Bin Laden's Secret Life
The world’s most-wanted terrorist lived his last five years imprisoned behind the barbed wire and high walls of his home in Abbottabad, his days consumed by dark arts and domesticity.
American officials believe that Osama bin Laden spent many hours on the computer, relying on couriers to bring him thumb drives packed with information from the outside world.
Videos seized from Bin Laden’s compound and released by the Obama administration on Saturday show him wrapped in an old blanket watching himself on TV, like an aging actor imagining a comeback. A senior intelligence official said other videos show him practicing and flubbing his lines in front of a camera.. He was interested enough in his image, the official said, to dye his white beard black for the recordings.
His once-large entourage of Arab bodyguards was down to one trusted Pakistani courier and the courier’s brother, who also had the job of buying goats, sheep and Coca-Cola for the household.While his physical world had shrunk to two indoor rooms and daily pacing in his courtyard, bin Laden was still revered at home — by his three wives, by his children and by the tight, interconnected circle of loyalists in the compound.
He did not do chores or tend to the cows and water buffalo on the south side of the compound like the other men. The household, American officials figure, knew how important it was for him to devote his time to Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he founded and was still actively running at the time of his death.
American officials say there is much they do not know about the last years of Bin Laden, who was shot dead by Navy Seal commandos last Monday in his third-floor bedroom, and the peculiar life of the compound. But what has emerged so far, in interviews with United States and Pakistani military and intelligence officials and Bin Laden’s neighbors in the middle-class hamlet where he had been hiding, is a portrait of an isolated man, perhaps a little bored, presiding over family life while plotting mayhem — still desperate to be heard, intent on outsize influence, musing in his handwritten notebooks about killing more Americans.
“My father would not look forward to staying indoors month after month, because he is a man who loves everything about nature,” Omar bin Laden, a son of Bin Laden, said in an e-mail message in 2009. “But if I were to say what he would need to survive, I would say food and water. He would go inward and occupy himself with his mind.”
Abbottabad, a scenic hill cantonment for the British Raj and later home to the elite military academy that is Pakistan’s West Point, became the Bin Laden family base in late 2005. Their large compound, in a new neighborhood on the outskirts of town, is now the most photographed house in the country, with stories spilling forth from astonished neighbors. Bin Laden, who was the tall man C.I.A. officers watched pacing the courtyard from a surveillance post nearby, never went out. The neighbors knew the family as Arshad Khan and Tariq Khan, the local aliases of the trusted courier — he also went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — and his brother.
The Khans seemed pleasant enough, but they kept to themselves behind their 12-foot concrete walls and barbed wire, the neighbors said. They never invited anyone in or went to others’ homes, although they did go to prayers in the mosque and funerals in the neighborhood. The women only left the compound with their husbands in a car, covered in black burqas. The children rarely played outside. When neighborhood boys playing in the fields let a ball fly into the compound by mistake, the Khans gave them 50 rupees, less than a dollar, to buy a new one rather than let them in to retrieve it.
“We thought maybe they had killed someone back in their village or something like that and were therefore very cautious,” said a neighbor, an engineer who identified himself as Zaheer.
The brothers had two cars, a red Suzuki van and a white Suzuki jeep, and paid double the daily wage (about $2.40) to laborers who worked on the house as it was being built in 2004. They offered various explanations to the neighbors about their comparative wealth, once saying they had a hotel in Dubai or that they worked in the money-changing business. They were Pashtuns from Charsadda, in Pakistan’s northwest frontier.
“They never told us why they came here,” said Naheed Abassi, 21, a driver and farm laborer who said he worked on construction of the house. The courier and his brother, both in their 30s and killed in the raid, were sons of a man Bin Laden, generally believed to be 54, had known for decades. A Bin Laden son, Khalid, who lived in the home and was also killed, was married to a sister of either the courier or his brother, Pakistani officials said.
Little is known about how Bin Laden managed his relationships with his three wives. (Islam traditionally allows a man to have four wives.) But on the night he was killed, Bin Laden was in his bedroom with his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, whose Yemeni passport shows her to be 29 years old, a quarter-century Bin Laden’s junior.
This wife was apparently the one shot by commandos in the leg as she rushed them in an effort to protect her husband. American officials say there were also children in the bedroom; Pakistani intelligence officers, in reports that have not been verified by American officials, say a 12-year-old girl told them that she was a daughter of Bin Laden and that she saw the Americans shoot her father. There was one woman killed in the raid, who was caught in cross-fire when the commandos killed the courier. A retired Pakistani intelligence officer, Brig. Asa Munir, said the woman was an Arab doctor.
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