Thaindian News

Washington, May 14 (IANS) US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed nothing before the raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, and kept even her husband, Bill, in the dark, the former US president has said in an interview.

Bill Clinton said he had contacted his wife the day of the operation but had no clue that the Al Qaeda chief would be hunted down that very day.

“I placed two calls to my wife on that day, and all I was told is, ‘She’s at the White House and can’t talk to you’,” Bill Clinton told CNBC in an interview Friday.

The former president insisted that despite his proximity to one of the key decision-makers on the raid in Pakistan’s Abbottabad city, his wife disclosed nothing about it, the New York Post reported.

Clinton said he had no clue to the months of planning and was as surprised as everyone else to find out the Al Qaeda chief had been killed by US Navy SEALs in a special operation.

“When Hillary got on the Armed Services Committee, which is right after she became a senator, I made up my mind that as long as she was there - and then she became secretary of state - I would never take a security briefing unless asked to do so by the president for a specific reason,” Clinton was quoted as saying.

“And you will be proud that I, like all Americans, knew nothing about the bin Laden operation, which had been debated in the administration in a tiny number of hands for months, until the president called and told me,” he said.