ABBOTTABAD, PAKISTAN - Osama bin Laden was out of touch with the younger generation of Al-Qaida commanders, and they often didn't follow his advice during the years he was in hiding in northern Pakistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials now say.
Contradicting the assertions of some U.S. officials that Bin Laden was running a "command and control" center from a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, officials say that Bin Laden clearly wasn't in control of Al-Qaida, though he was trying to remain influential.
"He was like the cranky old uncle that people weren't listening to," said a U.S. official who has been briefed on the evidence collected from the compound and who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "The younger guys had never worked directly with him. They did not take everything he said as right."
Nearly two months after Bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs who raided his hideout, a more detailed picture is emerging of how the world's most wanted fugitive lived out his final years in this town in the Himalayan foothills.
Financial troubles?
One new detail is that the Bin Laden household was buying and selling gold jewelry, perhaps as a way to raise money. Another is that for a household that included at least nine women and twice that many children, its consumption of electricity and gas was far less than that of neighboring households, a sign either of Bin Laden's legendary frugality or an indication that the terrorist leader simply had run out of money and was living as cheaply as he could.
The SEALs who raided the compound scooped up computer hard drives and thumb drives that held a huge amount of data before they left the scene with Bin Laden's body. Most of that information has been sifted through now, allowing officials to reach better conclusions about how Bin Laden had been passing the time and with whom he'd been in contact.
The data provided no "smoking gun" that Pakistani intelligence or other Pakistani officials knew of Bin Laden's presence in the house. The computer records also lend credence to long-held beliefs that Bin Laden's longtime deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was named Al-Qaida's leader earlier this month, had been much more involved and important to the group's operations than Bin Laden had been in the past several years.
