'No Easy Day': six top revelations from book on the bin Laden mission

The Navy SEAL Team 6 operators hand-picked to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011 had some unwelcome surprises waiting for them as they hit the ground, according to Matt Bissonnette in his controversial book “No Easy Day.” The training that went into the mission included key help from female operators, practical jokes, and an audition of sorts for top US officials, who watched it before deciding whether the Special Operations Forces should go ahead with the raid.

3. Women were pivotal to the bin Laden mission

The SEAL team was given the green light by a CIA analyst with the pseudonym “Jen” who was “the main force” behind tracking bin Laden to Abbottabad, the Pakistani town that is also home to the country’s premiere military academy. Before the SEAL team was launched, Bissonnette writes, this analyst told them that “she was one hundred percent certain that [bin Laden] was there.”

“This was her baby,” Bissonnette writes. “Jen and her team spent five years tracking [bin Laden] to get us to where we are now. We were just there to finish the job."

A woman from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency “took care of the maps and satellite images for us,” Bissonnette writes. “She provided any detail – big or small.”

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