SEAL's first-hand account of bin Laden killing

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Scott Pelley: SEAL Team 6 is made up of a number of squadrons. And I wonder why was your squadron chosen for this particular mission? Was there something special about you?

Mark Owen: Nope, nope. Certainly nothing special about me, nothing special about the 24 guys that were chosen. Nothing special about the-- our squadron. It really could have been any number of guys.

Scott Pelley: You just happened to be available for training?

Mark Owen: Yes.

In April 2011, they had just returned from Afghanistan when they were told to report to North Carolina for an exercise.

Owen walked into a top-secret briefing room, saw a model of a compound, and heard this from his buddies:

Scott Pelley: What did they say?

Mark Owen: Said, "Hey, we found bin Laden," or, "We think we found bin Laden, and they want us to come up, you know, rehearse and come up with a plan. If there's gonna be a ground option approved, they want us to rehearse for one."

Scott Pelley: What did you think?

Mark Owen: Awesome.

The mission was "Operation Neptune Spear" under the authority of the CIA. The agency had tracked a bin Laden courier to a curious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They'd been watching the compound with satellites. The house seemed too big for the neighborhood. There was no telephone connection. The people there burned their trash. There was a wall, 12 feet high and a walled-in balcony. Who lived up there?

Mark Owen: They briefed us on the individual they were calling the Pacer.

Scott Pelley: The Pacer?

Mark Owen: The Pacer. So he would come out of the house and kind of walk around the yard. What was assessed to just be getting exercise.

Scott Pelley: Where did the Pacer pace?

Mark Owen: Over here [points to model].

Scott Pelley: In this courtyard back here?

Mark Owen: Right. So, he'd just kind of walk out in here. And a lot of the vegetation out here was probably purposely planted so surveillance couldn't see down on 'em.

Scott Pelley: And he would just go round and round and round?

Mark Owen: Yup, he'd walk around the yard. Sometimes he'd walk with what they assessed to be a female but, they just walked around the yard. They never stopped to help anybody do any work. If there was other people in the yard working, he never seemed to do any of that. Almost above it.

Scott Pelley: Above doing the manual labor. He was the boss, whoever he was?

Mark Owen: Right.

The Pacer had been in Abbottabad about five years. It's a well-to-do city of one million people. The compound was about a mile from the Pakistani Military Academy.

Scott Pelley: In terms of the inside of the house, how much did you know?

Mark Owen: Zero. Zero.

Scott Pelley: So once you went through the door, you didn't know what you were gonna be facing?