Netflix’s Latest American Manhunt Goes Inside the Top Secret Raid that Killed Osama bin Laden

It took about 10 years to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, 2011—a founder of the extremist group al-Qaeda, responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in American history on September 11, 2001, which left 2,977 dead and thousands injured.

American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden, a Netflix docu-series out Mar. 10, features people involved in planning the historic raid. Over three episodes, top intelligence officials who worked for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama outline key milestones that led to the capture and why it took nearly a decade to track down bin Laden.

As Leon Panetta, CIA director when Osama was killed, explains the significance of the terrorist’s death in the docu-series, “In many ways, we had really brought justice to all of those victims” of 9/11.

Here’s a look at the biggest turning point in the top secret mission and what was going on in Pakistan and in Washington, D.C. on the day of the raid.

How the U.S. found Osama bin Laden

Shortly after President Barack Obama was inaugurated for his first time in 2009, he ordered intelligence officials to double down on finding Osama bin Laden, making it priority number one for his new CIA director Panetta. These officials focused on finding a courier named Abu Ahmed, hoping he’d lead them to bin Laden’s hideout. They knew they were on the right track when they ran the name past top al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who was being detained in Guantanamo Bay, and KSM told other detainees not to talk about Ahmed to any Americans—not realizing that he was being wiretapped.

A breakthrough moment came in the summer of 2010, when intelligence officials were able to listen in on one of Ahmed’s phone calls and track him down in a white SUV, which they followed to a large home in Abottabad, Pakistan that immediately seemed suspicious. It wasn’t clear how Ahmed, who had no traceable means of income, could have owned such a large structure. Additionally, the walls were covered in barbed wire, and the balcony had a large privacy wall. Panetta points out in the series that tourists go to Abbottabad to see its famed mountains: “Why would you put an eight-foot wall on the third floor?” Intelligence officials then measured the shadow of a man seen walking in the garden every day, who was the same height as bin Laden. They even called up a journalist who had interviewed Osama to see if he had any footage of him walking, so they could see if the pacer’s gait was the same.

In April 2011, the Navy’s elite special operations force, Seal Team 6, started training to invade the compound, practicing in a mock building located in North Carolina that was constructed based on surveillance footage. Each time a part of the building got destroyed during simulations, it would get immediately rebuilt so that the men could keep practicing.

After about a month of training, Seal Team 6 invaded the compound on May 2. They conducted the mission in helicopters designed to be hard to pick up via radars.

Inside the war room

In American Manhunt, top Obama advisors open up about what they were doing in the hours leading up to the bin Laden siege. As Seal Team 6 was flying to the compound, American officials dealt with the pressure in their own ways. Panetta says he went to mass to pray. Deputy CIA director Michael Morell reveals that his marriage was on the rocks because his wife was livid that he couldn’t attend his daughter’s last concert as a senior in high school, and he couldn’t tell her what he was working on that was more important. Rob O’Neill of Seal Team 6 was handwriting letters for his kids to read in case he didn’t survive. President Obama played spades, as he tended to do when he was nervous. Ben Rhodes, a senior communications advisor, says people started going around the room talking about where they were on 9/11.

After landing their helicopters outside the compound, Seal Team 6 faced several obstacles before actually finding bin Laden. One soldier says he knew he reached bin Laden’s hiding place when he found a fake door on a concrete wall, exclaiming “nobody does that!” After finding, shooting, and killing bin Laden’s courier Ahmed, they were faced with women turning themselves into human shields—"another indicator that he’s here,” O’Neill recalls.

When he finally got face-to-face with the most wanted man in the world, O’Neill said he recognized bin Laden’s nose and found him to be taller and skinnier than he expected. On May 2, 2011, Seal Team 6 fatally shot bin Laden and seized any and all intelligence records on the premises.

And yet, there was no immediate applause in Washington, D.C. Rhodes said the President wanted to be informed the minute that Seal Team 6 made it out of Pakistan airspace before claiming any victory. No Americans were harmed. In the series, O’Neill sums up what was going through their heads: “We accepted death on this mission but it’s nice to live.”