When President Asif Ali Zardari’s phone rang at 1.15 a.m. on Monday, it was President Barack Obama on the line, with news that a U.S. operation to eliminate Osama bin Laden and retrieve his body had been successful. That phone call, Pakistani officials tell TIME, was the first that their government heard about a U.S. military operation conducted just three hours’ drive from Islamabad. There was no mistaking the obvious mistrust from Washington in the timing: Pakistan’s military establishment only learned of the raid when it was too late, according to government and military officials. U.S. helicopters were able to swoop in from Afghanistan undetected, as Pakistani radars had been jammed. The Pakistan government, in a statement, tried to explain this away by saying, the choppers took advantage of “blind spots in the radar coverage due to hilly terrain.” By the time Pakistani fighter jets set off to pursue them, it was too late.
The discovery and death of bin Laden on Pakistani soil has been a source of great embarrassment here. Throughout Monday, both the government and the military struggle to form a response. Some officials made clumsy attempts to suggest that there had been some form of cooperation, but a government statement on Tuesday conceded that Pakistan had been kept out of the loop. A senior Pakistani military tells TIME that they did not know of the raid, but calls attention to remarks by Obama and by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, insisting that it had been Pakistani intelligence cooperation that first put the U.S. on the trail that enabled them to locate bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.
