That’s in contrast to its calm surroundings: The area around it looks bucolic and manicured. It’s about a kilometer away from a Pakistani military academy, tweets a journalist on the scene. Built in 2005 at the end of a dirt road, it’s about “six times” the size of any of the houses around it, with fifteen-foot high walls guarded with barbed wire.

Though its main security measures come from where it was built: 35 miles “northeast – towards India – of Islamabad and within the Pakistan air defense intercept zone for the national capital,” as the Nightwatch intelligence newsletter observes.

It means no drone could’ve pulled off the hit on Bin Laden.

The Reaper robotic plane (pictured) is the most advanced in the U.S. unmanned fleet. It has a top speed of only 260 knots. And it lights up on radar like a Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Pakistani surface-to-air-missiles would have brought it down in an instant. Nothing can fly in that region without detection and without permission from the Pakistan Air Force, even from Afghanistan,” as NightWatch notes. Of course, any possible drone shootdown near the compound would have risked tipping off bin Laden and scotching the entire painstaking manhunt.