The Rest Is Classified - 56. Bin Laden vs the CIA: Death in Pakistan (Ep 6)

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

His poetry celebrated a cosmic struggle of violence and glory, but his end was far from a medieval power play. Why did Osama bin Laden spend his final years in a secluded compound in Pakistan, attempting to manage a global terrorist organisation while living a surprisingly mundane life? What were the chilling details of the raid that finally brought him down, and how did it forever change the landscape of global security? In the final episode of our series on Osama bin Laden vs the CIA, we delve into his strange, semi-retired life in Abbottabad, where he micro-managed Al Qaeda from a makeshift studio and devoured books about himself. Discover how the US military's capabilities evolved from the late 1990s to 2011, culminating in the precise operation that targeted his compound. From the dramatic helicopter mishap to the final moments inside his "self-made prison," we recount the daring raid and its immediate aftermath. Join Gordon and David as they conclude this wild series, reflecting on bin Laden's ultimate demise, his shattered legacy, and the profound, lasting impact he cast over the world. Plus, make sure you’re subscribed to the Declassified Club via the link below for a special, bonus interview with a man who spent his career tracking down Al Qaeda’s infamous leader. ------------------- To sign up to The Declassified Club, go to www.therestisclassified.com or click this ⁠⁠⁠link⁠⁠⁠. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restisclassified It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrills.ca. He hunches forth, staining the blades of Lance's red. May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent humans should they fall, as the stallion bears my witness that I hold them back. My stabbing is like the cinders of fire that explode into flame. Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.

And that, unfortunately, is the poetic verse of None Other Than Osama Bin Laden. Thank you, David, for making me read that wonderful bit of poetry. Revenge for Snowden. It's definitely revenge for Snowden. I also, I mean, I could have used poetry in every episode of this series, so this is admirable restraint on my part to only include it in the last episode. So you actually, your thanks are accepted. You are very welcome. Very good. But like many megalomaniacs, Osama bin Laden fancied himself a poet. I mean, lots of people who think they're great men or whatever think they're poets. The Iranian supreme leader is a poet. Yeah, so we've got all kinds.

Yeah, so that's Bin Laden. And I think I'm not sure I'd give that much more than a C-minus his poetry. Most of it seems pretty full of cliché. The iambic pentameter was all wrong. Yeah, maybe it was my reading. But you can sense that what he's trying to do there, I don't think very successfully, is have a kind of cosmic sweep celebrating violence and death and martyrdom and glory and this struggle to defeat his enemies and talk about lances and things like that back to some kind of medieval power play of the Islamic world against the West. I guess that's what he's trying to talk about in that poetry. And on the rest is classified in this final episode of the series on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, we are going to talk about the final end for that murderous poet.

So, David, last time we left it on the manhunt, finally locating bin Laden at this compound, slightly mysterious compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan. We left it as a cliffhanger though, a little bit, Gordon. A little bit. Nobody is quite sure who is there. So listeners will have to get to the end of this episode to figure out if Osama Bin Laden is actually in that compound. It's a proper cliffhanger.

It's a proper cliffhanger. But maybe we should say a little bit about him because we focused a lot on the CIA hunt for him. But what about him and what he's been up to in those years? I mean, he's been on the run, but also still trying to run Al-Qaeda, hasn't he? I guess we could say he's certainly been on the run. He's also, I guess, in a bit of a retirement phase in some respects, because basically after Toribora, which is really the last time we saw him in the story, he, Al Qaeda, even his immediate family are essentially

just scattered to the four winds. And by the middle of 2002, and I should say that much of what we have come to know about sort of this decade, this post 9-11 decade for Osama bin Laden is due to some exceptional work by the journalist Peter Bergen, who's written a biography of Osama bin Laden. And then there's been a bunch of work done on a lot of the documents that were exploited following the raid. So by mid 2002 Osama bin Laden is in Peshawar in Pakistan, which is actually the city where he founded Al Qaeda back in 1988. And he's shaved off his beard in this period, which is sort of hard to picture. He and Amal, his youngest wife, for

those listeners following with which wives are still with Osama and how many of his four capacity is he carrying at any point in time, he has Amal with him, who is the Yemeni teenage bride. They are ferried by van into the north of Pakistan, where they settle in a house. It's actually a very lovely spot. It's in Swat, Pakistan, Gordon, which is apparently known as the Switzerland of Pakistan. Beautiful valleys. Yeah, a very kind of green mountainous lush area, lots of rivers and lakes. So he settles there for a little while. He and Amal conceive their second child

there. They live under the protection of that Kuwaiti courier Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, this kind of courier slash body guard who has been so central to the CIA's manhunt. And the Kuwaiti's brother is also there. And it's here in Swat that some bin Laden is gonna issue some of his first public statements. Since Tora Bori, he'll meet with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the 9-11 masterminds. And then listeners will remember that in 2003,

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is arrested. And this prompts bin Laden to move. So he's gonna move to another city an hour outside of Islamabad. He's going to live there with two of his wives. Amal has two more children. He basically, this is a period where he's starting to not really see anybody, right? There's going to be no visitors because once KSM is arrested, you can't live there anymore because that knowledge would be in KSM's brain. So by 2004, Osama's videos, I think, are getting a little bit less militant, Gordon.

You go look at these. Gone are sort of the camo and the fatigues and the propped up AK-47. He's kind of sitting behind a desk. He's dressed in gold robes, like he's at a Saudi wedding. His beard is starting to go white, very embarrassingly. And Peter Bergen notes, I think quite aptly, he says, Bin Laden in this period

starts to try to project an image as the elder statesman of jihad. So kind of the senior leader, the founder and CEO, the executive chairman of this now, quite sprawling organization with franchises all over the world. And this in 2004 is actually the first time that bin Laden takes explicit responsibility for 911. And in what I think is a shameful taunt, even by the standards of the horrible, shameful things that he's done, he actually taunts Bush on the video for continuing to read a story about a pet goat to the kids at that elementary school in Florida, when he gets knowledge of the 911 attacks, there's

kind of a weird personal thing there. And it is starting in 2004, 2005 that Abu Ahmed, the courier slash bodyguard, starts to acquire parcels of land in a Pakistani city called Abbottabad. So that compound land starts to get built up to the specifications of Abu Ahmed. And in August of 2005, Osama, two of his wives, six of his children, the two bodyguards and their families all move into the compound

in Abbottabad, Pakistan. So this kind of strange, as you put it, it's a kind of half retirement home, half layer where he's trying to still run operations, but also he's got his family there. He's trying to keep a low profile but also trying to still have contacts for the outside world. It's a strange life, isn't it? And he's there for what's that August 2005, you know, for years, years and years and years. He doesn't leave. I mean, so he goes in and August 2005 doesn't

leave. Do you think he never actually ever leaves that compound in five years? I mean, that's extraordinary if that's the case, isn't it? In terms of isolation. It is. I mean, the kids were not leaving. I mean, we talked in the last episode about so many of those bizarre and very difficult behaviors to sustain over time. And I don't think he did. I think he stayed inside.

I mean, he's there. Another wife joins him. So he ends up with three wives there, 12 children. Now he's also got grandchildren there, bizarrely enough, because he had married off one of his daughters to an al-Qaeda fighter in Afghanistan when his daughter was 12. She had died in childbirth in 2007, her husband, so it would have been his son-in-law, Samu Bin Laden's son-in-law, is later killed in a CIA drone strike. So there's four orphaned children from that marriage who end up going to Abbottabad to live in the compound with their grandpa, Samu Bin Laden. So he's got the three wives, 12 children and grandchildren, the two bodyguards, their wives and seven children.

There's 27 people in total living in that compound. And Bin Laden is spending, it seems, a lot of his time reading or listening to nonfiction. And so in the materials expulsed after the raid, they had Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars was on his shelf. He was listening to the audio version of Peter Bergen's book, the Osama Bin Laden I I know an oral history of Al Qaeda's leader, which we've also used on this podcast. That is weird if you are listening to an audio book about the Osama bin Laden I know, and you're Osama bin Laden, and you're listening to an oral history of people who've met you over the years talking about me. That's that is telling me you're a narcissist without

telling me you're a narcissist. Yeah, right. That is. Yeah, that is kind of weird. He obviously is taking an intense interest in himself and what the Western writers think about him and how he's being reflected in the states and which is back to his sense of personal brand and his kind of projection of himself is this great figure in history, isn't it? That's right. which you also get from the poetry that you so lovely read, you know, at the beginning of this podcast. Now, he also, as listeners will remember, the head of Alex Station at the CIA, the Bin Laden hunting unit in the mid-90s, Mike Scheuer.

Sam Bin Laden had a bunch of Scheuer's books on, because Shoyer had taken a bit of a turn in the mid 2000s and was writing books very critical of US foreign policy in the CIA. Bin Laden has his books on the shelf. Now, he also has a book, Gordon, Shopping for Bombs by one G. Carrera. I don't think he did. Couldn't see the first name that was also on the shelf in Abbottabad. We never plug our books, but that one is about Pakistan and the role of Pakistani intelligence in or alleged role in nuclear weapons proliferation. So you might find it kind of interesting. I don't know how he got the signed copy Gordon there was on the shelf.

Anyway, anyway, so this is the weird world of Osama bin Laden. So he's reading, he's reading, he's listening to audio books. He's got an upstairs bedroom or the ceiling. Now remember, bin Laden is a tall guy. He's like six foot four. He barely stands in this room, right? He's kind of crouched over. He's got a study where he writes letters off to al-Qaeda lieutenants and to family members. He is definitely a news junkie. As he's aging, he's becoming a stereotypical kind of old man

who's watching the news and probably, you know, getting irate as he sees various headlines. He is also, we say retirement, which is kind of true, but he's a micromanager, right? And he is really trying to retain as much control as possible over Al-Qaeda in these years, which admittedly would be very challenging, Gordon, because it has franchised globally

in kind of the post 9-11 decade. I mean, there's a branch in Iraq, which is extremely violent and bloodthirsty in these years and has a leader who I think is not really following the Osama bin Laden playbook. Yeah, exactly. There was some tension who I think is not really following the Osama Bin Laden playbook. Yeah, exactly. There was some tension, I think, between Zakawi and the others and al-Qaeda leadership. You always would hear about this. Yeah. So there was lots of these affiliates, aren't there, which are all under different elements of control, aren't they? And how far

they're actually controlled by the center. So he's trying to control them, I guess, but not always successfully through his messages. I would say largely unsuccessfully, to be quite honest. I mean, there's a branch at Yemen, there's a branch in North Africa. And you recall back to the early episodes of the series talking about his involvement in the family business. I mean, Bin Laden was kind of a micromanager when it came to business administration when it wasn't jihad. And there's a great letter that was captured after the raid, where bin Laden is advising Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch in

Yemen, that they should, they should make sure to eat well before taking long road trips so they could make fewer stops along the way and presumably be less vulnerable to security. So he's, he's in the weeds, Gordon. Yeah, that's weird, isn't it? Yeah. Now he's also he's very active, kind of in the media, right? So he releases more than two dozen video and audio tapes in the decade after 911. He's actually got a makeshift television studio at the house in Abbottabad. Peter Bergen has

this great line in his book, he says, when Osama flubbed his lines, he chuckled and wrapped his knuckles on a desk to signal that he wanted to do a retake, which is also what we do on the rest of the class. I was going to say these days you'd have a podcast rather than a TV show together. That's right. That's right. And by 2010, he is considering a rebrand of the Al Qaeda organization. Can't imagine why. I think the shocking amount of ordinary civilians killed has worked against it, let's say Gordon. And I think Bin Laden is starting to understand that toward the last few years of his life. He's actually thinking about planning a public declaration that would emphasize the quote, friendliness of al-Qaeda in order to regain of Al-Qaeda in order to regain the trust of the Muslim public. So by the time of the Arab Spring in 2011, I think this is an interesting kind of commentary

on just how in some ways irrelevant he has become. Although I don't want to overstate that because I do think that, especially in a lot of the materials gathered after the raid, it was clear that he was actively involved in attack planning up until the very end. And Al Qaeda Central, as an organization, was still very much attempting to conduct mass casualty attacks in the US and across the West. So we shouldn't undersell it too much. But it's interesting that how irrelevant he had become by the time you get to the Arab Spring, where he's basically watching from the sidelines as the Egyptian regime totters, the Tunisian regime totters,

the Libyan regime, the Syrian regime, the Yemeni regime. I mean, he's kind of, Al-Qaeda is present in those conflicts, but it's not the driving force behind any of the kind of upheaval shaking the Arab world that year. Yeah. And of course, that had been one of his motivations. If you go back to where he started in the 90s, it was about removing the kind of Arab dictatorships, which he said were oppressing Muslim people and preventing the radical Islam he believed in. And he'd always made the case, hadn't he, that you need the kind of terroristic violence of al-Qaeda to do that. And suddenly, some of these regimes are being challenged and even toppled by people power, by if you like, more democratic, less,

you know, violent forces than those that he espoused. So it is quite challenging to the whole al-Qaeda kind of philosophy that this was the means of achieving change, I think, at that moment. So again, it is that sense in which he's a man out of time, his time has passed a little bit. Well, I think maybe there's an understanding on his part, or maybe an anxiety that that is actually happening in his kind

of old age. He's holding regular kind of family meetings at that compound in Abbottabad, almost a kind of bin Laden family kitchen cabinet, where he's trying to hone his message for these videos and these audio tapes that he's going to release. A couple of his wives are quite educated. One of them actually has a PhD in Quranic grammar, and he does seem to rely on them for advice in this period and value their opinion on Al-Qaeda's messaging and branding. I mentioned the spectacular attacks earlier, I should have said. one of them is he is kind of interested, I think, in assassinating senior members of the American administration.

And so he at one point is advising all kinds of deputies that they might consider killing President Obama, or potentially David Betrayus. He very wildly says, you know, don't even bother trying to kill Vice President Biden. Bin Laden apparently thought Biden was totally unprepared for the presidency and so he wasn't a worthwhile target. But by April of 2011, as President Obama, as CIA Director Leon Panetta, the Obama administration are debating this raid to go after and kill Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden and his family, that kitchen cabinet, are thinking about releasing a major statement amid this kind of Arab Spring, this two-malt in the Arab world. Now, he's also, at this point in the spring of 2011,

kind of running out of leash with those bodyguards, Abu Ahmed and his brother, because they're fed up with this. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Unsurprising. He is with him and his brother, because they're fed up with this. Yeah, not surprised. Unsurprising. He is with him and his many, many children. They're basically indentured servants to some bin Laden. They're taking massive risks. He's apparently paying them $100 a month, Gordon. Which does not seem very much.

Not compensating them for the risks. Right. That's for sure. And the property at Abbottabad is in their name and they want out. And so in the spring of 2011, now, obviously, at this point in time, the Obama administration is not aware of any of this. But the raid actually does come at a fortuitous moment because Osama bin Laden is trying to figure out where he might go next and who will protect him.

If Abu Ahmed and his brother toss him out, right? And Bin Laden is at this point, he's got three wives under one roof. He's got a bunch of kids. He's got the four grandkids. He's apparently drinking a vina, which is a syrup made from oats, which is supposed to produce Viagra-like effects. He's eating olives as an aphrodisiac. He's dying his beard, Gordon, just for men.

He's taking something from viagra like effects and something else from an aphrodisiac and dying his beard. I mean, this guy, he still thinks he's a bit of a player, does he? I mean, he's just bizarre. We said in the first episode, Gordon, that I think Osamu Bin Laden is a very sexual creature, okay? And we got to understand him that way. And he doesn't want to just kind of pack that up, right? I mean, he's got his wives with him there. And on the night of the 1st of May, 2011, the night is moonless. And Osama bin Laden is, I guess, in a kind of semi-retirement. He's on the cusp of being evicted from this compound. He's got his family all around him. And on that night when he lies down to bed, at long, long last, Gordon, the CIA and the Americans are finally coming for him.

Yeah, after a long, long wait, what he doesn't know is that President Obama, as we'd kind of seen last time, was going to give the order, wasn't he, for what was called Operation Neptune Spear. I mean, that is a good title for this kind of... It's a good name. It's solid marks for that one, yeah. Solid marks for that one. We've had some stinkers on the rest of the class, but I think

we give that one the good marks. And they're going to go for it. And they opted, as we heard last time, not to bomb the place, the risk of collateral damage and not knowing whether you got him was too high with that, but instead going for the raid using a mix of special forces but under CIA direction or leadership. It's quite an unusual mix the way this mission is structured. I mean, is that something normal, the way it's organized? So in this case, when the CIA started to think up options and present them to the president,

it seems like it became clear to Panetta right away that it would make sense to use JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, use forces under its control to actually conduct the raid. But because the raid is happening in Pakistan, you want to be able to deny it, right? And you want that to happen under CIA, I guess, covert action authorities. So the arrangement that they come up with is to, it's called sheep dip the seals. The chain of command is running from the president to Leon Panetta at the CIA, and then to JSOC and the seals. says the Joint Special Operations Command. Yeah. It's probably worth a word on the capabilities that are going to be brought to bear on Osama bin Laden that compound via JSOC primarily, because listeners to the series will note, I mean, as we lay this out,

the incredible evolution of the United States abilities to just sort of go and find someone and reach out and touch them anywhere in the world between the late 90s when the CIA and Washington are wringing their hands about what do we do about Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, let's say, you know, in a sanctuary. How do we really get to him? We're using those feckless tribal militia, the trod pints, we're lobbing cruise missiles ineffectively. We need six hours of advanced notice of where he's gonna be if we're gonna find him. But by 2011, JSOC, I mean, it's really the result

of a generation of US military adaptation that goes back to the failed Desert One mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, which ended in disaster, ended in a helicopter crash in the desert, probably contributed to Jimmy Carter losing re-election. And since that point in time, and JSOC has become this kind of fusion of elite operator capabilities. So Delta Force, the SEALs, the 75th Ranger Regiment, the Night Stalkers, which is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, basically one of the best helicopter pilots in the world. All of these

different units are loosely fused together underneath this JSOC umbrella. Cooperation between the CIA and JSOC has deepened really substantially even just in the few years leading up to 2011. And so, as we said, Panetta had basically said, look, if the president wants to go for the ground option, JSOC should really take the lead. And so basically what it has come down to by 2011 is that human spy networks across Pakistan and Afghanistan have been

rebuilt and strengthened. The CIA, the NSA have this platform of global surveillance, which is aided by control of the telecommunications infrastructure. There's a massive fleet by 2011 of both surveillance drones and weaponized drones. I mean, by 2010, the drone fleets in the thousands with the ability to watch dozens of locations in real time all the time. And you have these really elite kind of operator units, many underneath JSOC that have in a decade almost of experience conducting exactly these kinds of raids almost every night in places in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, I remember that in Iraq. I mean, they got into this cycle, didn't they, the Special Operations Forces, where it would be hit a target, gather intelligence from them, send it up, have it analyzed somewhere, mix it with other types of intelligence, then go hit the next target the next day, and just kind of a real fast cycle of doing these raids using

intelligence and kind of moving forward. But this is different,'t it? I mean they built this capability but there's never gonna be no kind of pressure on a single raid as there's gonna be on this one in in 2011. So let's maybe stop there take a break and afterwards we'll come back and we'll see how that raid on Osama bin Laden goes down. Internet, ad companies, data harvesters, parties unknown. NordVPN blocks all of it's malware, pop-ups and the creepier corners of the web. It's like having your own digital dead drop. Secure, untraceable, nobody quietly rifling through your browsing history or collecting your personal information. And so threat protection works even when the VPN's off. So even if you forget to switch

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Welcome back. It is the start of May 2011, Sunday the 1st. Cloud Cover in Pakistan has delayed emission. But now David, it's on isn't it? It is on because it is going to be a largely moonless night, but with just enough light so the night vision goggles will work for the folks flying the helicopters and for the operators on the ground. So it is Sunday, the first of May 2011. Now we should say that we should back up because on Saturday, Gordon, the president and basically everyone involved

in these Mickey Mouse meetings to plan the raid have to attend the White House Correspondents Dinner, which is a big thing in Washington. I find it a bit bizarre. No, I've never been okay Okay, I find it's a bit of a bizarre love in for the kind of President and the American media. I think it looks a bit odd on the outside. But this is a particularly famous one, isn't it? Because it's the one where Donald Trump is in the audience.

He's there. Yeah, but Donald's there. And he's been kind of going on about President Obama's birth certificate, and he's not really an American, not a legitimate president. And Obama kind of makes fun of it and rips Donald Trump. One of the theories, isn't it, is that this is the moment where Donald Trump, because he's made fun of at the dinner, goes, screw you, I'm going to become president of the United States and show you.

So this is possibly one of the most consequential weekends in American history, because you've both got perhaps the moment that spurs Donald Trump to run for president, because he's made fun of at this dinner, and you've got the raid on Osama bin Laden about to happen, you know, kind of few hours afterwards. And you've got half the participants in this one room. I mean, you couldn't make it up, could you? I guess President Obama is at the nexus of both of those things, right? So he is quite the weekend. He goads President Trump into running and

eventually serving eight years as president and he kills Osama bin Laden. Or I shouldn't give that away yet, should I? We're not there. So listeners will be shocked. Now, another reason the correspondence didn't do those interesting Gordon is that Seth Meyers, American comedian, will be shocked. Now, another reason the correspondence to those, interesting Gordon, is that Seth Meyers, American comedian, he cracks a joke about Bin Laden. And he says, quote, everyone thinks he's been hiding in the Hindu Kush, but he really hosts a C-SPAN show from four to 5 p.m.

And it gets some good laughs. And you zoom in on Panetta and Obama. And I think they play it pretty cool. You know, they kind of laugh right along with it. But in their minds, of course, you got to be wondering they're like, good grief, this guy. If only he knew. Yeah. If like two days later, you wonder if they're texting Seth Meyers going, I'm sure they were now the ABC news anchor gets wind of something going on at the White House, because the White House, they give tours of the West Wing and the Situation Room and a Sunday would be a pretty good day to do that. But they'd closed it.

They'd closed the West Wing to tours the next day. And this ABC journalist calls the White House Chief of Staff and he says, do you guys have something big going on over there? The Chief of Staff says, it's a plumbing issue. So we've shut the place down. Journalist seems to buy it. So they get through the correspondence dinner. And the next morning is Sunday, the first of May in DC time, the raid is going to be starting now it is 1030pm in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, two very oddly shaped, stealth Blackhawk helicopters are taking off and heading for the Pakistani border. On the choppers are 23 seals and full kit.

There's a Pashto interpreter in case locals will have to be addressed. There's a dog named Cairo for sniffing explosives and hunting for safe rooms, because we should also mention that although the seals have practiced extensively on mock-ups of the compound, no one knows what it looks like inside, right? So there could be panic rooms. We don't really know. Admiral McRaven, who is gonna be the JSAW commander for the mission, he's in Jalalabad, he's not actually in the helicopters. He is a gigantic Texan. I appreciate having a Texan involved in the story. Love it when a Texan makes an appearance on the show, Gordon. Very good. He's got a deep

baritone voice. He is sans cowboy hat, but he is basically all of our British listeners will recognize him as exactly what they think a Texan should sound like, I would say he is he is the par for the course sort of Texan par excellence. He's running the raid from this kind of makeshift command center, which is basically a glorified closet where he can communicate simultaneously with the SEALs and CIA headquarters. McRaven's wearing a headset so he can narrate what's happening. Now the helicopters are followed by an RQ-170 stealth drone, which is flying miles above them

and transmitting live video back to McRaven and his team. Now, half an hour after the Blackhawks had departed Jalalabad, three Chinook helicopters take off from the same airfield. One Chinook is loaded with SEALs. It's going to land just before it reaches the Pakistani border, and it's going to act as kind of a quick reaction force, because of course, there's the possibility hanging over all of this, that there could be a legitimate firefight with the Pakistanis. So they're there to go in if you need reinforcements basically. Exactly. The other two Chinooks are filled with seals and additional fuel for the Blackhawks. They fly into Pakistan to a pretty desolate region 50 miles or so northeast of Abbottabad,

again as a kind of backup force. Now, the Chinooks are a lot easier to see on the radar. And so the Blackhawks are in the lead should the Chinooks be detected. There is kind of a winding hour and a half flight that is designed to avoid urban areas and radar. So of course they're not flying in a straight line. And when the Blackhawks come around the mountains into Abbottabad,

there's going to be a couple minutes when the helicopters might be detected by radar, and where residents of the town and the surrounding areas might be able to hear the rotors from the helicopters. Now, at the White House, the Obama team can follow the raid in the White House situation room, right? But they can only see the drone video feed in one of the neighboring kind of cramped anti-rooms. And by the way, I'll note that the White House situation room, that whole kind of complex underneath the West Wing is very, very

cramped. The ceilings are not tall, the rooms are not particularly large. And there are a lot of little half sized conference rooms off of the main sit room that listeners might recognize from from films, right? Yeah. And so that famous picture, yeah, of the team kind of watching the raid is from one of these little side rooms. And because the side room has the video, the principals, you know, Obama and Biden and everybody began to drift into that room. Now, it's a moonless night. The power is out in Abbottabad and two minutes out from the compound, the side door of the first Blackhawk opens, some of the SEALs start to swing their feet out of the helicopter and get their fast ropes

ready. Now, the plan apparently was for one of the Blackhawks to hover over the compound, over what they thought was Osama bin Laden's third floor bedroom. They would then fast rope onto the roof of the bedroom and surprise him, which you figure that makes a lot of sense because You don't have to deal with well What is the layout of the ground floor and how do we get up and who's down there? You just you know, he's in that bedroom and you just get right to him now that doesn't happen

The rehearsals in the States had taken place with chain link fencing standing in for the high concrete walls around the compound. And that fencing had allowed the helicopter's rotor wash to kind of dissipate. But the concrete walls at the actual Abbottabad compound amplified it. And it caused a phenomenon known as settling with power. And basically, there's a situation where the helicopter gets stuck in the kind of the down wash from its own rotors. Sounds like a mini tornado or something. Right. And so the Blackhawk begins to just kind of drop out of the sky.

We mentioned this night stalker aviation regiment, these Helo pilots. I mean, a lot of the words after this were describing it as like a crash. It kind of wasn't a crash. It was a very hard but controlled landing because the pilot knew exactly what he was doing. It happens in the animal pen part of the compound, there are cows living there. And so the the Blackhawk kind of slams down. I mean, this is a disaster, isn't it? Potentially, though, it's not a disaster. That's wrong. There's the potential for a disaster is the potential if you've got a helicopter, which has gone down

to start thinking that has got echoes of that famous raid in Iran to try and free the hostages, where helicopters crashed, don't they in the desert, and the whole thing is a kind of catastrophe or blackhawk down because again, this is an actual blackhawk that is seemingly crashed in Pakistan. Yeah, and the tail rotor of clips that compound wall. So it can't fly. But again, it's not really a crash because I think the pilot did exactly what he should have done in that situation. And frankly, they prepared for this. And in fact,

McRaven, Admiral McRaven, who's narrating this for the Obama team, says, we will now be amending the mission. My men are prepared for this contingency and they will deal with it. Now, one of the Chinooks is called up from the waiting area. So we should note, I think what's really different about this is the element of it's Pakistan, right? That's the part of this that's so different. But again, these guys have done this many, many, many times.

This isn't new to any of them. So one of the Chinooks is called up from the waiting area. Second helicopter then lands outside the compound. Now, of course, at this point, because a helicopter has made a very hard landing into his cow pen, Osama bin Laden is awake. And his wife, Amal, who was with him in the bedroom has gone to check on her five children.

Osama bin Laden's two eldest daughters have come up to check on him. And you kind of get the sense here that you can look out the window somewhere, presumably something big is happening. So the element of surprise is definitely gone at this point, hasn't it? That's right. Yeah, the fast rope thing where they're going to be able to kind of come in like ninjas is not not going to

happen. So Samama bin Laden is upstairs with his two eldest daughters. Together they pray, they pray to the Kalima, the Muslim profession of faith, they say, there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. Osama bin Laden tells his daughters, basically, you know, the Americans have arrived

and you need to leave this room immediately, and they refuse. So they're with him. Now the seals move from that animal pen area toward a one-story building that houses Abu Ahmed, the Kuwaiti, the bodyguard. Seals check the door. It's locked. They place a small explosive charge on it. Someone starts shooting through the door. The seals return fire, and then everything goes quiet. They shout in Arabic, open the door and come out. The door opens, bodyguard's wife comes out,

holding small child. There's three other children trailing behind her and Abu Ahmed is dead. Now the seals are entering, another group of seals are entering the main house. Inside it's pitch black. Again, the electricity is out in Abbottabad that night. Some of the early accounts of

the raid suggested that the US had somehow turned it off. The more recent accounts have suggested that it's actually just that Pakistan rations the power, right? So there was a load shedding happening that night in Abbottabad. So the seals go in, it's black. Now Bin Laden's other bodyguard, which is Abu Ahmed's brother and his wife, they live on the ground floor. One of the seals shoots and kills them both.

Apparently his wife had been armed. So there's more seals, three of them walking through the kitchen, kind of move deeper into the house. Near the back of the house is a stairwell. Now it's not a normal stairwell, there is a massive iron gate that is blocking the staircase and the access to the upper two floors of the house. Which is not normal. Which is not standard.

Yeah, it's kind of suspicious. If you're in, you're thinking this definitely feels like we're onto something now, don't you? Now the seals put an explosive charge in the gate, they blow it open. If all this sounds familiar to listeners, you also note that I think the Zero Dark 30... Yeah, it's pretty realistic, isn't it? It's pretty realistic to what happens. Now, the CIA thinks that Osama bin Laden's son Khalid lives up on the second floor. And on the second floor, as they're sort of going up the stairs, the SEAL who's on point

sees a head pop out and then kind of disappear back around the corner. The seal whispers Khalid Khalid and then hearing his name, Khalid sticks his head out and he's shot and killed. The seal step over his body and move forward. They're not taking prisoners. No, anyone who is armed, any adult males are being shot. Oh, correct. Yeah. So the point man who's going upstairs sees someone stick his head out of a room on the third floor

and thinks it's Sam Bin Laden, he shoots at him. Now he might have wounded him. There's a whole separate side story to the number of SEALs that have come out to talk about their role in the raid and who actually shot Bin Laden. I will note that it doesn't actually matter for the purposes of the story, but he may have been wounded here.

Now the point man steps ahead. There's two other SEALs coming upstairs. Amal, his wife, sees someone coming up the stairs and aiming a weapon in the direction of her husband. She rushes the soldier, the SEAL, and Amal is shot in the calf, and then kind of passes out or slumps over onto the bed. Now there's, there's lots of children and grandchildren

that are kind of gathering on the staircase. As you mentioned, this place is full of kids, right? The point man bursts into that third floor bedroom and sees two women. These are Bin Laden's two eldest daughters and kind of sweeps them into his arms and shoves them against this wall to get them out of the way or potentially to protect his colleagues from a suicide vest or something like that. It is worth saying they are not just killing everybody in the house.

No, they're not. They're absolutely not. I mean, it seems that the reason why the bodyguard's wife, Miriam, was shot was because she was armed. Yeah. And that would be the exception. And Amal is shot in the calf, not to kill, but to injure because she's rushing at the soldier. But then there they are with Bin Laden. But then there they are.

And it seems that the two seals gone into the room and shoot Salman Bin Laden a few more rounds into his chest and apparently through the left eye. And then that's it. He's dead. I mean, it's amazing. I mean, dramatic. And yet also, after so many years, almost anticlimactic. I mean, it couldn't it doesn't sound right, because it is incredibly dramatic and exciting. And yet, that's how it ends for this guy. He doesn't fight. No, he doesn't fight in the end. You know, so much for all his

lances and heroism. And you know, the image he projected himself, it's not quite the end for him that I think he'd maybe expected or wanted going out fighting. Yeah. You wonder if he's trying to protect his family, maybe? Knowing that if he starts to shoot, is he going to risk kids or grandkids being killed? Yeah. I mean, so there were 11 adults in the compound. I mean, seven were shot in the space of 15 minutes, presumably while he is listening, right? Or watching. Yeah. So he knows what's going on. He knows what's happening. Now, the raid commander calls Admiral McRaven on a satellite radio and he says, Forgotten country, Geronimo. Geronimo is the code name for Osama bin Laden.

So he does this right after they've shot him. Now, McRaven asks the SEAL commander on the ground, is he EKIA, enemy killed in action? And a few seconds later, the answer comes back, Roger, Geronimo, EK-K-I-A. Now, McRaven also announces this to the White House crew that's gathered there in that anti-room. Michael Morrell, who's the deputy director, and Leon Panetta, who's the director of the CIA, apparently hug. It's the first of two highly unusual hugs between CIA senior officials.

Not a great hugging. It's not a huge hugging organization at the upper levels, as far as I can gather. They will hug again, though later, apparently, when they hear chants of USA, USA, USA, CIA, CIA, CIA, while leaving the White House. So there's another hug. Two hugs. Unprecedented hugs between two officials who I would have thought were more handshake type guys. Now, on the second floor of the house, there's a massive trove of stuff.

There's CDs, DVDs, memory cards, thumb drives, computers, digital voice recorders. So this is real Intel, right? It's going to be the kind of thing that not only helps shed light on al-Qaeda. It might stop other plots. Might stop other plots, exactly. So the SEALs start barely bagging all of this stuff up. They end up taking 10 hard drives, five computers, around 100 storage devices, like thumb drives and disks.

They're on target on the ground for like 45 minutes. And McRaven, of course, is starting to get a little nervous about this, says, OK, let's wrap this up. Outside the compound, that Pashto interpreter is seeing that, well, the neighborhood's up now. People are waking up because of all this noise. There's been gunfire, there's been a helicopter crash, and people are coming at the compound. Again, you can see a version of this in Zero Dark 30. The Pashto interpreter calls at them and basically says, look, this is government business. If you want to stay alive, don't come, go back to your house.

There's still people, you know, kind of looky-loos who are interested in what's going on. These guys keep running at the compound. The SEALs actually apparently get ready to shoot them. And the interpreter says, no, hold on, let me have a word with them. And basically, the interpreter yells at them eventually and they turn back around. So no one else has to be shot, right? Now, so the seals, they end up being at the compound in total for 48 minutes,

which is 18 minutes longer than they had planned, presumably because they weren't able to fast rope. And they may not have expected, frankly, the massive quantity of stuff, right? And they've also got to like, frankly, restrain all of the women and children who are still left behind and the Pakistanis will have to deal with them, right. They've also got that downed Black Hawk helicopter, which is sitting there kind of rumpled over the side of the cow pen.

And which is full of very top secret kind of equipment, isn't it? You'd prefer that the Pakistanis don't get the avionics off of that thing, right? So they basically load it with explosives and blow it up at 1 or 6 a.m. It sends 150 foot mushroom cloud into the air above the compound. The Chinook come in to kind of pick up the remaining seals as well as to take Bin Laden's DNA samples and all this intel retrieved at the compounds, you've got another helicopter that's come in. Now, Bin Laden's body has been placed on that surviving Black Hawk because that's going to be the fastest bird to get out. And they want to make sure that the body is not captured by the Pakistanis or shot down or anything like that. One Chinook flies a direct route back to Afghanistan. The surviving Blackhawk heads to get fuel from the second Chinook,

which has a fuel bladder that it can refuel the Blackhawk. And then those two helicopters return to Afghanistan. So at 2.26am local, the Chinook and the Blackhawk enter Afghan airspace. It's been some of the memoirs after this. It's the first time the SEALs had really enjoyed hearing the words welcome to Afghanistan. So they're back and safe outside of Pakistani airspace. So the big question though, at this moment, because of course, you know, remembering the

decision to go in, they weren't totally sure it was Bin Laden. There was always the possibility it was someone else. Now, a lot of this has suggested it is someone very important, but that's got to be the crucial question at this moment, is confirming it was Bin Laden and making sure you've got the right guy, because that's all the pressure is on that, isn't it? And trying to understand it. When I go back to Kofa Black after 9-11, giving the orders to some of the people they were sending into Afghanistan, we did this in some of our earliest episodes, and he said, bring me back Bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice. And it was both a kind of grisly trophy that Kofa Black wanted. But actually, if you're I mean, I remember actually asking myself about this. And he said, No, no, no, it's about

confirmation. It's about DNA. It's about being sure it's not about bloodlust. It's not about bloodlust. Now, I'm not sure about that Kofi. But you know, that's what he told me. But it's interesting, even back then, it was like, that's how you confirm you've got him is the equivalent of head in a box. It's going to be slightly different this time. I mean, they're not going to deliver their head in the box to the White House, but they do need to, to be sure it's him.

They do. And I mean, Michael Morell and his memoir will make the point that for a while after the raid, I mean, no one can really be certain at this point, you're more or less taking it on the word of, you know, the seals who were in the room, and that's fine, but it's not 100% confirmation. They take pictures and then run it through a couple facial recognition tools. Although I don't think there's that much of his face. I mean, it's pretty, it's been shot. Well, yeah, and it's suffered damage, right? I mean, at one point, one of the seals actually lies down next to the body in Jalalabad to try to confirm the height.

And I think Obama makes some jibe on the other end of this video conference saying, we just spent $60 million on a helicopter, meaning they've crashed Blackhawk and you guys didn't have 10 bucks for a tape measure. We have to sort of eyeball this with a tall seal who sat down. So the CIA does have two facial recognition analysts in the DS&T, the Directorate of Science and Technology, independently look at the photos.

They say we're 95% sure it's him. And the White House essentially decides like we can't sit on this story. It's just, it's gonna break, right. But the next day, they do conduct DNA testing at a forensics lab out in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Base and confirm it's Osama Bin Laden. And then it's that evening. So it's Sunday evening, Washington time, isn't it? And it's starting to kind of, I remember

this in an interesting way, because the news started to leak that something was going to be announced, there was going to be a special presidential statement. And I think it was kind of 1030pm or something around that time. And it was interesting, because I was in London, and I, it was one of the few times where you get woken up really in the middle of the night, and I think I got woken up about 2.30am, 3am in the morning, normally they'd they'd leave you to about 5am at the BBC. For that time, they

woke me up at 2.30. And they said, look, something big is going on. And it was interesting, because they had a feeling it was Bin Laden. They said, so already kind of rumours were seeping out that it was going to be an announcement, Bin Laden. So I remember racing into the office. And then it was extraordinary, because by the time President Obama makes this announcement, we've got him, there's these cheers outside the White House, aren't there? And people start gathering outside the White House and chanting. It was extraordinary, because actually,

already the news started to come out that Bin Laden's body was gone. They pushed it out, hadn't they, into the Indian Ocean, I think, and deposited the body. So it was this extraordinary moment where you're like, it's over, it's done, and it's complete, and the body is even gone, because they're so sure it's him. It's very rare to have something which is so final, so precise, and so complete at that moment, I think, is that and so memorable. I was working at the CIA at that point in time. I was in DC at Langley, and I was not working on counterterrorism issues or all kind of urban London or anything like that. So I remember, I'd like a good federal worker

Gordon, I had gone to bed early that night to prepare myself for the week. So I didn't hear about it until the next morning when I'm driving, I still do remember listening to the radio driving down the GW Parkway on the way to Langley and hearing the news. And for me, it had come out of nowhere, because of course I'm not privy to any of this to just out of the blue seemingly. And get into Langley and there's a message right away,

kind of an all workforce message, these things that pop up on everybody's computer all at once, basically saying, the director is gonna address the workforce. So there's a video address that Panetta gives. And I can still remember it today computer all at once, basically saying the director is going to address the workforce. So there's a video address that Panetta gives, and I can still remember it today because usually these kinds of things are a bit dry and not frankly worth listening to unless it's like on a topic that's like really impacting you.

I mean, a lot of people would, you know, just sort of go about their day. But Panetta was so off script and so excited. Like I don't think I've ever seen an adult human as excited as Leon Panetta was that morning. And he gave this terrifically profane, blunt, detail laden speech about the raid that he probably probably shouldn't have given. But he was so excited. I honestly have never seen someone's it was like CIA it was like Christmas morning for a CIA director is what it was like he was just so thrilled.

I mean, what a contrast to that compare it to September the 11th and 12th 2001 in the sense of kind of despair in the counterterrorism center. when they realised the attack of God through and the kind of shock of it. What a contrast. As we sort of reflect back on it, we should say, I mean, you mentioned Bin Laden's body being tipped into the Indian Ocean. I mean, he's given a burial at sea, he's given a proper kind of Muslim burial, but the administration had decided,

look, we don't want him to be buried anywhere. We do not want there to be the possibility for like a, you know, sort of a monument or a shrine to this guy. We want the location to be unknown. And there were pictures taken, of course, of his body and of the burial to prove that it had happened, but they're not made public. Again, I think because there's a desire

in the part of the White House, and I think understandably so, that you don't want any of that material used in someone's radicalization story in the future. Almost this erasure of him is what they're after. And yet, when you think about the impact this guy has had on the world, I mean, we started this series talking about how he's probably one of the most influential people of the past 50 years. And it's almost like where do you even start?

Because if you go back to the decade after 9-11, I mean, there really is a direct line, isn't there, Gordon, from him to 9-11, to the conflicts that really defined the first quarter, really the first 25 years of this century. Yeah, I mean, people called them the forever wars, didn't they? I mean, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly that period of really intense conflict, because I don't think Iraq would have happened without 9-11, certainly not in the way it did. No. Iraq transformed the Middle East, the kind of impact on Afghanistan as well, that long intervention in Afghanistan, that wouldn't have happened without 9-11. And then you think about the impact on so many other countries of al-Qaeda, whether it's Pakistan, where, you know, many people died as well. I mean, one of the things we've never really got to the bottom of is what did the Pakistani government, one of the unanswered

questions, you know, the Pakistani military and intelligence know about the fact Bin Laden was in Abbottabad. But anyway, Pakistan is also a country which suffered, you know, at the hands of al-Qaeda and some pretty terrible attacks, as did so many countries. Syria, Yemen, Saudi. You think of Britain and 7-7, you think of the Madrid bombings, you just think of the kind of the toll of wars and terrorism, which really did emanate from this one individual. And it is kind of extraordinary, I think. And I think some of those aspects of terrorism and conflict would have happened, but I don't think they would have happened in nearly the same way without Bin Laden. Well, it's interesting how global American counter-terrorism

operations become in the decade afterward. I mean, we, the Americans conducted counter-terrorism operations in 78 countries in the decade, or two decades after 9-11. There are new American bases that pop up in Afghanistan, in Djibouti, in Iraq, in Kuwait, in Qatar, in Syria, in the UAE. I went and had a look. There's a group at Brown University. It's called the Costs of War Project that has tried to put both a human and an economic cost on a number of these conflicts. And they estimate that there's somewhere between around 900,000 and 940,000 people that were killed in direct military action

between Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. And if you take an indirect toll, that's maybe three million to five million people who died from disease, starvation, the collapse of public infrastructure in these wars. There were 38 million people displaced by the conflicts that we now call the 9-11 wars. It's just, it's astounding. And also there's an opportunity cost because that decade spent dealing with Al-Qaeda and more, you know, and then ISIS is also time

when we weren't doing other things and, you know, including dealing with other national security challenges like the rise of China because of this kind of focus on getting Bin Laden and the manhunt. And I think that's one of the other kind of difficult legacies about the fact, because this is one of the big themes of our series, is that it did take a long time. I think, you know, it's a triumph for the United States in the end to get him in the end. But I do think if you'd said to people just

after 9-11, it's going to take close to a decade, I think that's a long time, a long, long time for him to be on the run and to be kind of doing all the damage he did. There's this sort of long, long shadow that he, probably more than anyone else, has cast over all of us. I mean, this was a crazy one, Gordon. So on 9-11, there were 16 people on the US no-fly list. 16. And by the time of the Abbottabad raid, there were 40,000 and another million

people on a list where they'll basically pulled into secondary if they get onto a US-bound flight. So there's kind of this like Fortress America thing. It's a great statistic because it arguably that tells you a lot of the whole story we've been telling in that one statistic as we come to know because the fact there were only 16 people on a no-fly list on 9-11, that was probably too few. And the fact that they didn't have some of the people who were actually Al-Qaeda operatives, you know, on the no-fly list, that was a kind of a myth. So it was too little pressure on Al-Qaeda before, and then arguably too much where you end up with this kind of massive national security state and machinery. I mean, the other angle here is, it is true that there was not another massive casualty spectacular attack conducted in the US homeland in the 25 years after 9-11.

Right? I mean, the US, the FBI, the CIA, sort of, our intel and security agencies were successful at preventing another one from happening. And there were loads that were in the works that were stopped midstream from occurring. But what we now have is a world where really lone wolf terrorists in many respects, who are kind of, they can be radicalized just by reading

about Osama bin Laden on the internet in talking and chat rooms. I mean, you have these kinds of smaller scale, almost homegrown jihadist attacks that have killed over a hundred people in the States since 9-11. And I really think that, I mean, another legacy of bin Laden's is that even though we might see Al-Qaeda's terrorism, this kind of religious terrorism that does

have some roots in anarchism, this kind of anti-colonial or Marxist waves of terrorism that occurred in the 60s and the 70s, those waves really burn themselves out over time. And you kind of, you know, maybe as we look ahead, you think, well, this current al-Qaeda-inspired phase in many respects might do just that. But it's actually, I think, maybe not going to be as simple as that because Bin Laden's brand is religious. And even though a very tiny number of Muslims around the world ascribe to his ideas like infinitesimally small, it is still in just raw numbers, a decent number of potential recruits, right? Probably more now than there were on the eve of 9-11, as a result of 9-11 and the wars afterwards and the policies afterwards. Yeah. So I guess after this fascinating journey into Bin Laden into the battle between

Bin Laden and the CIA, David, where do you where do you leave it when you kind of think about him and the man? I mean, it's hard to sum it up, isn't it? I mean, back to the poet. The lens of poetry, Gordon is powerful. And there's this a line from one of his his horrendous poems says, let my grave be an eagle's belly, its resting place in the sky's atmosphere amongst perched eagles. And he wrote a lot of that a few years after 9-11 while he was in hiding.

And I do think he didn't get his wish, which I think is one way to look at the man. I mean, his resting place is not in the sky's atmosphere amongst perched eagles. His family just to bring it back to the man, we started this series with Osama bin Laden, the man, the boy, young Osama growing up in Saudi. And you know, his family, much of it was destroyed. He had two sons that were killed in US counterterrorism operations. He had a daughter who he had married off at the age of 12, who dies in child

birth while delivering her baby on the run in Pakistan. He had a son-in-law killed in a drone strike. Two of his wives left him before 9-11, taking five children with them because they couldn't deal with it anymore, which makes a lot of sense. Two of his adult sons had abandoned him. And after 9-11, seven of his children and his oldest wife were held under house arrest in Iran, right? So and then you have Amal, his wife was wounded in the raid, right shot by a US seal. And she and the other two wives in Abbottabad are held in Pakistani custody for another year after that. So you know, this is a guy who dies

violently at the hands of a couple young American soldiers. He's in this kind of, as you said, a self-made prison among his wives and children. He's surrounded by broken glass and wreck stuff and kids toys. And after all of that, he is not perched among the eagles, but he is dropped quietly into the sea and he disappears. And so there David with Osama bin Laden at the bottom of the ocean beneath the waves. I think we should leave it. But just to say for those who are wise enough to be members of the Declassified Club, we have a special treat for you, don't we David? Because we have actually got an interview that which we've done with one of the people who was part of that CIA team hunting for Osama bin Laden for many years.

That's right. So we're going to talk with an alumnus of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who was deeply involved in the hunt. He's going to talk to us about the hunt. He's going to talk to us about what it was like at the CIA on 9-11. He's gonna talk to us a little bit about the raid. So he's gonna tell Gordon everything Gordon got wrong in the series so far and make a great scorecard out of it. So don't miss that. And of course, go to therestisclassified.com if you wanna sign up for the club. If you don't want to, it's of course frowned upon, but nonetheless, we shall return next time.

See you next time.