She went on: “The amount of work that was required to get a strong-enough basis of information on which to plan took more than a decade . . . and then all of a sudden putting this matrix together and saying, ‘This guy used to protect bin Laden — he has just made a phone call. He said this in the phone call. We need to figure out where he is. Then we need to follow him.’

“And that is how we found this compound in Abbottabad [Pakistan]” — where a team of Navy SEALs took out bin Laden in May 2011.

WikiLeaks asked in a tweet if Clinton’s comments revealed too much about the bin Laden hunt by mentioning the phone calls.

It’s unclear whether Clinton’s story was classified. But what she said in Toronto varies from other accounts of how the United States determined bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Many reports of the time said the United States was tipped to bin Laden’s location by a Pakistani intelligence officer; other reports say Washington *tracked him down with extensive surveillance.