Revealed The Hunt For Bin Laden

We all know how the story ends and think we know how it unfolded, but here, for the first time, is the official and authoritative story of the ten-year global search for Osama bin Laden, culminating in the May 2011 raid by U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan. Reading like the world's greatest action thriller, and with never-before-read first-person accounts and never-before-seen artifacts, this indispensable resource documents one of the most dramatic missions in American history. Based on the 9/11 Museum's special exhibition, Revealed draws on exclusive interviews with President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Admiral William McRaven, the mission commander, all woven together with oral histories from the SEALs who participated in the mission and the intelligence officers and analysts who tracked bin Laden down. Illustrations include surveillance imagery, maps, and the famous model of the Abbottabad compound--built to brief the president on options and used by the SEAL command to plan the raid--all being made public for the first time.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling Holy War, Inc., this is the definitive account of the decade-long manhunt for the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda expert and CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen paints a multidimensional picture of the hunt for Osama bin Laden over the past decade, including the operation that killed him. Other key elements of the book will include: - A careful account of Obama's decision-making process as the raid was planned - The fascinating story of a group of women CIA analysts who never gave up assembling the tiniest clues about bin Laden's whereabouts - The untold and action-packed history of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the SEALs - An analysis of what the death of bin Laden means for Al Qaeda and for Obama's legacy Just as Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler was the definitive account of the death of the Nazi dictator, Manhunt is the authoritative, immersive account of the death of the man who organized the largest mass murder in American history.

The long and secret effort to track down Osama bin Laden has been called the biggest, costliest manhunt in history. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post, this reconstruction- compiled from reporting from more than two-dozen Washington Post correspondents and staffers from over more than 15 years- traces the hunt from its beginnings in 1997, during the Clinton administration. THE HUNT FOR BIN LADEN is a behind-the-scenes narrative that reveals the fourteen-year, billion-dollar effort that brought the hunt to a swift and conclusive end, including: The numerous times CIA agents had bin Laden in their crosshairs prior to 9/11, only to have missions canceled at the last moment. Vivid details of bin Laden’s behavior in the wake of the attacks on September 11th. The myriad of ways he evaded detection in his years on the lam, including his narrow escape from the caves and tunnels of Tora Bora. How the war in Iraq drained resources and diverted the spotlight from the hunt, turning the mission to kill or capture bin Laden into a back-burner operation and political liability for the Bush administration. It wasn't until the Iraq war began to wind down that the search gained its endgame momentum, the Post shows, reclassified as a highest priority again by a new president. How increasingly punishing drone attacks, interrogations of captured al Qaeda operatives, and an ever-expanding network of informants finally began to yield a trail that led to bin Laden’s courier, a cell phone interception, and ultimately, bin Laden.

The gripping account of the decade-long hunt for the world's most wanted man. It was only a week before 9/11 that Peter Bergen turned in the manuscript of Holy War, Inc., the story of Osama bin Laden--whom Bergen had once interviewed in a mud hut in Afghanistan--and his declaration of war on America. The book became a New York Times bestseller and the essential portrait of the most formidable terrorist enterprise of our time. Now, in Manhunt, Bergen picks up the thread with this taut yet panoramic account of the pursuit and killing of bin Laden. Here are riveting new details of bin Laden’s flight after the crushing defeat of the Taliban to Tora Bora, where American forces came startlingly close to capturing him, and of the fugitive leader’s attempts to find a secure hiding place. As the only journalist to gain access to bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound before the Pakistani government demolished it, Bergen paints a vivid picture of bin Laden’s grim, Spartan life in hiding and his struggle to maintain control of al-Qaeda even as American drones systematically picked off his key lieutenants. Half a world away, CIA analysts haunted by the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 and the WMD fiasco pored over the tiniest of clues before homing in on the man they called "the Kuwaiti"--who led them to a peculiar building with twelve-foot-high walls and security cameras less than a mile from a Pakistani military academy. This was the courier who would unwittingly steer them to bin Laden, now a prisoner of his own making but still plotting to devastate the United States. Bergen takes us inside the Situation Room, where President Obama considers the COAs (courses of action) presented by his war council and receives conflicting advice from his top advisors before deciding to risk the raid that would change history--and then inside the Joint Special Operations Command, whose "secret warriors," the SEALs, would execute Operation Neptune Spear. From the moment two Black Hawks take off from Afghanistan until bin Laden utters his last words, Manhunt reads like a thriller. Based on exhaustive research and unprecedented access to White House officials, CIA analysts, Pakistani intelligence, and the military, this is the definitive account of ten years in pursuit of bin Laden and of the twilight of al-Qaeda.

Chronicles the final months of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

The world’s leading expert on Osama bin Laden delivers for the first time the “riveting” (The New York Times) definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today. In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergan provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long war with al-Qaeda and its decedents, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, depending on his two wives, both of whom had PhDs, to make critical strategic decisions. Yet, he also brought ruin to his family. He was fanatically religious but willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam. He inspired deep loyalty, yet, in the end, his bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals. In his final years, the lasting image we have of bin Laden is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself, just as another dad flipping through the channels with his remote. In the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound, far from the front lines of his holy war. And yet, despite that unheroic denouement, his ideology lives on. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s “comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling” (H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World) portrait of Osama bin Laden reveals for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.

Looks at America's search for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, from his addition to the FBI's list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives in 1999 to the intensive global manhunt still underway in 2004.