On the morning of May 1, 2011, most Americans had never heard of Abbottabad. By that night, the dusty midsize city near the mountains of northwest Pakistan was the center of the biggest story in the world. A team of U.S. Navy SEALs had just descended by helicopter on a high-walled mansion there in the dark of night, located the globe’s most hunted man and killed him.

The effort to track and execute Osama bin Laden, which took place 10 years ago this weekend, was the most closely held operational secret in modern American history—a highly sensitive, politically fraught and physically risky mission that involved breaching the sovereign territory of a purported U.S. ally to target an icon of international violence and terror.

Once his death was announced in a hastily organized late Sunday night presidential address, much of the initial attention focused on the bravery and skill of the SEAL operators who flew in and conducted the attack. Other popular culture, like the movie Zero Dark Thirty, would later center on the years of work by the analysts who traced the elusive bin Laden to his compound. But the operation also stands as a fascinating window into the most rarefied zone of presidential decision-making: Barack Obama had sole authority to approve an act with huge consequences and huge risks, one that could easily sink his presidency if it went bad. And, with a decade’s hindsight, there was another consequential domestic political subplot at work that week, too: On the day between when Obama approved the operation and when Seal Team Six helicoptered in, the president kept a long-scheduled date at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, where he publicly roasted celebrity real estate developer-turned-TV host Donald Trump for pumping up the “birther” conspiracy theory that he wasn’t a real citizen.

The bin Laden raid that President Obama greenlit that Friday in late April—code-named Operation Neptune’s Spear—was the culmination of months of intricate preparation that reached across the capital and around the globe, from full-scale SEAL dress rehearsals in North Carolina to deep Washington legal debates over whether the mission would be “kill or capture,” all planned around a small, precise physical model of the Abbottabad compound that traveled back and forth from CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia to the West Wing. The tense moments as the raid unfolded half a world away yielded one of the most famous inside-the-room photographs in presidential history, Pete Souza’s portrait of 14 people crammed into a White House Situation Room anteroom—a moment of high drama that included Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and two future current Cabinet secretaries.

The full story of how, and why, America’s top security officials decided to pull the trigger that night in May has never been told. This oral history—the story inside the West Wing and U.S. intelligence agencies as Neptune’s Spear coalesced over the fall of 2010 and spring of 2011—is based on extensive original interviews with nearly 30 key intelligence and national security leaders, White House staff, and presidential aides—including some who have never spoken publicly before, and roughly half of those pictured in Souza’s famous photograph. Their accounts, from the White House, CIA headquarters and Afghanistan itself, paint a never-before-seen view of the most momentous decision of Barack Obama’s presidency.

GEN. JAMES CLAPPER (RET.), U.S. director of national intelligence: Since 9/11, the U.S. Intelligence Community had one mission that surpassed all others, at least emotionally: Find and capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

GEORGE LITTLE, director of public affairs, CIA: 9/11 was still very fresh in everyone’s minds and consciousness.

JON DARBY, senior official on counterterrorism, NSA: There were dozens of leads being worked at any one time.

LEON PANETTA, director, CIA: Some thought he was living in a cave; some thought he was in the tribal areas of Pakistan; others thought he might be in Iran; others thought he might be dead.

MIKE LEITER, director, National Counterterrorism Center: You had no shortage of reporting about a 6-foot-3 man wandering through the streets of Berlin—crazy things, none of them really had any meat on the bones.

LEON PANETTA: It was clear that after almost 10 years of working on it, almost every lead had led to a dead end.

TOM DONILON, national security adviser, White House: The president, after one of our regular counterterrorism meetings, called a group of us—myself and Leon Panetta, Rahm Emanuel, Michael Leiter—up to the Oval Office and said that he had been told that the case had gone cold and he wanted the intelligence community to reinvigorate its efforts.

JEREMY BASH, chief of staff, CIA: After the tragedy at Khost where we lost seven CIA officers on December 30, 2009, Director Panetta said to the team responsible for hunting al Qaeda, “I want you to come brief me every Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. on the hunt for bin Laden, even if there’s nothing new to report.”

LEON PANETTA: I remember saying that in the very least I expected them to come in and tell me four or five new ideas about how they would try to locate bin Laden.

ADM. WILLIAM MCRAVEN, commander, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC): He represented everything—everything we were fighting against.

LETITIA “TISH” LONG, director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: I was in my office in August 2010 and my executive assistant, a Navy captain, comes in and says, “Ma’am, there’s a couple of folks here to see you.” And I said, “OK, you want to tell me a little bit more?” He said, “It’s two analysts and the director of analysis. They said they really need to see you.” He brings them in. I said, “Brett, you stay,” and the director of analysis looks at me and says, “Ma’am, he can’t stay. He is not read into this program.” They lay out a bunch of the imagery and proceed to brief me on the compound of interest. As they’re briefing me, I’m thinking, “Wow—just wow.”

MIKE MORELL, deputy director, CIA: The director and I would have a three-times-a-week meeting with our Counterterrorism Center officers in the director’s conference room starting at 4:30 p.m. Occasionally at the end of that meeting, the director of the center would say, “Hey, can I see you guys in a smaller group?” In August of 2010, the director of the Counterterrorism Center said, “Can I see you guys alone?” He had never used that word “alone” before.

JEREMY BASH: The briefer said, “We’ve been following two individuals who were historically couriers for bin Laden. We found them and we followed them down a dead-end street in a town called Abbottabad.

At the end of the street, there’s a place that looks like a fortress.” I remember Panetta looked up from his briefing binder and he’s like “A fortress? Tell me about that fortress.”

MIKE MORELL: As he was going through what was unique about this compound, the hair on the back of my neck literally stood up. Literally stood up.

JEREMY BASH: They began to tell him that this place had 12-foot-high walls on the front, 18-foot-high walls in the back, no electricity, no phone service. The people who were living there were taking great pains to conceal their identity.

MIKE MORELL: He showed us that the main house had very few windows. He showed us that the compound was compartmented, broken up with internal walls so it was difficult to move from one part of the compound to another. And he pointed out to us that there was a balcony off the third floor—the interesting thing is the balcony had a privacy wall, so if there was somebody on the balcony, you couldn’t see them. And I remember Director Panetta saying, “Why would you put a privacy wall on a balcony—isn’t the whole point of a balcony to be able to see out?”

LEON PANETTA: Abbottabad is about the closest thing in Pakistan that comes to a resort area—there are mountains all around. If you have a compound, you would assume you’d like to look at the mountains. To have a seven- or eight-foot wall on the third floor raised a lot of issues.

MIKE MORELL: Nobody said aloud that bin Laden might be there, but everyone was thinking it.

LEON PANETTA: Not only was there high security around the compound, but the couriers would travel 90 miles away to make a cellphone call. In addition to that, there was this mysterious family on that third floor. Using our intelligence capabilities, looking at the clothes and the clothesline, we identified how many members were in that family. The sense was that the number of members in that family matched the number of family members they thought were in bin Laden’s family. But we never saw that family.

MIKE MORELL: The first briefing we did with the White House was [White House homeland security adviser] John Brennan—just John—and then a second briefing was John, Tom Donilon and Jim Jones, who was then the national security adviser.

MARY DEROSA, legal counsel, National Security Council, White House: I was in the Sit Room—as all the meetings were—and before the briefing started, I remember an unusual amount of attention to who could be in the room, including for people who were normally in everything. That’s the atmospherics—like, “What am I about to hear?” I’ve been in many very, very sensitive meetings, but it hadn’t been like that before.

TOM DONILON: The intelligence community came to me and indicated that they thought they had the best lead on where bin Laden might be since the United States lost him in the mountains of Tora Bora years before in Afghanistan.

NICK RASMUSSEN, senior director for counterterrorism, National Security Council, White House: They were labeling it as a “compound of interest.” There were still many, many maybes attached to this.

MARY DEROSA: I usually carry around these green notebooks and took notes in meetings I was in. I wrote one word down and the person next to me put his hand on my arm and shook his head. I remember later looking, and the word was “compound.”

LEON PANETTA: The president listened very seriously. He’s not somebody who started jumping for joy or even expressing any kind of a commentary. He basically said that what was essential was that we continue to do surveillance on the compound with the hope that we could ultimately find conclusive evidence that bin Laden himself was there.

MIKE MORELL: He gave us two very specific orders at the end of that meeting. The first was “Leon, Michael, find out what the hell is going on inside that compound.” The second orders he gave was “Don’t tell anyone. Don’t share this with anyone.” This is CIA and this group in the White House, and that’s it, nobody else. No secretary of Defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, no secretary of State, no attorney general and director of the FBI—nobody else.