 Good evening. I'm Mark Uptegrove, the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, and I want to welcome you to a brand new season of programming from the LBJ Presidential Library. It's not exactly what we had planned. We had hoped by now to welcome you back into the library for in-person programming, but as with so many things, our plans changed with the resurgence of COVID-19. Still, we're as committed as ever to bringing you the very best in public programming, and we'll continue to offer our beloved Evening With Series and other programs virtually until we can safely gather again. In the next month, we'll feature two programs exclusively for our friends of the LBJ Library members. A continued conversation with Jason Stanford, one of the authors of the recent book Forget the Alamo over the lunch hour on September 15th, and then on the evening of October 6th, we'll welcome you to an evening with renowned Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the president. You won't want to miss these programs, so if you haven't already done so, this is a good time to renew your membership online at lbjfriends.org. We have a great start to the season of programming. Tonight's guest is Chris Wallace, anchor of Fox News Sunday. Throughout his five decades in broadcasting, he has interviewed numerous U.S. and world leaders, including seven American presidents, and won every broadcast news award for his reporting, including three Emmy Awards and the Peabody Award. Tonight, he'll talk to me about his new book, Countdown Bin Laden, the untold story of the 247-day hunt to bring the mastermind of 9-11 to justice. And now, please join me in welcoming Chris Wallace. Well, Chris Wallace, welcome and congratulations on Countdown Bin Laden. Thank you. I hope you liked it. Well, I loved it, and that is a sincere statement from this interviewer, and I can tell you that I also loved our last conversation and your last book, which was Countdown 1945, the extraordinary story of the atomic bomb and the 116 days that changed the world. This book recounts the 247 days that it took the United States to capture and kill Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9-11 attacks. So what led you to writing this book? Well, part of it was a direct result of 1945. I loved writing about Truman and all the people in his world and the decision to finally to use the nuclear bomb, the atomic bomb, to try to end World War Two by dropping it on Hiroshima, the frustration with the book. And I guess this says something that really deep down I'm more of a reporter than a historian was that all the key players, all the people that I wanted to ask, why'd you do this? And what were you thinking? We're all dead. And so I was spending a lot of time reading previous history books, looking at diaries, looking at memoirs, looking at letters, and it was rich. There's no question about it. There was plenty to use to get the interior conversations. What was really going on behind the scenes in the decision to drop the bomb? But I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to do this, to find a history thriller, and all of the people are still here? And I don't know, a series of conversations. I came up with the hunt for Bin Laden. And in the course of researching the book, I spoke to almost everyone. I spoke to Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, which came up with the original lead on the compound at Abadabad, a lot of the top people, and also not only him, but also his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, his deputy director, Michael Morrell. We got the first time that the head of the Pakistan Afghan Department, a fellow we call Gary, has ever told a story, has ever talked to an outsider. All the people in the White House, with one exception, which I'll get to, all the people in the military, including Admiral William McRaven, the head of Joint Special Operations Command, and two of the SEALs who were on the mission, including the man, Robert O'Neill, who actually killed Bin Laden. The only interview that I wanted that I didn't get was with Obama. And, you know, obviously I tried hard and I talked to his people. He had just written his memoir, and he has a chapter about Bin Laden. And his press guy said, you know, he's going to let that chapter speak for itself. So we took stuff from that chapter, but I also got a lot of the interior sense of what Obama was doing and thinking, because I had spoken to his national security advisor, Tom Donilon, and his chief counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan. And the other great advantage of this book is there were a lot of stuff written right after 9-11 when everything was still very classified. And this was now 10 years later. And so people from Panetta, to McRaven, to Donilon, whatever, were able to tell more than they had ever told in their own memoirs of the history books that were written in the year or two after the takedown of Bin Laden. Your book recounts the 247 days from the CIA's lead on Osama Bin Laden's whereabout to the mission on his compound. But it took us 10 years, nearly 10 years, between 9-11, the attacks on 9-11, and that mission to bring down Osama Bin Laden. Chris, what took so long? How did Osama Bin Laden evade capture for almost a decade? Well, it was a tremendous operational security and discipline on the part of al-Qaeda and considerable operational security in the part of Bin Laden, who in the early years kept moving in the tribal territory, we believe, the tribal territory between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And as they started rolling up people inside al-Qaeda, they would question them. First of all, they didn't know how to get the lead that would get to Bin Laden. And some thought, and they captured some members of Bin Laden's family. They led nowhere. They captured some officials. They led nowhere. And officials in al-Qaeda, one of the leads or one of the avenues of investigation that they kept pursuing was couriers, because they believed that Bin Laden would be too careful to ever directly be in contact. And he still was running al-Qaeda even while he was on the run. But they thought he must have a courier system where he was able to deliver in a non-electronic way, a way that couldn't be intercepted messages from wherever he was to where al-Qaeda central was. And so, but they didn't know whether that was going to work either. And what happened was over the years, they kept pursuing the courier angle. And for instance, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the actual specific architect, not the mastermind, but the architect of 9-11, they finally capture him in Pakistan and they take him to a prison and they waterboard him 183 times until he used the CIA terminology. They got him in a compliant state. And then they asked him about they had gotten the name of a courier. Again, they're, you know, it's like organized crime, which I guess this is. They're trying to use building blocks that gotten the name the none de guerre, if you will, of a courier named Abu Ahmed al-Qaeda. And they asked him about him and he said, well, yes, he was a member, but he wasn't Bin Laden's courier and he had left al-Qaeda after 9-11. What Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not know was the entire prison was tapped, was wire tapped, which is being surveilled. When he gets back to his cell and he's in a cell with other members of al-Qaeda, he says, and they're able to hear over listening devices, don't say anything about the courier. So the fact that he had played down al-Qaeda and now goes in and tells his colleagues, be careful about al-Qaeda. Again, it wasn't a great lead, but it was helpful. And that led eventually, they're surveilling, trying to be quick about it. They're surveilling another terrorist who's talking to somebody on the line. And the guy is having a conversation. They were surveilling this other guy, not not him al-Qaeda. But it turns out it is al-Qaeda on the other line. They're able to get a cell phone for him. They're able to identify his real name, Ibrahim Saeed. And they are Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. And they were able to trace the cell phone to the rather large city of Peshawar. And from Peshawar, they're able to identify by GPS where the cell phone is. It's in a white Suzuki Jimny. And they're able to track that back to a compound in Ababad. It just took time. There were a lot of false leads. And I will tell you, every time they would get a lead, they'd be, oh, this is it, it wouldn't be yet. So when they even got the Abadabad compound and they told the Navy SEALs and they told people in the White House, the first reaction wasn't, oh, my gosh, we got it. The first reaction was, yeah, we've seen this this movie before. This comes after intensive interrogations, including, as you mentioned earlier, waterboarding. Based on what you see here emerging, does waterboarding work? Did that method of interrogation work in deriving information that led to our finding out where some of Abadabad was? Well, that's, you know, that's a controversy. And obviously, some people will say you could have gotten the information without waterboarding. Colleague Sheikh Mohammed, 183 times, we'll never know. But they did get a lead from doing that. It certainly, you know, it was only one small step. They still had to after they had this name, they had to be able to figure out who the real person was and then get the cell phone and then track the cell phone to a to a Suzuki and then track the Suzuki back to Abadabad. You know, the the answer is it depends. People in the CIA would say, absolutely, that waterboarding didn't produce the lead, but it helped to produce the lead. There are other people who said they could have done it without it. There are a number of heroes that emerge in your story, two of whom you've mentioned. I want to talk about both of them. One is William McRaven, the at the time, the commander of US Special Forces. Talk about Bill McRaven and how he factors into this story. You know, Obama at one point said, if they were going to make a movie of this story, McRaven would be the lead and he would play himself. He is Captain America. He is just, you know, you guys know him in Texas. He, of course, was the chancellor of the University of Texas System. I have to say, I think he's one of the great Americans alive today. I had known him before I did this book. I got to know him a lot better in the course of doing this book. He was extremely generous with his time. He, you know, he came moved from to Texas, grew up there. His father was in the military. He decided to become a Navy SEAL. At some point, he went to the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California and literally wrote the book, which ended up becoming the Bible on these kinds of missions. And his theory was that if you had a small group for a very short specific period of time, that had a speed of the attack, utterly rehearsed, you know, took people by surprise that a smaller group could overwhelm a bigger group. And he actually took case studies of about a dozen cases from the glider rescue of Mussolini during World War Two on down to the Entebbe raid, where the Israelis freed hostages in Uganda. And this became the Bible. And he was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which many was in charge of the Green Berets and the Delta Force and the SEALs and was running operations out of Afghanistan. And they would do raids sometimes a dozen a night. So when he's first presented and he gets into this very late, the original lead comes to the CIA in August. He's not brought in until the end of January of the following year, 2011. He says, you know, we do this kind of thing all the time. The big difference between this raid and any other is the fact that they are going to have to fly one hundred and sixty two miles from the Afghan border into deep into Pakistan to this town of Abadabad, which was the home of the Pakistani West Point. And it's a resort. And then there's a military base there. The West the West Point is there. There's a police force. There are a couple of hundred thousand people there. So getting in past Pakistani air defenses, raiding the compound and then getting out is what makes this different from the kinds of raids they did in Afghanistan every night. You know, I know Bill McRaven, but I did not realize that his father, also a military man, had graced the box of Wheaties in his time. And so the apple does not fall far from the tree. If there's anyone who should be on the box of Wheaties, it's it's Bill McRaven for the reasons you suggested. But there's a wonderful scene, Chris of Admiral McRaven talking to the Navy SEALs just before they embark on the mission. And he knows at that point that he's not just their commander. He's a coach revving them up to get into the game. And he he gives a speech, talk about what he says to those Navy SEALs about to go on that dangerous mission. You know, it's interesting. I just want to say one thing before I tell the story. You know, one of the things I was concerned about when I started to write this book and research it was, of course, there was a movie made a year or two after called Zero Dark Thirty, which focuses on a particular woman played by Jessica Chastain, whose role is greatly exaggerated. There wasn't a woman named. Well, her name wasn't Maya, but that's the code name that they had in the CIA for her role is not nearly as big, although she was still a key player and a fascinating character. But one of the things I realized as I researched the book is that. The reality, the true story is so much more interesting and frankly, in some ways, so much more theatrical than the movie was. And this is a perfect example. So he's has he decides they go through they're in Jalalabad, right on the eastern border of Afghanistan, just over the border, you're going to get into Pakistan and begin the mission. And he's meeting with the two dozen SEALs that are going to carry out the mission. And they've gone through all of the logistics and he kind of realizes I've got to give him a speech. I've got to give him a talk, as you say, by a coach. And he starts to talk about, you guys know, I like basketball. And a lot of them, he used to play pick up basketball games with them and used to throw elbows and stuff. And, you know, with these SEALs and they greatly respected them. But they also got a smile on their face when he starts talking about basketball. And he says, my favorite, one of my favorite movies is Hoosiers. And do you remember the scene? And anybody who's a sports fan, I think has seen Hoosiers and loves it. And he says, remember the scene when the small town team, small Indiana town, they come to the Indianapolis to play the state championship game against a local team. And they're playing it in the big state gymnasium. And he says, when the kids come in, they're all overwhelmed by the size of this gym. They've just played in these little country gyms in rural Indiana. And so he says to one guy, the smallest guy on the team, get up on the shoulders of the biggest guy and here's a tape measure. And they go where they do the tape measure. And he says, how high is the basket? He goes 10 feet. And they says to another guy, walk off the the size of the basketball court. And it's 94 feet. And the point is, it's exactly the same size. The stands are much bigger. The arena is much bigger. But the court is exactly the same size as the court back in their little town. And he says, this mission is exactly what you guys have done every day. The stage is bigger. The stakes are bigger. But if you just do what you do every day, when you go out on these regular missions, you will be just fine. And Robert O'Neill, who is, I guess, our main character among the SEALs, the man who ends up killing bin Laden, says that he was born to give that speech. And he said, I would have gone out right at that moment and begun the raid. I was the perfect speech to put in context what they had ahead of them and and that just stick to your knitting, stick to your game and you'll be fine. And we haven't heard the last of tape measures as we'll discuss in a moment. I'll get back to that in a second. But the among those two dozen Navy SEALs is Robert O'Neill, who led the mission and ultimately is the one who took out Osama bin Laden. Talk about Rob O'Neill, Chris. Well, Robert O'Neill was born in Montana, average kid. He his parents were divorced and his father, Tom, decided at some point that he really wanted to help bring him up even in this broken home. And he, for instance, O'Neill was a big basketball fan. He took him to a court and they and tried to teach him how to throw shoot free throws. And at one point you had to shoot 20 free throws in a row before you could end the practice. His record was over 100. And then he introduced him to a SEAL, not thinking he was going to become a SEAL. But he ended up going up into a mountain with this this guy in a very steep, tough climb to see. I think it was L and and they didn't shoot any. They just looked at them and the guy was impressed. And he said, you know, you're in pretty good shape. You could be a SEAL. One problem because he was in Landlock, Minnesota, rather, Montana. O'Neill didn't know how to swim. So he had to go learn to swim. And fortunately, there was a swimmer, a collegiate swimmer from Notre Dame who took him and the local pool, took him under his wing and taught him to swim. He went to SEAL training and the buds and ended up becoming a part of SEAL Team Six. And he was, you know, a warrior and was a little older than a lot of the guys. He was into his 30s and had become a team leader. So sometimes he wouldn't go out on the missions. He would organize the missions and stay back. But he was one of the people when they were forming the group that would be part of these two dozen SEALs that would take on. Some could say that the most important, the most dangerous mission in the history of the SEALs, he was on the team. And there is another unlikely hero in the raid, a dog named Cairo. What role did Cairo play? Well, Cairo was, you know, they would bring dogs on missions because the dogs could do things sometimes the SEALs couldn't. First of all, they could smell explosives and they could chase down people running away that the SEALs couldn't. And Cairo was a Belgian, I hope I pronounced this right, Malinois, who had actually been shot in combat. And when he was wounded in combat, he was as if a SEAL had been wounded. He had a handler, a fellow named Will Chesney, and they had a helicopter come to the helicopter. And they took him to a combat hospital that would have been used for humans to stitch him back up. And he had a time of recuperation. And then he comes on the mission to and his job when Will Chesney obviously handling him was to patrol the perimeter because this was a very crowded town. They were going to have these two helicopters come in. One of them ends up crashing, as you remember, into the wall. That had a hard landing. But the the tail of the helicopter, of this Black Hawk, ends up perched up on the on the wall of a compound inside the compound. And, you know, they make a lot of noise and neighbors start coming and then police start coming. And part of the way they try to fend them off is the threat, you know, that was posed by by Cairo, who, you know, is is out there in the perimeter trying to keep the people away, whether it's first responders or just nosy, nosy Pakistanis, while the main group is inside raiding the main house. The the the most gripping part of this book, our audience will not be surprised to know, is your description of the actual mission itself. It is an it's worth the the price of the book alone. Can you just give us a condensed version of the mission, Chris? What happened? Thank you for saying that, Mark, because, you know, what I try to try to do in 45 and what I try to do in Countdown Bin Laden is to write a history thriller. You know, so often books are written. Well, we know this has happened. How did it happen? Why did it happen? No, I wanted it to be written from the point of view of people in real time in the room when they get the first lead. You know, we know about this compound. One of the things in the book is I never tell you whether Bin Laden is in the compound because they didn't know whether Bin Laden is the compound. When when Obama decides to he's going to launch the raid, he decides that on April 28, three days before they actually carry out the raid, various people in the National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room are saying, well, I think it's a 60 percent chance he's there. I think it's an 80 percent chance. And when it finally comes to to Obama, he says, you know what, guys, it's basically a 50 50 proposition. He's either there or he isn't. But that's no more in the president's mind than 50 50. He's even going to be there. So you have these two Black Hawk helicopters. And we told you in great detail how they prepare. They set up a replica of a compound and a CIA secret base in North Carolina. And then they go out to to Nevada, out into the desert. And they carry out another raid. And this was part of McRaven's theory. If you're going to if you're going to do a raid, you have to practice every element of it. So when they do the final dress rehearsal, they literally get the helicopters take off, fly 162 miles, trying to evade radar by the mountains in Nevada, come out. And they're trying to get the amount of time from when they come out of the mountains until they hit the compound. They know that there's going to be a certain noise signature. And as soon as that they want that at first, it's two minutes. Then it's 90 seconds. They finally get it down to 60 seconds that people in the compound would be able to hear the sound of the helicopters before the helicopters get there. So they're these two helicopters. They're called they, you know, code names, Chalk One and Chalk Two, each with about a dozen seals, one of them with a dozen seals and Cairo the dog and they they go through the mountains and there are lights that are shining and they don't know whether it's just lights or whether they have the Pakistani air defenses have picked them up. They finally end up over a Bada Bada Chalk One goes in and they're going to hover over the compound and people are going to repel out by rope lines into the compound. And then the man, that's the one that loses lift and crashes into the wall and has a very hard landing. And then you see that famous picture of the president and all of his team in the situation room and Hillary Clinton with her hand up to her mouth as the as the helicopter crashes and they don't know is this the end of the mission? Is it just gone completely nuts or not? And McRaven like a pilot when you're in big shop and you're on an airliner and he comes on and he sounds like he doesn't have a care in the world says, well, we got one chopper down, but we're fine and we're proceeding with the mission and everybody's part, you know, goes out of their throat and back into where it's supposed to be in their chest. They go and attack the main house where they believe that bin Laden is there. He's in the main house. And meanwhile, Chalk Two goes to the perimeter, drops off the people that are going to be on the perimeter and the dog, Cairo, and then was supposed to go and above the main house and drop a group of people off who were going to repel down to the ceiling of this three story house. So they'd be coming down at bin Laden at the same time the group in the courtyard was coming up. But when they realized that something was wrong in the courtyard and we can talk about it afterwards, that made the planes unable to hold their position, they dropped O'Neill and his group outside the perimeter. They now have to get inside the fence and all of them go up from from the bottom of the ground floor to go up to the third floor to see who's who's there, who's the person living in the best quarters of the house and whether it's bin Laden or some other criminals, some other al-Qaeda terrorist or somebody's crazy aunt. And they find out when they get up there, they look and Rob O'Neill is pretty sure that it's bin Laden. He shoots him in the head twice. They eventually have to get out of the compound. Talk about that part of the mission. They think they have Osama bin Laden. He is dead. They put him in a bag, but now the mission is not over. They have to get out of the compound and out of the country because the Pakistani government does not know that this raid is happening. So talk about that part of the mission. Well, there are a couple of things they had always said. This was a three and a half hour. Let me say one thing first. And there are several things in this book that are new, that have never been reported before. And one of them was they all thought the SEALs did, and particularly O'Neill, that this was a suicide mission. They absolutely believe that this was as he put it to me, O'Neill did. It was a one way ticket that they were going to get there. But if it was bin Laden, that one, there would be explosives all around the compound. Two, that the house itself would be booby trapped. Three, that he would have body guards who would go down and, you know, take out any, any raiders. And four, that they probably would have an escape tunnel and that bin Laden might be able to get out in that 60 seconds between when he heard the chopper noise and when he got out. So they were amazed. They are still alive. It was always going to be an hour and a half there, a half an hour on the ground and an hour and a half back by helicopter. But after they killed bin Laden, they go to the second floor to what was bin Laden's office and they find a treasure trove of terrorist material, more than they have found in the entire 10 years since the war. They find computers. They find hard drives. They find thousands of pages of documents. They find bin Laden's personal journal. They also find huge freeze dried packets of opium and which I guess they were using to sell. But in any case, they find all the stuff and they make a request to headquarters, can we have more time? But obviously they're trying to balance. We don't want to leave this treasure trove behind. We may be able to exploit it and stop missions and roll up Al Qaeda. On the other hand, every more minute we're there, there's a chance that there'll be more people, Pakistanis that will come and stop. Anyway, they probably stayed around 35 or 40 minutes instead of 30. They get out. There is one helicopter, the Black Hawk that had brought Chalk 2 that hadn't crashed and they put bin Laden and all the material because that's what they've got to get out most and some of the seals. They get them out. But in the course of planning for this, they had put a spare helicopter inside Afghanistan. And as soon as one crash, McRaven said that this other Chinook needed to come was about a half an hour away, needed to come and wait just outside the compound. So they're able to get all the rest of the people on that helicopter and to get out two things they had to do before they left. One, they had to get because there were a lot of children. There were three wives of bin Laden were there. They have to get all of them out safely. And that says a lot about the mindset of US military. And, you know, we saw this in Afghanistan that where people are risking their lives to protect children, here they were delaying their departure to make sure everybody was safe. And then they had to blow up Chalk 1, the Black Hawk, which was a stealth helicopter with all kinds of absolutely new technology to evade radar. This is the first time it had ever been used in combat. And they had to blow that up while not endangering any of the other people. Anyway, they get back in the in the helicopters, the one Chinook, one Black Hawk, they head back for the border an hour and a half. And, you know, there's plenty of concern about now the Pakistanis know they've made a lot of noise. Can the Pakistanis scramble their jets and take these helicopters down? One of the other things that I don't know that it had been widely reported is that as part of his plan, in case they should get into a firefight, McRaven had what he called his guerrilla package. And they were they were in the air flying in circles just inside the Afghan border. They didn't come across, but he had fighter jets and he had AC 130 gunships. And if it became clear that they were going to be in a firefight with Pakistani fighters, he was going to send all of these planes, this guerrilla package across the border to protect the SEAL team coming back. In fact, they didn't need them. They get back safely. So when they get back, they have to identify that this is, in fact, Osama bin Laden. And that's when the tape measure comes back into play. Yeah, so they finally get back to Jalalabad. They land, they take the body bag, carrying what they believe to be bin Laden into the compound, into the hangar. And McRaven, because he's going to be have to be the one who reports back to Panetta, who is, you know, in a formal sense, but not really in charge of this mission. This is done by the CIA, not the Pentagon, so that if everything had gone wrong, they would have been able to deny. No, we weren't in a bonobot. I don't know what you're talking about. So he's going to have to report back to Panetta at the CIA. He goes in and he personally, McRaven, opens up the body bag, unzips it and pulls the body out of the body bag. And, you know, I was described. I asked people, what had what had bin Laden looked like at this point? His face had been largely blown apart. I mean, it was not. It wasn't like there was some discrete coal. He had had three shots in his head because when he landed, McRaven put a rather O'Neill put a third shot into him just to make sure he was dead. And so he's looking at it. And yes, there are certain things that look like bin Laden, but basically the whole center of his face is gone. And but he knows one other thing about bin Laden, and that is that he's big. He's six four. And he suddenly realizes McRaven for all of the planning that he had done. And he had done an enormous amount of planning. He doesn't have a tape measure. So he says to one of the SEALs, he says, hey, how tall are you? The guy says he's six two. He says, I want you to lie down next to the corpse. And the guy kind of looks at him like, what? And but he's on the craven. He's the head of joint special operations command. So he lies down next to the corpse and he and he fees that the corpse stretched out is about two inches taller longer than the SEAL is. So he figures, well, this has got to be bin Laden. And he reports he ends up reporting all of this back to the president. And the president, by this point, is pretty sure it's him. So there's a little bit of a lightning of this extremely tense mood. But he does say to McRaven, wait a minute, you had $60 million for a helicopter that we just had to blow up, but you didn't have $10 for a tape measure. And a weeks later, McRaven meets. This actually says so much about both of them. McRaven meets Obama in the Oval Office and Obama, you know, congratulates him and tells him, you know, I want you to express all of this to the team. And then he goes back behind his desk in the Oval Office and he pulls out a plaque and on the plaque is a gold plated tape measure. You know, wish you'd have this McRaven, incidentally, ends up giving it to the unit because he feels this isn't for me. This is for the unit, you know, this present, this gift from the president of the United States. And so some weeks later, he's at his home in Fort Bragg in North Carolina. There's a knock on the door and there's a military officer and he comes and he gives McRaven. He says, we hear that you gave the tape measure from the president away. He says, yeah, look, I thought it belonged to the unit and he wants to make it clear I didn't care about it. So I just gave it away. He says, well, the president would like you to have one for your family to keep. And he hands him another plaque with a tape measure. It's an amazing moment. You quote Bill McRaven as saying of Barack Obama, he was the ultimate team player and the smartest man in the room who made the incredibly bold decision to do the mission. How does this mission reflect the legacy of Barack Obama? Well, I think it I think it does and in a lot of ways. First of all, one of the things that impressed me is the number of meetings they had just in March and April of 2011. Now, remember that after Panetta gets the lead in August, he goes to the Oval Office and briefs Obama in September of 2010. They have meetings throughout the fall. He has a meeting with him just before he heads to Hawaii for his Christmas vacation in December. But as it gets really closer and really serious, there are 17 meetings in March and April. Now, the president isn't in everyone, but there are different levels. There are deputies meetings, which are that sort of the people under the principles like the Secretary of State. There are principles meetings, which are the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the CIA director, but not the president. And then there are National Security Council meetings, which is when the president is at the end of the table in the sit room. And each of the meetings is held very carefully and, you know, building blocks and reviewing what they know and what they don't know and answered. Let's answer this next question. And so Obama could really set a process in motion. And I will tell you, Tom Donilon, who by the spring of 20 of 2011 is his National Security Advisor. They take this they absolutely maintained a meticulous process, which is hard because this is so secret that a lot of people were never read in. Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, wasn't read into the mission. As I tell you to say, they got the first lead in August. Defense Secretary Gates isn't read in until December. Hillary Clinton, because he's the Secretary of State, isn't read in until March, a little over a month before the mission takes place. And they were told, you can't tell any of your staff. They were so scared that there would be a leak. This was the best lead on bin Laden since Torah Bora in 2001 when he escaped from the mountains in eastern Afghanistan. And they were so scared there'd be something. Well, they seemed to have a lead in bin Laden, and then he'd be gone like that. So the the principles were not allowed to tell any staffer. She wasn't allowed to tell the Deputy Secretary. She went to a meeting at the White House, Hillary Clinton. She had to make up a story as to why she was going. She couldn't say, I'm going to have a meeting about bin Laden, even to the people right around her. And having said all of that, when they finally get to the final decision meeting on April 28th, they go around the table. Biden says, we don't have enough information. We're going to really mess up our relationship with Pakistan. I don't think you should go now. Let's see if we can get more information. Gates, these are the first two people he talks to on the right side of the table in the Situation Room. Bob Gates, the Secretary of Defense. And this is very interesting. Donaldson said history was in the room that day because everybody came at this based on their experience. Well, Bob Gates had been an advisor to an executive assistant to the CIA director back in 1980 during the around hostage crisis when they carried out Operation Eagle Claw. Remember the rescue mission under Jimmy Carter to rescue the hostages? And they ended up at a spot in the desert in Iran and there were transport planes there and helicopters there. And they ended up having a terrible collision and killing eight people. He had never gotten over that. And his feeling was something always goes wrong in these missions. I think if we want to have a drone to take out this one guy who walks around, they call him the pacer. That's fine, but it's too risky. Then there were other people who thought, you know, that they should go ahead. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mullin, Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, who said it was a 51-49 proposition. Obama says, look, it's 50-50. I'm going to make a decision and I'll let you know in the morning. You know, talk about a great go to commercial. And he sits by himself upstairs in the family quarters in the treaty room, which was his office with a basketball game with Kobe Bryant playing at night, thinking about it, going over everything and makes the decision to do the right. And I will tell you that when the next morning, on Friday the 29th of April, he calls Donald in to the White House to tell him before he heads out on a trip he had to take. They weren't, he wasn't at all sure he was going to approve the mission when Donald calls Panetta. He's not at all sure. And when Panetta calls McRaven in Bagram before he goes to Jalalabad and says the mission is a go, McRaven wasn't at all sure he was going to say yes and thought, as you say, that it was an incredibly gutsy decision. It bears mentioning Chris that this happened, this was staged in Afghanistan when it was under U.S. control. That has changed. Back in July, Joe Biden said that there really wasn't a chance of the Taliban coming back. He said the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely. He was wrong. You covered this as a journalist when it was happening that the stunning takeover of the Taliban of Afghanistan and you will look back on it as an historian, you are both. So as a journalist, why was Joe Biden so wrong and as an historian, how will history look upon this moment? Well, that's interesting. You know, you got to remember when Joe Biden came in in 2009, there was a big discussion because we were in the process of losing the war in Afghanistan then. If you remember, President Obama had a series of meetings with top advisors. People started saying it was paralysis by analysis because he had so many meetings as to whether or not to search troops. He ended up surging tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan. Biden was against it. And this is before they had taken down Bin Laden. But his feeling was this idea of this big mission to kind of transform the country and turn it into a Jeffersonian democracy and transform the role of women in Afghanistan was a mistake that we did have a role there, but it could be much smaller as a simple counterterrorism role. And he got beaten by, I mean, he got, he was overruled by the president who gets to make the final decision. He even said at one point to Obama, you're getting rolled by the Pentagon here, but he always wanted out. So if you remember in the campaign in 2020, when he's running for president, Biden says, I wanna end the forever wars. Of course, Trump had said the same thing. And when he comes in, he keeps up. Remember Trump had made the deal with the Taliban was planning to pull out by May 1st. Biden makes a deal with the Taliban. We're gonna pull out, it'll be a few more months. It'll be September 11th, but we're gonna get out. And I think there's a few things. I think some of the intelligence was wrong. Look, there were very few people who said the Taliban was gonna take over in 11 days, which is basically what they did. But I think a lot of it was also the fact that Biden had wanted out of Afghanistan for more than a decade. And now he was in charge. He was the man making the decision. And that was the decision he wanted to make. So what do we learn from this ignominious chapter in American history? The failed takeover and democratization of the Taliban by Afghanistan? Well, I think that the decision that most of the American people had made, which is why they voted for Trump in 2016 and why they voted for Biden in 2020. And there were other people running who said, no, we need to stay in. And in both cases, they said we need to get out. Is that people felt that had a different view than we had up till 2016 about our national security interests in Afghanistan. That where, you know, the original thought was we need to stay there. We need to have a presence. We need to solidify a government and a fighting force. Their feeling was that in a strict definition of our national security interests, what we really need to do is to make sure that they can't strike the US homeland. I remember having a conversation after the President Biden decided in April that he was gonna pull out with a top White House official. And this officials, I asked, I said, you know, at some point the Taliban may take over. And if they take over, things are gonna turn very bad for the millions of Afghan women and Afghan girls who have come to lead different lives in the last 20 years. And this official said, that's true. But ultimately sending Americans to fight and die for Afghan women is not in our national security, which is kind of cold-blooded and calculated, but I'm not sure that it's wrong. And, you know, this official said, there are a lot of terrible things that happened around the world and we can't police them and we can't stop them. Our function in Afghanistan is to prevent an attack on the US homeland. And frankly, and I talked to a top person in the Pentagon this last week who said Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Qaeda in Yemen is more capable of striking the US homeland than any Al Qaeda unit. Not to say Al Qaeda is gone. The President Biden was dead wrong about that, but that it's not as up to a real threat to the US as Al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula is right now. So, you know, people are gonna disagree about this. There are a couple of things that I feel about Countdown Bin Laden and why I think it's important, particularly now when a lot of people have such regrets and feel so sad about the way this war has ended, our America's longest war. One, we did accomplish our prime objective there. We did bring the mastermind of 9-11 to justice and we did roll up Al Qaeda. Now it's not gone and it's still a threat, but you know, there was not an attack by Al Qaeda on the homeland on anything like the scale of 9-11 over these last 20 years. Two, as screwed up, and I think that's not an unfair thing to say as our way of getting out of Afghanistan has been. The Bin Laden raid is a case study of how the Intel community and the political community around the president and the military community under McRaven worked together flawlessly hand in hand to pull off a great mission, a risky mission, a dangerous mission, a mission where they didn't know what they were gonna find in the compound and they did it. And then thirdly, it's just a great story. It's a story that I think Americans can rightly take pride in, the ingenuity, the persistence, the stick-to-it-iveness, the bravery, the courage, and the daring of Americans and at a time when a lot of people may not feel that way right now about our government and the decisions that we made. This is a pretty good case study of how well we can do things sometimes when we get it right. Well, I enjoyed every word of Countdown Bin Laden and I have great admiration for its author, Chris Wallace. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. Mark, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Signed book-plated copies of Countdown Bin Laden are available for sale at lbjstore.com. I hope you'll join us for our next programs, continued conversations with Jason Stanford on September 15th at 1130 Central and an evening with Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 6th at 7 p.m. Registration is available online. See you next time.