Bob Woodward: 'How a phone call led to bin Laden'

The Washington Post has an article by Bob Woodward telling how a phone call to a courier led the US to find Osama bin Laden.

Woodward writes: "It seemed an innocuous, catch-up phone call. Last year Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for a Pakistani known to U.S. intelligence as the main courier for Osama bin Laden, took a call from an old friend.'Where have you been? inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?'

"Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: 'I’m back with the people I was with before.' There was a pause, as if the friend knew that Kuwaiti’s words meant he had returned to bin Laden’s inner circle, and was perhaps at the side of the al-Qaeda leader himself.The friend replied, 'May God facilitate'.”

Woodward says: "When U.S. intelligence officials learned of this exchange, they knew they had reached a key moment in their decade-long search for al-Qaeda’s founder. The call led them to the unusual, high-walled compound in Abbottabad, a city 35 miles north of Pakistan’s capital."

Best ever front page? Telegraph combines royal wedding and the killing of Osama Bin Laden

The Huffington Post is highlighting the Daily Telegraph's weekly world edition for combining the Royal Wedding and the killing of Osama bin Laden for its splash - with one commentator describing it as the "greatest front page ever".

Huff Media says the front page is "An absolutely astonishing melding of the royal wedding and the death of Osama bin Laden. The wedding got bigger play, but the two stories turned the front page into a kind of global symbol for the twin poles of fluff and grit, hard news and soft, that make up today's journalistic world."

It notes that The Atlantic's James Fallows was very direct in his opinion about the page, calling it: "the greatest front page ever" and saying it won't be topped.

Huff Media is running a poll asking readers if the front page is the "best ever". So far those voting "definitely" are just beating those voting "no way".

Journalism graduate commanded Bin Laden raid

Vice-Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the SEAL team that hunted down and killed Osama Bin Laden, is a journalism graduate, reports TIME magazine's Battleland blog.

In an article headlined 'The Most Deadly Would-be Journalist in the World,' TIME reports: "McRaven hedged his bets while studying journalism at the University of Texas in Austin before graduating in 1977: he also was a member of the Navy ROTC program.

" 'You wouldn't expect a journalism major,' former deputy CIA chief and ex-Navy admiral Bobby Inman told the San Antonio Express-News, 'to end up running special forces'.

"But it looks like McRaven picked the right career path: in his 35-year career, McRaven went from being a SEAL platoon commander, to heading a SEAL team, to running U.S. special operations in Europe. But he didn't give up everything he learned in journalism school: in 1996 he published Spec Ops, a book on the art of special operations based on eight case studies."

The TIME piece concludes: "Not a bad day's work for a would-be journalist. Sure as heck beats writing about it."

• Maybe McRaven will make ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie re-think his view that all journalism colleges should be closed.
• Hat-tip SDBrook on Twitter

US front pages on news that Bin Laden is dead

Here are some more US front pages on the news that Osama Bin Laden is dead. I've already featured the 'Rot in Hell' front page from the New York Daily News. For more front pages see the newseum website.

Three 'Obama' fails on Bin Laden dead reports

Oh dear. Three mix ups between Obama and Osama in these news reports from Fox, El Pais and the BBC on the killing of Bin Laden.