Michael Scheuer

But, you know, if you identify a liaison,

who you know has information you need, it's not impossible to persuade them to do it since we defend Saudi Arabia, especially in that case.

We were told not to send any more cables on that issue to Riyadh.

Just because I was the chief of operations on Osama bin Laden didn't mean there wasn't somebody else working on the same issue in an opposite direction.

And as it turned out, the opposite direction carried the day with the approval of presidents.

Tarnak Farms is where he lived.

We knew...

Osama bin Laden, his family, Zawahiri's family, and a couple of other, the most senior al-Qaeda people were going to be there.

When we wrote the operational plan, you have to keep in mind, speaking to the policymaker, you have to keep in mind that they have their families there.

And if there is violence, if they don't surrender, they're liable to be people killed, noncombatants.

They said, okay, we'll go ahead with it.

So that one went almost to the starting gate.

And one of the last dumps of overhead imagery we got happened to show a child swing set.

And they suddenly said, oh, we can't do that.

What if that picture gets out and we'll be responsible?

We had an operation that was planned to kidnap bin Laden within Afghanistan.

It was a plan that required getting him out of the country and then taking him to another country.

And it was approved.

And then it was at a last minute, it was unapproved.

And then a week later, the embassies went up.