While other homes in the area put rubbish out to be collected, the trash was burned in the ground of the mansion, which did not have a telephone or internet service.
By February, U.S. intelligence officials were confident that Bin Laden and his family were living there and by March, Mr Obama was convening top secret meeting with his senior security staff.
The CIA believe that for many years before settling in Abbottabad, Bin Laden moved from village to village in Waziristan. He communicated only about once a month and never used a telephone.
When he reached a village with his bodyguards he would request a meeting with the local tribal leader and a substantial bribe would be paid.
Bin Laden would then be the guest of the village, where under Pashtun custom, he must be protected.
The main obstacle in finding him was that even if someone wanted to betray him and collect the $25 million reward - there was no one to turn to.
The local police would know Bin Laden was there and if anyone tried to report his presence they would quite likely be killed.
One local mullah from Waziristan agreed to send information about Bin Laden’s movements and his beheaded body was found several weeks later with a message that his was the fate of spies.
While Operation Enduring Freedom was successful in liberating Afghanistan from Taliban control after 9/11, there was no doubt that the real prize was Bin Laden himself.
But the Al Qaeda chief had chosen his first redoubt with care. For several years before 2001, he had developed an intricate network of caves and dwellings 14,000ft up in the settlement known as Tora Bora.
The impenetrable mountains not only made it difficult for anybody to track him, they were also just a few miles from Pakistan, allowing him to escape easily as western troops moved in.
The commander of one U.S. military force told the ’60 Minutes’ news show how soldiers under his command found Bin Laden - but let him slip through their fingers.
The commander, calling himself Dalton Fury, expressed his frustration at having known where Bin Laden was, but feeling he was powerless to do anything.
At one point, he said, his forces were closing in on Bin Laden's men - but he decided to abort the mission because he did not have support from Afghan troops.
And in another incident Delta soldiers actually saw a tall man dressed in camouflage that they believed was Bin Laden - only to have the Al Qaeda leader escape their bombing campaign in the mountains.
Fury talked about a book he has written entitled 'Kill Bin Laden', detailing his memories of the campaign in Tora Bora in 2001.
'Our job was to go find him, capture or kill him, and we knew the writing on the wall was to kill him because nobody wanted to bring Osama bin Laden back to stand trial in the United States somewhere,' the mission commander told his interviewer.
He said the administration's strategy was to let Afghans do most of the fighting, however.
Using radio intercepts and other intelligence, he said, the CIA pinpointed Bin Laden's location in the Tora Bora mountains near Pakistan.
Fury's Delta team joined the CIA and Afghan fighters and piled into pick-up trucks. He claimed their orders were to kill Bin Laden and leave the body with the Afghans, keeping an Afghan face on the war.
However an audacious plan to come at Bin Laden from the back door was vetoed higher-up - Fury claimed he was never sure who.
And a second plan to drop hundreds of landmines over any escape route into Pakistan was also vetoed, with Fury claiming he had no idea why.
The only option left was a frontal assault. Fury said he had 50 men in Delta force up against Bin Laden's 1,000 - support from the Afghan forces was needed.
But, he claimed, many of the Afghan soldiers were not on board - seeing Bin Laden as a hero.
One night - alone without his Afghan allies - Fury said he was told Bin Laden was two kilometres away. Faced with overwhelming odds, he elected to stay away.
But the decision always nagged him. He wrote in his book: 'My decision to abort that effort to kill or capture Bin Laden when we might have been within 2,000 metres of him, about 2,000 yards, still bothers me.
'It leaves me with a feeling of somehow letting down our nation at a critical time.' But, he added, it wasn't worth the risk.
Fury had a second chance: Later, a Delta force named Jackal radioed they had Bin Laden in sight.
He wrote: 'The operation Jackal team observed 50 men moving into a cave that they hadn't seen before. The mujahideen said they saw an individual, a taller fellow, wearing a camouflage jacket. Everybody put two and two together, "okay, that's got to be Osama bin Laden egressing from the battlefield".
'They called up every available bomb in the air, took control of the airspace. And they dropped several hours of bombs on the cave he went into.
'We believe, it was our opinion at the time, that he died inside that cave.'
Later, however, he was proven wrong, when American forces were unable to find Bin Laden's body and the Al Qaeda leader began releasing radio and video footage again.
Fury told 60 Minutes he believes he knows what happened.
He said Bin Laden was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel from an American bomb, and was then hidden a town next to the Al Qaeda cemetery.
'We believe a gentleman brought him in - a gentleman, him and his family were supporting Al Qaeda during the battle. They were providing food, ammo, water.
'We think he went to that house, received medical attention for a few days then, and then we believe they put him in a vehicle and moved him back across the pass,' he was quoted as saying.
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