The man who hunted Osama bin Laden
Hidden from read, standing simply outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst. Within the look for the world's most-wanted terrorist, there could are nobody additional necessary. His job for nearly a decade was finding the al-Qaida leader.
The analyst was the primary to place in writing last summer that the CIA may need a legitimate lead on finding bin Laden. He oversaw the gathering of clues that led the agency to a fortified compound in Abbott bad, Pakistan. His was among the foremost assured voices telling Obama that bin Laden was most likely behind those walls.
The CIA won't allow him to talk with reporters. However interviews with former and current U.S. intelligence officers reveal a story of quiet persistence and continuity that led to the best counterterrorism success within the history of the CIA. Nearly all the officers insisted on anonymity as a result of they weren't licensed to talk to reporters or as a result of the failed to wish their names linked to the bin laden operation.
The Associated Press has agreed to the CIA's request to not publish his full name and withhold sure biographical details in order that he wouldn't become a target for retribution.
Call him John, his middle name.
John was among the many people that poured into the CIA's Counterterrorism Centre once the Sept. 11 attacks, bringing recent eyes and energy to the fight.
He had been a standout within the agency's Russian and Balkan departments. When Vladimir Putin was coming back to power in Russia, for example, John pulled along details overlooked by others and wrote what some colleagues thought-about the definitive profile of Putin. He challenged a number of the agency's typical knowledge regarding Putin's KGB background and painted a far fuller portrait of the person who would come back to dominate Russian politics.
That ability to identify the importance of seemingly insignificant details, to weave disparate strands of data into a meaningful story, gave him a selected knack for searching terrorists.
"He might invariably offer you the broader implications of of these details we have a tendency to be amassing," said John McLaughlin, who as CIA deputy director was briefed frequently by John within the mornings once the 2001 attacks.
From 2003, when he joined the counterterrorism centre, through 2005, John was one among the driving forces behind the foremost successful string of counterterrorism captures within the fight against terrorism: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi bin Alshib, Hambali and Faraj al-Libi.
But there was no larger prize than finding bin Laden.
Bin Laden had slipped off from U.S. forces within the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in 2001, and also the CIA believed he had taken shelter within the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. In 2006, the agency mounted Operation Cannonball, a trial to ascertain bases within the tribal regions and realize bin Laden. Even with all its cash and resources, the CIA couldn't find its prime target.
By then, the agency was on its third director since Sept. 11, 2001. John had outlasted several of his direct supervisors who retired or went on to different jobs. The CIA does not wish to keep its individuals in one spot for too long. They become jaded. They begin missing things.
John did not wish to depart. He'd invariably been persistent. In college, he walked on to a Division I basketball team and hustled his means into a rotation filled with scholarship players.
The CIA offered to push him and move him away. John needed to stay the bin Laden file.
He examined and re-examined each facet of bin Laden's life. How did he live whereas hiding in Sudan? With whom did he surround himself whereas living in Kandahar, Afghanistan? What would a bin Laden hideout seem like today?
The CIA had a listing of potential leads, associates and members of the family who may need access to bin Laden.
"Just keep operating that list bit by bit," one senior intelligence official remembers John telling his team.
"He's there somewhere. We'll get there."
John rose through the ranks of the counterterrorism centre, however thanks to his nearly unmatched expertise; he invariably had influence beyond his title. One former boss confessed that he did not grasp precisely what John's position was.
"I knew he was the guy within the space I invariably listened to," the official said.
While he was shepherding the look for bin Laden, John conjointly was pushing to expand the Predator program, the agency's use of unmanned airplanes to launch missiles at terrorists. The CIA largely confined those strikes to targets along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. However in late 2007 and early 2008, John said the CIA required holding out those attacks deeper within Pakistan.
It was a risky move. Pakistan was a crucial however shaky ally. John's analysts saw a rise within the variety of Westerners coaching in Pakistani terrorist camps. John worried that those men would soon begin spotlight on U.S. soil.
"We've ought to act," John said, a former senior intelligence official remembers. "There's no explaining inaction."
John took the analysis to then CIA Director Michael Hayden, who agreed and took the advice to President George W. Bush. Within the last months of the Bush administration, the CIA began hanging deeper within Pakistan. Obama immediately adopted identical strategy and stepped up the pace. Recent attacks have killed al-Qaida's No. 3 official, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, and Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.
All the whereas, John's team was operating the list of bin Laden leads. In 2007, a feminine colleague whom the AP has conjointly agreed to not determine determined to zero in on a person called Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a nom de guerre. Different terrorists had identified al-Kuwaiti as a crucial courier for al-Qaida's higher echelon, and he or she believed that finding him may facilitate cause bin Laden.
"They had their teeth clenched on this and that they weren't reaching to leaving behind," McLaughlin said of John and his team. "This was an obsession."
It took 3 years, however in August 2010, al-Kuwaiti turned up on a National Security Agency wiretap. The feminine analyst, who had studied journalism at an enormous 10 university, tapped out a memo for John, "Closing in on Bin Laden Courier," saying her team believed al-Kuwaiti was somewhere on the outskirts of Islamabad.
As the CIA homed in on al-Kuwaiti, John's team frequently updated the memo with recent data.
Everyone knew that something with bin Laden's name on it'd shoot right to the director's desk and invite scrutiny that the early drafts played down hopes that the courier would cause bin Laden. However John saw the larger image. The look for al-Kuwaiti was effectively the look for bin Laden, and he wasn't afraid to mention thus.
The revised memo was finished in September 2010. John, by then deputy chief of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, emailed it to people who required grasping. The title was "Anatomy of a Lead."
As expected, the memo immediately became a hot topic within CIA headquarters and Director Leon Panetta needed to grasp additional. John never overpromised, colleagues recall, however he was unafraid to mention there was a decent probability this may well be the break the agency was craving for.
The CIA tracked al-Kuwaiti to a walled compound in Abbott bad. If bin Laden was hiding there, in a very busy suburb not removed from Pakistan's military academy, it challenged abundant of what the agency had assumed regarding his hideout.
But John said it wasn't that far-fetched. Drawing on what he knew regarding bin Laden's earlier hideouts, he said it created sense that bin Laden had surrounded himself solely along with his couriers and family and failed to use phones or the net. The CIA knew that prime al-Qaida operatives had lived in urban areas before.
A cautious Panetta took the knowledge to Obama, however there was way more work to be done.
The government tried everything to work out who was in that compound.
In a tiny house nearby, the CIA place people that would slot in and not draw any attention. They watched and waited however turned up nothing definitive. Satellites captured pictures of a tall man walking the grounds of the compound, however never got a glance at his face.
Again and once more, John and his team asked themselves who else may well be living in that compound. They came up with 5 or six alternatives; bin Laden was invariably the most effective clarification.
This went on for months. By regarding February, John told his bosses, as well as Panetta, that the CIA might keep making an attempt, however the knowledge was unlikely to urge any higher. He told Panetta this may well be their best probability to seek out bin Laden and it'd not last forever. Panetta created that very same purpose to the president
Panetta held regular conferences on the hunt, typically concluding with an around-the-table poll: How positive are you that this is often bin Laden?
John was invariably bullish, rating his confidence as high as eighty %.
Others weren't thus positive, particularly people who had been within the space for operations that went dangerous. Not 2 years earlier, the CIA thought it had an informant who could lead on him to bin Laden's deputy. That man blew himself up at a base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven CIA staff and injuring six others.
That didn't come back up within the conferences with Panetta, a senior intelligence official said. However everybody knew the danger the CIA was taking if it told the president that bin Laden was in Abbottabad and was wrong.
"We all knew that if he wasn't there and this was a disaster, actually there would be consequences," the official recalled.
John was among many CIA officers who repeatedly briefed Obama and others at the White House. Current and former officers concerned within the discussions said John had coolness and a reassuring confidence.
By April, the president had determined to send the Navy SEALs to assault the compound.
Though the arrange was in motion, John went back to his team, a senior intelligence official said.
"Right up to the last hour," he told them, "if we have a tendency to get any piece of data that implies it isn't him, someone needs to raise their hand before we have a tendency to risk yank lives."
Nobody did. Within the case space, the analyst who was barely known outside the close-knit intelligence world took his place alongside the nation's prime security officers, the household names and well-known faces of Washington.
An agonizing forty minutes once Navy SEALs stormed the compound, the report came back: Bin Laden was dead.
John and his team had guessed properly, taking an intellectual risk primarily based on incomplete data. it absolutely was a chance that ended a decade of disappointment. Later, Champagne was uncorked back at the CIA, where those within the Counterterrorism Centre who had targeted bin Laden for therefore long celebrated. John's team revelled within the moment.
Two days once bin Laden's death; John accompanied Panetta to Capitol Hill. The Senate Intelligence Committee needed a full briefing on the successful mission. At one purpose within the non-public session, Panetta turned to the person whose counterterrorism resume spanned four CIA administrators.
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