Osama bin Laden feared his wife’s tooth held a tracking device
WASHINGTON: US drones were devastating the upper ranks of al-Qaida, his men were killing suspected spies, and Osama bin Laden wondered: Could an Iranian dentist have planted a tracking device in his wife’s tooth?
“The size of the chip is about the length of a grain of wheat and the width of a fine piece of vermicelli,” he wrote, using the nom de guerre Abu Abdallah.
A few paragraphs later, bin Laden signs off and then adds, “Please destroy this letter after reading it.”
The letter was among thousands of pages of documents and other materials seized by Navy SEALs during the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011, and it was declassified Tuesday with 112 other pieces of writings and letters found in the al-Qaida leader’s hideout.
US officials have said that the intelligence seized by the SEALs during the raid included letters, spreadsheets, books and pornography. Yet only a fraction of the materials have been made public — Tuesday’s release was the second set of documents from the raid to be declassified — and experts have cautioned against drawing broad conclusions until there is more.
The bulk of the materials released Tuesday come from the last decade of bin Laden’s life, and include letters to lieutenants and loved ones, drafts of speeches he was preparing to release and stray bits of operational minutia.
Though there do not appear to be any major revelations, the materials provide a glimpse of bin Laden’s thinking and his struggle to keep al-Qaida’s main branch and its offshoots in line as US drones killed the group’s senior leaders and demoralized its foot soldiers.
Bin Laden’s will
An undated will that bin Laden is believed to have written by hand in the late 1990s was included in the documents released Tuesday.
In it, Bin Laden reviewed his finances, saying he had received $12 million from one of his brothers and that he had $29 million in Sudan, where he lived from 1991 to 1996. If he was killed, he wrote, he hoped his family would “spend all the money that I have left in Sudan on Jihad.”
A senior intelligence official, who the CIA insisted speak on the condition of anonymity, said the agency did not know what became of the money, or if any of it remained at the time of bin Laden’s death. But the will, the official said, was probably important to bin Laden, because he carried it with him for years.
Fear of surveillance
The fixation on the possibility of his own premature death, and the fear of the US efforts to track him and kill him, is a theme that surfaces again and again. In one letter, bin Laden warns that a suitcase used to deliver a ransom could contain a tracking device.
Even people presenting themselves as friends were not trusted. In another letter, which does not appear to have been written by bin Laden, the author relates that a Qatari diplomat visited al-Qaida members in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and brought gifts, including a “huge” watch.
But after the diplomat left, a militant identified by the pseudonym Abu Umamah took the watch and “smashed it with a hammer” because he was afraid of it.
Read full article: Economic Times
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