"They choppered in, rappelled down and went into the compound," said a former official familiar with the operation. "It was tactically very well executed."
Several mid-level operatives were detained, according to the official. The raid was separate from the January 2006 Predator strike in Damadola that missed Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri, the official said.
But Special Forces missions in Pakistan have remained rare, officials said, for fear of embarrassing the Pakistani government and inflaming anti-U.S. sentiment.
As a result, Predator missile strikes have become the default U.S. response. CIA officials have even coined a term -- "squirters" -- for the survivors who are tracked by Predator cameras as they flee the wreckage.
Senior CIA officials said the Predator probably would be the weapon of choice even if Bin Laden were located, and that there was no plan to capture the Al Qaeda leader or his deputy.
According to officials, Bush made his preference clear during a visit to the agency after CIA Director Michael Hayden was sworn in. During a briefing, an agency officer alluded to "dealing with" Bin Laden.
Bush interrupted him: "You mean kill him."
But those prospects seem increasingly distant amid political changes in Pakistan that could erode the country's commitment to U.S. counter-terrorism objectives.
In fact, the new government has renewed an effort to strike peace accords with tribal leaders rather than confront them militarily. A similar strategy by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf a few years ago helped allow Al Qaeda to regroup, U.S. officials say.
Tension over Pakistan has emerged in the U.S. presidential campaign. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has said that U.S. forces should "take out" top militants if Pakistan did not act on firm intelligence. Republican Sen. John McCain, though not ruling out the possibility that he would do the same, accused Obama of trying to sound tough.
With Musharraf's power in decline, U.S. attention has shifted to his successor as army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the former head of the ISI whose ties to the U.S. military date to 1988, when he attended a prestigious military school at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.
Pentagon officials said Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others have pressured Kayani to take action in the border regions. But Mullen and senior civilians also have urged caution, pointing to the fate of Musharraf, a once-respected military officer who lost favor within Pakistan in part over his Bush administration ties.
"Kayani has to be very careful about how much of the relationship he shows, because he doesn't want to be perceived as a lackey," said a Pentagon official involved in Pakistan strategy. "He's out there on a limb."
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greg.miller@latimes.com
Times staff writers Peter Spiegel, Josh Meyer, Paul Richter and Julian E. Barnes in Washington and Laura King in Istanbul, Turkey, contributed to this report.
