23

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
March 23, 2011, 1545 Hours Local Time

“We’re ready for you, Boss.” Bin Laden Group Chief Dick Hallett stood in the partially opened door to the director’s inner office. The former Marine was a big man, barrel-chested. A weight lifter and a skier with a vacation house in Idaho. He hadn’t had much time for the latter in the past eight months, although he was religious about bench-pressing three days a week in the CIA gym to relieve stress. Stress had been a big part of Hallett’s life since early the previous August. That was when his top analyst, George S. Nupkins, a.k.a. Spike, had painstakingly laid out his argument about UBL and the Khan compound in Abbottabad, and suggested that once eyes-on had been established, CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division should mount a covert capture/kill mission to take Bin Laden out.

Spike made sense, too—at least the part about UBL’s location. His rationale answered all those nagging questions about how and where, and why Bin Laden was leaving so few ripples, such weak spoor, and such sparse footprints.

Spike’s conclusion: there were no footprints because UBL wasn’t moving. He’d gone to ground. He wasn’t transmitting. He was static. No electronic signals intelligence signature. No Internet. He was obviously passing messages through his two trusted couriers. The selfsame couriers who had bought land and built a huge compound on the outskirts of Abbottabad, a house large enough to hold at least three families: Arshad’s, Tareq’s, and a third one as well. With a privacy wall surrounding the third-story balcony tall enough to shield the six-foot-five Bin Laden from prying eyes. And the Khans were always there. Except when they traveled, to the Gulf, and Yemen, and the Maghreb, and Europe.

Only last week, Spike noted wryly, Arshad had flown from Lahore to Abu Dhabi, and from there to Frankfurt. He stayed one night there, having dinner with the publisher of an Islamist magazine, then took a train to Paris, where he caught the Chunnel train to London. And then it was on to the coast and a ferry to Dublin.

Spike paused. “And between the time his passport was stamped at Frankfurt and he climbed off the ferry in Ireland, guess what: no one checked his passport. Because it was all EU-centric. Because despite a real threat, the Euros are either lazy or just careless.”

In Dublin, Spike continued, Arshad checked into The Fitzwilliam, a fashionable hotel on St. Stephen’s Green. It was, Spike noted, the same hotel Tareq had stayed at in 2005, when he’d made that significant phone call back to Abbottabad. On this trip it was the same hotel, as it turned out, where a trio of young British citizens of Pakistani descent were also staying. The Brits, two from Manchester, one Londoner, were on an MI-5 watch list and suspected of terrorist activity. They and Arshad had gone out to dinner at a neighborhood restaurant called Hugo’s, where they’d spent hours talking in code about possible operations. “Thank God,” Spike said, “MI-5 was on the case.”

There was more. “All those places Arshad visited?” Spike asked rhetorically. “Al-Qaeda has operational cells. One wonders from whom he was bringing messages, since the villa he lives in has no phones, no Internet, no comms at all. There’s been only one incoming call in months—and that was Tareq again, when his kid was sick. And we know neither of the Khan brothers is an operator. They don’t do bombs or explosives. They’re couriers. They carry messages face to face.

“Imagine. No incoming information. And yet, they certainly have lots of information to take away. And to deliver face to face. How . . . coincidental.” Spike’s eyes glistened. “How . . . asymmetric.”

“Gotcha.” It struck a chord. Dick Hallett knew that in the intelligence business there are no coincidences. And he understood “asymmetric” not just because he was a Marine, but because he was a Marine who studied Marines. And one of the Marines he’d studied was a three-star Marine general named Paul Van Riper.

In 2002, then-SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld ordered a major war game, the largest war game the Pentagon had ever put together. It was called Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02), a $250 million multilevel, multitheater multiexercise that ran from July 24 to August 15. MC02 included live, table-top, and computer battlefield simulations. The reason for the war game was Secretary Rumsfeld’s desire to test his theories of “force transformation” and “network-centric warfare,” in which U.S. forces, continuously linked by data, information, and joint operational tactics, defeat an enemy by employing overwhelming technological superiority: precision-guided munitions, automated C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence), overhead surveillance systems like satellites and UAVs, and sophisticated SIGINT, IMINT, and MASINT (signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, and measurement and signatures intelligence) to spy on an enemy’s communications, capabilities, and positioning. Rumsfeld’s theory was that by relying on technological superiority, you could wage warfare, if not on the cheap, then certainly in a more efficient, digitized manner, resulting in victory less dependent on old-fashioned analog warfare, that is, boots on the ground.

The United States was represented by the Blue Team, and the Blue Team had the best capabilities that the science of war could produce. The bad guys—an unnamed Middle East country that should have been called Iraq—was represented by the Red Team. Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper was in charge of the bad guys. Van Riper is a big proponent of the art of war, not the science of war. As he himself once put it to an interviewer on the PBS science show NOVA, “The art of war and the science of war are not coequal. The art of war is clearly the most important. It’s science in support of the art.”

Bottom line: Van Riper employed the art of war against the Blue Team. How do you defeat an overwhelming enemy? You employ the art of war, following dictums written three thousand years ago by Sun Tzu. You go asymmetric.

So Van Riper’s messages were delivered by motorcycle messenger or F2F (face to face), not via cell phone or radio. He used small boats, like the ones used by Somali pirates, to gather intelligence on the Blue Fleet. And then, while his Blue adversaries were still trying to get a fix on him, he launched a massive, preemptive strike combined with suicide attacks.

In the first seventy-two hours of MC02, Van Riper sank one Blue aircraft carrier, ten Blue cruisers, and five Blue amphibious ships and caused more than twenty thousand Blue Force casualties.

As the story goes, Rummy hit the ceiling. Van Riper had hit him where it hurt the most: right in the transformation. At that point, MC02 was suspended. The Blue Fleet was refloated, and the war game was resumed. With certain changes, changes that guaranteed a Blue victory. The Red Force would henceforth follow a predetermined script. It was like the field maneuvers in the movie Heartbreak Ridge, in which the idiot major’s force always beats the Recon platoon, until Gunny Highway uses unconventional methods to shake things up and Recon comes out on top.

But real life ain’t Hollywood, and the good guys don’t always win. Real life is politics and hundreds of billions of dollars in defense contracts, and if all those expensive technological goodies like littoral combat ships and F-22 fighters can be defeated by guys in small boats and raggedy-ass insurgents with RPGs, then why are we spending all this $$$$$ on crap that doesn’t work against asymmetric adversaries?

The answer is simple: because we rig the war games so the military-industrial complex can prosper.

Except: Paul Van Riper was more concerned with the art of war than the art of making money. He resigned from MC02. He retired from the Marine Corps. Then he went public. He told anyone who would listen that having overwhelming force and cutting-edge technology doesn’t mean you’re going to win against an asymmetric enemy who can adapt, identify your vulnerabilities, and exploit them.

Van Riper’s theory was proved correct in Iraq by AQI and by the thousands of IED attacks against our forces.

So when Spike came to Dick Hallett with his Abbottabad theory, and Hallett spent two days arguing devil’s advocate but couldn’t shake the keep-it-simple-stupid, makes-sense logic of Spike’s arguments, he and Spike took the case to Stu Kapos, who listened, and then called up to the director’s office and asked for an appointment.

Within twenty-four hours, Hallett had been instructed to commence an operation that would result in a covert CIA entity, Valhalla Base, being established in Abbottabad. From that base an undercover team of CIA spooks would observe the Khan compound from afar and penetrate it utilizing the latest state-of-the-art eavesdropping, thermal, and optical equipment available. The goal: lay eyes on UBL. Then find a way to kill him.