CIA spied on bin Laden from safe house for months
Amazing - the CIA maintained a safe house in Abbottabad from which they spied on the compound where OBL was found. They did this for many months, undetected, apparently. The “achilles heel” of OBL’s hiding place was that Abbottabad is very welcoming to outsiders - what served OBL’s purpose, also served the CIA well.
The compound was discovered, apparently, last August, so this safe house operated from about then up ‘til now - almost 9 months.
The CIA maintained a safe house in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad for a small team of spies who conducted extensive surveillance over a period of months on the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Special Operations forces this week, U.S. officials said.
The secret CIA facility was used as a base of operations for one of the most delicate human intelligence gathering missions in recent CIA history, one that relied on Pakistani informants and other sources to help assemble a “pattern of life” portrait of the occupants and daily activities at the fortified compound where bin Laden was found, the officials said.
The on-the-ground surveillance work was part of an intelligence-gathering push mobilized after the discovery of the suspicious complex last August that involved virtually every category of collection in the U.S. arsenal, ranging from satellite imagery to eavesdropping efforts aimed at recording voices inside the compound.