The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

Acknowledgments and Notes

On the theory that Osama bin Laden’s command of his native language was comparable to the average English speaker’s mastery of his native tongue, I have taken the liberty of here and there smoothing out the clumsy phrases in the translation of bin Laden’s documents by the CIA. The official translations can be found at the Web site of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center: www.ctc.usma.edu.

It has been my practice to compile detailed source notes for my books, but in this case the number of those who did not wish to have specific information attributed to them directly, even when the source seems obvious, would have made the exercise more frustrating than helpful.

This work has been informed by two excellent articles, Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (The New Yorker, 8/8/2011), and (in portions of Chapter Four) Shane Harris’s “Killer App” (The Washingtonian, 1/31/2012). Anyone who writes about Osama bin Laden is indebted to Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (Knopf, 2006), and to the superb reporting of Peter Bergen, who over the last ten years made himself the foremost journalistic authority on the man. This book was paticularly informed by Bergen’s oral history, The Osama bin Laden I Know (Free Press, 2006), and by his Manhunt (Crown Publishers, 2011). In the latter book, Bergen recounts some of the same scenes I have described here, but those passages in this book, like the rest of it, are based entirely on my own reporting and interviewing—in some cases with the same participants.

I would like to especially thank my son Aaron, my cousin David Keane, and their company, Wild Eyes Productions, for help interviewing. I would also like to particularly thank Ben Rhodes, Jay Carney, Dave Moniz, and Preston Golson for helping me set up interviews, and also those at the CIA and in the JSOC who agreed to be interviewed but asked not to be named.

The others I can thank are listed below:

Samira Abdullah Mouhey el-Dein Azzam, Huthaifa Azzam, Tony Blinken, John Brennan, James Clark, Faheem Dashty, Thomas Donilon, Michèle Flournoy, Larry James, Peter Jouvenal, Habibullah Khan, Hamid Mir, Michael Morell, Asad Munir, Barack Obama, William Ostlund, David Petraeus, Samantha Power, Stephen Preston, Matt Flavin, Guy Filippelli, James Poss, Denis McDonough, Nick Rasmussen, Michael Scheuer, Gary Schroen, Kalev Sepp, Michael Sheehan, Michael Vickers, Jamal Ismail, and Ahmad Zaidan.