* Luxury compound was only 60 miles from Pakistan capital Islamabad
* Terrorist refused to surrender and was eventually shot in the eye
* CIA analysts spent months looking at satellite trying to work out what was inside
With heavy cloud rolling in over the town of Abbottabad, conditions were perfect for the raid to take out Osama Bin Laden after ten years on the run. The previous night, the operation had been cancelled because the weather was clear and the U.S. aircraft would have been spotted from a distance.
But at 1am yesterday – 9pm on Sunday UK time – the sleeping citizens were awoken by the clatter of four military helicopters thought to be two Black Hawks and two Chinooks.
They contained more than 100 elite commandos who had been training intensively for days at their airbase, Bagram in Afghanistan, using a detailed mock-up of Bin Laden’s hideaway constructed by the CIA. After dummy runs on April 7 and April 13, they flew to the Tarbela Ghazi airbase in north-west Pakistan, which the CIA has permission to use.
Wanted man: Nearly 10 years after the 9/11 atrocities, a carefully planned U.S. operation led to Osama bin Laden being shot dead in Pakistan
From there they swooped into Abbottabad – named after British Major James Abbott, who founded it in 1853 – skimming over the tops of houses in the darkness with their lights off.
As soon as they realised what was happening, Bin Laden’s guards opened fire from the rooftop with rocket-propelled grenades and apparently managed to shoot down one of the Black Hawks.
A White House official said it was a heart-stopping moment for Barack Obama, echoing the disastrous ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia in 1993 which left 18 US servicemen dead.
This time, the crew escaped unhurt and the team went ahead with the raid ‘even though they didn’t know if they would have a ride home at the end’, said the official.
As terrified townsfolk emerged from their homes to see what was going on, Pashto-speaking CIA agents told them to go back in and shut the doors.
Two dozen U.S. Navy Seals – special forces – wearing night-vision goggles dropped into the high-walled compound by sliding down ropes from Chinooks.
They stormed inside to secure the terror chief’s hideaway room by room, with head cameras relaying the action to the President and the director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who was overseeing the operation at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Following the shootout with Bin Laden, his body was carried out and taken away in one of the helicopters. Three men, including one of his sons, and a woman, who tried to act as a human shield to save him, were also killed.
Other unidentified males who survived were flown from the scene, while four children and two women, including Bin Laden’s daughter Safia, were taken away in an ambulance. It is believed his youngest wife Amal al-Sadah was also taken into custody.
After the raid, blood covered the floor of one room inside the sprawling house. In another room that held a small kitchenette, broken computers could be seen – minus their hard drives.
U.S. officials said the commandos had spent most of their 40 minutes on the ground scouring the compound for further intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives. They suffered not a single casualty.
The story behind the raid begins four years ago, when prisoners being interrogated under torture at Guantanamo Bay betrayed the ‘nom de guerre’ of a courier used by Bin Laden. Fat and heavily bearded, he was said to be a protege of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and one of the few men on the planet whom Bin Laden genuinely trusted.
To the terror chief who had dared not use a phone in seven years, his couriers were the only means of communicating with the outside world and especially the remote training camps where the next generation of Al Qaeda terrorists were being groomed.
It took a further two long years before the CIA identified the man’s real name and learned the area where he operated. In August last year they finally traced him and his brother, another courier, to the house in Abbottabad.
The former home of the Gurkhas, the town is ringed by hills and boasts a pleasant climate that makes it a bustling hub for tourists visiting the region
CIA analysts pored over satellite images of the sprawling three-storey compound for months to try to determine who was inside.
Although valued at $1million – a vast sum for two Pashto brothers with no obvious sources of income – the house did not have a telephone or an internet connection.
Built around five years ago at the end of a narrow, dirt road, its security measures included a 12ft outer wall topped with barbed wire, and internal walls sectioning off different parts of the compound. Two security gates restricted access, and few windows faced the outside world. It was also noticed that the inhabitants burned their rubbish rather than putting it outside for collection.
It rapidly became clear to intelligence agents that they could be looking at the bolt-hole of a senior Al Qaeda operative.
A 7ft wall on the third floor of the terrace aroused further suspicion as they believed it was built so high to allow a tall man to walk outside without being seen. Bin Laden was between 6ft 4in and 6ft 6in. There was another tantalising clue, the house being known locally as Waziristan Mansion – a reference to the mountainous tribal region which until now most observers believed to be the hiding place for Bin Laden.
By September, CIA experts decided there was a ‘strong possibility’ that he was holed up in the compound, and by February this year U.S. intelligence officials were confident it was the home of Bin Laden and his family.
But ten years of doomed bids to capture the Al Qaeda leader haunted the operation. Countless searches in the mountains and caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan had come to nothing, with the vast American military and CIA risking becoming a laughing stock for their failure to catch one frail old man with kidney problems.
And serious doubts remained. Would the world’s most wanted man really choose to hide out in the heart of an army garrison town which is home to 400,000 people, and just half a mile from the Kakul Military Academy described as Pakistan’s equivalent of Sandhurst?
The nation’s most senior army chiefs would virtually pass his door to attend events there, and the town is home to many retired members of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services – supposedly the West’s allies in the hunt for Bin Laden.
On the other hand, several other Al Qaeda leaders had recently been found hiding in similarly built-up areas, in the Pakistani cities of Quetta, Karachi, Faisalabad and Rawalpindi.
There were two clinchers for the Americans, who by now had the Abbottabad compound under full-scale satellite and spy-plane surveillance, not to mention by CIA agents of Pakistani descent who had installed themselves in farm buildings in close proximity. They had even managed to smuggle a camera into the compound itself.
The CIA learned too that there was another family living with the couriers, and that the composition of this family matched Bin Laden’s.
The first solid evidence that the Al Qaeda leader was actually there came in the form of a recording of him speaking, picked up on a CIA microphone. The snippet was analysed and it matched previous recordings of his voice.
Then came a photograph taken of him inside the compound, an image so significant it was rushed straight to Barack Obama. On March 14, the President held the first of five top-secret meetings with his security advisers to discuss a raid.
Initially, he considered obliterating the compound with two B2 stealth bombers dropping more than a dozen 2,000lb devices. But when he was told the building would be reduced to rubble, he decided not to order the mission because he wanted to have Bin Laden’s body – and DNA samples – as firm proof that he was dead.
It is also likely a bombing raid would have killed all 22 people living there, including women and children, plus innocent neighbours in the built-up area.
The far more daring operation was given the go-ahead last Friday morning, as the world’s attention was on the Royal Wedding in London, and Bin Laden’s fate was finally sealed.
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