How a Courier's Trail Led to bin Laden's Compound

The trail to Osama bin Laden's compound started with a name that wasn't a name.

After 9/11, detainees gave American interrogators the nom de guerre of a man described as one of the few couriers bin Laden personally trusted — Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The pseudonym sat in the files for years. It wasn't until 2007 that intelligence agencies learned his real identity, and it took two more years of painstaking tracking before analysts could place him and his brother operating in Pakistan.

In August 2010, the courier's trail led to a house in Abbottabad that made analysts sit up. Everything about it was wrong for the neighborhood: a plot roughly eight times larger than surrounding homes, walls twelve to eighteen feet high, two security gates, its own seven-foot privacy wall — and, for a multimillion-dollar home, no telephone line and no internet connection. The residents burned their trash instead of putting it out like their neighbors.

Then came the detail that turned suspicion into near-certainty: intelligence indicated a third family lived there, and its size and makeup matched what was believed to be bin Laden's. The working assessment was that bin Laden was living there with his youngest wife. No single piece was proof, but taken together, analysts concluded no other candidate fit the compound nearly as well.

The intelligence was shared with no other country. Only a small circle inside the U.S. government knew in advance.

On the night of May 2, Pakistani time, a team of Navy SEALs flew in by helicopter, stormed the compound, and killed bin Laden in a firefight. The courier who had carried bin Laden's secrets for years had, in the end, carried the Americans straight to him.