WASHINGTON — Toward the end of his decade in hiding, Osama bin Laden was spending as much time exchanging messages about al-Qaeda’s struggles as he was plotting ways for the terrorist network to reassert its strength.
Over the past year, the al-Qaeda leader fielded e-mails from followers lamenting the toll being taken by CIA drone “explosions” as well as the network’s financial plight, according to U.S. officials who have completed an exhaustive review of the trove of bin Laden files collected at his compound in the May 2 U.S. raid that killed him.
Bin Laden approved the creation of a counterintelligence unit to root out traitors and spies, only to receive a complaint in mid-2010 from the unit’s leader that it was losing the “espionage war” and couldn’t function on its paltry budget.
Just months before the Arab Spring took hold, bin Laden warned affiliates in Yemen and elsewhere that it was too soon to create an Islamic state. The Saudi native, whose family had made its fortune in construction, concluded that there wasn’t “enough steel” in al-Qaeda’s regional support structures to warrant even tentative steps toward re-establishing the caliphate.
Such sober assessments and references to setbacks are among the fine-grained details that U.S. intelligence analysts have gleaned to assemble a new and more nuanced portrait of al-Qaeda and its founder in the aftermath of the raid on bin Laden’s compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.
Analysts at the CIA and other agencies are likely to continue poring over the bin Laden files for years. But the multi-agency task force that was set up to review what officials have described as the largest cache of terrorism records recovered to date finished its job and was disbanded last month.
“We believe the materials will continue to yield new insights on al-Qaeda for years to come,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with the task force’s work. “But the task force is done.”
The group produced more than 400 intelligence reports in a span of six weeks and prompted public warnings of al-Qaeda plots against trains and other targets.
Officials said that the main value of the data is in enabling analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait of al-Qaeda, and that many of the most recent files found on bin Laden’s computers depict an organization beset by mounting problems even as its leader remained singularly focused on delivering a follow-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes.
“The trove makes it clear that bin Laden’s primary goal — you can call it an obsession — was to attack the U.S. homeland,” said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official. “He pushed for this every way he could.”
