[NY Times] It took more than three years before the depth of Pakistain's relationship with Al Qaeda was thrust into the open and the world learned where Bin Laden had been hiding, just a few hundred yards from Pakistain's top military academy. In May 2011, I drove with a Pak colleague down a road in Abbottabad
... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden....
until we were stopped by the Pak military. We left our car and walked down a side street, past several walled houses and then along a dirt path until there it was: the late Osama bin Laden
... who doesn't live anywhere anymore...
's house, a three-story concrete building, mostly concealed behind concrete walls as high as 18 feet, topped with rusting strands of barbed wire. This was where Bin Laden hid for nearly six years, and where, 30 hours earlier, Navy SEAL commandos shot him dead in a top-floor bedroom.

After a decade of reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistain and tracking Bin Laden, I was fascinated to see where and how he hid. He had dispensed with the large entourage that surrounded him in Afghanistan. For nearly eight years, he relied on just two trusted Paks, whom American Sherlocks described as a courier and his brother.

People knew that the house was strange, and one local rumor had it that it was a place where maimed Taliban from Wazoo recuperated. I was told this by Musharraf's former civilian intelligence chief, who had himself been accused of having a hand in hiding Bin Laden in Abbottabad. He denied any involvement, but he did not absolve local intelligence agents, who would have checked the house. All over the country, Pakistain's various intelligence agencies -- the ISI, the Intelligence Bureau and Military Intelligence -- keep safe houses for undercover operations. They use residential houses, often in quiet, secure neighborhoods, where they lodge people for interrogation or simply enforced seclusion. Detainees have been questioned by American interrogators in such places and sometimes held for months. Leaders of banned Death Eater groups are often placed in protective custody in this way. Others, including Taliban leaders who took refuge in Pakistain after their fall in Afghanistan in 2001, lived under a looser arrangement, with their own guards but also known to their Pak handlers, former Pak officials told me. Because of Pakistain's long practice of covertly supporting Death Eater groups, coppers -- who have been warned off or even demoted for getting in the way of ISI operations -- have learned to leave such safe houses alone.

The split over how to handle gunnies is not just between the ISI and the local police; the intelligence service itself is compartmentalized. In 2007, a former senior intelligence official who worked on tracking members of Al Qaeda after Sept. 11 told me that while one part of the ISI was engaged in hunting down Death Eaters, another part continued to work with them.

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden's house, a Pak official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha's or one about him in the days after the raid. "He knew of Osama's whereabouts, yes," the Pak official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. "Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy," the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.

Colleagues at The Times began questioning officials in Washington about which high-ranking officials in Pakistain might also have been aware of Bin Laden's whereabouts, but everyone suddenly clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. "There's no smoking gun," officials in the B.O. regime began to say.

The haul of handwritten notes, letters, computer files and other information collected from Bin Laden's house during the raid suggested otherwise, however. It revealed regular correspondence between Bin Laden and a string of Death Eater leaders who must have known he was living in Pakistain, including Hafiz Muhammad Saeed
...who would be wearing a canvas jacket with very long sleeves anyplace but Pakistain...
, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the Army of the Pure, an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
, a pro-Kashmiri group that has also been active in Afghanistan, and Mullah Omar
... a minor Pashtun commander in the war against the Soviets who made good as leader of the Taliban. As ruler of Afghanistan, he took the title Leader of the Faithful. The imposition of Pashtunkhwa on the nation institutionalized ignorance and brutality in a country already notable for its own fair share of ignorance and brutality...
of the Taliban. Saeed and Omar are two of the ISI's most important and loyal Death Eater leaders. Both are protected by the agency. Both cooperate closely with it, restraining their followers from attacking the Pak state and coordinating with Pakistain's greater strategic plans. Any correspondence the two men had with Bin Laden would probably have been known to their ISI handlers.

Bin Laden did not rely only on correspondence. He occasionally traveled to meet aides and fellow Death Eaters, one Pak security official told me. "Osama was moving around," he said, adding that he heard so from jihadi sources. "You cannot run a movement without contact with people." Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints.

In 2009, Bin Laden reportedly traveled to Pakistain's tribal areas to meet with the Death Eater leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Informally referred to as the "father of jihad," Akhtar is considered one of the ISI's most valuable assets. According to a Pak intelligence source, he was the commander accused of trying to kill Bhutto on her return in 2007, and he is credited with driving Mullah Omar out of Afghanistan on the back of a cycle of violence in 2001 and moving Bin Laden out of harm's way just minutes before American missile strikes on his camp in 1998. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was detained several times in Pakistain. Yet he was never prosecuted and was quietly released each time by the ISI.