During a terror trial in Brooklyn last month, federal prosecutors entered into evidence several files recovered in Osama bin Laden’s compound. The documents, consisting mainly of letters to and from bin Laden during the last year of his life, gained more and more attention over the weeks that followed. There are simply too many revelations to ignore. And so the documents have been featured in news coverage around the globe, from primetime television in Pakistan to the front page of the New York Times.
The files show that the Pakistani government, including the brother of the current prime minister and Pakistani intelligence “leaders,” sought out negotiations with al Qaeda. Pakistani leaders were willing to cut a deal as long as al Qaeda directed its terror elsewhere. In another episode documented in the letters, al Qaeda successfully orchestrated the kidnapping of an Afghan diplomat, receiving $5 million in ransom. Some of the cash, according to the New York Times, came from CIA funds given to the Afghan government. Al Qaeda continued to explore ways to attack the West in bin Laden’s final year, and even considered plotting attacks from Turkey and Iran. And the files show that al Qaeda has a much more significant presence in Afghanistan than many U.S. officials have claimed.
This is just some of what the new documents reveal. And it stands to reason that there are many more front-page-worthy details in the files that remain classified.
As The Weekly Standard has previously reported, more than one million documents and files were captured during the raid that led to bin Laden’s demise. In May 2012, the Obama administration released just 17 of these files. The trial exhibits released last month bring the total number of documents available to the American public to about two dozen. This is still a paltry sampling. The calls for additional transparency, however, and for the release of more documents are growing louder.
Two weeks after the newly available bin Laden letters became a news story, CNN’s national security analyst, Peter Bergen, weighed in. “It’s long past time for the government to release more of these thousands of captured documents,” Bergen wrote at CNN.com. If anything, Bergen understated the number of files being withheld from the public. The total number, again, exceeds one million.
Ironically, the closer one looks at Bergen’s reporting on the bin Laden files, the stronger the case for transparency becomes. It is obvious the American people cannot take White House officials at their word when they describe the files’ contents. Bergen, of all people, should know this.
Before any documents were made public in May 2012, certain Washington journalists were given preferential access. Bergen was one of them. “At the White House, I was allowed to review a number of those just-declassified, unpublished documents in mid-March 2012,” Bergen writes in his 2012 book, Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad. (In the book’s acknowledgments, Bergen thanks two White House staffers, Ben Rhodes and Jamie Smith, for their help.)
After surveying the evidence he was given access to, Bergen concluded that bin Laden was out of the terror game at the time of his death. Manhunt begins with a prologue entitled “A Comfortable Retirement.” Bin Laden “spent much of his enforced leisure time writing on a variety of themes,” Bergen argued.
Bergen’s prologue concluded by driving home this theme: “It was a comfortable, if confining, retirement for al Qaeda’s leader. He was able to indulge his hobbies of reading and following the news, and of course he continued rigorously to observe the tenets of Islam. He was attended by three of his wives and surrounded by many of the children he loved. For the world’s most wanted fugitive, it was not a bad life. Not bad at all.”
Except this isn’t true. In his piece for CNN.com earlier this month, Bergen espoused precisely the opposite view. “Far from the image of the isolated man in the cave that was prevalent before he was killed, the documents portray bin Laden as a hands-on manager of al Qaeda,” Bergen wrote.
It is impossible for these two conclusions to both be right. Either bin Laden was indulging his hobbies in “retirement,” or he was a “hands-on manager.” Bergen does not alert readers to his dramatic about-face.
Perhaps Bergen came to his first conclusion in 2012 on his own, without any specific guidance from the Obama administration, which was coincidentally pushing the same line. However, it is difficult to believe this was a coincidence at all. Other journalists given VIP access to the bin Laden documents by the White House, including the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, came to the same conclusion at precisely the same time. On March 18, 2012, Ignatius wrote that the “few documents shown to me by a senior Obama administration official give a sense of how bin Laden looked at the world in the years before his death.” Bin Laden, Ignatius informed the Post’s readers, was “the lion in winter.”
Bergen has led the charge in declaring al Qaeda dead for years. Remarkably, Bergen’s opinion has remained unchanged even as the basic underlying facts, including his own understanding of bin Laden’s role, have, shall we say, evolved. In a piece written in June 2012, for instance, Bergen claimed that al Qaeda had only “one senior leader left.” This was obviously false at the time, and the bin Laden files identify a number of al Qaeda leaders who remain alive today. “Al Qaeda played no role in the Arab Spring and hasn’t been able to exploit in any meaningful way the most significant development in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,” Bergen argued in the same piece. The bin Laden files show that al Qaeda had already sent operatives to the so-called Arab Spring nations more than a year before Bergen wrote those words. Al Qaeda maintains a strong foothold in several of those countries to this day.
Undaunted, Bergen sees al Qaeda’s demise in the newly released documents. The title of his CNN.com piece is “A gripping glimpse into bin Laden’s decline and fall.” None of the details that cut against his conclusion appear in the piece.
Bergen begins his analysis of the files by arguing they show al Qaeda “understood it had severe problems resulting from the CIA drone program that was killing many of the group’s leaders in Pakistan’s tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.” This was no secret, however. Al Qaeda’s leadership losses are well documented. There is no question the airstrikes have severely damaged al Qaeda’s management infrastructure in South Asia. The al Qaeda letters emphasize the “toll” the “espionage war” had taken on bin Laden’s group, leaving them “short in staff and leaders.”
This is not the end of the story, however. The files offer us interesting insights into how al Qaeda planned to outlast the drone campaign and replenish its leadership cadre. Some leaders returned from Iran, where they had been held in a form of detention for years. Al Qaeda was encouraged by their reintegration. And, as Bergen notes, the group discussed moving its surviving leaders out of the drones’ kill box in northern Pakistan.
The environment in Afghanistan was especially appealing, as Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, al Qaeda’s general manager at the time, pointed out in a July 2010 letter to bin Laden. “As I have explained before, we have a good battalion over there led by Faruq al Qatari,” Rahman wrote. “He is the best of a good crew. He recently sent us a message telling us that he has arranged everything to receive us; he said the locations are good, there are supporters and everything.” Al Qaeda did in fact move some of its leaders into Afghanistan, where Qatari remains firmly embedded.
Even at the height of the drone campaign in 2010 al Qaeda was grooming its next generation of leaders. “Please send us the résumés of all the brothers who may be nominated now or in the future for important management positions,” bin Laden wrote to Rahman in a letter dated August 7, 2010. “I would appreciate it if you can ask each one of them to write down his outlook on the Jihad work in general and their opinions and suggestions on any of the Jihad arenas.” A letter from Rahman to bin Laden just weeks earlier shows that al Qaeda had already begun preparing its “new generation,” including “team members and leaders.”
Bergen sees al Qaeda’s “weakness” in its attempt to negotiate a ceasefire with Pakistani authorities in the summer of 2010. The files tell a different story. One June 19, 2010, letter, written from Rahman to bin Laden, describes the jihadists’ ongoing insurgency against the Pakistanis. Both the “brothers” in the tribal areas and “our foreign brothers who are working with them” had reported that the Pakistani Army was “losing soldiers nearly every day.” Rahman continued, “There are always several operations under way, mines detonating, snipers, and even assaults on forward army positions.”
The army had even “tried to mount a broad campaign” in one of the tribal areas, Rahman explained, but “it appears like it was not able to” because there “were many Mujahidin there, ready to repel the army” and “they did so repeatedly.” In fact, bin Laden’s chief lieutenant believed that the Pakistanis’ war in the tribal areas “is lost in every sense.” In short, al Qaeda did not think it was negotiating from a position of “weakness.”
Bergen has repeatedly downplayed any suggestion that Pakistani duplicity accounts for bin Laden’s safe haven in Abbottabad. The publicly available bin Laden letters are insufficient to draw any firm conclusion. Still, Bergen goes too far in offering an apologia for Pakistani authorities. Regarding the negotiations, Bergen writes there “is no evidence in the documents indicating that the Pakistani government had any clue about bin Laden’s location or presence in Pakistan.”
The documents show that Pakistani authorities knew how to get in touch with al Qaeda’s senior leaders, using prominent jihadists as cut-outs. Those same jihadists are the ones the Pakistanis “approve” of, Rahman noted. Pakistan’s preferred jihadists also just happened to be some of bin Laden’s closest allies, including Fazlur-Rahman Khalil, who signed bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against the West and Israel. Khalil has been designated a terrorist by the U.S. government.
The files make it clear that while Iranian officials held some al Qaeda leaders in custody, others were allowed to operate on the mullahs’ soil. Bergen quotes from one document to argue that al Qaeda decided against opening an Iranian office. The citation, however, clearly refers to a specific, isolated decision. Another document, written in April 2011, just weeks before bin Laden’s death, refers to al Qaeda’s “coordinator” in Iran. This same jihadist is almost certainly an al Qaeda leader known as Yasin al-Suri. The U.S. Treasury Department designated Suri a terrorist in July 2011, noting he was the head of al Qaeda’s Iran-based network. Suri serves in that capacity under an agreement between the Iranian regime and al Qaeda.
The al Qaeda files require careful analysis. And without many more of the files it is impossible to tell the whole story. The Obama administration and many analysts in Washington have repeatedly declared al Qaeda dead, or close to it. Much has changed in the world since bin Laden’s death, and, of course, not everything has gone al Qaeda’s way. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, for example, has challenged al Qaeda’s authority over the global jihadist movement. In addition, American-led counterterrorism efforts have stopped many of its plots and taken out numerous al Qaeda leaders. Yet, al Qaeda is alive and threatens the West.
Osama bin Laden’s files are the best source of information on al Qaeda, shedding light on the past and offering an explanation as to why we live with this enduring threat. Peter Bergen argues that many more of the files should be released. On that score, at least, there is common ground.
After all, we can’t trust the White House to tell us what is in them.
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
