i remember in 1973 when it was last opened. thousands will evacuate ahead of the rising water. we'll cover it for you on cnn. it's a disaster in louisiana and it's heartbreak. thanks for joining us. i'll see you at 10:00 p.m. eastern. cnn presents "ginside the mission: getting bin laden" right now. >> narrator: he was no ordinary fugitive and this was no ordinary hunt. >> there was only one way to find him which was through the couriers. >> reporter: following the trail would take years. >> not brick by brick, but pebble by pebble. >> reporter: the decision was risky. >> one of his aides started repeating again, we have option a, option b. he interrupted and said, "we're going in." >> reporter: the chance of failure -- high.

>> s.e.a.l.s would rather die than be captured. >> at the end of the day it was a leap of faith. vi . >> reporter: friday, april 29, just after 8:20 a.m., the mission begins. the president gives the go. >> the president, after a long night's sleep, basically came in and immediately told the staff, "you've got the green light." let's go. >> reporter: as president obama departs for the tornado-ravaged south, the u.s. military's best-kept secret is under way. >> the troops were ready and in place. the equipment was ready to go. the plan had been practiced again and again and again. >> reporter: america's most wanted man may finally be in reach. osama bin laden.

the architect of 9/11 had eluded the world's most powerful nation for more than a decade. >> the trail was quite cold. >> reporter: former cy director michael hayden recalls the early misfires. >> most of what he had looked more likele elvis sightings than intelligence. >> reporter: the trail caught fire last august when u.s. intelligence zeroed in on this compound. >> an unusual compound. unusualle in its security, in its size and location. >> reporter: its location, just over a mile from pakistan's premier military academy, north of islamabad. the compound was discovered after tracking down bin laden's trusted courier. >> one of my sources said to me, you know, one of the reasons it was so interesting to us is we knew bin laden was in the construction business. and this was well constructed. >> reporter: more clues begin to

emerge from behind the 18-foot-high wallses. >> what they began to notice is the occupant burned their trash. they couldn't determine that there was any internet access or telephone in this compound. >> it was a lack of things they did that was really interesting. you know, for a family that lived there for several years, never went to the movies, never went grocery shopping. >> reporter: to build a better case, cio director leon panetta looks for clues. >> we never knew bin laden was there. we noticed an individual pacing in the courtyard who had some of the appearances of it, but we were never able to verify that, in fact, it was him. >> this was a circumstantial case. and i have heard lots of percentages thrown around. some say 50/50. some say 60/40. whatever. certainly not 100% clr

identification of osama bin laden. >> reporter: there is no smoking gun, no photograph of bin laden, just a tall shadowy figure in a compound that arouses suspicion. still, the odds are good enough for panetta to make a case to the president. >> i think the argument was this was the best chance we have ever had. the odds have never been higher and if we don't take this opportunity, the odds may never be this good again. >> reporter: panetta tapped vice admiral william mccraven to hatch an action plan. three options are put on the table. >> one of them was to just go in and bomb it, obliterate it. the problem with that is you probably wouldn't have a body left and you couldn't show evidence that osama bin laden was really there. the next option was to send in an unmanned drone with a missile, a predator.

>> reporter: both scenarios are ruled out for fear of collateral damage leaving the riskiest game plan of all -- a commando-style assault. >> the risks are unimaginable. everything could have gone wrong, but the reward was if it worked they would come out with a body, they would come out with dna analysis. >> reporter: president obama shared what weighed on his mind in a cbs interview on "60 minutes." >> these guys are going in the darkest of night. they don't know what they are going to find. they don't know if the building is rigged. they don't know if, you know, there are explosives that are triggered by a particular door opening. so huge risks that these guys are taking. and so my number one concern was if i send them in, can i get them out. >> reporter: and those men willing to risk everything.

navy s.e.a.l.s known as team six, a covert commando force made up of some of the military's best. like former navy s.e.a.l. howard wasden. >> it's like being part of an elite team that made it to the super bowl. >> reporter: his super bowl came in 1993 during a raid against a somali warlord. shot three times he nearly lost his right leg. >> i started thinking then, i'm not going to make it out of here. this is it. i'm going to die today. >> reporter: the battle better known as blackhawk down left 18 americans dead and scores wounded. a failure, wasden says, because the security of the mission was compromised. >> we were in there with the united nations and these guys did not know how to keep operational security. >> reporter: painful memories of

black hawk down would trouble the president and advisers. the decision is made to keep pakistan in the dark. >> to not tip them off in order to maintain the secrecy shows, number one, that there is not a lot of trust between the u.s. and pakistan. but number two, it showed this was a bigger gamble. >> reporter: that april morning in alabama, surrounded by the wreckage of mother nature, president obama hides any sign of worry. >> he really kept a pretty good game face on to not let the publ public know at all there was something cooking behind the scenes. >> reporter: the ghosts of torabora will haunt the mission to get bin laden. only superpages.com®. for local maps, deals and more, go to superpages.com®. and let the good guys save the day.

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operations is afghanistan. here, the fundamentalist taliban regime provides sanctuary. so immediately after september 11th, small u.s. commando teams begin working with local warlords who oppose the taliban to get bin laden. cia officer gary burnson is on the ground helping lead the mission. >> keep pushing people forward. keep taking ground. keep working with northern alliance or other tribal units to seize territory and to kill the enemy. >> reporter: concerned that a large deployment of american troops would provoke a backlash, the americans are, in effect, outsourcing the hunt for bin

laden. using cases of cash. >> we paid the enemy off to get them to surrender at times. we paid for our allies. we used cash as a tool. and it was quite effective. >> reporter: within weeks, afghanistan is falling. bin laden is on the run. east to the mountains. nestled among the 14,000-foot peaks, a complex of caves known as tora bora. >> it was an excellent place to hide. bin laden had spent many years living in and around that region. he had a house with a small rudimentary swimming pool. there was a bakery. there was -- he had a whole set-up there. had this mini jihadist kingdom.

it was his retreat. >> reporter: six years earlier a journalist interviewed bin laden here in a cave turned into a command center. >> he told me that he feels safe in the caves. he knows the area very well. he knows it is very difficult for anybody to come and follow him there. >> reporter: but now bin laden is being followed. >> at that point i only had about 20 americans in the province, you know, working with a couple thousand afghans we had put online. we had paid a number of afghans. >> the journalists gathered on the mountainside there. >> reporter: tim lister was part of the cnn team for the war. >> we outnumbered the number of u.s. personnel on the ground. >> reporter: the americans call for air strikes and they come with thundering force. [ explosions ] >> we brought in gunships which

can put a bullet on every inch of a football field. >> the amount of ordinance dropped over a period of two weeks almost defies belief. the mountains were rearranged. >> reporter: from a radio, word of a dead al qaeda fighter. the americans hear bin laden try to rally the men. >> we hear him apologize to them for having led them to an area where they are having air strikes on them relentlessly. >> reporter: with bin laden in the crosshairs burnson wants u.s. forces sent in to finish the job. >> in the first two or three days of december i would write a message back to washington recommending the insertion of u.s. forces on the ground. i was looking for 600 to 800 rangers, roughly a battalion. they never came.

>> reporter: instead, the u.s. relies on its hired guns. >> yeah. it was not a professional military force by any stretch of the imagination. some of them took bribes from members of al qaeda to look the other way. >> reporter: outsourcing fails. bin laden vanishes into the mountains. >> he was there. we were listening to him on the radio. bin laden and roughly 180 would escape. >> the moral of the story, i think, is that to capture someone as resourceful as osama bin laden who has so many local contacts and local friends, you had to do the job yourself. >> reporter: though he has disappeared, his threats continue. [ speaking in a foreign language ] >> the fact that he communicates through videotapes and audio tapes isn't a sign of weakness. he had a choice which was to say nothing and become irrelevant or

continue saying things and stay relevant. he chose the latter. [ speaking in a foreign language ] >> his message continues to resonate even when he was on the run. >> reporter: with a $25 million bounty on his head, bin laden is now the most wanted man on the planet. right underneath our fee, and all we need to do is change the way we're thinking about them. a couple decades ago, we didn't even realize just how much natural gas was trapped in rocks thousands of feet below us. technology has made it possible to safely unlock this cleanly burning natural gas. this deposits can provide us with fuel for a hundred years, providing energy security and economic growth all across this country. it just takes somebody having the idea, and that's where the discovery comes from. [ woman speaking chinese ] thank you.

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>> reporter: in the years after tora bora, bin laden seems to have vanished, appearing only in video messages that mysteriously materialize, but leave no trace of his whereabouts. general michael hayden headed up the cia at the time. >> for most of my time in office, i would even publically say that the trail was quite cold. we didn't have a whole lot of evidence in which we had much confidence. >> reporter: tough interrogations of al qaeda detainees, some at secret prisons, begin to provide the clues that will lead to a compound in pakistan, the pan mansion hideout of osama bin laden. >> we began to focus, drill down on the courier network as perhaps a way to chase after bin

laden. we knew he was communicating, but we were convinced he could not possibly be communicating electronically or we would have picked that up. it had to be human-to-human contact, hence the courier system. >> amongst people detained soon after tora bora were i man al kata katani. he tried to be the 20th hijacker but he was never admitted to the united states. >> reporter: according to this interrogation log obtained by "time" magazine the would be 9/11 hijacker doesn't give up information easily at guantanamo bay so they subject him to standing nude and having pictures of nude women hung around his neck. according to this fbi letter they make him endure months of intense isolation in a cell always flooded with light.

he starts talking. >> as far as we can tell from looking at the detainee assessments published by wikileaks he mentioned a lot of names. one of those he mentioned was abu ahmad al kuwaiti who was a courier. >> reporter: a courier who was with osama bin laden at tora bora. a tantalizing tidbit, but is it the one nugget out of thousands that's worth pursuing? >> you could sense the trail getting warmer. >> reporter: hayden credits the enhanced interrogation techniques or e.i.t.s. >> well, we found out that the e.i.t.s were productive. look, honest men can differ as to whether or not they want their country doing them. i understand that. that's an honorable position. but a lot of folks like to make the argument i don't want you doing it and it didn't work. i have not met anyone who has actually been involved in this

program who would say that this didn't work. >> reporter: amid much controversy, waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were banned by president obama shortly after he took office, but the story of the trail that led to bin laden has re-opened the debate. stephen clineman is an experienced military interrogator. >> i have spent about 27 years now, all in human intelligence-related activities, mostly on active duty in the air force and the remainder in reserve. to get useful information on a reliable and consistent basis usinging coercion is not the way to go. >> given how much we learned from detainees, particularly in the first three or four years after 9/11 it's hard for me to conceive of an operation like the one that happened a couple of weeks ago taking place without relying on information that we got from this program.

>> there were people from the fbi who had more direct access who suggest that coercion was not involved. >> reporter: whatever techniques the interrogators are usinging, they are finally taking the first steps along the path that will take them to osama bin laden's front door. >> what they had was not the courier's name, but a nickname. and it took them a couple more years to try and figure out who this courier was, whether or not this courier was important or not important. one of the interesting things here is that they went to khalid shaikh mohammed and al libi. khalid shaikh mohammed was waterboarded 183 times.

>> reporter: they ask him what he knows about the courier. >> and khalid shaikh mohammed was completely dismissive about who this person was and said, "not important." and it was the lie, as my source said, that was alerting. the lie of khalid shaikh mohammed, the lie of al libi. those two men lyinging about this courier made them understand that, in fact, the courier was actually important because they knew from other sources that the courier had been a protege of k.s.m. and he made believe he didn't know who he was. so bingo, right? then they had to go about finding him. >> reporter: investigators established the courier's name and begin to monitor his family's phone calls and e-mails. >> once they established one

cell phone call then it was a question of making inquiries at the ground level, listening out for further calls. they were beginning to close in on him at this stage. what we believe happened is that al kuwaiti was tracked to a particular vehicle and once they found that vehicle perhaps in the environs of peshawar it was waiting to see where he went. >> last august,ing august 2010, they finally had the courier lead them to the compound. my source said to me -- one of my sources said to me, when we got a picture of that compound we said, wow, this is different. >> reporter: despite constant surveillance, there's never 100% certainty that osama bin laden is inside, but back in the united states an elite force has begun to train for a top secret mission -- getting bin laden.

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i'm don lemon. here are your headlines. for the first time in 38 years the morganza spillway in louisiana has been opened. historic flooding on the mississippi river made the move necessary to prevent the river from overwhelming levees in new orleans. last time it was open was 1973. thousands of people must

evacuate ahead of the rising water. two florida imams have been arrested on charges of providing support to the pakistani taliban and another son in the family has been arrested. the three are accused of supporting a conspiracy to kill, injure and kidnap people abroad. we are told the arrests aren't linked to the recent killing of osama bin laden. those are the headlines this hour. we now return you to the cnn presents special "inside the mission: getting bin laden." >> reporter: osama bin laden has survived attacks, eluded detection, and hidden away for ten years. but finally, u.s. intelligence believes they have found him.

now, it will take an ambitious plan to get bin laden. it will take some of the best of the american military. it will take the navy s.e.a.l.s. >> they are very highly trained. they do a lot of very tough jobs around the world. these are the commandos. these are the ones that we are going to kick down the door, take osama bin laden dead or alive and get the job done. >> reporter: for an elite unit, a special kind of sailor. >> the heart and soul of the navy s.e.a.l. is somebody committed to their country and committed to their teammates. >> reporter: howard wasden was a navy seal for nine years. >> i think that's somebody who wants to be part of the best. i really want to do something special and that's the s.e.a.l. motto. someone special. want to be special? okay, prove it. >> reporter: provinging it means

survivinging a training program so long and so tough that most don't make it. they call it b.u.d.s. >> basic underwater demolition s.e.a.l. school. it all starts there. my class started i think around 126, 130 and we graduated around 22 to 25. [ chanting ] >> reporter: every day begins with physical training, miles of swimming, runninging, hundreds of sit-ups, push-ups, all before the day's real work begins. and even more important than preparing the body is preparing the mind. case in point, an exercise called "drown proofing". >> candidates' hands are tied behind their back, their feet are tied together. then they are thrown into the pool. you better not panic. control your breathing.

control your heart rate. they tell you day one at b.u.d.s., mental toughness. not physical toughness. it's what's between the ears that keeps the body going. >> reporter: and then comes hell week. six days, little sleep, submerged in frigid water or running hundreds of miles. >> now, the important thing to remember about that 200 miles, you're running that 200 miles with a boat on top of your head. you have to paddle out in those boats, dump the boats over and right them, paddle back in. do tons of paddling, tons of swimming. >> reporter: even the toughest are pushed to their limit. >> i always get asked, did you ever think about quitting? i have never spoke to anybody in the teams who said at one point they didn't at least think about it. the difference is, just like going into battle, controlling your fear. you don't quit. >> reporter: for months after hell week the training continues

until these sailors become navy s.e.a.l.s. >> that sequence of developing confidence is part of s.e.a.l. training. >> reporter: ryan zincke was a s.e.a.l. team commander. >> that's why at the end, they're tough guys. when they go toe to toe against somebody there is an absolute belief that they will win. failure isn't an option and guys will not give up, ever. ever. >> reporter: that's why when the target is osama bin laden the president turns to the navy s.e.a.l.s and a special unit, s.e.a.l. team six. wasden and zincke were both members. >> s.e.a.l. team six is a different unit from the rest of the s.e.a.l. teams and as much as they concentrate primarily on one thing -- counter-terrorism, hostage rescue. >> it's the nation's 911. it's our nation's best that is

trained and equipped, led to do the missions of strategic importance worldwide. that's a big responsibility. >> reporter: so how do you prepare to go get bin laden? practice. >> it's perpetual training all the time. that's why america should be proud of these guys. they make their lifestyle so when they get up in the morning they start training and never quit training because the training is forever. >> reporter: and for this mission an extraordinary step -- training on an actual model of the compound. navy s.e.a.l.s hope for the best but prepare for the worst. >> they what-if it to death. it's called the murder board. you take things and you basically have so many contingencies, so many what-ifs that you kill the plan. >> reporter: and there is plenty

in this operation that could go wrong. >> they hadn't been to osama bin laden's compound. they had no idea what they would find. would there be traps? how would they get through the walls? how would they find osama bin laden in this compound? >> reporter: the training complete, the plan prepared, finally it's go time. >> for every s.e.a.l. on the ground there was 50 to 100, maybe 200 people supporting the mission in some capacity. and you're amped. i mean you're aboard the helicopter. the adrenaline is rushing. but also is that the sequence of events you have rehearsed it. it's not your first rodeo. >> reporter: for s.e.a.l. team six, total focus. howard wasden remembers. >> i would say a little prayer, first of all, for me and my teammates. the next thing would be paying attention to right now. double checking everything.

have i gone over this in my mind enough? and then just going out, taking my place on that bird and going systematically through that same mental checklist until the job's over. >> reporter: on their minds -- the mission. but on their shoulders -- a president's legacy. and a nation's grief. we all have internal plumbing. but for some of us with overactive bladder, our pipes just don't work as well as they should. sometimes, i worry my pipes might leak.

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[ applause ] the president of the united states. [ cheers and applause ] >> reporter: saturday, april 30, 2011. >> it is wonderful to be here at the white house correspondents dinner. just in case there are any lingering questions, tonight for the first time, i am releasing my official birth video. [ laughter ] >> reporter: but behind the laughter, it is a defining moment for obama's presidency.

>> little did we know what he knew which was that we were just a few hours away from killing osama bin laden. >> reporter: just hours earlier, the president made a final phone calle to vice admiral mcraven. >> it was very dramatic because the president basically said, you know, god speed, we have given you all we can to get the job done, now it's up to you and your men. >> reporter: 7,000 miles away at a u.s. military base in afghanistan, a handful of america's elite commandos are gearing up for the most important mission of their lives -- capturing or killing osama bin laden. under the cover of darkness in the early morning hours of monday, may 2, two u.s. military

blackhawks with 25 navy s.e.a.l.s descend on the compound believed to be hiding the world's most wanted terrorist. >> you've got endorphins being released. you've got epinephrine or adrenaline being released. if you control that fear, you fight. >> reporter: an intense mission with no room for error, but as the s.e.a.l.s close in on their target. >> something went very wrong. one of the helicopters lost lift and crashed. the whole plan had been that they would rope down from helicopters hovering overhead. doesn't work anymore. the s.e.a.l.s on that helicopter had to get out and assault the compound from the ground. >> reporter: now, the second chopper shifts gears and lands outside the compound. the s.e.a.l.s have to breach the outer wall. >> i am sure that the folks monitoring the operation had their hearts in their throats when that happened. >> reporter: president obama and his national security team are following the mission in

realtime from the white house situation room. for 25 anxious minutes there are no updates from the ground. the president and his staff wait. >> the minutes passed like days, but it was clearly very tense, a lot of people holding their breath and there was a fair degree of silence. >> reporter: from the ground the teams approached the buildings ready for battle. former s.e.a.l. howard wasden knows what it was like. >> everything's coming faster, faster. heart's going to beat quicker. going to breathe faster. >> reporter: the s.e.a.l.s encounter enemy fire from the guest house at the south end of the compound and kill a man who turns out to be the courier, al kuwaiti. s.e.a.l.s move through the main house. >> you come through the door and you don't know what's on the other side. you don't know what they're holding if they are good guys, bad guys, how the room is set up. >> these navy s.e.a.l.s didn't

know whether there was going to be a booby trap, suicide vests, whether or not they would walk in essentially to a killing field. >> reporter: inside the house, they confront and kill the courier's wife and brother and one of bin laden's sons. then they climb to the third floor where they come face to face with the target they came for. >> bin laden knows they're coming, sticks his head out in the hallway. there is a first shot. it misses. that would be a very tough shot to take. remember, it's nighttime. it's night vision goggles the s.e.a.l.s are wearing. things are loud and confused. but then bin laden goes back in the room by all accounts, all very quick, within seconds, the s.e.a.l.s kick down the door. >> reporter: bin laden's wife rushes them and they shoot her in the leg. then they go for bin laden. >> the first shot is to bin laden's chest. by all accounts he reels backwards from the impact and

then they shoot him very quickly above the left eye in the forehead. this is the classic double-tap. two rapid nearly simultaneous shots. the target is dead. he falls to the floor. >> reporter: in the situation room, the president's team is still holding their breath. >> and nobody knows what's going on until admiral mcraven is able to report back to washington that they've gotten him. that they have bin laden. and he's dead. >> reporter: but it's not over yet. >> nobody takes an easy breath until the helicopters are back, everybody's back home, everyone's accounted for. >> reporter: at the compound, the s.e.a.l.s move quickly out of the house, taking with them a treasure trove of intelligence data and bin laden's body. they destroy the disabled chopper to protect its reported cutting-edge technology. 38 minutes after the daringing

raid began, the s.e.a.l.s are gone before pakistani fighter jets can scramble to reach them. >> i have never been on an op that went that smoothly. i have never even heard of an op that went that smoothly. nobody was injured or killed and they achieved all their objectives. >> the risks are unimaginable. everything could have gone wrong, but the reward was if it worked, they would come out with a body, they would come out with the intelligence on the ground they gathered up -- the computers, the dvds, the thumb drives -- all of the things that would have been destroyed in a bombing or missile attack and show the world. >> reporter: bin laden's body is flown to the u.s.s. carl vincent. within 12 hours the body is washed, wrapped in a white cloth and buried at sea. at 11:35 p.m. eastern time on sunday night, president obama speaks to the nation delivering the news americans have waited a

decade to hear. >> tonight i can report to the american people and to the world that the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden, the leader of al qaeda. >> reporter: a risky decision, a daring mission and soon the world would see bin laden as they'd never seen him before. ♪ [ male announcer ] in 2011, at&t is at work,

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[ cheers and applause ] >> reporter: ground zero, may 2nd, 2011. >> we got him! [ chanting "usa" ] ♪ god bless america >> reporter: almost a decade earlier, the site of unspeakable tragedy. now, a place of celebration. osama bin laden is dead. it is a scene that plays out in cities across the u.s. and around the world. >> you can understand that people are ready to celebrate that he's gone. it's what they have been waiting for for ten years. >> it's a completely different feel. >> reporter: cnn's nic robertson is one of the first reporters to

arrive in abbottabad. >> there was a lot of surprise. they knew about the helicopters coming in. they had heard the helicopters, seen the flames, heard the gunfire, gone to the roofs to see what was happening, but it was all sort of too unreal for them, if you will, that this most wanted terrorist was living right under their noses. >> reporter: on the streets of this town, 70 miles from the capitol, the mystery of where the world's most wanted terrorist was hiding out begins to unfold. >> it was up there on the second and third floor where bin laden was killed. two shots -- one to the head, one to the chest. it's becoming already a tourist attraction. look at the people gathered here now. >> reporter: this small resort town is a far cry from the remote mountains or primitive caves that many imagined as bin laden's hideout. >> he couldn't have been

hidinging in any more plain sight than this. around three sides of the compound, a farmer's field. cabbage here, potatoes there, marijuana plants up to the side of the compound. he was just over the wall. >> this is a very beautiful area. >> reporter: a former pakistani government official lived there in the '80s, before bin laden arrived. >> so people come there for tourism also. i have very good memories of the area, but i do remember that as soon as you start going close to the military academy it's like west point. then there are check posts and the surrounding area is also, if not cordoned off, at least watched very carefully. >> reporter: the location was likely a strategic move by osama bin laden. >> one said to me there is darkness in the shadow next to

the candle. what he means is if you are next to a military base and you are hiding there that's the last place people will look for you. it seems bin laden was smart choosing this city. it wasn't associated with terrorist activity. >> he knew that the area closer to any military installation will at least be saved from the attacks. >> reporter: at the compound, there is evidence bin laden was not expecting trouble. >> i was surprised at the lack of intensity of gun battle. i think it tells us that bin laden had grown safe. that's why we didn't see the signs of mass struggle. that's why navy s.e.a.l.s were able to take down the courier, the courier's brother, bin laden's son and get to him in the room without huge signs of struggle. without having to blast their way through walls to get to bin laden sort of in a super secure room. >> he was living with his wife, maybe two or three, with seven

or eight children. this is not a sign of someone who's hiding and running away and really scared. this is someone who's having a comfortable life. >> reporter: suggesting bin laden had help in pakistan -- a point not lost on president obama as he told cbs's "60 minutes." >> we think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin laden inside of pakistan. but we don't know who or what that support network was. >> reporter: the pakistani government denies any role. >> allegations of complicity or incompetence are absurd. we emphatically reject such accusations. >> reporter: the white house and the world may find answers in the mother lode the navy s.e.a.l.s carried with them from the compound. ten hard drives, five computers, more than a hundred storage devices, even bin laden's diary.

we already know there are details of a possible attack on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 as well as plans to strike washington, new york, chicago, and los angeles. >> i think this is as significant as the death of bin laden, what's found with him. it's a treasure trove and the fact that the president made the decision not to go in and bomb the place means we have this rich amount of data coming out of there which will make people safer and give us a better sense of what was happening internally within al qaeda. >> reporter: released already -- this video. >> one of him watching tv looking like this old guy monitoring his own image. a very unheroic look. a great piece of american propaganda to put that out there to undercut bin laden's heroic image. >> reporter: an old man reliving his early fame, prapinerhaps af he had become irrelevant.

>> i think bin laden must have been looking at the advance of the arabs in the middle east with a mixture of glee and despair. glee because this is what he wanted -- the overthrow of the regime. despair because it had nothinging to do with him. there is not a single protester in benghazi or libya carrying a picture of bin laden. the arab spring shows their id yol jis are relevant and their leader is now dead. >> reporter: will bin laden's number two, ayman al zawahiri step into his shoes? few think he's capable of it. >> if he took over that's good for the united states and the civilized world. he would probably drive what remains of the group into the ground. >> reporter: bin laden's message of jihad and hate may outlive him and continue to fan the embers of al qaeda. but the lon