PBS News Hour - Full Show - Inside the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden 15 years ago

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

It's been 15 years since the U.S. found and killed the world's most notorious terrorist, Osama bin Laden. Compass Points moderator Nick Schifrin continues last week's conversation with Mark Kelton, the CIA's station chief in Pakistan at the time, for more on the raid and its fallout. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Reflecting on American vengeance. I was prepared to do everything in my power to bring him to justice. Tonight, the culmination of the nearly 10-year-long hunt for Osama bin Laden and an inside look at the raid that brought him to justice. That's coming up on Compass Points. Hello and welcome to Compass Points. It's been 15 years since America found and killed the world's most notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden. Last week, Mark Kelton, the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad,

walked us through the fierce debate over the level of confidence and the intelligence leading up to the raid. Mark is back with us now for the second part of our conversation about the raid and its fallout. Mark, thanks very much. Welcome back. Thank you. Let's go through the day of the raid. There were a lot of ways that it could have gone wrong, militarily, the intelligence diplomatically. You were watching it live. Were you worried?

Yeah, watching it live, watch the raid go in. Of course, you know, the famous picture you have of the Situation Room, we were looped into them and looped into our own headquarters, so we saw that. You know, in the moment, of course, you capture in the Situation Room is when the helicopter lost lift and fell. And one of the unsung heroes, the unsung hero, the operation is that helicopter pilot. He brought that helicopter down, effectively a controlled crash. If he hadn't, we would have a repeat of Desert One, right? And everybody walked away from that, and the Seals did what the Seals do. It's worth taking a minute because in many of the histories of this moment and everything that led up to it, that is such an extraordinary moment.

We went back, Director Leon Panetta, had this to say about that moment when the helicopter goes down. He said one of those, oh, expletive moments, right? And Ben Rhodes, who's also in the room, Deputy National Career Advisor, said this. there's almost like a gasp in the room because the worst-case scenario was a helicopter crashing and Americans die right there. So in that moment, did you also fear the worst-case scenario? Thought of Desert One, you know. But we were looped into McRaven and he quickly was in Admiral McRaevin, who's the head of J-Socke, head of Joint Special Operations Command, who's running the operation. And he came up and said, you know, everybody's out fairly quickly after

that. So there was a moment of, you know, fear and concern. But once we knew that the people, everybody got away from the helicopter, then we had a backup plan anyway. And the seals were prepared to execute. They had to modify their operation, their tactical operation, of course, because they were going to prosecute the target from the roof down, but they lost the helicopter. But they had a backup plan.

And they drill and drill for this stuff. Absolutely. So the seals enter the compound. There is some very short gun fight with some of those couriers, who, as you said, in last week's episode, were armed. There's women, there's children. Right. And then they go upstairs.

And you are not able to see this lot. But you are able to hear the audio. Right. You hear the audio that I hear from McRaven. From McRaven. Yeah. He's got the tactical audio. And then you hear Geronimo.

Right. Geronimo, For God and Country. Geronimo E.K-I-A. Right. Bin Laden had been found, confirmed, and bin Laden had died. Right. Take us inside that moment. You know, I'd been awake for like two days by the time this happened.

And, you know, theoretically I should have been tired. But that moment, no. You know, when that came, just immense pride for what, you know, CIA had done, or my own organization. Happiness for the families of the people who were killed on 9-11, that hopefully they got some closure after that. I got a chance later on to go up to 9-11 Museum and meet some of them. right and uh for me it was about that and people asked me later on what was the motivation

well i had friends that were up in new york at the time and they told me the horrific stories of what happened that day were present and uh that was the motivation so it was a moment of closure for me personally but it wasn't really about me it was all my colleagues who had for all that time pursued this target the people that did all the work the people who were killed at coast coast in east Afghanistan. Some CIA officers who thought they had a mole inside al-Qaeda, it turns out it was a double-agent. Right, right. And, you know, people throw around the word hero all the time. People have asked me, they throw that around us. I'm not a hero. The people that are on the wall are the heroes. People are on the wall at CIA headquarters.

And this was for them. And for everybody else that was killed by the bastard. And we delivered justice. And it's a great day. A great day. You're not supposed to celebrate the death of a man. I did. I did. As you said when we talked last week, vengeance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And vengeance can be portrayed in people's mind

as a negative thing. Sometimes vengeance is necessary. In this case, it was. He had killed all those people that day, been responsible for it, and everything that happened afterwards. And, you know, I think in the world, was better off for his leaving.

The famous moments, as you've said, are the photo, frankly, from the Situation Room, the President's announcement afterward, the cheering outside afterward. The only time I ever saw CIA cheered in the streets of Washington. You actually, you're in the embassy in Islamabad, you're actually able to see the video even before

the Situation Room in the White House was because of the delay. So they actually heard you respond first, right? They did. They did. You know, we were up cheering in my office. You know, that was, you know, but again, the other great moment for me was keeping in mind that the people who were working with me, not everybody knew about this operation. They may even have worked on parts of it and didn't know what it was about. What it was about. That's how compartmentalize it was. So the next morning, of course, rounded everybody up and told them. And for them, there were tears, moment of, you know. And we did what we always. it's cross off a target on the wall and this was the number one target right have high value target one people have been pursuing him for years and years and years and years and that was it yeah it's worth making a point of something that has been discussed for many years that we talked a little bit about last time which is that bin laden was not found hiding in a cave right he was not even found in a house in the middle of nowhere. The location was absolutely shocking. As I reported,

for ABC News, I was the Pakistan-Afghanistan correspondent in time, I reported for ABC News a few hours later from the main street in Abidabad. A few thousand feet from me is the bin Laden compound, and about five or six hundred feet away from that is a Pakistani army base, actually something that is basically Pakistan's West Point, a Pakistan military academy. And there's a lot of questions today about how close bin Laden's compound was to that army base, why they didn't know, as they say, why bin Laden was living there. Did you believe at the time that Pakistan's army knew he was there? And today, do you believe that they knew he was there?

I believe. I never saw any evidence that proved conclusively that Pakistan knew. If you look at the building, it's interesting to look at it because it's all flattened out, right? I mean, but it stood out like a sore thumb. They bulldozed it. It stood out like a sore thumb from the surrounding areas, right? So people would know in the area there's something going on there, and we knew that the local people knew there were some different people living there. Which ironically meant that they stayed away.

They stayed away. But people in the compound didn't mix with the local people. They didn't, you know, down to the point that there was no electronic signatures coming off. the compound. You know, they didn't do Wi-Fi, they didn't interact with people. The compound itself was configured if you look at it. There was a long driveway where you couldn't see laterally into the sides of the compound. So clearly they were hiding something. You had 18-foot walls, you had balconies that were walled off. So the question is, what were they hiding from? Were they hiding from the locals or were they hiding from just us, right? I don't know the answer

to that. I don't know. I find it difficult. to believe that they didn't know the families were there. And, you know, that's as much as I can say. Whether they knew bin Laden was there or not, that remains an open question. I never saw any evidence that said they knew. And there were families, you know, wives, children, I mean. A lot of children, a lot of children. The video that I aired that day.

Toys everywhere, you know. People interacting locally, you know, going out and getting food. So, you know, they were called locally, the Arabs, you know. So they knew there were people there. Now, if they knew exactly what people were there or who they were, I don't know. We talked last week a lot about the context of what happened when you arrived. Difficult relationship that you were walking into with the ISI, with Pakistan's intelligence service, and its Director General and the Chief of the Army staff.

And then the raid, which, you know, as we discussed, the U.S. decided, the president decided not to share with the ISI, with the Pakistanis ahead of time. You're summoned afterward. How did that go? That was a rough conversation, right? I wasn't the most popular man in Pakistan beforehand, but afterwards I was less popular.

And at that stage, it becomes obvious that I become the focus of ire or anger, right? That's the way it is. It comes to the territory. So I would, thinking at that sort of, stage and that my time would be limited anyway. What I wanted to do was to stay as long as I could to put the office in the best place and to put the relationship in the best place I could and tried to do that. But circumstances, of course, ended that time that I curtailed that.

And we'll get to that in a second, but had that conversation go, what was the level of anger from the Pakistanis and from your perspective, were they shocked that he had been found and killed? Initially, it was shock, you know, because the president, of course, had reached out a hand and said, we can work together on this for counterterrorism partners, right? And it could have been portrayed in that way as a joint success, right? They chose to go another direction. And so the shock turned to anger, infringement of Pakistani sovereignty, betrayal by the agency in the United States, by not telling them,

embarrassment, all of that. And I get that as an emotion. But, frankly, as a constructive point for the relationship, it would have been better if they'd taken the president's hand and said we can do this as a joint success. After all, I mean, Al-Qaeda killed Pakistanis. His allies killed Pakistanis. And it's important to note, and I went back again

in some of my reporting at the time, you know, Pakistan suffered. I mean, 30,000 people had been killed. Absolutely. terrorism since 9-11, and they felt that the U.S. wasn't respecting them enough for their sacrifice. Right, right. And I think there was a moment where they could have said, okay, well, I understand pride is hurt and everything else. We can go forward and solidify the relationship against a common enemy, right? Resolidify, let's put it that way. But they went in another direction, so anger.

And you saw manifestations of that anger in multiple ways. Al-Qaeda had been weakened for years by then. by CIA drone strikes in the Northwest, part of the country. Why do you think it was so important? You said it was the end of a chapter. Why was it important for the counterterrorism mission to kill bin Laden if the organization itself had operationally been?

Well, when they asked me beforehand, what do you think we should do? You know, and they asked about, you asked about the percentage. You know, everybody was making up percentages. And I said, your confidence. Yeah, 95%. My belief that he's there.

Yeah, 95%. And I said, well, you can't leave Hitler in his bunker and end the war. You know, so we've got to do this, right, one way or the other. And I had told the director before I went out there when he asked about it, he said, what do you think? And I said, well, if we think he's there, we've got to, we got to prosecute the target. American people won't tolerate another Toro Bora. Toro borough, of course. We can't let it.

We can't let it. We can't let it. So it was an opportunity then to end, at least not the fact that we would. wouldn't have problems with terrorism, but to put a punctuation mark on the end of that search and the end of that fight. And I think it was an important moment to do it. You know, what came afterwards, of course, was continued war in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda had been vastly degraded, but their terrorism fight went on, you know, for a decade afterwards in Afghanistan. In that sense, what do you think the lasting legacy of the raid is, the raid itself is?

Well, viscerally, of course, is if you attack the United States, we're going to hunt you down. And I think sending that message was extremely important. Pride in what our people did. The American people should have pride. I mean, you know, see, I do other media things, as you know, and the goal in those things is to explain to the American people what CIA actually does in their name. And as I said before, this is the only time I ever heard CIA cheered publicly on the streets of Washington. Usually, I'm going to hearings or something and getting questioned.

So I think, you know, professional pride that the United States, you know, delivered justice to a killer of so many people. The, you know, I've asked lots of people about the legacy of bin Laden, of course, since 25 years, right? Since I love another anniversary this year. And, you know, some have argued to me recently that, look, you know, CIA, military, we achieved extraordinarily. tactical, operational, counterterrorism successes, but strategically, as you said, we kept fighting Afghanistan, that didn't go well. The legacy for Pakistan is mixed as well, right?

I mean, you could argue that the raid and a lot of the things that the U.S. strategy did, of course, CIA was part of that, did not empower a civilian government. And you still have, to this day, a country largely led by the military and its intelligence service. Well, I think as an operations officer,

So I accept the battlefield as it is. I'm not in the business of changing things unless I'm given an order to. So, you know, the battlefield there is Pakistan. And there are some wonderful people in Pakistan that I met at that time. But, you know, its government has always been dominated by the military. The military has played a principal role. And that's going to be a question that the Pakistanis themselves have to work out. But I will say they were better off for having bin Laden removed from the stage.

The issue of strategy versus tactics, great tactical victory. A strategic victory, was it an all-encompassing victory? No, because we were fighting an ideology. And the idea of the ideology still lives on, right? In other forms, other metastasized forms of terrorism, it was not a transformational point in that sense, but it was in terms of ending the fight with al-Qaeda. We had degraded al-Qaeda markedly, and this put an end to it. Two months after the raid, I want to show a story that I wrote in July for ABC News,

where I was the correspondent there again. CIA chief in Pakistan exits led OBL hunt team. CIA station chief who oversaw the intelligence team that found Osama bin Laden, left Pakistan for medical reasons. Now, I did not know you at the time. The story did not use your name. What happened? Got very sick.

All of a sudden, lost about 40 pounds. Actually came back to Washington at one point. This was probably, probably got sick in May, started getting sick. So just days, weeks after that? Yeah, late May. And then came back and went back to post and just couldn't function anymore in tremendous pain. and as I said, weight loss. And of course, pride, I wanted to stay and finish the fight,

finished stay with my people. I've never kind of backed out from an assignment before. But at one point in the middle of the night, my security people and medical people said, you're done. That's it, right? You know, it reached the stage where I couldn't function. And at that point, you become a problem for your own people. So I came back and multiple medical treatments after.

It took quite a while to recover. There's a lot of stories printed about what happened. I don't know to this day what happened. Odd symptoms, let's put it that way. That had to be treated in several operations. It's something that I live with now, but it's not something that I fixate on, not something I ask for sympathy for.

I would go back and do it again in a minute. You know, it was the honor to be there at that time. Your wife recently said something publicly. She said of you, quote, you did not look like someone who would survive. Yeah, I think that that was, I didn't necessarily expect that I would. I was that sick. But, you know, there are a lot of people in a lot worse situations.

I think we all have to face, you know, those kind of challenges. And again, it was in a good cause. And God was kind, and I recovered. And I've gone into retirement and been able to look back on it. The odd thing, of course, is that CIA, because of all the publicity, they decided, okay, you can say you were in Pakistan, right? So I guess that's a gift, although, frankly, I would rather none of it had leaked. I'm not blaming you for the story.

But, you know, I would rather none of it had gone out. I would rather have stayed totally out of the public eye. But making a silk purse out of a sow's ear or in taking the best out of it, I get a chance to talk a little bit publicly about what your agency does. You've been careful just in the last minute describing any cause, or not describing any cause to your sickness. We talked last week about your history, about your what you've done at the...

agency. One of the jobs that you've had at the agency is counterintelligence, of course. So put on your counterintelligence hat for a second, and as chief of station, not you, returns from Pakistan with these symptoms. What do you think? What did the doctors think? Why did you get sick? Yeah. Try to depersonalize the situation. Of course, if I was chief of counterintelligence and somebody had had the similar symptoms, I would have looked at all causes, right? And would have relied on the medical people to make that judgment.

And what did the medical people tell you could have happened? They told me it could range from anything from poisoning to exhaustion, simple exhaustion, or just there's a lot of bad stuff in the water out there. It's just South Asia, you know, anything. So, you know, all those options were out there and some of that stuff leaked, but they never arrived at a conclusion.

Because, frankly, maybe I could have pushed more for a conclusion, you know, but I did not. But also, it was a situation where there were too many variables and they just couldn't figure it out, right? And, you know, I have to have to accept that. I have to accept it. Again, the stories are out there, and I just, I'm always careful, and I, you know, to represent the truth that I don't know. You were only there in the end for six months. You got there January, as we said,

and you're gone by July. Yeah. But you did what you went there to do. That's right. Right? Worth the risk, even if, as I mentioned before, your wife said you might have died? Absolutely, absolutely.

You know, you only get a chance. It's the greatest honor of my life to serve my country. You know, and to be, I had the opportunity during my career to be on a number of victories. And some, most of them I can't talk about. But this one is one that I do get the chance to talk about. And I'm very proud of the people at CIA that did that work. I'm proud of the people across the intelligence community

that served with us and we delivered a victory. We delivered a victory of the United States that was something that probably will never be repeated. You recently said this, and we can end with this idea. there was not a day that I worked at CIA that I did not want to open the door and go in to work. That's absolutely true. That's a great thing. Even on the worst days, even on the worst days, was what I was born to do, to be an intelligence officer.

At some point in life, you realize what you're on earth for and at purpose, and I was put on earth to be an intelligence officer, to be a CIA officer. And, you know, there's other parts of my life, but my professional life was something that I valued. I value the fact that I had that opportunity. The American people gave me the privilege to serve them. Sometimes I still can't believe they did it. But it's great. It's great. And again, that makes the risks worth it?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I mean, again, I have a lot of friends. People that I knew that are on the wall, they paid a much dear price. The Wall of Stars. The Wall at CIA. Yeah. They paid a much greater price.

So, yeah, I suffered a bit, but I'm still here. you know and I'd do it again in a minute as I said before and as you've said multiple times it wasn't you you just happened to be there at the end thousands yeah I was like I was like the the relief pitcher in a baseball game that came in at the end and you know and they closed the game yeah right you know but everybody else beforehand did all that work years and years and years of slugging it out to get to that point and you know people risked their lives people gave their lives to get there. And it wasn't only CIA personnel, but I'm focused on CIA personnel.

They're the people I served with. That's right. Right. Well, Mark Elton, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Former Chief Station. Thank you. And Islamabad.

Really appreciate it. And thank you for watching. That's all the time we have now. Thank you for joining us. I'm Nick Schifrin. We'll see you here again next week on Compass Points.