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Ammon News - MTN News _ Movies like "Zero Dark Thirty" and an Emmy award winning HBO documentary called "Manhunt... The search for Bin Laden" chronicle the search for some of the world's most notorious terrorists.

In the middle of the action was a CIA analyst from Montana named Nada Bakos.

Bakos discovered that her job was a far cry from growing up in Denton, Montana.

"So on the one hand I think I got lucky," said Bakos recently in a Skype interview. "But on another, I think I just happened to be able to fit the requirements of the job. So I applied on-line to the CIA through their website."

Bakos started at the CIA in 2000. Her duties included collecting intelligence for policymakers.

After Sept. 11, 2001, she worked in the counterterrorism center where her role shifted to different groups possibly linked to Al Qaeda.

"I moved to Iraq accounts where I was on a team that was in charge of evaluating whether or not Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, which it did not," said Bakos.

Bakos' focus then shifted to searching for the link between Jordanian militant Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and Al Qaeda.

"He had a completely different agenda at the time," said Bakos. "He was really looking at focusing on the Jordanian government affecting the situation in the region. The US and the west wasn't part of his M.O. yet, not until after we invaded them did he join Al Qeada."

It's believed the work of Bakos and her fellow analysts, many of whom were women, helped connect the dots that eventually brought Bin Laden down. Some have even speculated that she was the inspiration for the main character in the film "Zero Dark Thirty."

"No, I've never met the producer or director," said Bakos. "I was not at the agency at the time when they took down Bin Laden. I had left a year prior to that. So while the comparison is interesting, it just so happens that the timing of when I started talking publicly and Zero Dark Thirty coming out, it was just an easy comparison for the press to make."

Bakos now lives in the Seattle area, and says she's working on a book about her time with the CIA as well as a documentary about the Boston Marathon bombing.