Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I had Netflix on the other day and just flipping
around looking for something would I would like to watch.
It's amazing how they have many thousands of things, but
only a handful of them are things I want to watch.
And then something popped up that I thought, I definitely
want to watch this, and it's called let me get
the name exactly right, American Man Hunt Colon Osama Bin Laden.
(00:21):
And so I start watching this thing, and of course
it should have occurred to me as I was starting
to watch it, it should have occurred.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
To me, like, who might be in this thing? A
documentary about getting Bin Lauden?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
And then I think it maybe was the first voice
that I heard in the documentary, and I had my
face away turned away from the screen for a minute,
so I just heard it, and I heard the voice,
I'm like, wait, I know that, dude, And and so
again I think the very first voice was former CIA
Deputy director and twice acting director Michael Morrell. And Mike
(00:55):
and I actually first met when he wrote his bill
very timely book called The Great War of Our Time,
the CIA's Fight against terrorism from al Qaeda to ISIS,
and and we've we've kept in touch and been friends
since then, and I asked him, since seeing that remarkable documentary,
(01:17):
if he could join us this morning and talk about
a little bit. So, Hi, Mike, thanks for doing this.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
You're welcome, Ross. It is really good to be with
you and your listeners.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I'm curious how much of the that the whole saga
of what you guys did to get bin Laden, and
we'll get into the saga in a minute, how much
of that is just so deeply etched into your memory
that you will never forget it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And how much was.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Some something that, let's see, when people making the movie
asked you about it, that you had to look it
up or ask a friend or ponder for a while.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
So for the two the two big moments, you know,
in terms of my role being with President Bush on
nine to eleven itself and then being part of President
Obama's national security team when we found him and when
we killed him, those are etched in my mind as
(02:16):
if they were yesterday. Some of the other details about,
you know, all of our work prior to nine to
eleven and then some of the work in the immediate
aftermath of nine to eleven that that that the documentary
covers were things I had to go back and refresh
myself on it's been a while, right.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, you know, And it's funny.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
You know, you and I have been friends for quite
a while now, and even when we talk, I've rarely
asked you about this, except maybe when I was interviewing
you for the book. And I think, in my mind,
I think part of it was the dude gets asked
these questions all the time, and.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I'm just not going to put him through that again.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
But now you're on now, you're on TV about it,
so I figure we might as well talk about it
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Fair game, Yeah, fair game.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
So tell us a little bit about your day on
nine to eleven.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Yeah. So I was the president's daily intelligence brief for
that whole year, the whole year of two thousand and one,
and I went wherever he went, you know, whether it
was in the Oval office or Camp David or his
ranch in Texas, or traveling domestically or traveling internationally. I
was with him all the time. So I was with
(03:33):
him on September eleventh, I briefed him that morning and
then we got, you know, in the motorcade to go
to the school where he did the education event with
the kids, right, And that's where we learned, you know,
what what had happened that morning and what was happening
right in real time for me. For me Ross, it
(03:54):
was a day of the intensity of doing my job,
you know, with a surreal So give you one example
of each so intensity of doing my job.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
It was.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Him looking at me in the eye and saying, Michael,
who did this? And you know, we didn't know for sure.
And when you watch the doc it's a little mixed
up from a time sequence point of view, but we
didn't know for sure when he asked me that question,
and I said, miss President, you know, I think when
(04:26):
we get to the end of the trail, we're going
to find al Qaeda and we're going to find Bin Laden.
And I told him I'd bet my children's future on that.
So that's an example of the intensity of doing my job.
The surreal the best example there were menu that day.
But you know, as we were flying back, and the
documentary covers this, As we were flying back to Andrew's
Air Force Base that night, the President's military aid, right,
(04:48):
the guy who carries the nuclear football, he and I
had become friends. He was looking at the left side
of the aircraft as we were approaching Andrews, and he
waved me over, and I went over, and I looked
out the window and there was an F sixteen on
that wingtip, and he said, as an F sixteen DC
Air National Guard. There's another one on the other wingtip.
(05:11):
And it was so close you could see right, you
could see the pilot in the plane, and in the
distance you could steal you could see the still smoldering Pentagon.
And then he said something to me ross that still
sends shivers up my spine. He said, do you know
why they're there? You know, I had no idea, not
a military guy, right, He said, they're there to put
(05:34):
themselves in between the president and a surface to air missile.
If somebody fires one at us on final approach, it's
like whoa wow, whoa yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I remember hearing you say that in the documentary. That
sent shivers up my spine too.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You did, did you was how was the level of
fear of that on that plane ride? Or are you
just so busy thinking about what just happened to the
country that you guys even really weren't thinking about yourselves.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
You know, I wasn't thinking about myself. I was actually
thinking about the president, sure, and they were kind of
there were kind of there were kind of three moments
right where where there was some concern. The first is is,
you know, we were standing in the school. This event
had been on his calendar for weeks, you know, and
(06:30):
the two towers had already been hit. So I'm standing
there thinking, you know, is somebody going to fly a
plane into the school. So that was one moment, right,
and I looked over the Secret Service and I could
tell by the look on their eye that they were
thinking the same thing on your right, wanted to get
out of there.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
The second was when the White House Chief of Staff
Andy Card took me aside on Air Force One after
we'd left, and he told me that the White House
had received a threatening call that there was a bomb
on Air Force one. And he said, you know, they
(07:12):
get these kind of phone calls all the time, but
you know we're paying attention to this one because the
person who called used Air Force one's code name, which
at that point was Angel, so that you know, it's
like wow, right. And then the last time is when
the when the military aid said to me, right, we're
(07:34):
afraid somebody might shoot us. Surface to air missile at US.
But one of the great things about the military, right
is is they prepare for everything. And so they were
prepared for everything. Wow, even though they're low.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Right. Yeah, I'm gonna skip way ahead. Actually no, I'm
only skip a little bit ahead. I'm going to ask
you to compress an immense amount of work into a
fairly short answer. But paint a picture for us of
what two things actually getting a sense like, maybe Bin
(08:13):
Laden is in this place in Abadabad?
Speaker 2 (08:15):
How did you figure out he might be there?
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And then the second, how did you get to a
high enough level of confidence, which I don't ever think
was at its highest, But how did you get to
a high enough level of confidence that President Obama could
give the go.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Two great questions. The first one is that way back
in two thousand and two, and I'm going to be
quick here, way back in two thousand and two, we
heard about a guy who supposedly worked for Bin Laden
prior to nine to eleven, supposedly was a courier between
Ben Laden and Colleaguejaik Muhammad, the mastermind of nine to eleven,
(08:59):
and got really interested in this guy, but we didn't
have his true name, didn't know where he was, right,
didn't have any of that kind of information. So it
literally took us seven eight years to figure out who
he was, what his nationality was, what his phone number was,
you know, and another year to pinpoint him on the planet.
(09:22):
But once we did find him, we followed him back
to this a big about a bad compound, right, and
that compound, you know, just just just yelled out, right,
there's somebody special here, just because of the way it looked, right,
twelve to eighteen foot walls topped with barbed wire and
a lot of other stuff. So that's how that's how
we found him.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
In terms of confidence, you know, we had big debates
about that in the sit room, a situation room with
President Obama, and you know, it turned out that people
had varying levels of confidence. Right, the analyst who did
the work, she said she he was ninety five percent confident.
Her boss, the senior analyst in the counter terrorism centers,
(10:06):
that he was eighty percent. I said, I was only sixty.
So we had these big discussions about why right, people
were all over the map. President Obama will tell you
that he was fifty to fifty at the end of
the day. But you know, he felt that he had
a responsibility to go look and see if he was there,
and I couldn't agree more with him.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
We're talking with Michael Morell, former Deputy director twice acting
director of the CIA, and he was President Bush's daily
intelligence briefer during that faithful year of two thousand and one,
and we're talking about a new Netflix documentary, American Manhunt.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Osama bin Laden.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Did did Obama ask your opinion whether you.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Thought he should give a green light to the mission?
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Yeah? When we were when we were talking about the probably,
and I told him I was only sixty percent. And
I told him the reason I was only sixty percent
was because this was only a circumstantial case. We had
no direct evidence bin Laden was there. And I lived
(11:16):
through a rock WMD. Right, I lived through the CIA
saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and
we were wrong. So I was looking at it in
that context, and then I said, you know, mister President,
you actually need to know this is a sit room
full of people, right, you need to know that the
case that bin Laden is that Abadabad is weaker than
(11:42):
the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Well,
you could hear a pin drop in the room. And
he immediately said He immediately said to me, Michael, does
that mean you wouldn't do this? And I said, no,
mister President, I absolutely would do this because this is
the best lead we've ever had and sixty percent is
(12:02):
good enough.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, I don't I don't want to spend too long
on this because it's going to sound like I'm trying
to be.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Political, and I'm really I'm really not.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
But it's it seemed from the stuff that I read,
and maybe from stuff I read from you, I don't
remember that near the end, basically everybody was a yes
except for Bob Gates and Joe Biden. And then Bob
Gates changed his mind and turned to yes this. And
you can tell me if that's wrong. But I might
have gotten that from you or your book or something.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
And it seems like at the end only Biden was
a no.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Is that true? And what do you think of any
of that? Again, I'm not trying to drag you into politics.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yeah, yeah, sure, the it's only two people who said no.
So the last meeting, you know, a few days before
the raid, Obama has this big, big meeting in the stroom,
all of the cabinet members and then all of their deputies. Right,
So I was a deputy and we're all in the
(13:02):
room and he he pulls all of the cabinet members
and a couple of the deputies, right, what's your view?
What should I do here? And at that meeting, two
people said. Two people said I don't think you should
do this, and one was Bob Gates. And Bob Gates
didn't think the intelligence case was good enough, and he
(13:23):
was really concerned about the risk to the Seals because
he remembered Desert One, right when when President Carter sent in,
you know, sent in helicopters to try to sit, you know,
rescue the hostages in Tehran at the embassy in Tehran,
and the helicopters crashed, another plane blew up, and a
(13:46):
bunch of guys died, and that was his concern. And
then Joe Biden said, you know, I don't think the
intelligence case is good enough either, miss President, and I'm
worried about US pakistanis So Bob Gates changed his mind
the next day and said he was a yes. I
don't know whether Joe Biden never did. He has He
(14:08):
has later said that he wanted to give the president
some decision making space. I have no idea whether that's
true or.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Not interesting, And I don't know how many people remember this.
And it does come up in the documentary in an
almost funny way, and we can talk about it as
if it's almost funny since we know how the mission
ended up. But where somebody mentioned the Desert One helicopter
(14:35):
crash as a risk in this mission, and I and
the story in the in the documentary, I don't think
it was Bob Gates. I think it was a junior
person who said it, and they're like, oh my god,
don't even say that, And then why don't you.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Tell us what actually happened.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, So there were two moments, right, one I knew
about and when I didn't until I watched the documentary.
The first was was when Bob Gates said, you know,
I was there for Desert One guy, Right, that's a
risk here. Military operations never go like they're supposed to.
So Bob Gates did it once and I knew that
because I was in the room when he said it.
(15:11):
And one of the one of President Obama's aids in
the documentary says, whoa I don't believe you just said that.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
If we actually do this, then something bad happens. You know,
people are going to leak leak that you said that,
and President's going to look stupid.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
But the other was one of the seals, right, one
of the young seals said, right, what if the helicopters
crash and somebody else, you know, one of the seals,
I don't believe you just said that.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
You chinxed that, right, And then one did.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But but it was already close to the ground, and
it was it was more like a very bad landing
than what you might think of as a crash like
what happened in Desert one. And they did get out
of the helicopter and participate.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
In the Michie and then it just lost a lyft
about ten feet above the ground.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, and they ended up explaining that it was like
it's all in the documentary.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I won't even I won't bother with it. But and
then and then we blew up.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
That helicopter on the way out, so that whoever was
couldn't couldn't get information and equipment out of it. Let's see,
give me a quick answer to a listener question, did
the government have images of Osama bin Ladden's shadow.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
So documentary didn't quite get this right. But there was
a guy right who came out every day and walked.
We called him the Pacer. Turned out it was Bin Laden,
but we couldn't get a clear enough viewers of his
face to actually tell it was him. But we were
interested in how tall this guy was. Now in the documentary,
(16:46):
somebody says that when we looked at the shadow and
the day of the time of day and all that
kind of stuff, that we determined that it was a
person about the height of Bin Laden. That's not right.
What we determined was that the height was somewhere between
five feet and seven feet, which wasn't particularly helpful. They
should have put that in there.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
It was funny. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
We're talking with Michael Morele, former Deputy Director and Acting
director of the CIA about a new documentary that he
features prominently in American Manhunt Osama Bin Laden.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So all right, I wanted to save this question.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
For a last question, and I'm not quite gonna say
it's the most important question, but it's one that for
me because I know you, I find important. You talked
in this documentary in a very emotional way about the
stress on your marriage.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Did you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Sure? You know, even before we were working this particular
lead started in August of twenty ten. The raid was
in May of twenty eleven. Even before that, being the
deputy director acting director CIA, you know, is a seven
day a week job. I probably worked sixteen hours a
(18:05):
day Monday through Friday, and I worked, you know, maybe
eight hours on Saturday, and I was lucky if I
could take Sunday off. So it was already a stress
on my marriage, right. And then and then the bin
Laden hunt starts, you know, in August, and I'm working
even more, and I'm working all day Saturday. Now I'm
working all day Sunday now, and I can't tell her
(18:30):
right what's going on. And then the whole thing bubbles
over on the day of the raid, where you know,
I go to work even before she's up in the morning,
so you know, I leave it like at six am
on that Sunday when we did the raid, and you know,
she calls me about nine am and she said, I
(18:50):
just wanted to I don't believe your work already, and
I'm just you know, I'm calling you to make sure
you're coming to our daughter's last quarrel concert in high school. Yeah,
and it was at one o'clock. It was right in
the middle of the raid. And so I said, you know,
I can't. I'm really sorry. And she said, she said,
(19:11):
one hour, you know, her last concert. And I said, no, sorry,
and I gotta go, and I just hung out. It's
probably the wrong thing to do, but she tells the
story that later and she didn't hear from me from
that moment until about ten o'clock at night when I
called her and told her to turn on the TV.
She didn't hear from me. And she tells the story
(19:33):
that after she put the kids to bed that night,
she was she was sitting on the sofa wondering how
this divorce thing works. Wow, So thank god we got him. Yeah,
and god President Obama decided to announce it publicly that night,
or I would have had, you know, after gone home
to you know, difficult situation.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Do you think last quick question were just about out
of time?
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Do you think and I'm talking about a big picture now,
do you think I think your wife would say that
all those years of not having her husband around very much,
even more than just those few months of hardly having
you around at all.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
But just it's like being a military spouse.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Do you think your wife would save the life of
a you know, senior CIA spouse? Is was worth it
for her? Oh?
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Wow, we should get her on here. You know, when
I did call her that night to tell her to
turn on the television and the president is going to
be speaking, He's got something important to say, she immediately said,
you got him, didn't you. So you know that was
(20:44):
incredibly important to her too.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah, you know, she.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Was in a sense part of the hunt, but in
a very different way, right than somebody who worked at
the agency at the time, And so you know she
might jokingly tell you, no, right, it wasn't worth it,
but I think, you know, in a super candid moment,
I think she would say yes.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
And I do think there are major parallels there to
military spouses as well.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
I mean, Mike, you you've been just part of some
of the most important modern American history. It's really quite
incredible actually what you've done and what you've seen and
what you've heard, and I'm sure that there's an immense
amount of stuff that you will, you know, take to
your grave or only ever discussed with other people who
(21:34):
have the very top security clearances. So I think what
you've done and seen and heard is probably we've probably
only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And nobody's going to see the rest of it.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
But I'm so grateful for everything that you've done, and
and I'm honored to be your friend, and thank you
for giving us some time today.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
He're welcome, Ross, and I'm honored to be your friend
as well.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Have a great day.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Mike Morrell's new documentary is not just his Netflix new
documentary is called American Manhunt Osama bin Laden
I had Netflix on the other day and just flipping
around looking for something would I would like to watch.
It's amazing how they have many thousands of things, but
only a handful of them are things I want to watch.
And then something popped up that I thought, I definitely
want to watch this, and it's called let me get
the name exactly right, American Man Hunt Colon Osama Bin Laden.
(00:21):
And so I start watching this thing, and of course
it should have occurred to me as I was starting
to watch it, it should have occurred.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
To me, like, who might be in this thing? A
documentary about getting Bin Lauden?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
And then I think it maybe was the first voice
that I heard in the documentary, and I had my
face away turned away from the screen for a minute,
so I just heard it, and I heard the voice,
I'm like, wait, I know that, dude, And and so
again I think the very first voice was former CIA
Deputy director and twice acting director Michael Morrell. And Mike
(00:55):
and I actually first met when he wrote his bill
very timely book called The Great War of Our Time,
the CIA's Fight against terrorism from al Qaeda to ISIS,
and and we've we've kept in touch and been friends
since then, and I asked him, since seeing that remarkable documentary,
(01:17):
if he could join us this morning and talk about
a little bit. So, Hi, Mike, thanks for doing this.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
You're welcome, Ross. It is really good to be with
you and your listeners.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I'm curious how much of the that the whole saga
of what you guys did to get bin Laden, and
we'll get into the saga in a minute, how much
of that is just so deeply etched into your memory
that you will never forget it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And how much was.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Some something that, let's see, when people making the movie
asked you about it, that you had to look it
up or ask a friend or ponder for a while.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
So for the two the two big moments, you know,
in terms of my role being with President Bush on
nine to eleven itself and then being part of President
Obama's national security team when we found him and when
we killed him, those are etched in my mind as
(02:16):
if they were yesterday. Some of the other details about,
you know, all of our work prior to nine to
eleven and then some of the work in the immediate
aftermath of nine to eleven that that that the documentary
covers were things I had to go back and refresh
myself on it's been a while, right.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, you know, And it's funny.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
You know, you and I have been friends for quite
a while now, and even when we talk, I've rarely
asked you about this, except maybe when I was interviewing
you for the book. And I think, in my mind,
I think part of it was the dude gets asked
these questions all the time, and.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I'm just not going to put him through that again.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
But now you're on now, you're on TV about it,
so I figure we might as well talk about it
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Fair game, Yeah, fair game.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
So tell us a little bit about your day on
nine to eleven.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Yeah. So I was the president's daily intelligence brief for
that whole year, the whole year of two thousand and one,
and I went wherever he went, you know, whether it
was in the Oval office or Camp David or his
ranch in Texas, or traveling domestically or traveling internationally. I
was with him all the time. So I was with
(03:33):
him on September eleventh, I briefed him that morning and
then we got, you know, in the motorcade to go
to the school where he did the education event with
the kids, right, And that's where we learned, you know,
what what had happened that morning and what was happening
right in real time for me. For me Ross, it
(03:54):
was a day of the intensity of doing my job,
you know, with a surreal So give you one example
of each so intensity of doing my job.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
It was.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Him looking at me in the eye and saying, Michael,
who did this? And you know, we didn't know for sure.
And when you watch the doc it's a little mixed
up from a time sequence point of view, but we
didn't know for sure when he asked me that question,
and I said, miss President, you know, I think when
(04:26):
we get to the end of the trail, we're going
to find al Qaeda and we're going to find Bin Laden.
And I told him I'd bet my children's future on that.
So that's an example of the intensity of doing my job.
The surreal the best example there were menu that day.
But you know, as we were flying back, and the
documentary covers this, As we were flying back to Andrew's
Air Force Base that night, the President's military aid, right,
(04:48):
the guy who carries the nuclear football, he and I
had become friends. He was looking at the left side
of the aircraft as we were approaching Andrews, and he
waved me over, and I went over, and I looked
out the window and there was an F sixteen on
that wingtip, and he said, as an F sixteen DC
Air National Guard. There's another one on the other wingtip.
(05:11):
And it was so close you could see right, you
could see the pilot in the plane, and in the
distance you could steal you could see the still smoldering Pentagon.
And then he said something to me ross that still
sends shivers up my spine. He said, do you know
why they're there? You know, I had no idea, not
a military guy, right, He said, they're there to put
(05:34):
themselves in between the president and a surface to air missile.
If somebody fires one at us on final approach, it's
like whoa wow, whoa yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I remember hearing you say that in the documentary. That
sent shivers up my spine too.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You did, did you was how was the level of
fear of that on that plane ride? Or are you
just so busy thinking about what just happened to the
country that you guys even really weren't thinking about yourselves.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
You know, I wasn't thinking about myself. I was actually
thinking about the president, sure, and they were kind of
there were kind of there were kind of three moments
right where where there was some concern. The first is is,
you know, we were standing in the school. This event
had been on his calendar for weeks, you know, and
(06:30):
the two towers had already been hit. So I'm standing
there thinking, you know, is somebody going to fly a
plane into the school. So that was one moment, right,
and I looked over the Secret Service and I could
tell by the look on their eye that they were
thinking the same thing on your right, wanted to get
out of there.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
The second was when the White House Chief of Staff
Andy Card took me aside on Air Force One after
we'd left, and he told me that the White House
had received a threatening call that there was a bomb
on Air Force one. And he said, you know, they
(07:12):
get these kind of phone calls all the time, but
you know we're paying attention to this one because the
person who called used Air Force one's code name, which
at that point was Angel, so that you know, it's
like wow, right. And then the last time is when
the when the military aid said to me, right, we're
(07:34):
afraid somebody might shoot us. Surface to air missile at US.
But one of the great things about the military, right
is is they prepare for everything. And so they were
prepared for everything. Wow, even though they're low.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Right. Yeah, I'm gonna skip way ahead. Actually no, I'm
only skip a little bit ahead. I'm going to ask
you to compress an immense amount of work into a
fairly short answer. But paint a picture for us of
what two things actually getting a sense like, maybe Bin
(08:13):
Laden is in this place in Abadabad?
Speaker 2 (08:15):
How did you figure out he might be there?
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And then the second, how did you get to a
high enough level of confidence, which I don't ever think
was at its highest, But how did you get to
a high enough level of confidence that President Obama could
give the go.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Two great questions. The first one is that way back
in two thousand and two, and I'm going to be
quick here, way back in two thousand and two, we
heard about a guy who supposedly worked for Bin Laden
prior to nine to eleven, supposedly was a courier between
Ben Laden and Colleaguejaik Muhammad, the mastermind of nine to eleven,
(08:59):
and got really interested in this guy, but we didn't
have his true name, didn't know where he was, right,
didn't have any of that kind of information. So it
literally took us seven eight years to figure out who
he was, what his nationality was, what his phone number was,
you know, and another year to pinpoint him on the planet.
(09:22):
But once we did find him, we followed him back
to this a big about a bad compound, right, and
that compound, you know, just just just yelled out, right,
there's somebody special here, just because of the way it looked, right,
twelve to eighteen foot walls topped with barbed wire and
a lot of other stuff. So that's how that's how
we found him.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
In terms of confidence, you know, we had big debates
about that in the sit room, a situation room with
President Obama, and you know, it turned out that people
had varying levels of confidence. Right, the analyst who did
the work, she said she he was ninety five percent confident.
Her boss, the senior analyst in the counter terrorism centers,
(10:06):
that he was eighty percent. I said, I was only sixty.
So we had these big discussions about why right, people
were all over the map. President Obama will tell you
that he was fifty to fifty at the end of
the day. But you know, he felt that he had
a responsibility to go look and see if he was there,
and I couldn't agree more with him.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
We're talking with Michael Morell, former Deputy director twice acting
director of the CIA, and he was President Bush's daily
intelligence briefer during that faithful year of two thousand and one,
and we're talking about a new Netflix documentary, American Manhunt.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Osama bin Laden.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Did did Obama ask your opinion whether you.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Thought he should give a green light to the mission?
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Yeah? When we were when we were talking about the probably,
and I told him I was only sixty percent. And
I told him the reason I was only sixty percent
was because this was only a circumstantial case. We had
no direct evidence bin Laden was there. And I lived
(11:16):
through a rock WMD. Right, I lived through the CIA
saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and
we were wrong. So I was looking at it in
that context, and then I said, you know, mister President,
you actually need to know this is a sit room
full of people, right, you need to know that the
case that bin Laden is that Abadabad is weaker than
(11:42):
the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Well,
you could hear a pin drop in the room. And
he immediately said He immediately said to me, Michael, does
that mean you wouldn't do this? And I said, no,
mister President, I absolutely would do this because this is
the best lead we've ever had and sixty percent is
(12:02):
good enough.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, I don't I don't want to spend too long
on this because it's going to sound like I'm trying
to be.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Political, and I'm really I'm really not.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
But it's it seemed from the stuff that I read,
and maybe from stuff I read from you, I don't
remember that near the end, basically everybody was a yes
except for Bob Gates and Joe Biden. And then Bob
Gates changed his mind and turned to yes this. And
you can tell me if that's wrong. But I might
have gotten that from you or your book or something.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
And it seems like at the end only Biden was
a no.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Is that true? And what do you think of any
of that? Again, I'm not trying to drag you into politics.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yeah, yeah, sure, the it's only two people who said no.
So the last meeting, you know, a few days before
the raid, Obama has this big, big meeting in the stroom,
all of the cabinet members and then all of their deputies. Right,
So I was a deputy and we're all in the
(13:02):
room and he he pulls all of the cabinet members
and a couple of the deputies, right, what's your view?
What should I do here? And at that meeting, two
people said. Two people said I don't think you should
do this, and one was Bob Gates. And Bob Gates
didn't think the intelligence case was good enough, and he
(13:23):
was really concerned about the risk to the Seals because
he remembered Desert One, right when when President Carter sent in,
you know, sent in helicopters to try to sit, you know,
rescue the hostages in Tehran at the embassy in Tehran,
and the helicopters crashed, another plane blew up, and a
(13:46):
bunch of guys died, and that was his concern. And
then Joe Biden said, you know, I don't think the
intelligence case is good enough either, miss President, and I'm
worried about US pakistanis So Bob Gates changed his mind
the next day and said he was a yes. I
don't know whether Joe Biden never did. He has He
(14:08):
has later said that he wanted to give the president
some decision making space. I have no idea whether that's
true or.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Not interesting, And I don't know how many people remember this.
And it does come up in the documentary in an
almost funny way, and we can talk about it as
if it's almost funny since we know how the mission
ended up. But where somebody mentioned the Desert One helicopter
(14:35):
crash as a risk in this mission, and I and
the story in the in the documentary, I don't think
it was Bob Gates. I think it was a junior
person who said it, and they're like, oh my god,
don't even say that, And then why don't you.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Tell us what actually happened.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, So there were two moments, right, one I knew
about and when I didn't until I watched the documentary.
The first was was when Bob Gates said, you know,
I was there for Desert One guy, Right, that's a
risk here. Military operations never go like they're supposed to.
So Bob Gates did it once and I knew that
because I was in the room when he said it.
(15:11):
And one of the one of President Obama's aids in
the documentary says, whoa I don't believe you just said that.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
If we actually do this, then something bad happens. You know,
people are going to leak leak that you said that,
and President's going to look stupid.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
But the other was one of the seals, right, one
of the young seals said, right, what if the helicopters
crash and somebody else, you know, one of the seals,
I don't believe you just said that.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
You chinxed that, right, And then one did.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But but it was already close to the ground, and
it was it was more like a very bad landing
than what you might think of as a crash like
what happened in Desert one. And they did get out
of the helicopter and participate.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
In the Michie and then it just lost a lyft
about ten feet above the ground.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, and they ended up explaining that it was like
it's all in the documentary.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I won't even I won't bother with it. But and
then and then we blew up.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
That helicopter on the way out, so that whoever was
couldn't couldn't get information and equipment out of it. Let's see,
give me a quick answer to a listener question, did
the government have images of Osama bin Ladden's shadow.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
So documentary didn't quite get this right. But there was
a guy right who came out every day and walked.
We called him the Pacer. Turned out it was Bin Laden,
but we couldn't get a clear enough viewers of his
face to actually tell it was him. But we were
interested in how tall this guy was. Now in the documentary,
(16:46):
somebody says that when we looked at the shadow and
the day of the time of day and all that
kind of stuff, that we determined that it was a
person about the height of Bin Laden. That's not right.
What we determined was that the height was somewhere between
five feet and seven feet, which wasn't particularly helpful. They
should have put that in there.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
It was funny. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
We're talking with Michael Morele, former Deputy Director and Acting
director of the CIA about a new documentary that he
features prominently in American Manhunt Osama Bin Laden.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So all right, I wanted to save this question.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
For a last question, and I'm not quite gonna say
it's the most important question, but it's one that for
me because I know you, I find important. You talked
in this documentary in a very emotional way about the
stress on your marriage.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Did you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Sure? You know, even before we were working this particular
lead started in August of twenty ten. The raid was
in May of twenty eleven. Even before that, being the
deputy director acting director CIA, you know, is a seven
day a week job. I probably worked sixteen hours a
(18:05):
day Monday through Friday, and I worked, you know, maybe
eight hours on Saturday, and I was lucky if I
could take Sunday off. So it was already a stress
on my marriage, right. And then and then the bin
Laden hunt starts, you know, in August, and I'm working
even more, and I'm working all day Saturday. Now I'm
working all day Sunday now, and I can't tell her
(18:30):
right what's going on. And then the whole thing bubbles
over on the day of the raid, where you know,
I go to work even before she's up in the morning,
so you know, I leave it like at six am
on that Sunday when we did the raid, and you know,
she calls me about nine am and she said, I
(18:50):
just wanted to I don't believe your work already, and
I'm just you know, I'm calling you to make sure
you're coming to our daughter's last quarrel concert in high school. Yeah,
and it was at one o'clock. It was right in
the middle of the raid. And so I said, you know,
I can't. I'm really sorry. And she said, she said,
(19:11):
one hour, you know, her last concert. And I said, no, sorry,
and I gotta go, and I just hung out. It's
probably the wrong thing to do, but she tells the
story that later and she didn't hear from me from
that moment until about ten o'clock at night when I
called her and told her to turn on the TV.
She didn't hear from me. And she tells the story
(19:33):
that after she put the kids to bed that night,
she was she was sitting on the sofa wondering how
this divorce thing works. Wow, So thank god we got him. Yeah,
and god President Obama decided to announce it publicly that night,
or I would have had, you know, after gone home
to you know, difficult situation.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Do you think last quick question were just about out
of time?
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Do you think and I'm talking about a big picture now,
do you think I think your wife would say that
all those years of not having her husband around very much,
even more than just those few months of hardly having
you around at all.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
But just it's like being a military spouse.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Do you think your wife would save the life of
a you know, senior CIA spouse? Is was worth it
for her? Oh?
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Wow, we should get her on here. You know, when
I did call her that night to tell her to
turn on the television and the president is going to
be speaking, He's got something important to say, she immediately said,
you got him, didn't you. So you know that was
(20:44):
incredibly important to her too.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah, you know, she.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Was in a sense part of the hunt, but in
a very different way, right than somebody who worked at
the agency at the time, And so you know she
might jokingly tell you, no, right, it wasn't worth it,
but I think, you know, in a super candid moment,
I think she would say yes.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
And I do think there are major parallels there to
military spouses as well.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
I mean, Mike, you you've been just part of some
of the most important modern American history. It's really quite
incredible actually what you've done and what you've seen and
what you've heard, and I'm sure that there's an immense
amount of stuff that you will, you know, take to
your grave or only ever discussed with other people who
(21:34):
have the very top security clearances. So I think what
you've done and seen and heard is probably we've probably
only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And nobody's going to see the rest of it.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
But I'm so grateful for everything that you've done, and
and I'm honored to be your friend, and thank you
for giving us some time today.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
He're welcome, Ross, and I'm honored to be your friend
as well.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Have a great day.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Mike Morrell's new documentary is not just his Netflix new
documentary is called American Manhunt Osama bin Laden
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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