60 Minutes - 01/29/2023: Killing Bin Laden

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

A former member of SEAL Team 6, Mark Owen, recounts the raid that killed the world's most wanted man: Osama bin Laden. Owen, now retired, says the SEALs trained for the mission using a full-size replica of the bin Laden compound, and that a dress rehearsal was held for military top brass. And Owen refutes charges that he's trying to make a political statement with his book, "No Easy Day." Scott Pelley reports. This episode originally aired in September 2012. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. This is an Encore presentation of a 60 Minutes broadcast that originally aired in September 2012. You are about to meet one of the men who shot Osama bin Laden. Mark Owen recently left the Navy's elite counterterrorism unit, Seal Team 6. Mark Owen is not his real name. It is the name that he used to write a new book about the assault on Bin Laden's compound called No Easy Day. Owen was on the helicopter that crashed into the compound. He was the second man in Bin Laden's bedroom, and he took the pictures of the body that the world has never seen.

Owen received a silver star for valor and a purple heart for a wound suffered in the raid. But despite all that, Owen told us in his only interview that No Easy Day is not about him. He says it's a tribute to the hundreds of Americans who gathered intelligence, planned and trained in the 10-year pursuit of the world's most wanted man. SEAL Team 6, he told us, just took care of the last 40 minutes. Was this a mission, was the plan to kill Osama bin Laden or capture him before you went in?

This was absolutely not a kill-only mission. It was made very clear to us throughout our training for this that, hey, if given the opportunity, this is not an assassination, you will capture him alive if feasible. That was the preferred thing? Yes. To take him alive, if you could? Yeah. I mean, we're not there to assassinate somebody. We weren't sent in to murder him. This was, hey, kill or capture.

We've never heard the story from someone who was there. The raid, May 1, 2011, had been years in the making. But in the moment, the best-laid plans failed, leaving a small team of Americans to improvise victory from near disaster. This operation was one of the most significant operations in U.S. history, and it's something that I believe deserves to be told right and deserves to go in a book and stand for itself. You're in disguise as we do this interview today, and I wonder why.

The focus shouldn't be on me. The focus should be on the book. I'm not trying to be special or a hero or anything. I'm just trying to tell the bigger story. But you're in disguise also for your own security. Yeah, absolutely. Tell me about that. What concerns you? You know, the enemy has a long memory. And so we spent a long time perfecting a new look for Owen. Before each interview, the best artist spent four hours thoroughly changing his appearance. We've used shadows to enhance the effect and we've altered his voice. When I first joined the Navy...

Chief Petty Officer Owen was in the Navy 14 years. He had read about the SEALs in junior high school and set his sights. How many times have you been to war since 9-11? I've done 13 combat deployments. Afghanistan? Afghanistan, Iraq, all over. There are several SEAL teams, but Owen rose to the very top. A unit called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6. SEAL Team 6 is made up of a number of squadrons,

and I wonder, why was your squadron chosen for this particular mission? Was there something special about you? Nope, nope. Certainly nothing special about me, nothing special about the 24 guys that were chosen, nothing special about our squadron. It really could have been any number of guys. You just happened to be available for training. Yes. In April 2011, they had just returned from Afghanistan when they were told to report to North Carolina for an exercise. Give me the lay of the land here. What do we see? Owen walked into a top-secret briefing room, saw a model of a compound, and heard this from his

buddies. What did they say? They said, hey, we found bin Laden, or we think we found bin Laden, and they want us to come up, you know, rehearse and come up with a plan. If there's going to be a ground option approved, they want us to rehearse for one. What did you think? Awesome. The mission was Operation Neptune Spear, under the authority of the CIA. The agency had tracked a bin Laden courier to a curious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They'd been watching the compound with satellites.

The house seemed too big for the neighborhood. There was no telephone connection. The people there burned their trash. There was a wall 12 feet high and a walled-in balcony. Who lived up there? They briefed us on the individual they were calling the pacer. The pacer? The pacer. So he would come out of the house and kind of walk around the yard to what was assessed to just be getting exercise.

Where did the pacer pace? Over here. In this courtyard back here? Right. So he'd just kind of walk out in here and a lot of the the vegetation out here was probably purposely planted so surveillance couldn't couldn't see down on him and he would just go round and round and round yep he'd walk around the yard sometimes he'd walk with this has to be a female they just walk around the yard they never stopped to help anybody do any work if there was other people in the yard. They never stopped to help anybody do any work. If there was other people in the yard working, he never seemed to do any of that. It's almost above

it. Above doing the manual labor, he was the boss, whoever he was. Correct. The Pacer had been in Abbottabad about five years. It's a well-to-do city of one million people, the compound was about a mile from the Pakistani Military Academy. In terms of the inside of the house, how much did you know? Zero. Zero. So once you went through the door, you didn't know what you were going to be facing. Right. But again, it goes back to that 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 of this as particularly challenging. The tricky part was getting there. The U.S. 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 modified Blackhawks, call signs Chalk 1 and Chalk 2, would drop 24 SEALs and a Belgian Malinois combat dog named Cairo. Chalk 1, which is the one I was on, was going to hover over the compound here. We would drop the two fast ropes, slide down the ropes into the courtyard here, and then go about our business while Chalk 2 would land out here, just over here by the road, drop the external containment team off. They would provide security external.

We'd have two men and our combat assault dog would do a quick patrol of the perimeter down to the south and around to make sure that there was no tunnels underneath the walls if somebody did hear us coming and had time to escape. After dropping those guys off, the second helo was going to come up, hover over the third floor, drop off the remaining guys. They would then hop right down into the balcony, assaulting from the top down, and our guys would assault from the bottom up. A few days after getting the mission, they had their plan. And so began weeks of rehearsals

on a full-size version of the compound built in North Carolina. How many times did you assault it? How many times did you train on it? A lot. Between when we got the mission and when we left for Afghanistan, we probably, you know, probably a good hundred times. So how unusual was this kind of training? Yeah, very unusual. I've never had all the mock-ups. I've never rehearsed for something for three weeks. One rehearsal had an audience, the nation's

highest-ranking officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the nation's highest ranking officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the head of special operations, Admiral Eric Olsen, and observers from the White House. One of the things that I liked after the fact was I remember Admiral Mullen coming by and talking to each one of us and then Admiral Olsen as well, and I thought that was cool. They walked by, shook each of our hands, and said, Hey, are you guys ready? Can you guys pull this off?

And I'm pretty sure to a man we all said yes, absolutely. The team got several days off at home around Easter. Then in late April, about a month after they got the mission, they loaded on a plane bound for a U.S. base in Afghanistan. The president wasn't convinced yet. No one confirmed that bin Laden was the pacer, so SEAL Team 6 was on standby. One of the passengers on their plane was a CIA analyst who had spent five years on bin Laden's trail. I can't give her enough credit. I mean, she, in my opinion, she kind of

teed up this whole thing and it was just, you know, wicked smart, kind of feisty. And she was, you know, we'd always talk back and forth, hey, what, you know, what do you think the odds of this are? What do you think the odds of that are? And, 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 what? Well, we'll see. Three days later, on April 30th, the president was telling jokes at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner.

CIA Director Leon Panetta's belly laugh was heard all across the room. Reporters in ball gowns and tuxedos had no idea that just a few hours before, President Obama had ordered Panetta to launch the raid. Mr. Obama kept to his schedule, thinking that on this night, it was better to have reporters drinking and laughing than asking questions. When did you first hear that the President had approved your mission? The commanding officer of our command walked in and said, Hey, just got off the phone. The mission's approved. What did you think?

This is big. This is cool. I'm glad I'm a part of it. The raid was supposed to be April 30th, but the weather was bad. The next night, Vice Admiral William McRaven saw the men off. He was a SEAL, and he had planned the mission as head of the Joint Special Operations Command. Just before midnight, the Blackhawks started the sprint from the U.S. base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to Abbottabad, about 150 miles away. The helicopters were blacked out against a clear, moonless night. The Army pilots, guided by night vision goggles, flew high speed, treetop level, under Pakistani radar. It was roughly an hour and a half. I remember, you know, we took off, shut the doors,

and the radio call I heard was, you know, hey, we're over the border. We're crossing the border into Pakistan. And I remember thinking, wow, this is okay. This is happening. And I swear I glanced around the helicopter, and half the guys were sitting there asleep on the ride in. It was an hour and a half ride. Guys got to catch a few Zs on the way in. Wait a minute.

Your team is flying in to Osama bin Laden's compound and they're asleep? Yeah, no, it's your time to just kind of shut your eyes, relax, you know, mentally walk through whatever you need to walk through. It was about one o'clock in the morning, 66 degrees, 65 percent humidity with calm winds. At one minute we opened the door and I just kind of swung my legs out and I'm sitting there looking down. I'm thinking, wow, you know, this is a beautiful spot. Houses with pools in the backyard, well-lit, manicured yards. Like, well, this is definitely not, you know, the mud huts of Afghanistan. Somehow there was a blackout in the neighborhood. No one will say whether that was

luck or design, but it meant ideal darkness for the SEALs with their night vision goggles. You could see the compound coming. You had the door to the Blackhawk open, and your legs were swung outside. Right. To make a little more room, be faster, quicker for everybody to get out and fast rope by the helicopter so everybody's getting ready to fast rope and then all of a sudden we banked hard 90 degrees once we went hard 90 it was very apparent that something was wrong owen doesn't know what went wrong but pilots say that a chopper can lose lift when it drops 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 compound's walls. These pilots are the

best in the world you don't you don't get better than these guys and and typically they just boom they move right in and they stick it it's like parking a car for these guys and and it was it guys. And it was a rough ride. We were pretty low. Tail rotor and everything happened to miss this wall here. And then we were just kind of sliding and falling out of the sky this way. I was now in the front of the helicopter. Although I was sitting on the left side, I was now in the front.

My buddy right behind me, he pretty much should have fallen out. If it weren't for him hanging on to me, there's a good chance I would have been thrown from the helicopter. As the helicopter is going down, what were you thinking? This is going to suck. You know, hey, wow. The carefully rehearsed plan was out the window before the first boot hit the ground. With one helicopter and half the SEALs crashing, the second helicopter abandoned the roof assault as too risky and the SEALs began to improvise. One thing was sure now, the people in the house knew they were coming.

The raid on Bin Laden's house was supposed to be straightforward. Two helicopters, call signs Chalk 1 and Chalk 2, carried 24 members of SEAL Team 6, each man hauling 60 pounds of gear. One group planned to slide down ropes onto the roof of the house. Mark Owen's group planned to rope down into the courtyard. But Owen's helicopter crashed and now everything was changing for the most important counterterrorism assault in U.S. history. Tell me about the crash. The pilot mentioned, you know, I remember him mentioning in the rehearsals, he's like, you know, if I have to ditch this thing, I'm going to try and put it down in this courtyard. So that's exactly what he did. You could tell, you could hear the helicopter winding up. He was putting all the power on it he could but it wasn't helping no nothing

came in and impacted boom had the angle been more the rotors would have hit the ground snapped off and caused us to roll and the tail rotor hit obviously it'll broken cause us to break and roll the load bearing section of the tail landed precisely on the wall the strongest part of the tail just happened to land on the wall yep and the angle happened to be perfect it all came down to inches really inches either way we stopped the main rotor blades are still turning I don't think you could recreate that if you tried lucky lucky but again huge props to these pilots I mean everybody wants to meet the guy who shot Min Lan. I want to meet the pilot. I mean, I wouldn't be here for more for him. If the pilot had not brought your helicopter down intact, would the mission have failed? No, I don't think so, because Chalk 2 was on the ground,

and as soon as they saw us crash land, that Chalk 2 helicopter pilot saw that happen, decided not to push the position to go to the roof. And that's one thing that Admiral McRaven said in one of our very last rehearsals, briefs, dry runs right there in Afghanistan before we launched. He stood up and he said, hey, listen, don't try any fancy stuff. Just get the guys on the ground and they'll figure it out. You mention in the book that one of the Army pilots that was flying your team looked to you to be about 50 years old. He was definitely a little older. But I guess in this line of work, it's experience that matters.

Yeah, yeah, he's probably been flying longer than I've been alive, so nothing wrong with that. They had planned to be on the ground 30 minutes, but now they were running late. Owen's team landed in this courtyard, walled off from the house. So your team does what? I ran out here, I turned around and looked, and I see the guys on the left side of the helicopter. They're sitting right at, staring at the front door. So they simply hop out and go right to the front door like nothing happened. Go right to this door here? Yep. The other helicopter landed outside the perimeter wall, dropped all of its seals, and took off.

Now, what's your objective? What's your team supposed to do right now? We're clearing and securing the southern compound. You expect to find people in this building, and you want to clear that building so the rest of the team can do what they need to do in here. Exactly. I think what seals are good at is what I consider pickup basketball. We all know how to play the game. You hear the saying in the teams is, can you shoot, move, and communicate? So we all know how to shoot.

We all know how to move efficiently and tactically, and we can communicate clearly. So when something goes sideways, we're able to play that pickup basketball and just kind of read off each other. Now the SEALs were in several groups. One group was outside the perimeter wall to make sure no one escaped. The group that was supposed to rope to the roof was outside the wall looking for a way in. Owen led his team to the outer building

where they expected to find one of Bin Laden's couriers. We got to the door. Obviously, we made tons of noise at this point. It had taken a little longer to get there. So, you know, the element of surprise is slipping away quickly. We got to the double doors. I tried it once real quick. It was locked.

My buddy who was with me is carrying a sledgehammer. Pulls it out, gives it a couple good swings. Nothing. Door's not going anywhere. Kind of solid metal. So I'm like, okay, we're going explosive. We all carry explosive charges. I pulled one off, got on my knee, and started setting it.

And right as I was attaching it, a round started coming through the door at us. Somebody started shooting at you from inside the house, and the bullets were coming through the door. Yep. Immediately, my buddy who was standing up started returning fire. I kind of rolled away from the door, blindly returned fire back through. You couldn't see what was on the other side, and then it went quiet. Thankfully, the SEAL that was there with me, that initially returned fire with me, spoke Arabic. So he immediately started calling out to the people inside, started hearing the metal latch on the inside of the door.

Are they going to come out with a suicide vest? Are they gonna throw a hand grenade out? Are they gonna, you know, spray their AK? Door opens up, a female holding a kid, couple kids right behind her. You got your finger on your trigger and you're looking at a woman with her children. Yeah, yeah, split second, I mean, we just received fire. My buddy's speaking Arabic, he's asking her, you know,

hey, where's your husband, what's going on? And she replies back to him, he's asking her, you know, hey, where's your husband? What's going on? And she replies back to him, he's dead, you shot him. Owen didn't notice until later, but he was bleeding, a shoulder wound from a fragment of something in the firefight. Yeah, I just got a little piece of frag in my shoulder from some of the rounds that came through. It really wasn't a major wound at all. But I carry a set of bolt cutters to cut locks with. When I got back, you know, I was checking my gears, any holes or anything, and I pull out the bolt cutters,

and I've got the bullet stuck in the handle. So the bullet just missed me by a little bit, and the handle stick up either side of my head. Right by your neck. But you don't consider that to be a big deal? No. Plenty of other guys have suffered much, much, much worse. So it's not a big kill. Within five minutes, Owen's team cleared the outer house. More SEALs entered the compound and converged on the first floor of the main building. Inside, they found another courier with an assault rifle.

Those SEALs were in the process of shooting the second gunman. Right. And his wife jumped in front of him. All the women on target were very hostile. It's something very different than what we see in Afghanistan or Iraq. You typically don't see the women that are this aggressive and hostile. Even though the females had come out of this building and talked to us, they were still very combative and aggressive. And we saw that throughout the entire compound, even all the way up on the third floor. They secured the ground floor and then the second

floor. The team continued to head up these stairs single file. The first SEAL in line is called the point man. Owen, at this point, was right behind him, number two, going up to the third floor. The SEALs had been told they could expect one of Osama bin Laden's sons. O' Guys start making their way up the stairs and it's quiet, it's pitch black in the house, no lights, all night vision. Get to the second floor. Intel had said, we think that Khalid, his son, lives on the second floor Intel had said we think that Khalid his son lives on the second floor this is Osama bin Laden's son yeah the guy in front of me

who's appointment he sees the head pop out and disappear really quick around the corner it's like okay you know what do you who is it what do you think I don't know he literally whispers not not amped up, not yelling, not anything. He whispers, hey, Khalid, Khalid. Whispers Khalid's name. Doesn't know if it's Khalid or not. Khalid literally looks back around the edge of the hall and he shoots him. What was Khalid thinking at that time? Look around the corner. Curiosity killed the cat. I guess Khalid, too. It had been 15 minutes since the crash.

It was now about 1.15 a.m. Give me a sense of what this scene is like in there. I mean, are these guys yelling and charging up the stairs? Is there a lot of action? How's it unfolding? You know, it's not like the movies. You know, movies make it out to be, you know, loud and crazy and everybody's yelling. This is what we do. We're really good at it. And so it's quiet, calm, like we've done it a million times before. We have a saying, you know,

don't run to your death. So nice and slow, and we head up the stairs. Khalid is dead on this landing. The point man is stepping past Khalid, and now you're number two in the stack. You're right behind the point man. Yep. I kind of try to look around him, hear him take a couple shots, kind of see ahead. Somebody disappeared back into the room. The point man had seen someone stick his head out a door Mm-hmm and shot him just the way he'd shot Khalid. Yep. What did you do then? Inside the room I could see a body laying on the ground Over him was was two females real close to the door They looked up and saw the saw the point man, he steps in to the room, literally rushes the two women, grabs

one under each arm and pushes them back against the far wall. So if they did have a suicide vest on and they did blow themselves up, that that wouldn't affect the rest of the guys. But it would have killed him. Yeah. You stepped into the room and saw the man lying on the floor. What did you do? Myself and the next assaulter in, we both engaged him several more times

and then rolled off and then continued clearing the room. When you say you engaged him, what do you mean? Fired. You shot him? Yeah. He's still moving? A little bit, but you couldn't see his arms couldn't see his hands so he could have had something could have a hand grenade or something underneath his chest

so after osama bin laden is wounded he's still moving you shot him twice a handful of times a handful of times and the seal in the stack behind you also shot Osama bin Laden, and at that point his body was still. Yes. Did you recognize it? No. You know, everybody thinks it was like, you know it's him. No. To us at that time, it could have been anybody. Maybe this was another brother. Maybe this was a bodyguard. Maybe. It doesn't matter. The point is, is to just continue clearing. By now, 20 minutes had passed. Every single thing the woman with the

CIA had told them on the plane had been right, but time was running out. Throughout the raid, the remaining helicopter was in the air. It only had enough gas to stay for 30 minutes or so. Pakistani neighbors had discovered the seals posted outside the compound wall, and it couldn't be long before the Pakistani military would know they were there. One seal was charged with keeping an eye on his wristwatch and calling out the dwindling time on the radio. 20 minutes, 15, 10. We'll be right back. Sometimes historic events suck, but what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling

podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. As time was slipping away, Mark Owen and a couple of other members of SEAL Team 6 kneeled around a mangled body on the third floor of the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Everything the CIA analysts told them about the raid on Osama bin Laden's house had checked out exactly as she said. But was this bin Laden?

You know, in my mind he looked way younger than I thought he was gonna be. His beard wasn't gray at all. I'd studied lots of photos of him, and, you know, they were always gray. His beard was dark black. Identifiably, he was very tall. So, okay, you know, you can kind of chalk that up as something. Bin Laden was about 6'4". Right. His nose, to me, was something that I could kind of identify.

So, you know, kind of looking at the profile shots and everything, I was like, okay, I was pretty sure that was him. But, you know, I'm not willing to make that call. Certainly not at that point. Not willing because Owen says they suspected the president was listening at the White House and he was right. The helicopter crash had been reported up the chain of command. Owen says the SEALs wanted proof before anyone said anything on the radio about killing Osama bin Laden. They turned to one of the SEALs in the room who spoke Arabic. So he moved out to where the women and kids were, grabs one of the younger kids, says,

hey, who is that inside? She says, Osama. Osama who? Osama bin Laden. The child? The child. Identified him? No. Grabbed one of the females, asked her again, said, who is that? She said, Osama bin Laden. So does a cheer go up among the SEALs? You start shaking hands, patting each other on the back? Nothing. It's all business, one o'clock here. So we call up the commanding officer. He comes upstairs, looks at the body. We give him what we have so far.

Hey, here's what he looks like. Take a look. He's tall. Women and kid confirm it. He took one look. Said, okay, I think that's him. The commander used the code word for bin Laden, Geronimo, as he passed the message to Admiral McRaven. For God and country, he said, I pass Geronimo, Geronimo, E-K-I-A, which stands for enemy, killed in action. Twenty minutes had passed, ten minutes left on the schedule.

We wanted to collect DNA samples. We wanted to take photographs of them, and then we wanted duplicate copies of that. So obviously we're taking the body out, but if a helicopter got shot down on the way out and it had the body we wanted the other helicopter to have DNA and photos so they'd have some sort of evidence that said hey we do have them and here it is. You wanted duplicates of everything? Yeah just in case. You thought of everything? We tried. One SEAL took blood and saliva samples. Owen took the pictures. I figured these were probably some of the most important photos I'd ever take in my

life, so, you know, make sure I do it right, get good angles and all this other stuff. But you know, you've got to clean off the face as identifiable as possible. So one of my buddies had a Camelback with some water in it, got some, you know, spread some water on him, took a sheet off the bed, kind of wiped the blood off, and then took photos. Wiping the blood off of Osama bin Laden's face? Camelback is one of those backpacks that has a water bladder in it, and you use it to drink water out of, but you used it to wash his face? Mm-hmm. And you shot pictures of his face in a profile? Can you describe what they look like?

They're pretty gruesome. Well, when you say gruesome, what are we talking about? He had a bullet wound in the head, so that gruesome. Two SEALs took the body downstairs and zipped Bin Laden into a bag. In the bedroom, Owen found an assault rifle and a pistol on a shelf. And some people would argue that, you know, why did that point man take those shots? Well, immediately, the first door we went to, my team was engaged by enemy fire through the door. So automatically, we know we're going into an enemy compound.

Shots being fired back at us immediately. AK found next to Khalid on the stairs. All those boxes have been checked that if a guy sticks his head around the corner, he very easily could have a gun. You don't wait to get that AK or the grenade thrown down the hall or the suicide vest. So in the split second, that's when he engaged. He did have a gun, but he didn't use it. And I wonder what you make of that. I think in the end he taught a lot of people to do, you know, martyr themselves and he masterminded the 9-11 attacks.

But in the end, he wasn't even willing to roger up himself 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, videotapes, more priceless intelligence than they could carry. There was so much stuff in this house. The guys were just stuffing this stuff in garbage bags? We had carried bags with us, but we filled all these bags up. So you just find an old gym bag on target, dump out whatever's in it, and use that.

As we were running out, I look over at my buddy. He's got a bag of stuff in one hand, like Santa Claus running out of there, but a bag full of goodies in one hand that he'd collected and a computer terminal in the other. The plan had been to be on the ground for 30 minutes, but now they were a few minutes late. It was after 1.30 a.m. Now things are starting to pick up outside. People have obviously woken up at this point. They're coming over to investigate what's 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 real dynamic for that team outside. Everybody wants to know what was going on inside. That team had way more responsibility than just about anybody else because they were dealing with all the what-ifs outside. What if the police showed up or the military? We're running out of time. We got to get going. There's neighbors approaching. The interpreter that was out here said, hey, there's a police operation going on here. Go back to your homes. And they'd simply go back away. Among the

unfinished business was the crashed helicopter. It was a secret design loaded with secret gear. They had to blow it up. A message was passed to their explosives expert called the EOD man. Prep it to blow, they said. But the it in the message was a little vague. The EOD guy thinks he means prep the house to blow. So there we are in the middle of this. And he's like, okay, roger that, prep it to blow.

So he's running around the first floor of the house, setting his charges, getting ready to blow up the house. And somebody looks over and is like, dude, dude, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I'm prepping it to blow. He's like, not the house, the helicopter. Well, he hadn't got the word that there was a helicopter even down. He's like, what helicopter? He's like, the one in the courtyard, go take a look. So he runs outside, sees the helicopter, and then they proceed to rig it to blow. It was past time to go.

Two large helicopters called CH-47s, filled with reinforcements and fuel had been standing by during the raid. The remaining Black Hawk would return for half of the SEALs. A CH-47 would pick up the rest. The Black Hawk that's picking us up lands first. We run through the field carrying the body in the body bag, load the remaining Black Hawk, and then we slowly lift off and move away. While they're waiting for the 47 to come in, the timer on the charges is ticking down. The explosion on this helicopter is coming.

How much time have they got? Not much left. Minutes. They're under 30 seconds. They're running down. The team leader that was in charge of the demo team, he gets a hold of the commanding officer, gets him on the radio talking at the 47, tells the 47 to do a go-around as he's doing the go-around of the south. Boom, the charge goes. Our Black Hawk's already gone. This explodes, big, huge explosion.

The 47 comes right back around, lands, the guys load on, and now they're airborne. We're done. We're clean from the target. That glow at the compound was the helicopter on fire. The SEALs were on the ground about 38 minutes, which meant their Blackhawk had been in the air waiting a little longer than planned. Sure enough, I'm sitting in the helicopter, and you turn around and look in the cockpit, and I see flashing red lights. Well, I'm not a pilot, but anything flashing red in a vehicle is typically not good.

Those gas gauges were about to run out of fuel. During their escape, the SEALs were forced to land in Pakistan. One of the CH-47s was waiting on the ground and refueled their Black Hawk. The Pakistanis didn't get you on the way in, but you're concerned they're going to get you on the way out. Sure, we got to get out of here. When did you know that you were out of Pakistan? They radioed over, came on over the radio, said, hey, we're back, we're back in Afghanistan. And you thought what? Big sigh of relief. Wow, we might have actually pulled this off. This is crazy. Was there ever a point, Mark, in which you shook hands with each other,

slapped each other on the back? Yeah, once we landed, everybody kind of hugged and high-fived and took a couple photos. And, you know, it was our five-minute, hey, cool, we pulled this off, good job. And then it was back to work. In his book, Owen describes how they loaded the body onto a pickup truck and brought it to a hangar where Vice Admiral McRaven, head of Joint Special Operations Command, was waiting. They unzipped the bag. Standing nearby was that CIA analyst who had spent years on bin Laden's trail. Miss 100%, the woman who told you that she was 100% certain that they had a son of bin Laden.

Right. So we're all in the hangar. Immediately we saw her, and she started crying. 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 report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda. Yeah, we watched it live. It was, they had some TVs set up in the hangar that we were at, and literally still in your camouflage uniform, our gear kind of set to the side,

and we heard it was coming on, and we went and gathered around and watched the address. What did you think? You know, now the world knows that we've got them. USA! USA! When you landed back in the United States, I mean, what did you think of all the media coverage? It was all surreal because, you know, this had all been so hush-hush leading up to it. We went and did it.

Now it was the biggest news story ever. We got on a bus. They drove us back to work. I didn't even go in. They told us we had a couple days off, I grabbed my keys went got my truck and and You know, I put it in the book but you know, I hit hit Taco Bell on the way home hit the drive-through a couple tacos and You know ate it in my car right there and then and then drove home

You were part of the team that killed Osama bin Laden and the first thing you do when you get back to the United States Let's go to Taco Bell. Two tacos and a bean burrito. It's routine. Life has been anything but routine for Mark Owen since the publication of his book was announced. We'll have that when we come back. Days after returning from the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Mark Owen's squadron boarded an ancient C-130 transport plane for one more mission. The men wondered why the plane was so old. Then they found out the plane had been used in 1980 in the failed attempt to rescue the

American hostages in Iran. Somebody thought it was a fitting piece of American history to carry the American hostages in Iran. Somebody thought it was a fitting piece of American history to carry the men to their secret meeting with the President of the United States. The terrorist leader who struck our nation on 9-11 will never threaten America again. President Obama was making a speech at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and he met with the Bin Laden team privately. All of the men would receive a silver star for valor.

Did the president ask you guys which ones 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. You wouldn't tell him? Why not? Pulling a trigger is easy. A couple pounds of pressure on your trigger finger, and I've done it millions of times, and it's not that hard. So it's not about who that one person was. It's who was on the team, or the helicopter pilots, or the intel folks that teed this whole

thing up. Who cares who the one person is? It doesn't matter. I wonder, in writing this book, whether you're worried that some of your fellow SEALs will be angry with you. I've had nothing but an outpouring of support from the guys who know me. To quote one of my friends, he said, hey, if anybody can tell this story and do it right, it's you. And I'm not taking that. I'm trying to toot my own horn. They know I'm doing it right. You say in the preface to the book that if a reader is looking for secrets, this isn't their book. No, absolutely not. I'm not talking secrets. I'm not talking tactics.

I don't even get into any of that stuff. But I really try and give the reader a sense of what it's like to be there. Publicly, the Pentagon is not happy about No Easy Day. They have a differing account of bin Laden's final minutes, saying that he was first shot when the seals were inside his bedroom this book spokesman george little said last week that owen signed a secrecy agreement as a seal and should have submitted his book for editing by the government and the author is in material breach of his secrecy agreements with the united states government we believe that uh sensitive and classified information is contained in the book.

I don't think I could be any clearer than that. But Owen insists there is nothing in the book that compromises the secrets of the United States or the safety of the SEALs. And there was one more thing that he wanted to say. The release of the book was timed to the anniversary of 9-11. My worry from the beginning is, you know, it's a political season. This book is not political whatsoever. It doesn't badmouth either party, and we specifically chose September 11th to keep it out of the politics. You know, if these crazies on either side of the aisle want to make it political. Shame on them.

The Bin Laden raid 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 little piece. Some people would argue bigger, but to us, we were just doing our job. It's not a big deal. We were just lucky to be at the right place at the right time. But then going to New York and where the World Trade Center stood at one point, and it was just very, very emotional.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed right there alone. It was emotional, and it was like, you know what? It was ready to move on, full circle. Your team had avenged those deaths. Absolutely. When word of the book No Easy Day came out last month, a cable news channel learned Mark Owen's real name and reported it. Since then, others have reported his name. We will not.

Owen intends to donate most of the profits from the book to charities that support families of fallen troops. He wanted us to know that he thinks of what he's written as a public service to get the history straight and as a tribute to every Navy SEAL wherever they may be serving tonight.