Panetta breaks his silence over the mission and its operational planning.

Early on, they ruled out airstrikes by B-2, cruise missiles or involving the Pakistanis lest they tip off the targets.

For weeks, Panetta had been pushing the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to try to get photographic confirmation of the presence of the bin Laden family. “NGA was terrific at doing analysis on imagery of that compound,” he says, but “I kept struggling to say, ‘Can’t you at least try to get one of the people that looks like [Bin Laden]?’” NGA produced photographs of the two couriers and their families that McRaven’s Navy Seal team used to identify players in the compound as they made their way toward bin Laden.

Panetta only learned that the President had been convinced by his arguments on Friday, when Obama told him he was authorizing the helicopter mission and made his orders official in a signed letter. After he received the order from Obama, Panetta told McRaven of the President’s decision and instructed him to launch. He told him the mission was, “to go in there get Bin Laden, and if Bin Laden isn’t there, get the hell out!”

CIA officials turned a windowless 7th floor conference room at Langley into a command center for the mission, and Panetta watched the operation unfold from there. As he and his team waited for McRaven to report whether bin Laden was indeed in the compound, Panetta says the room was tense. “I kept asking Bill McRaven, ‘OK, what the hell’s this mean?’ and when McRaven finally said they had IDed “Geronimo,” the mission codename for bin Laden, “All the air we were holding came out.” When the helicopters left the compound 15 minutes later, the room broke into applause.

The aftermath of the mission has been productive. The U.S. collected an “impressive amount” of material from bin Laden’s compound, including computers and other electronics, Panetta says. Panetta has set up a task force to act on the fresh intelligence. Intelligence reporting suggests one of bin Laden’s wives who survived the attack has said the family had been living in the compound since 2005, a source tells TIME.