It took about 10 years to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, 2011—a founder of the extremist group al-Qaeda, responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in American history on September 11, 2001, which left 2,977 dead and thousands injured.
American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden, a Netflix docu-series out Mar. 10, features people involved in planning the historic raid. Over three episodes, top intelligence officials who worked for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama outline key milestones that led to the capture and why it took nearly a decade to track down bin Laden.
As Leon Panetta, CIA director when Osama was killed, explains the significance of the terrorist’s death in the docu-series, “In many ways, we had really brought justice to all of those victims” of 9/11.
Here’s a look at the biggest turning point in the top secret mission and what was going on in Pakistan and in Washington, D.C. on the day of the raid.
How the U.S. found Osama bin Laden
Shortly after President Barack Obama was inaugurated for his first time in 2009, he ordered intelligence officials to double down on finding Osama bin Laden, making it priority number one for his new CIA director Panetta. These officials focused on finding a courier named Abu Ahmed, hoping he’d lead them to bin Laden’s hideout. They knew they were on the right track when they ran the name past top al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who was being detained in Guantanamo Bay, and KSM told other detainees not to talk about Ahmed to any Americans—not realizing that he was being wiretapped.
A breakthrough moment came in the summer of 2010, when intelligence officials were able to listen in on one of Ahmed’s phone calls and track him down in a white SUV, which they followed to a large home in Abottabad, Pakistan that immediately seemed suspicious. It wasn’t clear how Ahmed, who had no traceable means of income, could have owned such a large structure. Additionally, the walls were…
