She went on: “The amount of work that was required to get a strong-enough basis of information on which to plan took more than a decade . . . and then all of a sudden putting this matrix together and saying, ‘This guy used to protect bin Laden — he has just made a phone call. He said this in the phone call. We need to figure out where he is. Then we need to follow him.’ “And that is how we found this compound in Abbottabad [Pakistan]” — where a team of Navy SEALs took out bin Laden in May 2011.