Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against America that left more than 3,000 dead, was able to evade detection for nearly a decade.
But it turns out now that one little thing gave away his location in Pakistan, according to a new report.
Bin Laden, 54, was killed by U.S. special forces on May 2, 2011. And Peter Bergen, a national security analyst for CNN, said in “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden” that how the members in bin Laden’s compound hung out the laundry led authorities to his location, according to excerpts printed in the New York Post.
“In 2010, the CIA got a break: A Pakistani informant in the crowded city of Peshawar spotted a man believed to be Ibrahim, bin Laden’s longtime bodyguard,” Bergen writes. “In August 2010, Ibrahim’s white jeep led the CIA to the property’s 18-foot-high, barbed-wire-topped walls. The place was packed with bin Laden’s three wives, eight of his youngest children, and four grandchildren, including 2- and 3-year-old babies.”
There were a number of oddities about the compound. For one, the occupants almost never left. For another, they never put out their trash for collection, but instead burned it all.
The property had many unusual features that made CIA analysts take note. It had no telephone lines or Internet service — despite the fact that whoever built it was surely wealthy enough to afford such necessities. The large main house had few windows, and the top floor’s open-air balcony was surrounded on all sides by a high wall.
“Who puts a privacy wall around a patio?” then-CIA Director Leon Panetta asked his staffers. “Exactly,” one analyst replied.
A short time later, the agency set up a team in a house nearby to keep an eye on the compound. And that’s when they were able to figure out how many people lived there.
“[T]he final clue was the clotheslines on the compound, which flapped each day with women’s garments, shalwar kameez worn by Pakistani men, children’s outfits and diapers — far more than the 11 members of the bodyguards’ families could ever wear.
The invisible inhabitants, according to the agents’ laundry calculations, had to include an adult man, several adult women, and at least nine children, a perfect fit for the polygamous patriarch they were seeking. After more than nine years in hiding, Osama bin Laden was betrayed by his family’s laundry.
The information was passed to Panetta, who on Dec. 14, 2010, presented it to President Barack Obama. Even though CIA agents never snapped a picture of bin Laden in the compound, “they also never found evidence that undercut the notion that he was living there,” Bergen writes.
Obama decided the data was cause to move, ordering the U.S. Navy to plan a raid that would end in his death. That was, Bergen writes, “a decision that might never have been made if Osama bin Laden had thought to give his wives a clothes dryer.”