Bin Laden’s Last Will and Testament—and Other Oddities

Daniel R. DePetris

Security,

On March 1, the U.S. government released its third batch of Osama bin Laden files.

When Seal Team Six launched its midnight raid into Pakistan on May 1, 2011, and surprised Osama Bin-Laden in his boxer shorts in his Abbottabad compound, the United States succeeded in finally tracking down and killing the world’s most wanted terrorist thirteen years after he first declared war on America. But the closely guarded operation was just as important for its intelligence value. American personnel not only netted its biggest counterterrorism victory in a decade, but swept up thousands upon thousands of pages of information from bin Laden’s computer files.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has spent the better part of four years translating these documents, scrubbing them for any actionable intelligence that the U.S. military and intelligence community can use in the field, and releasing select portions into the public domain. On March 1, ODNI released its third batch of UBL files. They portray a man who desperately attempted to stay relevant in his very own organization, someone who obsessively sent messages to his subordinates on the most mundane of topics, and a terrorist mastermind who was consumed by paranoia.

Bin Laden’s Will

It’s common knowledge that Osama bin Laden was a very rich man. His father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, was a construction magnate from Yemen who compiled a massive fortune helping the Saudi royal family build the kind the infrastructure that was required for the country to survive and prosper. King Faisal issued a decree that essentially provided Mohammed bin Laden with a monopoly on all construction projects in the kingdom. By all indications, King Faisal and Mohammed were close.