 Hi everybody, my name is Brian Fishman. I'm a fellow here at the New America Foundation And I have the pleasure today of introducing Peter Bergen The man that hired me at New America, so that's fun And I you know Peter doesn't require that much of an introduction. I think he's you know, he's one of the The best-known analysts of al-Qaeda one of the most experienced analysts of al-Qaeda in Washington and and one of the most high-profile as well he's the National Security Correspondent at CNN. He's been here at New America for for years has a number of books under his belt including the recent one manhunt about the hunt for bin Laden the the hunt for and ultimately Securing of or killing of Osama bin Laden So I'm just gonna tell two brief little anecdotes to try to embarrass Peter before he comes to talk The the people don't know because he is so well-known on the the first one is I think that people don't know that how sort of unceremonial Peter Peter actually is And that's hallmarked by the fact that I wasn't actually going to introduce him today He just sort of wanted to do this himself not have an introduction and one of our sort of organizers Faith Smith or one of our gurus back there said Brian you've got to come do this you've got it He can't introduce himself. Somebody's got to introduce him So so so please go ahead Which I think says something about sort of Peter's Where Peter's focus has always been and this is one of the things I've learned from working with him is he cares about getting things done and Accomplishments and not so much the ceremonial aspects, which is really to his credit I think and then the second thing that I just want to retell a short story. We were talking about The end of the sort of finishing of manhunt and I asked Peter what his next project was going to be He said, you know, I'm gonna take a little bit of downtime and I said, yeah I mean you've been working your butt off on this thing for over a year and he said, you know Actually, it's been since 9-eleven and I think that that perspective is is really kind of interesting where Peter has been The one of the leading if not the leading analyst of al-Qaeda for the entire duration since 9-eleven and beforehand when he was paying attention But the rest of us were not and so I Hope you do get some downtime and and with that I'm going to turn it over to Peter to talk about the book I'll ask a few questions and then we'll turn it over to the audience Thank You Brian for that very kind invitation and thank you everybody for coming today What I thought I would do is Talk about the big themes that I when I started writing the book And arguably I've been writing it for a long time in my lease in my head. I Basically had a year or less than a year to write and research and edit the book and As I sat down to write it I did something which I hadn't done and really we're not writing a book before which is really think about what are the big sort of themes that I need to think about rather than just start writing and So there were five or six sort of themes that I thought were important to think about as I was writing the book first of all President Obama as a commander-in-chief was an important theme Secondly and as a decision-maker generally Secondly the sort of evolution of the Agatha Christie story of how the courier was found at the CIA Thirdly the elevator the evolution of JSOC joint special operations command Which obviously was critical to the the gen you know if this is basically an Agatha Christie story with the James Bond ending You know JSOC Supplied the sort of James Bond aspect of it and the CIA supplied the Agatha Christie aspect of it another big theme was Kind of the evolution of the US-Pakistani relationship because of course this whole event happened in the context of You know a much worsening US-Pakistan relationship and the final sort of Related big theme was you know what was bin Laden doing and what essentially had happened to al-Qaeda in the years that he was on the run So those were the sort of themes that I thought were sort of important to think about as I was writing the book and Just to sort of take them in more or less in the order of that. I just laid out You know President Obama is probably the first winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who went and in his acceptance speech laid out his philosophy of war and His philosophy of war In the Nobel Prize acceptance speech at Oslo. I thought was a very interesting way to think about President Obama as a commander-in-chief You know he said and I'm paraphrasing when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize Which by the way happened a week after he had Publicly announced the surge of 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan He said essentially, you know much as I admire the tradition of You know of Gandhi and of Martin Luther King it wouldn't have done much to stop the Nazis And you can't really negotiate with al-Qaeda and in fact a defense it was essentially a defense of just war theory and it President Obama wound up his his observations by sort of saying, you know He wasn't sort of endorsing the use of violence, but in certain situations It becomes necessary because essentially, you know any student of human history can tell that at certain points Violence will be necessary to to achieve your goals And of course President Obama has turned out to be quite a disappointing president for many people who voted for him on The basis of the fact that he might be the anti-war president But in fact if you go back to and as I do in the book in on August I think August 1st 2007 President then-candidate Obama gave a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center, which was Understood by the people in his in his team which included Susan Rice Dennis McDonough and Ben Rhodes That this was going to be a very critical speech because it was going to be the kind of foreign policy speech of The of the candidate that was going to get the most notice and they labeled over a particular line in the speech quite for quite some period of time a lot the line essentially was If President Moushara won't do Enough to go after how al-Qaeda high-value targets in Pakistan We reserve the right to unilaterally do so now as you may recall President then-candidate Obama was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for this Mitt Romney described him as a doctor strange love at the time John McCain Hillary Clinton senator of Christopher Dodd. They all basically Criticized President Obama for this statement saying that you know, we shouldn't unilaterally Attack one of our allies No one really took President candidate Obama seriously enough But clearly he was serious about this and when it came down to the decision in the situation room about a unilateral raid President Obama pushed back against a number of people who said that that was the wrong thing to do And it you know one of the the final scene in the book One of the final scenes in the book is the April 28th meeting in which was the crucial National Security Council meeting The last of five in which basically President Obama went around the room and asked everybody for their advice and The advice that he received from Secretary Robert Gates Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who'd served every president since Richard Nixon was don't do the raid And in fact do something slightly different which was use a small small munition bomb It's called a small tactical munition. It's never been used in combat No one when I reported the book would tell me directly exactly about this It's I bet up through a sort of talking to enough people that became clear to me that this small tactical munition Is a 13-pound bomb that's been developed by Raytheon amongst others and Admiral Mullen in particular was Was not happy with this concept at all saying look we rely too much on technology and what if this doesn't work So president Secretary Robert Gates was against the unilateral raid and vice president Biden of course was against the unilateral raid Why was vice president Biden? Why was Gates against the raid? I think Gates was in particularly concerned about the ground The ground communications through Pakistan supplying NATO troops in Afghanistan He had of course that had been in the White House his operation Eagle Claw often known as operation desert one had gone on the night of April 24 25th 1980 as he was in the White House as the executive assistant to then CIA director Stanfield Turner when that operation basically went You know completely everything that could go wrong with it did go wrong as you as you may recall They'd American servicemen died I think Joe Biden was concerned about an embassy overrun in Pakistan as you may recall in 1979 An enraged mob enraged by the Salman Rushdie affair burned to the ground that the US Embassy in Islamabad Something that was on president vice president Joe Biden's mind So there was quite a lot of pushback and so for you know There was a certain narrative which obviously I didn't know about when I was writing the book But after the book came out there were you know a lot of Mitt Romney in particular said look every president would have made This decision including Jimmy Carter. Well Jimmy Carter did make this decision. He made him a one-term president He made a form of this decision that was a disaster So the idea that just any president would have made this decision. I think it's because it doesn't I mean I think it's very implausible You know the two most senior out of three of President Obama's advisors were advising something different and There was certainly by the way some costs to doing nothing because at a set You know in the final meeting on April 28th Leon Panetta said Mr. President I use a test which is you know if any a group of a more ordinary American citizens were in the room What would they say if they knew what we know now? I think they would say we should do this And so I'm not saying that there were no costs There might have been costs also by the way of doing nothing or just waiting because of course the intelligence You know bin Laden may have gone or you know There were a lot of different things that could have happened the surveillance operation might have been discovered in an abt about it cetera, et cetera, et cetera But so Obama is a decision maker Very well calibrated very careful think about this decision started The decision-making process started in August of 2010 and culminated in in May of 2011 It was almost a year of very very careful thinking about this issue A president very comfortable with use of American power. He's the first major American political figure In decades who doesn't who who what he did or did not do in Vietnam isn't front and center in his of his brain So, you know Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush didn't serve in Vietnam and that is part of their story And of course John McCain and John Kerry did and it's part very much part of their stories And so I think President Obama and a lot of a number of his younger advisors They're just not burdened by the Vietnam syndrome that an older generation of Democrats were Then on the evolution of JSOC, you know, obviously the the hero of that story in many ways is Stan McChrystal if if Let's say President George W. Bush had this the same kind of intelligence picture that was developed about abt about in 2002 and Picked up the phone and called the then head of JSOC essentially to do this operation in Pakistan It may well have gone wrong. There's a that's I think that's uncontroversial as you know There's been you know what Stan McChrystal and to some degree also his his deputy then Colonel Mike Flynn now Lieutenant General Mike Flynn Did with JSOC in Iraq is really turn What was described as the Ferrari in the garage that was never used into something that was really an incredibly agile Killing machine and they did that I get in I have a chapter in the book about how they how they were able to achieve that You know one of the main ways they achieved that was moving the whole operation out of the United States and not even out of Baghdad and putting it in Balaat Air Force Base far away from all the sort of you know typical kind of constraints that would develop in Washington and people not taking Decisions because they are frightened of failure, etc. etc. etc. McChrystal I think the the the motto there was 17 to five which is 17 hours of work two hours of relaxation and Five hours sleep so it was in a very intense environment and you know There are many reasons why the Iraq war turned around you're very familiar with the laundry list of the surge the awakening previous ethnic cleansing General portrays I mean to that list obviously JSOC must be added and then Admiral McRaven himself as a sort of person is a Very interesting character. I think in the in in the book I mean any his book special operations which he published in 1995 is really the key to thinking about how Abtabad went forward He looked at eight special operations seven from World War two and one the raid on Entebbe And in fact if there's a hero of McRaven's book It's Jonathan Netanyahu baby's older brother who of course died in the raid of Entebbe and who led the raid of Entebbe and The rate of Entebbe is an interesting just think about the contrast between Abtabad and Entebbe and Entebbe The the Palestinians had taken hostage shakers had taken a number of Israeli hostages And at the time it was inconceivable that you would fly seven hours to Uganda where they were being held from Israel That you would land at the airport And do a do a hostage rescue operation when the Israelis got off the plane They were all dressed in Uganda military uniforms They got the details so perfectly that they were driving Mercedes the tip that a Ugandan general would drive And so they had the advantage of total surprise. They rescued the hostages hostages in three minutes And what so there were a number of lessons that McRaven took from this raid and others another another interesting one is the rescue of Mussolini By the Nazis when he when Mussolini had been taken by Italian partisans The Nazis rescued him using hang gliders in an area where no one ever would a mountainous area Where no one ever would have thought that hang gliders would ever be able to land and they didn't fire a shot when they rescued Mussolini It was a sort of perfect Special forces operation and so McRaven derived a number of kind of larger lessons from these Eight case studies and he interviewed almost everybody who had been involved in these operations and actually visited the sites where they happened and They some of them are kind of obvious like surprise Some of them are less obvious perhaps repetition One of the reasons operation easel Eagle call failed was they never rehearsed no one that no one rehearsed the operation No, it's repeatedly and that of course is one of the keys to success Another big theme just moving on through the list. I mentioned at the beginning of my presentation Is what was bin Laden doing? And I think you know, we all know the story the battle Torah borrow I went to Tain you with that But in how is al-Qaeda doing in this period? I had written a previous book the longest war which came out In the middle of January of 2011 it happened before the Arab Spring and obviously before the death of bin Laden But I think the theme of the longest war was al-Qaeda has been losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world for a very long time Their ability to do an attack on the West is very constrained And I think the events of the Arab Spring and the death of bin Laden amply amply can you know kind of confirm those those kind of conclusions? The US-Pakistan relationship Obviously has never really been worse unfortunately and it peaked arguably with arraignment Davis affair Now the one you think about the president's decision-making process and all this bear in mind that Raymond Davis is in prison as These decisions are being made and Raymond Davis there was a great deal of concern at the National Security Council that Davis might be killed in prison That there was a very great deal of concern that he might be killed if this operation went forward There was also a very great deal of concern in the National Security Council that if the operation went wrong in Abtabad that instead of one Raymond Davis in prison you'd have 24 Raymond Davis's or not Raymond Davis like people but you 24 US Navy SEALs who might get involved in some sort of hostage problem So on March 16th Raymond Davis is released from Pakistani jail a very interesting story about how that happened That I you know that basically by paying blood money for you know the fact that he killed two Pakistanis And that I think helped the decision to move forward because with Davis it's still being in jail It might have been a more complicated decision But the Davis kind of story also very much influenced how Abtabad was constructed as an operation I quote Admiral Mullen in the book He was absolutely adamant that this is something that he wanted to put on the on the record that it was President Obama who said we need to make this operation a larger operation than it's presently being presented By which he meant more you need more quick react quick reaction force We need more helicopters because what if something goes wrong because when McRaven to come to President Obama with the initial plan He had believed that it was predicated on the idea that we should not anger the Pakistanis unnecessarily And so he put in a relatively small package Obama basically said go back to the drawing board so instead of two or three helicopters it became five helicopters two black orcs And three chinooks two of which were landed relatively close to Abtabad and one of which was to remain on the Afghan Pakistan border And of course something did go wrong and the backup wasn't necessary But this this all happened in the context of a very very difficult US-Pakistani relationship And of course this is one of the reasons the US-Pakistani relationship continues to get worse and worse Interesting sort of minor point on this The reason that President Obama went out at 1135 on Sunday night on May 1st to make this announcement about President about Osama bin Laden being captured killed was because the Pakistanis put pressure on The the administration to announce it you may recall that there was not a hundred percent DNA match There was a 95% DNA and match that evening. There was a very good facial recognition match but there wasn't a hundred percent and President Obama was extremely reluctant to go out and be have a 5% chance of being wrong about a rather important issue and What happened was Mullen calls general Keane? That's probably about 5 a.m. Pakistani time 8 p.m. Washington time and says we've killed the son of the modern and Keane By now was aware that that was that something along those lines. Probably it happened And he first reaction is congratulations from Keane. The second is the rest of 20-minute phone call is pretty tense and Keane basically says look we have a Helicopter down that is obviously not a Pakistani helicopter in Abbott about we have media already gathering at the site We can't explain this because it's not our operation You are going to have to go out and explain this as fast as possible because no one will understand Unless it's something this you know an operation to get Osama bin Laden then it becomes a lot more Understandable and so Mullen comes back into the situation room says Keane wants us to go out and make this public And there are other people in the situation room particularly on the communication side who was saying look We need to get out there and we need to explain what happened So the US the the declining US Pakistani relationship was was was part of all this and Then you know, what is this I guess you know in kind of being wrapping this up. What does this all mean? I Mean you could make the argument that At the end of the day bin Laden was sort of irrelevant by the time he was killed So does that mean therefore that the operation itself was irrelevant and my book doesn't mean anything and you know nobody should read it? Or does it mean something else and obviously I have a very strong self-interest in saying that it does matter And I think it does matter, you know, there's no doubt that bin Laden had become less and less relevant over time There's no doubt that al-Qaeda has become less and less relevant over time And in fact today they pose Extraordinarily marginal threat to the United States itself That said, you know, there is the matter of justice for the many victims of 9-11 not only the people who lost their lives with their families I don't think you could kind of close the chapter on the war and terror without killing or capturing a song bin Laden Because at the end of the day, what was the war on terror about it was really about finding one person I mean if the Taliban had handed over a Assam bin Laden in October or November of 2011 History would have been very different different. We might not have invaded Afghanistan I think it would have been impossible to have invaded Iraq I Think the whole history of the whole national security history that we are so familiar with of the last decade plus would have been very different and so You know, I think a way of ending the war on terror or the war against al-Qaeda and its allies was to was to capture or kill Bin Laden and I think you know, I went on the night that bin Laden was killed I went on CNN and will bliss it turned to me and said what's your reaction? I hadn't really sort of it was immediately after president stopped speaking and I said the war and the war on terror is over We can more or less announce that right now, and I think that's still a very defensible statement You know, we have a choice now we can sort of say well You know the war on terror continues because they're still members of al-Qaeda and they still pose some kind of threat I think that that's a kind of lazy way to think about things We can't be in a state of kind of quasi permanent war Against a group of people that don't pose much of a threat to us I think that it's very hard for politics for a politician like president Obama or any politician to say You know, essentially we have we have won against al-Qaeda and we can just declare victory and move on because what if we were even 1% wrong the political costs of having an attack that could be traced in any way to al-Qaeda or like-minded groups Even with a small death toll would be very high if you'd made that kind of statement But I think people in my position or people in Brian's position who are you know sort of have credibility in the field I think that we almost have an obligation to sort of say this problem is really been managed And it's it's and it's two parts of this. It's al-Qaeda's own weaknesses Which are just you know manifold and then it's our own strength rather than speaking I mean just to throw out just a couple of observations on that point On 9-11 there were 16 people on the no-fly list today. They're 21,000 on 9-11. There was no TSA today There is a TSA you can debate where that's put in a perfect world. It would exist, but it does exist There on 9-11. There was no DHS on 9-11 the CIA and the FBI didn't talk to each other basically on 9-11 There were just a few joint terrorism task forces now. They're more than a hundred We have 860,000 Americans with top-secret clearances We have a huge national security industrial complex. It used to get like you know 25 billion dollars a year just for intelligence now It's 80 billion You know and we're in a time of budgetary constraints. We need to be thinking that we need to be thinking about you know reformulating that I think And also thinking about the other sort of white swans or grey swans or black swans that may be coming down the pike That aren't al-Qaeda because after all You know 9-11 was a big surprise to a lot of people It maybe shouldn't have been but there will be other threats that we Need to think about and I think the cyber attacks that we've launched on Iran something that we should be having a public discussion about because There's a certain point. We're not going to enjoy a monopoly on this forever this kind of technology And it is not inconceivable that a state might try and attack us in a similar manner So with that I'll take brief some questions from Brian and any questions that you might have I guess I'm just gonna ask a couple of questions and then turn it over to the audience But you know the first question that I have is about There was this small cadre of people right you outside of government looking at problems like al-Qaeda But then there were people inside of government that were dealing with issues on the sort of margins of al-Qaeda or groups that later Came to be part of al-Qaeda And one of the things that struck me and sort of the Agatha Christie part of the story that you wrote Is how the intelligence age our intelligence agencies went back to look at other manhunts in history, right? They went to find how did they find Miramal Casey? How did they find various drug lords those sorts of things and that was reminiscent frankly of some of the story in Josh Meyer and Terry McDermott's book about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of the people that were chasing him around Before we understood who he was going to be so my question is for this cadre of people You included that we're looking at this problem before 9-11. I mean Do you find that it's it's going to be hard for those people to sort of let go of al-Qaeda? I mean you are urging All of us to do that, but that's you don't hear that from everybody in that sort of position, right? Well, I Mean, I think that's a very interesting question because Clearly, I mean The Soviet Union officially dissolved itself on a certain day. I've forgotten in 1990 and al-Qaeda is never going to officially Doesn't dissolve itself and there's going to be no surrender agreement with al-Qaeda as the world as a world with the Nazis So we know for a fact that there's no way to sort of end it in an official way So we just we need to be to start talking about it because they won't talk about it And I think that one way to think about it, which might be a more politically Sellable way just to talk about it is When we when leon panetta talked last year about we are close to strategically defeating al-Qaeda That's a very interesting formulation because it doesn't suggest that we have Completely eradicated al-Qaeda it suggests that al-Qaeda doesn't pose a strategic threat to the United States And I think that is an incontrovertible truth. What is a strategic threat to the United States? Well When pan-103 blew up over Scotland the George H. W. Bush administration killing 270 Americans did not go to war with Libya Iran or Syria or any any of the people who were believed to be behind it Similarly when Oklahoma City blew up, you know, that wasn't seen as a sort of like absolutely existential threat to American national security 9-11 clearly was that event so I Think by saying we have strategically defeated al-Qaeda it leaves you the sufficient wiggle room for a Major Nadal Hassan influenced by al-Qaeda in the raven peninsula killing 13 Americans at Fort Hood so that you can say well We didn't mean that you know nobody, you know that that this that this ideology is being completely exterminated and so But I think there will be people for all sorts of reasons who I don't want to cast suspensions on people's motives You know if people because I think it is a very strongly held view by some people that this is still a very very large problem and You know, I would say maybe one way of answering that Brian is I think that When people say the sky is gonna fall and the sky never falls usually They're very rarely held to account. I mean to give you just one example somebody whose work I greatly admire is Graham Allison In 2004 he wrote that within a decade there would be a terrorist attacking the United States with nuclear weapons Well, we're about two years from and I don't think this you know from that deadline and there's really no evidence that and so You know, I think that there will be people who continued believe this is a big problem and and you know, they may well be right I hope they're not And there is you know for people in this room, I think it's a well-known fact that Six out of ten of the richest counties in the United States are now in the Washington, DC area and before 9-11 The you know, there was only one that fell into that category So, you know, if they're not and thought that the war on terror was gonna bankrupt us He doesn't he's not particularly good economists because in fact We'll have a you know, they're a huge Keynesian pump into the economy, particularly the Washington economy Well, it's true in Vietnam and it's true in World War two So, yes, there are people who probably have an interest whether it's of all kinds to you know The whole infrastructure is built up around this And sort of I think it you know as it's impossible to kill government structures once they're in You know once they exist, I think I mean, that's when I sort of iron law of Washington So, you know, but I think that there are voices who are beginning to say, you know Look when Liam Panetta says it, I mean, he's got a lot of credibility on this issue the president of background Air Force Base On it on May 2nd You know came he said we're close to defeating Okay, so I'm sure, you know, he believes that and I think that that is a very accurate statement You're sort of uniquely positioned among virtually any American to make sort of a to speculate at least intelligently about What somebody like Osama what Osama bin Laden may have been thinking in these last few years, you know, you had him is You know, we've talked in the past and you said, you know, this is somebody that was a true Religious fanatic to the end is it your impression after looking into his experience in his existence over the last five years of his life That he may have had regrets that he Wished he took a different path in life. I think a je regret Ria would be his sort of general You know kind of response to that, you know, I think you know bin Laden is as Brian says I mean he's been he was a religious fanatic from the age of about 12 or 13 And you know and that just hardened and hardened and hardened So I don't think he had any regrets You know one of the things that I was able to do for the book was to get inside the compound where bin Laden died and I it was interesting it kind of There's no substitute for being in the place where these things happened and You know bin Laden didn't Go out with a spectacular martyrdom He died surrounded by his wives and kids in a kind of squalid suburban compound And his life was in the end confined to a room about the size of the area where Brian and I are talking in Which was his study and then another bedroom, you know He had a toilet about the size of this lectern and a small kitchen Maybe twice the size of this lectern where his 29 year old Yemeni wife would cook him dinner It was a pretty I Don't know it was it was not It was it was not the spectacular martyrdom at Torah borough or that he might have sort of people thought he might have wanted to do And so but did you have any regrets that I don't see any of that. I mean we've had as you know You know Brian used to be at West Point. We've had the West Point releases of the 17 documents And I think those documents are they representative of the whole trove? They seem to me to be probably represented people said they're represented Of course the government's the government has released documents that put bin Laden and al-Qaeda in a very poor light But I think their concerns As expressed in those documents were very real. We are worried about the drones. We think the al-Qaeda brand name has been tarnished We're very worried about money. I mean so I don't he regrets. I think he had real he had some pretty pressing concerns about the health of his organization and You know when he's advising al-Shabaab the Somali affiliate of al-Qaeda not to use the al-Qaeda brand name because it'd be bad for Fundraising and also would attract undue negative attention. I mean I think that sort of speaks for itself He I think he's conscious. They're very conscious about how badly Al-Qaeda in Iraq had tarnished their image as you know and You know, I think we knew that we assume that but also it's interesting to see that they internally said the same thing And they're advising the Taliban to stop killing Pakistani civilians. They understood that they understood all their Achilles heels But the you know al-Qaeda and the groups sort of that are inspired by it Understand their strategic problems. They just don't seem to be able to be able to do anything to really stop them The the compound where where bin Laden lived and was ultimately killed you seem to be you know at the purpose built for this for this for this purpose and It was purchased. It seems like there was some infrastructure around this man Helping to facilitate this environment. Is it plausible that that went on without at least Elements of the Pakistani intelligence services knowing what was going on. There's no evidence that I mean, you know this is a very big question and There's no evidence that the Pakistani intelligence or any government official helped bin Laden and I I Intuitively believe that As I started reporting the book But for two reasons first for al-Qaeda has declared war on the Pakistani state They try to kill Mashaf twice in December of 2003. There's no love loss between al-Qaeda in the Pakistani state Secondly having had some experience of dealing with bin Laden is in a circle the very paranoid secretive discipline people Why would they involve anybody that they didn't completely control thirdly as they began reporting the book? There are people living in the compound adults who didn't know bin Laden was living there So the courier's wife one day saw a strange Arab tall who was living on the compound She'd been instructed by her husband for several years. We have somebody here You cannot talk about him to me or anybody else So you know bin Laden was hiding from people inside his own compound He wasn't trying to expand the kind of concentric circles of what people who knew where he was In my mind, there's no Pakistani complicity now. We do have four terabytes of data that was recovered It has been gone through. I think if there was a smoking gun, you know, US Pakistani relations are such that we would have Yeah, the government would have said something the US government would have said something about it but you know The definitive book about her Pearl Harbor was written in 1962 So, I mean we're gonna still be finding out things for for years that we don't know One of the things that I thought was I wish I'd had when the book came before I'd finished the book Was the police report of the Islamabad police report of that interrogation of his youngest wife Which really kind of filled in some details about what he was doing between 2002 and 2005 So there'll be other things that come out and the why now in Saudi Arabia you know People that we live in an open society. My guess is that other people involved in the operation are gonna Bob Gates is writing a book I can't believe that you won't mention some of this Seems right. So things will be coming out. I mean it's a it's a I loved writing this book I mean it was it was it was a huge crash But it was there's a great thing in a way to have a real deadline not a deck So I tended to my previous books to say can I take another year and you know, it was great It kind of really helped me sort of focus and you know, it's an amazing tale And you know, it's one of those tales where you know, there are a lot of people who come out of it very well There's a great line in the book about Leon Panetta Who I mean, you know, who's a as you know, sort of, you know He's a amazing guy to be around and he's very very funny and I asked him What did you think that morning when you were going in to you know, basically be overseeing the raid and he said I looked at myself in the mirror when I was shaving out And I said the next time I look at this face It's either I'm either going to be fine or I'm going to have to be explaining a lot of things to a lot of people I thought was a great line, but he uh, so you know this thing Another great by the go back to this question of was this an easy call One of the only characters in the book who's there on 9 11 and also there the day the bin Laden is killed Is the deputy director of the CIA Mike Morel who was the briefer on 9 11 who basically talked to Bush on Air Force 1 about who the likely Kind of candidates for this, you know, who had done this attack Mike Morel talks to Lee and Panetta at one o'clock on the day of the raid and Mike Says to Panetta Well, maybe Panetta says to Morel Where are you Mike on this and he says Bin Laden is either there or he's not there and Panetta says that's where I am they really did not know You know there was people saying 90 percent people saying 40 percent You know the percentages gave a sort of false sort of view that A false kind of precision I mean at the end of the day bin Laden was either a hundred percent there or either a hundred percent not there You know, there's no, you know, he wasn't 40 percent there And so, you know, that's that's why you know When president obama went back at 7 p.m. To the private part his residence in the white house You know, that's a pretty heavy set of decisions and you know Over the course of 11 hours 13 hours He came to the decision, you know, it's a go but it wasn't it wasn't clear to anybody involved that that was necessarily the right decision I'm gonna ask you A brief two-part question as you know, I've got a I've got a run but the The first part is where do you see bin Laden's successor going in our do you have any insights on imman al-zawahari? Yeah, I think, you know Emman al-zawahari has has inherited the blockbuster video of global g hat, you know, there's nowhere to go except down Yeah Yeah, yeah And what about that? I mean just reports today of discussions reportedly Within the u.s. Military and with the afghan Special forces to potentially raid pakistani territory to target other militant groups the hakanis, etc Um, you know based on the experience with the pakistanis after the bin Laden raid Do you have thoughts about the wisdom of that course of action? Well I think it would be kind of I think it would I think it would be quite unwise You know I I think it's pretty clear that that would be Probably the end of what what remains of the u.s pakistani relationship I don't I mean and I think the pakistanis would respond with force I mean, um, they've made it very clear. I think on that subject And I am understanding from reading the afpack channel daily brief a product of new america foundation every morning is that that discussion I think john the general allen basically said we're not gonna we're not gonna that's a bridge too far With that i'm gonna turn it over to questions from the audience. We should have some folks with a mic And why don't we start right up here? Peter good to see you again There's a little bit outside the scope But i'm curious do you think given all the times we have been laden in our sites before 9 11 Do you think we could have prevented 9 11 by taking him out on any one of those occasions? I think If you there is a debate about how many times we have been laden in our sites before 9 11 on one side of that debate Is mike shawyer who ran the bin laden unit who says there were ten occasions and on the other side of that debate Is richard clark who was you know the chief counterterrorism advisor them to george w bush? And and also to bill clinton That we had him that we had been laden in our site three times so But there's a little there was one particular time when it seemed like the most promising shot which was in kandahar in 98 outside kandahar a group of Emirati princes who were hunting busters were In the desert with a camp and bin laden was visiting And you know the shot wasn't taken because what if bin laden wasn't there and You ended up incinerating half the emirati royal family You know that was regarded as being kind of not worth it Um historians will debate whether that was a right call or a wrong call I guess they'll probably say that was a wrong call although The man was there for you know it was much harder to do an attack go back to the pre 9 11 era There are no armed drones The only way to do the attack is there are only two ways to do the attack one is cruise missiles Well cruise missiles they they have to fly from the arabian sea So you have you then they have to spin up in their tubes and then they have to fly several hours across Pakistan and then Afghanistan To reach their target. So it's not a snap decision There's at least a 12 hour sort of lag between deciding to do something and being able to execute And then you know bin laden can be wandering off somewhere else in that course at that time The other way to get him at the time was to send in afghan tribals who were on the ci payroll, but they were you know it was not They'd had they'd had some extremely confusing instructions From the cia because the cia and the clinton administration the nsc Seemed to have rather different views about what what the instructions were So in the cia's View of the matter They largely thought that if it was a ground operation it was kind of a capture bin laden operation And if he got killed in the process of it You know that was okay, but it wasn't he wasn't intended to be an assassination operation I guess the clinton nsc sort of felt it was more of a kill up bin laden operation Anyway, so there was some confusion about the rules of engagement The cia the afghan tribals You know were not the most organized group and so in the end You know these shots weren't taken either with cruise missiles or afghan allies on the ground Really were prevented 9 11 if we'd done that. I mean it might have if it had been early enough because at the end of the day bin laden was One of the things I try and say in the book When I wrote holy war ink, which is the first of four books I've written about this I thought that amen al-zawari was the brains of the operation And that was kind of the view that I'd been heard from a lot of people in egypt And amen al-zawari is a smart guy, but I mean over the 14 years over the 12 years that Sort of I've been writing about it I began to realize that that was I'm wrong. In fact bin laden Zahir was focused on one thing overthrowing the egyptian government And by the time that he and bin laden hooked up for the second time in the early in the mid 90s Zahir was the penniless leader of a very small g-hag group with You know Who was not well liked or well regarded whereas bin laden was becoming a global celebrity and he had this big organization And so there At the end of the day it was bin laden's idea to do 9 11 And there was quite a lot of pushback within al-qaeda about whether 9 11 was a good idea Some people were saying hey, this is probably against islam, which of course it is Even within al-qaeda other people were saying, you know, this is going to really anger the taliban We the taliban have repeatedly put in also put us on notice Not to anger the united states, which clearly this will so if you've taken bin laden out particularly You know early in the game at a certain point the 9 11 train was leaving the station I mean, let's say if you By the time, you know, a lot of flight lessons were happening and a lot of money transfers from jubai were happening to the united states that Hi, you know the hijackers were arriving the united states by then, you know, it was too late But if you go back to the 98 99 time period it might not have been too late after all muhammad atta the lead hijacker only arrived in afghanistan In 99 and that made it was the arrival of muhammad atta made the whole thing much more likely to succeed because Atta and the people with him were people who understood the west and the atta had a phd from a german university The people that they had recruited previously were all sort of yemenis and saudis who weren't necessarily that sophisticated So, yeah, I think if he'd been killed early on History would have been different Fatima just here in front You have uh, commented on carter's decision and the uh Is the ryan hostage and how that that failed and then compared that to the obama decision and of course as we know in the carter situation carter overruled the military and Took less than uh, then they were recommending and in this case obama overruled the military and Took more force than uh, they recommended uh, what what made or what caused him to uh To do what what he did. Did he get outside advice or some other advice from uh, other than his own military planners Well, let me let me the military advice that obama was getting was kind of split Um There's the kind of narrow question of the plan that macraven initially presented which was too small in obama's view But that wasn't because macraven had been ordered to do something small He he he sort of felt that his marching orders had been to not anger the pakistani So he just went back to the drawing board and they produced a bigger operation So there was really no dispute about that. I think we were the bigger kind of dispute. It wasn't even a dispute the general cartwright who was the number two Military advisor to the president was advocating a small bomb a drone strike using in this experimental munition that I mentioned Was he advocating that because he felt that that was his position as the military advisor to Advocate, you know to kind of be the institutional voice of a position that needed to be taken into consideration Or was he advocating that because he really believed in it? I'm not entirely sure but you know People in the room felt that he either one of the either one of those things Then of course general, you know, robert gates was against the rate For the reasons we've already discussed On the other side of the creation of mollum was very much in favor of the rate from the beginning Yeah And so this is very unusual because you think about the history of the obama administration Usually obama usually gates and mollum are in lockstep. For instance about the size of the surge in afghanistan and other issues But in this case, they were on the opposite side. So obama was getting kind of conflicting military advice On the issue of carter, you know, I Don't know enough about it except to say that I read the hollow way commission, which was the investigation And of of the operation equal claw desert one and it's fascinating because jaysoc I should have said this earlier jaysoc was created as a result of the failure of operation Uh evil claw desert one. Why is joint special operations command? everything that could go wrong with iranian operation did go wrong and it was a Uh, it was an accident waiting to happen All four of the services wanted to be involved in this, you know, incredibly prestigious Rescue of the hostages in iran and yet none of them have ever done an opera special operation together Everything was kept at a very highly classified level. So very few people actually understood what was going to happen Um The navy didn't uh service the helicopter sufficiently So they had developed mechanical problems There were as you may recall desert storms creating, you know, these very intense sand storms That wore down the helicopters and so, you know, every piece of this the and the and the whole thing was predicated on something that Even if even today would be or normally impossible very very difficult They were going to land in the iranian desert, maybe 800 miles from terraan They were then going to go into a very large city with millions of people Go to the embassy which was protected by the revolutionary guards rescue the americans there and then get out I mean, even if everything worked perfectly it was a very very unlikely To succeed and everything did go wrong Um, and so as a result of which joint special operations command came forward One thing that I do say in the book, which I think is an important point Joint special operations was not you asked about, you know, if Bin Laden had been killed before 9 11 President Clinton asked then general Hugh Shelton Maybe a couple years before 9 11. He said basically I apologize for the exact language here in in advance I don't think this is a children's program He uh, he said to Shelton look it was scare the shit out of al-qaeda if the black ninjas repelled into their camp and got And you know attack them and it would also be a big psychological victory for for us And I don't recall exactly what Shelton said, but Shelton and the people in inside the u.s. Military the higher in the army When the Clinton administration was asking for Plans to attack bin Laden in afghanistan They came back with basically politically honest unsustainable plans for Normandy style invasions of afghanistan. I mean this is I mean that's a slight exaggeration But I I quote I think mike chore in the book You know Clinton wanted a rapier and they kept giving him a sledgehammer and so The Ferrari in the garage. I mentioned earlier. This is president This is a general shoemaker was head of special operations. He said look it was very frustrating The Ferrari was it was it was always kept in the garage and we didn't use it And it was only after 9 11 that it began to be used and of course, you know the rest is history Uh, but so in terms of obama's obama was getting Kind of mixed signals from the military about the right way to proceed In the back Thank you. My name is said Zafar Hashemi from voice of america's afghanistan service Today john allen the commander of international forces in afghanistan said that Today's cobbles. He saw signature of haqqani network in today's attacks in cobble so and clinton earlier had said that He she didn't say it clearly But she kind of indicated that the u.s might negotiate with haqqani network in order to resolve the issue of afghanistan um Do you think the u.s is allowing by our ignoring haqqani network to become a big terrorist organization In a in a way that it might attack the u.s later on as was al qaeda at the beginning not as big as it was during 9 11 and second Question is about your book Did you get a chance to talk to dr. Afridi the pakistani doctor who helped with finding dna's of Yeah, no, I I did not speak to dr. Afridi who was convicted of treason than now He was convicted of helping a taliban insurgent group which is kind of ironic because he was actually kidnapped by this taliban insurgent group And was forced to perform medical treatment on them. Uh, he didn't do it voluntarily Um, and so the charge that he's been, you know, he hasn't been convicted of treason He's been convicted of helping a taliban insurgent group who actually kidnapped him But he was not able to speak to afridi And I don't think anybody will probably will for any, you know length of time In terms of the haqqani network attacking the united states directly, uh, you know, I don't think It's not implausible pakistani taliban did send faisal shazad to time square On may 1st 2010 he did try to blow up an suv and time square at 6 p.m. On a saturday night We should very good time to kill a lot of people. Luckily it didn't work pakistani taliban also sent suicide bombers to basa lona In january of 2008, so it's not inconceivable We see no evidence of it so far And the haqqani network seems to be, you know, pretty successfully tying down a lot of american troops in eastern afghanistan and being able to attack in Kabul, so You know for that for them that may be sufficient in the back here My name is sarish I was wondering um pakistanis were very enraged by obel episode that Especially that pakistani sovereignty was violated Do you think it was a good decision by pakistani military and the government to not address the people of pakistan and explain to them what happened? and my second question is um and like A lot of like strategy that us has been utilizing especially regarding drone attacks and opial episode like which is Violating the sovereignty of these countries. What do you think will be the implication of these like for future? thank you I mean I Let's do the thought experiment where a very large group of mafia families were living in buffalo new york and upstate new york and Canada was sending drones that were killing These mafia families in buffalo new york and killing a relatively small number of civilians in upstate new york as well I think most americans would be pretty angry about it even if they were Happy that this mafia family was being eradicated in buffalo new york And so it's not a little surprising that most pak a lot of pakistanis are extremely angry about the drone strikes in their country as any you know as any I think as any country would be You know, it's complicated by the fact that the pakistani Government has been sort of complicit or as a you know acquiesced in these drone strikes for a long time now They're really seriously pushing back The number of drone strikes is going down pretty markedly in in 2010 there were 118 2011 there were 70 I can't remember the exact count now, but let's say there were been 20 this year Part of that is a result of the pakistani pushback part of that is the result of a cia drone base being closed in blut Blutistan And part of that is because there are fewer targets in al qaeda now And part of that also is because there's been a recognition I think in the u.s. Government that merely because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it all the time And I think technology is allowed you know The drone technology has got much much better over time and it's much more discriminatory and we're killing fewer civilians The idea we're killing zero pakistani civilians fails common sense tests. I think Um, but we're killing very relatively small numbers So that's not so much the issue is the it's the pakistani sovereignty issue which you point out Which is the same thing that the bin Laden raid Um, and you know people in pakistan are very angry and I think if the cost of a successful drone program Is that we just anger 180 million pakistanis for a very long time? I think that's a very hard large cost to pay that said Many of the drone drone attacks Have killed enemies of the pakistani people and state Byatullah masood I was in pakistan when he was killed the leader of the pakistani taliban Has the blood of hundreds or even thousands of pakistanis on his hands and and in fact there was Quite a people in pakistan. I think we're pretty happy that it was killed you know, uh I was there when byatullah was killed I think the headline in the door newspaper was good. Good riddance byatullah, you know, so it Some of these drones for exit clearly being done in pakistan's interests And I think if there was a more transparent drone program with more pakistani buy-in and less pakistani Kind of trying to have both sides of you know And the pakistani officials have had to sort of have both sides of the issue and sort of publicly saying we're against this and privately sort of encouraging it and um, I think This is the most public covert program in the history of secret Things, I mean a drone strike is by its very nature a public event And I don't quite understand the secrecy that surrounds it at this point pretty, you know, president obama talked about the drone program in a google hangout So, you know, the president has the ultimate right to declassify things. It's not it's not a secret We should be having a much a much richer Discussion about this because there is a very defensible presumably quite defensible Justification legal justification for this program. We've heard a lot shards of it from harold co and others Uh, there is a defensible rationale for the people that are being killed in this I mean when biotilla masood is killed or when a leader within al-qaeda is killed. I think you can easily defend that What is not defensible is the kind of signature strike so-called which we've seen or is much harder to defend Where just you know a bunch of bearded guys in the pakistani tribal region get together and they're regarded to be a group of militants and You know, I think that that is not defensible so It bet a wider public discussion of this. I think would be in pakistan interest our interests And and one final point on this We were not able the united states was not able to arm its drones until After 9 11 I think something like fatima who has the microphone here has just been investigating how many countries have drones And there are about 60 countries that have drones now that you know appear to have relatively sophisticated drone programs It is very you know It is within the next year two years three years. The chinese will be able to arm their drones Within the next one two three years the russians will be able to arm their drones Will the russians use drones in against chechens? Will the chinese use drones against the weakers? You know, we don't know but the fact is that we're creating a set of precedents that any country whose Kind of policies we may not fully embrace will be able to say hey you've created the precedents here And so I think there's a very strong public interest for a wider discussion of drones And I think the fact that President obama has presided over a massive expansion of the drone program Has precluded some of the same discussion that happened under george w bush about guantanamo You know george w bush was roundly criticized for the lack of due process at guantanamo There's no greater lack of due process than just being the judge jury and executioner in a drone strike And we often execute people in this country who turn out to be innocent I don't we don't want to say often but even after years of judicial review We still execute innocent people So the idea that we're not that we're routinely killing 100 evil people and these drone strikes fails a common sense test and so I think that It is in our benefit for us to have a deeper discussion of this because this is the future of warfare In the back there, sir. Thank you. Now the hatak What future uh, do you see for al qaeda? In the region, I mean afghanistan and pakistan after the withdrawal of us and nato in 2014 and secondly What can be or what should be the strategy apart from drones to counter the threat? Thank you So what was the first part of the question dad? Uh, my first question was that what future do you see for al qaeda in the region mean afghanistan? By the way, what strategy should be apart from drones to counter the threat dad is a leading pashtoon journalist at radio pre europe who's from From swat where after all taliban seemed to be You know taliban really had entrenched themselves in 2009 Uh, what future for al qaeda in the region? I think the future is very very I think the future is is not good For al qaeda, uh, I don't mean as a as a kind of corollary that i'm not advocating your precipitous withdrawal from afghanistan Because I think that we have strong strategic interests in making sure of al qaeda that the taliban doesn't take over part of the country Because the problem, of course, is not just al qaeda the problem is uh, islamic moves movement of us bekistan the islamic g-hand union lashkari tiber the pakistani taliban I mean there are a lot of groups that in one way or another threaten either regional stability or in some cases You know could carry out an attack in the west of some kind So the problem is for al qaeda's grim Uh, but you know, I think that i'm very i'm hardened by the fact that the obama administration says that will be in Afghanistan in a significant way till 2024. I think that's the right signal to send to everybody in the region as the right thing to do What can we do other than drones? Um, is an interesting question. We just had an arrest by the pakistanis of an al qaeda european al qaeda figure um So, you know, you can't arrest people And resting people comes freighted with problems. You have to put them in the judicial system and you know it Uh, you know one of the side effects of killing people with drones. You don't have to send them to guantanamo I'm sure it's not an intended reason for the program, but it is a kind of side effect So but you can arrest people and you know arresting people is you know dead men don't tell tales and so Resting people comes, you know, you can gather a lot of information from people even who don't want to cooperate with you So when how the shake mohammed was arrested he had he was arrested with multiple phones multiple computers um He had letters from bin laden on his person There was a lot of just forensic information that you could gather from Ksm how the shake mohammed because he was arrested rather than killed in a drone strike Uh, so there are other options Uh, other than drones, but uh, i'm not saying the drones are something that you can't i'm not saying we should end the drone program I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it should be done with more discrimination Um, it should be done with more pakistani buy-in um And uh, it should be done. It should be a tool that is used really for people that are Threats that are real threats the united states Um and and or to pakistan itself um, you know president obama Even if you take the minimal number of people killed in drone strikes in pakistan yemen under president obama It's 2000 people that's more than twice the number of people who've gone to guantanamo And um You know, I it it defies common sense that all these people where it was necessary to kill all these people in the front here Thank you, russell emory I have one comment on um on the greatly reduced circumstances of uh, ben laden and It's not necessarily um That he was humbled by this because the The fundamentalist wing of uh, islam Does go toward a very plain existence as it does in christianity with Monasteries and also judeism so And about the uh, the toilet the size of the uh the podium, you know, it's you know Some people could say he was a rich man that gave a lot up No, well, that's that's I mean you're absolutely right In fact, this is the way ben laden had lived um for Since he'd been in the sudan in the mid 90s I mean this is a guy cartoon is one of the hottest places in the world. He had no air conditioning When he was living in afghanistan, there was a choice about moving to somewhere in kandahar He chose the place without air conditioning or running water And so ben laden as you point out, he's sort of an ultra fundamentalist and for him This life of poverty uh was part of the way that you know, he saw that as a religious expression Um, so it was not out of character for him to live like this at all Okay, I have a question too. Yeah the um in september of 2007 um as an intelligence company called site Who uh were handed a video before it's released by uh al qaeda or some of ben laden and it was um given to the um a couple of officials high up in the bush administration at 11 a.m And then by the afternoon it was uh had been distributed all over. I think it was on youtube um had um Had you know come into the media and so forth. Of course the contacts were all blown Um, and they'd been developed them for a while. Did that have any? Influence possibly on extending this this 10-year hunt. I remember this story and um I yeah, I'm not really sure with what the answer is to that I You know Site which is a company that monitors jihadi communications had Was it monitoring some kind of channel that they were using and this was sort of blown? Yeah, was it a big deal? You know, I I don't know um I really I mean anybody can go online and see the story. I I'm not convinced it was a big deal But I don't know enough about it. Okay. Thank you Are you here? What um What do you think we can and should do to improve the us pakistan relationship? And you mentioned for example, we should get buy-in for the drones, but is that even possible? Yeah, it is possible. I mean for two reasons first. Well, we you know See I had a base in pakistan. It was the main base for the drone attacks. I mean so it's not implausible um And if the pakistanis really wanted to end the drone program, they could shoot them out of the sky with their f-16s I mean they're very slow moving relatively speaking. So There is some buy-in and but why the way something that almost never gets mentioned. There's a big discussion of the ground Kind of lines of communication through pakistan and the fact that pakistanis have closed them If they closed their airspace to our flights into kandahar, which is one of the busiest airports in the world That would be a big problem for us and they haven't done it and they haven't even suggested it And that's a subject of non-public discussions. So the point is that this is It's a very difficult relationship as you know If they really wanted to turn the heat up on our efforts in afghanistan beyond what they have already have done They could do so and they haven't and um So I think you know, how could we improve our relations? So let me give you a very concrete example The european union has just relatively recently announced that pakistan that no tariffs for for pakistan It's a very pretty big deal if we We tax french textiles. I think at like, I don't know three percent and we tax pakistanis textiles at 12 percent pack textiles make up The bulk of pakistani manufacturing And it's a country with huge problems Yeah And you know if we lowered our tariffs, uh, which is something that has been discussed for years, you know, that would go a long way They don't want our aid Which always comes freighted with a lot of caveats and preconditions and they want our trade And they want freer trade with the united states. That is something that is absolutely something that they would want the problem is Uh, what they mostly have to offer is textiles and the south carolina delegation in congress is not about to allow the u.s. Textile manufacturing in their area to be undercut um, and so and right now doing anything in a good type of for pakistan in the u.s. Congress would be impossible Uh, because you know, there is so much bad blood But that is something pretty concrete. I think that we can do Uh, that we could do And there are But that I think that's that's that's that's the principle Of 43 years And I am no part of any fundamental well done Totally with the microphone sir. I have no sympathy with stallin hitler Okay, shah of iran Saddam hussein, I see a lot coming work Gaddafi al-bashara said and a few more leaders in the world today But my question is based on enough is enough I know that the vice premier of israel recently gave a statement And showing some desire to have peace in the middle east and i'm talking about the Root cause Of creation of terrorist What do we have to do bring peace in the middle east kashmir cheshna? What do we have to do about it? What do we have to do to bring peace in the middle east? Well, that's above my pay grade I mean, I think the answer is pretty well known, uh, you know And clearly You know the kashmir problem is not too similar to the Israeli-palestinian problem in the sense that it's you can blame the british for both of them and And the outlines of a settlement are well known to all parties I mean, uh, steve cole my boss and and friend and and colleague You know wrote the definitive piece in the new yorker about how close musharif and His indian You know interlocutors came to a deal on kashmir They came this close and we know at camp david that It was clinton came pretty close So we know what the essential We know what the deal would look like in both cases The question is what are the politics to get you there and your musharif As the deal came closer on kashmir suddenly musharif was presented by enormous political problems at home And he lost all credibility with the pakistani population and it's a public diplomacy issue because The pakistani population has been told for so long that this is an incredibly important thing and india is wrong And you know, you know what has been said You can't just sort of undo that overnight and it's a sort of nixon goes to china thing and musharif could have delivered it Uh, but he he became it just the politics were not there and as you know the politics in israel now A deal seems less and less plausible. I mean, you know the settlements are going forward So, I mean these are very very difficult problems. They are by the way To say that Solving all these issues was sort of magically make terrorism go away. I'm not convinced that's true Because I think there is a sort of fanatical personality Who will attach themselves to violence? And is sort of opportunistic about the reasons that they do that It isn't necessarily. I mean sure these issues play a role But bin laden had 53 siblings Not one of them took up arms against the united states or the saudi government or you know, it's it's There is a sort of element of individual choice here And i'm sure of his 53 siblings a lot of them were unhappy about the israeli situation It may have been unhappy about kashmir, but um, so i'm Violence is something that will be utilized by people. I think You know that goes beyond simply the kind of rationales that they say that they are engaging in violence I think for some people it's In some cases fun I think of hola shake mohammed as somebody who basically Enjoyed being a terrorist Rather than being a sort of basically a religious fanatic So yes, it would help if these things were answered But there is always going to be Particularly in the in the middle east right now Unemployed young men who are going to attach themselves to violent to Ideologies that may encourage violence because they don't have much hope when their societies aren't providing them much hope Um, and I just think that's the nature of human of being human perhaps um to a lot of americans it seems sort of inconceivable that Bin laden could have been In this compound and no one knew about it. Um, so for those of um as who aren't as familiar with um How he could have uh, you know Hidden hidden for so long Can you can you talk a little bit more if it wasn't the pakistani state that was helping him? Who is he getting assistance from and how is it possible that he could hide for so long? Well, he was getting you know, the main assistance was coming from the two couriers the two couriers were brothers the brothers um Were the perfect people to hide him because they were called You know al-kuwaiti, which means you know Ahmad al-kuwaiti was the name of the first carrier Um, they weren't really from kuwait. They were from swat in northern pakistan Their father had emigrated to kuwait 50 years ago and as a was a preacher is a preacher in kuwait As you know, kuwaiti's do not grant citizenship to anybody who was in kuwaiti So they lived as sort of second-class citizens in kuwait They spoke they grew up speaking arabic, but they also grew up speaking pashto Which is the the language of northern northwest pakistan They were the perfect people to hide bin laden's because they could communicate with the arab leadership of al-qaeda in arabic and they could communicate in pashto and be locals in abtabad and other places around it and They were just they seemed to be just the local guys Now you may recall in october of 2005. There was a devastating earthquake in kashmir Which kashmir is very close to abtabad. There was a lot of reconstruction going on that was right when bin laden built this Building and so he was able to take advantage of that. There were a lot of people moving into abtabad from the surrounding areas You know who you know because there were refugees from this huge earthquake in kashmir that killed 75 000 people And so the fact that this building was being built was not unusual The fact that it looked like it did was not unusual at all because a lot of there were a lot of wealthy afghan refugees in the area and they're building houses that sort of you know have perder elements so that women are not seeing from outside And you know bin laden only lived on he lived on You know in u.s. Terms he lived on the second floor on the third floor And he didn't he went you know, he had a brief walk You know infrequently it was like under and you know, he did it under a tarpaul and he had no idea of the americans were trying to Yeah, just said you know we spent a lot of satellites over on drones by you know The summer of 2010 the fall of 2010 and they were never able to get a shot at bin laden Because he was you know hyper paranoid, you know even on the off chance that an american satellite might go over he was Doing his exercise under a tarpaulin So, you know, he was being very careful was and they were growing their own crops and they were They had cows. They had chickens. They were had honeybees. They had they were growing cucumbers They had a vegetable garden, you know, they were completely self-contained bin laden never left his wives never left You know, they were being very very very very careful You know and brian mentioned that the cia the cia had no leads for years. I mean they just they had nothing but kiss to use the new york term And so we're you know kind of in desperation They started looking at other manhorns to say are there any other lessons we can learn Now iceman who is a subject of the you know very intense manhunt by the israelis took 15 years How was iceman caught it was something the cia was interested in so I mean if you look at the history of iceman Basically, his son was dating a girl and he kind of blabbed he was boasting to the girl and her father about his dad's nazi past The father was not impressed by this and called a friend in germany who was a federal judge who had investigated nazi's Nazi crimes Somehow more sad got hold of this information and then of course famously kidnapped iceman from Buenos Aires And so what was the lesson of that? It's like the family can give you away, you know the inadvertent kind of discussions And so, you know ben laden if he didn't want to get caught at all He would have stopped communicating with members of al-qaeda completely Because there would have been no courier network to But you know he decided to continue to do that and so he was taking a minor minor risk As it and it would turn into a big risk over time But it looked like a minor risk to continue to be in touch with is the man, you know the top leaders of al-qaeda But you know, I think in answer to your question. He was being pretty careful and think about whitey bulger by the way Whitey bulger, you know It took longer to find whitey bulger than it did to take to find this arm of ben laden and you know The fbi put a great deal of effort into trying to find him And he was living in I don't know somewhere in california on the beach with his girlfriend And you know, why did it take so long to find whitey bulger? Probably because he was very careful Why was he found, you know, probably because his girlfriend said something stupid to somebody at some point You know, and that's how people get caught. I mean human beings I was confident that we would find ben laden because human beings by their nature Are you know, we'll do we'll make a mistake at a certain point Um It seems to be something very, you know, it's a very visceral thing that pakistani should have known They answered one more point away We spent About a trillion dollars. We spent at least half a trillion dollars in my view trying to find ben laden if you add up all the sort of Intelligence, you know, it's it if you add up the intelligence budget since 9 11 And we also spent 10 years and a lot of very very bright people in the u.s. Government got up every morning To go to go to work and think about this problem and it still took 10 years for us to find ben laden. So You know, it wasn't that easy it turns out Um It took five years to find eric rudolf it took Four years to kill mere amil kansi who killed two ci Employees right outside the gate of ci headquarters in langley, virginia in 1993 It just takes a while to find people who aren't making obvious mistakes Thanks again, peter. You are the michael jordan of this uh, this subject. So obviously you have a record to build on unlike uh, laveron james Um I know nothing about american football Is is it, um, is it mohammed, uh, kehani. What's that? Is it mohammed, uh, kehani. Um, the the the courier in chief the fellow had I'm an al-kuwaiti. Okay. Sorry Mixing up my characters. Um, could you sort of give a backstory of this guy? I found him to be one of the most fascinating folks in the book. Um, play this very fateful role I think of his interest in joining the uh, the attackers and then wound Up this is sorry. So you were right. Muhammad al-katani. Muhammad al-katani was supposed to be the 20th hijacker This is actually this is i'm glad he raised this because another issue that I should have talked about earlier Muhammad al-katani was a very, um, I would say not a very sophisticated saudi Um, who basically was in a bunch of dead-end jobs. He was You know, kind of a messenger and he suddenly had a religious awakening went to and went to afghanistan joined al-qaeda and was at the battle of torr bar and, uh before As he joined al-qaeda Bin Laden basically said, you know, we have a mission. You should go to halachi. Muhammad the halachi Muhammad said I'm sending the united states He was a saudi. So it was very easy for him to get in the united states at the time Unlike if he was yemeny And he goes to orlando airport in the summer of 2001 Muhammad atta the lead hijacker is waiting for him a very kind of Smart ins officer Says this guy doesn't speak english. He's on a one-way ticket I don't like his attitude and i'm sending him back home And so it is possible that if katani got in the country flight 93 might, you know They would have had more muscle on the plane and you know, they might have been able to get to washington So katani was the 20th hijacker and um When he was picked up after the battle of torr bar he was then taken to guantanamo in guantanamo He said i was in afghanistan because of my interest in forkenry, which was a not uncommon al-qaeda cover story But obviously is not true And about a year later they matched his fingerprints to the guy who'd been turned out back at orlando airport And suddenly he became the subject of a great deal of interest inside guantanamo He was subjected to 45 plus days of very Coercive interrogation, so i don't use the word torture in the book But a federal judge by the name of susan crawford who'd been appointed to the bench by president reagan And then was appointed by president george abby bush to run the trials at guantanamo said this guy's treatment Rises the level of torture. He cannot be tried for anything He was kept away for like 40 days He was subjected to you know, very bad music by christinia ag agorette He was He was subjected to a whole range of other things high temperatures low temperatures. He was Performed forced to perform dog tricks in the in the naked. He was he was very very badly maltreated He during the course of his interrogation said that the That there was this guy called akmed al-kuwaiti abu akmed al-kuwaiti Who played an important role for al-qaeda and in fact had trained him before he'd gone to the united states and cleared Clearly somebody who was training this guy on the internet and other things before going to the united states Was somebody who was inside al-qaido's? Somebody who was in a hala shake mohammed is in a circle So this is the first time that u.s. Government becomes aware of this guy abu akmed al-kuwaiti is an important guy So coercive interrogations were used on this person Now did he give up this information in the course of them? It's not clear to me, but but it's possible Then another Guy called hasen gul was picked up in iraq. He was also coercively interrogated. He also said that abu akmed al-kuwaiti was bin laden's courier Did he give up this information before or after he was coercively interrogated not clear The senate senate intelligence committee is going to release a Massive report and I think they're going to say that this guy was coercively interrogated But he gave up the information before the coercive interrogations began Two final points hala shake mohammed and abu faraj al-libi the number three is an al-qaeda Were both coercively interrogated. They both gave up disinformation about the courier So the reason I got into all that is what role the coercive interrogations play in all this Kind of a mixed bag as you can tell There were not in the end There are many other techniques that got you to the compound in abtabad But another country gave us abu akmed al-kuwaiti means the father of akmed from kuwait It's not a very precise clue since the population of kuwait. I think is Three million and abu akmed. You know akmed is a very common name A country in 2007 told us his real name and I think that country was pakistan, but I can't be sure In 2010 the national security agency intercepted the phone call that this courier made Which allowed them to geolocate the phone to poshawa, which is a very large city in western pakistan And then human human spies in human intelligence people on the ground Followed the abu akmed back to abtabad. So there was a combination of good old fashioned spies on the ground classic american signals intelligence classic liaison relationships with foreign intelligence agencies In addition to information that came from interrogation So You know There was no one thing you can say that this is the way that we found bin laden And for people who say that without coercive interrogation, you wouldn't have found bin laden I think it's a I I just offer to you. I think why it's that's kind of it's a rather complicated Coercive interrogations that did play a role in identifying the Not the courier, but that kuwaiti was playing a role in al-qaeda It seems Could we have elicited this information another way without coercive interrogations? ramsey usef Who was the bomber of the trade center in 1993? Gave the entire plot away in a in a in a flight from islamabad to manhattan Without any coercive interrogations to brad garret who was one of the characters in the book abu zubeda gave the name of halachik muhammad essentially to ali sufan who's spoken right here in this seat Without coercive interrogations, which was really the you know the beginning of identifying how halachik muhammad is as the leader of the 911 plot and there are many other examples so You know we can't run history backward We we just don't know For the people who say this had nothing to do with coercive interrogation. I think you know that that that isn't true either It is not a black and white answer. It is kind of gray Peter thank you for your presentation My question is during the bush chain years It went from the hunt for bin laden went from Dead or alive to the president bush saying that He didn't care where he was or Not interested in his whereabouts. What happened? Yeah, bin laden there was I don't think I quote ci director Michael hayden Who would every Thursday morning at eight o'clock go into a meeting with george w bush? and george w bush would say How's it going mike? And what he meant was how's it going finding bin laden everybody understood in the overall office that that was what that question meant It didn't mean anything else George w bush did not privately ever let it go He would have liked to have killed bin laden if you look at the drone strikes in the last six months of his presidency I think there were seven drone strikes in the first six months of 2008 and 44 in the Last six months and a lot of they were quite effective in killing leaders of al qaeda but not bin laden himself And of course, he wasn't in the tribal areas where the drone strikes are overwhelmingly concentrated So, you know, whatever publicly he said about it He didn't privately let it go and there was a There was a clearly no Upside for the bush administration to kind of be saying we really want to find bin laden when they knew damn well That they didn't really have anything And so I think that, you know, they basically said, you know, to themselves We should just not we shouldn't we there's no reason to amp this guy up more than he is already. Let's just stop talking about him But that didn't mean that privately they were not pursuing him and one of the things that by the way I say in the book Is I talked to five senior cia officials who worked under both president obama and president bush and they all said the idea that president obama came into office and Radically Amped up the hunt for bin laden is ludicrous I mean There are people at the agency who kept on Looking for bin laden one of them by the way just walked in bob grenier who ran the cia counter terrorist unit and Till 2005 and who was there's a I think very interesting scene in the book where Bob is negotiating with the number two leader of the taliban on two occasions for them to hand over bin laden Something that they seem to be interested in doing And so history would have turned out very differently if they'd actually gone through with that But you know true deputy bush wanted to find bin laden. There was no You know, whatever he confusing signals. He might have said publicly about you know him being no longer relevant that that Privately he was very intent on finding him This gentleman over here I think that will be the last question I'm Mr. Altajik. I'm free fellow Umar patek He was involved in Bali bombings. He was also arrested from abatabad. Okay. Yeah, so one of the guys who was most responsible for the body bombings of 2002 which killed 200 mostly western tourists in Bali was arrested in in in abtabad in january of 2011 and a lot of You know why you know abtabad is a pretty obscure city in pakistan Why is somebody who is leading the bali bombing attacks which had been financed by al-qaeda of showing up in abtabad? And this was a real cause of concern For the cia, which was like, you know, is this something we kind of don't understand about abtabad? Or why is this guy here? Was he trying to see bin laden? At the end of the day, they just said this is one of life's strange coincidences And that's what it was. There was no he wasn't he didn't know bin laden was there. He wasn't visiting bin laden Um, and it was just kind of a coincidence So with that I will wind up and if you want to You know, I'd love to sign any book that you want to have me sign Thank you very much