The Bin Laden Papers: Examining the documents seized from the al Qaeda leader's compound

Eleven years ago, a team of two dozen Navy Seals flew under the cover of darkness to Badabad, Pakistan, to carry out one of the most important counterterrorism missions in history to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. 30 minutes into that mission, the Seals had their man and something they didn't expect. Thousands of pages of letters and personal notes from Osama Bin Laden. In 2017, the CIA declassified most of those letters without context and the author of few translations and an Islamic scholar. nelly lahood wanted to read it all spent much of her career researching al-

qaeda

with stints at harvard and cambridge universities and speaks fluent arabic so she carefully examined many of those

documents

line by line tonight we will hear what she found when obtaining a rare glimpse into al-

qaeda

's inner sanctum through the trash.

papers

loaded the story will continue in a moment this is the bustling city of abadabad pakistan from above you can still see the scar in the landscape this vacant lot where children now play cricket is where Osama bin Laden's house once stood and where the world's most wanted terrorists hid until the afternoon of May 1, 2011.

Tonight I can inform the American people and the world that the United States carried out an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. The operation called Neptune Spear lasted 30 minutes, but then a seal alerted the command that they had found a bunch of computers and electronic devices and needed more time. The seals were given an additional 10 minutes which was extended to 18. They grabbed computers, VHS tapes, books, USB drives, hard drives and notebooks, and carried them in bags slung around their necks. That last-minute decision by the seal team to take those

documents

bin

laden

's greatest fear was exposing al-qaeda's secrets and so the fact that the seals decided to recover these letters ensured that al-qaeda's secrets would be exposed.

In 2012 Nelly Lahud was teaching at West Point, when the CIA declassified the first 17 documents from the raid, she was asked to lead the analysis of those documents for West Point's counterterrorism center for the past five years. She has been reading, translating and analyzing the remaining declassified documents in consultation with American admirals general. and members of the special forces community to make it all make sense, there are home videos like this one, of Osama bin Laden's son Hamza getting married in Iran, family photos, audio files and letters, five hundred thousand files all over Nelly Lahood centered in six thousand pages of them for his book The bin

laden

papers

, so you were creating a kind of narrative based on all the documents and you couldn't do it any other way, you couldn't have a division of labor where several people took over because We are all so connected, vague references in one letter can only be explained if you look at several other letters, so to understand what was really going on you really need to be able to have read them all together.

Letters were Osama's only way. Bin Laden communicated with al Qaeda associates for nearly a decade as he attempted to evade capture. Bin Laden had a television in his

compound

, but no Internet or telephone access, so everything was written by hand or on computers and encrypted in flash. The hard drives that were given to couriers to deliver all the letters had backup copies on hard drives. We see in the letters, er, dimunitive, Bin Laden, someone who is very different from this powerful figure that we read about daily in the newspapers for more than a decade. The disconnect between his ambitions and his capabilities is confusing.

That disconnect was clear immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda did not anticipate that the United States would go to war. What did you think was going to happen? It's a limited aerial attack, but they did it. I didn't think they would go any further than that, but as the war progressed in Afghanistan, Lahud says these letters show that Osama bin Laden was surprised by how Americans reacted to 9/11. He thought the American people would take to the streets replicating anti-Vietnam War Protest measures and pressure their governments to withdraw from Muslim-majority states. The great miscalculation. A huge miscalculation in November 2002.

US intelligence officials warned that Al Qaeda could be planning, among other things, spectacular attacks that could cause mass casualties, but Lahood says the letters show that Al Qaeda was weak at the time. the main

leader

s had been killed or forced into hiding the terrorist organization was directionless there is definitely a narrative that bin laden was still controlling al qaeda behind the scenes the puppet master hiding somewhere but that's what the newspapers say show fafurmant like this That he wasn't calling the shots at all She says Osama bin Laden didn't communicate with his al-Qaeda associates for three years because he was on the run;

It is still unknown exactly where he was hiding, but in 2004 he reconnects with al-Al Qaeda in this letter he offers the surviving members his new plan to attack the United States. You are very eager to replicate the 9/11 attacks and in the United States, you know, you are aware that security conditions are very difficult at airports now. She read as part of this chilling Letter from Osama Bin Laden to the head of Al Qaeda's international terrorist units Bin Laden writes that instead of hijacking a plane, agents should rent one for their next attack on the United States and adds that if that It's too difficult, they should target the American railroads, so Bin Laden, who had a degree in civil engineering explains exactly how to do it.

He wanted to remove 12 meters of steel rail so that the train could derail and we find him explaining the simple tool kit that they could use you know, he said here he could use a compressor he could use a tool to smelt iron and he's in those little details at the most granular level of the granules, what does that tell you? He is very methodical, very methodical, he believes that he does not want to leave anything to chance, fortunately he never was. able to execute his plan because Lahood says that Al Qaeda had been destroyed by the war.

She read us this letter from Tafiq, a young associate who ran operations for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She is telling Osama Bin Laden how incapacitated the terrorist organization is. had become the weakness, failure and aimlessness that befell us, were heartbreaking, we Muslims were defiled and defiled, our state was torn apart, our lands were occupied, our resources were plundered and he is handing over the state of al-qaeda to Osama bin Laden, who probably has not heard this he did not know that he did not know the reality and in fact he warns him that I am going to tell him the truth as it is and I know that some of the brothers here are not telling everything in detail because I don't want to bother you particularly because of the delicate situations in which you find yourself with that delicate situation is the life of bin Laden in hiding.

In 2005, Osama Bin Laden lived behind the 18-foot walls of the Ababadabad

compound

that he shared with some of his wives, children and grandchildren seen here in this video

seized

during the raid in this clip, Khalid, the 22-year-old son years of bin Laden, is showing the tamer gardens of the complex and the animals he cares for. Khaled also recorded his father's public statements that were intended to be seen around the world. Around the world he can be heard laughing as the lights fail, but Nellie Lahood says it was actually two of Bin Laden's daughters who played the biggest role in crafting his father's messages and jihadist missions. .

The people who actually worked on Osama's public statements were mostly his daughters, Mariam and Sumayyah on one of the pages, you know, we find Osama explicitly requesting to start preparing start thinking about the ideas that should come up in the statement public, it's their own words, it's surprising how involved they were, yeah, it was surprising to me. the world of al-qaeda and if jihadism in general women are not part of the public face of jihad but in private bin laden's women were very involved in this letter to a relative bilan's wife sees him mourning the loss of a daughter who died in childbirth but then the tone changes quickly and then he becomes ashamed and at the same time within the men to accept what he had done and say, you know, our women and children are suffering while the men are being so vile and cowardly so that's the type of personality we are encountering wow the women in the compound yes al qaeda was also running out of cash lahoot says documents show that in 2006 al qaeda He had only $200 in his coffers and could not support or control an increasingly unruly jihad.

Still, he says Osama Bin Laden continued plotting the hood. He showed us this letter to another young Eunice associate who impressed Bin Laden with her keen intellect. She says this is specifically directed at you, top secret. Don't share it with anyone. It's from Osama Bin Laden. plans another terrorist attack in 2010. This time he wanted to attack multiple crude oil tankers and major shipping routes around the Middle East and Africa. He says the importance of oil to this industrialized economy today is not lost on him and is similar to blood. for human beings, so if you make someone bleed excessively, even if you don't kill them, you will at least weaken them, and that's really what he really wanted to do to emerge into the American economy, he says, bin Laden details how agents of Al Qaeda should integrate into those port areas as fishermen, tells them exactly where to buy a specific type of wooden boat to evade radar, and then once again goes into the granular details of his plan: the birds need to transport a large volume of explosives, preferably placed in an arched position in front of the ship, so not only does he tell them what explosives to buy, but he also tells them how to place them in an arched position, but their final plan of attack seems to have been stopped by something he never saw coming: the arab spring, according to this family notebook a single item confiscated in the raid the peaceful protests were confusing and worrying for the bin ladens on one level they were very excited by the fact that the people were able to overthrow the dictators but at the same time there were all these questions marks about what is the value of jihad at this time and we find that this really throughout this notebook is jihad still necessary lahud says bin laden seen here in the last months of his life was struggling with the answer to that question before he was killed US intelligence agencies say that most of Al Qaeda's terrorist activity is now carried out by smaller branches of Al Qaeda.

Bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-zawahi, now heads al Qaeda. This month he appeared in a new video denouncing the enemies of Islam.