Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter L. Bergen

time along, President Bush would ideally have loved to have been able to have gotten bin Laden,” says Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary.
    At the same time that he gave the green light to the accelerated drone attacks, Bush also authorized Special Operations Forces to carry outground assaults in the tribal regions without the advance permission of the Pakistani government. On September 3, 2008, a team of Navy SEALs based in Afghanistan crossed the Pakistani border into South Waziristan toattack a compound housing militants in the village of Angoor Adda. Twenty of the occupants were killed, but many of them turned out to be women and children. The Pakistani press picked up on the attack, which then sparked vehement objections from Pakistani officials, who protested that it violated their national sovereignty. Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, bluntly said that Pakistan’s “territorial integrity … will be defended at all costs,” suggesting that any future insertion of American soldiers into Pakistan would be met by force. The cross-border missions by Special Operations ceased, but the drone attacks increased in intensity.

5 A WORKING THEORY OF THE CASE
     
    C IA HEADQUARTERS in Langley, Virginia, is a grouping of modern buildings with the air of an upscale office park sprawling over acres of quiet woodland, twenty minutes’ drive from downtown Washington, D.C. Casual visits are not encouraged. To reach the main building, you negotiate first the visitors’ center—where machines constantly sniff the air for chemical and biological toxins and guards bristling with automatic weapons direct traffic—then walk for fifteen minutes down a narrow road screened off from the surrounding woods by high fencing topped with barbed wire, then pass the CIA’s own dedicated water tower and electrical plant. At the end of the road is a seven-story modernist glass-and-concrete building, the main headquarters, erected in the 1950s, its lobby paved with slabs of white marble. Emblazoned in the marble floor is the great seal of the Central Intelligence Agency, andengraved on a wall are words from the Gospel According to John: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
    On one wall of the lobby are dozens of gold stars that represent CIA officers killed on the job since the Agency was founded in 1947.Beneath the gold stars, the names of the fallen are inscribed in black ink in a glass-encased book. In some cases there is only a star and no name in the book, as the officer remains, even in death, undercover. In the decade after 9/11, the names of two dozen CIA officers and contractors who died in the line of duty wereadded to the honor roll, a reminder that the Agency is much more than just another office complex in the Virginia suburbs.
    On the ground floor of the main building is the Counterterrorism Center, whichlong oversaw the hunt for bin Laden. During the several years after hedisappeared at the Battle of Tora Bora, the hunt for bin Laden sputtered, encountering dry hole after dry hole. Any news that came into the Counterterrorism Center about al-Qaeda’s leader was only in the form of “Elvis sightings,” recall the officials who were tracking him. But all the Elvis sightings still had to be run down, says the founder of the bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, “because after 9/11 the senior officers in the Agency and everywhere in the intelligence community were covering their asses. If you got a report that Osama was in Brazil, sunning himself in Rio, you had to at least respond to the cable. And so we were chasing enormous numbers of sightings. And because everybody was afraid something else was coming, we were tracking things down that a normal adult would have never done.”
    In April 2002, Barbara Sude, a senior Agency analyst who had done her doctorate at Princeton in medieval Arabic thought and had been working full-time on al-Qaeda for years, joined a task