Osama bin Laden was a prolific email writer and built a meticulous system that kept him one step ahead of the best American spies despite not having access to the Internet at his hideout in Abbotabad, Pakistan.
His methods, described in detail by a counterterrorism official and a second person familiar with the U.S. investigation, worked well for him for years and thwarted the West's efforts to follow him through cyberspace. The arrangements allowed Bin Laden to stay in touch with the world without leaving any fingerprints. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence analysis.
Osama's system was built on discipline and trust. But it also left behind an extensive email-sharing archive that the U.S. is going to investigate. The trove of electronic records removed from his compound after he was killed last week is revealing thousands of messages and potentially hundreds of email addresses, people said.
Locked in his walled compound in northeastern Pakistan, with no phone or internet connection, bin Laden had to write a message on his computer without an internet connection, then save it using a thumb-sized USB flash drive. He then passed the memory to a trusted messenger, who was on his way to a distant Internet café.
There, the messenger would plug the memory unit into a computer, copy bin Laden's message into an email, and send it out. Reversing the process, the messenger copied any incoming email into memory and returned to the compound, where the Al-Qaeda leader read his messages offline.
It was a slow and laborious process. And it was so meticulous that even veteran intelligence officials have been amazed at bin Laden's ability to keep him for so long. The United States always suspected that bin Laden communicated through messengers, but did not anticipate the volume of his communications as revealed by the materials he left behind.
The assault team found about 100 USB sticks in the Bin Laden compound. The trail of electronic documents is so huge that the government has hired Arabic-speaking people from across the intelligence community to study them thoroughly.
U.S. government officials have said the records did not reveal a new terror plot, but showed bin Laden remained involved in al-Qaeda's operations long after the United States assumed it had passed control to his lieutenant, Egypt's Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Source: La Nación
