Bin Laden’s Carefully Guarded Emails
Even if he had no access to Internet or phone lines at his compound, as “those would have been a great risk to his personal safety”, according to Bill Roggio, Osama bin Laden was a very skilled writer and communicator of his self-imposed isolation.
He was using couriers, saving all of his email correspondence to a flash drive, which the courier would then send away from an Internet café. Navy SEALs managed to retrieve around 100 of these drives, which proves that bin laden was highly involved in crucial al Qaeda operations, even after some leaders of the world came to the conclusion that his responsibilities were handed off to Ayman al-Zawahri.
As Roggio confirmed, “the emails are proof that bin Laden never surrender his operational or strategic control”. Roggio was granted advance access to lots of al Qaeda’s leader’s files, even before the CIA released them publicly. “He was issuing orders and was being briefed on many reports, promotions, reassignments, strategy and ideological issues, such as fatwahs and religious rulings.”
