the president.”
“President Obama’s top counterterrorism and intelligence go to him and say, ‘Look, we think we may have the location where Bin Laden is right now. We can’t be certain, but given all the other Clues that we have.’”
“Obama is cautiously optimistic. This is by far the most solid lead they’ve had on the location of Bin Laden in years.”
“Once the intelligence reached a point where there was at least a higher confidence level about the possibility, uh the next uh question we asked was, ‘What should we do operationally?’”
“President Obama is facing the most momentous decision of his career. He needs to choose the best course of action: bomb the compound from the air, send in a Black Ops unit, or maybe wait until he is sure Bin Laden is there.”
“The priority was to ensure that you either kill or capture Osama Bin Laden and the only way you could do that was to send in a Commando team to do that job.”
“As the president considers his options, one US Special Ops team is ordered to start preparing.”
“Handpicked for the job, they are the best of the best: the Navy’s top secret counterterrorism Force, SEAL Team Six.”
“Well historically, you know, people didn’t talk about SEAL Team 6. The missions, the tactics, what they do, how they do it is all close-held secret.”
“Inside the Navy, the unit is only known as DevGru, short for Naval Special Warfare Development Group.”
“‘Let’s go, let’s go. Here’s the out over here.’”
“There are 300 operators at SEAL Team 6. There’s a team of a couple thousand people supporting them, everyone from intelligence to Dog Handlers to the boat and helicopter folks who get them into the mission.”
“You can’t really train all the other teams to quickly deploy to the Jungle, quickly deploy to the desert, or the Arctic or an urban. So you have one team made up of elite of the elite who can play anywhere in the world. And that team really is our nation’s 911 worldwide call.”
“Only seal operators with years of experience are considered for a job with the team.”
“You have a screen to become a part of SEAL Team 6. There’s an additional years of training, of screening, of requirements that involved.”
“McRaven knows he can rely on Team Six. He was once a commander with the unit and helped shape it as one of the best counterterrorism forces in the world.”
“I think the thing that separates SEAL Team 6 from all others is SEALS just don’t quit. They’re trained never ever quit.”
“Over the last decade, US Special Forces have had a great deal of operational experience. Thousands of operations that have been conducted. Many of them are not uh in the front page, um, but almost all have had a significant influence on the direction of the war on terrorism.”
“One of the few publicly known missions was the rescue of the captain of the Maersk Alabama from Somali pirates who hijacked his boat near the Horn of Africa in 2009.”
“The hostages were rescued, the snipers you know did their hit on the pirates, but for every one that you hear about, there’s a thousand successes you don’t hear about in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nightly raids have been part of the Seals mission. They are ready for action.”
“The Seals got the go-ahead to start planning for this raid and a small team worked on a model of the compound, figured out how they would go in, what was the best way to get everyone subdued, kill, capture. They were going to train and train and train and be ready if the president said, ‘Get on that plane and get to Pakistan.’”
“Not one of them breathed a word to their families or to their other seal teammates.”
“At SEAL Team 6, there’s one real concern about keeping the mission secret: should the US involve the Pakistani government? There are worries about trust.”
“Over time we saw problems working with Pakistani intelligence, information going out the back door. For example, when we were cooperating with them, too often when they got a tip it turned out that an hour before a raid, for instance, mysteriously the target of that raid would disappear. He would have been tipped off.”
“The president determines that bringing the pakistanis in on the plan could mean losing the one chance in almost a decade to get Osama Bin Laden. But keeping the pakistanis in the dark makes this raid even more risky.”
“This is crossing a border, crossing a large uh territory of Pakistan, a sovereign country, without the knowledge of local Security Services. With the prospect that local police might get on you and start shooting you in Abbottabad. The risk factors here were incredible.”
“The consequences of a potential disaster weigh heavy on the president and his AIDS.”
“In the back of everyone’s mind is the failed Desert One operation to rescue hostages from Iran in 1980. Eight American servicemen were killed when the helicopters collided on the way to the mission.”
“It was a crushing blow for the Carter presidency.”
“And some of those in the room with Obama are still haunted by what came to be known as Blackhawk Down, a Special Forces operation codenamed Gothic Serpent into Somalia in 1993. Militants shot down two US helicopters. At the end of the battle 18 American soldiers were dead, their bodies mutilated and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.”
“These are his top advisors, people like Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, defense secretary Bob Gates, CIA director uh Leon Panetta. And they’re all giving their assessments to the president. Some are more skeptical about this than others. Joe Biden for instance is a little more skeptical. Gates is is skeptical about sending in ground troops. He’s the one individual from this group who lived through Desert One. Other intelligence officials however, including Panetta, were much more bullish. Secretary of State Clinton, she was convinced that this was the right call to make even though she laid out all of her doubts before saying, ‘You know, we could be very wrong, we could end up with a bad relationship with Pakistan for a decade to come, but this is the right call to go in.’”
“It’s a tough call. Whenever you’re advising the president about a particular operation, it’s how certain do you feel that your Target’s there and that you will have a good opportunity to successfully execute that mission versus what are the likely consequences or potential points of failure.”
“To stack the odds in his favor, Obama orders additional backup.”
“The president said, ‘I want to be able to protect these guys and get them out.’”
“Within the White House itself the top uh National Security AIDS, the president, others were actually devising something they called ‘The Playbook’. It was a three-ring binder about 2 in thick, and it was all the various contingencies of what could go right, what could go wrong, things in the middle uh, what would happen for instance if this Navy SEAL Team when it got in on the ground was engaged by Pakistani soldiers or police? What would you do then?”
“The president wants another SEAL Team ready nearby as a quick reaction force.”
“One thing that he personally wanted to see was the option to fight their way out if they had to uh, they didn’t want to be pinned down. And so the military went back and devised some backup plans that had additional transport helicopters ready, the chance that there might be a problem.”
“Even now the president still hasn’t decided whether to Greenlight the operation, but members of SEAL Team 6 are sent to prepare in North Carolina. And in the Nevada desert an exact replica of the compound is built, especially for them to train for every potential scenario.”
“You could have landmines or the whole building could be a trap and the moment you get in a compound you know 4,000 lb of explosives uh gets detonated, you know that’s enough to kill the entire force. They know that they have a bunch of contingencies that they have to be prepared for and that plans don’t always go according to plan.”
“We have a saying, you know, ‘Plan your dive then dive your plan.’”
“From the intelligence gathered, the SEALS learn that behind the high walls securing the compound are at least two buildings. The mysterious residents and the Courier’s brother seem to be in the main one; the smaller building has his Al-Kuwaiti and his family.”
“Intelligence was critical our satellite imagery or Ground Intelligence uh to the degree we could, we had an understanding of at least the the battlefield exterior of the compound.”
“As the SEALS prepare the president calls in more experts. He wants fresh eyes on the intelligence, what the pros call a red team exercise. Senior analysts have given everything that’s been gathered on the case their job is to provide an objective assessment of the intelligence. After reviewing the material the red team concludes the chances Bin Laden is in the compound are only 50/50.”
“To get the 50/50 in itself, I thought was significant. That might seem like low odds for Vegas, for me as an intelligence professional, that’s pretty good odds.”
“In the last secret White House meeting the room is still divided on the best plan of action.”
“As they went around the table, each one of the participants basically is is prefacing his or her remarks by saying, ‘You know Mr President, we know this is probably the most difficult decision you’re going to make,’ and of course it got to be a joke as they went around because they each echo each other, as if to kind of shield them from the ultimate responsibility of having to make this decision. Knowing of course the commander-in-chief will be the one who decides whether to go or not.”
“I think most of us would have said the risk here is huge and the best we could do is to say ‘Boss, I’m going to have to ask you to take a huge risk.’ That said, I think I would have said I’m not sure it’s going to get any better and now it’s on your back.”
“It’s the ultimate decision for the commander-in-chief: is he willing to risk the lives of American troops based on so much uncertainty? President Obama says he needs more time to think, but delay carries its own risk.”
“What happens if you wait so long to have it be perfect that you lose the opportunity?”
“The next morning the president calls in his top advisers. He has made up his mind. Operation Neptune Spear is a go.”
“It’s the best information they were going to have. This was Bin Laden and this was the opportunity to strike, the opportunity they’ve been looking for for years uh and the risks were worth it.”
“The raid is planned for the next day, Saturday April 30th, with Sunday May 1st as an alternative if the weather is bad. As the SEALS prepare for the operation the president continues with his planned commitments.”
“The White House Correspondence Dinner is scheduled for Saturday night. The president always attends it. This is an annual event here in Washington where the president shows up uh in a black tie, he’s usually subject you know he’s expected to give a funny speech.”
“‘All right everyone, please have a seat.’”
“To make sure the operation remains a secret, everyone has to act as if it’s business as usual.”
“The White House advisor really debated, do we pretend that the president is sick? Do we want him making jokes from the podium which is the point of that particular dinner? Just as the Raiders are hitting the compound what if the helicopters go down? What if you have another Blackhawk Down situation where you lose a a whole team?”
“At the last minute, forecast for cloudy weather delays the mission by 24 hours.”
“11:00 p.m. in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.”
“It’s a moonless night. Two Blackhawk helicopters take off from a US Airbase. Each is carrying 12 members of Navy SEAL Team Six.”
“The operation to get Osama Bin Laden, codenamed Neptune Spear, is finally underway.”
“‘Boy, this is a little haywire, okay. We are flying in PX. Yeah, this is a goal, this is definitely a goal.’”
“And then it gets some more excitement in the air and everybody starts getting a lot more serious.”
“‘We’re definitely going now, we’re going in, it’s going in at night.’”
“On the flight to Abbottabad the Troops go through last-minute preparations.”
“And there’ll be a very detailed Patrol order. Time you’re going in, time you’re coming out, what gear you’re going to take, who’s going to be sitting where in the Hilos.”
“These SEALS were handpicked for the mission because of their specialities and experience. It’s the operation they’ve long been waiting for.”
“You’re going through the ‘what ifs’, you know? What if we get fire upon upon infiltration? What if? What if the fast rope is in the wrong spot? You know, what if, what if we we get around and the helicopter you know is downed outside the compound where now you need to protect not only the the pilots, you know, where you going to move them into? You know, you’re you’re kind of going through your your playbook.”
“The troops also find time for a personal moment.”
“The air is so so thick. Uh people saying last-minute prayers and thinking about the families and uh making sure the weapons loaded, doing press checks, making sure there’s a round in the chamber, making sure all the gear’s secured, going over last-minute notes with the buddies, thinking of all the details.”
“Also on board the aircraft, a translator and a dog named Cairo, member of the K9 unit. They’re for anti-personnel and sniffing things out.”
“‘Go, search something for smell, looking for somebody.’”
“Cairo was a veteran. A veteran of many raids. He’d actually been wounded in a previous raid and had taken 6 months out to recuperate.”
“The SEALS are flying in new stealth helicopters specifically designed for this mission.”
“The SEALS have the state-of-the-art equipment and every year and every generation the helicopters get a little faster, a little lighter, a little harder to detect. The operation Pilots are the Night Stalkers, members of the Army’s Elite 160th Special Aviation Regiment.”
“We’re called ‘Night Stalkers’ for a reason. We tend to like to fly at night uh to give us the cover of Darkness. Flying in the dark is a lot different than flying in the day and and sound acts differently, light obviously acts differently.”
“The whole mission is planned to hit the target from an unexpected Direction and an unexpected time.”
“Journey to the Target in Abbottabad takes about 90 minutes. The two stealth helicopters managed to cross the border to Pakistan undetected.”
“You’re going to have uh uh, you know, weather radar so you can detect, you know, storms uh or uh electrical storms that could be on the horizon. You’re going to have weapons um and these weapons are generally not found in the in the conventional Army uh inventory, so these are spec specifically designed to get onto an objective.”
“A lot of the aircraft today have long-range fuel probes so they can do a refueling.”
“In the original plan, they were going to fast rope down into the outer Courtyard.”
“It would have taken two minutes to land these guys and maybe 10 minutes in all to storm both buildings.”
“Just as he’s hovering above the compound preparing to land, one of the pilots hits serious trouble. The air was hotter than anyone had expected and the helicopter lost control.”
“Cuz the air was thinner and the helicopter therefore was heavier and started falling a little bit through space, sliding greasily back and forth.”
“Drones flying over the compound stream the unfolding disaster back to Vice Admiral McRaven in Jalalabad, the CIA headquarters in Langley, and to The Situation Room in the White House.”
“They’re all jammed in a very small kind of room listening, watching the feed. All they could see is the helicopter going down and then crashing and wondering, ‘Have we just lost the mission?’”
“With one helicopter down and the loss of the surprise element, the SEALS will have to quickly adapt to the situation or the whole operation could be compromised.”
“It landed upright, just landed a little hard. We call that you know an uncontrolled Landing or or hard impact landing. And in that case, you know, it became mechanically impossible for that aircraft to take off.”
“In The Situation Room the tensions are running High.”
“Your heart’s in your throat. You don’t know at any moment if the pakistanis are going to come rushing in. You don’t know if you’re going to hear that the whole mission has been lost.”
“The White House advisers are desperate to hear if the SEALS survived the crash. An extremely tense moment until they heard from McRaven.”
“Now the guys are out, the guys are good and we’re prepared for this. We’re modifying the plan.”
“When Admiral McRaven indicated a kind of, you know, ‘This is not a problem, these guys are going to do the job,’ it gave me a sense of confidence.”
“In Abbottabad the pilot buries the nose of the helicopter in the ground.”
“If failure is not an option you have to have a way to uh to accomplish the mission. One thing that’s critical to the success is imaginative operators on the ground and people that can shift gears.”
“The SEALS immediately activate Plan B.”
“When uh things go wrong uh you’re not going to overreact. You have a checklist and you can get through just about anything.”
“They quickly organize themselves to storm the compound from the ground.”
“The first thing the guys have to do is get a full head count, make sure everybody’s there.”
“But the crash has caused noise.”
“The town’s wake and so they’re thinking any minute now we can be run down with you know a lot of enemy forces coming at us.”
“Fearing they’ve lost the element of surprise they know every second is now critical.”
“And once you’re at the door, the door’s got to be breached. Soon as the door’s breached, people in left, right, left, right, left, right, and then you make movement.”
“The SEALS make it to the Courtyard. Now they must get to the main building where they think Bin Laden may be.”
“There were these knots of children who were trying to avoid getting caught, trying to avoid getting hit and not knowing what to do or where to run.”
“They still don’t know who else is in the compound and how many people are armed.”
“And they’re just moving, moving, going through danger areas, moving, moving, moving, checking stairways, clearing, so people go up stairways.”
“When someone opens fire they engage.”
“With still no sign of Bin Laden, the SEALS move to clear the next building. They find that most entrances and pathways are barricaded or blocked.”
“The key is to have the standard operational procedures that allow a unit to flow through a structure like that, keeping the Target in mind, keeping Security in mind. They get a closed door, they know to get security on it. People blast through the door.”
“From his headquarters in Langley, CIA director Leon Panetta is narrating the action for the president.”
“We had heard that shots had been fired. We really weren’t quite sure what you know what was happening. It was a good 15 or 20 minutes of uh silence in the sense of what exactly was going on.”
“They are inside the main building.”
“The young man they’ve just shot matches the description of Bin Laden’s son. They Advance up the stairs leading to the top floor. Osama bin Laden pokes his head around the doorway. One of the first SEALS in the line knows that’s Bin Laden.”
“The operational signal for citing their target is sent to the command.”
“Geronimo.”
“The signals were set out by alphabet A, B, C, D. G was securing Osama Bin Laden. G for Geronimo.”
“They gun down Bin Laden with the signature double tap: one shot to the chest and one to the Head.”
“In The Situation Room it was: ‘We got him, we think, wait, maybe, we hope.’ Those were very long and tortuous moments waiting for the word.”
“They move in to confirm they got the right man. A message is sent back: EKIA, enemy killed in action.”
“One of them pushes Bin Laden’s Widow out of the way. He has to assume they may be wearing suicide vests. One of the women is bleeding from gunfire ricochets.”
“They collect DNA samples. The SEALS started evidence collection, taking photographs of Bin Laden’s face and sending those back so that two waiting teams in the CIA who were facial recognition experts measuring the length of the nose, the length of the jaw.”
“The operation is not complete. Bin Laden was running Al-Qaeda from the compound. The evidence he left behind could be used to prevent future attacks.”
“It took them 19 minutes to get to Bin Laden and then in the rest of the time they were going from room to room looking for computers, cell phones, documents, anything that might tell them what Bin Laden had been doing there for the past 6 years and anything that might lead them to other parts of the network.”
“But every minute they spend Gathering material puts the teams at greater risk.”
“One of the helicopters positioned nearby makes its way to the compound to assist in evacuating them.”
“We have everybody, we have the aircraft, that we exiting on the right route.”
“Before taking off one team blows up the crashed helicopter, making sure its classified design features and Technology will not fall into the wrong hands.”
“In the early morning hours the SEAL teams finally make it back to Jalalabad.”
“Before being taken away Al-Qaeda’s leader is identified with almost 100% certainty.”
“Hours later his body will arrive at the USS Carl Vinson and Bin Laden will be given a Burial at Sea.”
“The White House team is getting ready to announce the news to the world. America’s number one most Wanted terrorist is dead.”
“When the helicopters got back over the border into Afghanistan and it dawned on the people inside the situation room and the top secret officials that they’ve done it. Looks like we’ve got Bin Laden and all the SEALS and all the team supporting them is safely out. That’s when people quietly started popping the champagne bottles.”
“Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.”
“When President Obama goes to congratulate the SEALS who took part in the mission a few days later, the question of the identity of the seal who shot Bin Laden comes up. They collectively answer: ‘We all did, Sir.’”
“The team then hands the president an American flag with an inscription saying, ‘Operation Neptune Spear, May 1st 2011, for God and Country. Geronimo.’”
