Countdown bin Laden: The Untold Story of the 247-Day Hunt to Bring the Mastermind of 9/11 to Justice (Chris Wallace’s Countdown Series)

Product Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER\nFollowing Chris Wallace’s “riveting” (The New York Times) and “propulsive” (Time) first book Countdown 1945 comes a deeply reported, revelatory, and thrillingly told account of the final months of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.\nOn August 27, 2010, three CIA officers ask for a private meeting with CIA Director Leon Panetta. During that secret session, they tell Panetta that agents have tracked a courier with deep Al Qaeda ties to a three-story house at the end of a dead-end street in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But they say it’s more than a house—it’s a heavily protected fortress. No one in the meeting says the name bin Laden. They don’t have to. Everyone understands that finally, after nearly a decade, maybe, just maybe, they’ve found the world’s most wanted man.\nIn
Countdown bin Laden, celebrated journalist and anchor of
Fox News Sunday Chris Wallace delivers a thrilling new account of the final eight months of intelligence gathering, national security strategizing, and meticulous military planning that leads to the climactic mission when SEAL Team Six closes in on its target.\nThe book delivers new information collected from Wallace’s in-depth interviews with more than a dozen central figures, including Admiral William H. McRaven—leader of the operation in Pakistan—as well as CIA Director Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and two members of SEAL Team Six who participate in the raid, including the special operator who kills Osama bin Laden. Wallace also brings to life the human elements of this story, talking to families who lost loved ones on 9/11, sharing what relatives of SEAL Team Six went through, and bringing us inside the tense Situation Room during the raid.\nPublished on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11,
Countdown bin Laden is a historical thriller filled with intrigue, cinematic action, and fresh reporting about the race to apprehend and bring to justice the mastermind of the most consequential terrorist attack in American history.
Review
“A highly readable, vividly detailed account of one of the most dramatic intelligence victories in recent history . . . The author alternates the focus among Panetta, the key CIA officials who developed the mission plan, and members of the Navy SEAL team that carried it out. The narrative accelerates as it progresses, and Wallace provides the right amount of detail to bring the events to life.” \n—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \n“Engrossing . . . This is a cinematic overview of one of the CIA’s most heralded missions.”\n—Publishers Weekly\nPRAISE FOR COUNTDOWN 1945:\n“[A] superb, masterly book . . .
Countdown 1945 is filled with fascinating details. . . . On one hand, the book reads like a riveting novel as Wallace reveals the machinations and internal debates among the scientific community to devise a workable atomic bomb as quickly as possible. . . . But
Countdown 1945 is also a profound story of decision making at the highest levels—and of pathos.”\n—Jay Winik, New York Times Book Review\n“A compelling and highly readable account of one of the most fateful decisions in American history. Like John Hersey in his book
Hiroshima, Wallace and Weiss humanize events too often reduced to technical or diplomatic arcana by telling their story through the lives of individuals. . . . The book moves along at a rapid clip, with colorful anecdotes enlivening the narrative.”\n—Gregg Herken, The Washington Post\n“Vivid and engaging . . . Wallace has made a taut nonfiction thriller out of the dramatic days between Harry S. Truman’s succession to the presidency, following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, and the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than four months later. . . . This is a deeply absorbing reading experience about the fateful final months of a confli