

The unit, called Navy SEAL Team Six, probably won't claim the credit publicly, however.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say units from SEAL Team Six dropped into bin Laden's high-walled compound in Pakistan early Monday morning, sliding down ropes in the pre-dawn dark. The military won't confirm which unit carried out the attack.


"Be extremely careful about operational security," he added. "The fight is not over."

Made up of only a few hundred forces based in Dam Neck, Va., the elite SEAL unit officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or "DEVGRU," is part of a special operations brotherhood that calls itself "the quiet professionals."


The unit is overseen by the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the U.S. Army's Delta Force and other special units. JSOC's combined forces have been responsible for a quadrupling of counterterrorism raids that have targeted militants in record numbers over the past year in Afghanistan.


CIA Director Leon Panetta was in charge of the military team during the covert operation, a U.S. official said. While the president can empower the SEALs and other counterterrorism units to carry out covert actions without CIA oversight, President Barack Obama's team put the intelligence agency in charge, with other elements of the national security apparatus answering to them for this mission.

SEAL Team Six actually works so often with the intelligence agency that it's sometimes called the CIA's Pretorian Guard — a partnership that started in Iraq, as an outgrowth of the fusion of special operations forces and intelligence in the hunt for militants there.


McChrystal described it as building a network to chase a network, where the special operations forces work with intelligence analysts back at a joint base. The raiders, he said, could collect valuable "pocket litter" from the scene, like documents or computers, to exploit to hunt the next target.

The battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan had been informally divided, with the SEALs running Afghanistan and the U.S. Army's Delta Force conducting the bulk of the operations in Iraq, though there was overlap of each organization. There is considerable professional rivalry between them.

The successful bin Laden mission is a much-needed boost for the unit. The SEALs' reputation took a hit within the special operations community after a 2010 rescue mission led to the accidental killing of British hostage Linda Norgrove, held by militants in Afghanistan.
