How Accurate is the Movie "Zero Dark Thirty?"

I saw "Zero Dark Thirty" Wednesday night with Visalia Times-Delta Entertainment Editor James Ward.  You can see his review of the film here.  He asked me along to look into the movie's historical accuracy.  When investigating a movie like “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicts secret operations like the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the mission that killed him, there are unavoidable problems from the historian’s point of view.  There are some sources, but not a great many, and not from many different perspectives.  The official records remain classified.  Also, personal and political controversies still swirl around some facets of the events, especially including the means by which information may have been gathered to piece together the master terrorist’s whereabouts.

The film moves like a story within a documentary.  Director Kathryn Bigelow measures time for the viewer by making references to world events, especially to some of the al-Qaeda terrorist operations that took place between the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 and the killing of bin Laden on May 1, 2011.  These are all historically accurate in the dates and in the characterizations of what took place.  In the movie these include the al-Khobar massacre of 22 victims on May 29, 2004, the London bus and subway bombings that killed 52 on July 7, 2005, the truck bombing of the Islamabad, Pakistan Marriott Hotel that killed 54 on September 20, 2008, the suicide bombing that took eight CIA personnel at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan on December 30, 2009, and the attempted car bombing of Times Square, New York on May 1, 2010.       

The culminating raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, is rendered with exacting detail and remarkable faithfulness to the accounts we have.  “Zero Dark Thirty” portrays the raid in real time, taking precisely eighteen minutes from helicopter touchdown to the shots that felled the al-Qaeda chief.  The sequence correctly shows the SEALS and their actions in bringing down first bin-Laden’s principal courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, Kuwaiti’s brother Abrar, Abrar’s wife Bushra, one of Bin Laden's sons, Khalid, and finally Osama bin Laden himself, in addition to wounding one of bin Laden’s wives, Amal al-Fatah. 

There are a few inaccuracies in the raid depiction.  In the real raid, after killing bin Laden the SEALS had twenty minutes to gather intelligence.  The movie gave them four.  The SEALS brought a Belgian Malamois dog named Cairo along to sniff for explosives; he was portrayed as a German shepherd in the film.  A fluent Pashto-speaking operative was part of the mission in case they needed to speak to the local Pakistanis.  The movie shows many locals approaching the compound during the raid, and the operative having to threaten to have the SEALS shoot them if they did not leave.  In reality, he wore a Pakistani Army cap, only a few neighbors came by to see what was going on, and he easily got them to leave by telling them a security operation was underway and to go home and turn off their lights.          

Certainly the most controversial part of “Zero Dark Thirty” is its depiction of the use of torture to get information from detainees at secret CIA sites, and the importance of that torture in obtaining the crucial information that enabled the movie’s agent Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, to locate bin Laden’s courier and have him tailed to his master’s hideout.  Most sources that have come out so far take issue with that view, though not all. 

Former CIA chief supervisor of interrogations Jose Rodriguez says, “No one was bloodied or beaten in the enhanced interrogation program which I supervised from 2002 to 2007,” and that “written authorization from Washington” was needed even to give a prisoner a slap across the face.  He says they did use sleep deprivation or “in rare cases, waterboarding,” which was discontinued in 2003.  Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, along with Leon Panetta, CIA Director from February 2009 to June 2011, strongly maintain that no information useful to the bin Laden operation was obtained by the enhanced techniques, including the identity of the courier. 

In opposition to that, former Bush Administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey has claimed that the waterboarding of al-Kaeda’s number three leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, (captured in 2003) provided information “that led to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.”  He says this even though it wasn't found until seven years later.

The historian has to take special care to reserve judgment in the case of sources who may be trying to justify controversial political positions in their recounting of events.  Though the preponderance of those who have spoken so far tends to discredit the torture depictions of the film, the definitive verdict may have to await the declassification of the relevant documents.  That, of course, might not be for several years.