Four man team in Ghazi, Ghazi Tarbela, a very important base in Pakistan. A lot of black operations are run with us and the Pakistanis out of it. It's not that well known. There's an airbase there, but there's also a covert unit. The Pakistanis also train most of the guards who monitor and watch over the nuclear weapons there. So it's a -- we're there. We're getting -- our team is collecting data on the place in Abbottabad where bin Laden -- you can call him a prisoner under the supervision that there were steel doors leading to his apartment that were locked. He was on the third floor of this complex there. There were a number of buildings in the compound. And we have great detail. We're learning how thick the steel is, how much dynamite you need to blow it, how many steps are going, who else is there. This is all being passed by the Pakistanis to us.
The whole game and the whole crux of the story I'm writing is that nothing was supposed to be made public after the raid. The SEALs were supposed to go in -- and you have to understand we're talking about two Black Hawks full of SEALs, packed to the brim. The SEALs are basically better off with 8-10 people, and they had 12 in each of them. They were -- the plane was stripped down. They were coming in heavy. And 24 SEALs going into a compound where, presumably, if it was the secret raid there would be somebody with arms. Certainly, if Pakistan itself wasn't guarding it with armed people, bin Laden would have armed guards because a man that a lot of people would want to get to. They're going in just repelling down was the plan. You know, a perfect target for anybody with a BB gun. And they're going to go in like that without any air cover. It's a story that it is -- and bin Laden, the most hunted man in the world at that time since 2001. He was number one international terrorist. He's going to hide out in a compound at Abbottabad, sort of a resort town, and a resort town 48 miles or so outside of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, within a mile or two of Pakistan's West Point where they train young officers, the army does, and a couple of miles from a regimental headquarters full of army troops. He's going to hide out there? I mean, As I wrote in the article, it's a Lewis Carroll story. It just doesn't sustain any credibility if you look at it objectively.
And so the deal was it was not to be announced. We were going to go kill the guy. That was, of course, the mission. That's why the President had to talk about a firefight. There was not firefight. They've actually acknowledged that within a few days of the raid; the White House did. Bin Laden did not have an AK and wasn't being -- cowering behind some woman as was initially said. There was -- the point being that, as I write very carefully in this article -- seven to ten days after the body -- the killing was done and the body was taken away, we were going to announce -- the White House -- the President, himself, was going to announce that a drone raid somewhere in the Hindu Kush mountain area, you know, the Waziristan -- that's not clear, it was going to be vague as to whether it -- that's the area that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan mountain area -- it was going to be vague as to which country this took place in. Somewhere in that border area a drone raid hit a building. We sent in a team to look at it. There was a tall guy that looked like bin Laden. We took some pictures, some DNA -- my god, we got him. That was the announcement. That protects everybody. Pasha and Kayani are working with us and nobody has to know it. Why are they worried about being told?
At one point in the last six or seven years, eight percent -- that's the popularity of America in Pakistan, was eight percent -- bin Laden was hugely popular. If it was known to the public that Pasha and Kayani, the two leading generals that worked with us to kill the guy, they would be in real trouble. They'd have to move to Dubai or have armed guards.
So once the president did it -- this is done without notice. And I'm -- of course, as the -- you quoted some officer saying it was unilateral. It was all American, yes, Pakistanis were not involved in a raid, our SEALs were. And so, I wish, as you said in the intro, Amy, the denials are all sort of non-denials.
AMY GOODMAN: Well before we get to the denials, with your sequence of events, you say they killed him, Obama didn't plan to announce it right away. What happened? And what happened to Osama bin Laden's body according to your account?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. You have to understand this is caveated in my article. What I said was that the SEALs initially reported that -- first they put a lot more bullets in it than has been publicly said; not in the head but in the body. There were six SEALs. SEALs work -- SEALs are funny. They work in teams of six because that's how many fit into a dinghy. Although, god knows, since this war began, The War on Terror, the American SEALs don't go into the water very much, which is a source of great annoyance to them. They're no longer water people they're just regular ground guys. The issue accounts, and I do have access to people who had access to it -- I'm sorry I have these sources, I just do. And I'm sorry other reporters don't, but I just do and that's just the way it is. And they did talk about throwing out parts of the body over the Hindu Kush mountains from the chopper because it was shot up pretty badly. The head was intact.
Any way. And by the way, if you think about the sequence that I'm telling you, that you're going to find another bin Laden somewhere, you don't need the body. The only reason they took the body, the needed to take the body, is because the Pakistanis wanted it out of there. They didn't want anybody to know anything about this. And we just followed their orders. And so what happened is that night -- you know, it's funny, I remember this vividly. Around nine o' clock, I think it was CNN or somebody began to report at, on the night that the raid was announced, the night of the raid, after it's success, there was reports that something had happened to bin Laden; something was coming very quickly. Two and a half hour debate. Two and a half hours of, as I understand, the debate was simply with a lot of people around Obama saying you cannot trust this story to be kept for seven to ten days. Among other things, the Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, who had been very critical of the plan, very, very critical, as he wrote in his memoir, very upset about what happened, he might start talking, somebody might start talking, they'd start blabbing and you lose the edge Mr. President. This is re-election time and presidents do strange things before re-elections; often strange things. We know that.
And so Obama delivered a speech that was written by his political people and not cleared by the national security team. It was a speech with -- I can't begin to tell you Obama's state of mind. As far as I know, he got a speech, he believed everything he read. He was -- you know, he's getting briefings, he believed what he was read. I'm not accusing him of lying, but what happened, what was said was a lie. And in the speech he laid down the foundation for an enormous scramble over the next weeks -- the next days and weeks they had to recreate a new story. He said, as you said in the introduction, there was a firefight and Obama was -- bin Laden was killed in it. That's to cover the idea that it's an out and out murder. And he said also, in the fight, he said also a treasure trove of material was recovered. We have yet to see it and I raise a lot of questions about what was covered, what was collected.
At one point the SEALs were said to have taken 15 computers out of there. But if you read everything that was written, it also was written and said many times there was no internet connection in Abbottabad. There was no sign of any operational capability of bin Laden at all. And one of the problems with the -- protecting the walk in, when you -- you had to protect the walk in --- one of the reasons you didn't want to talk about a walk in is you don't do that. And so we had to protect that ---
AMY GOODMAN: You mean the guy who revealed to the U.S. -- walking into the U.S Embassy.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, they call him a walk in. And the President actually said in his speech, we had a lead -- he said in Aug -- we had a lead in August of 2010, which, really, for a lot of people in the intelligence community, that was too close to the mark. A lead means something something specific happened then. And that's when the walk in went to see a guy named Jonathan Banks, the station chief, a very competent guy from everything I hear; the station chief for the CIA in Islamabad. And they -- we had to call in -- lie detector people from Washington had to fly in to debrief the guy and conclude he was telling the truth. It was a big piece of evidence. Anyway. But you have to get around that story so you create the courier story, that the CIA with brilliant work -- and initially they wanted to say through enhanced interrogation -- found out about a courier who led them to bin Laden. That is such a -- that is really an outrageous story and they sold it to a movie called, "No Easy -- " no what was it --
AMY GOODMAN: "Zero Dark Thirty"?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Zero Dark -- Zero Dark -- that was the thesis of the movie. It also included the torture element. Absolutely not so. What happened is we had a guy walk in. NBC -- NBC, last night about six o' clock, put out that story saying it, and you hardly saw it today. There was a piece I read in The New York Times this morning that didn't deign to mention that independent network had confirmed one of the major elements. Not only a walk in, but it raises questions about the couriers that they talk so much about. And so ---
AMY GOODMAN: Sy -- go ahead.
SEYMOUR HERSH: -- it's not -- Let me just say this; here's my theory about this. You know, there's been a -- in Europe and the rest of the world they're more open minded, more willing to say, oh, terrible things happen. In America, I think, one of the problems with the press, and this is just a heuristic thinking -- there's nothing empirical about what I'm saying -- I think one of the things that's got them so agitated -- people were writing stories accusing me a plagiarism in the press in the last two days. You know, Politico, which does great stuff, has a blog in which they said this sort of wacky stuff. A 10,000 word article that's plagiarized? Anyway, I think there's a sense that everybody bought into the story. Everybody bought into the story after 9/11. The White House had it going. They had the press begging for more information. Briefings were given. The stories initially had, if you remember the initial stories, they had bin laden ready with an AK and they were shooting in the doorway, etc. The only firing that came across in the first wave of after action reports was a stray bullet apparently hit a woman in the leg who was screaming, either before or after the bullet hit her, I don't know. But there was no murder in the -- there was no killing of people in the court yard. If there had been a gun in the court yard, if anybody'd had a gun in the court yard it was cleared by the intelligence -- Pakistani intelligence cleared all of the guards out before the SEALs landed. If anybody had a gun in the courtyard, the SEALs wouldn't have gone near the courtyard the way it did, just flying in, you know, like in a World War II movie.
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