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You would have thought that after 9/11 the president would have finished the job in Afghanistan, and kept the focus on capturing Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda deputies, but he and his team gave top priority to their original plan to invade Iraq.

The plan we developed to deal with al Qaeda depended on developing sources of human and technical intelligence that could give us insights into his plans at the tactical level. This is easy to say but hard to accomplish.

One cannot understate the importance of eliminating Bin Laden. He was a symbolic head of the organisation and, as we now know, an operational head of the organisation.

It's not just Bin Laden or just those that are involved in the counterterrorism effort. We've gotta cast the net broader than that. But I think it's a - very special tribute that we all owe to the bravery and courage of the men and women in the intelligence and military business who performed so well to finally get it done.

I would like to see us find Osama Bin Laden, but let's say we did capture him. Let's say we did kill him. How much good would that do? There's still thousands of people behind him. It's this huge thing.

Well, our position, and our chairman has talked about this extensively, is that we had a lot of intelligence prior to 9/11. We knew that two al Qaeda operatives who ultimately participated in the 9/11 disaster were in the United States. We didn't find them.

Osama bin Laden fervently hoped that attacking the United States would create pressure on American leaders to reduce their support for Middle Eastern regimes. Bin Laden believed that without that American support, the Arab regimes would collapse and would be replaced by Taliban-style rulers.

We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.