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In its haste to break the news to the world, apparently before personnel involved in the strike against bin Laden had been fully debriefed, U.S. government officials put out information that would turn out to have been inaccurate. An initial claim that bin Laden had used a woman as a human shield, and that she had been shot dead as a result, proved to be unfounded. A woman did die in the assault, but elsewhere in the compound.

Contrary to an early statement giving the impression that bin Laden was armed and died fighting, presidential spokesman Jay Carney later said he had been unarmed. “Resistance,” Carney said, “does not require a firearm.” The al Qaeda leader had been in his nightclothes when confronted, it was reported later, clothing that could conceivably have concealed a weapon or explosives. The U.S. commandos involved, said CIA director Leon Panetta, “had full authority to kill him.”

The rush to get the story out, albeit raw and insufficiently checked, had not been merely for maximum impact. U.S. officials had in part rushed to get their version out, it was reported, “before the Pakistanis pushed theirs.”

The version of events that emerged from Pakistan was indeed different. A twelve-year-old daughter of bin Laden, who survived, was quoted as saying her father had been “captured alive and shot dead by the U.S. Special Forces during the first few minutes … in front of family members.” That provocative quote, significantly, was sourced as coming from “senior Pakistani security officials.”

Pakistan was compromised by the strike, for bin Laden had been living—by all accounts for years, comfortably housed and well protected—in not just any Pakistani city. He had been living in the pleasant town of Abbottabad, where many serving and retired military officers live, and within shouting distance of the nation’s most prestigious military academy—the equivalent of America’s West Point. The ISI also had a presence there.

Officials in Washington did not mince their words when these facts became public. The Pakistanis, CIA director Panetta said, had been either “involved or incompetent.” The President’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, thought it “inconceivable” that bin Laden had not had a “support system” in Abbottabad. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Obama himself speculated “whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, [supporting bin Laden] … that’s something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

Bin Laden, Pakistan’s President Zardari said helplessly, “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be.” The ISI, long the principal object of U.S. suspicion, denied that it had shielded the terrorist or had known where he was. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul, the veteran supporter of jihad, declared it “a bit amazing” that bin Laden could have been living in Abbottabad incognito.

Bin Laden had been tracked to Abbottabad, U.S. sources revealed as this book went to press, thanks to information on his use of couriers to hand-carry messages to his associates. Unmentioned in the coverage these authors have seen are facts about the link between Abbottabad and al Qaeda that former president Musharraf made public as long ago as 2006—five years before the U.S. caught up with bin Laden and killed him.

Pakistan’s 2005 capture and transfer to U.S. custody of another very senior bin Laden aide—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi—Musharraf had written, had been achieved after a prolonged pursuit by Pakistani investigators. In the course of the hunt, according to Musharraf, the investigators discovered that Libi used no less than three safe houses—in Abbottabad. Far from being a place where one would not expect a top terrorist to be hiding, it turns out, Abbottabad has a track record for being exactly that.

America’s eventual success in tracking down bin Laden, it is clear from the reporting, grew out of the intelligence gained from Libi back in 2005.