Now a virtual program
Almost nine years after the 9/11 terrorist attack on America, three CIA officers met secretly with Director Leon Panetta to report a major break in a hunt that had consumed them for all too long: Agents had tracked a courier with deep Al Qaeda ties to a heavily fortified house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Abbottabad, Pakistan. No one mentioned the name of the person living there; no one needed to.
And so it began: the 247 days of intelligence gathering, strategizing and meticulous military planning that led the nation’s civilian and military leaders to gather nervously in the Situation Room as a Navy SEAL team finally closed in on that house and located their long-elusive prey.
In Countdown bin Laden, Chris Wallace and cowriter Mitch Weiss deliver a riveting account of the intricate lead-up to that fateful moment, based on interviews with Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and members of the SEAL team, including the man who shot Osama bin Laden.
Twenty years after the name bin Laden became imprinted on the American psyche, Wallace and Weiss join us to discuss those fateful and tense days of preparation and the resonance of May 2, 2011, for the families of those killed on 9/11 — and for all Americans.
During his almost half century in network news, Chris Wallace has covered just about every key political event, from political conventions to the Gulf War, and interviewed dozens of world leaders and seven American presidents. Now anchor of Fox News Sunday, he has won dozens of major broadcast news awards, including three Emmys, the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton and the Peabody Award. His last book, Countdown 1945, was a #1 national bestseller.