This World s12e08 Episode Script

He was the world's most wanted man and the CIA operation to track down Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan was one of America's greatest intelligence coups.
But do we know the real story? Definitely they managed to hide a lot of the truth.
One day, we will know about it.
They can not hide this secret for ever.
Now a new and controversial account alleges Pakistan's intelligence service was hiding Bin Laden for years.
They just handed him over to the Americans.
This was not a tough mission, it was a turkey shoot, as they call it.
They just go in, whack the guy-- they were always going to kill him-- carry the body out-- the Pakistanis said, don't leave a body So, is the American official account a lie? Was the death of Bin Laden a grand conspiracy? It's rubbish.
100% of the story that's out there is true-- but not 100% of the story is out there.
June 17th, 2015 Operation Neptune Spear.
US Navy Seals fly under cover of darkness into the heart of Pakistan to get the man they hope is Bin Laden.
This was a covert action, so it was a CIA operation.
The deputy CIA director was at the heart of the White House team that night.
Michael Morell's given us his inside account.
The Seals on the ground said, "Geronimo, EKIA.
" Which, Geronimo was the call sign for, "We think we got Bin Laden.
" 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.
USA.
USA.
USA.
The American people were told the Pakistanis weren't informed about the raid, for fear Bin Laden would be tipped off and escape.
This was, you know, extraordinary operational security on the part of the United States of America.
It's both a testament to the capabilities of the United States and quite frankly a testament to the lack of capabilities of the Pakistanis.
But a very different story about the death of Bin Laden's now emerged from a veteran investigative journalist whose scoops have embarrassed Administrations in Washington before.
Seymour Hersh says the whole US raid was staged.
Pakistani intelligence was holding Bin Laden and just gave him up.
If you want to believe they can go in and out and evade any radar, you're in fairyland.
You're in Lewis Carroll-land.
Alice in Wonderland, whatever.
The only reason they could even plan the mission with as little force as they had, is they knew there would be no opposition.
The official American account of the death of Bin Laden is a fiction, according to Mr.
Hersh.
But the problem is, his version's largely based on information from a mystery man he doesn't identify.
Seymour Hersh says he had one major US source for his account of the tracking and killing of Osama Bin Laden.
That anonymous source, he says, was a retired senior intelligence official.
Seymour Hersh says that his main source was in the meetings.
This person was never in any of the meetings that I was in.
Because the meetings I were in were completely different than the Seymour Hersh story.
So, what do we know about the hunt for Bin Laden? I've been reporting on him for nearly two decades.
I was in the caves at Tora Bora after the 9/11 attacks, where Bin Laden hid as American airstrikes pounded the country.
There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, "Wanted.
Dead or Alive.
" For years, the al-Qaeda leader taunted the CIA, releasing videos suggesting he was still somewhere in the mountains.
We had hundreds of leads on Bin Laden over the years and we'd literally followed every single one of them until you hit a brick wall.
We now know that all this time Bin Laden was living in a series of Pakistani cities.
At one point, he was in a car pulled over for speeding.
But he'd shaved off his beard and escaped detection.
His youngest wife gave birth twice in a Pakistani clinic.
Doctors were told she was deaf and dumb.
Amazingly, in 2005, he and his family moved to a military garrison town.
I went to Abbottabad a day after Bin Laden was killed.
He'd been living just yards from Pakistan's top military academy.
Well, this is the entrance to the actual compound area.
It's sealed off by the police at the moment.
We're having to walk through.
Bin Laden allegedly stayed hidden in this compound for nearly six years, right under the noses of the Pakistani military elite.
But Seymour Hersh claims that's because he was actually a prisoner here.
Bin Laden had been captured around 2006 by the Pakistanis.
It's not credible that Bin Laden could live in Abbottabad surrounded by major defence areas.
It's a major area of defence for the Pakistani military.
Bin Laden lived behind high walls in the compound with three wives and 12 children and grandchildren.
The official American account says he was in hiding.
He remained al-Qaeda's kingpin and was protected by two brothers-- al-Qaeda henchmen.
They lived here with their families too and acted as bodyguards and couriers, smuggling out his orders.
Journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who spent time with Bin Laden in Afghanistan isn't surprised he managed to hide for so long in Pakistan.
He actually supervised the security of the house by himself and he did not let anybody to interfere on that.
He never used a satellite telephone.
He never used smartphones.
Bin Laden went to bizarre lengths to hide his identity.
Fearing surveillance from satellites overhead, his family say he even wore a cowboy hat when outside in the compound.
Nobody will expect Osama Bin Laden to wear a cowboy hat.
Maybe, it's just to say to the satellite, you know, "I'm not Osama Bin Laden.
" It does show he was very clever and even when he disguised, he knows what kind of hat to wear.
According to the official account, Bin Laden managed to keep his large family, including a toddler, completely hidden.
He controlled every aspect of his children's lives, they never went out-- not even to school.
There is no picnics.
There is no going to the park or something like this.
No playing in the streets, like other children.
So, definitely, it was an awful way of life.
In a video found in the compound, released by the Americans, Bin Laden is seen watching his own propaganda.
He also had books on conspiracy theories even one suggesting the 9/11 attacks were an American inside job.
He had a lot of conspiracy theories, which isn't terribly surprising, because in some sense he was a weaver of conspiracy theories.
I mean, that was sort of his art.
Bin Laden's wide range of books even included Christine Fair's on terrorism in Pakistan.
I think what really struck me was just how well read he was.
But, then, if you think about it-- you're Bin Laden in Abbottabad, what else are you supposed to do? He was evil, but he wasn't stupid.
This we do know.
There were other, more surprising finds in the compound-- natural Viagra and, according to American intelligence, even pornography.
I know from the people I talk to that that is the case.
It's been very consistent with these Jihadis.
I don't believe this story about pornography in his computer.
Why? Because this man actually is a very religious man and he got three wives.
What does he need that pornography for? I think this is a black propaganda.
Throughout Bin Laden's years in the compound, the CIA were desperately trying to find him.
The key, they say, was to identify and track his courier, knowing he would lead them to Bin Laden.
We found Bin Laden in the compound by following the courier.
It took us a number of years to learn his real name, it took us a couple more years to identify his general location somewhere in Pakistan.
Took us another year to identify his specific location and put eyes on him.
In August 2010, Michael Morell says he was finally able to brief the President on their breakthrough.
The President essentially said, "I want to know more about what's going on in that compound and I don't want you to tell anybody else about this.
Nobody else in our Government knows about this-- we keep it in this small circle.
" The CIA set up a surveillance post in a nearby house to watch the compound.
Bin Laden had taken every precaution to keep himself hidden.
No phone and no internet at the compound.
They burned their trash.
The brothers didn't turn their phones on until they were 30 miles away from the compound.
Numerous CIA officials have testified to the tracking of the courier, but Seymour Hersh rejects all that.
I think the notion that Bin Laden was operational and having couriers come in and out and in contact is just ludicrous.
Mr.
Hersh claims instead that a retired Pakistani military intelligence officer walked in to the CIA station in the US embassy in Islamabad.
It was this man, not the courier, who revealed Pakistan was hiding Bin Laden, says Mr.
Hersh.
We had offered $25 million for information about Bin Laden and he certainly did learn where Bin Laden was, not directly, through somebody else and he eventually cashed in what he knew for the money.
But to the veteran American spy who ran Alec Station-- the special CIA Bin Laden unit-- the story of the walk-in doesn't ring true.
If you have a walk-in-- maybe 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 20 that gives you something useful-- that's a pretty good average.
For someone to be able to walk in and give you this whole story at one drop is certainly would be spectacularly unusual.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that nobody ever walked in with a significant piece of information about Bin Laden's whereabouts.
That led to you knowing his whereabouts? Absolutely, never happened.
But Seymour Hersh goes much further.
He claims the walk in revealed Bin Laden's whereabouts was known at the highest levels in Pakistan.
Basically, it went to the top of the Pakistani intelligence and military services.
If you want to believe that he can go and live there without being known to the intelligence service of Pakistan, then you are living in a fairy tale.
We couldn't speak to Mr.
Hersh's crucial, anonymous sources, but we've talked to some of the other people he quotes in his account.
One of them does provide some support for his theory.
Carlotta Gall spent more than a decade reporting from Pakistan, from 9/11 till after Bin Laden's death.
I came to understand how the intelligence service runs safe houses.
Very high walls, but non-descript otherwise-- but no obvious guarding on the outside.
It all made sense that the military had to have known and had to have been watching this place.
So, to me, this looked just like that sort of safe house, you know.
Carlotta Gall says she received an intriguing tip-off that the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, knew all about Bin Laden.
I found out that they were running a special intelligence desk, which was specifically to handle Bin Laden and it was only run by one man, he made his own decisions-- so it was a very small number of people knew.
But they were hiding him and keeping him in some sort of protective custody.
Do you think that knowledge extended right to the top of the intelligence service, to the head of the Army? I think it went right to the top, yes.
The head of the army, Chief of Army Staff, as they call it, and the head of the ISI, the intelligence service.
I think what I'd learned was that they were in on the whole thing from the start of hiding Bin Laden in that house.
Pakistan's intelligence service has always denied they were hiding Bin Laden or knew where he was.
But the general who headed the ISI more than 20 years ago, gave Seymour Hersh's account some qualified support.
No-one has talked to me about this particular affair from the ISI, from the military or from any other quarters.
My assessment has always been that someone did know and ultimately the whole thing happened with co-operation from the military.
If this assessment is, to some extent, valid, it makes sense, then, the highest levels had to be involved.
I am 95 to 99% certain that the Pakistani government, as an institution, did not know-- civilian, military, ISI did not know.
I can't tell you why I believe that, but I do.
I am not at all convinced that somebody in the ISI Abbottabad detachment or in the ISI police department weren't working for al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda sympathisers and in some way protecting him there.
Oh, sure, they had Bin Laden and they kept it at a low level.
There you go, you're living in Lewis Carroll fancy land again, of course it went to the top.
My God, can you imagine having Bin Laden, you'd be-- you'd be strung up and quartered if you didn't tell the boss about it.
But there's another possible explanation-- the murky history of rogue elements operating inside Pakistan's army and intelligence.
That's what some respected analysts say.
It's called the enemy within, whether it's in the intelligence apparatus, security apparatus or even at the level of businesses-- people who simply sympathise with the cause of Osama Bin Laden.
I think that the highest level-- that would be the president of Pakistan, the army chief or the prime minister-- were not aware of the presence of Osama Bin Laden in that particular compound-- this doesn't seem plausible to me.
But Imtiaz Gul was quoted by Seymour Hersh to bolster his argument that Pakistanis at the highest level knew about Bin Laden.
I personally think Mr.
Seymour Hersh has tried to quote me and many others out of context.
He needed a spin for his story.
I guess I'm sorry if-- if I've put him on the spot by quoting from his book, but I didn't misquote it.
And if he wants to recant what his book says, that's, that's his problem, not mine.
By the beginning of 2011, according to the official account, the net was closing round Bin Laden.
Just three months before the raid, there was a new arrival-- Bin Laden's oldest wife, who'd been living in Iran since after 9/11.
She'd been warned even to remove recent fillings from her teeth in case a bug had been planted in them.
It must have been like mafia wives.
You know, these are women who have children with known killers and every day that you're with that person you're putting, you know, your child in harm's way.
The CIA were focused now on a mysterious man in the garden of the compound.
We first saw this person who would pace around the compound and we called him, "The pacer".
We could never get a very good look at him.
We never did identify the individual but we assumed, we assumed it was Bin Laden.
President Obama made the decision to launch a military mission into the heart of Pakistan, apparently without telling his ally.
At the end of the day, the President decided that the risks of bringing the Pakistanis into it in any way, was simply too high.
And it wasn't-- We weren't concerned that the Pakistani government, as an institution, would tip off Bin Laden.
We were concerned that somebody in the Pakistani system would tip off al-Qaeda and therefore Bin Laden would be tipped off, and he'd be long gone before we ever got there.
But in a radically different account, Seymour Hersh claims the Americans told the Pakistanis they knew they were hiding Bin Laden.
To avoid that embarrassing revelation, the Pakistanis were forced to agree on the US plan to assassinate him and then cover up the truth.
We made an agreement with the Pakistanis that we would go in, do our business-- the SEALS are very good, this was not a tough mission.
It was a, a turkey-- a turkey shoot, as they call it, they just go in, whack the guy, they were always going to kill him, carry the body out The Pakistanis said, "Don't leave a body.
" On a moonless night in May, US helicopters flew over the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan.
According to a former Navy SEAL, it looked like a one-way ticket.
Most of the guys did not think they were going to survive the op.
Every one of them willingly went into this to get the most evil person on the planet.
Then the mission was suddenly in jeopardy.
One of the helicopters crashed as it hovered over the compound.
It was very tense and was particularly tense when the helicopter went down.
Military operations don't always go as they're planned.
But, incredibly, the US mission was able to continue.
That, says Seymour Hersh, is just more evidence the raid was staged by the Americans with help from the Pakistanis.
Seymour Hersh says the Pakistanis were keeping him prisoner there, right, under house arrest.
Not true.
Absolutely not true that the Pakistanis knew that we were going to do the raid and we had given them advanced warning and that they cleared the air space.
Not true.
None of that is true.
According to the official American account, there was a firefight-- the Seals killed the armed al-Qaeda henchmen and Bin Laden's son.
When the SEALS reached Bin Laden's bedroom, they wounded his wife as she tried to protect him.
Bin Laden was shot in the head.
He never used the pistol and AK-47 he had in the room.
The fact that he actually was not totally submissive, with his hands up or making any type of movement at all, sealed his fate.
It was very clear to the SEALS that if he did not have a suicide vest on, that he was not going to put their lives at risk, they would have, they would have captured him, right? But as long as there was any risk, right, that he was going to put their lives in harm's way they were going to kill him.
Oh, my God, of course it was a kill mission, from day one.
I mean, it was absolutely a I don't want to break the heart of your British audience, but we do assassinate people.
There's a picture of me kind of hugging the Director of CIA.
But we weren't really certain until much later that night that the individual that was killed at that compound was indeed Bin Laden.
The helicopter crash, the shooting from the compound, alerted neighbours, who did call the police.
But, curiously, the Abbottabad army command told them not to respond.
It's in a military town, it's right near the military academy.
So, the police were told to stand down and then we found out that the military didn't get there while the Americans were still on the ground-- and they were there for 40 minutes.
So that was very strange.
The first helicopter lifted off with Bin Laden's body.
In his most shocking allegation, Mr.
Hersh says the US SEALS threw parts of the body out on the way back to Afghanistan.
Mr.
Hersh is being really irresponsible, dangerous and I can tell you every special operative is looking at this Hersh guy and laughing.
I have not talked to a SEAL on the mission I have talked to many SEALS who know the people and I did have access to some of the initial debriefs, and they talked about throwing out parts of the body.
I've been around hundreds of SEALS, hundreds, and I don't know one with the deviation of character or the insidious nature that would ever consider dismembering another human being, even if it were practical, and in this sense it was absolutely not only impractical but impossible to do.
Facial recognition and DNA tests proved without doubt it was Osama Bin Laden.
But to this day, no photographic evidence has ever been produced of his body or his burial.
Bin Laden's body was put on a plane in Jalalabad and flown from Afghanistan to a US military ship at sea, where he received a proper Muslim burial at sea.
I know that for a fact because I've seen photographs, and I've seen the video of the burial.
Do you think we'll ever get to see them? I don't know, I don't know.
That's a call for the White House.
So why not put them up? I mean, isn't that an obvious question? That's the way to handle me-- put out the photographs.
Show us the I mean, give me a reason you can't.
It's classified? We've all talked about it.
The mistake they made, and it allows Mr.
Hersh and others to come up with counter theories, was they didn't show the pictures of Osama Bin Laden spread dead.
Why they didn't do that, I don't know.
But, er, secrecy breeds conspiracy theories.
The SEALS seized a haul of documents and computers from the compound.
A decade after 9/11, the CIA say those documents proved Bin Laden still played a critical role and still was a threat.
It was a treasure trove.
What we found in the documents was that Bin Laden was running the organisation day-to-day He was still very much interested in conducting attacks against the West and against the United States in particular.
You never talk about a trove because the last thing you want to do is let the other side know you have such intelligence.
The only reason to mention a treasure trove is when you didn't get anything.
But just a few days after Seymour Hersh's article appeared, the US government released more than 100 of the thousands of documents seized in the compound.
At the US military academy at West Point, they've tracked al-Qaeda for years.
Now they're analysing the latest haul of papers, which include instructions to field commanders and details of the inner workings of al-Qaeda.
- Now this one looks like a financial document? - Yeah.
This is a financial document that shows different inflows and outflows of money from an account, that was used to pay Make payments to individuals or to otherwise finance the organisation.
Now, what about this one here? This is a kind of jihadi application form for the organisation.
That's exactly what it is.
At the very end it says, you know, "If you should become a martyr, who should we contact? Who should we get in touch with if you've actually been successful in this venture?" So do the documents reveal Bin Laden was still the kingpin of al-Qaeda? He is both offering advice and trying to pull strings, but he is also trying to deal with the fact that he can't directly command and control these organisations in their daily activities.
The CIA and the American government call this a "treasure trove".
Do you think that's overstating it? I think that the sum total of the documents represent a treasure trove and I think that the documents speak for themselves and give us a great window into this organisation and into how we can continue to fight against it.
Bin Laden's compound was quickly demolished.
The American operation caused deep shock and embarrassment in Pakistan.
That shame could be behind the latest conspiracy theory, says the CIA man at the heart of the operation.
The only way to get out from underneath the embarrassment of us finding him and them not is to have been involved in it all along.
So it's a story they've been trying to peddle.
So I think, finally some American somewhere bought that story and then sold it to Seymour Hersh-- that's what I think happened.
Of course it's possible.
I could I could It's possible that right now, in my office, I've got a cheque for $1 million from the Pakistani Intelligence Service.
Anything's possible, Jane.
The American government has dismissed Mr.
Hersh's account outright, as just a conspiracy theory.
It's rubbish Almost every sentence is inaccurate.
I can tell you with absolutely certainty that the story told by the United States Government is 100% true 100% of the story that's out there is true, but not 100% of the story is out there.
Seymour Hersh stands by his story.
He's still convinced there was a grand conspiracy-- involving not just Pakistan, but the American government and its military.
We keep a lot of secrets, despite the fact that people think that it's all Everything leaks.
So much stuff goes on that is secret that isn't kept, so you know, you can say conspiracy theory all you want but it just doesn't make sense.
And will the world at large ever know 100% of the story? Probably not, because we have to be able to protect the way we do our job.
Bringing Bin Laden to justice was a very significant battle in this war It was not the end of the war.
It was just a very significant victory in that war.
The war goes on.