PBS News Hour - Full Show - Retired CIA officer reflects on the intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden's killing

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

It has been 15 years since the historic Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in retribution for the deadliest attack on U.S. soil. Compass Points moderator Nick Schifrin gets an inside look at the dangerous operation — and the intelligence that led up to it — from the man who at the time led the CIA in Pakistan, where bin Laden met his demise. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Reflecting on American vengeance, after the deadliest attack on U.S. soil. I want justice. Retribution. Justice has been done. It has been 15 years since the historic raid that killed the world's most wanted terrorist. Tonight, an inside look at the dangerous operation and the intelligence that led up to it from the man who at the time led the CIA in Pakistan where bin Laden met his demise. That's tonight, the first in a special two-part edition of Compass Points.

Hello and welcome to Compass Points. Fifteen years ago, I woke up in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, where I'd live for three years as the ABC News correspondent, and I drove about an hour and a half to Abadabad. I drove past Pakistan's Military Academy, the country's West Point, and turned into a neighborhood where one house stood high above the others. This was the first footage from inside the compound where Osama bin Laden had lived and died.

These are the walls that protected him, 15 feet high, topped with razor wire, as seen in this exclusive video from inside the compound. Inside, the house is big, eight rooms. On the first floor, a bedroom covered in blood. Look at the papers left on the floor. Up on the second floor, the master bedroom, perhaps bin Laden's, with blood that's still on the floor. This is the nicest room in the house, the only one with a carpet and a queen-sized bed. down the hall, a food pantry. You can't see it that well,

but there's enough food in here to sustain a family for weeks. Bin Laden never had to leave. The Navy SEAL raid was the culmination of a decade of intelligence work by thousands of CIA officers, including some who lost their lives. The top CIA officer in Pakistan at the time, the chief of station, was Mark Kelton.

He is now retired from the CIA and is a senior advisor at the Chertoff Group and a founding partner of the Five Eyes Group, and he joins me now. Mark, thanks so much. Thanks for being here. Happy to be here. Take us back 15 years

and something that we all remember for the time, but it's been a little while. How important was it for CIA, for the intelligence community, for I would argue the country to find and bring to justice in whatever way, Osama bin Laden Laden Laden. Well, I mean, it was crucial for,

at the time, of course, people saw it as a benchmark, right? We had CIA, of course, was in that fight for the entire time since 9-11 trying to hunt down bin Laden. And, of course, the predicate to all of that is the 9-11 attack itself, right? The failures, the failure, the intelligence failures, and the CIA effectively being blamed for it. I don't think that was fair, but that is the case. I always say, you know, when I talk about the operation, that I was there at the end of it, right? There were thousands and thousands of people beforehand that worked and got us to that point.

So every moment, even before 9-11, of course, bin Laden was a threat. But after 9-11, it was obvious who had perpetrated the attack, and we began to hunt. finding bin Laden of course and bringing him to justice was for me the only way we could say that we had closed the door on what happened on 9-11 the people that suffered that day the people we lost that day

will always be remembered but it was about justice and frankly it was about vengeance and I don't have any problem saying that and I'm happy you know happy to have been there honored to have been there Your career started in 1981 out of grad school. You were a Soviet military analyst. You're a Cold War warrior.

How do you end up in Pakistan in January, 2011? I ask myself that sometimes, too. That's a long story. But, you know, I joined an 81 to CIA, as you say, out of grad school. I never intended to go into Soviet operations. But, you know, I got a call when I was in training, and they said come up to headquarters and report to the front office of Soviet Division

and I did and they said, well, you're going to Moscow. I never went to Moscow. I went to other places. But the point is that I never asked for jobs during my time at CIA. They always told me you're going. And I only bid, I think, on one job

and CIA you have a process where you can bid. Every other time I said we needed to go there, we needed to go here. So I answered the needs of the service. And in Pakistan, it was like that. They needed a senior officer. The timing, of course, got rushed because my predecessor departed. And that moved me up to a little earlier than I would have gone.

But I had particular skills that I think were needed at that time. And got the word. And Panetta said to me, get your ass out there. Literally, get your ass out there. as director Panetta could. Pretty salty. Yeah. How did your history, do you think, shape how you approached Islamabad, as you say not?

You were not a regional specialist, not necessarily even a CT guy, a counterterrorism special. No, I was not. Yeah. I did counterterrorism work. Everybody did after 9-11, but no, I was not a counterterrorism specialist. I think the skills that I brought to it were from working against our hardest adversaries and working against the hardest targets.

Frankly, I think when you do that, everything else doesn't become easy, but you realize what the art of the possible is. You can have great confidence in your people and understand that you can achieve things under tremendous threat, particularly counterintelligence threat or CT threat and run operations to the highest level of discipline,

which is really what you need to do and it needed to be done in Pakistan. at that time. I mean, we had a target. We didn't know what it was. We didn't know if bin Laden was there. We had to collect intelligence on that target, and we had to do it in a manner that wouldn't spook. Yeah, yeah. Spook the target. We're going to go into great detail on how that happened. But Pakistan is unique. I've always argued that the ISI, the Pakistan intelligence service, was two things simultaneously, long before you arrive.

Right. A very good partner, according to many U.S. officials, after nine or six, especially on al-Qaeda, and simultaneously a supporter of groups in Afghanistan, Taliban groups that would kill U.S. soldiers. And, of course, there were incidents where the Pakistanis themselves had ties to terrorist groups. When you arrived, did you approach the ISI, did you approach your job as seeing your intelligence counterparts as problematic partners? Or were they more determined foes? No, every intelligence service in the world is in the business of collecting and leveraging the person across the table from them, every one of them.

So, ISI is no different than any other service that I dealt with in that sense. Their great partner in the counterterrorism fight had helped deliver some great victories. I approached the job wanting to work with ISI, but circumstances changed. and the tension and the bilateral relationship caused by events that took place after I arrived made it very difficult. Of course, the nature of what you were about to do. And frankly, later on, of course, as we were moving towards the bin Laden operation, decisions were taken, and we can talk a little bit about those as to whether or not to include Pakistan in the operation. Yeah, yeah.

And at that point, the president decided. it made a decision, that would not be the case. At that point, once we did the operation, it became very difficult and not sustainable for me. It was unsustainable, frankly. I mean, I remember I was living there, I was reporting on all this. It was unsustainable practically as you arrived, right?

So January 2011, tensions running extremely high for two main reasons. Your predecessor, his name had been exposed. There were protests over CIA drone strikes in the Northwest. You see some of those protests there. And CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, had been tracked by two people who I reported at the time had actually been hired by ISI. He shot them in self-defense. They had brandished their weapons against him. He was sitting in detention in Lahore in the east of the country. Those two things had happened right before you arrived and

literally right as you arrived. Right as arrived. How did that affect the environment of what you Well, Ray Davis was an embassy contractor, you know, and this issue, you know, the incident, of course, occurred at a stop sign in Lahore. He was in traffic. Guys came up on a motorcycle, pointed a weapon at him through a windshield, and he did what he was trained to do. I always tell people, you know, that I don't have any problem with what Ray did that day. It was either he was going to go home in a box or they were going to go home in a box. And he acted totally, as I think any professional would have reacted. The consequence of that was, of course, his diplomatic immunity wasn't respected. He was jailed. He ended up being jailed for the longest time of any American diplomat apart from the Iran hostage crisis since World War II, that I know of anyway. Very difficult circumstance because we had an American in jail. We couldn't reach him in terms of get him free. He was going to be charged and was charged with murder, double murder.

And the issue then became, how do we ensure his safety and support him in a way that we can at the same time put pressure on the Pakistani government to release him? You know, and the fear all the time that Ray was in jail was, of course, that he was under direct physical threat. Pakistan's a dangerous place. I had people ask me all the time, what was he doing with a gun? I said, it's Pakistan, right? I mean, it's Pakistan, and it's very dangerous for Americans and official Americans to be there. That's why we had security personnel. All of that is happening as your mission.

You were briefed ahead of time, and your mission or party mission is AC1. Abidabad compound. AC1, yeah. It had already been under surveillance for months by the time you got there again. This is January 2011. So who was the PACER? And why was it so difficult at the time to know who he was? So we'd roll back a little bit before my, before I went over to Pakistan.

I met with the director and he said, you've got to go down and get briefed on this project. So I went down to our counterterrorism center, and we had a mock-up of the compound. It was sitting there. It's the one that's currently in the CIA Museum. If you had a good a chance to go into the museum at CIA. It was done by NGA, done to scale. and they briefed me on how they discovered the compound. And, you know, the story is pretty well known

that, you know, we at one point intercepted a phone call and then tracked people that we knew to be, we called the couriers to back to the compound. The challenge was, of course, if you look at the compound itself, the configuration of the compound, clearly designed to hide from view the inhabitants of the compound.

We directed collection against it, everything that we could. So the pacer was a person seen walking behind the main building underneath a trellis occasionally. The problem was, as Director Panetta put it, we're the CIA. Why can't we find out who this guy is? Well, you know, the challenge was the photography we could get was that at such an angle that you couldn't even get an accurate

count of his height. Now, Bin Laden was a tall guy, right? You know, so I think Director Panetta said at one point, they gave me an estimate of five foot six to six foot three. You know, that doesn't really help. And it was about the angle of the camera, frankly. So got the briefing, had a conversation with the director. Our job was to go out there and do everything we could to verify who this person was,

who was present in the compound, and to do it in a manner that we didn't, frankly, spook them. I mean, that was the big concern. Our people had been hunting for bin Laden for years. I mean, he disappeared after Toro-Borra. And as we found out later, he went and he crossed into Pakistan, which everybody suspected, but was hiding out in Pakistan. My counterpart in CTC, the director of CTC, was asked once, why can't you find him? He said, he's hiding. And bin Laden, as we found out afterwards, and we knew it at the time, had cut himself off from electronic communications and electronic

connection and that complicated the intelligence problem. Were you able, though, in the end, to identify everyone else in that compound? Yeah, we were able to identify by age and by nationality and sometimes by name and it matched at the end the couriers, families, and the family of Osama bin Laden. Quite a few family members. Yeah, quite a few family members were there. I mean, the compound itself, you know, was closed off, but the family would go into town. They'd go in for supplies. they go in for educations, they had to interact with people locally? One aspect that I know you'll be cautious in how you talk about your efforts to identify was an effort to try and use a vaccination program to get bin Laden's DNA,

a program that Pakistani officials exposed after the raid to journalists living in Pakistan, including me. I went back to some of my reporting and was told by a local NGO official about a year and a half later that in this, this official's opinion, some vaccination workers had been killed because of the association of this program ahead of the bin Laden raid. I've talked to some officials even this week, who say this was still a mistake. In retrospect, do you believe that all of the efforts you made to confirm his identity were worth it and worked? Yeah, I do. I do. I don't have any problem with it. I understand the claims afterwards that people have been killed as a result, but Pakistan's

a place where people are getting killed beforehand, too. We were responsible for tracking down the killer of thousands of Americans and other people. And frankly, I was prepared to do everything in my power to bring him to justice. It doesn't mean anything unlawful, but everything in my power. And we did.

We did, and I'm proud of it. I don't have any problem. with, and I understand people after the fact, were critical, but this was a killer. We needed to try to verify who he was, and we did it. There was a debate back in Washington about the level of confidence. What was your level of confidence? 95%. 95?

Yeah, they asked me. I said 95%. Why? The debate back in Washington at the senior levels, of course, you had people that weren't watching the target every day that weren't seeing all of the intelligence. And frankly, the other part of it is you have an operational sense with enough experience as to how targets act, how they behave. And from my experience, looking at it every day, and we looked at it every day,

it appeared that they were behaving like people would behave if they were trying to protect a senior there. Was there a moment? Was there anything you saw, anything your team saw that clicked where you said, ah, I'm at 95? No, no. I just, no, no particular moment. I went out there having been briefed and then started looking at the target, looking at all the collection that we had, talking to my own people who had been working on it for a while. Even in the office out there, the operation and the details of it were heavily compartmented. I mean, the great fear, frankly, was that some there would be a leak in Washington and a leak elsewhere that would expose it. So there was some urgency to move with alacrity to try to ascertain who was there and to get as much information as we could, which was, frankly, part of the operation that you talked about earlier. We were with the speed we needed to move quickly.

And ultimately, of course, the risks are not only losing people, but are we going to put people's lives at risk to attack a tar? without some degree of certainty that he's there. Right? Some of the options to do that once the president, of course, made the decision to go in the military, you know, a bombing raid. The Pakistanis could have done it. That was rejected.

One of the options, though, was CIA could have done it itself. And I think that you believed that you guys could have succeeded. Is that right? Yeah, we could have succeeded in getting people to the target. The problem was getting people out of the target. I mean, literally out of the house. After. Because, you know, it's a combat situation, right?

The people in the, we didn't know, keeping in mind, we didn't know whether the people in the compound were armed, which they turned out to be. We didn't know whether they had suicide vests. We didn't know any of that. So if we'd had injured or killed people on the target, that would have been very difficult to extract them without U.S. military support.

So that was one of the issues that ultimately moved us to where the direction that we went, the director to where he went. Keep in mind also this one of the few times that all the ultimate decision was the military operated under CIA authorities. Trained at a CIA. Yeah but under on the he was Leon Panetta's operation wasn't a he was in charge and that's very rare occurrence. It was because of the nature of the operation. The the issue of the possible options for for prosecuting the target, of course, there were a number discussed.

One was to share with the Pakistanis and go in jointly and do something, and that was pretty quickly set aside because, again, worried about a leak, worried about somebody telling the target. We didn't know if there was a relationship with local people with the target. Secondly, of course, was the CIA option. Thirdly, was bombing. Problem with bombing, twofold, A, collateral damage, but B, didn't have a box.

couldn't prove that she got him. So that led naturally to the progression of thinking to a U.S. military operation. CIA, of course, provided support for that, training, facilities, embedding people with the teams to get them under briefing them up on what they were likely to confront. And, you know, the process for getting there was a decision by the President, you know, ultimately, in consultation with the director. director. What were the contingency plans? You mentioned that if it leaked, whether from Washington or the Pakistan or bin Laden, what were the contingency plans as you were watching that compound? What were the plans? Well, we would try to cover. We did try to cover people that squirted it out of it

or ran out of it, right? Right. But the problem, the problem was you can never have 24-7 perfection coverage, right, without exposing yourself. So, you know, and the other, the other option was they maybe have local collaborators, maybe have government helping them. That would have made it extremely difficult, right? It was very close to the Pakistani military academy. It was. And because we didn't know with absolute certainty that he was there, you know, it made it, there were a lot of other questions that sort of hung on that.

What support structure did he have? So if they fled, could they go to ground quickly? how hard would it be to pick up the trail again. So it was imperative not to be of the information leak. And really, it was a miracle that it didn't. I mean, so much stuff, so much stuff leaks in Washington. I mean, you know, you can't keep secrets. It's really hard.

I've been through that multiple times. I was Chief of Counter Intelligence and then in my time at CIA I saw lots of leaks. And people leak for all sorts of reasons. But this would have been the biggest story that you possibly could have had. And so you get to, we're talking about late April now, 2011, getting closer to May 1st in Washington, May 2nd in Pakistan.

What were you worried about? What were those last-minute preparations? Well, yeah, we were worried about what was going to happen on the target, right? So, you know, if there had been a problem on the target, how would happen to the seals, the ultimate raiders that went in, they had injuries, they had people, what would happen? trying to sequence engagement of the Pakistani government afterwards, planning for afterwards. That was certainly a challenge, security of American personnel in the country.

How would the Pakistanis react? How would civilian population react? How would al-Qaeda react? Did they have the capacity to strike back? All of those... What was the answer to some of that in terms of... Well, al-Qaeda didn't have the capacity to strike back, although we've seen... you know, activities outside of Pakistan.

The issue we were mostly concerned about was local unrest, and we'd seen evidence of that quite a few times through the Davis episodes and otherwise where Americans would come under threat. I mean, as I said before, Pakistan could be a dangerous place. Yeah. Yet Americans kidnapped, journalists kidnapped, aid workers kidnapped, killed. So, you know, we had to worry about all of that. And the other thing, of course, was,

engagement with the local government. How was that going to be done? Who was going to convey the information? Who was going to talk to them? And that was all sequenced. And we worked that all out. Who was going to do the actual conversations with people? And so Sunday? And collection, of course, we collected right up till the end, as much as we could possibly get. I mean, the president, you know, he was pushing. I want to know. You know, do as much as you can. So that's why, you know, we pushed hard. As hard as I, um, you know, we, he was pushing. I dared push, let's put it that way. Fortunately, we had very, very good people.

You know, the people that worked on that, both in the Washington end and in the field, excellent people. And that's about to bring us to Sunday night, May the 1st. The raid would begin on May the 2nd, at Pakistan after midnight. You sit down to watch. You're going to watch it live.

Yeah, I watch it. We're going to talk about that in a second. And we'll pick it up after this event. episode ends for Compass Points. I really appreciate it. And next up, the rate itself. Thank you. That's our conversation, our first part of our conversation with Mark, the second part next week. I'm Nick Schiffen. Thanks for watching. We'll see you here again next week on Compass Points.