Central Intelligence Agency’s Gary Schroen, who had led an operation to hunt Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan following the 9/11 terror attacks, has said that he was ordered to “cut off the killed Al Qaeda chief’s head”.
On October 7, 2001, the US military began bombing targets in Afghanistan in retaliation for the September 11 attacks.
By the time bombing started, Schroen said he had been on the ground for nearly two weeks, and remembered how “everybody in the United States wanted to be the first person to go after bin Laden and get this hunt going, and they had given me that role.” Schroen, who had spent 32 years as a covert operator, was to lead a small team of Americans, after the CIA’s chief of counterterrorism gave him explicit orders to kill, CBS News reports. “I want you to cut bin Laden’s head off, put it on dry ice and send it back to me so I can show the president,” Schroen said, remembering the order.
On being asked if his boss was serious, Schroen said, “Yeah, I think so.”
He also said that the CIA and military now work closely together in operations like the bin Laden raid, which wasn’t like that at the beginning.
Bin Laden was finally killed in May this year in his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan.