Inside the Situation Room with President Obama
(CBS News) In his account aired on "60 Minutes" about a momentous Sunday night on the first of May in the White House Situation Room, President Obama said, "...it was the longest 40 minutes of my life with the possible exception of when Sasha got meningitis when she was three months old, and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right. It was a very tense situation."
Mr. Obama and those watching the action unfold as the Navy SEALs began their attack on Osama bin Laden's compound were nervous. They didn't want another Blackhawk Down situation, the 1993 operation in which U.S. helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenades triggered by Somali militia in Mogadishu.
The odds that bin Laden was within the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, were not the best--pegged at 55 percent by the president.
"We could not say definitively that bin Laden was there. Had he not been there, then there would have been significant consequences," Mr. Obama said.
"Obviously, we're going into the sovereign territory of another country and landing helicopters and conducting a military operation. And so if it turns out that it's a wealthy prince from Dubai who's in this compound, and we've spent Special Forces in -- we've got problems. So there were risks involved geopolitically in making the decision."
"60 Minutes": Killing Bin Laden--The President's Story, Part 1
"60 Minutes": Killing Bin Laden--The President's Story, Part 2
"60 Minutes": Killing Bin Laden--The President's Story Part 3
Transcript: "60 Minutes": Killing Bin Laden--The President's Story
Mr. Obama said those in the Situation Room were able to monitor the situation in real time, and received reports back from Vice Adm. William McRaven, head of special forces operations, and CIA Director Leon Panetta. "There were big chunks of time in which all we were doing was just waiting," he said.
"We knew as events unfolded what was happening in and around the compound, but we could not get information clearly about what was happening inside the compound," Mr. Obama said. "We had a sense of when gunfire and explosions took place....and we also knew when one of the helicopters went down in a way that wasn't according to plan. And, as you might imagine that made us more tense."
The president told "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft that while the operation didn't go exactly as planned, "all the work that had been done anticipating what might go wrong made a huge difference."
It wasn't until the corpse of the Al Qaeda leader was safely across the Pakistan border and in Afghanistan that the tension eased.
"When they landed we had very strong confirmation at that point that it was him. Photographs had been taken. Facial analysis indicated that in fact it was him. We hadn't yet done DNA testing, but at that point we were 95 percent sure," Mr. Obama told Steve Kroft.
Ending the greatest manhunt in American history