Pakistan Security Shielded Osama bin Laden from U.S. — Wikileaks

I thought we needed a new thread to discuss the bin Laden breakthrough. I’ll continue to update if I find more new information.

From the Tim Ross at the UK Telegraph:

In December 2009, the government of Tajikistan warned the United States that efforts to catch bin Laden were being thwarted by corrupt Pakistani spies.

According to a US diplomatic dispatch, General Abdullo Sadulloevich Nazarov, a senior Tajik counterterrorism official, told the Americans that “many” inside Pakistan knew where bin Laden was.

The document stated: “In Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden wasn’t an invisible man, and many knew his whereabouts in North Waziristan, but whenever security forces attempted a raid on his hideouts, the enemy received warning of their approach from sources in the security forces.”

Intelligence gathered from detainees at Guantanamo Bay may also have made the Americans wary of sharing their operational plans with the Pakistani government.

Hmmm…maybe those billions that are going to Pakistan would be better spend on dealing with unemployment here in the U.S.?

More on the courier from the CSM:

It is widely reported that the detained 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave his US interrogators the pseudonym of a man he described as Osama bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whose whereabouts were tracked last fall to a fortress-like compound in Abbottabad city, some 75 miles north of the capital Islamabad. But US intelligence was also monitoring the satellite calls made by bin Laden’s bodyguard, which also helped lead US forces to bin Laden’s hiding place.

Bin Laden avoided e-mail and phones for fear those lines could be tracked, and instead relied on a system of personal couriers who carried his messages to the outside world. His compound lacked any telephone or Internet connection, according to local sources, but he did have at least one satellite phone. Further backing their story, a Reuters reporter visiting the scene reportedly saw a satellite dish in the compound.

Here’s a fascinating story in the NYT about some of the intelligence work that went into finding out where bin Laden was hiding in plain sight.

A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.

[….]

American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.

Still, it was not until August that they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour’s drive north of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

C.I.A. analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound. A senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had decided that there was a “strong possibility” that Bin Laden himself was hiding there.