The War on Terror, Part Two - From Khost to Compounds | CIA
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Disclaimer, this episode contains strong language and violent scenes throughout. This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover.

What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. There was never a time, was it ever far from your mind that any one of these individuals at any time could represent a danger. But usually it wasn't the top thing that you thought about. Of course, that proved dramatically incorrect. The War on Terror, Part 2.

From coast to compounds. December 30, 2009. At the CIA's Langley headquarters, case officer Aaron Brown is desperately trying to get in touch with his colleagues at Camp Chapman, coast Afghanistan. No response is forthcoming.

The Coast Team's comms start to go offline altogether. It's chaotic and people are trying to figure out what's going on. Then, a senior officer enters the room. And it's clear-eyed face that something enormously bad has happened. He shepherds Aaron and his team into a side room. He's starting to tear up. There, he says...

In this, the second part of True Spy's special, on what really went on inside the CIA at the height of the War on Terror, you'll hear what happened at Coast that day. And you'll hear how it shaped Aaron's subsequent work in planning the most important counterterrorism operation in history. Operation Neptune Spear. The raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

As they're gearing up in SEAL Team 6 for this raid, I find myself knowing quite a few members of the potential raid force. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Aaron Brown has just been hit with the news. Many of his team at the agency's coast base are dead.

and that a number of them were in critical condition. So it wasn't clear immediately how many people died or who exactly had died. We're all sort of thinking about them and, you know, a handful were buried with kids and I think we're all thinking ourselves in their position and what this is going to mean. Right now, details of what exactly happened are scant. Because everybody who was involved in the planning or up near the front of where this took place died there on the base.

They know Balawe had arrived at Camp Chapman as scheduled. His Jordanian handler had even waived the security checks, allowing him into the inner sanctum of the base. But as the day progresses, further intel trickles back to HQ. Balawe had entered the base in a red Subaru driven by a local.

After being met by CIA security officers, one had reached inside the car towards Balawee, but he flinched away. He slides over and he gets out of the other side. And of course, it's confusing. Immediately, other officers approach the car, guns drawn. Humam rounds the front of the car. The security officers are now screaming at Balawee to put his hands up. He was not scared at all.

Then he twitches his finger. And he detonates a suicide vest. He kills seven CIA officers, including the security officers who were attempting to engage him, and Jen Matthews, the chief of base, and Harold Brown, who I sat across the table from at Thanksgiving, and obviously just changed the course of many things at that point. This was the first time anything like this had happened in the war on terror, anything even remotely like this.

It was the most deadly attack on the CIA in more than 25 years. Since the bombing of the Beirut embassy, it was to call it a wake-up moment is an understatement. The former acting director of the CIA called the event the nightmare we've been anticipating since we went into Afghanistan.

A number of additional CIA officers were very badly injured and went on to long, long battles of recovery. And fortunately, they did survive with, in some cases, terrible life-altering injuries. Nearly eight years after his colleagues from Ranger Regiment were killed on the mountain of Takurgar, Aaron Brown was learning of the deaths of more close friends in the War on Terror.

Jennifer Matthews has taken a fair amount of flack for being in charge at the base when this operation took place. And I am very hesitant to be one of those people because it's just not possible to know what she was thinking, what kind of pressure she was receiving. She was a very brave person, a very smart person, a very exacting person.

Jennifer Matthews had even worked at Alec Station, the CIA desk tasked with tracking bin Laden in the 90s. There's plenty of blame to go around, and frankly, I have to wrap myself in there. I don't remember ever talking to anybody after the fact that said I knew he was going to blow himself up. Balawi's vest was packed with C4 explosives, wrapped in marble-sized steel ball bearings and five-inch-long nails.

Most of those who ended up being killed were killed pretty quickly, instantly in the blast. Alongside the seven CIA officers killed were the Afghan driver, Aghawan, and Balawi's Jordanian handler, Sharif Ali bin Zayed, the cousin of the King of Jordan.

The latter attended bin Zayed's funeral, holding the wake at the royal palace. The Jordanian's official line was that he died performing "humanitarian work" in Afghanistan. In reality, the secrecy of the relationship between Jordan's intelligence agency and the CIA had also fallen victim to the attack.

It soon became clear that Bin Zayed was no humanitarian worker, all due to Balawee's deception. Because he did a really good job of stringing along the organizations that were talking to him. He clearly understood what the interests were. Balawee had been working alongside al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, all along.

He was, in essence, a triple agent, sending the Jordanians and CIA chicken feed. Accurate, but ultimately insignificant intelligence intended to distract them. And bin Zayed, his Jordanian handler, had taken the bait.

He knew how to establish his bona fides by sending in videos, by knowing information that wasn't publicly known. And I've learned a lot from this because I was just as wrong as anyone was in this circumstance. But in the world of a true spy, not everything is always as it seems, especially when it comes to handling informants.

You can never say something is absolutely true of anything in the CIA because there's an exception to absolutely everything. An incredibly deadly event took place that shouldn't have and could have been prevented with better decision. Though it's important to say at this time that not everybody was getting searched at that time. That wasn't like everybody got searched and that was just the way it was. That wasn't the case.

The seven CIA officers killed at Chapman each had a star engraved on the memorial wall at Langley, a suitably anonymous honor for a true spy's ultimate sacrifice. We gathered to pay tribute to seven American patriots who gave their lives in this fight. Either way, though, the CIA were back at square one. Bin Laden is still a ghost, but the mission went on.

And in addition to going after much of the top leadership, we now had the additional mission of going after all of the individuals who orchestrated this attack on our colleagues. And shortly thereafter, Aaron was running one of the most important efforts in that fight. He became deputy chief of forward operations at the CIA's PAK Afghan department, the epicenter of the agency's counterterrorism efforts.

In that role, he worked closely with the department's high-value Target One team, the agency's Bin Laden targeters. And they had potentially game-changing intel to share with him. In the fall of 2010, I remember them as whispers, and I think they were literally whispers. They found a compound that was very much out of place and was tied to an individual who folks thought had a history with Bin Laden.

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August 2010. It's eight months after that fatal day at Camp Chapman. In Peshawar, Pakistan, CIA paramilitary officers are hunched into a jeep driving around the city.

Amidst the hustle of the streets, the team are looking for one man. A man thought to be Osama bin Laden's courier. But he's not easy to find. He was using incredible operational security. And he was using a phone that only came out long enough for these phone calls in the shower.

Eventually, however, the signal gets hot. The team are close. Spotting a white SUV, they follow it out of the city due east. After two hours, the jeep pulls up at a house just outside the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

But not just any house. It was more like a compound. High walls, fortified gates, no windows on the top floor. And I'm told the individual who immediately upon seeing the house knew that they had found something extremely important.

Aaron Brown, now deputy head of forward operations at the CIA's PAK Afghan department, is one of the few to be informed. Because some of the ways that we were going to learn about this compound involved the operations for which I had a role over in managing.

For example, the PAK Afghan department was running a huge number of agents, both locals and Americans, in the two countries. Agents that Aaron had oversight of and whose each scrap of intel was deemed critical to the entire mission.

But this particular piece of hushed intel about a compound was difficult to process. This is an extremely superstitious team at this point. They have been duped numerous times on hunts for bin Laden. They're running out at this time, numerous other leads, and they refuse to believe or at least tell themselves that there's a chance that they're onto something really major. And this is why it's being whispered. But there's another reason for the whispers.

Because if it's true, this is obviously something they're going to need to keep very quiet for a long time while they figure this out. That fall, Aaron returns to Afghanistan. Utilizing the Arabic he learned back in Cairo, he debriefs an individual thought to have intel on al-Qaeda's presence in Abbottabad. It seemed everything was important at that time. So important that Aaron stayed up all night writing up his findings, cabling headquarters the next morning.

Ultimately, it proved a dead end. But still, while there, Aaron meets a group of Navy SEALs. I have the interesting history of having played Cornhole with Rob O'Neill. Cornhole, where players throw small beanbags at the opposition's board a few meters away. If they land, you get a point.

It's a pretty basic game, but to seal Team Six, that was the point. It's often extracurricular activities that are done out there in downtime. And Aaron's partner, Rob O'Neill? Remember that name. With the new year approaching, the compound looks more and more promising. There's a man living on the top floor who never leaves. The compound's security is watertight.

And it's becoming more and more apparent that something, someone really important is at this residence. As the operation grows in importance, so does its secrecy. I volunteered myself to go and participate in some of the planning sessions here. Even as a deputy head in the PAK Afghan department, Aaron was nowhere near senior enough to be involved. But he insisted.

and I've gotten invited by the chief of the department to play a very small role, considered as like an executive assistant. Which is far more significant to an operation like this than it may sound. Because of that, I had to sort of tag along with him to a lot of things that he was doing, and now I had a real role, a small one, but a real one in this planning process. Nobody asked my opinion. I still gave it anyways. The NSA's senior counterterrorism officer later said...

It was the most secretive operation he'd ever been involved in. Barely anyone in the PAK Afghan department, the center of the CIA's counterterrorism effort, was read in, except Aaron. But still, it's not yet clear what exactly would come out of this op. You couldn't get the HET-1 team to even hypothetically discuss the idea that it was PAMADA. They would not allow themselves to do that.

Nonetheless, President Obama was soon briefed about the compound. And the president just said, "You have unlimited resources. Consider no budget ceiling for this. If you have an idea and it's really hard to pull off and it's going to cost a lot of money, I wish for you to execute it." And so they continue to run out just an enormous number of things to try and figure out if it's him. We've heard the story of how bin Laden was tracked down in True Spies: The Bin Laden Files.

But you might not be familiar with the finer detail. This is how you identify a secretive super-terrorist.

The CIA rents a safe house in Abbottabad, stationing several spies there. It recruits a Pakistani doctor to visit the compound as part of a falsified vaccination program. Unmanned RQ-170 drones fly over the area. The National Security Agency's highly secretive, tailored access operations, a cyber warfare unit, frantically tries to hack into phones and laptops in the vicinity.

all in search of any shred of intelligence. There was no expense spared in this. This amazing model that was built by the National Geospatial Agency, NGA, which was an exact replica down to, in some cases, the number of sticks on the trees in the courtyard for the compound.

Less than 60 people are aware that this is happening in the entire world. Aaron was one of them.

Soon, he notices that keeping the operation secret was an unusual endeavor. You always knew when the bin Laden team was going to brief because they would exit the building carrying this model, which was an exact replica for the compound, boxed up inside plywood, and four of them would carry it out of the building. Nobody but those handful of us knew that that was the team dragging that thing downtown to use it as part of their briefing.

While some within the CIA were convinced it was bin Laden, the agency doesn't go on hunches. To keep things balanced, it brought in red teams to pick apart intel which suggested that it was, in fact, the al-Qaeda leader. Perhaps it was a drug dealer, another terrorist leader, but still. It is shaping up to more and more look like it's an al-Qaeda senior leader.

Despite the glut of federal resources, though, no proof of who exactly this man was materialized, nor did it look likely to. It's clear that it's not going to be possible to prove that it's been London. And somewhere along the lines, President Obama says, all right, we're going to start planning to do something about this, regardless of if we can prove that it's him.

Obama asks CIA Director Leon Panetta to draw up plans for a military strike on the compound. Panetta, in turn, speaks to Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of JSOC, the famed special operations command post that oversees the Tier 1 units of the U.S. military. These are not just the Navy SEALs and the Army's special forces, but the elite detachments of those. So

SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force. Aaron Brown had once toyed with applying to Delta way back in his ranger's days in the late 90s. You'll find in ranger regiments people who have amazing abilities, amazing fortitude, ability to carry a rucksack really, really far for reasons that are not entirely clear often. And even there, when you look to a place like Delta Force, the level up is an amazing distance. Just the level of human ability that exists in

in that unit in Delta Force is shocking. It's not just physical ability, there's a very specific personality and mental type. Vice Admiral McRaven asks one of his men, previously a SEAL Team 6 Deputy Commander, to present a raid plan.

By February 2011, he had moved into a first-floor office at the CIA's secure printing plant in Langley, Virginia, covering the walls with topographical maps and satellite images of the Abbottabad compound. Officially, he was attached to the Pakistan-Afghanistan desk, Aaron's desk.

And then around March, it's decided that a number of options will be considered. One, bomb the compound using B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. This offered the benefit of needing no boots on the ground in Pakistan. But the logistics were extreme in other ways. For example, it was impossible to know if there were any bunkers below the compound. The Air Force calculated that to ensure demolition of any possible such bunkers...

A payload of over 60,000 pounds would be needed. That's the equivalent of an earthquake, President Obama was advised. What's more... Still wouldn't know for sure who was at the bottom of that pile of rubble. Option two was slightly different.

Take a shot at the man with a small drone-mounted precision missile. The target often walked in the compound's garden, after all. The perfect opportunity. This presented a different problem, though. This compound is just blocks away from effectively what is Pakistan's West Point, one of their most prestigious military academies.

If the drone strike was successful and the Pakistanis retrieved bin Laden's body, how could we know for sure that they would confirm the kill? Because the Pakistanis at this point have great incentive to hide the fact that it was bin Laden because this is an extraordinary embarrassment for them. And while these missiles were precise, they weren't guaranteed. If it missed, bin Laden would be alerted and instantly disappear. Then there was option three.

Launching a special operations raid with troops on the ground to go in and attempt to capture or kill whoever this is. To many in the room, including Aaron, this seemed the strongest option. I came out of the Ranger Regiment. I knew a lot of the folks who did these types of missions. And for me, sending in a raid force to find this individual was absolutely the right call. Then there was the idea of working directly with the Pakistanis. This was ultimately their jurisdiction.

Obama immediately dismissed that idea. "The risk of this getting out was too great," he said. "Proceed with planning a raid." He wanted justice to be brought to this man by the hands of U.S. commandos. He wanted this to go down in a way that American forces came knocking for this individual. He thought that was an important way for this to happen, and he voiced that often in these engagements.

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Admiral McRaven's men at the CIA's printing plant now invited two former SEAL Team 6 colleagues to Langley. There, they considered the best way to conduct the raid. Touch down just outside of Botabad itself and approach on foot? Tunnel in? Whichever way they looked at it, though, one option stuck out. Helicoptering directly into the compound.

Compared to the hundreds of raids SEAL Team 6 had done all over the world, this one was actually quite routine. The compound was isolated, lightly populated, and had only basic weaponry. President Obama seemed to agree, ordering a team to be selected and raid rehearsals to begin. As SEAL Team 6 were already in Afghanistan, they were an obvious choice for Admiral McRaven.

They decide to seal Team 6, and they start reading these folks in, again, in very small numbers, and they start planning for this raid.

By mid-April, the team were practicing nightly raids on an exact replica of the compound in the Nevada desert. They even helicoptered the 90 minutes to and from each exercise to simulate the real mission. For Aaron, his role as deputy head of forward operations at the CIA's Pakistan-Afghanistan desk put him in an unusual position. Knowing quite a few members of the potential raid force...

One of the seals was Rob O'Neill, Aaron's cornhole partner back in the fall.

Towards the end of April, Aaron felt a growing sense of urgency among the planning team. Every day that went by only increased the likelihood of both leaks and bin Laden potentially relocating. So, on April 26th, Admiral McRaven and the SEAL Team 6 operators flew out to Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, to await the green light. On Friday, April 29th,

They got it. The raid was scheduled for the next night.

The Friday before the raid was a very interesting day, especially in my life, which involved me going up to what we call the seventh floor at CIA. And this is where the CIA leadership has their offices. And I have a role on this day to engage with the directors, chief of staff, to ensure that on the day of the raid, that all of the constituent parts of these people who are going to come into the office on that day run seamlessly, because there's going to be numerous places where this operation is going to be run from inside CIA.

Following his immediate bosses up to the seventh floor though, Aaron notices they're not going where they were meant to.

And it's a little confusing. All of these things are happening super, super quickly and they're a little bit disorganized. And I'm following these two guys who are very focused on what they're about to do. And they walk through a door and I follow them in. Looking around, Aaron's heart jumps. It's the meeting with the director already in progress. And I'm the youngest person in the room by 10 years. And I'm not supposed to be there. I mean, this is like a by invitation only exclusive event.

And I sort of whisper to her sheepishly, I am not supposed to be in here. Absolutely. This is amazing. So I find a seat on the edge of a couch sitting next to the director of science and I pull out my notepad and I'm like, I'm at least going to look like I'm doing something here.

Halfway through the meeting, though, the deputy director himself interrupts. He leans over and he asks another senior person, loud enough that the whole room can hear, who's that guy over there? He's pointing at Aaron. Finally, this is going to backfire on me and it's going to be super embarrassing. Suddenly, though, one of the group replies. And says, oh, don't worry, that's Aaron. He's up here with these guys. He's fine.

Staying put, Aaron hears the group go over every last detail of the plan. This operation was not run by the United States military. JSOC was seconded to the CIA and the director of CIA, Leon Panetta, had the ultimate authority for this mission, which is just an unusual circumstance, but was appropriate for this raid. And there was a particular reason for that.

The U.S. was not at war with Pakistan. Sending American troops into the country was not a good look, legally, if nothing else. But still, the president wanted boots on the ground. So, for the op, the SEAL Team 6 unit was simply transferred to the CIA, a civilian agency. After analyzing everything one more time, the group asks Director Panetta if he has any questions.

Afterwards, he will go to the White House to brief the president. He's like, I just want to know, is it OK if I go to church tomorrow before this whole thing kicks off? Aaron knows exactly what the director's doing. The reason they were talking about this is because there was questions over who should be doing what with scheduling, and they were very, very focused on not looking abnormal. Later that day, Admiral McRaven delays the raid by 24 hours due to excessive cloud cover.

The SEALs needed a clear night. Meanwhile, Aaron asks his boss what he's going to do that evening. He said, well, I'm going to go home. I'm going to cook up an enormous plate of spaghetti. I'm going to pour a really tall glass of wine. And I'm going to pray to God that Osama bin Laden is in that compound because he had staked his career at that point on it and had said to the president, I think he's there. Then Aaron makes one more request to let the broader department know what was really going on.

All right, his boss says. Tell them.

So that Sunday, the place was packed. There was food everywhere and it was electric with energy and probably more anxiety than positive energy. And we were down in this department where we had set up a ad hoc ops center. Just in case they needed to field questions from across government throughout the day.

By this point, though, Aaron was hoping he could just watch and observe developments. That would mean everything was going to plan. His work was done. The leadership team for the department was up on the seventh floor in the conference room, and they were running the raid from up there. That's where the director was. Even then, no one was certain what or who the SEALs would find.

I will tell anyone with absolute certainty because I was right there all the way up until the day before the raid launched. Nobody was certain that was Bin Laden. Aaron and the team get word. The two Black Hawks carrying two dozen SEAL Team 6 operators had taken off, headed for the compound.

Soon, a colleague contacts Saren...

It's apparent to people who have not been read into this in places further afield that something is happening at headquarters because they can see it. Lots of us are online. Aaron remembers the CIA tales of old.

There's a bunch of stories about the Russians in the 80s monitoring the number of pizzas being delivered to the Pentagon as like an indicator of possible nuclear war. And of course, we did the same thing. We ordered lots of pizzas to the agency on a Sunday. So anybody who was paying attention that day would have been able to determine that something very different was happening. And before long, the Black Hawk helicopters have entered Pakistani airspace.

And immediately, you know, the situation changes. It goes from sort of an excited, energetic environment to just a very professional environment, hyper-professional. There's almost no turning back. And now the threat is real because there's not 100% certainty that Pakistani air defenses aren't going to find this and they're not going to launch jets. And could this thing just absolutely implode right off the bat? It is a lot of stress in the entire space. Then they hear another announcement. SEALs on the objective, which means helicopters have arrived.

But immediately, there's bad news. Primary helicopter over the courtyard, the rotors have stopped moving. And it felt like the entire office stopped. For a former ranger like Aaron, this was more than just bad news. It was traumatic.

because I thought immediately of Black Hawk Down. And also of his friends in the regiment who died at Takur Gar way back in 2002 after they too had helicoptered in. Now we have a helicopter down. It's unclear if there's casualties. This raid just became something completely different.

But almost as soon as they hear that news, there's more. Admiral McCabe came over the comms and said, We had an incident on the objective. This is not affecting the mission. We are moving to one of the backup plans.

The following minutes are an eternity to everyone in that room, nestled within CIA headquarters, thousands of miles away from Abbottabad, Pakistan. I think a lot of people like to imagine us sitting there watching something like Hillary Clinton and President Obama. No, we were watching screens with words and we were waiting for words to come across. And so because of where we are in this, we're getting feedback from the tactile updates. And so there's a huge delay.

Then, some 15 minutes later, CIA Director Panetta's voice booms over the radio at the back of the room.

Geronimo, E-K-I-A. A few seconds later, those words flashed across the screens in front of Aaron. Nobody quite believed it. Nobody could remember exactly what that meant. Everyone was like, OK, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. What is it? What does this mean? Geronimo, the operation's codename for Bin Laden. E-K-I-A. Enemy killed in action. There was an eruption of...

Cheers. It was a stress relief of the variety you would expect from 100 people. Aaron turns to see his old colleague come out of the side office, the same colleague who told Aaron and his team of the deaths of their friends at Coast.

And I don't know if you've ever encountered one of these easy buttons from Office Depot, the little red buttons that people have on their desks sometimes. And he comes out and this is when the charge is still rippling through the office. And he presses this button and the automated voice comes on and says, that was easy. And I just remember that being like just sort of a release for everybody up there. Soon though, the team recomposed themselves.

because everybody realized right away, like, this thing was far from over. It was becoming aware that the raid had taken place. There was a very famous individual now that had put out on Twitter that there were helicopters over Abbottabad, which was extremely strange for that amount of time. And then quickly thereafter that there was gunfire. Something was happening in Abbottabad, and it became apparent that now this raid force was under the gun. They had to get out of there. And they had a lot of things they still had to do.

not least bagging as much hardware and documentation as the raid team could carry. Then there was the small matter of blowing up the downed Black Hawk to ensure its classified machinery remained classified. And they got a little bit long on that objective. And so all of us back in headquarters were just like, go, get out of there. People were even saying it out loud, like, get on the birds and go. And so it was a lot of anxiety. Eventually, the backup Chinook helicopter arrives.

And Admiral Craven says, OK, guys, wrap this up and get out of there. Because, again, at some point, the opinion is that the Pakistanis are going to launch their aircraft. And that is going to become a real bad day for helicopters, helicopters and jets. Jets always win. Some 30 minutes later, Aaron's floor hears another update. We're just sitting there again, back to being quiet, back to being stoic and nervous.

And then they cross. They call it out. Raid force back in Afghanistan. And then the second cheer goes up at that point. There's hugs and crying and people giving hugs who, like, you would have bet a million dollars would not be coming around a vault giving hugs. Fair amount of wine and champagne being consumed waiting for the president to come on TV, which quite literally was hours from all of us being certain that this thing was done. For Aaron Brown, the moment will stay with him forever.

I spent the time in the Rangers doing, I can't tell you how many training missions to 5 Midlanden. I ultimately dedicated my career and life to being in that exact place. Aaron also thought about Sergeant Brad Crose and Specialist Mark Anderson, the two Rangers he served with who died atop Takurgar Mountain back in 2002. The two friends whose funerals spurred Aaron on to become a true spy.

It was just a culminating event for sure. And then there was Camp Chapman, Coast. In all of our minds were our friends from Coast Base. We talked about them that day and just thought about how that affected the mission, the whole idea of going after bin Laden. I think they could have used the lessons learned from Coast to be more risk averse, but in this case it was a driving factor instead.

A few years later, Aaron received the CIA Award for Impact in a Foreign Language for his intelligence work in Arabic. Presented by then-director John Brennan, the moment proved Aaron's instincts right to not re-enlist in the aftermath of 9-11, but stay in college and study in Cairo.

I would have imagined myself on the raid force if I was truly being courageous in my mind's eye, but there was no other job short of that that would have gotten you closer. I got to end up in this location on this day with this team watching it happen among 60 people in the entire world that got to do so. If I had made any decision differently, I wouldn't have been there. There's no chance. Aaron left the CIA in 2021, his final post as Deputy Chief of Operations for Southeast Asia and Japan. ♪

I decided to leave CIA before retirement, not because I was disgruntled or didn't love it. It was an amazing job. I would still be there today if I thought I could do what needs to be done. Today, Aaron runs a nonprofit training some of America's largest technology companies, both in how to protect their intellectual property from theft and their critical infrastructure from attack, particularly by foreign state-supported actors.

Looking back at his CIA career, though, it was a career well spent. I had a young ranger ask me if it was disappointing to me that Americans didn't really think about terrorism anymore. If I found myself being mad about that, that's the wrong way to look at this. In fact, I see it exactly the opposite. The fact that Americans get on a subway in New York and don't think about being blown up.

The fact that Americans go on vacation all over the world and aren't worried about having their loved ones attacked by terrorist elements, the fact that they don't even think about it means that we won. We won. We accomplished what we set out to do. The goal was to remove this from the American psyche, to be so good at it that people didn't have to worry. And if they're not thinking, that means we did it.

You can hear all about the trail that led to the compound in True Spy's three-part special, The Bin Laden Files, including the story of how journalist Peter Bergen met the al-Qaeda leader himself. He was six foot four. He was rail thin, carried himself like a cleric. He spoke in a monotone. He spoke very low key. He didn't come off as angry, even though his words were full of anger against the United States.

I'm Rhiannon Neves. Join us next week to hear the extraordinary tale of Eileen O'Shaughnessy, the woman who rescued George Orwell. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

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The police charge up to a man on the table next to her, grab him roughly and bundle him out of the door. Her heart races and she tries to focus on looking normal, breathing evenly and drawing no attention to herself. She is lit up.

And then there he is. Eileen jumps up as discreetly and quickly as she can manage. She stands up.

very calmly walks over to him, puts her arm around his neck and kind of whispers in his ear, get out. True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.