Free The Hunt for bin Laden by Tom Shroder

extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it, U.S. officials said.
    Those watching the compound were stunned to realize that whenever Kuwaiti or others left it to make a call, they drove about 90 minutes away before even placing a battery in a cellphone. Turning on the phone made it susceptible to the kind of electronic surveillance residents of the compound clearly wished to avoid.
    As intelligence officials scrutinized images of the compound, they saw that a man emerged most days to stroll the grounds of the courtyard for an hour or two. The man walked back and forth, day after day, and soon analysts began calling him “the pacer.” The imagery never provided a clear view of his face.
    Intelligence officials were reluctant to bring in other means of technical or human surveillance that might offer a positive identification but would risk detection by those in the compound. The pacer never left the compound. His routine suggested he was not just a shut-in but almost a prisoner.
    Was the pacer bin Laden? A decoy? A hoax? A setup?
    Bin Laden was at least 6-foot-4, and the pacer seemed to have the gait of a tall man. The White House asked the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which provides and analyzes satellite imagery, to determine the pacer’s height, but the best it could do was place the man’s height somewhere between 5-foot-8 and 6-foot-8, according to one official.
    The problem was a lack of information about the size of the building’s windows or the thickness of the compound’s walls, which could have served as reference points. No U.S. spy agency was ever able to capture a photograph of bin Laden at the compound before the raid or a recording of the voice of the mysterious male figure whose family occupied the structure’s top two floors.

 
    ‘If You See It, Shoot It’
    By the middle of February, President Obama determined that there was a sound intelligence basis for developing courses of action in case the hunch that the mysterious pacer was bin Laden proved correct.
    In the ensuing months, Obama took charge of monitoring the operation at the White House, chairing five meetings of his National Security Council for updates, senior administration officials said. U.S. officials did not share any details about the operation in advance with any foreign governments, including Pakistan’s, whose leaders would be informed only afterward. A “very small number” of people within the U.S. government knew about it, a senior official said.
    In one White House meeting, CIA Director Leon Panetta told Obama and other top national security officials that although those tracking the compound were seeing the pacer nearly every day, they could not conclude with certainty that it was bin Laden, officials said. Panetta noted that there was no signals intelligence — cell or sat-phone intercepts, sound recordings, video — available and contended that it was too risky to send in a human spy or move any closer with electronic devices.
    Obama and his advisers debated the options, officials said. One option was to fire a missile from a Predator or Reaper aerial drone. It would be low-risk, but if the result was a direct hit, the pacer might be vaporized and officials would never be certain if they had killed bin Laden. If the drone attack missed, as had happened in some other attacks on high-value targets, bin Laden or whoever was living in the compound would flee and the United States would have to start the hunt from scratch.
    Panetta designated Navy Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, who had headed the Joint Special Operations Command for nearly three years, to devise a boots-on-the ground plan for the special forces that became known as “the McRaven Option.”
    McRaven had increased the intensity of Special Operations raids, especially in Afghanistan. During his first two years as head of JSOC,