CIA spied on bin Laden from safe house

The long-hunted al-Qaeda leader and chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States was killed by U.S. forces May 1 in a surgical raid.

By Greg Miller,
WashPost
Thursday, May 5, 5:56 PM

The CIA maintained a safe house in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad for a small team of spies who conducted extensive surveillance over a period of months on the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Special Operations forces this week, U.S. officials said.

The secret CIA facility was used as a base of operations for one of the most delicate human intelligence gathering missions in recent CIA history, one that relied on Pakistani informants and other sources to help assemble a “pattern of life” portrait of the occupants and daily activities at the fortified compound where bin Laden was found, the officials said.

The on-the-ground surveillance work was part of an intelligence-gathering push mobilized after the discovery of the suspicious complex last August that involved virtually every category of collection in the U.S. arsenal, ranging from satellite imagery to eavesdropping efforts aimed at recording voices inside the compound.

The effort was so extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it, U.S. officials said.

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