Residents, looking from atop an adjacent building to the compound where Osama Bin Laden was killed in an operation by US Navy SEALs, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 4, 2011.
To join al-Qaida in Osama bin Laden's day, prospective recruits had to take an arduous and risky journey to the network's haven in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan, the heartland of global Islamist militancy.
Then they had to fill in an
application.
The three pages of questions show how al-Qaida, in its vision of itself as a disciplined network of committed militants, blended the mundanely bureaucratic with the frighteningly absurd. Among the queries: "Do you wish to execute a suicide operation?" and "Who should we contact in case you become a martyr?"
The last line provided space for the address and phone number of next of kin.
The application, which was among nearly 80 documents and other materials, including books and press clippings, seized from bin Laden's compound during the raid by Navy SEAL members in May 2011, was declassified Wednesday by the Obama administration.
The material offers the deepest look yet into bin Laden's final years - much of which he appears to have spent sending missives to his subordinates, seeking to direct a terror network that appeared to have grown far beyond his control, and working his way through a pile of books that ranged from sober works of history and current affairs to wild conspiracy theories spun by anti-Semites.
He also appeared to have maintained a keen interest in what the U.S. government thought of al-Qaida. A copy of "The 9/11 Commission Report" was found in the compound in Abbottabad, as were three reports on al-Qaida by the Congressional Research Service. There was also an application for American citizenship (no word on whether it was filled out).
Apart from reading materials, most of the documents are letters between bin Laden and his lieutenants and writings by other loyalists and operatives. The documents do contain snippets of previously unknown information about al-Qaida, such as the fact that its Taliban benefactors objected to the Sept. 11 attacks and the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, U.S. officials said.
But it was the list of books found in bin Laden's compound that garnered the most interest Wednesday. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which managed the release, seized on bin Laden's reading list to promote it, titling the Web page listing all the now-public material "Bin Laden's Bookshelf."
Some of the books would be familiar to anyone interested in global affairs, such as "Obama's Wars," by Bob Woodward; "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," by Paul Kennedy; and "Imperial Hubris," by Michael Scheuer, the former official who once ran the CIA's bin Laden desk.
Other titles hinted at a paranoid worldview fostered by conspiracy theory classics such as "Bloodlines of the Illuminati," by Fritz Springmeier and "The Secrets of the Federal Reserve" by Eustace Mullins, a Holocaust denier.
He also kept scanned copies of Arabic newspapers. His English-language media diet seems to have leaned toward international news - six copies of Foreign Policy magazine were found in the compound - and articles about al-Qaida, such as one from The Los Angeles Times in 2005, "Is Al-Qaida Just Bush's Boogeyman?"
Bin Laden was either fascinated or frustrated by computers - or both - with more than two dozen instructional manuals for programs such as Adobe Photoshop and hardware like Intel circuit boards.
And he was apparently engrossed by France: He had 19 stories, essays and books about the country.
Wednesday's release came after years of pressure for the Obama administration to declassify material seized from the compound. Last year, Congress directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to look over the material.
The review, which began in May 2014, is expected to continue through the summer and into the fall, said Jeffrey S. Anchukaitis, a spokesman for the intelligence office. But the White House asked that office and the CIA to begin releasing material immediately because of "the increasing public demand to review those documents," he said.
The timing of the release also gave the administration a chance to push back indirectly on Seymour M. Hersh's recent article about bin Laden's death in The London Review of Books. The article, which was published this month, said the Obama administration had lied about the raid, and claimed it was staged in cooperation with Pakistan, which had been holding bin Laden prisoner in his compound.
Administration officials have dismissed the article.
Much of what came out of the compound remains classified, and the latest release brings to 103 the total number of documents from the raid that are now publicly available.
Most of the documents appear to be notes between bin Laden and his top deputies. There is talk of training recruits, and of how to select the most talented to carry out major attacks in the West. There are discussions of who to promote, and how to deal with the group's franchises in the Middle East and North Africa.
Experts have cautioned against drawing broad conclusions about the state of al-Qaida and bin Laden's role in the organization from the limited selection of documents, saying the sample size is too small relative to the cache of material that remains classified.
But one conclusion appears certain: Bin Laden was deep into the minutiae of al-Qaida's daily operations. A spreadsheet of various expenses for April to December 2009 was found in the compound, for instance, and in a letter dated Aug. 7, 2010, bin Laden advised a deputy not to give advances on monthly salaries to al-Qaida operatives.
"They could spend the money and then come back and ask for a loan," he wrote.
And there was the citizenship application. Whether it was ever used is a question U.S. officials did not answer. But in any case, the application's intent represents a codification of bin Laden's vision of al-Qaida as a network of skilled operatives who have been vetted and trained and are ready to be dispatched to inflict spectacular attacks.
What would happen after his own death is a question that appears to have weighed on bin Laden. In a letter written to one of his wives that was released Wednesday, bin Laden said that if he were killed and she wanted to remarry, "I have no objection."
"But you have to raise my children properly and to watch them, and be careful of bad company for them," he wrote in the letter from Aug. 15, 2008.
And then he added one more caveat: If she remarried, on Judgment Day she would have to pick only one husband with whom to spend eternity. He wrote, "I really want for you to be my wife in paradise."
© 2015, The New York Times News Service