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The long, secret campaign to track down Osama bin Laden has been called the biggest, costliest manhunt in history. This reconstruction, compiled from reporting done by more than two dozen Washington Post correspondents and staffers over more than 15 years, traces the hunt from its beginnings in 1997 during the Clinton administration, long before bin Laden had committed an act of terrorism.
The behind-the-scenes narrative reveals that time and again, CIA agents had bin Laden in their cross-hairs only to have missions canceled at the last moment by superiors in Langley and the White House. In vivid detail, Post reporters recount how bin Laden tried to get a satellite signal to watch the attacks of Sept. 11 on live TV. That evening, he toasted his handiwork at a collegial dinner, expressing pleasant surprise that the attack had killed so many.
The Hunt for bin Laden chronicles the myriad ways he evaded detection in his years on the lam, his narrow escape from the caves and tunnels of Tora Bora, and how the war in Iraq drained resources and diverted the spotlight from the hunt, turning the mission to kill or capture bin Laden into a back-burner operation and political liability for the Bush administration.
As the hunt continued in the background, Post reporters never stopped writing about it, revealing how increasingly punishing drone attacks, interrogations of captured al Qaeda operatives and an ever expanding network of informants finally began to yield a trail, pebble by pebble. It wasn't until the Iraq war began to wind down that the search gained its endgame momentum, the Post shows, reclassified as a highest priority again by a new president.
The breakthrough came when bin Laden's shadowy courier was finally identified, and his cell phone intercepted. Wire intercepts and surveillance eventually led the CIA directly to a mysterious million-dollar compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. After fourteen years, two wars and billions of dollars spent in the effort, a team of Navy Seals finally brought the hunt to a swift and conclusive end.
Contributors
Washington Post staff writers: John Ward Anderson, Peter Baker, Karin Brulliard, Steve Coll, Karen DeYoung, Michael Dobbs, Peter Finn, Marc Fisher, Bradley Graham, Anne E. Kornblut, John Lancaster, Richard Leiby, Vernon Loeb, Jerry Markon, Greg Miller, Molly Moore, Dana Priest, Ian Shapira, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby Warrick, Craig Whitlock, William Branigin, Pamela Constable, Susan B. Glasser, John Lancaster, Allan Lengel, Colum Lynch, Ellen Nakashima, Walter Pincus, John Pomfret, Keith B. Richburg, Thomas E. Ricks, Paul Schwartzman, Robert E. Thomason, Josh White, Griff Witte and Kevin Sullivan; staff researcher Julie Tate; and special correspondents Haq Nawaz Khan and Kamran Khan.
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