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

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

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

In February I secured permission to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed and where he had lived for the last half-decade of his life; the first, and only, journalist to do so.

I am very suspicious of the notion that somehow bin Laden was a media creation... Bin Laden's actions made him into a big deal. Not the media.

And in the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound surrounded by his wives and children and far from the front lines of his holy war.

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.