The Big Reveal: The Story of How 470,000 Documents from Osama Bin Laden's Compound Finally Got Into the Open
The CIA has finally released 470,000 files recovered from the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. Here's why it took so long.
Osama bin Laden in 1988. (WTN PICS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House,
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release
meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office.
“Closing the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final
Abbottabad Documents,” the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (ODNI) announced. “Today marks the end of a
two-and-a-half-year effort to declassify several hundred documents
recovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan,
compound in May 2011.” Accompanying the press release were 49 documents
captured during the raid, bringing the total number of documents made
public to 571.
For anyone who had paid even casual attention to the long-running
debate over the Abbottabad documents—a group that doesn’t include many
journalists—the ODNI announcement was cause for a chuckle. Closing the
book on Osama bin Laden? The final Abbottabad documents?
In the heady days immediately after the May 2 Abbottabad raid,
President Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, had described
the intelligence haul brought back from Pakistan by the Navy SEALs and
CIA operatives as extensive enough to fill a “small college library.” A
senior military intelligence official who briefed reporters at the
Pentagon on May 7, 2011, said: “As a result of the raid, we’ve acquired
the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”
Why would ODNI think it could get away with such an aggressive lie?
Why would officials there believe that they wouldn’t be asked to
reconcile the fact that they were releasing just 571 documents with the
repeated pronouncements that the Abbottabad collection was the largest
haul of terrorist intelligence ever?
The answer: The self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in
history” had spent more than five years misleading the American people
about the threat from al Qaeda and its offshoots and had paid very
little price for having done so. Republicans volubly disputed the
president’s more laughable claims—the attack on the Benghazi compound
was just a protest gone bad, al Qaeda was on the run, ISIS was the
terrorist junior varsity—but the establishment media, certain that
Obama’s predecessor had consistently exaggerated the threat, showed
little interest in challenging Obama or the intelligence agencies that
often supported his spurious case.
In this context, ODNI’s bet wasn’t a crazy one. No one outside of a
small group of terrorism researchers and intelligence professionals had
paid much attention to the fate of the bin Laden documents. The
likelihood that these ODNI claims would get much scrutiny in the middle
of the frenzy that accompanies a presidential transition was low. ODNI
dismissively swatted away questions about the absurd claims in the
release with absurd claims about the document collection itself: The
unreleased documents weren’t interesting or important, just terrorist
trash of little interest to anyone. The documents being withheld would
do little to enhance our understanding of al Qaeda or the jihadist
threat more generally, they said.
This is what the politicization of intelligence looks like.
* *
In the spring of 2012, with the Republican presidential primaries
nearing an end and shortly before the first anniversary of the
successful raid on bin Laden’s compound, Obama’s National Security
Council hand-picked 17 documents to be provided to the Combating
Terrorism Center at West Point for analysis. (Obama’s NSC would later
hold back two of those documents. One of them, laying out the deep ties
between the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda leadership, would complicate
Obama administration efforts to launch negotiations with the Taliban,
according to an explanation the NSC’s Doug Lute offered to West Point.)
The West Point documents were shared with Obama-friendly journalists.
Their conclusion was the only one possible, given the documents they
were provided: At the time of his death, Osama bin Laden was frustrated
and isolated, a relatively powerless leader of a dying organization. In
the summer and fall of 2012, Obama would use this theme as the main
national security rationale for his reelection: Al Qaeda was alternately
“on the run” or “decimated” or “on the path to defeat.”
