Who dares keeps quiet: Unedifying claims to the Osama bin Laden 'crown'

It was probably the most famous commando hit in history.

It was immortalised on screen by the movie Zero Dark Thirty, and in real life by that gripping photograph of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the rest of his national security team huddled in the White House Situation Room monitoring a supremely daring operation whose success was anything but assured.

So it was perhaps inevitable that – for all the Pentagon’s efforts to preserve the self-effacing elite forces ethos of “quiet professionals” who go about their business in anonymity – further details of the raid by US Navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 would emerge. But not via the demeaning squabble now unfolding over who precisely fired the shots that took down the al-Qaeda leader.

Money, of course, is playing a large part. Money prompted Matt Bissonette, a member of Seal Team Six that carried out the night attack on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to write his bestselling 2012 account of the drama, No Easy Day. Bissonette claimed the “point man”, or leader of the commando column, hit and wounded the world’s most wanted terrorist, and that his colleagues behind him merely finished the job.

Now a contradictory version has emerged, in which Robert O’Neill, another member of the team, says the point man’s initial shots missed, and that he himself fired the shots that dispatched Bin Laden. He was to tell all in a forthcoming TV documentary, but former colleagues found out. Angry at Mr O’Neill’s behaviour, they leaked his identity in advance. Mr O’Neill told The Washington Post he acted not for financial reasons or out of self-glorification, but to set out the truth of a story that would come out anyway. That may be so. But the mystique of the “quiet professionals” has been shattered for good.