"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 21

Episode 21: Lessons From the Man Who Got bin Laden

Meet Admiral William McRaven, the Navy SEAL who literally wrote THE book on special operations, and who says the best way to plan the raid for the world’s most wanted man — or do pretty much anything else — is to start by making your bed.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

###

Not too long ago I learned about a crazy special operation during World War II where Nazi commandos rescued the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop jail in Italy and spirited him away to Germany in a tiny plane. It’s a wild, action-packed story, full of surprises. But maybe the biggest surprise is the odd role this 80-year-old episode played in bringing about a more famous special operation that you undoubtedly know about: Operation Neptune Spear.

William McRaven: This will go down as one of the great operations in the history of the CIA.

That was when U.S. Navy SEALs raided a compound in Pakistan… that the CIA really hoped contained Osama bin Laden.

William McRaven: But for all the intelligence we had, you know, overhead intelligence, technical intelligence, human intelligence, we just couldn't determine whether or not it was bin Laden. We thought going into the mission that it was about a 50-50 chance it was him.

That’s retired U.S. Navy Admiral Willam McRaven. He’s pretty familiar with the risk and uncertainty of the bin Laden raid. He was the operation's architect. He planned it out and supervised it from Afghanistan as it went down. When President Obama and his senior advisors sat in a cramped room in the White House, watching a live feed of the operation, it was McRaven's voice on the secure line, delivering the news that bin Laden had been killed.

And even if you haven’t heard of McRaven, you’ve probably familiar with his work. Hollywood keeps making movies based on the operations that he ran.

ARCHIVAL Captain Phillips Trailer: Captain Phillips, can you hear me? Captain Phillips, can you hear me?

ARCHIVAL Zero Dark Thirty: But Bin Laden is there and you're gonna kill him for me.

But what does the bin Laden raid have to do with Mussolini getting rescued by the Nazis back in World War II? I recently had a conversation with Admiral McRaven that answered this Mussolini question... and another, bigger question about these kinds of high-risk, unconventional missions, carried out by highly trained teams. Which is, what makes any special operation… successful in the first place?

If you're curious about the answer, stay with me. It'll be a rare chance to hear from one of America's most admired and intellectually curious military leaders — a former journalism student turned Navy SEAL, who found a second act running a university and writing books on leadership. And he may be the first flag-rank U.S. officer ever to quote Taylor Swift in his published work.

William McRaven: The young millennials, they don't go to all of my fancy, dead German quotes. They go right to Taylor Swift.

It's me. Hi. I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Usually, when some expert or master of their craft develops a theory of that craft and writes it up in a book, they do this after they've gotten famous for some big victory. Or after they retire. It seems easier that way. Once the messy events of your experience are already laid out, you can come up with some rules that fit. This seems especially true when it comes to books about warfare. Famous theorists of war like Sun Tzu or Carl von Clauswitz — as best as we can tell — published their writing after their fighting.

But then there's Bill McRaven. A man whose book helped deliver his victories on the battlefield. As a mid-career U.S. Navy officer at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, McRaven decided to research a form of warfare that he thought hadn't received enough academic attention.

William McRaven: I realized that nowhere was there a theory of special operations.

McRaven published a book called Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare. He would later follow the principles in the book to the letter — sometimes even to the minute — as a commander of U.S. special operations. But first, he was just a graduate student with a question.

William McRaven: How can a special operation be successful in light of the fact that it's generally a smaller force going up against a larger or well defended force where the defense is always stronger than the offense? My hypothesis is there's something unusual, something unique in a special operation that allows it to succeed in spite of these things.

So what makes a special operation special? Special operations are those tactical, quick-strike military actions done by a small group of highly trained personnel. They’re secretive, risky, and the target is usually high-value. McRaven started his military career in special operations with the U.S. Navy SEALs. So he’s had some firsthand experience with the tradecraft. But for his academic project, he studied eight commando raids from the 20th century, from World War II up to the 1970’s. And, in what struck me as an intellectually cosmopolitan move, McRaven didn't confine himself to studying only American units. He also studied operations carried out by U.S. allies and even its enemies.

William McRaven: Boy, nobody has ever accused me of being intellectually cosmopolitan. I'm not a fan of a lot of evil people that ran commando operations. But you have to intellectually look at these things from the enemy's eyes sometimes.

And this is where that Nazi rescue of Mussolini comes in. This was one of the missions that McRaven studied for his book. And, to me at least, it’s the case study that most vividly illustrates McRaven’s theory of special operations.

The year was 1943.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF 1940s NEWSREEL MUSIC]

ARCHIVAL 1940s Newscaster: Allied grand strategy against the fortress of Europe is about to be revealed.

The Allies were gaining on the Axis powers and Italy was in the process of switching sides to join the Allies.

ARCHIVAL 1940s Newscaster: Italy's zero hour has arrived. Suddenly Mussolini the sawdust Caesar is kicked out of power.

Italy’s new government threw Mussolini in jail. About 250 Italian soldiers were holding Mussolini in a fortified hotel in Gran Sasso, which is a cluster of peaks high in Italy's Apennine mountains. German High Command ordered that Hitler’s buddy be rescued. The pointman on this raid was this fearless commando, handpicked by Hitler himself, named Otto Skorzeny. He appeared in German newsreels alongside the Fuhrer.

[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF 1940s GERMAN NEWSREEL, “SKORZENY” MENTIONED]

William McRaven: Skorzeny was, quote unquote, “Hitler's commando.” And Skorzeny in his time as a commando did some incredibly daring, bold, risky, dangerous, outta this world missions.

Skorzeny’s face was scarred from a saber duel when he was younger. He liked to drive race cars for fun and he had a reputation as the "most dangerous man in Europe." He sounds like he could've been the model for a whole bunch of different James Bond villains. And his raid to rescue Mussolini sounds like an action movie.

William McRaven: I did have the opportunity to go to Gran Sasso, and frankly, the mission was even more daring than it appeared from the books. Gran Sasso is this mountain retreat, now a ski resort, high up in the mountains, and the only way to get up there is by a funicular railway.

The Germans arrived by air in 10 gliders. One of them smashed into a mountainside on its way in, killing or critically injuring all the soldiers inside. The other nine gliders in the team managed to crash land in this boulder field, right by the hotel holding Mussolini.

William McRaven: When you get on the ground and you see the boulders that are strewn everywhere, you see how small of a landing area that is, it is remarkable that anybody survived.

The first glider down carried the scarfaced mission leader, Skorzeny. When he and his commandos climbed out of the wreckage of their little aircraft, they knew they’d be immediately outnumbered and outgunned by Mussolini’s guards. And so that’s why the Nazis had brought along a secret weapon.

William McRaven: Skorzeny gets there and cleverly what they had done is they had captured an Italian two-star general and they brought him along in Skorzeny's glider. And so as they land, the Italians at the top of the mountain, they don't know what's going on. They don't know who these people are. And of course, the first person to step out of the glider is an Italian two-star general. So he convinces them, ‘Look, this is all okay. You need to put your guns down.’

And so the smaller Nazi force managed to subdue the Italians with hardly a shot being fired, and freed Mussolini from his cell. The plan then called for a light plane, specially designed for short airfields, to come and land, pick up Mussolini, and take off again.

William McRaven: The pilot gets Mussolini in the plane, and then Skorzeny says, well, I'm coming with you. And the pilot says, you don't understand. We don't have the weight to do this. And, Skorzeny refuses to let Mussolini out of his sight. He jumps in, the three of them take off. When you see it from the mountain top, you wonder how crazy were they? Because they fly off the mountaintop and drop down a couple thousand feet to gain airspeed in what would appear to be almost a crash landing. He pulls up at the last minute and then manages to scoot away.

The Germans filmed the raid for their own propaganda channels and it seems even the British couldn’t resist using all that action footage in their own newsreels, although the tone of the storytelling was a little different.

ARCHIVAL 1940s Newscaster: Hitler's boyfriend, the deflated Mussolini, was carted off to Germany by plane following his rescue by Nazi paratroops. Captured enemy films show how after being kept a prisoner in Central Italy he was whisked off to become a Nazi stooge.

William McRaven: This was a remarkable, commando operation. It had surprise, it had speed, it had deception and of course incredible courage on the part of Skorzeny and his commandos.

Peter Bergen: You mentioned surprise, speed, and deception. When you looked at all these case studies, what were the general principles you took away?

William McRaven: You know: a simple plan carefully concealed, repeatedly rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.

I got the sense sometimes that McRaven — special ops guru that he is — has run this list through his head so many times it’s become something like a mantra. So I'll say those principles again, a little slower: a simple plan; carefully concealed; repeatedly rehearsed; executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.

William McRaven: There have always been principles of war, and I wanted to build principles of special operations.

For McRaven, every special operation begins with thinking — thinking hard to devise a plan — that's absolutely as simple as it possibly can be.

William McRaven: One of the things that I worked hard during my time in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan was to make sure that every plan was as simple as I could make it. Because the more complicated it becomes, the more the frictions of war come into play. So a simple plan, carefully concealed, so you have to make sure that the bad guys don't know you're coming. Repeatedly rehearsed. And this was an important one. I found in all of my case studies that every time a particular portion of a mission was not rehearsed, that portion of the mission invariably failed in combat. So you have to do a full dress rehearsal until you work out all the kinks, and then you had to have surprise, speed, and purpose.

Peter Bergen: Surprise, speed, I think are self-explanatory. What is purpose?

William McRaven: You know when I look back on the missions that were successful, the commandos, for lack of a better term, they went in with purpose. They were prepared to give their life to see this mission succeed. It is the young soldier that charges the machine gun nest. It's the young commando that dives on a grenade to save his buddies so that the mission can continue. This idea that you are filled with purpose means that you are going to do daring and great things.

Employing these principles allows a smaller force to take on a larger, more well defended force. Special operators attacking with enough speed, cleverness, and surprise achieve what McRaven calls “relative superiority” just long enough to win their objective. And it's worth reiterating that these principles also apply to the bad guys too. McRaven uses the example of the terrorist attack on the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans in 1983.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster: A speeding pickup truck crashed through barriers and exploded in the lobby of the headquarters building where Marines were sleeping. The blast opened a crater 30 feet deep and 40 feet across, causing the four story structure to collapse, killing, trapping, and injuring those inside.

William McRaven: Why is it so hard to stop the terrorist with a car bomb? So he’s got a simple plan. He's gonna put a bomb in his car, he's gonna drive that bomb along the corniche. He's gonna turn into the road. There's one marine or two marines standing there at the guard post. He's gonna drive through them and he is gonna hit the barracks, right? He's concealed it. It's just he and his friend know about it — carefully concealed. Repeatedly rehearsed — he's gonna drive down the corniche a bunch of times. He knows where all the stoplights are. And then he's gonna have surprise ‘cause nobody knows he's coming. Speed, because he is gonna put the pedal to the metal. And then God knows he's got purpose because he's gonna blow himself up when he hits that barracks.

So at what point in time does the terrorist with a car bomb achieve relative superiority over the enemy? And the answer is: as soon as he decides to do this, because you really can't stop him at that point. I mean, yes, maybe the Marine at the guard post happens to be a sharpshooter and takes him out on the way in. But if he builds a bomb, puts it in a car and drives it into a building, it's really hard to stop. The reason it's important for us to understand these principles is if you said, ‘Okay, then what can I do to prevent that from happening?’ And the answer's pretty damn easy. You don't have one single checkpoint that's the only barrier between you and the Beirut barracks. And so when you think about the reverse of that, it's how do you build a plan as a special operator to do good things to bad people?

One of the key case studies in McRaven’s book was a daring and successful raid that Israeli commandos carried out in 1976. Palestinian and Marxist terrorists hijacked a plane with more than 200 passengers — many from Israel — and landed the plane at Entebbe airport in Uganda.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: Passengers are now sitting in a sweltering airport under the guns of some very dangerous Palestinian extremists.

William McRaven: And of course, immediately, the Israeli government realizes they've got to do something to try to rescue these Israeli hostages. And it's a long way from Israel into Uganda. And they come up with this incredibly bold plan, which is to fly a couple of C-130s, to land on the airfield there at Uganda. But once again, the deception piece is important.

The deception piece involved faking a visit from Uganda’s notorious dictator, Idi Amin. The terrorists were under his protection, and Amin showed up regularly where the hostages were being held.

William McRaven: Every time Idi Amin would come in to meet with the hostages and the hostage takers, he would come in a Mercedes-Benz with flags flying. And so the Israelis got a Mercedes that they put in the back of these C-130s and, so much like Otto Skorzeny's momentary deception to trick the Italians, this is exactly what the Israelis did.

The plan called for an initial team of commandos to load into two Land Rovers with the Mercedes out front. The Mercedes was painted to look just like Idi Amin’s and — in a nice touch — it flew the Ugandan flag. They hoped the ruse would confuse the terrorists just long enough to allow the commandos to quickly reach the building holding the hostages.

William McRaven: They had great intelligence. They had rehearsed this again and again and again, and they knew what they needed to do. Jonathan Netanyahu, who was leading the force at the time, was from all accounts, an incredible leader, incredibly brave.

Jonathan Netanyahu was the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s now the prime minister of Israel.

William McRaven: It was a hard mission, but it was simple from the standpoint of we're gonna fly from point A to point B; we're gonna land in C-130s, we're gonna drive off with a Mercedes up to the airport; we'll be followed by a convoy. That will be enough to get us in there. Then the commandos will immediately begin to clear the airfield, engage the tower, rescue the hostages. So all that goes essentially as planned, except unfortunately, Jonathan Netanyahu leads the force forward and gets hit by gunfire. He was the only one killed, only commando killed, during the operation. A couple of the hostages were inadvertently killed during the rescue, but most of them got out alive.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: Those first few minutes when the Israelis troops came in firing, did you realize what was happening?

ARCHIVALRescued hostage: I had no idea.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: Do you think it was the right decision, given the casualties that there were?

ARCHIVAL Rescued hostage: It was the only decision that was possible.

William McRaven: It's one of the great, hostage rescue missions in the history of commando operations.

Peter Bergen: In your book, you quote Jonathan Netanyahu: “I believe in getting down to the smallest details. Anyone who fails to do that and tries to spare himself the effort is doing a disservice to our goal, which is preparing the unit for war.” This seems to be a big theme in your thinking and your writing and your planning and the operations you've carried out.

William McRaven: It is. It was always instilled in me from the very start. I mean we all understand in the SEAL teams and across the special operations community that the little things matter. You have to get the details worked out. You can't just have some big picture and hope that guys are going to, you know, kind of ad lib the mission.

Peter Bergen: Developing a simple plan isn't necessarily a simple thing to do.

William McRaven: It's never simple. In my case, I learned when I was a young SEAL delivery vehicle pilot, they were wet submarines, submersibles. So you're in a scuba rig, in an environment where you're cold all the time. But in the planning of those missions, you had to be exact, so that every phase of the mission, that meant, ‘Okay, we're going to get in a bus and drive to the boat ramp.’ ‘Okay, do we have a driver for the bus? Does the bus have gasoline in it? Are the tires on the bus inflated properly?’ You know, all the sort of little things that every time you have a change in the event, it was a different plan. And in that you listed all the things you needed to be trained, all the things that could go right, all the things that could go wrong, the timeline. And when you begin to put all those phases together, you see very quickly that you really do have to put a lot of detailed effort into making it simple.

Peter Bergen: I saw in your recent book that there were 165 separate phases for the bin Laden raid.

William McRaven: Correct. And again, that gets back to everything from literally, okay, we gotta put the SEALs on a truck. We're gonna move them from where we were out to the airfield. Well, do we have enough drivers? Do we have enough fuel? Do we have enough trucks? You know, what about all their kit? Now you get there, now you gotta load guys on the helicopters. ‘Okay, who's marshaling? Who's mustering the guys? Who's checking them? Ok everybody's on the helicopters, everybody in the right seat.’ All these sorts of things you have to think about. And while the mission, you can frame it simply, the devil is clearly in the details.

And when you stand back from all of those devilish details, the simplicity of the overall plan to get bin Laden really comes into focus.

William McRaven: Early on, when it was really just me and one other guy kind of planning the mission, there were a number of options. You know, we could have parachuted in. We could have taken a vehicle in. We had a lot of different options. But the simplest option was the thing that we did every night, which was get on a helicopter, fly to the target, get the bad guy, get back on the helicopter and fly back.

Peter Bergen: In your book, Spec Ops, one of your conclusions, a key conclusion I think, was these raids really had to be no more than half an hour. Why did you come to that conclusion?

William McRaven: When I did the research, I actually did 10 different case studies. I only put eight of 'em in the book cuz I ran out of time. But in every one of those missions, about half an hour into the mission, the enemy begins to regroup. The enemy begins to figure out what's going on. They start to get their act together in about a half an hour, and then the tide turns very quickly.

McRaven put this insight into practice as he planned the bin Laden raid.

William McRaven: I kept saying this in the meetings with the president that, you know, ‘Sir, we'd get in, 30 minutes on the ground, we'd get out.’ And at one point in time, Secretary Gates comes up to me and goes, “Bill, you keep talking about 30 minutes. Why did you pick 30 minutes?” And frankly, at the time, I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd written some thesis back in 1991 and that was the conclusions of the thesis. I just told him, I said, “Well, sir, you know, half an hour on the ground, you know, by that time the Pakistanis will probably start to figure out what's going on. And so we need to get up and get outta there.” Of course, we ended up being on the ground about 43 minutes. And I was uncomfortable with, with us going the extra 13 minutes, but the ground force commander had told me that they found a lot of intelligence on the second floor, asked for permission to scoop up as much of that as they can. I mean, there were computers and hard drives and papers and they threw 'em all in a big garbage bag. But that took 'em a little while to gather all that up.

Peter Bergen: One of the principles from your case studies was repeated full rehearsals. So in the bin Laden raid, what did that look like?

William McRaven: Right after we assembled the SEALs and the helicopter pilots, we began rehearsals in an undisclosed location on the East Coast. And we spent a couple of days there. Just going through the motions on the target. The CIA had done a very nice job of building a mockup. Now, it was a mockup in terms of the dimensions of the compound. So they had a chain link fence that mirrored the dimensions of this kind of trapezoid-shaped compound. They'd stacked a bunch of mill vans on top of each other to give you the sense of the three story building and where the outer buildings were. So the guys could rehearse their movement on target. Helicopters could come in, guys could fast rope down, develop the execution checklist, et cetera.

And then we went out to another undisclosed location on the West Coast and we rehearsed again, and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. And then finally we had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen came out, along with a number of White House and military dignitaries to watch our full dress rehearsal, for the umpteenth time. This was kinda the final one, where once it was done, I could report back to the president that, yeah, I knew we could do the mission.

Peter Bergen: The bin Laden raid was also a decision made with incomplete information. It wasn't clear if bin Laden was or was not in that Abbottabad compound. What do you make of President Obama's decision to greenlight the operation?

William McRaven: I think it's one of the boldest decisions in modern presidential history. And to your point Peter, we just didn't know it was bin Laden. So when you think of everything the president had riding on this, certainly the lives of the SEALs and the helicopter pilots going in, the reputation of the United States, the relationship with Pakistan, all of those things, not even to mention his own political career.

The president had asked the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, Mike Leiter, to review, to Red Team CIA's intelligence. Well he said, ‘Look, we've looked at CIA's intelligence and we think the chance that it's bin Laden is anywhere between 60% and 40%.’ And when he said 40%, I thought, ‘Well, this mission's over.’ I mean, who's gonna authorize a bunch of Navy SEALs to fly 162 miles into, into Pakistan to a compound that's about three miles from their West Point, three miles from a major infantry battalion, a mile from a police station. And oh, by the way, the Pakistanis have nuclear weapons.

As Obama’s advisors debated go or no-go, there were two deeply experienced, skeptical voices in the room: Vice President Joe Biden, who became a senator when Obama was only 11 years old and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who’d worked in every presidential administration since Lyndon Johnson. Both men remembered well the deadly, failed rescue of American hostages in Iran in 1980.

ARCHIVAL1980s Newscaster: On 183rd day of captivity for the American hostages word from Iran that the bodies of the Americans who tried to free them will be flown home early next week.

At a staging area code-named Desert One, a helicopter crashed into a plane, killing eight American servicemen.The debacle came to define Jimmy Carter’s presidency… and may have helped to end it.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: To the families of those who died and who were wounded I want to express the sorrow that I feel personally for their sacrifice. It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. The responsibility is fully my own.

William McRaven: Secretary Gates had been around during the attempted rescue of hostages out of Iran. And that framed his thinking. Every time I was meeting with the president, at the end of the session in the Situation Room, the president would go around the table and say, ‘What are you thinking about the raid?’ People would give kind of thumbs up and thumbs down and Secretary Gates was never in favor of the raid. And finally, after the third meeting, I pulled him aside and I said, “Mr. Secretary, I work for you. If you don't want me to push this raid, just, just tell me, and I'll back off.”

And the reason I have such great respect for Bob Gates is he said, “No, Bill, he said the president needs to have all the options on the table, and I want you to give him your best military advice on how to do this.” He said, “Look, I had to live through the disaster at Desert One, and I've never quite gotten over that, but no, the president needs to have your best military advice, so you keep doing exactly what you're doing.” I thought that was incredibly classy on his part.

Peter Bergen: What was your last conversation with the president?

William McRaven: I think the last conversation I had with the president was, “Sir, I, I'm gonna deploy to Afghanistan.” That's where I commanded the mission from. “If you make the decision to go, great, I'll be there. I'll have the boys ready and if you make the decision not to go, you know, not a problem. We got a lot of bad guys in Afghanistan. We'll just kinda get back to work.” And, so that was a Wednesday. I got on a plane that evening, arrived in Afghanistan sometime on a Friday. And on a Friday I got a call from the director of CIA, Leon Panetta. And that's when he said, “Bill, the president's made the decision that the mission’s a go.” And I thought, ‘Wow, that's a very, very bold decision in light of the fact that we just didn't know whether it was bin Laden.’

Peter Bergen: And of course, famously at the beginning of the mission, a Black Hawk took a very hard landing.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The SEAL Team coming to kill Osama bin Laden was just seconds from fast roping to the ground, when one helicopter came down on bin Laden’s outer wall.

William McRaven: I was watching it on the big screen from my little command post. But I was also listening to the conversation between the pilots and I knew pretty quickly nobody was injured. But we had a backup plan, and we had plan A, plan B, plan C, and plan D. We had always taken into consideration the fact that a helicopter might get shot down. Didn't expect that it would go down because of this kind vortex that caused the helicopter to lose lift. But we had assumed that we might lose a helicopter, maybe two. So I had a backup helicopter, standing by not too far from the Abbottabad compound. And when the time was right, we just called that bird in to pick the guys up.

Peter Bergen: Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth,” which sounds a lot like an aphorism you quote a fair amount from the Prussian General von Moltke who said words to the effect that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy.

William McRaven: And I'm sure Moltke, you know, took it from somebody else. It’s an understanding that, look, the enemy gets a vote. And actually the quote that most people like in the book is the one — and I don't have the book in front of me — from Taylor Swift that says, just because you make a plan doesn't mean that's how it's gonna turn out.

Admiral McRaven made me realize there might be more Taylor Swift fans in the national security game than I thought, and I suspect they take their trivia seriously. So I'll just note that the precise quote, from an interview published in Rolling Stone, is, “Just because you make a good plan, doesn’t mean that's what's gonna happen.” And it’s a good point, whether you're talking about helicopter crashes or that time Kanye West interrupted your acceptance speech at the VMAs.

William McRaven: You better have a plan B, and probably a plan C and maybe even a plan D. And I'm always stunned at times when people don't have a plan B or they haven't really thought out plan B. They've said in their mind, they go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what'll happen if this doesn't work.’ But they haven't done the detailed planning to make it a true plan B. Plan B's gotta be just as rigorous as Plan A. Plan C may not have to be as rigorous as plan B, but you still better have thought it all the way through.

Peter Bergen: Did it ever come close to derailing the mission, the helicopter going down?

William McRaven: No. It did not. Even had it been a mass casualty — of course we were, we had prepared for a mass casualty — if a helicopter crashed I had a whole second team on the border in Afghanistan, in more Chinook helicopters, more MH47 helicopters. I had what we referred to it as the gorilla package. So it had a combat air patrol, it had a gunship, it had everything I needed to be able to secure the terrain and get the mass casualty folks outta there if that had occurred. When the helicopter went down, I knew pretty quickly that the guys were banged up, but nobody was seriously injured and now they were just gonna have to call an audible and move to plan B. So, no, there was never any thought of canceling the mission.

Peter Bergen: How did you learn that bin Laden was killed?

William McRaven: We had developed this little makeshift command center, on the border there, in Afghanistan. And so I am listening to the communications between the Ground Force commander and my command center, and as I recall, the ground force commander said, “For God and Country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” and Geronimo was the code word for bin Laden. It occurred to me, however, as I reported this to Director Panetta and the White House, that I didn't know whether bin Laden was dead or not. So I had to go back to the Ground Force commander because this was — contrary to some belief out there – this was not a kill-only mission. I had made it very clear that if bin Laden had his hands up and was clearly not a threat, then we had an obligation, by the Law of Armed Conflict, to take him prisoner and we had a plan for that. But I didn't know whether he'd been killed when the initial call came through. So I had to go back and say, “Is this, Geronimo, E.K.I.A? Question mark” Enemy killed in action? And of course came back immediately, “Yeah. Geronimo, E.K.I.A.”

McRaven led one of his generation's most successful military operations. He took down the enemy who started America's longest war. It's a moment that all but guarantees that he'll be remembered in national security circles for decades to come. But you could argue that he got quite a bit more famous the year he retired from the Navy, when he told a bunch of college students… to make their beds.

ARCHIVAL William McRaven: If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task. And another..and another…

This was a commencement speech that McRaven gave at the University of Texas, Austin, in 2014. It's been viewed more than 20 million times on YouTube.

William McRaven: I started drafting my comments on the speech, oh, a couple weeks ahead of time, but on Wednesday of the Saturday before I was scheduled to give it, It didn't work. A good speech has gotta have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's gotta have some lessons. And I went down to my wife, I was writing upstairs. I went down to my wife and I said, “Oh my gosh, this doesn't work. It's not a good speech.” And she said, “Well, why don't you write about something, you know?” And I thought, well there's a clever idea. I said, “Look, the only thing I know is how to be a Navy SEAL.” And I'd been one for 37 years and I just couldn't believe that the students would really want to know all about being a Navy SEAL. But she kind of helped me put it in context and, you know, Navy SEAL training is, basic training, is six months long, as I said at the beginning of the speech, you know it really is about life crammed into six months.

ARCHIVAL William McRaven: It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors, who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.

William McRaven: So, what I wanted the students to take away from the speech was that there are some simple things you can do in life, to be successful.

ARCHIVAL William McRaven: Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. if you can’t do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made. That you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. So if you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

For McRaven, the speech in Austin was a homecoming.

ARCHIVAL William McRaven: It's been almost 37 years to the day that I graduated from UT. I remember a lot of things about that day. I remember I had a throbbing headache from a party the night before. [CHEERING FROM THE CROWD] But of all the things I remember, I don't have a clue who the commencement speaker was. And I certainly don't remember anything they said. So acknowledging that fact, if I can't make this commencement speech memorable, I'll at least try to make it short. [LAUGHTER]

Peter Bergen: Some of our listeners might be surprised that you graduated with a degree in journalism. Was that useful to you in your career?

William McRaven: Oh, it was very useful. I mean, the fact of the matter is, whenever you're in a leadership position, you gotta be able to communicate your ideas, both in writing and in public speaking. And the school of journalism gave me both those skills.

After he retired from the Navy, the University of Texas gave McRaven an opportunity to make that homecoming permanent — asking the admiral to become Chancellor of the entire University of Texas system. The role came with new responsibilities… and new challenges. Like feeling compelled to speak up against the current Commander in Chief.

William McRaven: I happened to be going over one evening to give a speech to the school of journalism. It may have been the day of or the day after that, President Trump said that the press was the enemy of the American people. And that concerned me deeply. Look, I've been raked over the coals by the press a number of times, but the press is one of the single most important institutions we have in this country. And so I realized that this was not going to sit well with a lot of people, but I had to make the point that I thought then, and I think today, that that comment was the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime. When the President of the United States says that the press is the enemy — let that word sink in — the enemy of the American people. Well, I've fought the enemy of the American people, and it's not the American press. I thought it was important to, in my position as the chancellor where academic freedom of expression is important, that I had to call it out.

Peter Bergen: Are there dangers for senior flag officers like yourself taking partisan positions even in retirement?

William McRaven: I think it's fair criticism. A lot of my colleagues, a lot of my fellow admirals, when I took my stand, came out and said, “Hey, you shouldn't be saying that, you shouldn't speak up.” There's an unwritten rule that retired senior officers don't speak out against the President. And I think that is a good rule. I understand it. I still have to wake up and look myself in the mirror every morning. And I've gotta be you know at least true to myself. But I understand the criticism, and it is fair criticism. It's not something that I took lightly and nor should you ever take lightly as a retired senior officer.

Peter Bergen: Donald Trump, of course, is running again and is leading among Republicans. He could well become the next U.S. president. Was he a good Commander in Chief?

William McRaven: Well, I didn't serve under him when he was Commander in Chief. So I think I would leave that question to others. At the end of the day, we all serve, at the pleasure of the president. And as the Commander in Chief, if it's a legal and lawful order, we're obliged to follow it. And I'm okay with that. I am absolutely okay with that. If Donald Trump had given me any legal order, I would've saluted smartly and moved out.

As Chancellor of the University of Texas system McRaven was running a huge enterprise, with more than 100,000 employees and 240,000 students across Texas.

William McRaven: You know, I was used to running large organizations. When I got to the University of Texas system, it was very similar to U.S. Special Operations Command. From the standpoint that I had morning staff meetings with my staff, I routinely visited the troops, quote unquote, the students and the faculty. I had to go testify at the state capitol just as I did at Capitol Hill. I had to deal with the press, so it felt very comfortable in terms of decisions that had to be made. What was different, of course, was. I knew nothing about higher education or healthcare, ‘cause a large component of it was healthcare.

So like anything else, you have to learn the business of the business. So I would sit down with the former presidents of universities and who I had, two of 'em on my staff and have them explain to me, okay, you know, what does a chair do? What does a dean do? What does a provost do? Explain to me how tenure works. All these sorts of things. You have to understand how things work in order to make the best decisions. But until that happens, you rely on the people with experience and you know you try to lead with a little bit of swagger, but with a little bit of humility too.

That combination of swagger and humility is something McRaven has written about in this next act of his career — publishing books about leadership. But now the audience isn't just the special operations community but… anybody who needs to inspire the people they lead. His latest book is called Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership made Simple (But not Easy). And in case you're wondering about what that bullfrog thing is, I was too:

William McRaven: The title Bullfrog, is the title given to the longest serving Navy SEAL on active duty. So in 2011 I was named the Bullfrog. The funny thing about it is they give you this kind of, god awful, dime store trophy, it's these four pillars, and on the top of it is this big ugly toad. And I think there's a lot of value in that, and the value being, “Hey, look, big boy, just because you're the bullfrog, you know, doesn't mean you're any more important than anybody else in the SEAL community. Be a little humble about it.” But the point of the title, of course, is that after 37 years, you'll learn a little something about leadership. Leadership made simple but not easy comes from Carl von Clauswitz who said, “Everything in war is simple. It's just the simple things are difficult.” And so what I've tried to do in the book is pull certain maxims, certain quotes, certain sayings that I learned over my years in the Navy, show you how those can guide you through some difficult times in your leadership journey.

After Taylor Swift, of course, my second favorite quotation in the book comes from a 19th Century American theologian named Tryon Edwards.

ARCHIVAL William McRaven: [NARRATING] True humility is not an abject, groveling self-despising spirit. It is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us.

Peter Bergen: I thought that was very striking because in this book, you say, when you're in command, you actually have to command, you can't be frightened of command, and yet at the same time, you can't be a sort of pathological narcissist so I wanted you to just reflect on that a bit.

William McRaven: I think every really great leader has to have a bit of a swagger. I mean, you have to be confident in yourself. You have to be confident, because the men and women that you are leading want a confident leader. You're gonna have bad days. You know, things are not gonna go well. You've got a lot of things going on that can beat you down. But when you walk in front of the troops, you better have your shoulders back. Your eyes ought to be clear. Your head ought to be up. You better show them that you've got a plan for whatever problem we are in. But having said that, you also ought to be humble enough to recognize there's always somebody out there that is smarter than you are, that is stronger than you are, that is faster than you are, that is more righteous than you are. So be very, very careful about getting too full of yourself because hubris is what will sink most good leaders. And so, yes, you have to have a little swagger. But if I have to weigh it between swagger and humility, you better be humble at least 60% of the time.

Peter Bergen: As I get older, I've noticed that the person who thinks that they're the smartest person in the room… is generally not.

William McRaven: Well, I never had that problem, Peter. I never worried that I was the smartest person in the room. So it's easy to be humble.

###

If you’re interested in learning a bit more about the bin Laden raid, and in particular the detailed mock-up of the compound in Pakistan that McRaven mentioned as part of the painstaking preparation for that raid, check out our episode called “The CIA’s Secret Museum.” A model of the compound is one of the exhibits in that museum — which is not open to the public. But they gave us rare access so you could have a peek inside.

Admiral McRaven allowed an extra 13 minutes for the bin Laden raid, which means that, if the SEALs had started their raid at the top of this episode, they’d be flying home just… about… now. The intelligence community… and the United States should probably thank the admiral for sometimes being a little flexible about time.

If you’re interested in exploring some of the issues and stories discussed in this episode we recommend McRaven’s books Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare, Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations, and The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy). And finally Manhunt: The Hunt for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad by… me. The last three are available on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Erik German With help from Jamila Huxtable.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Laura Tillman, Luke Cregan, Holly DeMuth, and Sandy Melara.

Theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore, Jason Ross and Joe Killian.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Eliza Lambert is our Supervising Producer.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.

Our Production Manager is Herminio Ochoa.

Our Production Coordinator is Henry Koch.

And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.

Head of Audible Studios: Zola Mashariki

Chief Content Officer: Rachel Ghiazza

Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah

Special thanks to Marlon Calbi, Allison Weber, and Vanessa Harris

Copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC

Sound recording copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC