failure, high. >> would rather die than be captured. >> at the end of the day it was a leap of faith. >> reporter: friday, april 29th, just after 8:20 a.m., the mission begins. the president gives the go. >> the president, after a long night's sleep, he basically came in and immediately told his staff you have the green light. let's go. >> reporter: as president obama departs for the tornado-ravaged south, the u.s. military's best-kept secret is underway. >> the troops were ready and in place. the equipment was ready to go. the plan had been practiced again and again and again. >> reporter: america's most-wanted man may finally be in reach, osama bin laden. the architect of 9/11 had eluded the world's most powerful nation for more than a decade. >> the trail was quite cold. >> reporter: former cia director michael hayden recalls the early misfires. >> most of what we had looked many more like elvis sightings rather than substantive intelligence. >> u.s. intelligence zeroed in on this compound. >> an unusual compound. unusual in security, unnushl the size and frankly unusual in its location. >> reporter: it's location, just over a mile from pakistan's premier military academy, north of islamabad. the compound was discovered after tracking down bin laden's trusted courier. >> one of my sources said to me, you know, one of the reason ares it was so interesting to us is we knew bin laden was in the construction business, and this was well constructed. >> reporter: more clues begin to emerge from behind the 18-foot high walls. >> what they began to notice is the occupants burned their trash. they couldn't determine there was any internet access or telephone in this compound. >> there was a lack of things they did that was interesting. for a family that lived there for several years who never went to the movies or grocery shopping. >> reporter: to build a better case, cia director leon panetta looks for any guarantee bin laden is inside. >> problem was, we were never really certain whether or not bin laden was there. we noticed an sprij who was pacing in the courtyard had some of the appearances of it but we were never able to verify that, in fact, it was him. >> this was a circumstantial case. and i've heard a lot of percentages thrown around. some say 50/50. some say 60/40, whatever. certainly not 100% clear identification of osama bin laden. >> reporter: there's no smoking gun. no photograph of bin laden, just a tall shadowy figure in a come nund arises suspicion. still the goods are good enough for panetta to make a case to the president. >> i think the argument was, this is the best chance we've ever had. the odds have never been higher and if we don't take this opportunity the odds may never be this good again. >> reporter: panetta tapped special operations commander vice admiral william mccrave on then to action an action plan. three options are put on the table. >> one was go in and bomb it, obliterate it. the problem with that is you probably wouldn't have a body left an you couldn't show evidence that osama bin laden was really there. the next option was to send in an unmanned drone with a missile, a predator. >> reporter: both scenarios are ruled out for fear of collateral damage. leaving the riskiest game plan of all, a commando style assault. >> everything could have gone wrong but the reward was that if it worked they would come out with a body. they'd come out with the dna analysis. >> reporter: president obama shared what weighed on his mind a cbs interview on "60 minutes." >> these guys are going in the darkest of night and they don't know what they will find there. they don't know if the building is rigged. they don't know if there are explosives that are triggered by a particular door opening. so huge risks that these guys are taking. and, so, my number one concern was, if i send them in, can i get them out? >> reporter: those men, willing to risk everything. navy s.e.a.l.s, known as team 6, a covert commando force hu-ya! >> made up of the military's best like former navy s.e.a.l. howard watts son. >> it is like being part of an elite football team that made it to the super bowl. >> reporter: his super bowl came in 19939 during a raid against a somali war lord, shot three times he nearly lost his right leg. >> i started to think then, i'm really not going to make it out of here. this is it. i'm going to die today. >> reporter: the battle better known as blackhawk down left 18 americans dead and scores wounded. a failure wattson says because the security of the mission was compromised. >> we were in there with the united nations and these guys did not know how to keep operational security. >> reporter: painful memories of blackhawk down would trouble the president and his advisers. the decision is made to keep pakistan in the dark. >> to not tip them off in order to maintain the secrecy shows, number one, there's not a lot of trust between the u.s. and pakistan right now but number two, it showed this was an even bigger gamble. >> reporter: that april morning in alabama, surround by the wreckage of mother nature, president obama hides any sign of worry. >> he really kept a pretty good game face on to not let the public on at all that there was something cooking behind the scene. >> reporter: a high-risk plan is in motion but the ghost of tora bora will haunt the mission to get bin laden. are energy securiy and economic growth. north america actually has one of the largest oil reserves in the world. a large part of that is oil sands. this resource has the ability to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. at our kearl project in canada, we'll be able to produce these oil sands with the same emissions as many other oils and that's a huge breakthrough. that's good for our country's energy security and our economy. 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concern that a large deployment of american troops would provoke a backlash, the americans are, in effect, out sourceing the hunt for bin laden. using cases of cash. >> we paid the enemy off to get them to surrender at times. we used cash as an ally tool. it was quite effective. >> reporter: within weeks, afghanistan is falling. bin laden is on the run. east to the mountains, nestled among the 14,000-foot peaks, a complex of save r caves known as tora bora. >> it was an excellent place to hide because bin laden would spend many years living in and around the region. he had a house with a small rudiment tri swimming pool, a bakery, a whole setup there and a little mini jihadist king dochl it was his country retreat. >> six years later, a journalist interviewed bin laden here, in a cave, turned in to a command center. >> he told me that he feels safe in this cave. he knows that area very well and he knows it is very difficult for anybody to come and follow him there. >> reporter: but now bin bib la is being followed. >> we paid a number of afghans. >> the journalists gather thoend mountainside there. >> reporter: tim lister was part of the cnn team covering the war. >> we outnumbered the u.s. personnel on the ground. >> reporter: the americans call for air strikes and they come with thundering force. >> we brought in specter gunships that can put a bullet on every inch of a football field. >> the amount of ordinance that was dropped in the area over two weeks almost defies belief. the mountains were rearranged. >> reporter: the radio stripped from a dead al qaeda fighter, the americans hear bill bin laden trying to rally his men. >> we listen to him apologizing for having led them to this trap and where they were having air strikes called on them relentlessly. >> reporter: with bin laden in the cross hairs, burnson wants u.s. ground forces sent in to finish the job. >> in the first two or three days of december i would write a message back to washington, recommending the insertion of u.s. forces on the ground. i was looking for 600 to 800 rangers, roughly a battalion. they never came. >> reporter: instead, the u.s. relies on its hired guns. >> it was not a professional military source by any stretch of the imagination, some took bribes to look the other way. >> reporter: out sourcing fails and bin latden vanished to the mountains. >> bin lad an 180 escape. >> the moral of the story is to capture someone as resourceful as bin laden who has so many local contacts and friends you have to do the job yourself. >> reporter: though he has disappeared, his threats continue. >> the fact he communicated through video and audiotapes, i don't think that is a sign of weakness. he had a choice which was to say nothing and be relevant or to continue to say things publicly and stay relevant and he chose the latter. so his message continued to resonate, even when he was on the run. >> reporter: with a $25 million bounty on his head, bin laden is now the most wanted man on the planet. ttd# 1-800-345-2550 ttd# 1-800-345-2550 ttd# 1-800-345-2550 and talk to chuck about ttd# 1-800-345-2550 rolling over that old 401k. >> in the years after tora bora, bin laden seems to have vanished, appearing only in video messages that mysteriously materialize, but leave no trace of his whereabouts. general michael hayden headed up the cia at the time. >> for most of my time in office, i would even publicly say the trail was quite cold. we didn't have a lot of evidence in which we had much confidence. >> reporter: tough interrogations of al qaeda detainees, some at secret prisons, begin to provide the clues that will lead to a compound in pakistan, the mansion hideout of osama bin laden. >> we began to focus, drill down on the courier network as perhaps a way to chase after bin laden. we knew he was communicating. but we were convinced he could not be possibly be communicating electronically. otherwise we would have picked that up. so it had to be human to human contact, hence a courier system. >> among the people who detained soon after tora bora was abu ahmed al kuwaiti . he was not admitted to the united states. according to this interrogation log obtained by "time" magazine the would be 9/11 hijacker does not give up information easily to investigators at guantanamo bay. so they subject him to standing nude and to having pictures of scantily clad women hung around his neck. according to this fbi letter, they also make him endure months of intense isolation in a cell, always flooded with light. at some point, he starts talking. >> as far as we can tell, from look at the detainee assessments that were published by wikileaks, he mentioned quite a lot of names and one of those he mentioned was this gentleman, abu ahmed al kuwaiti who, it turns out was a courier. >> reporter: a courier who had been with osama bin laden at tora bora. a tantalizing tidbit, but is it the one nugget out of thousands that's worth pursuing? >> you could sense the trail getting warmer. >> reporter: hayden credits the enhanced interrogation techniques or eits. >> we actually found out the eits were productive. look, honest men can differ as to whether or not they want their country doing them. i understand that. that's an honorable position, but a lot of folks like to make the argument, i don't want you doing it and it didn't work. i have not met anyone who's actually been involved in this program who would say this didn't work. >> reporter: amid much controversy, water boarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were banned by president obama shortly after he took office. but the story of the trail that led to bin laden has reopened the debate. steven kleinman is an experienced military interrogator. >> i have spent 27 years now, all in human intelligence related activities. most on active duty in the air force and the remander in the air force reserve. to get information on a consistent reliable basis, coercion is not the way to go. >> given how much we learned from detainees in the first three or four years after 9/11 it is hard to conceive of an operation like the one that happened a couple of weeks ago taking place without relying on information that we got from this program. >> i have a number of colleagues from the fbi and the military who had more direct access to what was going on with those interrogations than i who suggest that coercion was not involved. >> reporter: whatever techniques the interrogators are using, they are finally taking the first steps along the path that will take them to osama bin laden's front door. >> what they had was not the courier's name, but a nickname. and it took them a couple more years to try and figure out who this courier was, whether or not the courier was important or not important. one of the interesting things here is that they went to khalid shaikh mohammed and al libby, ka leeld shake mohammad had been water boarded 183 times. >> they asked him what he knows about the courier. >> and khalid shaikh mohammed was completely dismissive, completely dismissive of who this person wud was and said, not important. and it was the lie, as my source said, that was alerting. the lie of khalid shaikh mohammed the lie of al libby, those two men lying about this courier made them understand that, in fact, the courier was actually important because they knew from other sources that the courier had been a protege of ksm. and he made it believe he didn't know who it was. so bingo, right? so then they had to go about finding him. >> reporter: investigators established the courier's name and begin to monitor his family's phone calls and e-mails. >> once they have established one cell phone call, then it was a question of making inquiries at the ground level, listening for any further calls. they were beginning to close in on him at this stage. what we believe happened is that abu ahmed al kuwaiti was tracked to a particular vehicle and once they found that vehicle, perhaps, in the environment, there was a question of waiting to see where he went. >> last august, august of 2010, they finally had the courier lead them to the compound. and my source said to me, one of my sources said to me, when we got a picture of that compound, we said, wow. this is different. >> reporter: despite constant surveillance, there's never 100% certainty that osama bin laden is inside. but back in the united states, an elite force has begun to trade for a top-secret mission, getting bin laden. in 2011, at&, building up our wireless network all across america. we're adding new cell sites... increasing network capacity, and investing billions of dollars to improve your wireless network experience. from a single phone call to the most advanced data download, we're covering more people in more places than ever before in an effort to give you the best network possible. at&t. rethink possible. the place they've been searching for. staples. the one place that makes it easy to 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see what a raymond james advisor can do for you. personal pricing now on brakes. tell us what you want to pay. we do our best to make that work. deal! my money. my choice. my meineke. i'm don lemon. here's the headlines this hour. new video in to cnn this hour. two gates were open doubling the amount of water pouring in to the basin. it is too late for some residents in saint francisville. the water was so much higher than anyone had seen before. a man in charge of hundreds of billions of the world's money is sitting in a new york city jail cell on attempted rape charges. dominique strauss-kahn is accused of sexually assaulting a maid at a luxury hotel where he was staying near times square. dominique strauss-kahn is the head of the international monetary fund, an organization that oversees the world economy. his attorneys say he will plead not guilty when he is arraigned this evening. those are the headlines this hour. we return now to "inside the mission: getting bin laden." >> osama bin laden has survived attack, eluded detection, and hidden away for ten years. but finally, u.s. intelligence believes they've found him. now, it will take an ambitious plan to get bin laden. it will take some of the best of the american military. it will take the navy s.e.a.l.s. >> they are very highly trained. they do a lot of very tough jobs around the world. these are the commandos. these are the ones that were going to kick down the door, take osama bin laden, dead or alive, and get the job done. >> reporter: for an elite unit, a special kind of sailor. >> the heart and soul of the navy s.e.a.l. is somebody who is committed to their country and their teammates. >> i think it is somebody who want tobs part of the best. i want to really do something special and that is the s.e.a.l. motto, you want to be special, prove it. >> reporter: proving it means, surviving a training program so long, and so tough that most don't make it. they call it -- >> basic underwater s.e.a.l. school. it all starts there. my class started around 126 or 130 and graduated 22 to 25. >> hu-ya! >> every day begins with physical training, miles of swimming, running, hundreds of situps, pushups, all before the day's real work begins. even more important, than preparing the body is preparing the mind. case and point, an exercise called drown proofing. >> candidates hands are tied behind their back and feet in the water and you better remain calm. control your breathing and heart rate. they tell you day one at buds, mental toughness, not physical toughness. what is between the ears that keeps the body going. >> reporter: then comes hell week. six days, little sleep. submerged in frigid water, or running hundreds of miles. >> the important thing to remember about that 200 miles, you are running that 200 miles with a boat on your head. you have to paddle out in those boats, dump the boats over and right them. paddle back in, t