Killing Bin Laden | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

You're about to meet one of the men who shot Osama Bin Laden. Mark Owen recently left the Elite counterterrorism unit of Navy SEAL Team Six. Mark Owen is not his real name, it is the name he used to write a new book about the assault. at Bin Laden's compound called No Easy Day Owen was on the helicopter that crashed at the compound. He was the second man in Bin Laden's bedroom and took the photographs of the body the world had never seen. Owen received a Silver Star for Valor and a Purple Heart for an injury suffered in the raid, but despite everything Owen told us in his only interview, No Easy Day isn't about him, he says it's a tribute to the hundreds of Americans who gathered intelligence, planned and trained in the 10-year manhunt. of the SEAL Team of the world's most wanted man, he told us that he alone handled the last 40

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Was it a mission? It was the plan to kill Osama Bin Laden or capture him before entering. This was not at all a kill-only mission. Made. very clear to us, um, during our training for this, that hey, if given the chance, this is not a murder, you will take him alive if possible, that was the preferred, yeah, take him alive if you could, yeah, yeah, I mean, we. Aren't we there to assassinate someone we weren't sent to assassinate? This was, hey, kill or capture. We have never heard the story of anyone who was there. The May 1, 2011 raid had been years in the making, but at the time Lane's best-laid plans failed leaving a small team of Americans improvising.

Victory near disaster. This operation was one of the most important operations in US history and is something that I think deserves to be said correctly and deserves to move forward. in a book and defends himself, you're in disguise as we do this interview today and I'm wondering why the attention shouldn't be on me, people should be on the book. I'm not trying to be special or a hero or anything like that. um I'm just trying to tell the bigger story, but you're also disguised for your own safety, yeah, absolutely, tell me about that. What you're worried about, you know the enemy has a long memory, so we spend a lot of time perfecting a new one. look for Owen before each interview, top artist spent four hours completely changing his appearance, we see shadows to enhance the effect and alter his voice when I first joined the Navy, Chief Petty Officer Owen was in the Navy 14 years The seals he had read about in high school and noticed how many times you've been to war since 9/11.

I have done 13 combat deployments in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. Everywhere there are various sealed teams, but Owen Rose rose to the top, a unit called Naval Special Warfare Development Group Seal Team Six SEAL Team Six is ​​made up of several squadrons and I wonder why his squadron was chosen for this mission in particular. Was there something special about you? No, no, certainly, nothing special about me, nothing special about the 24. guys that were picked, there's nothing special about our squad, it really could have been any number of guys that were just available to train. Yes, in April 2011, they had just returned from Afghanistan when they were told to report to North Carolina for an exercise.

Me, the lay of the land here, what do we see? Owen walked into a top secret meeting room, saw a model of a complex and heard this from his friends, what did they say today? We found Bin Laden or we think we found Bin Laden and they want us to uh to come, you know, we rehearse and make a plan if a land option is going to be approved, they want us to rehearse for one, what did you think was incredible? The mission was the launch of Operation Neptune under the authority of the CIA. The agency had tracked a bin Laden courier to a curious compound in Badabad, Pakistan.

They had been monitoring the complex with satellites. The house seemed too big for the neighborhood. There was no telephone connection. The people there burned his trash. There was a 12 foot high wall. and a walled balcony who lived there we were informed about the individual they called Pacer the Pacer the Pacer to come out of the house and walk around the yard to what was considered him to be just exercising. the Pacer Pace here in this courtyard back here so you're just going to walk in here and a lot of the vegetation here was probably deliberately planted so that surveillance couldn't see them and he just goes around and around and around yeah he was walking around the courtyard sometimes he walked with this who will be a woman they just walk around the yard they never stop to help anyone do any work if there are other people in the yard working they never seemed to do any of that it's almost above doing manual labor he was the boss whoever the pacer was he had been in badabad about five years it is a well off city of a million people the complex was about a mile from the pakistan military academy in terms of the inside of the house how much did you know about the zero zero?

So once you walked through the door, you didn't know what you were going to face, but again it turns back. In reference to those years of experience, I mean, we've done this a million times. Raids like this were common many nights in Afghanistan and Iraq and, looking at the model, the seals didn't think this was particularly challenging, the hard part was getting to the US. I wasn't telling Pakistan so the helicopters could be shot down by Pakistan's modern air defenses, the pilots were from the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, two call signs modified Blackhawks, Chalk One and Chalk Two, would drop 24 seals and a Belgian Malinois fighting dog named Cairo.

Chalk one, which is the one I was on, was going to float over the complex here, we would drop the two fast ropes, slide down the ropes into the courtyard here and then go about our business, well, chalk two would land here , right over here next to the External containment equipment would provide us with external security. We would have two men in our combat assault dog. He would quickly patrol the perimeter to the south and around to make sure there were no tunnels under the walls. If anyone heard us coming and had time to escape after leaving those guys, the second healer was going to appear, float above the third floor, leave the remaining guys, then jump straight to the balcony attacking from the top down and at Argus.

They would attack from the bottom up a few days after receiving the mission, they had their plan and so began weeks of rehearsals in a

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-size version of the complex built in North Carolina, how many times did you assault it, how many times did you train? A lot happened between when we received the mission and when we went to Afghanistan, you probably know it well, probably well hundreds of times, so how unusual was this type of training, yes, very unusual. I have never, ever had all the models. I've never rehearsed for something for three weeks. A trial had an audience.

The highest-ranking officer in the country, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of Special Operations, Admiral Eric Olson and observers from the White House, one of the things I like after the fact. I remember Admiral Mullen came and talked to each of us and then Admiral Olsen too and I thought it was cool to know that they stopped by and shook each of us' hands and said, Hey, are you guys ready? take us out and I'm pretty sure we all said yes, absolutely, the team had several days off at home around Easter and then at the end of April, about a month after receiving the mission, they loaded on a plane bound for a US base in Afghanistan, the president was not convinced, but no one confirmed that Bin Laden was the Pacer, so SEAL Team Six was on standby.

One of the passengers on his plane was a CIA analyst who had spent five years tracking bin Laden. She gets enough credit, I mean, in my opinion, she kind of set this whole thing up and it's just, you know, evil, smart, kind of feisty, um and she was, you know, we'd always talk back and forth, hey, do you know what you think? the odds of this are what do you think the odds of that are you know hey you know what do you think you think he's there she's like 100 100 he's there and you thought how well we'll see three days later on April 30th the president was counting jokes at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner.

CIA Director Leon Panetta's laughter was heard throughout the room. The journalists dressed in evening suits and tuxedos had no idea that just hours before President Obama had ordered Panetta to launch the raid that Mr. Obama was following a schedule thinking that on this night it was better to have reporters drinking and laughing than doing questions when he first heard that the president had approved his mission the commanding officer of our command came in and said: they just got off the phone and approved the presentations What did you think? This is big, this is great. I'm glad to be part of this.

The raid was supposed to be on April 30, but the weather was bad the next night, Vice Admiral William Craven dismissed the men. Seal and he had planned the mission as head of the Joint Special Operations Command just before midnight, the Blackhawks began the Sprint from the US base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to Ababad, about 150 miles away, the helicopters were blacked out in On a clear, moonless night, the army pilots guided with night vision goggles we flew at high speed Treetop Level under the Pakistani radar, it's about an hour and a half. I remember, you know, we took off and closed the doors and the radio call I heard was um, you know, we're over the border.

We're crossing the border into Pakistan and I remember thinking, wow, okay, this is happening and, uh, I swear, I looked around the helicopter and half the guys were sitting there asleep on the far right for an hour and a half, Rod, you guys have arrived. catch some Z's along the way wait a minute your team is flying towards Osama Bin Laden's compound and they are asleep yeah, no, it's your time to close your eyes, relax, you know, mentally walk through whatever you need to cross era around one in the morning 66 degrees 65 percent humidity with calm winds within a minute we opened the door and I just stuck my legs out and sat there looking down, I'm thinking wow you know, this is beautiful, this is a beautiful place, uh , homes with backyard pools, well-lit and well-maintained yards, so it's definitely not.

You know the mud huts of Afghanistan somehow there was a blackout in the neighborhood, no one will say if that was luck or design, but it meant ideal darkness for the seals with their night vision goggles. You can see the complex coming. You had the door to the Blackhawk open and your legs were out. Did you make a little more space? Be faster. Know? Faster to get everyone out and faster to get out of the helicopter so everyone was getting ready to tie the rope and then all of a sudden we leaned hard 90 degrees once we got to 90 degrees.

It was very obvious that something was wrong. Owen doesn't know. What went wrong, but pilots say a helicopter can lose lift when it falls into the turbulence of its own downdraft and the turbulence would have been much worse because the downdraft was being magnified and reflected by the walls of the complex. These pilots are the best in the world. No, it doesn't get any better than these guys and they usually just explode, move in and hit it. It's like parking a car for these guys and it was a tough ride, it was a tough ride. Tail Road was pretty low and it was all about going over this wall here and then we were sliding and falling out of the sky like this.

He was now at the front of the helicopter, although he was sitting on the left side. Now he was at the front. My friend right behind me should have fallen if it weren't for him holding on to me. There's a good chance I would have been thrown out of the helicopter while the helicopter was falling. What were you thinking? This is going to suck for you. I know, hey, wow, the care

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y rehearsed plan went out the window before the first boot hit the ground with a helicopter and half the seals crashed. The second helicopter abandoned the roof assault.

It is too risky and the seals began to improvise. One thing was certain now the people in the house knew they were coming. The attack on Bin Laden's house was supposed to be easy. Two helicopters with call signs, Chalk One and Chalk Two, carried 24 members of SEAL Team Six, each man carrying 60 pounds of equipment. One group planned to slide down ropes to the roof. From the house, Mark Owens' group planned to rope up the yard, but Owens' helicopter crashed and now everything was changing for the largest counterterrorism attack in U.S. history. Tell me about the accident that the pilot had mentioned, you know, I remember thatwater bladder inside and you use it to drink water but you used it to wash his face and you took photos of his face in a profile.

Can you describe what they are? They seem to be pretty awful, well when you say awful, what are we talking about? I received a gunshot wound to the head, so two gruesome seals carried the body downstairs and put Bin Laden in a bag in the bedroom. Owen found an assault rifle. and a gun on a shelf and some people would say you know why that point man shot well immediately, the first door we went to, my team was hit by enemy fire through the door, so we automatically know we're going in . uh, an enemy complex fired on us immediately.

AK found himself next to Khalid on the stairs. All those boxes have been checked so that if a guy pops his head around the corner, he could very easily have a gun, so don't wait to get it. AK or the grenade thrown down the hallway or suicide better so in the split second when he confronted him he had a gun but he didn't use it and I wonder what you think of that, I think in the end He taught a lot of people to become into martyrs and, um, planned the 9/11 attacks, but in the end he wasn't even willing to let Roger stand up with a gun and put up a fight, so I think that speaks for itself.

Back on the second floor, the seals were grabbing computers, disks, flash drives, video tapes, more priceless intelligence than they could carry. There was so much stuff in this house that the kids were just putting these things in garbage bags. We had brought bags with us, but we filled them all. Pick up the bags so you find some you know, an old gym bag, on target, throw whatever's inside and use it like we did. Running I look at my friend, he has a bag of stuff in one hand like you know that Santa ran out of there, but a bag full of candy in one hand that he had collected and a computer terminal in the other, the plan had been to be on the ground for 30

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, but now they were a few minutes late, it was more from 1:30 a.m. m., now things are starting to improve outside, people have obviously woken up at this point, they are coming to investigate what is going on.

They were the neighbors and they had a lot of questions for the seals standing guard outside the wall, so that's where things could get really dynamic for that team outside, but he wants to know what was going on inside, that team had a lot more responsibility than just about anyone else because they were dealing with all the what ifs outside and if the police or the army showed up we're running out of time we have to leave there are neighbors approaching The interpreter who was here said hey there's a police operation going on here go back to their homes and they would just leave Among the unfinished business was the crashed helicopter it was a secret design loaded with secret equipment they had to blow it up a message was passed to their explosives expert called EOD man, prepare it to explode, they said, but what was in The message was a bit vague.

The EOD guy thinks he means setting the house up to explode, so here we are in the middle of it and he says, "Okay, Roger, it's probably going to explode, so he's running." the first floor of the house placing their charges preparing to blow up the house and someone watches. I was like dude, dude, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I'm getting ready for the hit, he's like no, it's not the house, the helicopter, well, not him. I didn't even realize there was a helicopter down there. He says what helicopter is like the one in the yard, he goes take a look, so he runs outside, sees the helicopter and then they proceed to set it up so it explodes.

It was time. to go two large helicopters called ch-47s full of reinforcements and fuel had been waiting during the raid the remaining Blackhawk would return for half the seals a ch-47 would pick up the rest the Blackhawk that is picking us up lands first we run across the field carrying the body and the body bag we load the remaining Blackhawk and then we take off slowly and walk away while they wait for the 47 to arrive the load timer is running the explosion in this helicopter is approaching how They don't have much time left because they have less than 30 seconds and they are running over the team leader who was in charge of the demo team.

He contacts the commanding officer and puts him on the radio talking to the 47. it's all 47 to go around while he's going around the South Boom the charge goes our Blackhawk is already gone this big huge explosion goes off The 47 returns immediately lands the boys load and now they are in the air We are done, we are clear of the target that shines in the complex was the helicopter on fire, the seals were on the ground for about 38 minutes, which meant that their Black Hawk I had been up in the air waiting a little longer than planned, sure enough, I'm sitting down. in the helicopter and you turn around and look in the cockpit and I see red lights flashing.

Well, I'm not a pilot, but anything that flashes red on a vehicle is generally not good. Those gas gauges were about to run out of fuel during his escape from the seals he was forced to land in Pakistan one of the ch-47s was waiting on the ground and refueled his Blackhawk the Pakistanis didn't take you along the way but you're worried about being found on the way I'm sure we had to get out of here, when did you know you were out of Pakistan? They called on the radio, they said on the radio: Hello, we're back, we're back in Afghanistan and you thought, what a huge sigh of relief and wow!

I could have achieved this. This is crazy. Was there ever a point where you shook hands and patted each other on the back? Yeah, once we landed, everyone hugged and high-fived and took a couple photos and you know it. It was our five minutes, well, we did a good job and then we went back to work on his book. Owen describes how they loaded the body into a truck and took it to a hangar where Vice Admiral Craven, head of the Joint Special Operations Command, was. He was waiting, they opened the bag and there was this CIA analyst who had spent years tracking Bin Laden nearby.

Miss 100 percent, the woman who told you that she was 100 sure that they were right about Osama Bin Laden, so we're all in the hangar immediately. I saw her and you know she started crying and it was a pretty significant event in her life. I'm sure six hours later the president announced it to the world tonight. I can inform the American people and the world that the United States has conducted an operation. that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, yes we saw it live, they had some TVs set up in the hangar we were in and you were literally still in your camouflage uniform, our equipment was set up to the side and we heard it coming and we went and met and looked at the dress, what did you think you knew now that now the world knows what we have when you landed in the United States?

I mean, what did you think of all the The media coverage was all surreal because, you know, this whole thing had been so secret before this that we went and did it now, it was the biggest news we've ever had on a bus, They took us back to work. I didn't even do it. I walked in and told us we had a couple days off and I grabbed my keys and went to get my truck and, you know, I put it in the book, but you know I hit Taco Bell on the way home, I took the drive.

I had a couple of tacos and, you know, I ate it in my car right there and then I drove home. You were part of the team that killed Osama Bin Laden and the first thing you do when you return to the United States is go to Taco. Bell and two tacos in a bean burrito. It's a routine life. Life has been anything but routine for Mark Owen since the publication of his book was announced. We'll have it when we return days after returning from the raid in Badabad, Pakistan. Mark Owen's squad boarded. an old C-130 transport plane for one more mission.

The men wondered why the plane was so old and later discovered that it had been used in the 1980 failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. Someone thought it was a suitable piece. American History to take the men to their secret meeting with the president of the United States. The terrorist leader who attacked our nation on 9/11 will never threaten the United States again. President Obama was giving a speech at Fort Campbell Kentucky and met with Bin Laden's team. Privately, all men would receive a silver star for Valor. Did the president ask you which of you had shot Osama Bin Laden?

Yeah, he asked he asked who was the one and we told him we wouldn't tell him he would do it. I'm not telling you why not pulling the trigger is easy, you know, a couple of pounds of finger pressure on the trigger and I've done it a million times and it's not that hard, yeah, so it's not about who it was that person, but who you know it was. about the team or the helicopter, the pilots or the people at Intel who arranged all this, who cares who that person is, it doesn't matter. I wonder if, as you write this book, you are worried that some of your fellow seals will be angry.

You know, I've had nothing but great support from the guys that know me, to quote one of my friends, he said, hey, if anyone can tell this story and do it well, it's you and I'm not going to take it. that. Trying to toot my own horn, they know I'm doing it right. You say in the preface of the book that if a reader is looking for Secrets, this is not his book, no, not at all, um, I'm not talking about secrets, no. Speaking of tactics, I don't even get into that stuff, but I really try to give the reader a sense of what it's like to be there publicly.

The Pentagon is not happy with No Easy Day. They have a different version of Bin. Laden's final minutes say he was first shot when the seals were inside his room. The book's spokesman, George Little, said last week that Owen signed a seal of secrecy agreement and should have submitted his book for government publishing and that the author is in material. breach of his secrecy agreements with the United States government we believe that confidential and classified information is contained in the book. I don't think I can be any clearer than that, but Owen insists that there is nothing in the book that compromises American secrets or the safety of the seals, and there was one more thing he wanted to say: the book was scheduled for publication the anniversary of 9/11.

My concern from the beginning is that you know it's a political season, this book is not political at all, it doesn't speak ill of either party and we specifically chose 9/11 to keep it out of politics, you know, if these crazy people On both sides of the aisle they want the attack on Bin Laden to be a political shame for them. It was Mark Owen's last. A few months later, he went to New York and saw ground zero for the first time. Our team played a small piece. Some people had argued that it was bigger, but for us it is very important.

We were just doing our job. It is not a big thing. We were lucky to be in the right place at the right time, but then we went to New York and if the World Trade Centers were there at any point and it was very, very emotional, almost 3,000 people died there alone, it was emotional. and it was like you know what I'm, uh, I was ready to move on. Full Circle, your team had completely avenged those deaths when news of the No Easy Day book broke last month, a cable news channel learned Mark Owen's real name and reported it. since others have reported his name, we will not.

Owen intends to donate the majority of the book's profits to charities that support the families of fallen troops. He wanted us to know that he considers what he has written as a public service to set the record straight. and as a tribute to every Navy SEAL wherever they are serving tonight