The man who killed Osama bin Laden had a special gift for the brilliant CIA analyst who found the 9/11 mastermind.
Robert O’Neill knew he had to give the “badass” woman who worked doggedly for years to find bin Laden a token to celebrate the completion of her life’s mission when he met her at the base at Jalalabad in Afghanistan following the May 2, 2011 raid.
“I pulled out the magazine from my gun that I used to kill bin Laden, with the remaining 27 rounds in it, walked up to her and asked do you have room for this in your backpack? She said ‘I think I do,’ ” he told The Post.
O’Neill described the analyst, who was famously portrayed by Jessica Chastain in the Oscar-winning Zero Dark Thirty, as a “no-nonsense” professional, anxious to finally deliver justice to the man with the blood of more than 3,000 Americans on his hands. He promised her he’d never reveal her identity, he said.
“You could tell it was her baby. She would say certain things, she would point at [bin Laden] in the model of his compound and say, ‘Osama bin Laden’s on the 3rd floor of this house right now. I don’t understand why we’re not going. Have a good night.’ Like frustrated,” he said.
They had a dramatic nighttime conversation moments before he boarded the helicopter to depart on the fateful mission, the heroic SEAL Team 6 member said.
“I was like, ‘Hey why are you nervous?'” O’Neill recalled. “And she looked at me and said like, ‘Why aren’t you nervous?’ I was like oh, we do s–t like this every day, fly somewhere and fuck s–t up, but on this one, you have to be right, this is gonna be a longer flight for you than it will be for us.”
Later, back at base, when the two of them looked at bin Laden’s corpse, he expected an emotional celebration, but instead the analyst maintained her non-nonsense disposition.
“She looked down at his body, and said, ‘F–k, I’m out of a job.'”
