The bin Laden raid that President Obama greenlit that Friday in late April—code-named Operation Neptune’s Spear—was the culmination of months of intricate preparation that reached across the capital and around the globe, from full-scale SEAL dress rehearsals in North Carolina to deep Washington legal debates over whether the mission would be “kill or capture,” all planned around a small, precise physical model of the Abbottabad compound that traveled back and forth from CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia to the West Wing. The tense moments as the raid unfolded half a world away yielded one of the most famous inside-the-room photographs in presidential history, Pete Souza’s portrait of 14 people crammed into a White House Situation Room anteroom—a moment of high drama that included Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and two future current Cabinet secretaries.
The full story of how, and why, America’s top security officials decided to pull the trigger that night in May has never been told. This oral history—the story inside the West Wing and U.S. intelligence agencies as Neptune’s Spear coalesced over the fall of 2010 and spring of 2011—is based on extensive original interviews with nearly 30 key intelligence and national security leaders, White House staff, and presidential aides—including some who have never spoken publicly before, and roughly half of those pictured in Souza’s famous photograph. Their accounts, from the White House, CIA headquarters and Afghanistan itself, paint a never-before-seen view of the most momentous decision of Barack Obama’s presidency.
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