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US intelligence had been looking for al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for decades. Once they found him in Afghanistan, where he was living as a guest of the ruling Taliban after the disastrous US withdrawal last year, they spent several months carefully planning his death.
Soon after Osama bin Laden was killed in a daring US raid in May 2011, the coward who helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks became the most wanted terrorist in the world, with a $25 million bounty on his head.
US intelligence agents looked for al-Zawahiri, who was said to be either in Pakistan's tribal area or in Afghanistan, during the terms of four presidents.
In 2003, the CIA was very close to being able to catch al-Zawahiri and then kill him in 2004.
In 2009, the agency thought it had finally caught him, but a double agent blew himself up in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven agency workers and hurting six more.
Officials finally found him earlier this year in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was staying in a safe house run by the Haqqani Taliban network with his wife, daughter, and her children.
A senior administration official told reporters Monday, "We were able to build a pattern of life by getting information from several different sources."
During that time, the terrorist didn't seem to leave the safe house. However, he was seen "multiple times, for long periods of time" on the balcony where he was eventually blown to pieces on Sunday.
Early in April, two top national security officials were told about the intelligence. Soon after, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told the president about the intelligence.
The officials said that in May and June, a small group of government officials worked to check the intelligence and come up with options for Biden.
Biden's national security staff then told him about the planned strike on July 1, after he got back from a five-day trip to Europe.
Officials spent a lot of time putting together "a pattern of life" to track al-movements. Zawahiri's They even made a scale model of the safe house and showed it to Biden in the White House Situation Room.
Insiders say that the president got his last briefing on July 25, while he was still alone in the White House residence with COVID-19.
Biden had tried to stop then-President Barack Obama from killing bin Laden, but this time, officials say, he gave the go-ahead for "a precise tailored airstrike" as soon as the chance came up.
This chance came early Sunday, which was late Saturday in Washington, after what Biden called "clear and convincing" signs that they could kill him in a way that would hurt other civilians the least.
A further 36 hours of intelligence analysis would follow before US officials began sharing that al-Zawahiri was dead.
The Haqqani Taliban network was seen restricting access to the safe house and relocating the dead al Qaeda leader’s family — which officials interpreted as the country’s rulers trying to conceal the fact that they had harbored the world’s most wanted terrorist.
“Justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more,” Biden finally told the nation Monday.
“Now we make it clear again tonight, that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide: If you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out,” he said.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was only 15 years old when it was known that he wanted to get rid of Egypt's "infidel" government. He ended up spending three years in prison because of the 1981 murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
After he was let out of prison in 1984, he first tried to get close to bin Laden. Bin Laden was impressed by his soon-to-be right-hand man's lifelong commitment to jihad.
“Bin Laden always looked up to him,” said terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University.
He was impressed that al-Zawahiri “spent time in an Egyptian prison, he was tortured. He was a jihadi from the time he was a teenager.”
The pair were high on the intelligence radar for decades before Sept. 11, with al-Zawahiri assumed to lead al Qaeda’s tactics and organizational skills while his supposed leader supplied charisma and cash.
“For decades, he was the mastermind behind the attacks against Americans,” Biden said Monday as he declared that “justice has been delivered” with al-Zawahiri’s death.
As the commander-in-chief noted, the terrorist “played a key role, a key role in the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 and wounding over 4,500 others” in 1998.
He was behind “the USS Cole [bombing] in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors and wounded dozens more,” Biden stressed.
“He carved a trail of murder and violence against American citizens, American service members, American diplomats and American interests,” he said.
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan. Al-Zawahiri and bin Laden fled to Pakistan, where al-wife Zawahiri's and at least two of their six children were killed by a US airstrike.
He was made the leader of al Qaeda less than two months after bin Laden was killed in a US raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This took the global network out of isolation.
By the time two US Hellfire missiles blew up al-Zawahiri on Sunday, he had spent almost all of his 71 years being a terrorist.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House's national security office, said Tuesday that the US didn't have DNA proof that he was dead, but that they knew who he was from other sources.
“We do not have DNA confirmation. We’re not going to get that confirmation. Quite frankly, based on multiple sources and methods that we’ve gathered information from, we don’t need it,” Kirby told CNN.
“We have visual confirmation, but we also have confirmation through other sources.”
