Navy SEAL who killed Bin Laden admits to secret part of mission 'President Obama didn’t know about'
A 'one-way mission' to kill Osama Bin Laden changed completely when Navy SEALs were shown something that dramatically increased their chances of coming home.
It's been 15 years since the terrorist leader was killed by the US military and it turns out that the mission was so secretive that there were some elements that even Barack Obama didn't know about.
Obama was president at the time of the terrorist's death in May 2011 and delivered the famous speech to the American people to confirm that the Al-Qaeda founder had finally been found and killed.
The 9/11 attacks were a transformative moment in US history and they were also the main motivation for former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill to sign up for what he thought he assumed would be a suicide mission to find and kill Bin Laden, no matter what the cost.
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His life would change forever when he fired the shots which killed the terrorist leader and he's now spoken to LADbible, via The Operators Collective, about Operation Neptune Spear, the secret mission which saw the US finally succeed after years of searching.
Things remained very secretive at first for O'Neill and the other Navy SEALs, who were simply told to go home to spend time with their families before a dangerous mission.
O'Neill said: "Our boss got a message that a few of the guys were being recalled back to Virginia Beach, which means you're going home. There's something coming up. It turned out to be some of the team leaders, guys in charge of the interior leadership of the squadron. And they brought us into a room at first and they were adamant about this is not a drill. You're definitely going.
“They broke it down to ‘we found a thing in a house and this house is in a bowl in a mountain range and you guys are going to fly to it and you're going to get it and you're going to bring this thing back to us and show it to us’. And that was that was pretty much the extent of the brief."
After conversations with the vice president and other high ranking officials, it quickly became clear that this was going to be a huge mission, but O'Neill and the other men didn't feel confident about their chances of getting back to America, even after coming up with a 'perfect plan'.
However, things changed for the better when the SEALs were introduced to a piece of technology that would massively boost their chances, and was so secretive that even the man in charge of the country allegedly had no idea about.
O'Neill added: “We came up with the perfect plan. We flew out west out near Nevada and they had some helicopters out there that even President Obama didn't know about, which made us feel a little bit better because we were having conversations every night knowing this is a one-way mission.
"But when we saw these helicopters, we knew our chances of survival had increased, since we’re going to war on f**king transformers.”
Eventually, after breaking into Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the SEALs succeeded in their mission to kill the jihadist, stuffing him in a body bag and jumping on a helicopter across the border to Afghanistan.
O'Neill had already said his 'final goodbye' to his three young daughters but counted down the minutes on the flight as he suddenly considered the prospect of returning home to his family.
Once they landed in Afghanistan, Bin Laden's identity was officially confirmed and Obama was able to share the news with the world, with O'Neill's identity also quickly becoming public.
He added: "As soon as Bin Laden was dead, the first question of every Navy SEAL in the house who didn’t see it happen was, ‘who got him?’ My name got out quickly and it started to get a little weird. A lot of these guys want to be silent professionals. They don’t want to be doing shows in front of Congress people and high-ranking officers. I wanted to retire after 30 years without anyone knowing my name but that wasn’t the plan God had in store for me.”
Topics: Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama
James Moorhouse