[ 2011-05-13 ]

Osama bin Laden: rarely left the top floor of his purpose-built residence in five or more years

Recluse bin Laden ran his global network by e-mail
Giles Whittell and Michael Evans in Washington
May 13 2011 12:01AM
For nearly two weeks the Obama Administration has
been heralding the psychological impact on
al-Qaeda of the loss of Osama bin Laden.
For months to come, America’s vast intelligence
analysis machine will be feasting on what he left
behind.
Gathered up in half an hour at the dead of night,
the mine of digital information accumulated by bin
Laden in his years in Abbottabad reveals him not
as remote and increasingly irrelevant, but
meticulously connected to the al-Qaeda rank and
file, and bent on destruction to the end.
He was deluded about American society, but
endlessly inventive in his schemes to throw it
into chaos. He was obsessive about his own
security, but not to the point of cutting himself
off from the outside world.
Bin Laden hardly left the top floor of his
purpose-built residence in the five years or more
that he lived there, according to relatives being
debriefed by Pakistani intelligence. In that time,
hidden by a 7ft wall even when he ventured on to
his balcony, he never allowed himself to be
photographed from outside his compound. Yet
neither did he forgo the simple convenience of
e-mail.
The mystery of how he kept in touch with his
followers was at least partly solved yesterday by
US intelligence officials close to the massive
operation under way near the CIA’s headquarters,
to sort through the memory sticks and laptops
carried away by Navy Seals along with bin
Laden’s body. To send an e-mail, bin Laden would
type a message on his computer, copy it to a flash
drive and hand it to a courier who would then
drive miles to a distant internet café, the
officials said. The courier would then send the
e-mail from the café, making it all but
untraceable. The routine was labour-intensive but
secure, and it accounts for the 110 flash drives
found in the residence, which US sources say are
already yielding thousands of messages and
hundreds of e-mail addresses used by bin Laden’s
associates.
The contents of the 2.7 terabytes of data scooped
up by the Seals on May 1 will take months to sort
through, but sources insisted yesterday that they
had already revealed far more than arcane detail
about the structure of the al-Qaeda bureaucracy,
as early reports suggested.
Tom Donilon, President Obama’s National Security
Adviser, said: “This is the largest cache of
intelligence derived from the scene of any single
terrorist. It’s about the size, the CIA tells
us, of a small college library.”
Documents and messages being analysed by teams of
Arabists and decryption experts working round the
clock in shifts a few miles from the White House
show al-Qaeda’s leaders discussing “strategic,
even tactical ideas and which operatives they want
to use”, one source told The Times.
Those ideas include a plan to derail a train,
hurling it off a bridge or into a valley, on the
forthcoming anniversary of September 11;
exhortations to bomb Los Angeles and smaller US
cities rather than those already targeted on the
East Coast; and a bizarre scheme to co-opt
“oppressed” blacks and Latinos to attack what
bin Laden appeared to think of as America’s
white power elite.
“Al-Qaeda sees the black convert community as
ripe for recruiting,” one intelligence source
told ABC News yesterday, prompting an outraged
response from the Rev Al Sharpton, the black
community leader and former presidential
candidate. “Remember, Osama bin Laden killed
blacks, whites, Latinos, everyone on 9/11,” he
said.
Most of the fresh intelligence is being closely
held by US agencies for potential use in further
attacks on al-Qaeda’s leadership, as Washington
seeks to capitalise on bin Laden’s death by
destroying what remains of the organisation he
built up over more than 20 years. US Navy Seal
teams are understood to be on high alert for any
more raids that President Obama may order. Asked
yesterday whether the US would launch attacks on
other al-Qaeda figures in Pakistan or elsewhere,
given sufficient intelligence, one senior official
told The Times: “If it was up to me, then, yes,
we would.”
Some of the intelligence has found its way quickly
into the public domain. A warning issued last week
to the entire US rail network by the FBI and the
Department of Homeland Security was based on
documents found in bin Laden’s residence dated
early last year.
As of February last year al-Qaeda “was allegedly
contemplating conducting an operation against
trains at an unspecified location in the United
States on the 10th anniversary of September 11,
2001”, the warning stated. In one option,
al-Qaeda “was looking into trying to tip a train
by tampering with the rails so that the train
would fall off the track at either a valley or a
bridge”.
The high quality of the intelligence being gleaned
has provided the CIA and other agencies with an
unprecedented insight into the way that al-Qaeda
works and functions.
America’s allies, including Britain, are waiting
to hear whether the intelligence hints at
potential plots outside the US, such as in Europe.
Although MI6 is being kept informed of the
intelligence being uncovered, the US official said
that nothing had been found so far that indicated
a specific plot against Britain.
“But there’s a huge amount of information and
I couldn’t speculate how long it’s going to
take to get through it all,” the official said.
“Who knows what we may find?”
As the CIA attacks the “mother lode”,
officials have also divulged new information on
the search that led to it. The breakthrough came
when a former CIA detainee, Hassan Ghul, tipped
interrogators off to the importance of Abu Ahmed
al-Kuwaiti, the courier who eventually led the
agency to the compound in Abbottabad. The US
believes that Ghul was released from Pakistani
detention in 2007, and is once again a frontline
militant.

Source - The Times(UK)

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