eleven years ago a team of two dozen navy seals flew under the cover of darkness into a badabad
pakistan to carry out one of the most important counter-terrorism missions in history to capture
or kill osama bin laden 30 minutes into that mission the seals had their man and something they
were not expecting thousands of pages of osama bin laden's personal letters and notes in 2017 the cia
declassified most of those letters without context and little translation author and islamic scholar
nelly lahood wanted to read it all she spent much of her career researching al-qaeda with stints
at harvard and cambridge universities and she's fluent in arabic so she dug in carefully examining
many of those documents line by line tonight we'll hear what she found gaining a rare glimpse
into the inner sanctum of al qaeda through the bin laden papers the story will continue in a moment
this is the bustling city of abadabad pakistan
from overhead you can still see the scar in the landscape this vacant lot where boys now play
cricket is where osama bin laden's home once stood and where the world's most wanted terrorists hid
until the evening of may 1st 2011. tonight i can report to the american people and to the world
that the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden the operation called
neptune spear took 30 minutes but then one seal alerted command that they'd found a ton
of computers and electronics and needed more time the seals were granted 10 more minutes
that stretched into 18. they grabbed computers vhs tapes books thumb drives hard drives and notebooks
carrying them out in bags strung around their neck how important was that last
minute decision by the seal team to take those documents bin laden's greatest fear
was about exposing al-qaeda's secrets and so the fact that the seals decided to recover these
these letters ensured that al-qaeda's secrets were exposed in 2012 nelly lahud was teaching
at west point when the cia declassified the first 17 documents from the raid she was asked to lead
the analysis of those documents for west point's combating terrorism center for the last five years
she's been reading translating and analyzing the remaining declassified documents consulting
with u.s generals admirals and members of the special forces community to make sense of it all
there are home videos like this one of osama bin laden's son hamza getting married in iran family
photos audio files and letters five hundred thousand files in all nelly lahood focused
on six thousand pages of them for her book the bin laden papers so you were creating kind of
a narrative based on all of the documents and you couldn't do it any other way you couldn't
have a division of labor where several people would take on because they're all so connected
vague references in one letter can only be explained if you looked at several other letters
so really to get a grasp of what was really going on you really need to be able to have read them
all together letters were the only way osama bin laden communicated with al-qaeda associates
for nearly a decade because he was trying to evade capture bin laden had television in his compound
but didn't have access to the internet or phone so everything was written by hand or on computers
and encrypted on flash drives that were given to couriers to deliver all the letters were backed up
on hard drives we see in the letters uh dimunitive bin laden somebody who is very different from this
powerful figure that we were reading about daily in the newspapers for over a decade
and the disconnect between his ambitions and between his capabilities is confounding that
disconnect was clear immediately after the 9 11 attacks al-qaeda did not anticipate
that the united states would go to war what did they think was going to happen it's a limited
airstrike but they didn't think that they would go beyond that but as the war raged on in afghanistan
lahud says these letters show that osama bin laden was surprised by how americans reacted to 9 11.
he thought that the american people would take to the streets replicate the anti-vietnam war protest
and they would put pressure on their governments to withdraw from muslim majority states the large
miscalculation a huge miscalculation in november of 2002 u.s intelligence officials warned al qaeda
might be planning quote spectacular attacks that could cause mass casualties but lahood
says letters show that by that time al qaeda was weak top leaders had been killed or forced into
hiding the terrorist organization was rudderless there is definitely a narrative that bin laden
was still controlling al qaeda from behind the scenes the puppet master somewhere hidden away but
is that what the papers show fafurmant so he was not calling the shots absolutely she says osama
bin laden didn't communicate with his al-qaeda associates for three years because he was on the
run it's still unknown exactly where he was hiding but in 2004 he reconnects with al-qaeda in this
letter offering surviving members his new plan to attack america he's very eager to replicate the 9
11 attacks and in the united states you know he he is mindful that now the security conditions
are very difficult at airports she read as part of this chilling letter from osama bin laden to
the head of al qaeda's international terror units bin laden writes that rather than hijack a plane
operatives should charter one for their next attack on the u.s and adds if that's too
difficult they should target u.s railways then bin laden who had a degree in civil engineering
explains exactly how to do it he wanted to have 12 meters of steel rail removed
so that this way the train could be derailed and we find him explaining the the simple tool
kit that they could use you know he said here you could use a compressor you could use smelting iron
tool and he's in in those small details at the granule most granular level what does that say to
you he's very methodical very methodical he thinks he doesn't want to leave anything for chance
fortunately he was never able to execute his plan because lahood says al-qaeda had been gutted by
the war she read us this letter from tafiq a young associate who was running operations for
al-qaeda in afghanistan and pakistan he's telling osama bin laden just how incapacitated the terror
organization had become the weakness failure and aimlessness that befell us were harrowing
we muslims were defiled and desecrated our state was ripped asunder our lands were occupied our
resources were plundered and he's giving the state of al-qaeda to osama bin laden who probably hasn't
heard this he didn't know he didn't know the reality and he actually warns him that i'm
going to tell you the truth as it is and i know that some of the brothers here are not telling
you everything in detail because they don't want to upset you particularly because of the delicate
situations in which you find yourself with that delicate situation is bin laden's life in hiding
by 2005 osama bin laden was living behind the 18-foot walls of the abadabad compound he shared
with some of his wives children and grandchildren seen here in this video seized during the raid
in this clip bin laden's 22 year old son khalid is showing off the compound's meeker gardens
and animals he tends to khaled also recorded his father's public statements that were
intended to be seen around the world you can hear him giggling as the lights malfunction
but nellie lahood says it was actually two of bin laden's daughters who played the greater
role in crafting their father's messages and jihad missions the people who really worked on osama's
public statements were mostly his daughters mariam and sumayyah one of the pages you know
we find osama soliciting explicitly start preparing start thinking about
the ideas that need to go to the pop into the public statement that's his own words
is this surprising how involved they were yes it was it was surprising to me in the world
of al-qaeda and if jihadism broadly women are not part of the public face of jihad but privately the
bin laden women were very involved in this letter to a relative bilan's wife see him is mourning the
loss of a daughter who died in childbirth but then the tone quickly changes and then she goes on to
shame and at the same time inside the men to take up she had and she says you know
our women and children are suffering while the men are being so vile and coward
so that's that's the kind of personality that we are encountering wow that the women in the
compound yes al qaeda was also running low on cash lahoot says documents show that in 2006
al qaeda had just 200 dollars in its coffers and was unable to support or control an increasingly
fractious jihad still she says osama bin laden kept plotting the hood showed us this letter to
another young associate eunice who'd impressed bin laden with his sharp intellect it says this
is specifically addressed to you top secret do not share it with anyone it is osama bin laden's plan
for another terror attack in 2010. this time he wanted to target multiple crude oil tankers and
major shipping routes around the middle east and africa he says it does not escape you the
importance of oil for this industrialized economy today and it is similar to blood for human beings
so if you cause somebody to bleed excessively even if you don't kill him you'll at least weaken him
and that's really what he really wanted to do to emerge to the american economy she says bin laden
details how al qaeda operatives should integrate themselves into those port areas as fishermen
he instructs them exactly where to buy a specific kind of wooden boat to evade radar and then once
again goes into the granular details of his plan the birds need to carry a large volume of
explosives preferably placed in an arch position facing the vessel so he's not only telling them
what explosives to buy he's telling them how to place the explosives in an arch position
but his final plan to attack seems to have been halted by something he never saw coming
the arab spring according to this family notebook a unique item seized in the raid the peaceful
protests were confusing and concerning to the bin ladens on one level they were very excited
by the fact that the people were able to bring down dictators but at the same time there were
all these question marks about what is the value of jihad at the moment and we find this really
throughout this notebook is jihad still necessary lahud says bin laden seen here in
the final months of his life was struggling with the answer to that question before he was killed
u.s intelligence agencies say most al qaeda terrorist activity is now being carried out by
smaller al-qaeda offshoots bin laden's second in command ayman al-zawahi now heads al-qaeda
this month he appeared in a new video denouncing the enemies of islam