Obituary: Gary Schroen, the CIA spy sent to get Osama bin Laden

On 19 September, 2001 - with the ruins of the World Trade Center and Pentagon still smouldering from the 9/11 attacks - CIA officer Gary Schroen stepped into his boss's office and received a set of orders: "Capture Bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice".

Within days, Schroen and a motley crew of paramilitary officers became the first Americans on the ground in Afghanistan, armed with little more than satellite phones - but also millions of dollars in cash to curry favour with potential allies.

"In Afghanistan more than two decades ago and in every other role he served at CIA, Gary embodied the very best of our organisation," Mr Burns said.

Over the course of a career that spanned decades, Schroen served as the CIA's "station chief" for both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s.

By 1996, however, Schroen said that the "equation had changed" after US intelligence began to focus on the activities of Osama Bin Laden, a then-relatively unknown jihadist and veteran of the guerrilla war against the Soviets in the 1980s.

For the next three years, at Schroen's direction, the CIA repeatedly tried to kill or capture Bin Laden, with plans ranging from ambushes on his convoy and raids on his farm in southern Afghanistan to cruise missiles and bombing raids.

Three years later, 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers launched the 9/11 attacks.

The 2001 mission to Afghanistan - officially known as Operation Jawbreaker - would see Schroen and seven other Americans link up with the Northern Alliance, a coalition of groups fighting the Taliban government that had ruled Afghanistan since 1996.

"I never expected I would get the call to go in," he said years later.

In interviews later in his life, Schroen said the failure of the US to secure Afghanistan and capture its main enemies there was, in large part, due to a drain on both CIA and military resources caused by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Despite initial claims from the US administration of George W Bush that the Iraqi government was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks, Schroen said he never believed in any linkage.

Schroen finally managed to retire in the years after the Afghan invasion, and in 2005 published a book entitled "First In" about the operation?