Details of bin Laden from his last hideout

WASHINGTON -- Surrounded by the din of his multiple families within walls that were both his sanctuary and prison, Osama bin Laden pecked endlessly at a computer, issuing directives to his scattered and troubled terrorist empire. It's not clear who really listened.

Go big, he told al-Qaida operatives and affiliates.

They mostly went small.

The latest intelligence from the wealth of material found at bin Laden's last hideout paints a complicated picture of the fugitive, both deeply engaged in his life's violent mission and somewhat out to pasture.

Inside the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound, he kept busy scheming plots, rehearsed and recorded propaganda, and dispatched couriers to distant Internet cafes to conduct his email traffic, using computer flash drives to relay messages he would write and store from his shabby office. He dyed his gray beard black to keep up appearances for the videos.

To U.S. officials, who possess bin Laden's handwritten personal journal as well as an enormous cache of his digital documents, the still-unfolding discoveries show he was more involved in trying to plan al-Qaida's post-911 operations than they had thought possible for a man in perpetual hiding.

Even so, he was disconnected from his organization in real time, lacking phones or the Internet at his hideout and with loyalists hunted at every turn.

Among the items found was an unreleased audiotape, recorded about a week before the raid, in which bin Laden praises those who rebelled in the "Arab spring," referring to revolts in the Mideast and North Africa, a U.S. official says. But bin Laden only mentions Egypt and Tunisia, though he would have been aware through news broadcasts on his cable TV feed of the uprisings in Libya, Syria and the Gulf state Bahrain, the official noted, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

For a man working from home, there seemed to be many distractions.

The U.S. raiders who killed him, a grown son and others May 2 encountered 23 children and nine women, including three of his wives, on the grounds of the three-story complex behind walls stained with mold, officials said afterward. The United States has questioned those widows, the Pentagon said Friday without revealing if anything was learned.

There is no dispute that bin Laden spent time in his lair dreaming up ways to kill Americans in great numbers again, for the terrorist believed that only mass casualties could move U.S. policy. Communicating both with his core group and al-Qaida affiliates, he advised plots against cities spared on Sept. 11, 2001, such as Los Angeles, and wanted to explore attacking trains.

Whatever the target, he sought a body count of thousands, the records indicate.

But not everyone was marching to his drum.

The Yemen branch of al-Qaida, which now overshadows bin Laden's central operation as the organization's top money-raising, propaganda and operational arm, has embraced the smaller-scale attacks that bin Laden thought were unsuccessful. Others in the network, too, have urged the like-minded to kill Americans wherever and however they can, without coordination or elaborate planning.

So far, intelligence officials have not identified specific targets or plots for coming attacks in their initial analysis of the 100 or so flash drives and five computers that the assault team took from the compound. Nor have they found that bin Laden was capable of coordinating the timing of attacks across the various al-Qaida affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq and Somalia.

Officials have seen no evidence that he was directly behind the attempted Christmas Day 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner or the nearly successful attack on cargo planes heading for Chicago and Philadelphia, as much as those operations seemed out of his playbook.Indeed, it remains unknown just what bin Laden accomplished for his jihad after the attacks of 2001 other than to stay alive and at large for nearly a decade afterward. That itself was quite a feat, but one that denied him a reprise of the American body count he wanted until the end.