Peter Bergen's Manhunt Details Ten Year Search for Osama Bin Laden

Posted on May 2, 2012

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen has a new book out about the ten-year search for Osama Bin Laden, called Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad. The book provides an inside account of the long search for bin Laden.

Bergen had access to White House officials, CIA analysts, Pakistani intelligence, and military officials. Bergen was also granted exclusive access to the Abbottabad compound in which bin Laden lived his final years.

Bergen first met bin Laden in the middle of the night in a mud hut in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in early 1997. In the course of that interview bin Laden surprised Bergen by declaring war on the United States on camera, the first time he had done so before a Western audience.

In the book, Bergen recounts the initial failures of the hunt for bin Laden, including the Battle of Tora Bora, where U.S. forces came close to capturing him only to see him slip away. He also covers the period of time when CIA resources and energy were redirected toward the Iraq War and the closing of the specialized bin Laden unit at CIA headquarters in 2005. In 2006, however, things turned around when Operation Cannonball put more American spies in Pakistan, and a group of tenacious analysts in the HVT (high-value target) section of the CIA - many of them women, despite the hypermasculine culture of the Agency - took a fresh look at all the clues to bin Laden's whereabouts. When, in 2009, a number of CIA employees and contractors were killed by an al-Qaeda suicide bomber posing as an informant, the Agency redoubled its focus on finding its nemesis.

Bergen says, "By the time bin Laden was killed, al-Qaeda was an ideological 'brand' long past its sell-by date and an organization in deep trouble. Bin Laden's successor is unlikely to turn things around, U.S. drone strikes continue to decimate the bench of al-Qaeda's commanders, and the popular revolts against the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East make it unlikely that al-Qaeda will be able to grab the reins of power."