The tip that led Navy SEALs to Osama Bin Laden's hideout came from the highest echelons of Al Qaeda - his loyal henchman, 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
The terror gang's No. 3 was being grilled in a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe when he spoke about a Bin Laden courier who went by the alias Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
It would take years for that bit of intelligence to guide the U.S. military to Bin Laden's doorstep, where daring commandos finally killed him Sunday with two bullets to the forehead and chest.
"Geronimo. E-KIA," went the confirmation message from the compound to the White House, marking vengeance nearly a decade in the making.
After Bin Laden's sheet-shrouded body was dumped into the sea on Monday, officials described a long and twisting road that ended with heart-stopping heroics.
The information Mohammed gave his interrogators about Kuwaiti was just the beginning of what intelligence officials described as "exceptionally tedious" analysis.
It wasn't until another detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, blabbed about one of Bin Laden's couriers that authorities were certain he was the key to the mystery of Bin Laden's whereabouts.
The hunt for Kuwaiti - a Pakistani whose real name was Sheikh Abu Ahmed - was cold until last year, when a wiretap of another suspect picked up a phone call with the courier, intelligence officials said.
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