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♪

[Crowd cheering]

TV ANNOUNCER: We will hear

from the President of the United States.

He will address the country in mere moments now,

speaking from the east room.

It is going to be a confirmation of a huge development.

BARACK OBAMA: Good evening.

Tonight, I can report to the American people

and to the world--

the United States has conducted an operation that killed

Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda.

Tonight we give thanks to the countless intelligence

and counterterrorism professionals

who worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome.

OBAMA: The American people do not see their work,

nor know their names,

but tonight they feel the satisfaction of their work.

♪

[Man speaking foreign language]

♪

WOMAN, VOICE-OVER: I think women make fantastic analysts.

We have patience and perseverance.

And we're not always looking for the sexy payoff immediately.

DIFFERENT WOMAN, VOICE-OVER: You know, trying to keep track

of all the threads of various threats,

and which ones are real and which ones aren't real

and what connects to what.

And, you know, people say,

"Why didn't you connect the dots?"

"Well, because the whole page is black?"

DIFFERENT WOMAN, VOICE-OVER: To pull a story

out of all of this information,

but there is no one single intelligence looking

at all this information.

It's a lot of different brains looking.

So the more that you can bring people together

and, you know, share what's important,

the better it works.

At that time, the people who had

really deep expertise in al-Qaeda...

you know, they were women.

And they did a job that at first did not make them

very popular with their managers.

I was counseled once in a performance review

that I was spending too much time working on bin Laden.

[Chuckles]

They said we were obsessed crusaders,

overly emotional.

You know, using all those women's stereotypes.

Men throw chairs. Women cry.

I ask you, Which one is better?

Yes, we were borderline obsessed,

but I thought it was for a good reason.

And were we crusading?

I wouldn't call it a crusade.

Were we passionate about what they were doing?

Absolutely.

And that's another bureaucratic norm of the time.

You weren't supposed to be passionate about anything,

which I think is ridiculous.

How can you do something like this without passion?

You can't.

[Osama bin Laden speaking foreign language]

DIFFERENT WOMAN: "Take a stand. We drove out the Russians.

"We destroyed the Russian empire.

"Now we'll drive out the Americans

"and we'll destroy the U.S. empire.

It worked then, it'll work here."

He felt like the United States

was driving a world movement against Muslims

and was the driver for everything

that was happening that was bad.

[Osama bin Laden speaking foreign language on recording]

CINDY STORER: Your starting point is Afghanistan.

Abdullah Azzam is the godfather of the Afghan jihad.

He is the one who called everyone to go and fight

in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

He helped set up a council of charities to bring

people and money to help with jihad.

And his partner was Osama bin Laden.

SUSAN HASLER: A link chart is the visual representation

of a terrorist network.

And it's what terrorism analysts spend

much of their time building.

STORER: My mental image is that, you know, I'm doing

Jacob's ladder.

You've got the string where you're pulling

the strings in your fingers.

I feel like that's what I'm doing mentally.

♪

STORER: Well, we certainly didn't know

that al-Qaeda existed.

We didn't know there was a terrorist organization.

We knew there was a very wealthy man

named Osama bin Laden,

who was funding a lot of terrorist groups.

We knew that there were people from terrorist groups

from all over the world, hanging out in Afghanistan

and in bin Laden's circle.

So you start to see signs of what looks like

an organization.

But is this bin Laden as a financial manager

with a bunch of companies funding

various terrorist groups

or is there a separate terrorist group here?

And that was a big question.

♪

Even in the analytical community, there's

a relatively smaller percentage of people

who are really good at making sense

of information that doesn't appear to be connected.

So this is what we call pattern analysis--

trying to figure out what things look like.

And those people, you really need those people to work

on an issue like terrorism, counter-narcotic,

international arms trafficking

because you've got

bits and pieces of scattered information

from all over the place

and you have to try to make some sense of it.

And these are organizations--

certainly al-Qaeda was one--

didn't even want to announce their presence to the world

for a long time.

You have to try to figure out they're there

when they're trying to deny, even to their friends,

that they exist.

That takes this talent, which is also a skill,

and people would refer to it as magic.

Not the analysts doing it,

but other people who didn't have that talent

referred to it as magic.

What I have here are four half-dollars.

MAN, VOICE-OVER: When you're following

an intelligence event, sometimes things move

and change in ways that you can't see.

You might think it's in one place,

and it pops up in another,

and you can't see how that happens.

MAN: So these coins are gonna jump one at a time

from here all the way over to here.

But they're going to do it invisibly.

1, 2, 3, 4. Watch.

See it jump? Heh. Heh.

JOHN McLAUGHLIN, VOICE-OVER: Reality is changing

all the time.

A single fact may come in which dramatically changes

your understanding and your projection

of where something's going.

McLAUGHLIN: Two and two.

Are you with me?

McLAUGHLIN, VOICE-OVER: Now, an analyst

in the intelligence profession

is dealing with highly ambiguous situations

in which information is arriving incrementally,

in fragments.

Are you with me?

McLAUGHLIN, VOICE-OVER: You never get the whole picture.

The picture changes as these pieces arrive.

Your perception of reality changes.

You have to be very clear about what you concretely

know and what you don't know.

♪

Alec Station was a collection of people

who had backgrounds in everything

from analysis to operations.

When you think about the CIA,

there's a few different cultures there.

One is an analytic culture--

people who try to assess things,

figure out what is actually happening somewhere

and project ahead--

and an operational culture,

that is, people who go out and collect intelligence,

develop human spies,

handle them, run them, if you will.

♪

The unique thing about Alec Station was

the fusion of analysis and operations.

We pushed the analysts and the operations people

together, so the operations people knew everything

the analysts were thinking

and the analysts knew everything

the operations people were doing.

Covertly, clandestinely, secretly, dangerously.

And the fusion of those two things gave

that organization the magic it had.

STORER: The people I worked with in the beginning were

six women.

I walked in my first day there.

I turned around to my colleagues--

this is a bay of six analysts--

and I said, "Does anybody have any Tums?"

And all these drawers open

with these gigantic bottles!

I thought, "Oh, my God.

What have I done to myself?" Ha ha!

When I moved over, there was

a group of women that I reached out to.

We were trying to protect the United States.

Whether we could do that,

it's a big...it's a big burden.

I was drawn to those women

because of the job that they were doing.

I mean, substantively they were so immersed in finding

bin Laden and tracking,

and some of them had been around working

this subject matter for so long

that they were the people I went to.

It wasn't even because they were women.

Gina Bennett was a mentor of mine and still is.

She worked on al-Qaeda for 20 years.

Gina and Barbara, they put a stake in the ground

and said, "It's OK if we're not operations officers.

We can be just as effective."

BARBARA SUDE: The rest of the organization

didn't necessarily think much of terrorism analysts.

They said, "Well, the terrorism people are just tracking

"things. That's not-- real analysis.

That's just tracking things."

So we poor, lowly terrorism analysts,

we were tracking things.

You're gonna have certain kinds of people who are

going to be the first ones to see something.

When you're the first one

off the block, by definition

you're going to be in the minority.

That's what we were.

NADA BAKOS: She was very dedicated to her job.

She was there a lot.

STORER: You know, Jennifer was one of that first group,

and she was always very intense, very focused,

really passionate about it from the beginning

and a real hard-charger from the beginning.

Jennifer was focused on finding bin Laden.

She was adamant that she was gonna stay around

on that team until it was done.

♪

She could be really abrasive.

[Laughs]

Yeah, but, you know, teams are made up

of people with all different kinds of personalities.

And at the end of the day, that doesn't really matter.

What matters is getting the job done.

And she certainly could do that.

We had a camaraderie.

And in the beginning, we were such a small organization

that we really had a very close relationship.

♪

[Birds chirping]

BAKOS: On the operations side,

this is where all the spies work.

STORER: Which are the ones you always see in the movies

running around recruiting assets

and playing James Bond or whatever.

It is dangerous. It is dangerous.

These guys need confidence to be able to pull that off.

BAKOS: There is a fair amount of bravado.

You know, we're case officers, right?

We're the jet fighters, we're the gangsters,

we're the doers.

You know, analysts? Come on, man.

I think a component of the personality

in some cases for the job.

There's varying degrees of that.

♪

MAN, VOICE-OVER: I was out in the bush, in that arena,

downrange, regardless of environment.

Often times, you see in the movies--

you talk about agents.

You know, he's a CIA agent.

Well, the agents are the people we recruit.

"Hi. I'm CIA. I'm assigned to this embassy.

Would you like to be a spy?"

That's why it doesn't work that way.

MARTY MARTIN: A case officer's job is to spot,

assess, and develop...

♪

find people who have access to secrets,

get to know them,

get them to trust you,

recruit them,

and then keep them safe.

In my particular experience, because I do speak Arabic...

[Marty Martin speaking foreign language]

I have been asked to meet some of our friends

in risky areas, dangerous areas.

Obviously, you need to get to the point

of building trust.

They look in your face, and they see an American

who has risked a lot to get there

to sit down and meet with them.

They do believe, honestly, that you care

for their welfare, you care for them,

and you respect what they're providing you with.

You're playing this chess game.

[Osama bin Laden dialogue continues]

MAN, VOICE-OVER: He was recruiting

basically very idealistic Saudi university students

to come to fight the Soviets.

Then some of them went to Afghanistan,

including bin Laden himself.

♪

It's intensely religious.

I mean, coming here was

an intensely religious experience

for these very idealistic young Muslim men.

And, you know, these magazines have many stories

about people being martyred fighting the Soviets

and their bodies don't decompose

or their bodies smell of perfume.

And this was a highly effective propaganda to get

other people to come and volunteer.

[Osama bin Laden speaking foreign language continues]

PETER BERGEN: This magazine called "Jihad"

was on sale in countries around the Islamic world.

The very first copy was published in 1984.

There's a guy called Abu Abdullah

in these magazines, and that was bin Laden.

No one really knew who bin Laden was at the time.

[Osama bin Laden speaking foreign language]

STORER: So during the Afghan-Soviet war,

the camps were set up by bin Laden and others

to train Afghans and people from--

who came from all over the world

to go and fight against the Soviets.

♪

Towards the end of the war, some of these camps

got converted over

into urban guerilla warfare camps.

And this is as, what we now know

was al-Qaeda, were taking over some of these camps,

and they were starting to train people

to conduct urban guerilla warfare

in various countries, like Egypt and Algeria.

♪

One of the prominent figures in the training camps

in Afghanistan is a gentleman who went

by the war name of Abu Zubaydah.

He was definitely running parts of the camps network.

♪

So now it's after the war in the early nineties.

We started to get all these reports

about things blowing up all over the world,

who were from people who had fought in Afghanistan.

So that's when we started to say to ourselves,

What is going on here?

Let's try to figure out, Is there some kind of

an organization?

Is it a social movement? What is it?

And we're starting to warn,

"Look this is going to be a problem."

And we actually issued some of that warning

before the first World Trade Center bombing.

[Sirens]

[Vehicle horns honking]

Ramzi Yousef, I'm sure, everybody knows

from the first World Trade Center attack.

He is the cousin/nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

and the attack was partly funded

by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

[Helicopter]

The same year there is the incident referred to

as the Black Hawk Down incident.

[Gunfire in distance]

We didn't learn until later the extent to which

al-Qaeda at least was involved.

[People chanting in foreign language]

STORER: These plots are multiple nationalities.

This is not your typical events, right?

We can't pin this on any one terrorist group.

What's going on here?

Oh, I mean, it was bin Laden.

There was no doubt that the common purpose had to be

bin Laden.

All of a sudden, it just hit me

that this is a bureaucracy.

[Osama bin Laden speaking foreign language]

STORER: So by 1998, we were able to say with confidence

this is a worldwide terrorist organization.

Bin Laden is the head of this organization.

Their goal is global jihad.

They want to create a global Islamic government.

It's not just about Saudi Arabia.

There was still some debate what it was called

because some said it was called the Islamic Army.

It was my analytical judgment

that it was called al-Qaeda.

♪

BERGEN: At that time in '97, Osama bin Laden

had declared war on the United States

in an Arab language newspaper,

and no one paid any attention.

You know, the case that I made to them was, you know,

if you're going to declare war on the United States,

don't do it on the BBC.

Do it on an American network.

And CNN is seen all around the world.

And also we have a reputation for being fair.

It was a lengthy process.

They were very concerned.

"Are you agents of the CIA?"

"Will you give Osama bin Laden a fair shake

if we allow you to do this interview?"

Eventually after a month or so, we got the sort of

coded message that we're gonna go and see bin Laden.

♪

BERGEN: They picked us up at dusk

in a van sort of like this, right?

Yeah, very similar to this. Yeah.

But in the evening. Yeah.

Yeah, in the evening. Yeah.

And then they gave us the sunglasses

that had cardboard inside them.

Right. And sort of crude blindfolds.

That's right.

Did they put those on-- immediately on us?

Yep, they did. Right.

[Vehicle horn honks]

PETER JOUVENAL: The interesting thing is

that when you go to Kabul,

you go through these tunnels.

So the fact that we were blindfolded,

you could hear-- feel the change

in air pressure and actually hear

the difference in sound in the tunnel.

So you had something of a good idea

of where we were heading?

Yeah, yep.

And on the other side of this,

this is where al-Qaeda had its

chemical weapons,

crude chemical weapons facility.

Straight down. Yeah.

BERGEN: So we got to--sort of

this plateau, right?

I think it was about 6,000 feet up maybe

or something like that.

Something like that, yeah.

And there was a small village,

the type that would be used by shepherds

to put their sheep in at night.

Yeah.

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: Peter Arnett was a correspondent.

He was at the time arguably the most famous

journalist in the world.

JOUVENAL, VOICE-OVER: They put carpets down,

so they made it respectable.

And then, as I recall, we waited

for some period of time

and had some sort of goat-like dinner.

That's right, yeah...

BERGEN: This is, like, the hostage video.

Yeah, the hostage video.

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: Do you recall when he came in?

JOUVENAL, VOICE-OVER: Yep.

BERGEN: And he shook your hand, right?

Yep. Yep.

Do you remember what that felt like?

It was sort of like a dead fish.

I mean, it wasn't a strong grasp.

Cold, a bit like...

[unintelligible].

I compare it sometimes

to a bank manager's shake, you know?

[Laughs]

PETER ARNETT: Thank you, Mr. bin Laden.

TRANSLATOR: Is there anything you'd like to add?

Hmm?

Anything you'd like to add?

We should change the tape.

PETER ARNETT: I think we'll just relax a minute,

I think. BERGEN: OK, fine.

Just relax now.

PETER ARNETT: Just get my knees.

I'm not used to this.

[Chuckles]

MAN: Not quite finished. The feed...

Well, Mr. bin Laden's voice is in good...

Good condition.

Good condition.

It got better as you got...

Hot.

more into the subject, as you talked about it.

[Speaking foreign language]

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: I did think that this was

an amazing interview. Yeah.

He declared war on the United States

for the first time to

an English-speaking audience.

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: We asked him why.

You know, he basically gave a laundry list

of complaints about American foreign policy

in the Muslim world.

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: We asked him to clarify,

Did that mean a war against American soldiers

or American civilians?

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: He sort of said American soldiers

were the primary target.

If American civilians got in the way,

that was their problem.

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: He said that in his mind,

the United States was as weak

as the former Soviet Union.

BERGEN, VOICE-OVER: And eventually

the United States, if it was subjected

to enough violent pressure, would pull out

of the Middle East,

and basically he would get his wish.

PETER ARNETT: What are your future plans?

[Translator speaking foreign language]

Can we get a couple of still pictures now?

Some photographs?

[Camera shutter clicking]

BERGEN: The impact of the interview at the time

was, I would say, pretty muted.

You know, it didn't get a lot of play,

because at the time, of course,

he hadn't really done anything.

Imagine if in 1937

the Japanese army had gone on NBC or RKO to say,

"Hey, we are planning

to attack the United States."

You know, Pearl Harbor might have turned out differently.

These guys repeatedly said publicly,

"We are planning to attack

the United States,"

and no one paid any attention.

[Wind]

♪

[Speaking foreign language]

[Different man speaking foreign language]

♪

SUDE: I always watched their latest statements.

Their choices of what they're gonna say

are very important.

Oh, yeah they were cagey at first about claiming credit

for anything.

They didn't want to claim credit.

Then later on, they become more willing to take credit,

in fact demanding credit for it.

♪

[Gunfire]

HASLER: You know, it's all this stuff hitting you,

all these horrible images hitting you.

It's just this rapid fire,

horribly evil music video/ horror film, slash...

[Men speaking foreign language, gunfire]

♪

STORER: Al-Qaeda is a global organization

made up of people from over 60 countries

who speak 60 different languages.

So they really have to communicate in the clear

through these statements.

And they're also under a religious obligation

to warn their enemy.

So for all of those reasons, it made complete sense

that they meant what they said.

♪

SUDE: They're planning something.

But where? When? What?

Is it going to be an armed assault?

Is it going to be a hijacking?

Is it going to be an assassination?

A bomb? You know, where?

There were no real answers.

♪

McLAUGHLIN: The CIA did very good warning

in that period of time.

There are dozens and dozens of reports

in which we express the view

that bin Laden is intending to attack the United States.

We would have weekly or biweekly meetings

sometimes on exactly

what was going on.

It's so frustrating

when you can't figure out date and time.

McLAUGHLIN: There's always a large band of uncertainty,

and that's fertile ground

for argument.

STORER: And if you warn about every little thing,

then you're crying wolf

and nobody pays attention to you at all.

SUDE: Middle East, South Asia, Europe,

United States. Where?

You just don't know.

MCLAUGHLIN: We did not at this time

and in this report have

what I would call "actionable intelligence."

"I want to know when, I want to know where,

I want to know who."

McLAUGHLIN: We could not determine time,

target, and method.

STORER: You know, I really wish I could tell you

when and where.

But it's not that easy with a clandestine organization.

"Well, if you just had more human assets and you

"did less analysis, then we would know

all these things."

Well, that isn't true.

You can say we're pretty sure it's gonna happen,

but we can't make that decision to say,

you should do or not do.

We can say that our bottom line is,

"It looks pretty dangerous."

The headline says,

"Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S."

There were just warning after warning after warning

all spring.

Well, you know with the benefit of hindsight...

We knew something huge was gonna happen.

it would seem that this was

a perfect warning

in August of 2001

that the United States was about to be attacked.

Everybody was completely tense.

McLAUGHLIN: Why didn't we do something about this?

The language being used by these guys was like,

"Oh, my God. What are they gonna do?"

[Man speaking foreign language]

♪

[Different men speaking foreign language]

♪

♪

On the morning of 9/11,

I was sitting in my office.

My office was here.

The office of the group chief was right next to it.

And I had my door open, and I looked,

and there was an analyst

running through the row between the cubicles.

And it was one of the older analysts.

And you don't see older analysts running.

I was in Jordan.

I was at the CIA.

9/11, I was in my office at NSA.

I was at the Executive Office Building of the White House.

I was in the Pentagon when it got hit.

The first breaking news was coming in.

Somebody has it on RealPlayer

on their--at their desk.

The report was saying there was a small aircraft

that apparently had hit.

STORER: Right then, second plane into the second tower,

and I knew.

There was no doubt in that office at that moment

that this is what we were waiting for.

This is it.

That's the words that went through everybody's mind.

This is it. This is bin Laden.

"It's an attack, it's terrorism,

and it's al-Qaeda."

I knew who they were.

I knew what their intentions were.

This is it. They pulled this thing off.

We're going to battle stations.

And we were all evacuated after that second plane

went in because we thought the next one--that is,

the Shanksville plane-- might be headed for us.

It was complete chaos.

The plane flew in under my office.

My two assistants looked out the window and saw a 757

fly in under their feet.

The order then went out

for the building to be evacuated, except

for the counterterrorism analysts.

We essentially decamped from the high-rises

and moved on into the operations center.

I said, "Look, chief says we can't go, but, you know,

if you want to leave, I'll cover for you."

And not one of those people left.

MARTIN, VOICE-OVER: 19 guys.

Look at their faces and think

about the tragic, terrible, consequences.

19. Only 19.

19 representing thousands

who went through training camps in Afghanistan.

19 representing all those who were sponsored

and trained and blessed these young men on that day.

♪

This is where it gets hard to talk.

[Chuckles nervously]

I have to say the worst moment in my life

happened in about November

because right after the bombing,

you're just so busy.

And everybody, you know-- cry at home; come to work;

be professional; do your job;

go home; cry at home; come to work;

be professional; and do your job.

And people were very focused, running around,

getting the job done.

On about November, things started

to slow down a little bit,

and the guilt sets in.

And that is just the worst.

I'm sorry. I'm gonna cry now.

Um...

feeling like you wish you could have done something,

but especially when all the criticism

starts to come in.

People would say things in Congress like,

"You were negligent."

I was like, "Really?

"What did you know about bin Laden before 2001?

"Nothing! You didn't help us at all.

And now you're blaming us for having tried--"

MAN, VOICE-OVER: This is not a matter of scapegoating.

This is a matter of accountability.

There has been...

DIFFERENT MAN, VOICE-OVER: What does the term

"accountability" mean to you?

DIFFERENT MAN, VOICE-OVER: Prior to September 11th,

U.S. intelligence officials

possessed terrorist information

that, if properly handled, could have disrupted

or possibly prevented the terrorist attacks.

DIFFERENT MAN, VOICE-OVER: It seems

from your testimony...

DIFFERENT MAN, VOICE-OVER: That information was

not distributed to the FBI.

[Overlapping men speaking in voice-overs]

DIFFERENT MAN, VOICE-OVER: ...The CIA analysts

and FBI officials in the New York field office...

DIFFERENT MAN, VOICE-OVER: Has anyone in the CIA

been held accountable for the failures

of September 11th

or the events leading up to it?

♪

STORER: Jennifer called me not long after 9/11,

screaming at me on the phone.

And we were just in-- we were,

a two-second walk from each other

in different vaults.

But, "You did this. This is your fault.

You didn't report on..." so-and-so.

Blah-blah-blah-blah- blah-blah-blah...

And I screamed back at her

and slammed the phone down.

And at the time, I was really angry,

and I actually really never spoke to her again.

But looking back on it,

I think it's just-- it was just

a manifestation of her passion

and her sense of-- her own sense of guilt.

I mean, everybody felt it.

[Child speaking foreign language]

MAN, VOICE-OVER: We were told to evacuate Yemen.

The entire team already boarded the plane,

and I was asked

that I will stay, I should stay

and to talk to an individual named

Nasser al-Bahri-- Abu Jandal.

♪

We showed him a photo book

that has a lot of photos in it.

He identified bin Laden,

he identified Ayman Zawahiri...

He identified the usual suspects

that there is no way he would never know.

But he didn't identify anyone

from the, you know, second tier.

No one.

And then he closed the book.

"I don't have anything else.

Don't know anyone."

So I ask him, "Please. Can you look at it again?"

But I just said, "Please. You know,

come on. Look at it again."

He was annoyed.

He said, "I just did. There is nothing..."

"For friendship's sake, you know?

We're now friends..."

So he did. Same thing.

So I laughed. I went like...

[Laughs]

To Bob, I said, "See? I told you."

"What's goin' on? What did you tell me?"

"Well, I told Bob-- my friend--I told him

"here--I said that you're basically faking.

"You're not cooperating at all.

And I think I won the bet."

"What are you talking about? I'm cooperating."

"Come on. Really? You're cooperating?

"Do you think I just flew

"all the way from D.C. to talk to you

"about this kind of like small talk

"and I don't know who you are?

I don't know what you know?"

"This guy, for example...

"He was in your guesthouse in 1999.

"He was sick. You were taking care of him,

"putting soup on his lips

"and you claim you have no idea who this guy is?

I know a lot about your organization."

"Maybe some of these people in the book are

in my custody."

"Maybe some of the people in the book

"are friend of mine's.

"Maybe they are my sources.

"Every time I ask you a question,

"most probably I know the answer for.

"And that's how I gauge

"if you're cooperating or not.

So do you want to start from the beginning?"

He said, yes.

So we showed him the book again.

He identified almost everyone in the book

that we know-- we'd assembled--

from the East Africa Embassy bombing,

from the "USS Cole,"

to include eight of the hijackers.

And he still insisted that bin Laden

would never do anything like this.

And I insisted that he did.

And I said, "No, bin Laden did it."

And he said, "Oh, bin Laden did it?

Who told you?"

"You did."

And he was mad. He was furious,

because he thought

I was putting words in his mouth.

I said, "No, you told me that al-Qaeda

was behind it, definitely."

And I took a manila envelope that I had,

and I put the photos that he identified

the seven hijackers-- or the eight hijackers--

I put them all in front of him.

I said, "Do you want to know who the hijackers?

Those are the hijackers."

♪

"You told me they were Qaeda members.

You told me that."

He was in total shock.

He put his hand like this,

and he starts shaking,

and he asked for, you know, five minutes.

We gave him five minutes, came back.

I said, "So what do you think now?"

And he said, "I think the Sheikh went crazy.

What do you want?"

[Wind]

[Osama bin Laden speaking foreign language]

♪

MARTIN: A small group of people--many of them women--

were blamed.

They were blamed.

"They failed to connect the dots!"

"Connect the dots."

If I hear that...

The Washington machine turned on them

and said, "It's your fault."

"Sit and do a line diagram, where you failed

to connect the dots..."

The dots were there,

It's us who decided to-- we need to erase the dots.

Hello! They're coming at us!

That was-- those were late nights.

You go home, you're driving,

you roll over what operations are going on,

what threats you believe are genuine.

You're thinking about your friends and colleagues

downrange.

Sometimes you're thinking about some talking head

who launched a bunch of empty bullets,

you know, of blame trying to get their face on the TV

and not understanding the sincerity

of the people involved.

That would cause me grief the next day

because I knew I was gonna have to go in

and tell people, "Listen, they don't

"understand what you do.

"Don't you know that?

Now, let's get it on."

♪

McLAUGHLIN: Something that people don't fully grasp is

how alone the CIA felt in this period of time.

Just by virtue of the evolution of events

in history, we ended up at this moment in time

with kind of unique knowledge

about this phenomenon, al-Qaeda.

I think the feeling all of us had was,

This is on our shoulders to prevent this

from ever happening again.

The day of 9/11, the President pulled us

together and said, "I want to see a war plan here."

Well, we had been working on this for a long time.

We were ready to go.

♪

MAN: The challenge when you look at al-Qaeda

after 9/11 was to understand it well enough

first to disrupt it and then dismantle it.

We're not in the business of disruption alone,

because if you disrupt an organization,

the adversary's so committed.

I mean, they believe

that what they do is inspired by a holy book,

that they'll just go on and plot another attack.

So the business really became dismantlement:

How do we destroy it?

And that's a people business.

[Overlapping conversations in foreign language]

PHIL MUDD: How do you find the operators, financiers,

trainers, et cetera?

And how can you know where they're gonna be tomorrow

so you can pick them up?

[Conversations in foreign language continue]

The explosion of intelligence at CIA

after 9/11 is hard to imagine.

You have a small group of people in Alec Station

who are looking at the problem pre-9/11.

They had limited resources.

After 9/11, that small core group of people

is dwarfed by the newcomers into the center post-9/11.

It was a foundational change in the organization.

♪

MAN, VOICE-OVER: They needed managerial horsepower

to support the increase in people and budget.

I did not know enough about al-Qaeda.

Just what little I had read in the press.

Was not my specialty.

But, you know, if you've had 25 years

of experience, you come

with a pretty good sense of what needs to be done,

even if it's a new target for you.

Pretty quickly, you learn what you need to learn

about that target.

I became the head of the Counterterrorism Center

just about the time when we were dealing

with all these threats.

I mean, it was daily constant intelligence

coming about a second wave of attacks.

But I had a reputation for building strong teams.

♪

MARTIN, VOICE-OVER: The phone rang.

A senior came on the line, basically said,

"We need you to come back.

"You know the gravity of the situation.

You need to come back and do what you do."

I basically came back to be the senior manager

for the worldwide effort against al-Qaeda.

I had a multidimensional responsibility.

I had to protect my people, you know?

We changed the rulebook a bit.

We were empowered more.

We did things more aggressive.

"My job is to kill al-Qaeda."

"Either get shoulder-to-shoulder,

get with us, or get out of our way."

JOSE RODRIGUEZ: We had been focusing on capturing

Abu Zubaydah.

♪

He knew who the leadership was.

He knew their methods of attack, their targets.

He was the highest level al-Qaeda terrorist

that we had ever captured.

When we captured him in March, he was

severely wounded,

and we knew we had to get him out of Pakistan.

And in the past, the way the U.S. had dealt

with issues like this was to transfer the terrorist

to a friendly country for interrogation,

but we needed to take responsibility

for high level terrorists ourselves.

So we understood what we had to do.

And we did it.

MARTIN: We took a lot of bad guys off the streets.

And they got put up-- and it's now public knowledge--

in a nice little, uh...

let's just say... boutique locations.

ALI SOUFAN: Basically you have two things you have

to bring with you to an interrogation room,

especially with individuals like al-Qaeda.

You have to bring knowledge,

and you have to bring empathy.

And if you don't have those two,

I think most probably, you're gonna fail.

He gave us a couple of pieces--information

during that early phase.

But then he stopped talking.

When he regained his strength,

he stopped talking.

And we became convinced

that we had to come up with a new alternative

to doing this because it was not working.

♪

Eight of the 12 techniques, in my humble opinion,

were pretty wimpy stuff.

You know, like, slapping. Give me a break.

OK, it might be unpleasant to slap somebody,

but it's not torture.

Grabbing someone from the lapel,

bringing him in to you may be unpleasant

and it's an attention grabber,

but it's not torture.

We didn't ask for this.

We did not ask to get attacked.

They did it.

And so if we can't make them uncomfortable to save lives,

then--we've missed the boat here.

I believe that the intention was,

"We can never allow this to happen.

Let's do whatever needs to be done."

MARTY MARTIN: They're straight-up haters.

There is no reasoning with them.

Some individuals who were at the time in places

to make decisions believe that the only reason

you deal with these individuals is by

techniques like this.

If you deal with some of the hardcore--

our detainees--they might have become compliant

and then maybe jovial and engaging,

but if you ask them, "What are you gonna do

if you ever get out?,"

they'll go, "I'm gonna come kill you, my friend."

All the information that came from Abu Zubaydah

we got before waterboarding.

Most of these things came

from traditional interrogation techniques--

by showing people evidence.

by putting detainees against each other,

by pocket litter.

So the traditional interrogation techniques

worked tremendously.

♪

RODRIGUEZ: We had the interrogators,

and we had the debriefers.

The interrogators would work with the detainee.

And once they became compliant,

they would step back and the debriefers--

the targeting analysts, the people who knew the most

about the target would step in

and would begin to question them.

Jennifer Matthews was there sitting in front

of Abu Zubaydah, asking him questions.

There is a big difference

between being an expert

behind a desk and being a field expert.

You can't argue with success.

And the fact of the matter is

that we were extremely successful.

Once we started using the techniques

on Abu Zubaydah and once he became compliant,

we started to collect incredible intelligence.

Abu Zubaydah gave us the play book of how to go

after these individuals.

♪

So in short order, every chief of operations was

either captured or killed.

MARTIN: Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Nashiri, Hambali.

KSM. Remember that guy? That was a nice one.

But they had him in an Arab yuppie outfit.

You know, he was looking very prim and proper.

I'm like, Forget this.

I want every guy, bad guy, downrange should know

what their future is.

This is their mack daddy.

This is their chief gangster.

This is your future.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

was waterboarded 183 times.

They tried to quantify the numbers

of pourings of water,

and eventually the pourings of water used

in waterboarding became "times."

So 183 total pourings of water

on Khalid Sheikh Mohammad became 183 times,

which is crazy.

Look, it's not FBI versus CIA.

I know for a fact that everything

that we've been told, that resulted,

because of waterboarding,

that's not true.

Only three terrorists

with American blood on their hands

were ever waterboarded.

In many cases, it was just a few days.

In the case of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

it was just a few weeks.

SOUFAN: This program evolved

because, you know, some of the stuff

that they tried to do is not working.

And during the evolution process, I realize

that we shouldn't be part of this

and--I shouldn't be even a witness for this.

And I put it to our headquarters,

and headquarters pulled us out.

We all knew Americans would find out at some point

about everything we were up to.

There were no illusions.

And so you have to try to provide a lens of history

that doesn't exist yet.

I understand people are uncomfortable with this,

but the options we had were not very good.

[Osama bin Laden speaking foreign language]

MARTIN: In the aftermath of 9/11, people expected

and realized he would probably go to Tora Bora,

which he did.

♪

After Tora Bora, he more likely than not went up

to Kunar and then somewhere.

Well, it could have been in--

I always thought of him as running around--

maybe in the Afghan-Pak border,

maybe even if Afghanistan.

That's what my favorite would have been--

having him in Afghanistan, because that was

his spiritual home, so to speak,

from the Afghan jihad.

RODRIGUEZ: I was asked, "Where is bin Laden,"

all the time.

When I went to testify to the Congress,

the first thing they wanted to know was,

"Where is bin Laden?"

♪

I went to the Oval Office a number of times.

I was asked by the president "Where is bin Laden?"

Everybody would ask the same question:

"Where is bin Laden?"

It was very frustrating to basically have to admit

that you didn't know.

One time, one of my colleagues came in to talk

to me about, "Where's bin Laden?"

And I told him, "Look, you know, I am so tired of this.

"The next time that the next person asks me,

"'Where is bin Laden,'

"I'm gonna say, 'You know what? Fuck you.

Fuck you.'"

♪

And later that day, I went home.

And the first thing my wife asked me when I get home is,

"Where is bin Laden? And why can't you find him?"

MARTIN: The toughest position to be in al-Qaeda

then was number three, number four.

Because why? You had to communicate.

You had to communicate to get attacks done.

You had to communicate-- and if you were doing that,

we're on you.

RODRIGUEZ: Frankly, even though

in the back of our minds, we knew we had

to get him some day,

we were actually too busy going after those

who were actually plotting against us.

♪

Congratulations, Abu Butthead.

You're now number three in al-Qaeda.

That's the good news. The bad news is,

you're now number three in al-Qaeda.

You'd better buckle your chinstrap

because your career path is

probably going to be short-lived.

MUDD: There is an aspect of the intelligence business

called targeting.

I think this is a revolution for a couple of reasons.

Just in the past ten years, the agency

has transitioned from strategic intelligence

to tactical intelligence that helps you identify

the movements and locations of one specific individual.

I'm not just worried about what al-Qaeda

looks like strategically;

I want an analyst

who's spending all their time looking

at one target with one name...

[Computer mouse clicking]

and people whose whole goal in life

is following one human being.

I went to the other women who had become

targeting officers when I moved over--

Jennifer Matthews and some of the other women

who had already paved the way--

just to ask them, "How do I do this?

I have to build this from the ground up,"

kind of like they did on the bin Laden side.

You know, "How do I do this?"

We still didn't have a great technical tool to do that.

I built a spreadsheet.

And when I reached out to Barbara and Gina

and a few other women, they just said,

"That's how we do it.

Go for it. That's exactly how you get it done."

♪

MUDD: You're leaving a digital trail every day.

So are terrorists...

when that person travels,

when that person gets on a phone,

when we get information from a courier in al-Qaeda

about who he's touching

and we bounce it against information we might have

found out two years ago.

MUDD: They're looking at a human terrorist in a field

and they might send a cable to a station

that results in action against that target

the next day.

MUDD: Somebody who wants in the fight.

That's what a targeter is.

You have to intimately know the target

that you're going after,

how you think that person is gonna act, react,

what they're gonna do that day,

what their strategy is, who they're gonna talk to.

What are their priorities in life?

Is it wife number one, is it wife number two?

♪

I was in Baghdad shortly after the war started,

and it was kind of like being in the Wild West.

It was complete chaos.

Bin Laden was initially excited about this.

He was excited about Iraq.

This is something he

couldn't, at the time, pull off.

So he was happy to support the endeavor.

♪

[Gunfire]

BAKOS: He was such a brutal terrorist.

I just felt like we owed it to the people of Iraq

to remove him.

BAKOS: It seems so strange that I never met Zarqawi.

My former colleagues

in the Jordanian Intelligence Service

used to call him my boyfriend.

[Computer mouse clicking]

[Man speaking foreign language]

BAKOS, VOICE-OVER: I felt like I knew Zarqawi too well.

BAKOS: He was a quiet guy...

in a pathological sort of way.

I mean, he was a monster.

There were calls at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning

from the group chief

every time a bombing happened,

every time he set off a VBID,

every time he targeted a mosque or anything.

♪

You know, I was thinking about him 24/7,

and it just wasn't pleasant after a while.

MARTY MARTIN: The model to me is very clear.

Our special forces, our JSOC operators,

their analysts, our analysts,

their operators, our operators,

were working hand-in-hand.

They were downrange.

They were downrange in our field stations

assisting in operations,

bringing that expertise there.

And the lessons and the ability to take

intelligence operations combined

with special operations to create a synergy,

a deadly synergy.

And your job as a targeting officer

in a war theater is to help point

boots on the ground or something up above

toward a target and be as accurate as possible.

♪

[Explosions]

MAN: Wait!

MAN, VOICE-OVER: For me, war is sort of like

something radioactive that you shouldn't touch

unless you've done a tremendous amount

of understanding of just the damage that it will do.

You can flirt with the idea that "I can cross the line

"and go into the dark side and then I can walk back

"because I'm going in the dark side

for a good purpose."

And there are times when that may be appropriate,

but it is dangerous.

♪

It's easier next time to cross.

[Explosion]

[Men speaking foreign language]

♪

I did not like being on the raids.

That wasn't--I was an analyst.

Wasn't--I just didn't...I...

♪

I think there are questions

about an intelligence organization

that slowly gets involved in executing these types

of global counterterrorism operations.

That's a real mind-set change.

The war was not an agnostic video game.

It was a personal game where you know

you're responsible

not only for the lives of Americans,

but for going up against an adversary

that you got to kill or capture.

August of 2004, I think we did 18 raids

that month in Iraq,

our force.

Two years later in 2006, same month,

Iraq, also, we did 300 raids.

[Man speaking foreign language]

STANLEY McCHRYSTAL: Our ability to collect

intelligence, act on intelligence,

and then collect more intelligence had taken

an almost industrial size and speed to it.

[Dialogue continues in foreign language]

BAKOS: It was definitely a well-oiled machine.

There were rolling raids.

Sometimes those were fruitful,

and sometimes not so much.

I think sometimes the momentum

sort of overtook the substance

of what we were going after.

You know, it's like, "There's another target.

Let's go after it, just because we can."

The machine just kept going.

[Airplane engine starts]

MAN, VOICE-OVER: We had executed thousands

of these kinds of raids in Iraq

and Afghanistan,

and we got better and better at them.

So it was that evolution in particular with the CIA

in ways that we just couldn't have imagined

in 2001 or 2002,

but were absolutely critical, as it turns out,

in order to be able to meet this threat.

♪

BAKOS: But you definitely need to know

what your moral center is and how you define that

for yourself in order to be able to do that job.

I mean, I worked in a center where my job was to hunt

a person down to capture or kill.

I mean, I had to be OK with that.

And, you know, the paradox of wanting to save

the women and children of Iraq

and kill someone in order to do that

wasn't lost on me by any means.

But, you know, I...

I can justify that for myself.

HASLER: The war on terror.

[Explosion]

How can you have a war on terror

when terrorism is a tactic?

You have a war against people.

♪

So the question immediately becomes,

Who are the people that we're fighting

the war against?

♪

[Explosions]

And I think still most people don't understand

why they hate us.

[Man speaking foreign language]

Some strikes are necessary, but if our solution

to this kind of problem is to just strike

without trying to take effective efforts

to prevent the rise of threats, it's endless.

♪

HASLER: Shock and awe does not end wars on terrorism.

It only creates more terrorism.

Money starts to flow to terrorist groups,

people become more radicalized.

[Crowd cheering]

[Men chanting in foreign language]

HASLER: Wars on terror should be fought

under the radar, as quietly as possible.

But counterterrorist operations are,

by their nature,

not very satisfying to a frightened public.

♪

BAKOS: And we were working closely

with the bin Laden unit,

and the dynamic of the relationship

between Zarqawi and core al-Qaeda

sort of turned a lot of assessments on

what was happening with core al-Qaeda on its head.

Bin Laden didn't know, I'm sure, what he was

getting into with Zarqawi--

how fundamentally different he was

from some of his other al-Qaeda leaders.

He did not have the same academic background

that a lot of the al-Qaeda scholars had.

He didn't have the same--

for a lack of a better way to put it--

professional sense of jihad as al-Qaeda did.

He didn't understand the rules of the game.

He just thought he could enact

any strategy regardless of how brutal it was.

[Man speaking foreign language]

♪

BAKOS: It was surprising to hear

that Zarqawi was not being deferential.

He was being insubordinate.

[Computer mouse clicking]

♪

Hassan Ghul was an emissary from al-Qaeda.

He was actually bringing over another letter

from al-Qaeda central to Zarqawi about

how he should be conducting operations in Iraq.

When we realized that Hassan Ghul

would be traveling to Iraq,

we decided this was an opportunity for us.

So we actually planned an operation--

it was my team with our base and the Kurdish government--

to capture him.

And we definite--

the Kurdish government kept him, and we

definitely gained a lot of information out of him,

including Al-Kuwaiti's name

and the role that he played with bin Laden.

Did that answer...

INTERVIEWER: Do you know how his name,

Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's, came up?

[Chuckles]

Within the course of a debriefing

with the Kurdish government,

Hassan Ghul gave up the name of Al-Kuwaiti,

the courier.

RODRIGUEZ: Ahmed from Kuwait.

It was significant information,

even though we knew that the pseudonym al-Kuwaiti

was a throwaways.

I mean, who-- It's like saying

"Jose the Puerto Rican," you know?

It could be anybody.

The key is what he told us about bin Laden

not using any other means of communicating.

♪

We asked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

about the information of the courier...

and he kind of just...

He jumped back.

His body language jumped back. He changed.

And he said, "No, no, no."

Look, we all know, even as little kids,

if suddenly you react and go, "No, no, no,"

it probably means "Yes, yes, yes."

He had not been truthful.

But later--and this is the benefits

of having black sites--

we intercepted a communication from him

to some of the other detainees.

He told his fellow detainees not to say a word

about the courier,

thereby telling us a lot about the courier...

♪

that he's of tremendous importance

and that we were on to something.

[Vehicles passing in distance, whistles blowing]

MICHAEL HAYDEN: In late 2007,

the bin Laden cell came to me.

♪

Some of these people had been doing this

well before 9/11.

I mean, they go all the way back to Alec Station.

These people had spent their lives on this target.

They said, "We're going to try another approach.

"It's got to be the courier network.

"We've got some information on couriers.

We're gonna begin to build from that."

The way it works is information comes in.

You catalogue it, you organize it.

You know, that little nugget there could sit

fallow on your shelves for four or five years

until something else comes in that's suddenly

very illuminating about something that you

may have had for a very long period of time.

That actually happened in the work

we did to hunt for Osama bin Laden

by trying to track his courier.

♪

RODRIGUEZ: It took years for the agency

to recruit the human source

that eventually gave us the true name.

That's why we're in the business

of clandestine human intelligence,

because in many cases, all these fancy gadgets

and everything else

won't give you the information

that you really need--

a true name.

And we finally got his true name...

which is whatever it is.

[Laughs]

Whatever Arabic name, you know?

But the true name, we were able to find out

a lot about him.

From then on, you know,

the agency was able to do what it does so well--

track the guy and find him.

HAYDEN: Very soon after that,

I briefed the President.

I said, "I got to tell you, Mr. President, my guys,

"they seem a little optimistic about this.

They actually think this could lead somewhere."

[Overlapping conversations in foreign language]

MARTIN: You're projecting force and intelligence

and assets across that border.

And that's what Khost represented.

Their focus was across over there in Waziristan,

because that's where the enemy was.

[Vehicle horns honking]

MAN: Jen Matthews was the chief of base,

of the CIA base down there.

She was there to have her fingers

right on the pulse of the information

that was coming through the base.

She never enunciated that, so to speak,

in such stark terms,

but my sense was she was

there to target and kill

senior al-Qaeda leaders.

I asked her, "Do you think we're going to get him?"

She smiled and said,

"We'll get him eventually,

and I hope I'm a part of it."

So...

♪

[Man speaking foreign language]

MAN: He's not at all what you'd expect as a radical.

He's a doctor; he's working in a refugee clinic.

It turns out he had this very dangerous hobby

on the side, which was writing this blog

and getting himself in trouble.

Over a period of months,

he becomes one of

the most visible writers

on the internet, and the CIA

and the Jordanian intelligence

go all out to recruit Balawi to be a spy.

Over several weeks, they convince him

to go to work for them.

[Humam al-Balawi speaking foreign language]

[Overlapping conversations in foreign language]

♪

JOBY WARRICK: Balawi finds his way into Pakistan

and essentially disappears.

Very likely somebody suspected him

as being an informant and maybe cut his head off.

Nobody hears anything from Balawi for three months.

Suddenly he's back on the radar screen again,

and he's saying, "I've gotten inside."

Balawi is a doctor.

He is now beginning to treat

the number two leader of al-Qaeda,

Ayman al-Zawahiri.

[al-Balawi speaking foreign language]

When Balawi sends this information

to the CIA headquarters, the place goes crazy.

Even the White House gets briefed.

This young man, Balawi,

is gonna take us right to number two

and maybe even to number one.

[al-Balawi speaking foreign language]

WARRICK: The meeting has to take place

in a place where the CIA can completely control

the environment, and by default,

this becomes the CIA base at Khost.

It falls to Jennifer Matthews

to come with a plan to get Balawi

inside this base at Khost without being detected.

Well, the problem is

that nobody in the CIA has ever met with Balawi.

♪

WARRICK: They make arrangements for him to come

into the base without even being searched

or checked because they're afraid

that somebody might recognize him,

his identity might be compromised.

♪

People have been too quick to blame Jennifer,

and that I reject totally

because there were many people

looking at this operation.

♪

RODRIGUEZ: People wanted to believe that the source

was good.

♪

There were also pressures coming from the White House

and elsewhere, saying, you know,

"Pursue, pursue, pursue. We need to do this."

I'm sure there were people, voices out there saying,

"Uh, maybe not."

"Maybe we should slow down."

♪

That happens in many operations.

Didn't happen in this one.

WARRICK: So they set up a plan to get him

through the checkpoints without being even looked at

by the guards.

He gets further into the base,

goes through a second checkpoint,

goes to a third checkpoint,

and gets all the way in to the innermost heart

of the base, the inner sanctum.

WARRICK: There are a total of 14 CIA officers lined up

to meet him.

WARRICK: Balawi gets out of

the car on the wrong side,

and he's chanting the words

in Arabic "God is great."

Before anyone could stop Balawi,

he fumbles for his detonator.

You will be sent to the hell.

WARRICK: Balawi hits a switch,

blows himself up, and there's a terrific explosion

that kills almost everybody who's within direct sight

of Balawi at the time of the explosion.

MICHAEL WALTZ: We heard the explosion,

but when we saw the smoke coming up

from exactly where I knew Chapman was,

then I knew the base had been hit.

We knew that someone had gotten

inside the base,

and we knew that it was the agency

that had been hit.

And we knew it was bad.

♪

By the time we got on the scene,

it was an ugly scene.

There were, you know, parts everywhere.

The conventional unit that was there landed--

the helicopter right in the courtyard

and evaced as many of the wounded as possible.

You know, he said Jen didn't make it.

Uh...

Her logistics chief that we had worked with

to close the base on a daily basis didn't make it.

And some of her case officers

never made it even back to--you know,

they died on the scene.

RODRIGUEZ: When you do this and do this and do this,

eventually you lose one.

And we lost...

and we lost really good people.

♪

BAKOS: When I heard that Jennifer was in Khost...

I was shocked that she...

was taken out by bin Laden.

I mean, that was just--

that just seemed so surreal

that that would happen to her.

You know, after she spent so many years trying to prevent

another tragedy by him,

You know, he, in effect,

had anything to do with her death,

it's incredibly disheartening.

HAYDEN: There was some criticism of the agency.

Frankly, I understand that.

But you don't get Abbottabad without Khost.

An agency that's not willing to take the risks that were

evident at Khost,

which unfortunately ended tragically...

that agency, if it's not willing to do that

is not an agency to do what it had to do

to build that trail all the way to Abbottabad.

In fact, some of the human beings who built

the trail to Abbottabad were actually killed at Khost.

It was kind of Team America in the hunt for bin Laden

and the fight against al-Qaeda.

And there is powerful connective tissue

between the two events.

♪

[Man speaking foreign language in voice-over]

♪

[Mustafa Ansara speaking foreign language in voice-over]

STORER: The hunt for the courier to bin Laden

makes complete sense to me.

It was based on all of these years of experience working

with a very tight-knit group of people

who really cared about this and supported each other.

♪

We invented the technique that works,

and it's the technique that got bin Laden in the end.

♪

I got a call from another-- a former colleague,

and he said, "Turn on the news."

You know, I was at home.

"Turn on the news.

The President's going to make an announcement."

And I had a feeling that it's been a good day

at the office...

OBAMA: Good evening.

And then finally it's him.

They got him. They got him finally.

That was--yeah, that was really something.

[Crowd cheering]

[Crowd chanting "USA"]

CROWD MEMBERS: ♪ Na na na na ♪

♪ Na na na na ♪

♪ Hey hey hey ♪

♪ Good-bye... ♪

SECOND GROUP: ♪ Obama, Obama ♪

♪ We fucking killed Osama ♪

♪ Obama, Obama ♪

♪ We fucking killed Osama ♪

♪ Obama, Obama ♪

♪ We fucking killed Osama ♪

♪ Obama, Obama, we... ♪

McCHRYSTAL: I'm not sure America has made the effort

that it needs to

to understand what it is we just went through.

The really key part is not how to do these operations;

the thing to understand is,

why are the people that we are fighting

doing what they're doing?

Why is the enemy the enemy?

If you don't understand why they're doing it,

it's very difficult to stop.

[Vehicle horns honking]

We don't speak the language enough.

We don't understand the culture enough.

We haven't taken the time to not be blind, deaf, and dumb

in areas of the world that matter to us.

MARTIN: It's a nice chapter to close,

nice chapter to close.

It's not over.

Sadly enough, I think we're gonna

be in this situation again.

BAKOS: Bin Laden achieved, you know, spreading

his ideology beyond what he probably expected it to.

How do you kill an ideology?

Killing one person doesn't end that.

MUDD: I don't like it.

I don't want it to continue. I hope it stops.

I hope we don't live in a world

where you deal with an adversary

that loses respect for the sanctity of human life.

But, look, this isn't a picture

from a video arcade.

This is a human being who has a family and a soul.

So when you confront that, what are you gonna do?

There are philosophical debates you can have,

but at the end of the day, the question is:

Are you gonna move or not? Yes or no?

Go or no go? That's it.

♪