Did Christiane Amanpour know where bin Laden was hiding?
The widely respected TV journalist suggested in 2008 that the al Qaeda leader was in a villa in Pakistan — not a remote mountaintop cave

A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Thank you for signing up to TheWeek. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
The video: Not everyone was surprised when Osama bin Laden was finally tracked down in a suburban hideout near Islamabad, instead of a mountaintop cave in the remote Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. In October 2008, Christiane Amanpour, then the chief international correspondent for CNN, correctly predicted bin Laden's whereabouts, as revealed in a newly unearthed conversation on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. "I just talked to somebody very knowledgeable," Amanpour told Maher, actor Alec Baldwin, and comedian Garry Shandling. "This woman who is in American intelligence thinks that he's in a villa — a nice comfortable villa in Pakistan." (Watch the clip below.) Maher jokingly asked if the villa was in Cabo, and Amanpour replied, emphatically, that bin Laden was "in Pakistan. Not a cave." Before Amanpour could say more, the conversation moved on to a topic that apparently offered more opportunities for political punchlines — Sarah Palin.
The reaction: Maybe our spies really did connect the dots two years ago, says Nick Carbone at TIME. Amanpour certainly sounds confident that bin Laden wasn't roughing it. "We wanted to envision a frail and gray Osama holed up in a cave," but maybe it should have been obvious all along "that a terrorist mastermind wouldn't settle for the life of a caveman." It's frustrating to watch this clip now, says Sarah Anne Hughes at The Washington Post. Amanpour seemed to have more specifics that she couldn't get out because Shandling and Maher kept interrupting. "Thanks a lot, Garry and Bill, for totally ruining our chances of finding out anything more." Take a look at the exchange:
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
Sign up to our 10 Things You Need to Know Today newsletter
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
-
Should you fire your financial adviser? 4 signs it's time to say goodbye.
The Explainer Breakups are never fun, but you have to protect your wallet
By Becca Stanek Published
-
The daily gossip: Man arrested in connection with shooting of Tupac Shakur, an OceanGate movie is in the works, and more
Feature The daily gossip: September 29, 2023
By Brendan Morrow Published
-
What to expect from an El Niño winter
The Explainer Things might be different thanks to this well-known weather phenomenon
By Devika Rao Published