Bin Laden documents
An isolated Osama bin Laden struggled to keep his bodyguards
Our Correspondent
In the last months of his life, an isolated Osama bin Laden was in a serious dispute with the two brothers who had been pretty much his only connection to the outside world for the previous eight years.
The brothers -- two longtime members of al Qaeda whose family hailed from northern Pakistan, not far from where bin Laden was hiding in the city of Abbottabad -- did everything for bin Laden.
Worried about the CIA hunting for him, bin Laden was confined to one building inside the large compound in Abbottabad, which the brothers had moved him to in 2005.
The two brothers shopped for produce from local markets for bin Laden as well as for the dozen members of his family who were living with him.
Crucially, it was one of the brothers who was the courier who delivered messages to and from al Qaedas leader to senior members of al Qaeda living in other parts of Pakistan.
Bin Laden was completely reliant on the two brothers both to maintain any semblance of control over al Qaeda and its far-flung affiliates and also for the daily necessities of life.
But by January 2011, just four months before U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden, he and the two brothers were having a serious dispute.
According to letters released Tuesday by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence that were recovered during the SEAL raid, by early 2011 the brothers were fed up with all the pressure that came from protecting and serving the worlds most wanted man.
A fallen leader
Indeed, the documents portray bin Laden, a man who once had commanded training camps in Afghanistan that had churned out thousands of recruits and had also overseen the single most deadly assault on American civilians in the history of the United States, as entirely dependent on his two bodyguards, running out of money and paranoid that even his family members might have concealed tracking devices to home in on him.
Bin Laden confided to one of his wives that the brothers who protected him were exhausted by all the pressures on them and were planning to quit.
Things got so bad with his two protectors that on January 14, 2011, bin Laden took the unusual step of writing the brothers a formal letter, despite the fact that they lived only yards away from him on the Abbottabad compound.
In the letter bin Laden said the brothers had been so irritated in a recent meeting with him that he was resorting to writing them a letter to clarify matters. He asked the brothers to give him adequate time to find substitute protectors.
Bin Laden then wrote a letter to one of his confidantes asking if he knew of any Pakistanis who could be trusted with complete confidence who might replace the two brothers as his liaisons to the outside world.
Relations between bin Laden and the two brothers deteriorated to the point that they entered into a written agreement that they would separate sometime in 2011 or early 2012 and that bin Laden and his family would move away from the compound in Abbottabad.
Of course, that didnt happen and on the night of May 2, 2011, bin Laden and his two bodyguards were killed in the SEAL raid.
But the new documents underline the fact that if the CIA had learned of the compound in Abbottabad later than it did, or if President Obama had not ordered the SEAL raid when he did, its quite possible that bin Laden could have left for another location and the trail that led the CIA to his Abbottabad compound might have gone cold.
In addition to the conflict that bin Laden was having with his two key protectors, the newly released documents underline some themes that had emerged in documents recovered from the SEAL raid that had been previously released by the U.S. intelligence community.
Al Qaeda was an organization that felt increasingly under pressure. Bin Laden fretted about the CIA drone program, which was picking off so many key members of al Qaeda in the Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan bordering Afghanistan. Bin Laden instructed his organization to leave Waziristan.
Bin Laden was also keenly aware that as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approached he hadnt pulled off another attack in the States and he pushed al-Qaedas affiliates to not get distracted by local issues, but to attack Americans and the United States. He advised the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen to recruit Yemenis with U.S. visas or American citizenship to carry out attacks in the States.
Al Qaeda leaders were worried about financing for the group, and despite the fact that bin Laden had drafted a will mentioning a supposed $29 million stashed in Sudan from his sojourn there in the mid-1990s, that money had long disappeared. Bin Laden was the scion of a wealthy Saudi family but there is no indication he had access to that fortune by the time of the raid that killed him.
Bin Laden also drafted a number of speeches he planned to videotape about the Arab Spring revolutions that began in early 2011 and were roiling the Arab world. He never delivered those speeches, but he clearly believed these revolutions to be momentous.
Despite the pressures he was under, while he was in hiding, bin Laden tried to maintain control of al Qaeda affiliates around the Muslim world. He conducted correspondence with the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, a supporter in Saudi Arabia, a fellow militant in Egypt, members of al Qaeda in Iraq, the leadership of al Qaeda in North Africa, and with the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab.
Bin Laden also remained in touch with the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, as late as 2010, sending him a letter intended to be a pep talk about how NATO was tiring of the occupation of Afghanistan. It cited the scheduled pullout of Canadian troops and Obamas decision to eventually pull U.S. troops out as well. In a separate letter in September 2010, bin Laden graciously thanked Mullah Omar for a letter he had sent him.
Despite the well-publicized claims of American journalist Sy Hersh, who wrote a piece in the London Review of Books in May that bin Laden was being guarded by the Pakistani military and that he was simply handed over to the SEALS the night of May 2, 2011, there is no evidence for that in the documents released Tuesday, which run to thousands of pages.
In fact quite the reverse: The documents describe the Pakistani army as infidels, as well as the intense Pakistani pressure on us and they include lengthy plans for attacks to be carried out on Pakistani military targets.
Ladens will, personal letters
made public
Newly released documents written by Osama bin Laden include the late terrorists will, personal letters and warnings to countries including the United States.
The documents show that he claimed to still be worth millions of dollars even as he struggled to remain relevant while his al Qaeda network splintered.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the newly declassified documents Tuesday. They were recovered during the May 2011 raid on bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which he was killed.
His will, dated from the 1990s, was just one of many documents revealing that death never seemed to be far from bin Ladens mind.
In it, bin Laden said that he had $29 million in Sudan that he wished to be used on jihad for the sake of Allah, while also directing a small portion of that figure to various family members. The whereabouts of the money are unknown.
And in a separate letter, from 2008, he wrote, If I am to be killed, pray for me a lot and give continuous charities in my name.
Bin Ladens media savvy was also on display. In an undated letter where he wrote about the upcoming 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he sought something of a media blitz to highlight his belief that the attacks were the precursor to the global financial crisis of the late 2000s.
He recommended that his lieutenants reach out to CBS, other unnamed American networks and the Islamabad bureau chief of Al Jazeera to pitch some type of anniversary special, recommending Robert Fisk, a journalist who had previously interviewed him, to moderate.
The financial hardships of al Qaeda also come through in the documents, with bin Laden suggesting a scheme that would extort money from other countries, Mauritania among them, in exchange for a promise from al Qaeda not to attack them in the future.
Bin Laden did express concern about attacking Iran and Turkey, however, because much of al Qaedas money traveled through those countries on its way to members of the organization.
Interestingly, bin Laden also appears to have considered moving from Abbottabad in January 2011, some five months before his eventual death, but apparently not because he believed he was being tracked.
A U.S. intelligence official pointed out Tuesday that bin Ladens discussion about moving locations somewhere else in Pakistan means if the U.S. had waited much longer, it might have missed getting him at the compound -- and that this new document is the first indication the U.S. had that he was thinking of leaving.
If the raid took place much later, we could have missed him, the senior intelligence official said.
Another intelligence official said there was no indication in the files that anyone in Pakistan knew bin Laden was there. He said that the al Qaeda leader seemed to be seeking to move because two couriers were complaining about being overworked and he was looking for a new arrangement.
The documents also showcase apparent differences with the current ISIS philosophy of establishing a caliphate as a base of operations. Bin Laden was reluctant to pursue a caliphate because of the difficulty in garnering popular support for it, along with the day-to-day burden of governing.
But his concerns were often more mundane, concerning the education of certain relatives and medical treatment of others.
In a letter dated less than three months before his death, bin Laden wrote that he preferred a female relative to visit a female doctor to describe an unidentified set of symptoms and said an x-ray or ultrasound should be obtained if the symptoms persisted.
In another letter, bin Laden expressed his gratitude that a brother of his was able to visit a dentist -- something the most-hunted man in the world was unable to do. Bin Laden also feared that one of his wives might have been implanted with a small tracking device in her tooth during a visit to a dentist in Iran, telling her, The size of the chip is about the length of a grain of wheat and the width of a fine piece of vermicelli.
The letters show Bin Laden to be paranoid regarding spy agencies tracking his movements, advising his subordinates to only travel on overcast days to avoid aerial surveillance and to dispose of suitcases that had been used to move money due to fears that the bags might contain tracking chips.
The more than 100 documents put out Tuesday are the second tranche to be released by the intelligence community and follow a rigorous interagency review process to determine which documents are ready for release to the public after being declassified and translated from Arabic.
Its important that the documents collected at bin Ladens compound be made available to the public, Brian Hale, director of public affairs for the Director of National Intelligence said in a press release accompanying the documents.
This was no easy feat as members of the task force dedicated themselves over a long period of time, he said.
The latest documents also shine a light on bin Ladens concern over a growing divide between al Qaeda and its affiliates and his efforts to present the terror network as a unified organization.
In a letter to the people of Libya, bin Laden praised the overthrow of the tyrant Moammar Gadhafi but called for the country to unite under the banner of Islamic law, while warning the United States and other countries to stay out of Libya.
And in a different letter addressed to Muslim brothers and sisters, bin Laden wrote of the importance of avoiding indiscriminate Muslim deaths in jihadi operations and urged jihadis to be judicious in their use of human shields during operations.
He also wrote directly to the American people, telling them after President Barack Obama assumed office that attacks against the United States would persist as long as America supported Israel.
The intelligence community expects to release additional documents from the raid later this year after they have been declassified.
Secrets of the bin Laden
treasure-trove
In his final years hiding in a compound in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden was a man who at once showed great love and interest in his own family while he coldly drew up quixotic plans for mass casualty attacks on Americans, according to documents seized by Navy SEALs the night he was killed.
On Wednesday morning, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an unprecedented number of documents from what U.S. officials have described as the treasure-trove picked up by the SEALs at bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
Totaling 103 documents, they include the largest repository of correspondence ever released between members of bin Ladens immediate family and significant communications between bin Laden and other leaders of al Qaeda as well as al Qaedas communications with terrorist groups around the Muslim world.
Also released was a list of bin Ladens massive digital collection of English-language books, think tank reports and U.S. government documents, numbering 266 in total.
To the end bin Laden remained obsessed with attacking Americans. In an undated letter he told jihadist militants in North Africa that they should stop insisting on the formation of an Islamic state and instead attack U.S. embassies in Sierra Leone and Togo and American oil companies. Bin Laden offered similar advice to the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, telling it to avoid targeting Yemeni police and military targets and instead prioritize attacks on American targets.
Much of bin Ladens advice either didnt make it to these groups or was simply ignored because al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and North Africa continued to attack local targets.
ISIS, of course, didnt exist at the time bin Laden was writing. The group, which now controls a large swath of territory in the Middle East, grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq and has charted a different path, seeking to create an Islamic state and not prioritizing attacks on the United States and its citizens.
Taken together, these documents and reading materials paint a complex, nuanced portrait of the worlds most wanted man in the years before he was killed in the raid on his compound.
In the letters that bin Laden exchanged with his many sons and daughters, he emerges as a much-loved and admired father who doted on his children. And in a letter he sent to one of his wives, he even comes off as a lovelorn swain.
Thats in sharp contrast to the letters bin Laden sent to al Qaeda leaders that demanded mass casualty attacks against American targets and insisted that al Qaeda affiliates in the Middle East stop wasting their time on attacks against local government targets. The focus should be on killing and fighting the American people, bin Laden emphasized.
What bin Laden was reading
Bin Ladens digital library is that of an avid reader whose tastes ran from Obamas Wars, Bob Woodwards account of how the Obama administration surged U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, to Noam Chomsky as well as someone who had a pronounced interest in how Western think tanks and academic institutions were analyzing al Qaeda. Bin Laden was a meticulous editor, and some of the memos he wrote were revised as many as 50 times. Of the thousands of versions of documents recovered from computers and digital media that the SEALs retrieved at bin Ladens compound, the final tally numbers several hundred documents.
The new documents show how bin Laden reacted to the events of the Arab Spring, which was roiling the Middle East in the months before his death. While bin Laden had nothing to say publicly about the momentous events in the Middle East, privately he wrote lengthy memos analyzing what was happening, pointing to the new factor of the information technology revolution that had helped spur the revolutions and characterizing them as the most important events in the Muslim world in centuries.
Some of the documents paint an organization that understood it was under significant pressure from U.S. counterterrorism operations. One undated document explained that CIA drone attacks led to the killing of many jihadi cadres, leaders and others, and noted, (T)his is something that is concerning us and exhausting us. Several documents mention the need to be careful with operational security and to encrypt communications and also the necessity of making trips around the Afghan-Pakistan border regions only on cloudy days when American drones were less effective.
Al Qaeda members knew they were short on cash, with one writing to bin Laden, Also, there is the financial problem.
Some of the documents have nothing to do with terrorism. One lengthy memo from bin Laden worried about the baleful effects of climate change on the Muslim world and advocated not depleting precious groundwater stocks. Sounding more like a World Bank official than the leader of a major terrorist organization, bin Laden fretted about food security. He also gave elaborate instructions to an aide about the most efficacious manner to store wheat.
Family concerns
Many of the documents concern bin Ladens sprawling family, which included his four wives and 20 children. Bin Laden took a minute interest in the marriage plans of his son Khalid to the daughter of a martyred al Qaeda commander, and he exchanged a number of letters with the mother of the bride-to-be. Bin Laden excitedly described the impending nuptials, which our hearts have been looking forward to.
Bin Laden corresponded at length with his son Hamza and also with Hamzas mother, Khairiah, who had spent around a decade in Iran under a form of house arrest following the Talibans fall in neighboring Afghanistan during the winter of 2001.
Hamza wrote a heartfelt letter to bin Laden in 2009 in which he recalled how he hadnt seen his father since he was 13, eight years earlier: My heart is sad from the long separation, yearning to meet with you. ... My eyes still remember the last time I saw you when you were under the olive tree and you gave each one of us Muslim prayer beads.
In 2010 the Iranians started releasing members of the bin Laden family who had been living in Iran. Bin Laden spent many hours writing letters to them and to his associates in al Qaeda about how best he could reunite with them.
In a letter to his wife Khairiah, he wrote tenderly, (H)ow long have I waited for your departure from Iran.
Bin Laden was paranoid that the Iranians -- who he said were not to be trusted -- might insert electronic tracking devices into the belongings or even the bodies of his family as they departed Iran. He told Khairiah that if she had recently visited an official dentist in Iran for a filling that she would need to have the filling taken out before meeting with him as he worried a tracking device might have been inserted inside.
U.S. intelligence officials have a theory that bin Laden might have been grooming Hamza eventually to succeed him at the helm of al Qaeda because the sons relative youth would energize al Qaedas base. But Hamza never made it to his fathers hiding place in Abbottabad. When the SEALs raided bin Ladens compound, they assumed Hamza would likely be one of the adult males living there, but he wasnt.
U.S. intelligence officials say they dont know where Hamza, now in his late 20s, is today.
There is no evidence in the newly released documents that the Pakistanis had any idea bin Laden was living in Pakistan or indeed he was even alive.
The new documents also do nothing to substantiate investigative journalists Seymour Hershs recent well-publicized claims that the raid that killed bin Laden was not a firefight in which the SEALs went into a dangerous and unknown situation, but a setup in which Pakistans military had been holding bin Laden prisoner in Abbottabad for five years and simply made him available to the SEALs when they flew in helicopters to the compound on the night of the raid.
White House rejects Hershs baseless assertions
On the first anniversary of bin Ladens death in May 2012, the Obama administration released a first tranche of 17 documents from the treasure-trove. Those documents also underlined how much al Qaeda feared the CIA drone campaign as well as bin Ladens obsessive interest in attacking the United States.
Hersh seems to believe that any documents released by the Obama administration that were discovered during the bin Laden raid have been faked by the CIA. Readers can judge for themselves by examining the English-language translations of the new documents and also the original Arabic documents here.
According to U.S. intelligence officials, in October seven U.S. intelligence agencies began the process of clearing for public release the documents that came out Wednesday.
Digital library
Among the most interesting windows in to the mind of al Qaedas leader are the contents of his massive digital library, which was painstakingly assembled. Because of security concerns, bin Ladens compound had no connection to the Internet so any books or reports that bin Laden had an interest in were assembled painstakingly by making PDFs of each page.
They were then put on to a thumb drive and delivered to bin Laden by one of his two bodyguards, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Strangely, one of the books in bin Ladens digital library was a suicide prevention manual. Senior U.S. intelligence officials do not believe that bin Laden was suicidal.
Bin Laden was interested in books with a conspiratorial bent, and he had tomes about the Illuminati and the Freemasons and even, somewhat ironically, a book that asserted 9/11 was an inside job. CNN
