The U.S. Intelligence Community has taken a lot of flak - some of it deserved - since the Nine Eleven attacks. Now those same organizations have something very big to show for their work in the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
Often we are told in Washington, D.C. that U.S. Intelligence can't publicly talk about how an attack was prevented, or how the U.S. avoided some kind of terror troubles.
But this one is more than just a high profile success story - it's the most wanted terrorist on the face of the planet.
"Since 9/11, this is what the American people have expected of us, and today, in this critical operation, we were able to finally deliver," said a Senior Administration Official a few hours after Bin Laden had been killed.
"The operation itself was the culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work. Officers from the CIA, the NGA, the NSA all worked very hard as a team to analyze and pinpoint this compound," he added.
But even after identifying the compound, there was no guarantee that Bin Laden was really there, or that he had even been there at some point.
"The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harbored a high-value terrorist target," said another senior official.
"The experts who worked this issue for years assessed that there was a strong probability that the terrorist that was hiding there was Osama bin Laden."
The cooperation among intelligence agencies enjoyed further synergy with the Joint Special Operations Command, which conducted the Bin Laden raid, showcasing even more improvement in the way that intelligence is dealt with by the Intelligence Community.
Remember, one grand lesson of Nine Eleven was that U.S. intelligence featured a lot of turf wars and a lack of intelligence sharing.
Don't get me wrong - there are still turf wars and infighting - but in this case, the system seemed to work as we might well have imagined.
“Bin Laden’s death is a major milestone in the global war on terrorism," said Scott Redd, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center during the Bush Administration.
"It’s the results of years of patient and painstaking work by an integrated intelligence community and was brought to conclusion by the kind of interagency teamwork which was put in place after 9/11."
Can that continue? The struggle is by no means over.
