By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst Updated 8:19 PM ET, Wed May 20, 2015
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Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad."
(CNN)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 Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
Peter Bergen
Totaling 103 documents, they include the largest repository of correspondence ever released between members of bin Laden's immediate family and significant communications between bin Laden and other leaders of al Qaeda as well as al Qaeda's communications with terrorist groups around the Muslim world. Also released was a list of bin Laden's 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 Laden's advice either didn't make it to these groups or was simply ignored because al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and North Africa continued to attack local targets.
Author on bin Laden's shelf: We interfere in Muslim world 02:52
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ISIS, of course, didn't 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 world's 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. That's 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.
Osama bin Laden's Afghan hideout 31 photos
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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.
Bin Laden watches TV at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound in a frame grab from an undated video from the Pentagon.
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 son's relative youth would energize al Qaeda's base. But Hamza never made it to his father's hiding place in Abbottabad. When the SEALs raided bin Laden's compound, they assumed Hamza would likely be one of the adult males living there, but he wasn't. U.S. intelligence officials say they don't know where Hamza, now in his late 20s, is today.
Osama bin Laden's compound 9 photos
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Similarly, al Qaeda members reached out to leaders of the Pakistani Taliban who maintain contacts with Pakistan's military intelligence service, ISI, to see if they could negotiate a similar truce with the Pakistani government. The deal would be that the Pakistanis would leave al Qaeda alone and vice versa and then al Qaeda would be able to focus on attacking American targets. However, the al Qaeda leader who was leading this effort told bin Laden, "As you know, this is just talk!" and nothing came of these discussions. 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 journalist's Seymour Hersh's 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 Pakistan's 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 Hersh's 'baseless assertions' On the first anniversary of bin Laden's 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 Laden's obsessive interest in attacking the United States.
Bergen: Hersh's account of bin Laden raid is nonsense 05:25
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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. Bergen: Was there a cover-up in bin Laden killing?
GHOSTS OF BEIRUT: SHOWTIME
The Fall of Osama bin Laden, National Geographic
BIN LADEN'S HARD DRIVE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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