Geronimo Is KIA

So they finally got Osama Bin Laden.

And they got him in Pakistan.  Down the street from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point.

In a McMansion with twelve foot walls.

Steve Coll, New Yorker writer and author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011, a great if bulky tome about the roller coaster history of Afghanistan, had this to say: “It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without it coming to the attention of anyone in Pakistan’s Army.”

No matter whom you believe, Coll also points out that the CIA’s Langley-based Bin Laden unit had gone deep and long on trying to understand other long international fugitive hunts, including studying the tracking down of Medelin Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, way back in 1993, to try and arrive at some lessons learned that could be applied in the search for Bin Laden.

Coll writes that the analysts looked for clues from those other manhunts — where did the breakthroughs come from? what were the clues that made the difference and how were the clues discovered?

But they also engaged in pattern recognition, analyzing relationships among terrorists, couriers, and raw data collected in the field, and also piecing together what they found with a breakthrough that came from detainee interrogations, including from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Sounds to me no matter how you add it all up, it was just some dogged, perservering, and good ol’ fashioned intelligence work.

As for how it all went down yesterday in Abottabad, this tick tock, found on the Politico web site, is a heart stopper.

Remember those scenes from all those movies where you’re inside the Situation Room waiting for the raid to go down, and everyone’s on pins and needles, including the President?

I’m guessing it was a little something like those scenes in the White House Situation Room yesterday afternoon.

Me, I’ve also been reading the first hand Twitter accounts from one Sohaib Ahtar, whose Twitter ID is @ReallyVirtual.

Sohaib is an IT consultant who was apparently taking a break from the rat race and hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, blogs TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher.

He unwittingly provided play-by-play action of the raid, which occurred around 1:00 AM local time in Abbottabad, having no idea what was really going down in his new mountain respite:

Sohaib’s first Tweet: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”

Yeah, more rare than you ever could have known.

Then, not too much later: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”

Guess it depends on how you define nasty.

Finally, NBC’s Chuck Todd informed us via Twitter this morning that Osama’s code name for this raid was “Geronimo,” and that the call came in as “Geronimo is KIA” (killed in action).

There are some parallels between the renowned Apache leader and Bin Laden.

Like Bin Laden, Geronimo was once surrounded by U.S. soldiers in the Robledo Mountains of southwest New Mexico, hidden in a cave from which he seemingly never came out.  But somehow, he escaped, both from the cave, and from the clutches of U.S. soldiers.

A story that is, of course, eerily reminiscent of Bin Laden being similarly trapped in caves in the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001, from which he also escaped.

But not this time.

This time, making smart, productive use of intelligence on the ground from the field — connecting the dots, if you will —  is finally what did “Geronimo” in.

Pictures Of War

I heard the news late yesterday that journalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, along with his associate Chris Hondros, were killed in Misrati, Libya, after receiving wounds inflicted from a mortar attack.

Hetherington received an Academy Award nomination for the film he co-directed about the American troops at the tip of the spear in Afghanistan, in the Korengal Valley, earlier this year, “Restrepo.”  The documentary grew out of the superb book that journalist Sebastian Junger also wrote about what he saw with American troops in the Korengal.

Hondros was a Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer whose work has graced the front pages of many newspapers and magazines with pictures from war zones around the world.

I only knew these individuals through their work, but as a self-confirmed news junkie, I greatly appreciated the personal sacrifice they made to bring back the pictures and moving images that they did from the world’s most troubled spots.

It would be easy to dismiss such individuals as adrenalin-addicted war zone junkies, but the truth is these men and women are often the only people there to bear witness and document the atrocities, aftermath, and consequences of the world’s conflicts.

If you’ve not yet seen “Restrepo,” I would encourage you to do so — but be prepared, it’s a heart-wrenching look at the good and bad of life on the front lines. And when I say front lines, I mean way out front. In the Korengal, American servicemen could wait a good 30 minutes for any air support to reach them, so they were pretty much on their own.

Them and the Taliban.

No matter what you think of the situation in Libya or the Arab Spring more broadly, I think it takes a special kind of person to run into a war zone carrying only a Sony HD camera or a Nikon.

Both Hodros and Hetherington will be missed, though I suspect their pictures will live with us for a long time to come.

You can see some of Hetherington’s work here on his Web site, and Hodros’ work here.

Charlie Wilson’s Last War

I was sitting here in Austin working away this afternoon, catching up on some email and trolling the news, when the headline hit my desk about former Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson’s death in Lufkin, Texas earlier today.

I was immediately saddened.

Charlie Wilson was a larger-than-life character, but he was also a great American and a great Texan who, through sheer doggedness and determination, helped bolster the mujahideen and overthrow the Soviet Union in the U.S./Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan in the mid-to-late 1980s.

You can read Wilson’s obituary in The New York Times here.

But what you really ought to do is read his book, Charlie Wilson’s War, which Wilson co-authored with writer George Crile.

I had an opportunity to see Wilson speak about his experience arming the mujahideen and helping them overthrow the Soviets at the Texas Book Festival here in Austin earlier in the decade when the book came out, and was simply stunned by the account I read.

Though the movie, made several years later, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, was quite entertaining, the details of Wilson’s adventures and efforts just can’t be done justice, even with that great cast.

You have to read the book to believe Wilson’s experiences as he worked to drive and manipulate the levers of Congress to help arm and provide the support necessary to help overthrow the Soviets, which paved the way to the later dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

My best thoughts and prayers go out to Wilson’s family.  He was 76.