It was a $1 million complex, in an affluent neighborhood of mostly military retirees 35 miles north of Islamabad in Pakistan.
It was those sometimes controversial interrogations that first produced descriptions of members of bin Laden’s courier network, including one critical Middle Eastern courier who along with his brother was protecting bin Laden at his heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad on Sunday. Both the courier and his brother were among those killed, along with bin Laden, in the dramatic raid by U.S. special forces.
Half a world away in the White House Situation Room, the president and his war council crowded around a table covered with briefing papers and keyboards and watched nervously as video feeds streamed in. The special forces team needed a rescue chopper. Gunfire was blazing around them. No one wanted another "Black Hawk Down" debacle.
The officials would not allow their names to be used in discussing the sensitive intelligence and military details of an operation that began Friday morning at 8:20 a.m. ET. Obama, on his way to view tornado damage in Alabama, made the decision to send a small U.S. team in helicopters into the compound to go after bin Laden.
The extraordinary drama surrounding the killing of Bin Laden encompassed the White House, the CIA and other arms of America's vast national security apparatus. The tale is part detective story, part spy thriller. But the decade-old manhunt for the Al Qaeda leader ultimately came down to a three-story building on a dirt road in the Pakistani army town of Abbottabad, north of Islamabad.
The place had no phone or Internet service. The residents, who included the courier and his brother and their families, burned their garbage instead of putting out for collection like everyone else.
It has 18-foot walls, two security gates, and no exterior windows. On a third-floor balcony, there were 7-foot high privacy walls.
As reports flowed into the White House, the commando team methodically swept through the compound. Bin Laden and his family lived on the second and third floors of the largest structure, U.S. intelligence indicated. Officials said that when the commandos found him there, he was armed and "resisted." They shot him in the head and chest.
They sent in a small team — they did not say who made up the team or how many members it had — in helicopters. A firefight ensued when bin Laden resisted and he, the couriers and several others were killed, possibly including bin Laden's son.
In the course of events, one of the helicopters went down because of mechanical trouble. Those aboard it were able to destroy it and get away with their fellow team members.
In addition, the raiding party took "a large volume of information" from the compound, a U.S. official said, "so large that the CIA is standing up a task force" to examine it for clues. The material, which includes digital and paper files, could be a treasure trove of new intelligence about Al Qaeda, the official said. Among other things, officials hope the information will lead them to Al Qaeda's other leaders.
They left behind the bodies of four other people killed in the raid — a courier they had been tracking for years, his brother, one of Bin Laden's sons and an unidentified woman.
The U.S. government doesn't officially acknowled the existence of SEAL Team 6, but it is well-known as an elite team designed specifically for counterterrorism missions. The team is trained to conduct lightning strikes under a variety of conditions.
Find the courier, the thinking went, and they'd ultimately find Bin Laden.
Interrogators at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay were pushed to ask Al Qaeda suspects in custody about possible couriers. The information came in pieces, a U.S. official said, and it took years.
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