The Words The SEAL Killing Osama bin Laden Radioed Home

The president spent the next morning playing nine holes of golf, while staff turned the Situation Room into a war room - and ordered sandwich platters from CostCo.

Staff set up a video link to Panetta, at CIA headquarters, and McRaven in Jalalabad. There were two more command centres at least, one at the Pentagon and another at the American Embassy in Islamabad. Obama joined his advisers around a conference table in the room at 2pm, half an hour before the Black Hawks took off from Jalalabad.

45 minutes later, four back-up Chinooks left the same airport deployed at the last minute after the president said he wanted to make sure the SEAls could 'fight their way out of Pakistan' if necessary. Two remained inside the Afghanistan border in case of emergency, and two more hovered just outside Abbottabad.

Back in the White House, Obama and his advisers spent 12 long minutes waiting to hear from them. A special operations officer told Schmidle: 'Eternity is defined as the time between when you see something go awry and that first voice report.'

What happened next took just 18 minutes. Breaking off into smaller teams, they reached the guest house where Bin Laden's courier was staying with his family. He came out brandishing an AK-47, but the SEALs shot him dead and kept moving through the compound.

Blasting away gate after gate, a team reached the patio at the front entrance to the main house. Abrar, the courier's brother, appeared next to his wife, carrying an AK-47. Both were shot dead.

Shortly afterwards, the SEALs, led by James, the commander, got into the house. For the next 20 minutes watchers in the White House had no idea what was going on.

Finding a locked metal gate at the bottom of a staircase, three SEALs blasted it away and went up the stairs. Halfway up, they saw Khalid, Bin Laden's 23-year-old son, come round the corner with an AK-47. The SEALs returned fire and killed him.

As the continued up the stairs, a tall man with a beard peered out of a bedroom door. The SEALs immediately realised it was Bin Laden, known as Crankshaft in their code

His two wives tried to shield Bin Laden, the youngest, Amal al-Fatah, screaming in shouting in Arabic. One SEAL shot her in the calf - and then, in a gesture of great courage and self-sacrifice, embraced both women in a huge bear hug in case they were wearing explosive vests.