>> NARRATOR: They are top-secret missions manned by specially
trained intelligence and military elite...
Covert operations using unconventional tactics outside
the standard protocol...
But behind the clandestine activities and state-of-the-art
training are secrets... Secrets so deceptive...
>> BOB BAER: Don't even go to the Bin Laden raid if you think
what you saw on the news has any correlation with what happened.
>> NARRATOR: So elusive... >> RONALD KESSLER: The CIA is
violating the laws of foreign countries.
That has to be kept secret. >> NARRATOR: So
life-threatening... >> OLIVER NORTH: Lord knows
keeping secrets matters when your life is at stake.
>> NARRATOR: ...that they've been kept hidden from the
public... until now. >> CHRISTOPHER HEBEN: I'm not
gonna be anyone's prisoner of war.
You're gonna have to kill me because I'll chew your face off
if I don't have any ammunition left.
>> NARRATOR: There are those who believe in the existence
of a book... a book that contains the most
highly guarded secrets of the United States of America,
a book whose very existence is known to only a select few.
But if such a book exists, what would it contain?
Secret origins? Secret missions?
Secret lies? Does there really exist...
>> NARRATOR: January 24, 2012: Moments before President Barack
Obama was to begin his State of the Union address, he commended
the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.
>> OBAMA: Good job tonight. Good job.
>> NARRATOR: But why? Kept secret from those outside
the Defense Department was the knowledge that, only minutes
earlier, an elite group of American special forces known as
SEAL Team Six had stormed a Somali compound in a daring
rescue mission. In a matter of minutes, two
hostages were extracted, unharmed, and President Obama
confirmed the rescue with their families.
It is the same elite unit, which only eight months earlier,
carried out an ultra-secret, highly classified mission:
Operation Neptune Spear. 38 minutes after U.S.
helicopters set down at a secret Abbottabad, Pakistan compound,
the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden,
was dead. >> OBAMA: The United States has
conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the
leader of al Qaeda. >> NARRATOR: Within hours, news
of the clandestine "Black Operation" or "Black Op," spread
across the globe, proclaiming the men of SEAL Team Six
as American heroes. But just who are the elite
soldiers behind these top-secret operations, and what exactly
makes a mission a "Black Op"?
>> OLIVER NORTH: "Black Ops" is a euphemism for unconventional
operations. And Black Operations include
everything from unconventional attacks against the enemy.
Today it's even cyberattacks all the way through hostage
rescue operations, surveillance, reconnaissance,
intelligence-collecting. Those are the kinds of
activities that we refer to today as Black Ops.
>> HOWARD WASDIN: The primary function of Black Ops is to do
something expeditiously that's gotta be done right away without
anybody else knowing that it's going on.
Nowadays during warfare, we need a scalpel rather than a hammer.
>> MIKE HAYDEN: That's covert action.
That's action taken on behalf of the United States government, in
which the hand of the United States government is intended
to remain hidden and activities which the United States
government does not intend to acknowledge.
It's that world between war and peace.
>> NARRATOR: While the U.S. government refuses to
acknowledge their existence, top-secret Tier 1 missions
can only be designated at the highest levels of government
and planned by the Central Intelligence Agency.
>> NORTH: What makes a mission a Tier 1 Mission?
It's a determination made at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and
inside the Pentagon.
>> BAER: These operations normally start with the CIA.
We collect all the intelligence for these guys to go into a
place. We're there first on the ground,
like Afghanistan when the CIA went in first, Special
Forces came in later. The CIA works with Delta Force
and the SEALs every single day. A lot of the people inside the
CIA had at one time been in Delta Force or the SEALs.
>> NARRATOR: While Navy SEALs and Army Delta Force are the
most recognized, the Army... Navy, Air Force, and Marines
all have elite Tier 1 units under the control of a
unified combatant command.
>> HEBEN: Special Operations Command, which is the big
umbrella that SEALs and Delta and Rangers and Air Force
Special Operations fall under-- they comprise about 60,000
individuals, and of those 60,000 individuals, there's
20,000 operators or shooters or door-kickers.
>> WASDIN: What makes SEAL Team Six different and what
makes Delta Force different is they're Tier 1
counterterrorist units, which means they can go anywhere
in the world at a moment's notice.
>> HEBEN: When there's a situation in the world that
threatens Americans' lives, the President wants to know a few
things right away: Where's the nearest aircraft
carrier? Where's the nearest SEAL team?
Where's the nearest Delta squadron, and how can we point
the needle in the right direction?
>> NARRATOR: Special Operations units are trained in areas of
direct action, psychological operations, intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance.
Many consider the Navy SEALs to be the best fighting force
on Earth, and they are often tasked with conducting
the most harrowing and dangerous missions.
>> WASDIN: SEAL actually stands for "Sea, Air, and Land."
It's the elements from which we operate.
The sea, the air... We sky-dive in, fast-rope in
from a helicopter. And of course land-- we could
patrol in. So "Sea, Air, and Land" is what
forms the acronym SEAL.
>> HEBEN: SEALs are described as the brain surgeons of shooting.
You also have a guy that can use his hands for any number of
edged weapons. So a guy can stab you,
slash you, jab you, poke you, shoot you, render you
unconscious, or straight out kill you with his hands.
That's a deadly combination.
>> NARRATOR: It was the failed American invasion of Cuba
in April 1961, known as the Bay of Pigs, that compelled
President John F. Kennedy to create a special force
outside the CIA, one that would be capable of conducting
unconventional operations.
>> RUSS BAKER: He began to see the duplicity involved with what
he was being told about the Bay of Pigs invasion.
It became more and more clear to him that the CIA was not
properly accountable. He became so angry at this
that he actually declared that what he wanted to do
was to destroy the CIA, break it into a thousand pieces,
and cast it to the wind.
>> NARRATOR: May 25, 1961: During his famous "Man on the
Moon" speech to Congress, President Kennedy made public
his desire for a special fighting force.
>> JOHN F. KENNEDY, JR. : I am asking the Congress for
an additional $100 million to expand existing forces
for the conduct of non-nuclear war, paramilitary operations,
and sub-limited or unconventional wars.
>> WASDIN: The Navy SEALs was originally formed by John F.
Kennedy in 1962. President Kennedy had the
foresight to realize that wars of the future
would be low-intensity conflicts that would spring up real quick,
and we needed the guys to send in to do that job.
>> NARRATOR: April 24th, 1980. President Jimmy Carter orders an
ultra-clandestine mission: Operation Eagle Claw,
in an effort to rescue 52 U.S. embassy employees held captive
in Iran for nearly six months.
>> RICHARD MARCINKO: Eagle Claw. Well-documented, in terms of
what went wrong.
We went over and over what could go wrong, and damn it,
something went wrong. So, a sandstorm kicks up.
It got to the filters of the helicopter that couldn't lift
off enough. Hit the wing tank of the C-130.
End of mission. >> NORTH: That operation was
the reason why the entire special operations community
was reorganized in the aftermath.
It was the direct consequence of the failure of that mission.
>> NARRATOR: Following the Eagle Claw debacle, where eight U.S.
service men died, the Department of Defense commissioned Vietnam
veteran Richard Marcinko to build a top secret
counterterrorism unit-- Navy SEAL Team Six.
>> MARCINKO: The consequence of Eagle Claw was, of course,
got me to build SEAL Team Six, which I consider my thesis of my
military career. One of the secrets about Six is
that when I built it, I called it Six, but there was only two.
We still had the Cold War going on, so I said, "Let them
figure out where three, four and five were.
I'll go to six." I think that Eagle Claw, for
being a failure, certainly has a plus, in that Congress
mandated the establishment of Joint Special Operations
Command. And now you have a bona fide
staff that does nothing but keep track of terrorism and special
operations around the world. We now have this tier-one
capability that won't let a failure like that happen again.
>> NARRATOR: Coming up: >> HEBEN: We train aggressively
as SEALs. One of our mottos is, "The more
you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war."
>> WASDIN: If you're going through BUDS, and you don't
at least think about quitting, something's wrong with you.
>> NARRATOR: Tier One special operators like the Navy SEALs
must conduct high-risk counterterrorism missions with
surgical precision in a matter of minutes.
>> Let's go! Let's go! Let's move, move!
>> NARRATOR: But what training process can prepare a solider
for these life-and-death covert missions?
And what skills really separate a Navy SEAL from other
Tier One Operators? >> NORTH: What does it take to
become a black operator?
First of all, you got to be a volunteer to one of the
branches of the armed forces. Second, you have to qualify.
And that means a very rigorous selection process.
>> ALL: Hey, up! >> HEBEN: When you look at the
numbers, active duty military personnel is about 1.4 million,
which represents .001 percent of our population.
So when you look at SEAL teams, there's only about 1,200 SEALs
that are actually what we call "door kickers, shooters"
or "operators." So not only are you .001 percent
of the military, but you're like .00005 percent of the
entire nation.
>> WASDIN: Nobody's recruited in the SEAL teams.
To be a Navy SEAL, you have to volunteer.
You gotta go through screening, physical, mental, psychological.
And there are three key characteristics in
the SEAL teams: aptitude one, very, very
intelligent people. Physical fitness.
And the biggest key of all is mental toughness.
And that is the key thing that separates a Navy SEAL from
anybody else on the planet. >> INSTRUCTOR: Fired up!
>> TRAINEES: Fired up! >> HEBEN: The attrition rate
with respect to SEAL training is pretty high.
It's never been lower than 85%, which means 85% of the people
that try out, don't make it. Matter of fact, the first day,
they say, "Look to the left, look to the right,
look behind you. Ten months from now, only one
of you is gonna be here." >> NARRATOR: For Navy SEALs,
secret training exercises can be more rigorous and intensive than
battlefield operations. >> HEBEN: We train aggressively
as SEALs. One of our mottos is "The more
you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war."
BUDS training is an acronym that stands for "Basic
Underwater Demolition SEAL" training.
That's the initial forging process that every SEAL has
to go through >> WASDIN: If you're going
through BUDS and you don't at least think about quitting,
something's wrong with you. People die in BUDS of
hypothermia, people die at all SEAL training.
>> INSTRUCTOR: Get down in the mud and start crawling!
>> WASDIN: Parachuting accidents, diving accidents,
fast-roping accidents. When you get to that level of
training, everything you do is inherently dangerous.
That's the price you pay for sharpening that spear.
>> NARRATOR: Before Navy SEAL candidates can graduate to the
next level of training, they must survive the most
anticipated and feared part of BUDS training: Hell Week.
For a grueling six days, these men must push themselves beyond
their limitations... or they will go home.
>> HEBEN: Hell Week starts on a Sunday afternoon and it
culminates the following Friday. It's a nonstop evolution from
swims to obstacle courses to running all over the place
with boats on your heads. There is a rotating shift of
instructors who are all SEALs themselves.
>> INSTRUCTOR: Into the water. >> HEBEN: So every eight hours
you get a fresh crew of these guys that are ready to stick
their foot up your backside.
The number-one quality of every SEAL is just a general overall
state of perseverance. We are not quitters.
We would rather die than quit. I'm not gonna be anyone's
prisoner of war. You're gonna have to kill me
because I'll chew your face off if I don't have any
ammunition left.
>> WASDIN: BUDS is just the screening-out process.
Now you have to prove you have the aptitude to do the
demolition, the skydiving, the diving, the IED work,
hostage rescue, whatever it is that may be required.
So that's another six-to-ten months of intensive training
that's worse than BUDS.
>> NARRATOR: For the elite 15% who actually survive Hell Week,
an even more harrowing experience awaits:
closed quarters battle.
>> WASDIN: CQB is an acronym for "Closed Quarters Battle."
It's the toughest type of battle.
Closed quarters could be on a ship, could be on an airliner.
It's basically non-conventional warfare, not open terrain.
>> MARCINKO: You're in confined spaces, close order, and not
is it that, but you're firing amongst each other.
So you're now going through a room where you have ricochets,
you have the hostages, you've got friendly assets in
there, and you have bad guys in there, and you're all firing.
>> HEBEN: Close quarters combat is a myriad of combat techniques
that are slammed together in this homogenous mixture
of [bleep] kicking. If you don't have the physical
skills or the mental skills to shift gears and quickly figure
out a solution to that problem that's right in front of you,
you're gonna die. >> NARRATOR: For Tier One
operators, special closed quarters resources are available
24 hours a day, seven days a week.
These facilities are aptly named "Kill Houses."
>> MARCINKO: A kill house is a training house for CQB.
You can arrange good guy, bad guy targets.
You have the capacity of changing the furniture around,
of changing the entry points, modifying it and electronically
scoring it so there's no, "Oh, I would have had it."
>> WASDIN: Being able to shoot a 3 X 5 index card about
this big, and being able to put two bullets into that
every single time. If I come wake you up at 2:00
in the morning, tell you to gear up, and we go do
a kill house run, you've got to be able to make
those killing shots every single time.
Once I got to SEAL Team Six, I realized that I didn't know
what I didn't know. These guys have CQB down
to a science. You only think you know CQB
unless you are SEAL Team Six.
(whistle blows) >> NORTH: In the training
process, you're basically given the qualities of a world-class
athlete. Right from the very beginning,
you're taught the importance of teamwork.
They train together. They work together.
They get committed together. And they become part of a
remarkably effective special operations unit in the process.
>> NARRATOR: Once SEAL tactical training is completed, the few
Navy SEALs that make it receive the SEAL Trident.
But to the men of the Navy SEALs, it's more than just a
badge of honor. >> HEBEN: The SEAL Trident is
the insignia that SEALs wear on their uniforms.
The head of our eagle is bowed in deference to the nation
because we are at service to our nation.
The second symbol is an old flintlock pistol.
The hammer is cocked, which is indicative of a constant state
of readiness. Also, there's King Neptune's
trident on there, which represents our mastery and
command of the sea. >> WASDIN: This is, like, the
biggest, baddest and gaudiest piece of chest equipment that
anybody wears. And every SEAL that gets one of
these has that buried into his chest, literally.
They're punched in by your commanding officer, your team
leader and everybody in your platoon.
You have to literally pull it out of your chest after you
earn that. I made up my mind.
I'm either going back to Wayne County, Georgia with a Trident
on my chest, or they're going to have to mail me back in a box.
>> NARRATOR: Coming up: >> RUSS BAKER: The very fact
that the federal government denies their preservation of a
so-called black budget, this is a kind of a game being played
with the American people.
>> NARRATOR: For the United States, top-secret Black Ops
missions are a necessary, yet extremely costly endeavor.
Billions of dollars are invested in training, equipment, weapons,
transportation and operational support.
But just how do covert operations get funded by a
government that denies their very existence?
>> MIKE BAKER: A black budget is essentially, uh, monies
allocated for the maintenance, resourcing, logistics of our
covert operations team.
Now, its not open book. That's the reason why it's
clandestine and covert. If it's not, then you might as
well get out of the game. >> KESSLER: The money for black
budgets, it's all done secretly.
The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have
closed-door sessions where they approve these black budgets.
>> BAER: The CIA has a separate funding from Congress.
The military has Black Ops that are under special
access programs.
You have to keep it secret.
>> MARCINKO: It takes a lot of money to train the operators.
It takes a lot of money to equip the operators.
When I started with 100 shooters in 1980, my training allowance
for bullets was larger than the training allowance for the whole
Marine Corps.
That's a lot of bullets. But when you're saying, "I'm
coming to save you," you don't care about the cost of those
bullets.
>> HEBEN: You have the ability to buy cutting-edge equipment,
cutting-edge gear from clothes that you're wearing to weaponry
to optics to even experimental types of food that we're looking
at to give guys more sustainable energy in the field.
>> RUSS BAKER: The very fact that the federal government
denies their preservation of a so-called black budget, this is
a kind of a game being played with the American people.
>> NARRATOR: With billions in funding secretly appropriated
to Black Ops every year, just who is signing the checks?
Could there be a secret chain of command, as some believe, that
stretches all the way to the White House?
>> NORTH: I know there's a lot of inquiry about-- how does that
chain of command work? And, quite frankly, I am not at
liberty to take the risk that I'm going to divulge something
I shouldn't.
>> MARCINKO: The chain of command of that Tier 1 is
working for the National Command Authority.
National Command Authority, by definition, is the president of
the United States and the secretary of defense-- that's
it-- managed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But, in essence, you're talking about the president saying,
"I want," secretary of defense says, "Go do it," and the chief
says, "Troops, be there." That is not a normal military
function, so that allows you direct line for funding,
direct line for intelligence, direct line for action, and
everybody's on a short tether.
>> ALEX JONES: They sell you secrecy in the name of, "The
enemy will know. We've got to have some secrecy."
And then it grows and grows and grows and grows, and expands and
expands and expands. It never ends.
And we're just gobbled up by the National Security State.
>> NARRATOR: But how is the president shielded from domestic
and international accountability when a covert operation is
exposed? Just how much-- or little-- is
the president aware of?
>> RUSS BAKER: Plausible deniability has been written
into the substructure of covert operations under the National
Security Act of 1947. Anything that is being done that
is illegal, immoral, unethical or potentially embarrassing must
be plausibly deniable by people at the highest levels.
>> JONES: Many times, the people involved don't even know exactly
what they're doing. That way, if things go wrong,
they can be cut loose. Plausible deniability.
>> BAER: Secrecy is always a good thing.
The problem with secrecy is when it covers up incompetence.
We're talking about the United States government.
There's a lot of incompetence. And when that's the purpose
of secrecy, it doesn't serve this country.
>> NARRATOR: Spring, 1984. Prior to the Summer Olympics
in Los Angeles, California, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations
James A. Lyons, Jr. voiced concerns about vulnerabilities
on America's military bases both at home and abroad.
Determined to expose potential weaknesses in America's defense
systems, Vice Admiral Lyons enlisted the mastermind behind
SEAL Team Six, Commander Richard Marcinko, to create and conduct
an ultra secret Black Op known as Red Cell.
>> MARCINKO: So I pulled some SEAL Team Six members.
And I hired a group of cameramen, and we went around
saying, "Which one of your bases would you like us to attack?"
He would pick it. And I would go out there, and we
would attack the base. I'd attack it for nine to ten
days, and every day, I would brief the senior officer on what
I had done the night before and what I got away with and
presented him with a film that said, "Gotcha."
>> NARRATOR: Commander Marcinko's Red Cell did, in
fact, expose security weaknesses on American military compounds.
But just how vulnerable were they?
>> MARCINKO: In New London, Connecticut, I was able to
get on board nuclear submarines. When Reagan was president, I got
a truckload of 500-pound bombs alongside Air Force One.
That proved the vulnerability, and... and policy lines had to
be resolved. >> NARRATOR: But did the
findings of the Red Cell mission also expose other secrets?
Ones that would threaten Commander Marcinko's very
future? >> MARCINKO: How'd I get in
trouble? I conspired with myself.
I didn't know you could do that, but apparently I did.
I was already retired. And Naval Investigate Service
spent a lot of money to find out how I did all the things I did.
I was guilty of a grenade contract that I said I needed.
The Army was the contracting service.
I had nothing to do with it but I was the one that went to jail,
because I didn't say it cost too much.
I spent time in a federal camp for a little over a year.
Landed in a manure pile and came out smelling like a rose.
>> NARRATOR: Did Marcinko violate the chain of command...
or was the former SEAL Team Six Commander a victim of his own
covert mission? Did the government create Red
Cell as a means to orchestrate an even larger, secret agenda?
>> HEBEN: Red Cell had a duality to it.
It was testing out American installations, but it was also
simultaneously building a database that is gonna allow us
to move in a Black Ops fashion all over the world, and assemble
an assault team somewhere without anybody knowing.
>> NARRATOR: Coming up. >> BAER: The CIA training never
stops. Right now, I can go to CVS and
I can make a bomb between now and midnight that will take this
hotel down. Now how are you gonna stop that?
>> NARRATOR: Undoubtedly, the most secretive and highly
classified of all Black Ops missions originate within the
cloak and dagger world of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Many CIA Operatives spend their entire careers shrouded in a
clandestine existence-- operating behind enemy lines,
spying against foreign countries, stealing secrets, and
conducting counterintelligence.
>> HAYDEN: When you look at CIA we are the nation's first
line of defense. We go where others cannot go,
and we accomplish what others cannot accomplish.
We spy, we conduct espionage, we steal secrets, and we do it
through human sources. We conduct analysis.
The actual number of analysts we have is a classified number, but
it's the largest collection of intelligence analysts in the
American government by far. >> NORTH: You also have
several affiliated organizations within the CIA that aren't
necessarily based at Langley. It's very highly classified how
they do it, where they do it, when they do it.
Very few of those are actually publically acknowledged.
>> KESSLER: Everything that the CIA does, does have to be done
secretly, because when CIA officers go into foreign
countries to collect intelligence, they are violating
the laws of those countries.
>> NARRATOR: About 150 miles away from CIA headquarters in
Langley, Virginia, tucked into the countryside, is an ultra
clandestine training facility-- Camp Peary-- where new CIA
operatives prove themselves. While the U.S.
government refuses to acknowledge its existence,
insiders simply refer to it as "The Farm."
>> BAER: The Farm is a training base.
It's an old naval base, which we're not allowed to name, but
you can say "The Farm."
They train you on all sorts of stuff.
They train you on weapons... high-speed driving-- how to run
somebody off the road at 70 miles an hour...
parachute training... secret writing...
short-range agent communication, communicating with satellites,
rendezvousing with a submarine in the Atlantic in the middle of
the night. You know, useful skills like
that. >> NORTH: The skill set that a
Special Operator employs is astounding.
It's communications. It's explosives, it's
demolitions, it's explosive ordnance disposal.
It's every kind of weapon that you can imagine.
>> BAER: We can go to CVS and I can make a bomb between now and
midnight that will take this hotel down.
Now how are you gonna stop that?
>> NARRATOR: From The Farm, an operative will be dropped in a
major U.S. city and must maintain his or her cover in a
real-life game of spy hunter. >> BAER: The CIA training never
stops. They put you on the
streets of Washington, and have constant surveillance...
even use FBI agents. You're supposed to detect them.
You're supposed to be able to put down dead drops, even
under observation. You're going 18 hours a day.
And what they're trying to do is break you down, to see at
what point you make mistakes. What they want to do is find
people that can live overseas, live under the pressure of a
foreign government watching them.
You learn it as part of your life.
Every single room, you assume is wired; you assume you're under
surveillance all the time.
>> NARRATOR: Former CIA Operative Bob Baer-- whose
covert exploits inspired the 2005 thriller Syriana-- was
in charge of the CIA in Iraq during the years following the
Persian Gulf War. His Black Op mission-- to
organize opposition against one of the most brutal dictators in
modern history, Saddam Hussein. >> BAER: An Iraqi general
came to me and said he can get rid of Saddam.
He had a tank company near Tikrit, and our plan was to
cause a diversion in Baghdad. Start shooting so that
Saddam would move to Tikrit and then once he was there, our
colonel was gonna move these 12 tanks on his compound
near Tikrit, and ask him to resign or we'd kill him.
>> NARRATOR: In 1995, Baer informed the Clinton
Administration that the opportunity existed to
neutralize the man known as "The Butcher of Baghdad," but
inexplicably, they refused. >> BAER: I was called back by
the FBI and investigated for murder and attempted murder.
And I figured once your employer's starting to think
about putting you in jail, it's time to move on.
>> NARRATOR: But why would the government stop Baer's Black
Op and investigate its highest- ranking CIA operative working in
Iraq? >> BAER: When I went into the
CIA, it was a very black and white world.
We were worried about the Soviet Union.
Was Moscow going to launch an attack on the United States?
The people that were doing counterterrorism
leading up to 9/11 had moved off accounts on the
Soviet Union. So you had a guy
that was very good at counting tanks, and then all of a sudden,
you're doing Bin Laden. Some of these people had never
set foot outside the Beltway and didn't speak Arabic, didn't
quite know who Bin Laden was. What was Al Qaeda?
>> NARRATOR: And what would be the ultimate consequence as the
antiquated CIA struggled to modernize?
September 11, 2001. America fell victim to a covert
attack... at home. >> BAER: When 9/11 happened, I
was in Washington D.C. Someone called me on the phone
and said, "Turn the TV on." The second plane hits...
and the Pentagon hits. And I can see the
Pentagon burning from my house. My first reaction is, "All
right, we're gonna finally get serious about this."
>> NARRATOR: The events of 9/11 galvanized the intelligence
community and Tier One Special Forces with one unified Black
Op mission: to hunt down and kill the mastermind behind the
9/11 attack-- Osama Bin Laden.
>> HEBEN: The events of 9/11 almost served as an
opening of a floodgate for special operations.
It's almost like having this Rottweiler that's been in a cage
with a choke chain on it, and all of a sudden, they open up
the cage, they take the choke chain off, they open up the
gate and say, "Go bite some people."
>> NARRATOR: Coming up. >> MIKE BAKER: You're trying
to decide, with some credibility, is Bin Laden behind
those walls... enough to be able to convince
the president to send the SEAL teams.
You'd better be on your game.
>> NARRATOR: August, 2010. White House intelligence
officers call a top-secret meeting with President Obama.
Nearly ten years after 9/11, President Barack Obama gave the
orders to launch the Black Op to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden: Operation Neptune Spear.
May 2, 2011, at 1:15 a.m. An American military transport
departed Bagram, Afghanistan, where two dozen elite warriors
from SEAL Team Six arrived at an airbase in northwest Pakistan
and boarded two Chinook helicopters.
Their destination: a multi-level Abbottabad compound,
fortified by 12-foot walls and armed guards.
>> HEBEN: We had been watching that place for years, and in
the months leading up to the actual operation, we had
constructed a mock compound. The SEAL Team Six guys, they
knew every square inch of that compound, much like you or I
would know the details in our kitchen.
>> MIKE BAKER: There were eight or nine years of work,
credibly labor-intensive, painstaking work carried out by
the CIA and others that led eventually to the SEALs landing
on that site and taking out bin Laden.
>> NARRATOR: Escorted by a pair of stealth Black Hawk
helicopters, the SEALs, equipped with night vision goggles and M4
carbine rifles, rappelled into the compound.
>> HEBEN: They had a lot of details of the compound, but the
door they thought was a door was a false door, it was a façade.
They ended up having to explode their way through one of the
walls. >> NARRATOR: While the SEALs
entered the house, a previously unreported stealth helicopter
was forced to land.
>> NORTH: We were told publically that it was a Special
Operations Helicopter that was damaged and then partially
destroyed. >> MARCINKO: We wouldn't have
known about that special helicopter if it hadn't crashed.
>> NARRATOR: As the SEALs stormed inside, they rely on
their close-quarters combat training, clearing room after
room. >> HEBEN: They climbed up that
three-story inner compound, and that's where they found Osama
Bin Laden. And they took him out
as he was reaching for a weapon.
>> NARRATOR: In a matter of seconds, the world's most
notorious terrorist was dead. >> HEBEN: The entire operation
happened in under an hour-- about 38 minutes.
But the actual defining moments wherein they were able to locate
Osama and put rounds into his body happened in under a minute.
>> WASDIN: 38 minutes is a very long time.
It becomes even longer if people are shooting back at you.
It becomes even longer if you crash a helicopter and you have
to breach through a wall and you don't know if somebody else is
coming for reinforcements.
>> NARRATOR: Sunday May 1, 11:35 p.m.
President Obama addresses the nation.
>> OBAMA: Good evening. The United States has conducted
an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of
al Qaeda. >> NARRATOR: But within hours,
conflicting details of the raid spread worldwide.
And over the next several days, the official statement from the
United States government would change multiple times.
>> RUSS BAKER: In the first week
after that raid, we were told so
many conflicting stories that have never been resolved...
Why, really, they disposed of the body so quickly...
whose orders it was to assassinate him, rather than to
take such a high-value intelligence target in for
questioning. >> WASDIN: Nobody outside the
team that hit the compound in Abbottabad knows what went on
in that compound. I find it laughable for people
to think that anybody's got any insider information about what
really went on inside the op to kill Bin Laden and stuff
like that.
>> BAER: You're gonna hear a lot of propaganda: You're gonna
hear a lot of propaganda out of the White House, and then you
got the SEALs that don't want to talk about it at all.
>> NORTH: Quite frankly, I was stunned at how much was
revealed about the operation to get Bin Laden.
What we know is that the administration announced that a
SEAL Team carried out a raid in which Bin Laden was killed.
And Bin Laden was then taken out to a ship and his body was given
a Muslim burial at sea.
>> NARRATOR: The death of Bin Laden marked the War on Terror's
greatest victory. So why would the United States
government be so eager to revise its accounts of the Bin Laden
raid and refuse to release any photos?
>> NORTH: Every warrior in those kinds of units understands that
divulging information, even about an operation that may have
taken place years ago, can jeopardize those who are on the
next mission. That old axiom "Loose lips sink
ships," they get that. >> NARRATOR: For highly-
classified, covert missions secrecy is paramount, but could
the clandestine nature of Black Ops, like Operation Neptune
Spear, spawn conspiracy theories and fuel mistrust in the
government? >> RUSS BAKER: With that
kind of misinformation, you don't really know whether in
fact, the operation went as characterized.
In fact, you don't even really know-- there's no proof--
that Osama Bin Laden was ever even there.
>> JONES: Upwards of 90% of warfare today is
psychological in nature or a Psy Op, and I cannot stress enough
how integral and how key this is to the overall system.
>> RUSS BAKER: Psy ops, or psychological operations, are
basically an attempt to influence hearts and minds.
It's an attempt to convince people of certain things, some
of them true, some of them not true.
>> NARRATOR: Beyond propaganda, rumors and conflicting
accounts, one thing remains clear.
The escalation of black budgets may point to one of
America's greatest military secrets. that the future of
American warfare and the global War on Terrorism lies largely
in Black Ops... and the elite
warriors who are prepared to sacrifice their own lives for
the safety of their nation. >> WASDIN: I've had people
ask me, "Is it true that most Black Ops don't live to see
their 30th birthday?" When I got into SEAL Team Six,
if you'd have told me that I would live to be 40, I would
have thought you were crazy. >> HEBEN: The secrets that we
keep are very, very necessary. We don't like people to know
where we've been, where we're going, where
we've come back from. >> WASDIN: I was an elite
warrior in the modern world, and that's all I cared about.
We had a saying at SEAL Team Six called "Live fast, die young and
leave a good-looking corpse."
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