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Osama bin Laden, the founder and first leader of the Islamist militant group, al-Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan on May 2, , shortly after &#;a.m. PKT^[1][2] ( UTC, May 1) by United States Navy SEALs of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group (also known as DEVGRU or SEAL Team Six).^[3] The operation, code-namedOperation Neptune Spear, was carried out in a CIA-led operation with Joint Special Operations Command, commonly known as JSOC, coordinating the Special Mission Units involved in the raid. In addition to SEAL Team Six, participating units under JSOC included the th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne)—also known as "Night Stalkers"—and operators from the CIA's Special Activities Division, which recruits heavily from former JSOC Special Mission Units.^[4][5] The operation ended a nearly year search for bin Laden, following his role in the September 11 attacks on the United States.

The raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was launched from Afghanistan.^[6] U.S. military officials said that after the raid U.S. forces took the body of bin Laden to Afghanistan for identification, then buried it at sea within 24 hours of his death in accordance with Islamic tradition.^[7]

Al-Qaeda confirmed the death on May&#;6 with posts made on militant websites, vowing to avenge the killing.^[8] Other Pakistani militant groups, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, vowed retaliation against the U.S. and against Pakistan for not preventing the operation.^[9] The raid was supported by over 90% of the American public,^[10][11] was welcomed by the United Nations, NATO, the European Union and a large number of governments,^[12] but was condemned by others, including two-thirds of the Pakistani public.^[13] Legal and ethical aspects of the killing, such as his not being taken alive despite being unarmed, were questioned by others, including Amnesty International.^[14] Also controversial was the decision not to release any photographic or DNA evidence of bin Laden's death to the public.^[15]

In the aftermath of the killing, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani formed a commission under Senior Justice Javed Iqbal to investigate the circumstances surrounding the attack.^[16] The resulting Abbottabad Commission Report, which revealed Pakistani state military and intelligence authorities' "collective failure" that enabled bin Laden to hide in Pakistan for nine years, was leaked to Al Jazeera on July 8, ^[17]

The search for bin Laden

Accounts of how bin Laden was located by U.S. intelligence differ. The White House and CIA director John Brennan stated that the process began with a fragment of information unearthed in , resulting in years of investigation. This account states that by September , these leads followed a courier to the Abbottabad compound, where the U.S. began intensive multiplatform surveillance. According to journalist Seymour Hersh and NBC News, the U.S. was tipped off about bin Laden's location by a Pakistani intelligence officer who offered details of where the Pakistani Intelligence Service held him in detention in exchange for a bounty.

ISI walk-in places bin Laden in Abbottabad

In August , a former Pakistani intelligence officer approached the U.S. embassy station chief in Islamabad and offered to reveal bin Laden's location, in return for the $25 million reward, according to a retired senior U.S. intelligence official.^[18] This story was corroborated by two U.S. intelligence officials speaking to NBC News, and had been previously reported by intelligence analyst Raelynn Hillhouse.^[19][20] The Pakistani official informed U.S. intelligence that bin Laden had been located by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI in , and held under house arrest near Pakistani intelligence and military centers ever since. The official passed polygraph tests, after which the U.S. began local and satellite surveillance of bin Laden's Abbottabad residence.^[18]

According to the retired senior U.S. intelligence official speaking to Hersh, bin Laden was ill at this point, financially supported by some within Saudi Arabia, and kept by the ISI to better manage their complex relationship with Pakistani and Afghan Islamist groups.^[18] According to the official, retired CIA officials emphasized the importance of bin Laden's courier to the press, because they were nervous over torture scrutiny and possible prosecution.

In May , the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was aware that bin Laden was in Pakistan with the knowledge of Pakistani intelligence services.^[21] The BND informed the CIA that bin Laden was in Pakistan and Bild am Sonntag states that the CIA then found his precise location through a courier. Der Spiegel questioned the veracity of the report, produced in the midst of a scandal over BND and NSA collaboration.^[21]

Identity of courier

According to the earlier official version of his identification from a U.S. official, identification of al-Qaeda couriers was an early priority for interrogators at CIA black sites and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, because bin Laden was believed to communicate through such couriers while concealing his whereabouts from al-Qaeda foot soldiers and top commanders.^[22] Bin Laden was known not to use phones after , when the U.S. had launched missile strikes against his bases in Afghanistan in August by tracking an associate's satellite phone.^[23]

The U.S. official had stated that by , interrogators had heard uncorroborated claims about an al-Qaeda courier with the kunyaAbu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti (sometimes referred to as Sheikh Abu Ahmed from Kuwait).^[22] One of those claims came from Mohammed al-Qahtani, a detainee interrogated for 48 days more or less continuously between November 23, , and January 11, At some point during this period, al-Qahtani told interrogators about a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who was part of the inner circle of al-Qaeda.^[24] Later in , Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational chief of al-Qaeda, said he was acquainted with al-Kuwaiti but that the man was not active in al-Qaeda, according to a U.S. official.^[25]

According to a U.S. official, in a prisoner named Hassan Ghul revealed that bin Laden relied on a trusted courier known as al-Kuwaiti.^[25][26] Ghul said al-Kuwaiti was close to bin Laden as well as Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mohammed's successor Abu Faraj al-Libbi. Ghul revealed that al-Kuwaiti had not been seen in some time, which led U.S. officials to suspect he was traveling with bin Laden. When confronted with Ghul's account, Mohammed maintained his original story.^[25] Abu Faraj al-Libbi was captured in and transferred to Guantánamo in September ^[27] He told CIA interrogators that bin Laden's courier was a man named Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan and denied knowing al-Kuwaiti. Because both Mohammed and al-Libbi had minimized al-Kuwaiti's importance, officials speculated that he was part of bin Laden's inner circle.^[25]

In , officials learned al-Kuwaiti's real name,^[28] though they said they would disclose neither the name nor how they learned it.^[25] Pakistani officials in stated the courier's name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, from Pakistan's Swat Valley. He and his brother Abrar and their families were living at bin Laden's compound, the officials said.^[29]

The name Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan appears in the JTF-GTMO detainee assessment for Abu Faraj al-Libbi released by WikiLeaks on April 24, ,^[30] but the CIA never found anyone named Maulawi Jan and concluded that the name was an invention of al-Libbi.^[25]

A wiretap of another suspect picked up a conversation with al-Kuwaiti. CIA paramilitary operatives located al-Kuwaiti in August and followed him back to the Abbottabad compound, which led them to speculate it was bin Laden's location.^[22]

The courier and a relative (who was either a brother or a cousin) were killed in the May 2, raid.^[25] Afterward, some locals identified the men as Pashtuns named Arshad and Tareq Khan.^[31] Arshad Khan was carrying an old, noncomputerized Pakistani identification card, which identified him as from Khat Kuruna, a village near Charsadda in northwestern Pakistan. Pakistani officials have found no record of an Arshad Khan in that area and suspect the men were living under false identities.^[32]

Bin Laden's compound

The CIA used surveillance photos and intelligence reports to determine the identities of the inhabitants of the Abbottabad compound to which the courier was traveling. In September , the CIA concluded that the compound was custom-built to hide someone of significance, very likely bin Laden.^[33][34] Officials surmised that he was living there with his youngest wife and family.^[34]

Built in , the three-story^[35] compound was at the end of a narrow dirt road.^[36]Google Earth maps made from satellite photographs show that the compound was not present in but had been built by the time that new images were taken in ^[37] It is located kilometres (2&#;¹&#;₂ miles) northeast of the city center of Abbottabad.^[33] Abbottabad is about &#;km (&#;mi) from the Afghanistan border on the far eastern side of Pakistan (about 30&#;km or 20&#;mi from India). The compound is &#;km (³&#;₄&#;mi) southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy.^[4] Located on a plot of land eight times larger than those of nearby houses, the compound was surrounded by a tometre (12 to 18&#;ft)^[34] concrete wall topped with barbed wire.^[33] It had two security gates, and the third-floor balcony had a metre-high (7&#;ft) privacy wall, tall enough to hide the &#;m (6&#;ft 4&#;in) bin Laden.

The compound had no Internet or landline telephone service. Its residents burned their refuse, unlike their neighbors, who set their garbage out for collection.^[35] Local residents called the building the Waziristan Haveli, because they believed the owner was from Waziristan.^[38] Following the American raid and killing of bin Laden, the Pakistani government demolished the compound in February ^[39]

Intelligence gathering

CIA aerial photo of the compound

The CIA led the effort to surveil and gather intelligence on the compound; other critical roles in the operation were played by other United States agencies, including the National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and U.S. Defense Department.^[40] U.S. officials told The Washington Post that the intelligence-gathering effort "was so extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December [] to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it."^[1]

The CIA rented a home in Abbottabad from which a team staked out and observed the compound over a number of months. The CIA team used informants and other techniques—including a widely criticized fake polio vaccination program—^[41][42] to gather intelligence on the compound. The safe house was abandoned immediately after bin Laden's death.^[1] The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency helped the Joint Special Operations Command create mission simulators for the pilots, and analyzed data from an RQ^[43] drone before, during and after the raid on the compound. The NGA created three-dimensional renderings of the house, created schedules describing residential traffic patterns, and assessed the number, height and gender of the residents of the compound.^[44] Also involved in the intelligence gathering measures were an arm of the National Security Agency known as the Tailored Access Operations group^[45] which, among other things, is specialized in surreptitiously installing spyware and tracking devices on targeted computers and mobile-phone networks. Because of the work of the Tailored Access Operations group, the NSA could collect intelligence from mobile phones that were used by al-Qaeda operatives and other "persons of interest" in the hunt for bin Laden.^[46]

The design of bin Laden's compound may have ultimately contributed to his discovery. A former CIA official involved in the manhunt told The Washington Post: "The place was three stories high, and you could watch it from a variety of angles."^[1]

The CIA used a process called "red teaming" on the collected intelligence to independently review the circumstantial evidence and available facts of their case that bin Laden was living at the Abbottabad compound.^[47] An administration official said, "We conducted red-team exercises and other forms of alternative analysis to check our work. No other candidate fit the bill as well as bin Laden did."^[48]

Despite what officials described as an extraordinarily concentrated collection effort leading up to the operation, no U.S. spy agency was ever able to capture a photograph of bin Laden at the compound before the raid or a recording of the voice of the mysterious male figure whose family occupied the structure's top two floors.^[1]

Operation Neptune Spear

The official mission code name was Operation Neptune Spear.^[4]Neptune's spear is the trident, which appears on the U.S. Navy's Special Warfare insignia, with the three prongs of the trident representing the operational capacity of SEALs on sea, air and land.

Objective

The Associated Press reported at the time two U.S. officials as stating the operation was "a kill-or-capture mission, since the U.S. doesn't kill unarmed people trying to surrender", but that "it was clear from the beginning that whoever was behind those walls had no intention of surrendering".^[49]White House counterterrorism advisorJohn O. Brennan said after the raid: "If we had the opportunity to take bin Laden alive, if he didn't present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that."^[50] CIA Director Leon Panetta said on PBS NewsHour: "The authority here was to kill bin Laden.&#; Obviously under the rules of engagement, if he in fact had thrown up his hands, surrendered and didn't appear to be representing any kind of threat, then they were to capture him. But, they had full authority to kill him."^[51]

A U.S. national security official, who was not named, told Reuters that "'this was a kill operation', making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan".^[52] Another source referencing a "kill" (rather than "capture") order stated, "Officials described the reaction of the special operators when they were told a number of weeks ago that they had been chosen to train for the mission. 'They were told, "We think we found Osama bin Laden, and your job is to kill him,"' an official recalled. "The SEALs started to cheer."^[53]

An article published in Political Science Quarterly in surveyed various published accounts and interpretations of the objective of the mission and concluded that "the capture option was mainly there for appearance's sake and to fulfill requirements of international law and that everyone involved considered it for all practical purposes a mission to kill."^[54]

Planning and final decision

The CIA briefed Vice AdmiralWilliam H. McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), about the compound in January McRaven said a commando raid would be fairly straightforward but he was concerned about the Pakistani response. He assigned a captain from the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) to work with a CIA team at their campus in Langley, Virginia. The captain, named "Brian", set up an office in the printing plant in the CIA's Langley compound and, with six other JSOC officers, began to plan the raid.^[55] Administration attorneys considered legal implications and options before the raid.^[56]

In addition to a helicopter raid, planners considered attacking the compound with B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. They also considered a joint operation with Pakistani forces. Obama decided that the Pakistani government and military could not be trusted to maintain operational security for the operation against bin Laden. "There was a real lack of confidence that the Pakistanis could keep this secret for more than a nanosecond," a senior adviser to the President told The New Yorker.^[55]

Obama met with the National Security Council on March 14 to review the options; he was concerned that the mission would be exposed and wanted to proceed quickly. For that reason he ruled out involving the Pakistanis. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military officials expressed doubts as to whether bin Laden was in the compound, and whether a commando raid was worth the risk. At the end of the meeting, the president seemed to be leaning toward a bombing mission. Two U.S. Air Force officers were tasked with exploring that option further.^[57]

The CIA was unable to rule out the existence of an underground bunker below the compound. Presuming that one existed, 32 2,pound (&#;kg) bombs fitted with JDAM guidance systems would be required to destroy it.^[58] With that amount of ordnance, at least one other house was in the blast radius. Estimates were that up to a dozen civilians would be killed in addition to those in the compound. Furthermore, it was unlikely there would be enough evidence remaining to prove that bin Laden was dead. Presented with this information at the next Security Council meeting on March 29, Obama put the bombing plan on hold. Instead he directed Admiral McRaven to develop the plan for a helicopter raid. The U.S. intelligence community also studied an option of hitting bin Laden with a drone-fired small tactical munition as he paced in his compound's vegetable garden.^[59]

McRaven hand-picked a team drawing from the most experienced and senior operators from Red Squadron,^[60] one of four that make up DEVGRU. Red Squadron was coming home from Afghanistan and could be redirected without attracting attention. The team had language skills and experience with cross-border operations into Pakistan.^[57] Almost all the Red Squadron operators had ten or more deployments to Afghanistan.^[61]

Without being told the exact nature of their mission, the team performed rehearsals of the raid in two locations in the U.S.—around April 10 at Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity facility in North Carolina where a version of bin Laden's compound was built, and April 18 in Nevada.^[55][58] The location in Nevada was at 1,&#;m (4,&#;ft) elevation—chosen to test the effects the altitude would have on the raiders' helicopters. The Nevada mock-up used chain-link fences to simulate the compound walls, which left the U.S. participants unaware of the potential effects of the high compound walls on the helicopters' lift capabilities.^[59]

Planners believed the SEALs could get to Abbottabad and back without being challenged by the Pakistani military. The helicopters (modified Black Hawk helicopters) to be used in the raid had been designed to be quiet and to have low radar visibility. Since the U.S. had helped equip and train the Pakistanis, their defensive capabilities were known. The U.S. had supplied F Fighting Falcons to Pakistan on the condition they were kept at a Pakistani military base under hour U.S. surveillance.^[62]

If bin Laden surrendered, he would be held near Bagram Air Base. If the SEALs were discovered by the Pakistanis in the middle of the raid, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen would call Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and try to negotiate their release.^[63]

When the National Security Council (NSC) met again on April 19, Obama gave provisional approval for the helicopter raid. Worried that the plan for dealing with the Pakistanis was too uncertain, Obama asked Admiral McRaven to equip the team to fight its way out if necessary.^[57]

McRaven and the SEALs left for Afghanistan to practice at a one-acre, full-scale replica of the compound built on a restricted area of Bagram known as Camp Alpha.^[64][65] The team departed the U.S. from Naval Air Station Oceana on April 26 in a C aircraft, refueled on the ground at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, landed at Bagram Air Base, then moved to Jalalabad on April ^[55]

On April 28, Admiral Mullen explained the final plan to the NSC. As a measure to bolster the "fight your way out" scenario, Chinook helicopters were to be positioned nearby with additional troops. The greater part of the advisers in the meeting supported going forward with the raid. Only Vice President Biden completely opposed it. Gates advocated using the drone missile option but changed his support the next day to the helicopter raid plan. Obama said he wanted to speak directly to Admiral McRaven before he gave the order to proceed. The president asked if McRaven had learned anything since arriving in Afghanistan that caused him to lose confidence in the mission. McRaven told him the team was ready and that the next few nights would have little moonlight over Abbottabad, good conditions for a raid.^[55][59]

On April 29 at &#;a.m. EDT,^[63] Obama conferred with his advisers and gave the final go-ahead. The raid would take place the following day. That evening the president was informed that the operation would be delayed one day due to cloudy weather.

On April 30, Obama called McRaven one more time to wish the SEALs well and to thank them for their service.^[55] That evening, the President attended the annual White House Correspondent's Association dinner, which was hosted by comedian and television actor Seth Meyers. At one point, Meyers joked: "People think bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Kush, but did you know that every day from four to five he hosts a show on C-SPAN?" Obama laughed, despite his knowledge of the operation to come.^[66]

On May 1 at &#;p.m., Panetta, acting on the president's orders, directed McRaven to move forward with the operation. Shortly after 3&#;p.m., the president joined national security officials in the Situation Room to monitor the raid. They watched night-vision images taken from a Sentinel drone while Panetta, appearing in the corner of the screen from CIA headquarters, narrated what was happening.^[59][63] Video links with Panetta at CIA headquarters and McRaven in Afghanistan were set up in the Situation Room. In an adjoining office was the live drone feed presented on a laptop computer operated by Brigadier General Marshall Webb, assistant commander of JSOC. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was one of those in the Situation Room, and described it like this: "Contrary to some news reports and what you see in the movies, we had no means to see what was happening inside the building itself. All we could do was wait for an update from the team on the ground. I looked at the President. He was calm. Rarely have I been prouder to serve by his side as I was that day."^[67] Two other command centers monitored the raid from the Pentagon and the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.^[55]

Execution of the operation

Approach and entry

The raid was carried out by approximately two dozen heliborne U.S. Navy SEALs from DEVGRU's Red Squadron. For legal reasons (namely that the U.S. was not at war with Pakistan), the military personnel assigned to the mission were temporarily transferred to the control of the civilian Central Intelligence Agency.^[68][69]

The SEALs operated in teams and used weapons including the HK^[70] assault rifle (their primary weapon), the Mark 48 machine gun for fire support, and the MP7^[55] personal defense weapon used by some SEALs for close quarters and greater silence.

According to The New York Times, a total of "79 commandos and a dog" were involved in the raid.^[36] The military working dog^[71] was a Belgian Malinois named Cairo.^[72][73] According to one report, the dog was tasked with tracking "anyone who tried to escape and to alert SEALs to any approaching Pakistani security forces".^[74] The dog was to be used to help deter any Pakistani ground response to the raid and to help look for any hidden rooms or hidden doors in the compound.^[55] Additional personnel on the mission included a language interpreter,^[74] the dog handler, helicopter pilots, plus intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classifiedhyperspectral imagers to view the operation.^[65]

The SEALs flew into Pakistan from a staging base in the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan after originating at Bagram Air Base in northeastern Afghanistan.^[75] The th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), a U.S. Army Special Operations Command unit known as the "Night Stalkers", provided the two modified Black Hawk helicopters^[76] that were used for the raid itself, as well as the much larger Chinookheavy-lift helicopters that were employed as backups.^[53][65][74]

The Black Hawks were previously unseen "stealth" versions that flew more quietly and were harder to detect on radar than conventional models;^[77][78] due to the extra weight of the stealth equipment, their cargo was "calculated to the ounce, with the weather factored in."^[74]

The Chinooks kept on standby were on the ground "in a deserted area roughly two-thirds of the way" from Jalalabad to Abbottabad, with two additional SEAL teams consisting of approximately 24 DEVGRU operators^[74] for a "quick reaction force" (QRF). The Chinooks were equipped with mm GAU/A miniguns and GAU/B caliber machine guns and extra fuel for the Black Hawks. Their mission was to interdict any Pakistani military attempts to interfere with the raid. Other Chinooks, holding 25 more SEALs from DEVGRU, were stationed just across the border in Afghanistan in case reinforcements were needed during the operation.^[55]

The th SOAR helicopters were supported by an array of other aircraft, to include fixed-wing fighter jets and drones.^[79] According to CNN, "the Air Force had a full team of combat search-and-rescue helicopters available".^[79]

The raid was scheduled for a time with little moonlight so the helicopters could enter Pakistan "low to the ground and undetected".^[80] The helicopters used hilly terrain and nap-of-the-earth techniques to reach the compound without appearing on radar and alerting the Pakistani military. The flight from Jalalabad to Abbottabad took about 90 minutes.^[55]

According to the mission plan, the first helicopter would hover over the compound's yard while its full team of SEALs fast-roped