The Man Who Hunted Osama bin Laden

The CIA tracked al-Kuwaiti to a walled compound in Abbottabad. If bin Laden was hiding there, in a busy suburb not far from Pakistan's military academy, it challenged much of what the agency had assumed about his hideout.

But John said it wasn't that far-fetched. Drawing on what he knew about bin Laden's earlier hideouts, he said it made sense that bin Laden had surrounded himself only with his couriers and family and did not use phones or the Internet. The CIA knew that top al-Qaida operatives had lived in urban areas before.

A cautious Panetta took the information to Obama, but there was much more work to be done. The government tried everything to figure out who was in that compound.

In a small house nearby, the CIA put people who would fit in and not draw any attention. They watched and waited but turned up nothing definitive. Satellites captured images of a tall man walking the grounds of the compound, but never got a look at his face.

Again and again, John and his team asked themselves who else might be living in that compound. They came up with five or six alternatives; bin Laden was always the best explanation.

This went on for months. By about February, John told his bosses, including Panetta, that the CIA could keep trying, but the information was unlikely to get any better. He told Panetta this might be their best chance to find bin Laden and it would not last forever. Panetta made that same point to the president

Panetta held regular meetings on the hunt, often concluding with an around-the-table poll: How sure are you that this is bin Laden? John was always bullish, rating his confidence as high as 80 percent.

Others weren't so sure, especially those who had been in the room for operations that went bad. Not two years earlier, the CIA thought it had an informant who could lead him to bin Laden's deputy. That man blew himself up at a base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven CIA employees and injuring six others.

That didn't come up in the meetings with Panetta, a senior intelligence official said. But everyone knew the risk the CIA was taking if it told the president that bin Laden was in Abbottabad and was wrong.

"We all knew that if he wasn't there and this was a disaster, certainly there would be consequences," the official recalled.