The best martyrs are those who stay in the battle line and do not turn their faces away until they are killed.
—Osama bin Laden
As al-Qaeda revived, bin Laden decided to find a permanent home big enough for his growing family to live comfortably alongside his two bodyguards and their families. He chose Abbottabad, a small city in northern Pakistan that was a popular retirement destination for Pakistani military officers. To the north of Abbottabad, the snow-covered mountains of the Himalayas marched in serried ranks toward the Chinese border.
During 2004 and 2005 bin Laden’s bodyguard, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, began assembling parcels of land in Bilal Town, a pleasant Abbottabad neighborhood, paying about $50,000 for them and putting the property in his name. The Kuwaiti then hired an architect to design a compound of two stories with four bedrooms on each floor, each with its own private bathroom. During its construction, a third floor was added.
Bin Laden and two of his wives, six of his children, and his two bodyguards and their families all moved to Abbottabad in August 2005. In Abbottabad bin Laden had another two children with Amal, his youngest wife; Zainab was born in 2006 and Hussain in 2008.
While they were living in Abbottabad, there were also tragedies for the bin Laden family. Bin Laden had married off his daughter Khadija to an al-Qaeda fighter in Afghanistan when she was only twelve, but she had died in 2007 after giving birth in Pakistan’s remote tribal regions. Khadija’s husband was later killed in a CIA drone strike, so now their four orphaned young children were also all living in the Abbottabad compound along with their grandfather Osama.
Living on the compound, in addition to bin Laden and his three wives and their twelve children and grandchildren, were also the two bodyguards and their wives and seven children, totaling twenty-seven people. The compound was crowded, but bin Laden never left it. One of his bodyguard’s daughters asked her father why “the uncle who lived upstairs” never went out to shop at the bazaar. The bodyguard made up a story that this uncle was too poor to buy anything. That seemed plausible since bin Laden lived quite frugally, with only three pairs of lightweight shalwar kameez, Pakistani shirts and trousers, for the summer, and another three heavier pairs for the winter. From then on bin Laden was known by the bodyguard’s family in Urdu, a local language, as “miskeen kaka,” the “poor uncle.” One day the bodyguard’s family was watching Al Jazeera and the daughter recognized the “poor uncle.” After that the TV was turned off and the bodyguards’ families stopped interacting with the bin Laden family.
The bodyguards’ two Pakistani wives occasionally visited their families in other parts of Pakistan. Following orders from their husbands, the wives lied to their families about where they were living, telling them that they lived in Kuwait. They even brought gifts for their families that they claimed to have purchased in Kuwait to bolster their cover stories.
During his long days at the Abbottabad compound, bin Laden read or listen to nonfiction. His digital library of hundreds of books and reports included Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars and the audio version of this author’s The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al-Qaeda’s Leader. Bin Laden was a fan of Michael Scheuer, who had spent years trying to capture or kill him while working at the CIA. After leaving the agency, Scheuer had written books sharply critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, such as his 2007 book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. Bin Laden also collected books with a conspiratorial bent about the Illuminati and Freemasons and even one that claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job.” Bin Laden wanted to understand how his American enemies thought about him, so he built up a significant library of analyses of al-Qaeda by think tanks such as RAND, as well as publicly available U.S. government reports about his group.
On the ground floor of the main house was a room where al-Qaeda’s leader relaxed watching TV news. There was a gas heater and an improvised exhaust system made from bits of sheet metal. Here bin Laden watched old videos of himself on television, wrapped in a blanket against the chilly Abbottabad winter.
Bin Laden spent much of his time on the top, third floor in the main house on his Abbottabad compound. Here was his bedroom, the height of which was low for someone as tall as bin Laden. There was a tiny bathroom for his use with no tile on the floor, a cheap shower, and a toilet that he squatted over to use. Off to the side of the bedroom was a small outdoor terrace surrounded by a seven-foot wall, which was high enough to disguise his presence when he walked onto the terrace, which was partially covered by an awning that prevented satellites from taking any overhead imagery of him. Next door to the bedroom was his study; crude bookshelves lined its walls and a large window overlooked the enclosed terrace. It was here that bin Laden composed lengthy letters to his key lieutenants and to his family members.
In Abbottabad, bin Laden settled into the role of attentive family patriarch. In the spring of 2011, he and his wife Siham were planning the marriage of their son Khalid. Bin Laden exchanged a number of letters with the mother of the bride-to-be and excitedly described the impending nuptials, “which our hearts have been looking forward to.”
From his Abbottabad hideout bin Laden corresponded at length with his son Hamza, who was one of his seven children who had fled to Iran after the 9/11 attacks and were detained there by the Revolutionary Guard. Hamza wrote a heartfelt letter to his father in July 2009 in which he recalled how he hadn’t seen him since he was thirteen, nine 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.” Hamza told his father that he was now married to a “pious wife” and had named his first-born son Osama.
Bin Laden was disturbed by the reports he received from Hamza and other members of al-Qaeda about the conditions they lived in while detained in Iran. Hamza wrote his father describing how after years of being held in prison-like conditions without charge, al-Qaeda detainees had staged a violent protest involving sit-ins and burning property. The protests were met with violence.
In the spring of 2010 the Iranian regime finally started releasing bin Laden’s family members. Two years earlier, bin Laden’s men had kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in Pakistan who was released as part of the prisoner swap.
Two of bin Laden’s sons, Osman and Mohammad, both in their mid-twenties, were released by the Iranians and were now hiding in Pakistan’s tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan. Bin Laden wrote to his sons that he was “longing” to see them, but he regretted that “our security situation does not allow us at this time to be together.” One of bin Laden’s sons, Saad, had been killed in a CIA drone strike in the tribal regions in 2009, and he wanted to make sure his other sons didn’t share this fate. He was also paranoid, worried that the Iranians might have injected his sons with a “shot,” writing that such a shot might have been “loaded with a tiny chip” no larger than a “seed of grain” that could track their whereabouts. He had no evidence of this.
In early 2011, as we have seen, his two bodyguards had told bin Laden that they were fed up with all the dangers of protecting the world’s most wanted man and they were leaving him in six months. Bin Laden told a top deputy that he needed to find a successor who was a Pakistani who could fit in locally, someone who wasn’t wanted for any crime, and who had a valid, official ID card that would enable him to rent or buy a new property for the bin Laden family, since they would have to leave his carefully constructed compound in Abbottabad, which was registered in the name of his bodyguard.
While bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad he not only was trying to reunite with all of his family that had scattered after the 9/11 attacks, he was also trying to extend al-Qaeda’s influence through a network of affiliated groups around the world. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was both the most lethal and high-profile of these affiliates, but the Iraqi group tended to ignore bin Laden’s directives.
The leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was the subject of an intense American manhunt and was killed in an American air strike on June 7, 2006. Bin Laden released a dutiful eulogy about him describing Zarqawi as a “hero” and remarking that Zarqawi “had clear instructions to focus his fight on the occupiers, particularly the Americans.”
In reality, Zarqawi had completely ignored those “clear instructions” and had killed thousands of ordinary Iraqi civilians. Privately, al-Qaeda officials did not mourn Zarqawi’s death.
While al-Qaeda was creating considerable havoc in Iraq, the organization was also regrouping in Pakistan’s remote and largely ungoverned tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan, where it started training recruits for attacks in the West. One of them was Mohamed Khan, a second-generation British-Pakistani schoolteacher who took time off from his job in November 2004 for a three-month visit to Pakistan, where he received training from al-Qaeda.
On July 7, 2005, a four-man team of British citizens led by Khan detonated suicide bombs on the London Underground and on a bus, killing fifty-two commuters and themselves. It was the most lethal terrorist attack in British history. Two months after the London bombings, an al-Qaeda videotape of Khan appeared on Al Jazeera, in which he described bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as “today’s heroes.” The “7/7” attacks in London were not anywhere near the scale of 9/11, but al-Qaeda had now recovered to the point where it could carry out significant attacks in the West.
Al-Qaeda’s leaders hoped to replicate the London bombings with similar attacks on the New York City subway. Three years after the 7/7 attacks, Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American, and two of his friends from Queens, New York, traveled to Pakistan, where they met with members of al-Qaeda who instructed them how to build hydrogen-peroxide-based bombs. But once he was back in the States, Zazi forgot how to construct the bombs, so he sent a message to an al-Qaeda email account asking for instructions. That account was being monitored by British intelligence officials, who tipped off the Americans. Zazi and his two co-conspirators were arrested in September 2009, around the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was the last time that al-Qaeda’s core group in Pakistan made a serious attempt to carry out a mass casualty attack in the United States.
A year later, the Pakistani Taliban, which was allied to al-Qaeda, dispatched a terrorist to bomb civilian targets in New York City. Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad had internalized the ideology of Binladenism, that there was a Western-led conspiracy to humiliate Islam and the only appropriate response was holy war. In Pakistan Shahzad was trained by the Taliban in bomb-making. When Shahzad was back in the States, on May 1, 2010, he drove a bomb-laden SUV to Manhattan, parking it in Times Square on a busy Saturday evening. Shahzad set off the bomb, but it didn’t detonate properly and he was arrested at JFK Airport.
Bin Laden was determined to maintain as much control over his other affiliates as possible; after all, they had all pledged bayat to him, a religious oath of obedience. To ensure that they complied with his orders bin Laden wrote lengthy memos to his top lieutenants covering a wide range of issues about overall strategy and personnel. Bin Laden sometimes gave bizarre guidance to his followers, complaining that as an American citizen, Shahzad, who had tried to blow up the SUV in Times Square, had broken the oath of allegiance he had sworn to the United States. Bin Laden explained, “We do not want the mujahideen to be accused of breaking an oath.” Al-Qaeda’s leader kept pressing his lieutenants for more attacks on the United States, but now he was telling them that they couldn’t recruit naturalized U.S. citizens to carry out those missions.
In 2006 bin Laden welcomed a new affiliate into the al-Qaeda fold, known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which operated in North Africa. The following year he received a detailed report from his North African affiliate detailing its cash flow and personnel issues.
After an aggressive campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) by the Saudi government following a spate of terrorist attacks by the group in the kingdom between 2003 and 2005, AQAP rebased itself in neighboring Yemen, where it sometimes controlled significant amounts of territory. The group also distinguished itself by regularly producing a slickly written and colorfully laid out jihadist webzine named Inspire; the first issue appeared in July 2010. Bin Laden objected to the content of Inspire, which aimed to inspire “lone actor” attacks in the West using such crude tools as welding knives onto a truck and ramming the vehicle into a crowd. Bin Laden was dismayed by such tactics, which he felt didn’t reflect well on his followers and in any event wasn’t the type of mass casualty attack that he preferred.
An increasingly prominent leader of AQAP was Anwar al-Awlaki. A Yemeni-American cleric, Awlaki became one of the most influential jihadist ideologues in the world because of his tapes about jihad that he delivered in colloquial English and were widely circulated on the internet. Awlaki also played an operational role in AQAP’s terrorist plots. For instance, he recruited a Nigerian to wear a bomb that evaded airport security measures. The bomb was concealed in the Nigerian’s underwear and he smuggled it onto an American passenger jet on Christmas Day 2009 and detonated the device as the plane was coming in to land in Detroit. Luckily, the bomb didn’t explode properly, but it put AQAP on the map as an al-Qaeda affiliate that had the capacity to carry out an anti-American operation. Even though the plot failed, bin Laden admired the audacity of the effort to blow up an American passenger jet.
Bin Laden also continued to instruct his followers through the more than two dozen video- and audiotapes that he released in the years after 9/11. These messages reached untold millions of people around the world, as they typically received considerable media coverage. In his Abbottabad compound bin Laden set up a makeshift TV studio with a neutral backdrop where he practiced his video addresses dressed in formal white Pakistani shalwar kameez and a neat, white turban. When he flubbed his lines, he chuckled and rapped his knuckles on a desk to signal that he wanted to do a retake.
Bin Laden’s tapes not only instructed al-Qaeda’s followers to kill Westerners and Jews, but some also carried specific instructions. On October 19, 2003, bin Laden called for action against Spain because of its troop presence in Iraq, the first time that al-Qaeda’s leader had singled out the country. Six months later, jihadist terrorists killed 191 people in Madrid. In December 2004, bin Laden called for attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and a little over a year later, al-Qaeda’s Saudi affiliate attacked Abqaiq, the largest oil production facility in the world.
Around the sixth anniversary of 9/11, bin Laden was sharply and publicly attacked by one of his heroes, Salman al-Awdah, a leading Saudi religious scholar. Awdah addressed bin Laden in the media, saying, “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed in the name of al-Qaeda?”
This was a personal rebuke of bin Laden about his murders of innocent civilians, and it was especially significant because Awdah’s sermons against the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait had helped to turn bin Laden against the United States. Since bin Laden was not a religious scholar himself, he was always especially sensitive about the views of genuine Islamic scholars, particularly those from the holy land of Saudi Arabia.
As he mulled over the critique from Awdah that al-Qaeda was killing mostly Muslim civilians, bin Laden became increasingly focused on the issue. A month after Awdah’s critical statement, al-Qaeda’s leader did something unprecedented, which was to issue a public apology on an audiotape that aired on Al Jazeera admonishing his holy warriors in Iraq to correct their “mistakes” and curb their fanaticism.
The Libyan dissident Noman Benotman, who had privately warned bin Laden in Afghanistan in 2000 not to attack the United States, now came out publicly with his own strong rebuke of al-Qaeda, calling on the group to end all operations that targeted civilians in the West. Benotman’s condemnation of bin Laden received widespread coverage in the Arabic-language press.
The issue of civilian casualties became a major preoccupation in bin Laden’s communications to groups allied to al-Qaeda. On August 7, 2010, bin Laden advised members of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab (“the Youth”) to try to avoid killing civilians, as they were then doing in battles in and around the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Bin Laden also warned al-Shabaab that the group would be better off if it did not declare itself publicly to be part of al-Qaeda for fundraising purposes, because businessmen in the Arab world “who are willing to help the brothers in Somalia” would be more likely to do so if they thought they were not supporting al-Qaeda directly.
Bin Laden was keenly aware that al-Qaeda’s brand was in trouble, and during the fall of 2010 he started contemplating a major rebranding of his group. He wrote a long letter outlining his plans to his operational commander, Atiyah. Bin Laden was particularly upset by terrorist operations by al-Qaeda in Iraq that had killed Shia Muslims attending mosques, and attacks by the Pakistani Taliban that had killed military officers worshipping at a mosque. He even encouraged the “Commander of the Faithful,” Mullah Omar, to come out publicly to condemn “the serious matter of shedding Muslim blood unjustly,” in a letter that bin Laden sent to the Taliban leader on November 5, 2010.
Bin Laden was planning to issue a public declaration that would emphasize the “friendliness” of al-Qaeda in order to “regain the trust” of the Muslim public. He wanted to use the upcoming tenth anniversary of 9/11 as the moment to relaunch al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups, which would collectively commit to no longer engage in local attacks against Muslims in countries such as Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen.
At one of the family meetings at the Abbottabad compound in early April 2011, bin Laden told his wives and daughters that he saw the Arab Spring, which was by then in full bloom, as a propitious moment to revamp al-Qaeda. His family urged bin Laden on, saying, “We need a public statement from you in your usual style with phrases that future generations will memorize, and that will be preserved as your heritage.” Bin Laden’s family saw him as a world historical figure who could reshape history with a speech.
Bin Laden’s proposed rebranding of al-Qaeda did not, however, extend to stopping any planning for terrorist attacks against American targets. He told his key lieutenants he wanted “big effective operations whose impact, God willing, is bigger than that of 9/11.”
The Americans always remained bin Laden’s main enemy, yet he was unable to successfully carry out an attack in the United States in the decade after 9/11.
For their part, in the decade after 9/11 the CIA and the U.S. military hadn’t forgotten who their main enemy was.