Ten Years After Bin Laden, We Still Need Better Intelligence Sharing
Leaders should still apply the lessons we learned, when contending with China and Russia. May 1, 2021 08:00 AM ET
It was a typical Sunday afternoon at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. As the senior intelligence officer for the command, I was at work and we were monitoring the conclusion of an operation in Yemen. As I left the small operations room, I saw Gen. Jim Mattis, the CENTCOM commander, and our operations officer, Vice Adm. Kevin “Kid” Donegan, at the end of the hallway. As I approached General Mattis, he looked at me in a very factual and unemotional way, and said, “We just got bin Laden.”
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email Teamwork Led Us to Bin Laden and Can Keep America Safe
As we look back on the Osama bin Laden raid of a decade ago, three lessons stand out.
Osama bin Laden didn’t have time to react. At 12:30 a.m. local time on May 2, 2011, bin Laden and his family were sound asleep when two dozen operators from America’s elite counterterrorism teams swooped into his compound and made their way up to his bedroom on the third floor of a large villa in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Within moments, America’s most wanted terrorist was dead, the culmination of a 10-year manhunt by U.S. intelligence that pinpointed his precise location on that moonless night.
Osama Bin Laden
In the universe of historic photographs, few are more iconic this this image of key White House policymakers watching and waiting for confirmation that SEAL Team Six had succeeded in capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. Although this photo is known as the “Situation Room”
It took nearly a decade following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. for American intelligence authorities to realize that al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden mastermind of the 9/11 plot hadn’t been skulking in a cave or a remote tribal
On May 2, 2011, the United States military killed and buried Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader behind the 9/11 attacks. U.S. Special Forces took him out during a raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan where he and some of his family were hiding out. After identifying his
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