How Accurate is Zero Dark Thirty?

Hollywood, the CIA, and crafting narratives

I’m trying something a little different this week. On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed by American special forces operating under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Later that same night, President Barack Obama delivered a speech to the nation outlining the events of the daring raid that had taken place. It sounded like something out of a movie. In fact, it was adapted into a movie at record speeds in the form of Zero Dark Thirty that was released the very next year in 2012. Zero Dark Thirty was directed by Academy Award winning director Kathryn Bigelow and featured a cast that included Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Kyle Chandler, James Gandolfini, Mark Strong, and many others. It received critical acclaim and was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. In short, it was a huge success that essentially solidified the story of how bin Laden was killed in the collective consciousness of the general public. But how accurate was it? How many artistic liberties did it take? Were there any insidious motives behind the making of the film? It’ll be a long time before many of the documents pertaining to the actual operation are declassified, but I’m going to do my best to sift through the information that is available and hopefully come to as close to the true story as possible.

To start, let’s run through the plot of the film itself. Spoilers ahead, but I think we all know how this one ends. The film opens on a black screen as real audio from 9-1-1 calls from September 11, 2001 are played. It then cuts to a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black site in Pakistan two years later where a detainee named Ammar (implied to be Ammar al-Baluchi, the nephew of al-Qaeda’s former Head of Propaganda Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) is being tortured in order to obtain information about Osama bin Laden. Present for the torture is a CIA intelligence analyst named Maya (Jessica Chastain) who serve as the protagonist for the film.

In 2004, Ammar gives up the name of an individual believed to be bin Laden’s most trusted courier between himself and al-Qaeda operative Abu Faraj al-Libbi. This courier goes by Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and he becomes the primary target of Maya’s investigation. Another detainee interrogated at an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) black site in Pakistan confirms that Abu Ahmed is indeed bin Laden’s most trusted courier. The ISI is essentially Pakistan’s CIA. Abu Faraj al-Libbi himself is captured by the ISI in 2005 and tortured at a CIA black site, but he denies knowing Abu Ahmed. Rather than dissuade Maya, this instead convinces her of Abu Ahmed’s importance that Faraj would deny knowing him after previous accounts established that he does.

In 2009, a Jordanian doctor believed to have been in contact with al-Qaeda’s top leadership makes contact with the CIA about claiming a $25 million reward in exchange for bin Laden’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a ruse, and he kills multiple CIA operatives in a suicide bombing at Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan.

In 2010, Maya is pressured by her superiors to stop focusing on bin Laden and worry more about stopping active terrorist plots. Maya insists that Osama bin Laden is personally ordering al-Qaeda attacks on American soil, and she says the terrorist organization would be more concerned with overseas targets if not for him.

Abu Ahmed is eventually located by tracking calls he makes to his mother. His vehicle is then tracked to a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan located less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy (described in the film as Pakistan’s West Point). Maya believes Osama bin Laden is living at this compound.

A special forces operation is put together to assault the compound and kill bin Laden. It is determined that this operation will need to be conducted without Pakistan’s knowledge. Two experimental stealth helicopters are used to land inside the compound carrying the JSOC operatives. One of the helicopters crashes, but there are no serious injuries. The operatives engage in a firefight with armed individuals within the compound. All of these individuals are killed including Osama bin Laden himself. The operatives abscond with his body as well as a treasure trove of documents and hard drives. Maya confirms the body is indeed bin Laden, and she boards a transport plane to return to the United States.

That’s the film in a nutshell, so how accurate is it? It mostly adheres to the official story put forward by the United States government, but there are some differences. For starters, Maya is not a real person. She is described by the filmmakers as a composite of several different real life figures in order to have a single protagonist for audiences to more easily follow the story. Fair enough. That’s a mostly harmless change. The next change is a much bigger deal. The film tells us that torturing detainees was needed in order to learn of the courier that would ultimately lead to the killing of bin Laden. In other words, torture works. I have a huge problem with this choice. A report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 concluded that torture did not actually produce any actionable intelligence. That includes the name of bin Laden’s courier. The report found that this information without the use of torture.

So why was it portrayed so differently in the film? That’s because the CIA worked directly with the filmmakers to make sure the illegal use of torture by the agency was portrayed as being both effective and necessary. Just a few weeks after bin Laden’s death, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta (played by James Gandolfini in the film) allowed screenwriter Mike Boal to attend classified ceremonies celebrating those involved in the operation that led to bin Laden’s death. In return, the CIA was granted access to Boal’s script in order to make “corrections” to it. It isn’t difficult to imagine why the CIA would want to push a narrative that illegal torture techniques yielded positive results.

Those are the key issues when comparing the events of the film to the official narrative presented by the government, but is the official narrative even accurate? Not according to renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. According to Hersh’s book The Killing of Osama bin Laden, much of the official narrative is false. According to Hersh, the story of tracking bin Laden through his courier is fictional. What yielded the location of bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound was actually a retired member of the ISI who walked into the United States Embassy in August 2010 and provided the information in exchange for the $25 million reward that was being offered for information on bin Laden at the time. Per Hersh’s sources, bin Laden had been in Hindu Kush mountains from 2001-2006 until the ISI paid local tribal leaders to give him up. The ISI took bin Laden and his wives and children into custody and placed him in the Abbottabad compound as a prisoner. Pakistan apparently let the Saudis know they had bin Laden in custody in order to charge them for his upkeep (read: blackmail to prevent him from telling the Americans what kind of funding al-Qaeda had received from elements of the Saudi government).

Once the Americans learned of bin Laden’s whereabouts, they began negotiating with the Pakistanis on what to do with him. Contrary to the official narrative, both of Pakistan’s top two military leaders (General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani of the army and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha of the ISI) were aware of the planned operation and assured the Americans that they would be allowed to operate within Pakistan’s borders without interference. Also at odds with the official narrative was that bin Laden and his family had no contact with the outside world. There were no couriers. He was a prisoner and an invalid. He had not been directing any operations since his capture in 2006.

When it comes to the operation itself, there was no firefight. There were no armed guards or heavy weapons within the compound. It was just bin Laden and his wives and children. One of the helicopters did crash, but none of the operatives were ever in any real danger. There was also no treasure trove of documents and hard drives since bin Laden was only a prisoner at this point in his life.

One of the most fascinating details from Hersh’s book is that the Americans and Pakistanis had apparently agreed to tell a completely different story to the world about what had happened to bin Laden. The plan was to wait a week after the operation was completed, and then Obama would announce to the world that he had been killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan. Pakistan did not want the world to know that they had custody of bin Laden out of fear that groups sympathetic to bin Laden (like the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP for short) would seek retribution. Saying he had been killed in Afghanistan would allow them to save face. Instead, the decision was made shortly after the operation to tell the world about the raid (with some major embellishments).

That’s Hersh’s reporting on what happened. It’s obviously significantly different from what we were told and what Zero Dark Thirty portrayed. As mentioned previously, it will be many years before documents pertaining to the operation are finally declassified. I tend to believe Hersh’s account based on his impressive body of work as an investigative journalist, but it’s up to each individual to decide for themselves which account they believe. More importantly, I think it’s vital that people remember that movies aren’t historical documents. They’re sources of entertainment, and at times they are sources of propaganda. Just something to keep in mind next time you watch a film claiming to be based on true events.

If you’d like to learn more about American foreign policy in Afghanistan, I recommend the excellent Blowback podcast.

If you’re looking for excellent foreign policy journalism from a fellow comic book nerd, then I urge you to check out Forever Wars from Spencer Ackerman.

If you’d like to stay up to date on extreme Salafist movements both past and present, then I suggest subscribing to Rob Ashlar’s excellent Substack.

Lastly, the legendary Seymour Hersh also has a Substack where he posts his latest stories.