FAQ

During the scene where Maya is angry of at CIA that she found Osama Bin Laden and wrote its 52 days that she found the house, the BGM is from the telugu film Leader.

How many days since they discovered that house and had yet to do anything about it.

CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain), assigned to Pakistan to learn how to apply "enhanced interrogation" (i.e. non-mutilation torture, e.g. waterboarding) in order to seek out information about al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (Ricky Sekhon), becomes obsessed with the search. After several years of pursuing leads, Maya believes that she may have found his whereabouts, and a U.S. Navy SEAL team is sent out to kill or capture bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty is a dramatized account of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. The screenplay was written by American journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal.

"Zero Dark Thirty" is military slang for an unspecified time in the early hours of the morning before dawn. The relevance of this term to the film is that the raid on Osama bin Laden's quarters was executed between midnight and 2 AM on May 2nd, 2011.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA and FBI combined.

That's probably poetic license on the part of the screenwriter. If anything, a former CIA officer might be in academia and perhaps think Maya would've been fit for the agency, and would suggest that she'd give it a shot. Alternatively, she could have joined the armed forces straight out of high school and then joined the CIA from there.

For the position 'Maya' held in the agency (a Targeter), it's extremely unlikely a high school student would be recruited. She wasn't an ops officer (what most would commonly call a 'spy'), but she served more in what could be called a clerical position.

The focus of the scene was that there were three women in the house, meaning that there had to be at least three men, one of whom was never seen. Nothing suggested that there couldn't be more than three.

SSE is sensitive site exploitation. NATO forces in Afghanistan developed the technique of taking pictures and gathering weapons, documents, computer files etc from the aftermath of raids in order to disprove any later claims that the terrorists they had killed were unarmed civilians. It also provided valuable intelligence; terrorists the world over are notorious for keeping extensive records for everything they do. Britain made progress against the IRA in the 1920s because the security forces captured so many of IRA leader Michael Collins' documents they had to create an entire department to read them all. In Vietnam, the Allies captured up to half a million documents a month from the Viet Cong, which allowed them to anticipate and largely thwart the famous Tet offensive. Killing Osama bin Laden himself was not nearly as important as capturing the vast number of records on his organisation he kept in the house.

Yes and no. All of the attacks depicted are based on real events but they are strung together as a connected narrative for the sake of the story; e.g., Maya being in the Marriott at the time of the bombing, which they were not in real life. The scene where the CIA agents in Pakistan are accosted by two armed men on motorbikes is based on a genuine incident, but in real life the CIA officer killed them both.

She's a composite character-Maya is based on several female CIA officers who worked on the bin Laden case in the years before and after 9/11. In his book "No Easy Day", former SEAL Mark Bassionette, who was part of the mission which killed bin Laden, mentions a female CIA agent, who he refers to by the pseudonym "Jen", who worked with the SEAL team on the mission. Just like Maya, "Jen" considers the probability of bin Laden being in the house at 100% whilst others are more cautious, she observes the mission from the control room, is there to meet the SEALs when they return with bin Laden's corpse and bursts out crying afterwards.

In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on American torture practices during the war on terror which referenced the influence of another CIA agent who was used as part of the composite character Maya. While not naming the agent, even with a pseudonym, the report is highly critical of her work, stating that she was a primary advocate for ineffective torture techniques and that she lied to Congress in an effort to misrepresent the effectiveness of the CIA's torture program. The report also notes that, prior to 9/11, she supported the decision of a subordinate to withhold from the FBI the fact that two of the 9/11 hijackers, who were on an FBI watch list at the time, had entered the country.