Students of intelligence history were hard-pressed Tuesday to cite another operation that focused on so high profile and valuable a target, and that ended in such resounding triumph. “I think this one is rather unique. You’d have to go back to the exploits of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, I think, to find a comparable exploit,” said former Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin. “But this one is, by any measure, the most important and prominent and best documented.”

Clandestine work is, by definition, intended to remain secret, and some of the most successful covert ops have been ones that resulted in nothing at all happening: an embassy not blown up, an informant kept alive. But the world has seen some missions to rival what the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Navy SEALs, and other personnel pulled off in Abbottabad this past weekend.

Perhaps the closest analogue is Israel’s capture of escaped Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, in May 1960, 15 years after his disappearance at the end of World War II. Israeli Mossad agents kidnapped the fugitive on his way home from work in Buenos Aires and spirited him – aboard a commercial flight, no less – to Jerusalem, where the unrepentant defendant was prosecuted for his central role in Hitler’s Final Solution and ultimately hanged.