- [Kento] I'm Kento Bento!
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Guangdong, China, 2005.
It was late at night.
A factory manager made his way past the assembly line to the adjoining warehouse,
where a meeting was set to take place.
A group of men had already gathered.
He didn't know exactly who these men were,
but from his contact, he knew they were important people.
Not wasting any time, he presented to them what they asked for, a toy,
a toy that he and his colleagues had passionately been working on the past few months.
Upon inspection, the men seemed pleased with the product,
but in order to move to the next phase of operation,
final approval was needed from Langley.
You see, these men were from the CIA,
and this operation, if successful, could help put an end to one of the greatest conflicts in modern time.
But how?
What was this toy?
And who were they targeting?
This happened in 2005, but what led to this moment actually started four years earlier.
New York, September 11, 2001.
Two commercial planes crashed into the North and South Towers
of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.
A third plane took out the Pentagon
and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
These airliners, as we all know, were hijacked
in a set of coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United States.
About 3,000 people were killed and over 6,000 injured
in what was the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history.
The leader of al-Qaeda?
Osama bin Laden, already on the FBI's most wanted list
for the U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi.
The U.S., along with coalition forces, responded by launching the War on Terror,
invading Afghanistan in the hopes of eliminating al-Qaeda
and ousting the Taliban regime.
After months of fighting though, many of these fighters eventually escaped to neighboring Pakistan,
where they continued to launch offensives.
The war was far from over.
Fast forward to 2005.
After years of conflict and devastation, in order to build goodwill in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region,
the CIA started a program where gift items would be handed out to kids.
These items included pencils, notebooks, games, toys,
all in backpacks for easy distribution,
blue for boys, pink for girls.
And this seemed to be appreciated by many of the locals.
Now by this time, despite bin Laden being on the run for years,
intelligence agencies were no closer to finding him.
There were leads that went nowhere
and conflicting information on his whereabouts.
The FBI even had a $25 million bounty out leading to his capture or death,
which for the most part generated no actionable intel.
Bin Laden's survival and ability to evade capture likely emboldened al-Qaeda
and was a reminder to the people of the region of the group's enduring influence and power.
And so the CIA felt ultimately that they needed a different approach,
one unconventional and perhaps even unsettling to some.
What they had in mind though was well beyond their expertise
and so they decided to enlist help from an unexpected source.
This individual turned out to be Donald Levine,
one of the greatest minds in the toy industry,
a former business exec at Hasbro, where he was head of research and development.
Hasbro, an American multinational toy company, is the largest toy maker in the world,
responsible for such notable offerings as Mr. Potato Head,
Transformers, Monopoly, My Little Pony,
Power Rangers, Twister, and the iconic G.I. Joe.
This was Levine's greatest creation.
Now the CIA wanted him to create a new product,
a very special toy for what was to be a very special mission.
Hesitant at first, he eventually agreed.
But now the next step was to travel 13,000 kilometers to Guangdong, China.
For Levine, this was familiar territory, Guangdong.
For nearly 60 years, he had done business in the region,
amassing a vast network of contacts.
Most of Hasbro's toys were manufactured in East Asia.
Through this, the CIA now had the means to discreetly develop and manufacture their secret product,
which would've been extremely difficult to do in the U.S.
Chinese artists and designers were also enlisted to ensure the work's precision and accuracy.
A few months later, a factory manager, who had been involved with development,
met with operatives in a Guangdong warehouse.
He had in his possession the final product and presented it for inspection.
Now the men seemed pleased.
The toy was as they envisioned.
In front of them...
...lay Osama bin Laden in 12-inch form,
a custom-made terrorist action figure, with a twist.
You see, the plan was for the toys to be sent to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region,
cheaply packaged, and handed out to children.
The CIA, after all, had the perfect cover in place
with their preexisting goodwill project.
Now as pencils, notebooks, games and toys were all being placed in backpacks,
the seemingly innocuous bin Laden dolls would also be slipped in.
From there they would be given to unsuspecting children on a nationwide scale,
where after finding the toy, they would play with the toy,
and it would be all fun and games thereafter,
until their faces start melting off,
a demon face, red skin, green eyes, black markings.
This was no ordinary doll,
because this was a doll specifically designed to induce fear and anxiety.
The doll's face was painted with heat-sensitive material
that was intended to peel off after a prolonged period.
Now it wouldn't immediately be evident,
but the idea was that children and their parents would be seriously spooked
and coerced into seeing the actual bin Laden likewise as a monster,
dehumanizing him, dissuading the people from idolizing the terrorist leader and from joining radical groups.
The aim was to strategically turn public opinion against al Qaeda with playtime propaganda,
leading possibly, whether directly or indirectly,
to bin Laden's capture and al Qaeda's defeat.
This covert psychological operation was codenamed Devil Eyes,
and even though Donald Levine and various officials were ultimately pleased with the final product,
in order for them to get to launching the next phase of operation,
final approval was of course needed from Langley.
By now, for over half a decade,
the CIA had been using drones, satellites, spies, and tracking devices to combat al-Qaeda.
More recent interrogations of detainees and intercepted radio transmissions
were among seemingly credible leads that they felt kept them on bin Laden's tail,
so when a package arrived one morning at HQ
with a funny-looking toy bin Laden inside,
perhaps the legitimacy of Operation Devil Eyes,
pitched well over a year ago and under different management,
was now lost on them.
Perhaps they felt they had more actionable intel now
or they were worried about operational costs
or the political blowback,
or it just seemed a ridiculous plan in retrospect.
Heck, maybe they realized a young pro-Taliban Star Wars fan
would actually find bin Laden morphing into a jihadist Darth Maul super cool.
But whatever the reason, upon inspection of the toy
and reassessment of the operation,
and after all that work,
the CIA ultimately decided to shut it down.
There would be no mass production, no distribution,
and all trace of the operation in China wiped out.
And so it was.
Now despite what the CIA has since claimed,
some sources have said the factory in Guangdong actually went on to produce
a few hundred of the bin Laden figures as part of a mistaken pre-production run in 2006,
and was even shipped out on a freighter to the Pakistani city of Karachi.
If true, this would mean hundreds of toys are still out there today in circulation.
Officially though, according to the CIA,
there are only three currently in existence, claimed to be variant prototypes.
Two of them were actually discovered in a basement many years later by Neil Levine,
son of Donald Levine who had then since passed,
and subsequently auctioned off to anonymous buyers for hefty sums.
The third and final bin Laden doll though,
well, it remains fittingly in the possession of the CIA,
at the agency's headquarters at Langley.
Five years later, on May 2, 2011,
the CIA tracked an al Qaeda courier to a private residential compound
in the urban city of Abbottabad, Pakistan.
At 1:00 a.m. local time,
Operation Neptune Spear, a CIA-led operation along with Joint Special Operations Command,
was carried out by members of SEAL Team Six,
where, in a 40-minute raid consisting of 79 commandos and a dog,
Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, was finally found
(gun popping)
and killed.
The man who pulled the trigger was Senior Chief Petty Officer Robert O'Neill,
who had been involved in more than 400 missions in his lifetime,
including saving Captain Phillips from Somali pirates
and rescuing Lone Survivor Marcus Luttrell.
Taking down bin Laden was just the cherry on top of his incredible life story,
which you can hear all about by listening to his book for free, narrated by O'Neill himself,
on Audible,
because Audible is the best place to get audiobooks
and other spoken word entertainment.
There's not just O'Neill's book The Operator,
or the ones covering interesting secret CIA operations,
which I've been listening to myself,
but there are also great titles from many other genres,
including history, mystery, sci-fi, business, science, self-development and more.
I like Audible because you can essentially read a book no matter what you're doing,
washing the dishes, folding the laundry, taking the bus, or going for a run.
Right now there's a special Christmas offer for a limited time only,
where you can get three months of Audible for just $6.95 a month,
which is actually more than half off the regular price.
You can get this by going to audible.com/kentobento
or texting kentobento to 500-500.
Once you become a member, you can browse and listen to audiobooks on any device, anytime, anywhere,
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head over to audible.com/kentobento
or once again, text kentobento to 500-500.
Thanks for watching.