Who was who in the hunt for bin Laden

Nada Bakos
(Image credit: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for HBO)

With the great new HBO documentary about the search by CIA analysts and officers for Osama bin Laden about to premiere, I thought it might be useful to put together a small cheat sheet for those keeping score. In a short period of time, a lot of the major actors in this historical narrative have either been outed by the press or chose to disclose information about themselves. Six months ago, America speculated about the inspiration for Mark Boal and Katherine Bigelow's main character in Zero Dark Thirty.

At the time, I assumed that "she" would never be identified, and that she had always been a composite. I was wrong and right; For all intents and purposes, most of the "sisterhood" of officers and analysts who followed the trail are now known. Even the senior CIA officer who ran the classified GREYSTONE program, which used rendition, interrogation, and detention to try to exploit intelligence from high-value al Qaeda detainees, has gone public, as has his boss, the head of the counter-terrorism center at the CTC, as has his boss, the head of the National Clandestine Service.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.