Publisher's Synopsis
From Mark Bowden, author of the multi-million copy best seller Black Hawk Down, and the preeminent chronicler of our military and special forces, comes The Finish, a gripping account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. With unprecedented access to key sources, including President Obama, Bowden takes us inside the rooms where decisions were made and on the ground where the action unfolded. On October 7, 2001, less than a month after the devastating attacks of 9/11, the United States invaded Afghanistan. They thought they had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, but then he vanished, and the trail went cold. Over the next ten years, as Bowden shows, America found itself fighting a new kind of war against the scattered forces of al Qaeda, one which demanded a new approach. Step-by-step, Bowden describes the development of a tactical strategy to fight this war a fusion of intel from various agencies and on-the-ground special ops in a six-step plan called F3EAD (Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate). An essential part of the new strategy was an initiative called Terrorism Information Awareness, the creation of a giant database that would collate information of any kind names, numbers, photos, broadcasts, rumors, interrogation transcripts data which could be analyzed by the Pentagons supercomputers in order to track down terrorists. In the field, improvements in intelligence gathering meant the Task Force teams in Iraq and Afghanistan were able to react quickly enough to get inside the information cycle of the enemy, striking at targets before they could react. After thousands of special forces missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the right weapon to go after bin Laden had finally evolved. Meanwhile, the CIA and the government never lost focus on bin Laden. By August 2010, intelligence regarding a man believed to b
