The White House's story of how US special forces hunted down and assassinated arch terrorist Osama bin Laden in his secret lair in Pakistan is unraveling.
The official narrative of the bin Laden raid is that for over a decade, US intelligence hunted for the terror chief until a surveillance/torture-enabled breakthrough tracked him to a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. On 1st May 2011, US Navy Seals entered the compound and assassinated him in a furious firefight.
The operation demonstrated how far the US military intelligence community had come since the days of 9/11, proving how its disparate agencies had now developed a tremendous capacity to share and process often obscure intelligence data, to guide precision covert counter-terror missions.
After killing bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader was buried at sea. When the raid was officially announced, Pakistan, a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, was incensed at the US operation on its own soil.
According to veteran reporter Seymour Hersh's scoop in the London Review of Books, all this is a convenient fairy-tale. Rather, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) captured and detained bin Laden in 2006 with the support of another US ally, Saudi Arabia.



Bin Laden's location was brought to the CIA's attention in August 2010, by a former ISI officer and CIA consultant who wanted to claim the reward money. In 2011, the US staged the military intelligence raid' on bin Laden's compound with ISI complicity.
There was no firefight. Bin Laden was torn to pieces quickly and easily under rifle-fire, and his remains were thrown out of a helicopter over the Hindu Kush mountains.
Hersh's account has been rejected by some on the grounds that he relies on unverifiable anonymous sources. This investigation conducts a systematic review of open sources and key journalistic reports relevant to the events leading up to the bin Laden raid.
While much corroboration for Hersh's reporting is uncovered, elements of his account and the Official History contradict a wider context of critical revelations disclosed by many other pioneering journalists. When that context is taken into account, a far more disturbing picture emerges.
The geopolitical relationship between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan played a central role in identifying and locating Osama bin Laden far sooner than officially acknowledged  yet nothing was done. The role of a former ISI officer in blowing the whistle on the ISI's protection of bin Laden in August 2010, brought his concealment out into the open and triggered high-level White House discussions on how to resolve the situation: to kill or not to kill?
Declassified documents, official government reports and intelligence officials confirm that since before 9/11, and continuing for the decade after, the US intelligence community was systematically stymied from apprehending Osama bin Laden due to longstanding relationships with Saudi and Pakistani military intelligence.
Despite specific intelligence available to elements of the US intelligence community on bin Laden's location in Pakistan, under the protection of US allies, no action was taken to apprehend bin Laden for years. That failure to act coincided with the launch of an anti-Iran US covert operations programme around 2005, pursued in partnership with Saudi Arabia, to finance Islamist Sunni militants including al-Qaeda affiliated groups.
Bin Laden's assassination in 2011 followed an escalating split within al-Qaeda between the terror chief and his most senior deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Contrary to US claims, bin Laden was positively identified and monitored in the months leading up to the raid, with the assistance of Saudi, Pakistani and Afghan intelligence agencies.
The decision to do so coincided with an extraordinary proposal made to al-Qaeda from British intelligence: to accept a renewed covenant of security', whereby Western forces would withdraw from Afghanistan and give al-Qaeda a free-hand, on condition that they refrain from targeting British interests.
Bin Laden refused the British offer. Four days later he was assassinated.



In the wake of his death, and under the leadership of al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda expanded its operations in many of the countries that had experienced turmoil in the wake of the Arab Spring' revolutions that year.
Since then  as official Pentagon and other sources confirm  the West's allies, the Gulf states and Turkey, deliberately sponsored al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria to hijack the revolution and destabilise the Assad regime, a strategy that was covertly supported by the West in 2012, but now openly admitted.
US government officials have scrambled to conceal the facts around the bin Laden raid.
They hope to suppress public recognition that the primary factor in bin Laden's ability to oversee al-Qaeda until 2011 was US collusion with his state-sponsors, for short-sighted geopolitical purposes.
Corroboration  four years ago

Hersh's critics, for the most part, have taken issue with his heavy reliance on anonymous sources. As that makes the story supposedly unverifiable, contradictions between Hersh's narrative and other Known Facts in the war on terror' Official History mean that Hersh's narrative must be false.
There is one big problem with this response: Hersh was not the first to break the story.
US national security journalist Dr. Raelynn Hillhouse, a former University of Michigan political scientist and Fulbright scholar who has broken a number of exclusive stories on the privatisation of the US intelligence community, punched holes in the Obama administration's narrative of the bin Laden raid before Hersh. At that time, her story was blacked out by the US media, but picked up elsewhere such as The Telegraph and New Zealand Herald.
In August 2011, in a series of articles on her national security blog, Dr. Hillhouse cited senior unidentified sources in the US intelligence community who told her that the US government had received notice of bin Laden's whereabouts from a Pakistani ISI informant, seeking the $25 million State Department reward. Hillhouse's sources said that "the Saudis were paying off the Pakistani military and intelligence (ISI) to essentially shelter and keep bin Laden under house arrest in Abbottabad."
What happened then according to Hillhouse's sources only raises further questions:

Johnson also confirmed that US intelligence had "learned that key people in Saudi Arabia were sending Pakistan money to keep Osama out of sight and out of trouble." He also adds some other interesting details, notably that Leon Panetta, then CIA director, ensured that all intelligence leading up to the operation was highly compartmentalised, and fed directly to him.
The charge to assassinate bin Laden was led by Panetta, who wanted to launch the operation as early as February 2011. But it was opposed by Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to Obama. The US president "initially sided with Jarrett. The White House spin that Obama had to persuade senior advisors to go after Osama is pure unadulterated bullshit."
The corroboration of the Hersh account from Johnson and Hillhouse adds weight to its credibility. But other evidence in the public record confirms that it is by far not the whole story: and that the cover-up of events leading to the decision to kill bin Laden occurred precisely to avoid public scrutiny of a wider context of unsavoury geopolitical relationships.
Both the Official History, and the alternate accounts offered by Hersh, Hillhouse and Johnson, agree that the White House did not know of Osama bin Laden's whereabouts, and that US intelligence was eagerly hunting him down.
But there is already credible evidence in the public record which suggests that while some sections of the US intelligence community were trying to locate bin Laden, other elements of that community had been aware of the likely location of bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, for years, and knew that Pakistani military intelligence was protecting him  but did nothing about it.
2004: Musharraf and ISI

In 2004, three months before the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, executive director of the government-appointed Commission, Philip Zelikow, requested a high-level Pakistani to produce a report that would "fill in the gaps about what was happening behind the scenes in Pakistan in the period immediately preceding the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington."
The report was perhaps the most extensive piece of research on Pakistan's connections to terrorism, and was based on interviews across the country with sensitive sources including former and active government officials, senior military officers and ISI personnel.



General Pervez Musharraf, former Pakistan President, is accused of harbouring Osama bin Laden by a confidential report to the 9/11 CommissionAlthough the document arrived too late to be included in the final report, like many other sensitive interviews and materials obtained by the Commission, it was not published and remains classified.
Leaks about the content of this classified addendum to the 9/11 Commission Report showed that it had concluded that senior ISI officers had known in advance about the 9/11 attacks, that Osama bin Laden was being protected by Pakistani military intelligence officials, and that President Pervez Musharraf himself had approved for the terror chief to be treated for renal problems repeatedly at a military hospital near Peshawar.
Zelikow, currently a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defence, was a former White House National Security Council staffer in the first Bush administration, and a member of President Bush Jnr.'s 20002001 transition team, before joining the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) until 2003. During his tenure, he played the lead role in re-drafting the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy. After his directorship of the 9/11 Commission, he was appointed Counselor of the State Department for Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice. More recently, under the Obama administration he served once again on the PFIAB from 2011 to 2013.
The existence of this classified report to the 9/11 Commission demonstrates that the US government had received detailed intelligence confirming the protection of bin Laden by senior Pakistani government, military and intelligence officials as early as 2004.
2006: Abbottabad flagged

Bin Laden's specific location in Abbottabad had been flagged up in a secret September 2008 US Department of Defence memorandum from Joint Task Force Guantanamo to the Commander, US Southern Command. The memo contained information obtained from Abu Faraj al-Libi, al-Qaeda's "operational chief" and third in command.
Al-Libi is described by the document as manager of al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, as well as a "senior commander of operations in Pakistan who maintained communication with senior al-Qaeda leadership including UBM [Osama bin Laden]."



Abu Faraj al-Libi, al-Qaeda's third in commandDetained by Pakistani security forces and passed to the CIA in May 2005, the document recorded that he had "provided safe havens for UBL and senior al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2001 and 2003."
The document goes on to say that in July 2003  the year that al-Libi provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden:

A Pentagon scale model of bin Laden's compoundAccording to one ISI official speaking to the BBC: "Just look at the house  it sticks out like a sore thumb from a mile off. You've been to Abbottabad  you know how these small towns are. Everybody knows everything about everybody, and secretive people are routinely investigated, especially by the police."
In October 2010, a senior NATO official "with access to some of the most sensitive information in the NATO alliance" told CNN that both bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri were believed by the intelligence community "to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together."
The CNN report explained:

It is therefore not surprising that other ISI officials, although they knew that a raid was occurring, had no idea that the target was bin Laden. "They gave us a grid and told us that they were going there after a high-value' target. There are certain protocols when that happens  we take care of the outer security, while they go in and do their work. We certainly didn't know who exactly was in there." The same official, like US Army special operations veteran Jack Murphy, dismissed claims that the US had jammed Pakistani radars.
But certain senior ISI officials were involved. Corroborating Hersh's account, in a report for Asia Times from 12th May 2011, Syed Saleem Shahzad reported that "Pakistan's military and intelligence community was fully aware of and lent assistance to the United States mission to get a high-value target in Abbottabad." But Shahzad's sources also told him: "What it did not know was that it was Osama bin Laden who was in the crosshairs of US Special Forces."
In reality, Shahzad's sources did not know, but according to Hersh's and Murphy's sources, two Pakistani Generals did know bin Laden was the target. And Hersh's sources specifically identified the officials as Pakistani Army chief Ashfaq Kayani and ISI Director-General Lieutenant Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha.



General Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistani Army chief, former ISI Director-GeneralShahzad's previous report from before the raid had already put paid to the idea that bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad was unknown to Pakistani intelligence. It showed that Saudi and Pakistani intelligence were tracking bin Laden's meetings with militants on behalf of the CIA months before the raid  indicating that bin Laden's presence and movements from his base in Abbottabad were known to senior ISI officials.



Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, ISI Director-GeneralShahzad's May piece further corroborated Hersh's account in reporting meetings between Pasha, Kayani, and US officials. Before the raid, he wrote, the US and Pakistan were negotiating a deal under which the US would have the unilateral right to conduct attacks on "high-value targets" like bin Laden and his deputy Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, in return for "better economic deals" for Pakistan and "a greater role in the Afghan end game."
To facilitate the deal, "top Saudi authorities" were called in, including "Prince Bandar bin Sultan," to play a "pivotal role in fostering a new strategic agreement of which the Abbottabad operation was a part."
As we shall see later, Saudi Arabia and Prince Bandar's role in facilitating the agreement under which the Abbottabad raid took place is highly significant. During this negotiation period, bin Laden was already under extensive surveillance by US, Saudi, Pakistani, and Afghan intelligence.



Prince Bandar bin SultanThen in early April, ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha visited the US to discuss "intelligence cooperation." Shahzad's security sources told him that "the new security arrangement" being negotiated between the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, "was high on the agenda."
According to Hersh, a retired US government official was at that April meeting with Pasha: "Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he's there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission… Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control."
In the last week of April, Shahzad reported, the US's top man in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, met with Pakistani military chief Gen. Kayani "and informed him of the US Navy Seals operation to catch a high-value target. The deal was done."
By Hersh's account, as early as January 2011, according to his retired US official, Kayani had agreed to a lethal strike on bin Laden: "He eventually tells us yes, but he says you can't have a big strike force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him, or there is no deal."
That the ISI had a super secret unit dedicated solely to the task of handling' Osama bin Laden  and that "former senior American officials" had concluded the same  raises a host of issues. If bin Laden had a dedicated ISI handler, by definition he was operating as an agent on behalf of the ISI. And at least some senior US officials were aware of this.
If that is the case, then it also raises questions about the very nature of the intelligence sharing arrangements by which Pakistan was passing on intelligence to Americans relating to Abbottabad and Osama bin Laden.
How much did the Americans know about this operation? Reports from the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, Brigadier General Qadir, Syed Saleem Shahzad, among other sources, showed that Pakistan was routinely sharing intelligence on bin Laden's movements and the Abbottabad compound with the US.
If Pakistani intelligence on bin Laden was, indeed, compartmentalised to a secret unit within the ISI under the authority of the most senior ISI officials, then the sharing of intelligence on his movements with the US (which apparently occurred about three months before the raid) could only have occurred as part of the same handling' arrangement, and with the approval of those officials  who would have exerted absolute control on how the ISI dealt with all intelligence related to bin Laden.
In internal emails obtained by Wikileaks, Stratfor's Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton  former deputy counter-terrorism chief at the State Department  told colleagues about information available to US government investigators:

Quote:Al-Libi is described by the document as manager of al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, as well as a "senior commander of operations in Pakistan who maintained communication with senior al-Qaeda leadership including UBM [Osama bin Laden]."

Detained by Pakistani security forces and passed to the CIA in May 2005, the document recorded that he had "provided safe havens for UBL and senior al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2001 and 2003."

The document goes on to say that in July 2003  the year that al-Libi provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden: