Handlung

Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA officer in 2003 (Two Years After Sept. 11), has spent her entire brief career since graduating from high school focused solely on gathering intelligence related to Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda, following the terrorist organization's September 11 attacks in the United States. She has just been reassigned to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan to work with a fellow officer, Dan (Jason Clarke).

During the first months of her assignment, Maya often accompanies Dan to a black site for his continuing interrogation of Ammar Al-Baluchi (Reda Kateb), a detainee with suspected links to several of the 9/11 hijackers. Dan makes the rules clear: If Ammar doesn't look at him when he's being addressed, Dan will hurt him. If Ammar steps off the mat, he's on or lies about anything, Dan will also harm him. Dan has Ammar put in further restraints and beckons to one of the masked individuals to follow him outside. He orders his men not to talk to Ammar.

Ammar screams that Dan is nothing more than a garbage man for his corporation but Dan retorts that Ammar is a terrorist who helped finance the September 11th attack in the USA and was caught with explosives in his house when they came for him. However, Dan also makes it clear he doesn't want to talk about Sept. 11 and he wants to know about the Saudi Group. Ammar refuses to talk so Dan's men set up mats as Dan forces him to the ground. Maya hands Dan a bucket and a towel so that Dan can water board him. He asks for an email and demands to know when was the last time Ammar saw bin Laden. At the end of the session, Dan makes it clear that in the end everyone breaks.

Maya sits in a waiting room. Dan brings their boss, station chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), to meet her. She mentions that what she saw was "a bit messed up" and Bradley is surprised, having assumed that she volunteered for this position. Bradley buzzes her into a secure wing and Dan asks if Maya is ready, but Bradley just points out that the CIA needs to break in the next generation. Maya is brought into a small conference room where fellow CIA agents Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), Jack (Harold Perrineau), Thomas (Jeremy Strong), and J.J. (J.J. Kandel) are working on the latest intelligence reports. Dan points out that Ammar is withholding on the Saudi Group while Jessica gives updates on the latest leads. Maya points out that some of their assumptions are based on pre-9/11 behavior rendered moot by the invasion of Afghanistan.

Dan subjects the detainee to torture, including waterboarding, and humiliation. Dan brings a dog collar and forces it around Ammar's neck, suggesting he's Dan's dog and needs to be walked. He drags him over to a box; a very confined spot, smaller than a coffin. Dan threatens to put Ammar in there if Ammar doesn't tell him about the impending attack. Ammar starts screaming days of the week but not a location, so Dan forces him into the box and leaves him there.

In May 2004, a group of Al Qaeda terrorists unload guns on civilians in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, targeting non-Muslims and Americans. Jessica, Dan, and Maya watch the footage in the aftermath. Jessica tells Dan that it's not on him but Dan insists that since Ammar is their prisoner the deaths are on him and Maya. Jessica points out that there are still other plots in motion that they can wring out of Ammar, including a planned attack in the London-Heathrow area. Maya realizes that since Ammar has been in complete isolation, they can lie about the outcome of the attack and claim that it was thwarted by Ammar in his sleep deprived state.

Ammar is brought out of his confinement and informed that his intel was good. Dan asks what Ammar did after the invasion. Ammar says the choice was to fight or run, and he wanted to kill Americans. He continues to talk about the members of the AQ cell but in vague terms until Dan makes it clear that he will put Ammar back in the box if Ammar doesn't start naming names. Ammar spills all the details he can including that his uncle once worked for Osama bin Laden and that Ammar had seen him in Karachi with a letter from the shah which said to keep working on the jihad, to keep it renewed for a hundred years. Finally Ammar gives them a name: Abu Ahmed.

Other detainees corroborate this, with some claiming Abu Ahmed delivers messages between Bin Laden (Ricky Sekhon) and a man referred to as Abu Faraj (Yoav Levi). Maya is escorted to a CIA Black Site in Poland. Hakim (Fares Fares), a fellow agent and interpreter, brings her to their prisoner. They ask him a few questions and he claims that he had contact with a man known only as Fahraj. Maya is suspicious that the suspect is simply making it up until the prisoner names all of Fahraj's children. He confirms that there was a network in place to pass messages on. Maya takes this information back to Bradley and gives him a report. Bradley points out that her hunt for Abu Ahmed has been fruitless because she doesn't know his real name or where to find him. She retorts that the fact that everyone has heard of Abu Ahmed means that he is important. He tells her to let him know when there's actionable intelligence so that they can order a strike.

In mid-2005, Abu Faraj is apprehended by the CIA and local police in Pakistan. Maya interrogates Abu Faraj under torture, but he continues to deny knowing a courier with such a name. Maya interprets this as an attempt by Abu Faraj's to conceal the importance of Abu Ahmed. Dan escorts Fahraj to his cage; a private cell with barbed wire around the sides. Dan says that he's bad news for men like Fahraj and that Dan isn't going to help him, he's going to break him. Asked if he's hungry, Fahraj has a tube shoved down his throat and blended food is forced down his throat. He is a difficult prisoner so Maya asks Dan if he will take a crack at Fahraj but he refuses, saying he's done this long enough.

Maya continues to sift through masses of data and information, using a variety of technology, hunches and sharing insights. Displaying the zeal and frustrations of a "single-tasker", she concentrates on finding Abu Ahmed, determined to use him to find Bin Laden.

During a span of five years, she survives the 2008 Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing as well as being shot at in her car by armed men. Dan, departing on re-assignment, warns Maya about a possible change in politics, suggesting that the new administration may prosecute those officers who had been involved in torture.

In 2009, Maya's fellow officer and friend Jessica travels to a US base in Afghanistan to meet a Jordanian doctor, highly placed in Al-Qaeda, who has offered to become a US spy for $25 million. Instead, he turns out to be a triple agent loyal to Al-Qaeda, and Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) is killed, along with several other CIA officers, when he detonates a suicide vest in what will come to be known as the Camp Chapman attack, the worst attack on CIA personnel in 25 years.

Thomas, an analyst who linked the Abu Ahmed lead, shares with Maya an interrogation of a Jordanian detainee claiming to have buried Abu Ahmed in 2001. Several CIA officers - Maya's seniors - conclude the target who could be Abu Ahmed is long dead, and that they have searched a false trail for nine years.

George (Mark Strong) arrives to brief Maya and her co-workers in the aftermath of the bombing, pointing out that they are losing the fight against their enemy. He yells that they "haven't done shit"; killing four of the 20 members of bin Laden's inner circle is a terrible success rate. He harshly demands they do their jobs and bring him people to kill.

Maya learns what the CIA was told five years earlier, information that was buried and lost track of in one of the many files of information that had been accumulated at the time: that is, that in 2001, a man named Ibrahim Sayeed traveled under the false name, or Nom De Guerre, of Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti. Seeing his picture, realizing that it is similar to but not the man in the picture they had that they thought was of Abu Ahmed, and that her lead may be alive, Maya contacts Dan, now a senior officer at the CIA headquarters. She speculates that the CIA's photograph of Ahmed is in fact one of his brothers, Habeeb, who was killed in Afghanistan. Maya says that their beards and native clothes make the brothers look alike, explaining the account of Ahmed's "death" in 2001.

Dan uses CIA funds to purchase a Lamborghini for a Kuwaiti prince in exchange for the telephone number of Sayeed's mother. The CIA traces calls to the mother, and one caller's persistent use of trade-craft to avoid detection leads Maya to conclude the caller is Abu Ahmed. At Maya's behest and with the support of her supervisors, numerous CIA operatives are deployed to search for and identify Abu Ahmed. They locate him in his vehicle and eventually track him to a large urban compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, near the Pakistani Military Academy. After gunmen attack Maya while she is in her vehicle, she is recalled to Washington, D.C. as her cover is believed blown.

The CIA puts the compound under heavy surveillance for several months, using a variety of methods. Although they are confident from circumstantial evidence that Bin Laden is there, they cannot prove this photographically.

Meanwhile, the President's National Security Advisor Tom Donilon (Stephen Dillane) tasks the CIA with producing a plan to capture or kill Bin Laden if it can be confirmed that he is in the compound. An agency team devises a plan to use two top-secret stealth helicopters (developed at Area 51) flown by the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to secretly enter Pakistan and insert a U.S. Navy SEAL team to raid the compound.

The SEAL team is commanded by JSOC Commander Vice Admiral Bill McRaven (Christopher Stanley), CO (Frank Grillo), team leader Patrick Grayston (Joel Edgerton), and operators Justin Lenihan (Chris Pratt), Saber Till (Callan Mulvey), Jared Bradley (Taylor Kinney), and Mike (Mike Colter)

Before briefing the President of the United States, the CIA Director holds a meeting of his top officials, who assess only a 60-80% chance that Bin Laden is living in the compound, rather than another high-value target. Maya, also in attendance, insists the chances are 95-100%.

The raid is approved and is executed on May 2, 2011. Although execution is complicated by one of the helicopters crashing, the SEALs kill a number of people within the compound, among them a man on the compound's top floor who is revealed to be Bin Laden. They bring Bin Laden's body back to a U.S. base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where Maya visually confirms the identity of the corpse.

Maya is last seen boarding a military transport to return to the U.S. and sitting in its vast interior as its only passenger. The pilot asks her where she wants to go but she does not reply and instead begins to weep quietly.