“This guy was living in a million-dollar compound in a residential neighborhood.” “I think the image that bin Laden had tried to promote was that he was an ascetic, living in a cave,” Obama told 60 Minutes. Obama said he and his team were not surprised to find bin Laden hiding in plain sight, but were surprised to learn that the compound had been there for so long without information leaking out about it.
“This was a very difficult decision, in part because the evidence we had was not absolutely conclusive,” he said. President Obama discussed the decision to attack with 60 Minutes following the raid. Over the next few months, the CIA used informants, surveillance and other intelligence gathering measures to arrive at the conclusion that bin Laden and his family were hiding out in the compound – but up until the attack, there was no hard proof that bin Laden was present, only the best guess available. For years, military and intelligence forces had scoured the globe to find bin Laden’s hideout, and in September 2010, the CIA got the lead they needed when they used surveillance photos and intelligence reports to determine that a known al Qaeda courier was visiting a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
