Jeremy Bash, chief of staff, CIA: After the tragedy at Khost where we lost seven CIA officers on December 30, 2009, Director Panetta said to the team responsible for hunting al Qaeda, “I want you to come brief me every Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. Tom Donilon, national security adviser, White House: The president, after one of our regular counterterrorism meetings, called a group of us-myself and Leon Panetta, Rahm Emanuel, Michael Leiter-up to the Oval Office and said that he had been told that the case had gone cold and he wanted the intelligence community to reinvigorate its efforts. (All titles and military ranks are presented as people were during the course of the operation, and interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.) Their accounts, from the White House, CIA headquarters and Afghanistan itself, paint a never-before-seen view of the most momentous decision of Barack Obama’s presidency. intelligence agencies as Neptune’s Spear coalesced over the fall of 2010 and spring of 2011-is based on extensive original interviews with nearly 30 key intelligence and national security leaders, White House staff, and presidential aides-including some who have never spoken publicly before, and roughly half of those pictured in Souza’s famous photograph. This oral history-the story inside the West Wing and U.S. The full story of how, and why, America’s top security officials decided to pull the trigger that night in May has never been told. The tense moments as the raid unfolded half a world away yielded one of the most famous inside-the-room photographs in presidential history, Pete Souza’s portrait of 14 people crammed into a White House Situation Room anteroom-a moment of high drama that included Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and two future current Cabinet secretaries. The bin Laden raid that President Obama greenlit that Friday in late April-code-named Operation Neptune’s Spear-was the culmination of months of intricate preparation that reached across the capital and around the globe, from full-scale SEAL dress rehearsals in North Carolina to deep Washington legal debates over whether the mission would be “kill or capture,” all planned around a small, precise physical model of the Abbottabad compound that traveled back and forth from CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia to the West Wing. And, with a decade’s hindsight, there was another consequential domestic political subplot at work that week, too: On the day between when Obama approved the operation and when SEAL Team Six helicoptered in, the president kept a long-scheduled date at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, where he publicly roasted celebrity real estate developer-turned-TV host Donald Trump for pumping up the “birther” conspiracy theory that he wasn’t a real citizen. But the operation also stands as a fascinating window into the most rarefied zone of presidential decision-making: Barack Obama had sole authority to approve an act with huge consequences and huge risks, one that could easily sink his presidency if it went bad. Other popular culture, like the movie Zero Dark Thirty, would later center on the years of work by the analysts who traced the elusive bin Laden to his compound. Once his death was announced in a hastily organized late Sunday night presidential address, much of the initial attention focused on the bravery and skill of the SEAL operators who flew in and conducted the attack.
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