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Dropped by Black Hawk helicopters, two dozen commandos from the US Navy\u2019s SEAL Team Six forged a deadly path through Osama bin Laden\u2019s fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, shortly after midnight on May 2, 2011.<\/p>\n
They quickly neutralised courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, sharing the attached guest house with his wife Mariam and four children; killed his courier brother Abrar and wife Bushra on the ground floor of the main house; took out bin Laden\u2019s son Khalid as he emerged on the first floor where more children hid; and on the second floor fatally shot the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed 2,996 people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe two couriers were exactly where the CIA said they would be,\u201d said Mark Bissonnette, among three SEALS who shot bin Laden.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone was where the CIA had said they would be,\u201d says Liza Mundy, author of a fascinating new book, The Sisterhood, which reveals how the women of the CIA tracked and targeted bin Laden, yet were robbed of any credit.<\/p>\n
Back in the White House Situation Room, surrounded by his national security team, President Barack Obama said simply: \u201cWe got him.\u201d The Pentagon brass and security chiefs \u2013 all men \u2013 celebrated in public. But Mundy says: \u201cIt was the CIA\u2019s women whose years of analysis and tracking had made the raid on bin Laden possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
And it was the CIA\u2019s female analysts who in 1982 first noted the Mujahideen \u2013 Islamic guerrilla fighters \u2013 pouring into Afghanistan from other countries to fight the Soviet invasion, and analyst Cindy Storer who warned they could become a threat to America.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody wanted to hear about it,\u201d said Storer. Mundy explains: \u201cAfter the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and the Soviet Union fell in 1991, America stopped worrying about Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey had won the Cold War and wanted to enjoy the \u2018peace dividend\u2019. The government actually cut CIA funding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Analyst Gina Bennett first identified bin Laden as a threat to the US in 1993, but all warnings fell on deaf ears at the CIA and White House. \u201cThey were focused on Iraq and Iran,\u201d says Mundy. Nobody thought a stateless group funded by a Saudi builder\u2019s son could become a real threat to America \u2013 except for the CIA\u2019s women analysts. Yet senior agents thought the women were being alarmist.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was five years after identifying al-Qaeda before Cindy Storer was finally allowed to publish a paper on the threat posed \u2013 a year after bin Laden had openly declared war on America.<\/p>\n
A small CIA group known as Alec Station targeting bin Laden devised as many as ten plans to capture or assassinate the terrorist leader, but the Clinton White House repeatedly shot them down.<\/p>\n
READ MORE <\/strong> Cold War spy satellites identify hundreds of undiscovered Roman forts<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe CIA\u2019s women analysts wanted to bomb bin Laden, but Attorney General Janet Reno was worried about collateral damage to his wives and children,\u201d says Mundy.<\/p>\n On August 6, 2001, CIA analyst Barbara Sude wrote in the Presidential Daily Brief a now infamous memo: \u201cBin Laden Determined to Strike in US,\u201d predicting an air strike on American soil. The CIA\u2019s counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, later confessed: \u201cIt was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the White House did nothing, and the CIA was blamed for failing to stop the bloodbath of September 11, 2001.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 9\/11 Commission accused the CIA of failing to connect the dots, failing to make a compelling case, and a failure of imagination,\u201d says Mundy. \u201cIt was a demoralising, devastating blow for the women of the CIA, who had spent years warning of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.\u201d<\/p>\n Women had spied for Britain and America during the Second World War, and were trusted with code-breaking and computer programming, but after the war governments wanted them back at home, reducing women in the CIA to clerks and secretarial roles.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/39\/590x\/secondary\/5033740.jpg?r=1698320737866\")
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