In the best-selling book “No Easy Day,” a retired Navy SEAL who was on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden revealed that training for the assault on the al-Qaida leader’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, took place in North Carolina.
Taking that information, the creators of the whistleblowing site Cryptome.org, apparently scoured satellite imagery of CIA facilities in North Carolina.
After putting in the coordinates in Google Maps for the Harvey Point Defense Testing facility, purportedly a CIA training ground, only a clearing in a field was seen.
On Bing Maps, however, Cryptome spotters, spied what looks like an uncompleted mockup of the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
PhotoBlog: Pentagon unveils scale model of bin Laden compound
Cryptome published its findings on its website on Tuesday.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said revelations in the book, written under the pseudonym Mark Owen, could put future operations in jeopardy and suggested that the writer should be punished for writing the best-seller.
Although the Pentagon has said it had dismantled the facility, Cryptome found the imagery on a dated satellite pictures. Satellite imagery is not updated that often, sometimes not for years.
Cryptome is a website that uses publicly available material to reveal what would otherwise be secret.
The site is run by John Young, a New-York based architect and political activist who was spilling confidential information even before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released secret government documents, according to a book review and profile of Young published on the website of Forbes magazine.
NBC News senior investigative producer Robert Windrem contributed to this report.
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