CIA took to twitter Sunday to share a timeline of details on the raid which killed Osama bin Laden five years ago.
Operation Neptune Spear, sometimes referred to as the UBL Raid, was conducted by various elements of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which includes elite units like the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six and the Army’s Delta Force. CIA began tweeting the pseudo live tweet at 1:25 p.m. EDT, the same time the raid began five years ago to the day.
“To mark the 5th anniversary of the [Osama] bin Laden operation in Abbottabad we will tweet the raid as if it were happening today,” said CIA in the initial tweet.
Daring #UBLRaid was an IC team effort & in close collaboration with our military partners.https://t.co/rklCIRLlgF pic.twitter.com/xZObdGeqPR
— CIA (@CIA) May 1, 2016
President Barack Obama, Director of CIA Leon Panetta, and JSOC commander Navy Adm. William McRaven approve the operation at 1:25 p.m. EDT.
At 1:51 p.m. EDT, specially-equipped helicopters take off from a staging area in Afghanistan and fly to Abbottabad in Pakistan.
Once the helicopters arrive at the compound at 3:30 p.m. EDT, one crashes on landing. With no casualties sustained, the raid continues. At the same time, Obama and his staff begin watching the operation live.
Just nine minutes into the operation, bin Laden is found on the third floor of the compound and killed. From 3:39 p.m. EDT to 4:10 p.m., the operators collect “large quantities of material from the compound for intel analysis.”
The president receives a “tentative confirmation” of bin Laden’s death at 3:53 p.m. EDT. At 4:05 p.m., the operators leave the compound. At 4:08 p.m., operators destroy the crashed helicopter. Just two minutes later, the remaining operators are removed in a “backup helicopter.”
The team of operators return to Afghanistan at 5:53 p.m. EDT, where McRaven greets them. By 7:01 p.m., Obama receives a “high probability of positive identification” that bin Laden is dead.
You can read the entirety of the live tweet at on the CIA twitter account page.
While the timeline was popular with CIA’s 1.33 million twitter followers, there were some who sneered and criticized the event. The Daily Show seemed unimpressed, responding to the live tweet saying “if you live tweet the Bay of Pigs invasion, call us. Otherwise, stop it.”
Despite the criticism, the event garnered thousands of likes and re-tweets, making it the agency’s most successful social media campaigns since the immensely popular first tweet.
We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.
— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014
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