A cache of newly released government photographs reveals key moments inside the White House during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, including images of top officials shaking hands after learning that bin Laden had been killed and President Barack Obama calling other world leaders to break the news. Through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Obama Presidential Library, The Washington Post obtained more than 900 photos taken by official White House photographers on May 1, 2011. Below is a selection of 23 photographs and the moments they captured as recounted in Barack Obama’s memoir “A Promised Land” and an oral history by Garrett M. Graff published in Politico.
Exclusive
Newly released White House photos capture the day bin Laden was killed
By Nate Jones
April 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
On April 29, 2011, Obama authorized the raid on the complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Intelligence reports had indicated that it was the likely location for bin Laden, the al-Qaeda founder who masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States that killed 3,000 people. Because of weather forecasts and the lack of moonlight, intelligence officials set the date as Sunday, May 1. The president then left Washington for a planned trip, including a brief tour of tornado damage in Tuscaloosa, Ala. He flew back to Washington and attended the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where he cracked jokes mocking Donald Trump.
The Situation Room becomes a ‘war room’
On May 1, the White House canceled all public tours — including some for celebrities who had traveled to D.C. for the correspondents’ dinner. According to Deputy Director of the CIA Mike Morell, any meeting about the raid was logged in the White House calendar as a “Mickey Mouse meeting” to avoid scrutiny. Cameras in the room had been turned off or covered. Obama played nine holes of golf that morning, as he routinely did on Sundays.
Around 1 p.m., national security adviser Tom Donilon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, homeland security adviser John Brennan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others entered the large conference room of the Situation Room complex.
At 1:22 p.m., CIA Director Leon Panetta gave the order to commence the operation. Unable to focus on other work, the president and a small group of confidants played spades in the Oval Office dining room.
2:16 p.m.
Just after 2 p.m., as helicopters were flying from Afghanistan to Abbottabad, Obama joined his national security team in the Situation Room conference room. In his memoir covering the period, Obama described the atmosphere as “a war room” and “predictably tense.”
Not wanting to sidetrack his team, the president resumed playing cards until shortly before 3:30 p.m., when Panetta announced that the helicopters were nearing the compound.
As Obama returned to the conference room, he heard the voice of Adm. William McRaven — who was commanding the operation from Afghanistan — and saw a live video feed of the raid in a smaller anteroom. From there, Air Force Brig. Gen. Brad Webb relayed the video and audio feeds into the adjacent larger conference room. As the raid began, Obama told his team, “I need to watch this,” and left the conference room to watch in the anteroom. Webb offered him his seat, but the president told him to “sit down” and pulled up a hardback chair.
4 p.m.
Obama’s national security team soon squeezed into the room with the president. White House photographer Pete Souza also was in the room, taking pictures with his “butt up against a printer.” At 4:05 p.m., Souza took the now iconic photo of Obama and his advisers intensely watching the video feed of the raid. A document on the desk remains blurred in the version released by the Obama Library. The Library withheld 307 photos from The Post, describing their contents as “national security classified information.”
4:05 p.m.
Barely a minute after Obama began watching the live feed, one of the Black Hawk helicopters was caught in an air vortex and performed an emergency landing inside the compound, becoming disabled. Obama said he felt “an electric kind of fear.” McRaven, who was describing the events like a “play-by-play” announcer, assured everyone in the room, “It’ll be fine.”
Minutes later, McRaven and Panetta almost simultaneously announced to the president and his national security team, “Geronimo ID’d … Geronimo EKIA,” or enemy killed in action. The CIA and military were later criticized for using the Apache leader as a code name for bin Laden.
As others in the anteroom gasped, Obama said softly, “We got him.”
4:13 p.m.
Obama shook hands with members of the team and left the anteroom, still worried about the SEALs flying in Pakistani airspace.
Bin Laden’s body identified
About 6 p.m., the helicopters crossed into Afghan airspace and Obama “felt some of the tension drain out.” At a later meeting in the Situation Room, McRaven, in Afghanistan, told the team that he was looking at the body and that it appeared to be bin Laden. He had asked a SEAL, who was 6-foot-2, to lie next to the body to confirm it matched bin Laden’s height of 6-foot-4. Obama quipped: “Seriously, Bill. … All that planning and you couldn’t bring a tape measure.”
7:05 p.m.
Soon after, photographs of bin Laden’s corpse were passed around the room. Obama was certain it was him. Others insisted that bin Laden’s death could not be confirmed until DNA test results came back, which could take a day or more.
7:17 p.m.
As the team debated whether to announce the death that evening or wait until it was confirmed the next day, news outlets began to report the helicopter crash. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen argued that he needed to contact his Pakistani counterpart, army Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to de-escalate any possible Pakistani military actions.
7:36 p.m.
7:48 p.m.
8:36 p.m.
8:47 p.m.
The president decided to make the announcement that evening.
White House at ‘full throttle’
Obama later wrote that his entire staff rushed back to the White House and began to work at “full throttle,” contacting diplomats and preparing for the president’s speech.
9:11 p.m.
Obama, his speechwriter Ben Rhodes and White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley met quickly to outline what Obama wanted to convey to the nation.
9:25 p.m.
Aides and journalists ended their Sunday activities and hurried to the White House. Several had been at a Washington Capitals hockey game. The photographs show one person in an Alex Ovechkin jersey preparing for the speech.
10:26 p.m.
According to Rhodes, Obama wanted to emphasize triumph and optimism, saying: “Look, I want to end on this idea that it’s been a pretty rough decade, but this shows that if America actually sticks to something, you know, we can do really big things. That’s something that should bring us together.”
The president put on a fresh suit and saw first lady Michelle Obama for the first time that day. “So?” she asked him. The president gave her a thumbs-up and the two embraced.
‘Very good news’
Next, the president called former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He emphasized to Bush that the mission was a culmination of the efforts begun in the Bush administration.
10:06 p.m.
He also called British Prime Minister David Cameron and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. “Whatever the fallout,” the Pakistani president said, according to Obama’s memoir, “it’s very good news.”
At 10:24 p.m., Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff to Donald H. Rumsfeld, tweeted: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden.” Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson sent a similar tweet seconds later.
10:38 p.m.
The president continued to make handwritten edits to his speech in the Oval Office as his advisers stood by, waiting for his televised address to begin.
10:51 p.m.
The group could hear a loud crowd gathering just outside the White House fence.
10:58 p.m.
At 10:45 p.m., the television news networks reported bin Laden’s death. Obama could hear chants of “USA! USA! USA!” as he walked to the East Room.
11:16 p.m.
An NBC News special report played in the background as Obama, Biden and White House press secretary Jay Carney took a few final moments to edit the speech. In national security team debates over whether Obama should authorize the raid, Biden had urged caution.
11:28 p.m.
Mullen and Biden showed photographer Souza the rosary beads they had wrapped around their fingers while watching the bin Laden raid from the Situation Room.
‘The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden’
At 11:35 p.m., Obama delivered his speech, televised globally from the East Room.
11:41 p.m.
A small group of White House staffers and Obama’s closest national security team — including Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., Donilon, Panetta, Mullen, Clinton and Biden — gathered in the East Room. Antony Blinken, pictured back left, was national security adviser to the vice president at the time. He is secretary of state in the Biden administration.
11:42 p.m.
“Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world, the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children,” Obama said, beginning his speech.
12:10 a.m.
Obama felt “a palpable shift” in the country’s mood and a sense of catharsis after the Abbottabad raid, he later wrote. In his memoir, he said that the public viewed the death of bin Laden “as the closest we’d likely ever get to a V-Day.” The president was proud that Americans took “some satisfaction in seeing their government deliver a victory” but regretted that “a sense of common purpose” seemed possible “only when the goal involved killing a terrorist[.]”
correction
An earlier version of this article stated that then-President Barack Obama visited Alabama in response to the aftermath of a hurricane. The visit was prompted by tornado damage. In addition, David Plouffe was incorrectly identified as Dan Pfeiffer in the caption for the 10:51 p.m. photograph. This story has been updated.
Methodology
The Post requested all official White House photos from the day bin Laden was killed using the Freedom of Information Act and the Presidential Records Act, which ensure public access to presidential records beginning five years after the end of a president’s administration. The Obama Presidential Library, which is administered by the National Archives, took 376 days to process this request and responded with a 161-page PDF of thumbnails and file names for all photographs taken between May 1 and 3, 2011. They did not provide time stamps, captions or original metadata. The Post then requested and received time-stamped, high-resolution copies of select photographs from the library.
Most of the photographs were taken by the chief White House photographer Pete Souza. External photographers often criticized the Obama administration as being the most restrictive in decades. Other featured photographs were taken by official White House photographer Chuck Kennedy.
Material for this presentation was based primarily on accounts of those present on the day. Those accounts include “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama, and the Politico oral history “I’d Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This: The plan to kill Osama bin Laden — from the spycraft to the assault to its bizarre political backdrop — as told by the people in the room” by Garrett M. Graff.
About this story
Editing by Jenna Pirog, Robert Miller, David Fallis and Sarah Childress. Design by Tara McCarty. Copy editing by Gilbert Dunkley.