Thaindian News

Washington, May 4(ANI): The Central Intelligence Agency did not keep Pakistan in the loop about ‘Operation Geronimo’, because US officials feared that Islamabad could have jeopardised the operation by leaking word to its targets, CIA chief Leon Panetta has said.

Long before Panetta ordered Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of the Joint Special Forces Command, to undertake the mission at 1:22 p.m. on Friday, the CIA had been gaming out how to structure the raid.

Months prior, the United States had considered expanding the assault to include coordination with other countries, notably Pakistan, but the CIA ruled out participating with its nominal South Asian ally early on.

“It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets,” Time quoted Panetta, as saying in his first interview since commanding the mission to kill bin Laden.

The CIA chief revealed that the US also considered running a high-altitude bombing raid from B-2 bombers or launching a “direct shot” with cruise missiles, but ruled out those options because of the possibility of “too much collateral.”

The direct-shot option was still on the table as late as last Thursday as the CIA and then the White House grappled with how much risk to take on the mission, and waiting for more intelligence also remained a possibility, the report said.

On Tuesday, Panetta assembled a group of 15 aides to assess the credibility of the intelligence they had collected on the compound in Abbottabad, where they believed bin Laden was hiding, it added.

At the key Thursday meeting, in which President Obama heard the arguments from his top aides on whether or not to go into Pakistan to kill or capture bin Laden, Panetta admitted that the evidence of bin Laden’s presence at the compound was circumstantial, it added.

But “when you put it all together, we have the best evidence since [the 2001 battle of] Tora Bora [where bin Laden was last seen], and that then makes it clear that we have an obligation to act,” Panetta said he told the room.

Obama decided that Panetta’s arguments trumped two other options: striking the compound remotely or waiting until more evidence was available to prove bin Laden was there.

After he received the order, Panetta told McRaven of the President’s decision and instructed him to launch, telling him that the mission was “to go in there [and] get bin Laden, and if bin Laden isn’t there, get the hell out!”

CIA officials turned a windowless seventh-floor conference room at Langley into a command center for the mission, and Panetta watched the operation unfold from there. As he and his team waited for McRaven to report on whether bin Laden was indeed at the compound, Panetta said the room was tense, adding that when the helicopters left the compound 15 minutes later, the room broke into applause.

The aftermath of the mission has been productive. The U.S. collected an “impressive amount” of material from bin Laden’s compound, including computers and other electronics, Panetta said. (ANI)