In his interview this week with ‘The Shooter’ – the US Navy Seal who killed Osama bin Laden – the American journalist Phil Bronstein described a trip to the cinema he and the unnamed man took to watch Zero Dark Thirty.

The film, which tells the story of the hunt for and eventual assassination of the al-Qaeda leader in Abbottabad, Pakistan, claims its action is ‘based on firsthand accounts of actual events’.

‘The Shooter’, however, had some quibbles. For a start, he said, the actors playing Seal Team 6, the special mission unit that staged the raid on bin Laden’s compound, talked too much. No one would ever yell “Breacher!” when calling for someone to blow down a door, he said - you would just put your fist to your helmet; the recognised signal for a Seal with explosive packets to get to work.

What’s more, when the terrorist leader was finally tracked down, in his bedroom on the third floor of the building, there was no whispered calling out of his name – “Osama, Osama” – to lure him into the open, as happens in the film.

"When Osama went down, it was chaos, people screaming. No one called his name," The Shooter told Bronstein.

But what about the rest of the film? Its director Kathryn Bigelow has said it is “accurate in the way a movie can be accurate: it's 10 years compressed into two and a half hours and there are many, many tactics utilised." But there is no question the film goes to great lengths to create an aura of authenticity. Its portrayal of torture by the CIA and the existence-or-not of its central character, Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), have been widely discussed. What is the truth behind some of the other intriguing aspects of the film?

CIA black sites

ZD30 opens at a CIA ‘black site’ in an ‘undisclosed’ location, where Dan (Jason Clarke) is subjecting detainee Ammar (Reda Kateb) to the agency’s so-called ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques. Later in the film, we witness a cross-examination at a ‘black site’ in Gdansk and then another at the Bagram Air Force base, in Afghanistan.

Consigned to history by Barack Obama, who ordered them to be closed in January 2009, ‘black sites’ were secret prisons set up by the CIA outside of American jurisdiction to interrogate suspects in the “war on terror”.

At the time of ZD30's release, no country had ever confirmed it hosted a ‘black site’, but it’s thought there were around 50, in 28 countries, including Poland, Romania and Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean, as well as 25 more in Afghanistan and 20 in Iraq. In December 2014, after the release of part of the CIA’s Torture Reporton December 9, Poland’s former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewsk acknowledged for the first time that there was a CIA black site on Polish soil.

A report by the CIA’s former inspector general, John Helgerson, published in 2009, revealed officers carried out mock executions and threatened inmates with guns and power drills. The interrogation techniques were described as “unauthorised, improvised, inhumane and undocumented”.

What really happened at Camp Chapman?

One of the tensest moments in Zero Dark Thirty, aside from the raid on Abbottabad, is a scene at Camp Chapman, a forward operating base in Afghanistan, where one of Maya’s colleagues, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), waits for a supposed informant to arrive.

Jessica watches his beaten up car drive to the gates and orders the guards to let him through, believing he’s about to give her important intelligence about an al-Qaeda leader. Instead he detonates a bomb, killing Jessica and six of her colleagues.

After the blast, we hear a recording of a news report about the attack, the CIA’s heaviest loss since 1983, which refers to one of the dead as a mother of three. The implication seems to be that Jessica is that mother. In June 2010, six months after the Camp Chapman attack, the real mother was named as Jennifer Lynne Matthews.

Described by former intelligence officials as “one of the CIA’s top experts on al-Qaeda”, Matthews was in charge of Chapman, a base near the eastern Afghan city of Khost. She had worked in a unit known as Alec Station, a division of the CIA dedicated to tracking bin Laden, and had also served a brief stint in London.

The bomber was Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor who had been providing the CIA with information about Taliban and al-Qaeda operations. Matthews arranged a meeting with Balawi at Chapman after he claimed to have new information on the whereabouts of bin Laden’s top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Zawahiri was never caught and is now the leader of al-Qaeda.

^{Jennifer Ehle as Jennifer Lynne Matthew in Zero Dark Thirty, 2013}

The CIA station chief

One of the many CIA officials Maya locks horns with in the film is Joseph Bradley, the station chief in Islamabad, played by Kyle Chandler. He wants “actionable intelligence” and is exasperated by her obsession with bin Laden. But Maya has some sympathy for Bradley when his name is made public and he’s forced to leave Pakistan.

Looking out a window at angry demonstrators who are calling for his head, she tells him ‘you’ve been f----- by the ISI’. This is a clear reference to the fate of real station chief Jonathan Banks. In December 2010, Banks was forced out of his post after he was named in a lawsuit brought by a Pakistani journalist whose relatives had been killed by US drone strikes.

Some US officials blamed Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, for the leak. Banks, who has kept a low profile since leaving Pakistan, is now facing possible arrest by Pakistani police.

“The Wolf”

One of the most intriguing cameos in Zero Dark Thirty is that of Fredric Lehne, who plays the CIA’s counterterrorism chief, referred to only as “The Wolf”. Despite being a key figure in the fight against Islamist militants, when we meet him in his office he is practising Muslim prayer.

As surprising as it sounds, this is true, at least according to a report by the Washington Post in March last year: the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), and the leader of the hunt for bin Laden, really has converted to Islam. Named only as “Roger” by the newspaper, he is in his late fifties and has worked for two presidents, four CIA directors and four directors of national intelligence.

His conversion to Islam came after he married a Muslim woman, but, according to the Washington Post, there is no prayer rug in his office. He is, however, known to clutch a strand of prayer beads.

The CIA’s “Magic Box”

The big breakthrough in the hunt for bin Laden was the CIA’s identification of Sheikh Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the al-Qaeda leader’s courier, who lived with him in the compound in Abbottabad. By tracing calls to the home of Abu Ahmed’s mother, CIA officers in ZD30 work out his mobile phone number and agents then use a gadget called a “magic box” to track down the phone.

The CIA’s use of this high-tech scanning device was first revealed in a 2008 newspaper report about the 2002 capture of the al-Qaeda logistics manager, Abu Zubaydah. Essentially the “magic box” is able to alert the user when a particular mobile phone is being operated and, by measuring signal strength, tell the user the approximate location of the phone.

In the film, Abu Ahmed is tracked down to Peshawar. The signal strength on the “magic box” goes up and down and the agents finally realise he must be driving around in circles while talking on the phone. Once they realise that, they pull over, scrutinise the vehicles going past, and soon pinpoint Abu Ahmed in a white jeep.

“Red Cell” analysis

After Abu Ahmed has been traced to the compound in Abbottabad, Maya’s boss, George (played by Mark Strong), still has to convince his superiors that bin Laden is there. In one scene he is told that his intelligence has been subjected to “Red Cell” analysis.

Red Teams or Red Cells are units charged with testing prevailing views in various departments of the US government. They have been used to brainstorm ways to attack America, in order to improve the country’s security, and they consult a wide and eclectic range of people. A Red Cell in the Department of Homeland Security has reportedly sought views from futurists, philosophers, scientists, novelists and even pop musicians in order to garner fresh insights. One of their recruits was political thriller writer Brad Meltzer.

^{Brad Meltzer Credit: AP Images}

The bogus vaccination programme

As part of their efforts to confirm bin Laden was in the compound, the CIA is shown in the film setting up a fake polio vaccination scheme in Abbottabad. That’s almost what happened. In fact, it was a hepatitis B programme. Why Bigelow changed it to polio is not clear.

Nevertheless, the idea was the same: to obtain DNA from bin Laden’s children, who were living with him in Abbottabad, and compare it with samples from his sister who died in Boston in 2010. The fact that top CIA officials were still not certain bin Laden was in the compound when President Obama gave the Seal mission the go-ahead to attack, suggests the bogus scheme was unsuccessful.

Since then, however, it has had two unfortunate ramifications: Shakil Afridi, a doctor who helped the CIA set up the scheme, has been jailed by a Pakistani court for 33 years for treason; and charity workers operating genuine vaccination programmes have been killed by militants who now suspect such workers to be American spies.

^{Shakil Afridi}

Cairo the dog

One cameo in ZD30, overlooked by many, is that of a German Shepherd who accompanies Seal Team 6 on the Abbottabad raid. This, again, is almost accurate. There was indeed a dog on the raid but it was not a German Shepherd, it was a Belgian Malinois. Called Cairo he was decked out in a bullet proof vest with night vision cameras and was tasked with detecting explosives, searching for false walls or hidden doors and chasing any suspects who tried to flee. He has been personally congratulated by President Obama.

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