Four more similar meetings to discuss the plan would follow, until President Obama gathered his aides one final time last Friday.

At 8:20 that morning, Mr. Obama met with Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser; John O. Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser; and other senior aides in the Diplomatic Room at the White House. The president was traveling to Alabama later that morning to witness the damage from last week’s tornadoes. But first he had to approve the final plan to send operatives into the compound where the administration believed that Bin Laden was hiding.

Even after the president signed the formal orders authorizing the raid, Mr. Obama chose to keep Pakistan’s government in the dark about the operation.

“We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” a senior administration official said.

It is no surprise that the administration chose not to tell Pakistani officials. The United States never really believed the Pakistanis’ insistence that Bin Laden was not in their country. American diplomatic cables in recent years show constant American pressure on Pakistan to help find and kill Bin Laden.

Asked about the Qaeda leader’s whereabouts during a Congressional visit to Islamabad in September 2009, the Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, replied that he “’had no clue,” but added that he did not believe that Bin Laden was in the area. Bin Laden had sent his family to Iran, so it made sense that he might have gone there himself, Mr. Malik argued. Alternatively, he might be hiding in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, or perhaps he was already dead, he added, according to a cable from the American Embassy that is among the collection obtained by WikiLeaks.

The mutual suspicions have grown worse in recent months, particularly after Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. contractor, shot two men on a crowded street in Lahore in January.