'We got him'

How painstaking intelligence work — and high-stakes decisions — finally ended the hunt for Osama bin Laden

FOR YEARS, THE agonizing search for Osama bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the Central Intelligence Agency drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s license plate. The man in the car was bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and over the next month CIA operatives would track him throughout central Pakistan. Ultimately, he led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles from the Pakistani capital.

On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound, officials said. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation. Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy SEALs snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial-recognition program.

And just like that, history’s most expansive, expensive, and exasperating manhunt was over.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the Situation Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it unfolded. Much of the time was spent in silence. Obama looked “stone-faced,” one aide said. Vice President Joe Biden fingered his rosary beads. “The minutes passed like days,” recalled John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief.

The code name for bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched Leon Panetta, the CIA director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan.

“They’ve reached the target,” he said. Minutes passed.

“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.

A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.” Enemy Killed in Action. There was silence in the Situation Room.

Finally, the president spoke up.

“We got him.”

The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, including the interrogation of CIA detainees in secret prisons in eastern Europe, where sometimes what was not said was as useful as what was. Intelligence agencies eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mails of the courier’s Arab family in a Persian Gulf state and pored over satellite images of the compound in Abbottabad.

Last July, Pakistani agents working for the CIA spotted the courier again, driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, American intelligence operatives felt they were on to something big, perhaps even bin Laden himself. It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding place. Rather, it was a three-story house ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and protected by two security fences. He was, said Brennan, the White House official, “hiding in plain sight.”

Back in Washington, Panetta met with Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Panetta spoke at length about bin Laden and his presumed hiding place.

“It was electric,” said an administration official who’d attended the meeting. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.”