(New York Times) — For years, the agonizing search for Osama bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the Central Intelligence Agency drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s license plate. The man in the car was Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and over the next month C.I.A. operatives would track him throughout central Pakistan.
Ultimately, administration officials said, he led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles from the Pakistani capital. On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound, the officials said. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation. Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial recognition program. And just like that, history’s most expansive, expensive and exasperating manhunt was over.
The inert frame of Osama bin Laden, America’s enemy No. 1, was placed in a helicopter for burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again. A nation that spent a decade tormented by its failure to catch the man responsible for nearly 3,000 fiery deaths in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, at long last had its sense of finality, at least in this one difficult chapter.
For an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism for a string of intelligence failures over the past decade, Bin Laden’s killing brought a measure of redemption. For a military that has slogged through two, and now three vexing wars in Muslim countries, it provided an unalloyed success. And for a president whose national security leadership has come under question, it proved an affirming moment that will enter the history books.
The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, including the interrogation of C.I.A. detainees in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where sometimes what was not said was as useful as what was. Intelligence agencies eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mails of the courier’s Arab family in a Persian Gulf state and pored over satellite images of the compound in Abbottabad to determine a “pattern of life” that might decide whether the operation would be worth the risk. As more than a dozen White House, intelligence and Pentagon officials described the operation on Monday, the past few weeks were a nerve-racking {www:amalgamation} of what-ifs and negative scenarios. “There wasn’t a meeting when someone didn’t mention ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ” a senior administration official said, referring to the disastrous 1993 battle in Somalia in which two American helicopters were shot down and some of their crew killed in action. The failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980 also loomed large.
Administration officials split over whether to launch the operation, whether to wait and continue monitoring until they were more sure that Bin Laden was really there, or whether to go for a less risky bombing assault. In the end, President Obama opted against a bombing that could do so much damage it might be uncertain whether Bin Laden was really hit and chose to send in commandos.
A “fight your way out” option was built into the plan, with two helicopters following the two main assault copters as backup in case of trouble. On Sunday afternoon, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the Situation Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it unfolded. Much of the time was spent in silence. Mr. Obama looked “stone faced,” one aide said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. fingered his rosary beads.
“The minutes passed like days,” recalled John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief. The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan. “They’ve reached the target,” he said. Minutes passed. “We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said. A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.” Enemy Killed In Action.
There was silence in the Situation Room. Finally, the president spoke up. “We got him.”
Filling in the Gaps Years before the Sept. 11 attacks transformed Bin Laden into the world’s most feared terrorist, the C.I.A. had begun compiling a detailed {www:dossier} about the major players inside his global terror network. It wasn’t until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up Qaeda operatives — and subjecting them to hours of brutal interrogation sessions in secret overseas prisons — that they finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers and money men Bin Laden relied on. Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s {www:pseudonym} past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure. As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and the intense criticism for using {www:waterboarding} and other extreme interrogation methods that critics said amounted to torture.
By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top {www:clandestine} officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name.
Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big, perhaps even Bin Laden himself. It was hardly the {www:spartan} cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding place. Rather, it was a three-story house ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and protected by two security fences. He was, said Mr. Brennan, the White House official, “hiding in plain sight.”
Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the topic in their alerts to each other. That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his presumed hiding place. “It was electric,” an administration official who attended the meeting said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.”
There was guesswork about whether Bin Laden was indeed inside the house. What followed was weeks of tense meetings between Mr. Panetta and his subordinates about what to do next. While Mr. Panetta advocated an aggressive strategy to confirm Bin Laden’s presence, some C.I.A. clandestine officers worried that the most promising lead in years might be blown if bodyguards suspected the compound was being watched and spirited the Qaeda leader out of the area. For weeks last fall, spy satellites took detailed photographs, and the N.S.A. worked to scoop up any communications coming from the house. It wasn’t easy: the compound had neither a phone line nor Internet access. Those inside were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather than put it on the street for collection.
In February, Mr. Panetta called Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., to give him details about the compound and to begin planning a military strike. Admiral McRaven, a veteran of the covert world who had written a book on American Special Operations, spent weeks working with the C.I.A. on the operation, and came up with three options: a helicopter assault using American commandos, a strike with B-2 bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint raid with Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told about the mission hours before the launch.
Weighing the Options On March 14, Mr. Panetta took the options to the White House. C.I.A. officials had been taking satellite photos, establishing what Mr. Panetta described as the habits of people living at the compound.
By now evidence was mounting that Bin Laden was there. The discussions about what to do took place as American relations with Pakistan were severely strained over the arrest of Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor imprisoned for shooting two Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore in January. Some of Mr. Obama’s top aides worried that any military assault to capture or kill Bin Laden might provoke an angry response from Pakistan’s government, and that Mr. Davis could end up dead in his jail cell. Mr. Davis was ultimately released on March 16, giving a freer hand to his colleagues.
On March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinions on the options. Mr. Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling it risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial bombardment using smart bombs. But a few days later, the officials returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000 pounds each. And how could the American officials be certain that they had killed Bin Laden? “It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn’t have given us a body,” said one American intelligence official.
A helicopter assault emerged as the favored option. The Navy Seals team that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at training facilities on both American coasts, which were made up to resemble the compound. But they were not told who their target might be until later.
Last Thursday, the day after the president released his long-form birth certificate — such “silliness,” he told reporters, was distracting the country from more important things — Mr. Obama met again with his top national security officials. Mr. Panetta told the group that the C.I.A. had “red-teamed” the case — shared their intelligence with other analysts who weren’t involved to see if they agreed that Bin Laden was probably in Abbottabad. They did.
It was time to decide. Around the table, the group went over and over the negative scenarios. There were long periods of silence, one aide said. And then, finally, Mr. Obama spoke: “I’m not going to tell you what my decision is now — I’m going to go back and think about it some more.” But he added, “I’m going to make a decision soon.”
Sixteen hours later, he had made up his mind. Early the next morning, four top aides were summoned to the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could brief the president, he cut them off. “It’s a go,” he said. The earliest the operation could take place was Saturday, but officials cautioned that cloud cover in the area meant that Sunday was much more likely.
The next day, Mr. Obama took a break from rehearsing for the White House Correspondents Dinner that night to call Admiral McRaven, to wish him luck.
On Sunday, White House officials canceled all West Wing tours so unsuspecting tourists and visiting celebrities wouldn’t accidentally run into all the high-level national security officials holed up in the Situation Room all afternoon monitoring the feeds they were getting from Mr. Panetta. A staffer went to Costco and came back with a mix of provisions — turkey pita wraps, cold shrimp, potato chips, soda.
At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta sketched out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the C.I.A. director began his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed into Pakistan,” he said.
Across the Border, The commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a base in Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan. The goal was to get in and get out before Pakistani authorities detected the breach of their territory by what were to them unknown forces and reacted with possibly violent results.
In Pakistan, it was just past midnight on Monday morning, and the Americans were counting on the element of surprise. As the first of the helicopters swooped in at low altitudes, neighbors heard a loud blast and gunshots. A woman who lives two miles away said she thought it was a terrorist attack on a Pakistani military installation. Her husband said no one had any clue Bin Laden was hiding in the quiet, affluent area. “It’s the closest you can be to Britain,” he said of their neighborhood.
The Seal team stormed into the compound — the raid awakened the group inside, one American intelligence official said — and a firefight broke out. One man held an unidentified woman living there as a shield while firing at the Americans. Both were killed. Two more men died as well, and two women were wounded. American authorities later determined that one of the slain men was Bin Laden’s son, Hamza, and the other two were the courier and his brother.
The commandos found Bin Laden on the third floor, wearing the local loose-fitting tunic and pants known as a shalwar kameez, and officials said he resisted before he was shot above the left eye near the end of the 40-minute raid.
The American government gave few details about his final moments. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” said Mr. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief. But a senior Pentagon official, briefing on the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Bin Laden “was killed by U.S. bullets.”
American officials insisted they would have taken Bin Laden into custody if he did not resist, although they considered that likelihood remote. “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,” Mr. Brennan said.
One of Bin Laden’s wives identified his body, American officials said. A picture taken by a Seals commando and processed through facial recognition software suggested a 95 percent certainty that it was Bin Laden. Later, DNA tests comparing samples with relatives found a 99.9 percent match.
But the Americans faced other problems. One of their helicopters stalled and could not take off. Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, the commandos moved the women and children to a secure area and blew up the malfunctioning helicopter.
By that point, though, the Pakistani military was scrambling forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani territory. “They had no idea about who might have been on there,” Mr. Brennan said. “Thankfully, there was no engagement with Pakistani forces.”
As they took off at 1:10 a.m. local time, taking a trove of documents and computer hard drives from the house, the Americans left behind the women and children. A Pakistani official said nine children, from 2 to 12 years old, are now in Pakistani custody.
The Obama administration had already determined it would follow Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours to avoid offending devout Muslims, yet concluded Bin Laden would have to be buried at sea, since no country would be willing to take the body. Moreover, they did not want to create a shrine for his followers. So the Qaeda leader’s body was washed and placed in a white sheet in keeping with tradition. On the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, it was placed in a weighted bag as an officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker, according to the senior Pentagon official. The body then was placed on a prepared flat board and eased into the sea. Only a small group of people watching from one of the large elevator platforms that move aircraft up to the flight deck were witness to the end of America’s most wanted fugitive.
(Reporting by By MARK MAZZETTI, HELENE COOPER and PETER BAKER WASHINGTON. Contributing to the story: Elisabeth Bumiller, Charlie Savage and Steven Lee Myers from Washington, Adam Ellick from New York, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.)
10 thoughts on “The bin Laden manhunt: An inside look”
No time has been wasted before they reconstructed and delightfully displayed Abumusab Alzerqawi’s disfigured face for all to see but when it comes to Ben Laden, there’s so much “Islamic sensitivity” as a result of the gruesome nature of the way he died. I personally care less about Ben Laden’s Islamic background than the fact that he is a common criminal with no regard to human life. I have no doubt that this man is taken out of the equation however, I suspect the notion that he is dead. They probably have captured him alive and came up with the idea of declaring him dead in order to avoid provoking wave of high level kidnappings by his sympathizers around the world in a bid to have him released.
One more thing what most reeeeeeally ticks off shek MalAss Z-setanawi of Ethiopia will be when he find out that Osama Bin Laden is the Prime Minister of Hell.
An intrusive and fantastic detail. I think the some key people from Pakistan intelligence might have given him sanctuary in such unsuspected in-town compound. Otherwise, it hard to believe that he was living being unnoticed by these personnels for such long time.
I applaud for the excellent job for the current US administration and security, esp. the president. I also like the handling of the case as a hole including the burial method.
many people question if he is really dead. why they dont show the picture of the body? why dna test was not done?
Bin Laden deserves death.This terriorist finally was unable to escape from the punishing justice.Gusy,did you notice;terrorists and dictators,in the end have identical fate,the fate that does well to them.Take,forexample Sadam Husen,Bin Laden,Gadhaffi and Meles Zinawi.
What do they have in common? yes;money in their banks and blood in their hands.Who would have thought Sadam would go first then,followed by Bin Laden;then,who will be first to go:- would it be Gadhaffi or Zinawi? Bin Laden had dove into the ocean and settled at the bottom of the ocean.So every criminal dictator has a unique fate that is allocated to him as per the crime he committed.
I think they should have cut his body into 6 pieces, dumped it outside the gibbi and let the jibs have a gibza.
Yihun injee!
This is best gift that can be given to the civilized and moderate section of the faith of Islam. I had written a comment about 3 years ago on this very website in which I predicted that the Iyal-al-souk from Riyyad will be caught or surprised while munching Halwa. Boy!! Did he get a surprise wake-up from America’s finest!!! Arab, Arab, Arab!!! He thought he had gone into retirement surrounded by 5 wives(including an under-age child who was given to him as a wife like a piece of furniture) and would live a comfortable life until he dies a natural death. Not so fast, said Obama, No that easy said our gallant Navy Seals!!! And not that peacefully said the four-legged hero German shepherd!!! He thought the innocent blood of those he callously spilled on 09/11 and hundreds of thousands after that would be disregarded by the Almighty. He did receive what he deserved and now he is in hell eaten away by maggots and slowly burning in the inferno for millions of years to come. He had desecrated the name of the Almighty and he will be paying for that in hell to eternity. Good riddance. Now, the next move should be against that son of a thousand fathers Egyptian so-called doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri. I am confident in the glorious Navy Seals that they will find him and all others fascists like him who are now hiding in the barren deserts of the middle-east and give them the ultimate justice – a deadly blast from M-16. Right on President Obama, Right on!!!! Insha Allah!!!
Trail to bin Laden began with phone call
A Pakistani vendor sells traditional sweets close to the perimeter of the walled compound where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. (Anjum Naveed/The Associated Press)
By Bob Woodward
Friday, May 6, 2011
It seemed an innocuous, catch-up phone call. Last year Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for a Pakistani known to U.S. intelligence as the main courier for Osama bin Laden, took a call from an old friend.
Where have you been? inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?
Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: “I’m back with the people I was with before.”
There was a pause, as if the friend knew that Kuwaiti’s words meant he had returned to bin Laden’s inner circle, and was perhaps at the side of the al-Qaeda leader himself.
The friend replied, “May God facilitate.”
When U.S. intelligence officials learned of this exchange, they knew they had reached a key moment in their decade-long search for al-Qaeda’s founder. The call led them to the unusual, high-walled compound in Abbottabad, a city 35 miles north of Pakistan’s capital.
“This is where you start the movie about the hunt for bin Laden,” said one U.S. official briefed on the intelligence-gathering leading up to the raid on the compound early Monday.
The exchange and several other pieces of information, other officials said, gave President Obama the confidence to launch a politically risky mission to capture or kill bin Laden, a decision he took despite dissension among his key national security advisers and varying estimates of the likelihood that bin Laden was in the compound. The officials would speak about the collection of intelligence and White House decision making only on the condition that they not be named.
U.S. intelligence agencies had been hunting for Kuwaiti for at least four years; the call with the friend gave them the number of the courier’s cellphone. Using a vast number of human and technical sources, they tracked Kuwaiti to the compound.
The main three-story building, which had no telephone lines or Internet service, was impenetrable to eavesdropping technology deployed by the National Security Agency.
U.S. officials were stunned to realize that whenever Kuwaiti or others left the compound to make a call, they drove some 90 minutes away before even placing a battery in a cellphone. Turning on the phone made it susceptible to the kind of electronic surveillance that the residents of the compound clearly wished to avoid.
As intelligence officials scrutinized images of the compound, they saw that a man emerged most days to stroll the grounds of the courtyard for an hour or two. The man walked back and forth, day after day, and soon analysts began calling him “the pacer.” The imagery never provided a clear view of his face.
Intelligence officials were reluctant to bring in other means of technical or human surveillance that might offer a positive identification but would risk detection by those in the compound. The pacer never left the compound. His routine suggested he was not just a shut-in but almost a prisoner.
Was the pacer bin Laden? A decoy? A hoax? A setup? Bin Laden was at least 6-foot-4, and the pacer seemed to have the gait of a tall man. The White House asked the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which provides and analyzes satellite imagery, to determine the pacer’s height. The agency said the man’s height was somewhere between 5-foot-8 and 6-foot-8, according to one official.
Another official said the agency provided a narrower range for the pacer’s height, but the estimate was still of limited reliability because of the lack of information about the size of the building’s windows or the thickness of the compound’s walls, which would have served as reference points.
In one White House meeting, CIA Director Leon Panetta told Obama and other top national security officials that the general rule in gathering intelligence was to keep going until a target such as the Abbottabad compound ran dry.
Panetta said that point had been reached, arguing that those tracking the compound were seeing the pacer nearly every day but could not conclude with certainty that it was bin Laden, officials said. Panetta noted that there was no signals intelligence available and contended that it was too risky to send in a human spy or move any closer with electronic devices. The Washington Post reported Friday that the agency established a safe house in Abbottabad for a small team that monitored the compound in the months leading up to the raid.
Obama and his advisers debated the options, officials said. One option was to fire a missile from a Predator or Reaper aerial drone. Such a strike would be low-risk, but if the result was a direct hit, the pacer might be vaporized and officials would never be certain they had killed bin Laden. If the drone attack missed, as had happened in attacks on high-value targets, bin Laden or whoever was living in the compound would flee and the United States would have to start the hunt from scratch.
Panetta designated Navy Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, who had headed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for nearly three years, to devise a boots-on-the ground plan for the special forces that became known as “the McRaven option.”
McRaven had increased the intensity of Special Operations raids, especially in Afghanistan. During his first two years as head of JSOC, the “jackpot rate” — when the strikes got their intended target — jumped from 35 percent to more than 80 percent.
His decision to assign the operation to the Navy SEALs, a Special Operations unit with extensive experience in raids on high-value targets, was critical. SEALs have a tradition of moving in and out fast, often killing everyone they encounter at a target site. Most members of the SEAL team in the bin Laden raid had been deployed to war zones a dozen or more times.
A “pattern of life” study of the compound by intelligence agencies showed that about a dozen women and children periodically frequented it.
Specific orders were issued to the SEALs not to shoot the women or children unless they were clearly threatening or had weapons. (During the mission, one woman was killed and a wife of bin Laden was shot in the leg.) Bin Laden was to be captured, one official said, if he “conspicuously surrendered.”
The longer such raids take, the greater the risk to the SEALs. One senior official said the general philosophy of the SEALs is: “If you see it, shoot it. It is a house full of bad guys.”
Several assessments concluded there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that bin Laden was in the compound. Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was much more conservative. During one White House meeting, he put the probability at about 40 percent.
When a participant suggested that was a low chance of success, Leiter said, “Yes, but what we’ve got is 38 percent better than we have ever had before.”
Officials said Obama’s national security advisers were not unanimous in recommending he go ahead with the McRaven option. The president approved the raid at 8:20 a.m. Friday.
During the assault, one of the Blackhawk helicopters stalled, but the pilot was able to land safely. The hard landing, which disabled the helicopter, forced the SEALs to abandon a plan to have one team rope down from a Blackhawk and come into the main building from the roof. Instead, both teams assaulted the compound from the ground.
The White House initially said bin Laden was shot and killed because he was engaged in a firefight and resisted. Later, White House spokesman Jay Carney said bin Laden was not armed, but Carney insisted he resisted in some form. He and others have declined to specify the exact nature of his alleged resistance, through there reportedly were weapons in the room where bin Laden was killed.
A senior Special Operations official said that SEALs would avoid providing more details about the raid, to prevent the disclosure of methods central to their success. The individuals who took part in the raid, the official said, would not grant interviews and had signed nondisclosure agreements about their classified work. “They are interested in closing ranks and getting on with business,” he said.
SEALs scooped up dozens of thumb drives and several computer hard drives that are now being scrutinized for information about al-Qaeda, especially an address, location or cellphone number for Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s second in command.
But officials said the delicate process of sifting this intelligence bonanza is made more challenging because of worries that using the wrong passwords could trigger a pre-planned erasure of digital information.
In the White House Situation Room on Sunday night, the president and his national security team watched a soundless video feed of the raid.
When bin Laden’s corpse was laid out, one of the Navy SEALs was asked to stretch out next to it to compare heights. The SEAL was 6 feet tall. The body was several inches taller.
After the information was relayed to Obama, he turned to his advisers and said: “We donated a $60 million helicopter to this operation. Could we not afford to buy a tape measure?”
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Evelyn M. Duffy contributed to this report.
May 7, 2011
A Reporter’s Quest for Osama bin Laden, the Unholy Grail
By JOHN F. BURNS – NYT
A Times correspondent reflects on decades in pursuit of Bin Laden and on an actual encounter with him in 1989.
As reporting opportunities go, few can have been more spectacularly flubbed than the one that came my way on a long-ago spring day in the former Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. The year was 1989; the location a cramped room at a ramshackle indoctrination camp for Arab militants in the hinterland outside Peshawar, the frontier town that was a staging area for the mujahedeen who forced Soviet troops to withdraw from Afghanistan earlier that year. At the back, in a corner, sat a tall, straggly-bearded man in his early 30s, silent, taut-faced, and plainly, by his body language, deeply upset by a reporter’s intrusion. His name, I learned later from an officer of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, was Osama bin Laden. I never spoke to him that day, on what proved to be the only firsthand sighting I would have of the man whose terrorist murderousness — and success for so long in eluding history’s biggest manhunt — was to recast the story of our time. For me, as for many foreign correspondents of my generation, Bin Laden was to become an obsessive figure, a sort of unholy grail, just as he was for the American commandos who finally tracked him down. A handful of reporters succeeded in interviewing him in the decade after my own encounter, always under cloak-and-dagger conditions, always at one of his hideaways in Afghanistan. But none were to meet him after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he became a figure to be seen only in the smuggled videotapes that became his sermons — and now his epitaph — for the world. Still, even unseen, the man and his cause were revealed in all manner of ways to those who pursued him. My own journey included a eureka moment in the old bazaar in the Yemeni capital, Sana, in August 2001, when a visit to a video shop specializing in jihadi best-sellers produced, from beneath the counter, a set of fresh-from-the-courier tapes that included hours of Bin Laden addressing Qaeda loyalists in Afghanistan. From the excitement in the eyes of the wizened old man who sold me the tapes, I judged that they might contain something unusual. After spending days poring over the tapes with an Arab-speaking scholar in a London garret, I came across a scene from early 2001 in which the Qaeda leader, apparently somewhere near Kandahar, framed against an azure sky in the flowing white robes of an ancient prophet, spoke to a gathering that seemed to include would-be suicide bombers, hailing a reckoning that lay ahead for America, and for them. I included that anecdote in an article I wrote in the days before 9/11, when its imminent significance was not apparent. The article was on the pending list at The Times’s foreign desk when the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and it did not appear in the paper. The following year, my haphazard pursuit took me on a trek into the mountains at Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, where American military might came closer to killing Bin Laden in December 2001 than at any time until the raid last week in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Frustrated by conflicting accounts as to whether Bin Laden had died in the American bombing at Tora Bora or had fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan along the frontier with Afghanistan, Times editors assigned me that spring to sort truth from fiction. Starting at Bin Laden’s devastated hideout in the foothills, littered with paper fragments in Arabic and the detritus from a clinic that appeared to have been used for the kidney dialysis he was rumored to need, I set out along the path he would have taken up the mountain to the 14,000-foot saddle leading on to Pakistan. All along the way, I met villagers who swore they knew the “sheik,” meaning Bin Laden, and several who said they had seen him, on horseback, riding up the rocky pathway with several other horsemen, and on into the Pakistan tribal area of Waziristan. The villagers appeared to have liked him, worshiped him even, a portent of how fraught the attempt to track him down over the following years would prove to be. A few weeks earlier, I had another virtual encounter with the evanescent sheik, in a rented house on the prosperous outskirts of Faisalabad, a city that lies, like Abbottabad, a few hours’ drive from Pakistan’s tribal frontier. Forty-eight hours earlier, the house had been the target of a raid led by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that captured Abu Zubaydah, the fourth-highest-ranking Qaeda leader — after Bin Laden, his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11. Abu Zubaydah, who was shot in the raid, was later one of three men, including Mr. Mohammed, to be waterboarded by the C.I.A. without volunteering anything about the whereabouts of Bin Laden. But I have often wondered — as I did again, after seeing the photographs of the scruffy, boarding-house-looking interior of the house the Seal team raided in Abbottabad — about the roster of Arab names that had been chalked up in the Faisalabad kitchen assigning mealtime duties. Among them, intriguingly, was the single word, “Osama.” Reviewing all this over recent days, my thoughts have gone back, as much as anywhere, to that one-and-only direct encounter in 1989. In light of what transpired at Abbottabad, several things stand out: First, the fact that access to the camp lay through a C.I.A. contact involved in America’s financing and arming of the mujahedeen; Bin Laden and his cohorts were then, at least notionally, America’s men. Second, Bin Laden’s hostility toward the United States, manifested by his sullen demeanor in the presence of an American reporter. Third, the close liaison, then and later, between the jihadis and the ISI, Pakistan’s spy agency, which acted as a conduit for American and Saudi backing of the mujahedeen. For the moment, attention is focused on nagging questions about the raid: whether, without a weapon in his hands, Bin Laden might have been taken alive; and whether, with the man now dead, he will prove a lasting icon for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, or, with his leadership extinguished, the movement will become a growing irrelevance, at least in the politics of the Arab world, amid the democratic currents now inspiring the Arab Spring. Along with these, and perhaps most pressing in its implications for America’s relations with Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan and the struggle with Al Qaeda, there is a further question: whether the ISI knew all along that Bin Laden was “hiding in plain sight” — for as long as five years, as his wounded Yemeni wife is said to have told Pakistani interrogators — in a town, Abbottabad, that is one of Pakistan’s principal army garrisons. Making sense of the jumble of justifications from senior Pakistani officials is a fool’s errand. Some have said Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad took the country’s security establishment by surprise; others, including at least two former ISI chiefs, say it is inconceivable that the spy agency did not know. Still others have said that Bin Laden’s success in hiding in a city in Pakistan’s interior was the result of basic mistakes by Pakistan or, conversely, that it can be traced to America’s decision not to share with Pakistan the intelligence that led to pinpointing Abbottabad as ground zero of the manhunt. Pakistan’s double-dealing is hard to contest. The country has absorbed more than $20 billion in American and other Western aid since 9/11, a crucial buttress to its fragile economy, yet it has been “looking both ways,” in the words of Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, on the terrorism spawned on its soil and across the border in Afghanistan. A WikiLeaks release of military field reports last year offered new evidence of the ISI’s role as a patron of Pakistan-based Taliban groups, and Al Qaeda. While few would have imagined its complicity might extend to sheltering Bin Laden, Pakistan’s trustworthiness as an ally has long been questioned in Washington. And yet: The view from Washington is not the only one useful for Americans seeking a way through this thicket. There is Pakistan’s viewpoint, too. Just as America once found it expedient to make allies of men like Bin Laden, training and arming them even while knowing that the jihadis’ embrace of violence in the name of fundamentalist Islam included an enmity for the West at least equal to their loathing of the Soviet Union, so powerful forces at the heart of Pakistan’s government have long found reasons to put expedience in the forefront of its relations with the Islamic militants. In the West, the Pakistani approach is often judged as misguided and self-defeating. But it has more than a faint resonance with America’s erstwhile willingness to sup with the devil of jihadism during the cold war, when a Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, for Washington, was an existential and obsessive issue. And so, in many ways, it has been for Pakistan, as it has fashioned its own relationship with the jihadis. Since Pakistan’s founding in 1947, strategic thinking there has been fixated on the country’s bitter rivalry with India. Defeats in three wars have combined with lopsided Indian advantages in population, economic strength and conventional military power to convince Pakistan’s leaders, or at least its generals, to seize every offsetting advantage they can. Central among these has been the “strategic depth” that has been seen to flow from enhancing Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan, its western neighbor. Because Afghanistan’s most powerful ethnic group is the Pashtuns, whose own national myth includes an irredentist ambition to reunite with Pakistan’s Pashtuns, playing for advantage in the politics of Afghanistan is central to Pakistan’s strategy to guard against the fissiparous forces that threaten it from within. So while America seeks the defeat of Islamic militancy, many of Pakistan’s leaders have convinced themselves that theirs must be a longer game. Remembering how America abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, these Pakistanis believe that their interest lies in hedging their bets as to who will ultimately rule in Kabul and Kandahar. If that helps explain how Bin Laden came to be sojourning in his fortress at Abbottabad, something else I have encountered often since 1989 seems worth bearing in mind as America weighs the consequences of having finally caught and killed him. The comfortable belief among many Americans has been that Bin Laden and all his works are anathema to many in the Muslim world, as indeed they are. If there was no sign of rejoicing in Cairo or Istanbul or Jakarta at the news of his death, there was little mass protest, either. The murderous mindset that brought 9/11 has reaped thousands upon thousands of Muslim victims in their homelands, too, as President Obama pointed out. Still, the anguish over the Qaeda-inspired killings coexisted paradoxically with a widely expressed personal admiration for Bin Laden while he lived, as the embodiment of attitudes that had a wide resonance in the Muslim world: a willingness to stand up against what many see as the bullying power of the West, and an ability to articulate, in a lyrical Arabic that drew heavily on the language of the Koran, the grievances many Muslims feel about American policies on oil and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, and toward America’s longstanding support for corrupt and repressive Arab regimes. He was also celebrated for an element of personal bravery and self-denial in forswearing the comforts of his Saudi Arabian inheritance for the rigors, and now the obliteration, of life on the run. There have been fewer Bin Laden posters for some time now in the car windows and storefronts of the Arab world, suggesting that these feelings are less intense now than they have been for much of the past 20 years, especially with the successes of the Arab Spring and the new path it is charting to Arab renewal. But if the West does not address the anger that Bin Laden articulated more forcefully and violently than almost any other Muslim leader of his time, his legend may well live on, and not just among the dispossessed. One measure of this, for me, goes back to a dinner party shortly after 9/11 in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, where many of the Pakistani guests were active or retired generals. As the whiskey flowed, tongues loosened, and the views made for deeply uncomfortable hearing. The attacks in New York and Washington, one man said, had “taught the Americans a lesson.” Another officer’s wife drew murmurs of assent when she said, “America had it coming.” With attitudes like these, I thought last week, was it so odd that Bin Laden chose for his final sanctuary the garrison town of Abbottabad, where he may have judged that powerful people might be prepared to look the other way?