WASHINGTON - Despite having no Internet access in his hideout, Osama bin Laden was a prolific e-mail writer who built a painstaking system that kept him one step ahead of the U.S. government's best eavesdroppers.
His methods, described in new detail by a counterterrorism official and a second person briefed on the U.S. investigation, served him well for years and frustrated Western efforts to trace him through cyberspace. The arrangement allowed Bin Laden to stay in touch worldwide without leaving any digital fingerprints behind.
The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence analysis.
Bin Laden's system was built on discipline and trust. But it also left behind an extensive archive of e-mail exchanges for U.S. intelligence specialists to scour. The trove of electronic records pulled out of his compound after he was killed last week is revealing thousands of messages and potentially hundreds of e-mail addresses, the Associated Press has learned.
How it worked
Holed up in his walled compound in Pakistan with no phone or Internet capabilities, Bin Laden would type a message on his computer without an Internet connection, then save it using a thumb-sized flash drive. He then passed the flash drive to a courier, who would head for a distant Internet cafe.
There, the courier would plug the memory drive into a computer, copy Bin Laden's message into an e-mail and send it. Reversing the process, the courier would copy any incoming e-mail to the flash drive and return to the compound, where Bin Laden would read his messages offline.
It was such an involved process that even veteran intelligence officials have marveled at Bin Laden's ability to maintain it for so long. The United States always suspected he was communicating through couriers but did not anticipate the breadth of his communications as revealed by the materials he left behind.
Navy SEALs seized roughly 100 flash memory drives after they killed Bin Laden, and officials said they appear to provide an archive of the back-and-forth communication between Bin Laden and associates around the world.
Looking at Internet providers
Al-Qaida operatives are known to change e-mail addresses frequently; so it's unclear how many are still active since Bin Laden's death. But the long list of electronic addresses and phone numbers in the e-mails is expected to touch off a flurry of national security letters and subpoenas to Internet service providers.
The Justice Department is coming off a year in which it significantly increased the number of national security letters, which allow the FBI to quickly demand information from companies and others without a subpoena.
Officials gave no indication that Bin Laden was communicating with anyone inside the United States, but terrorists have historically used U.S.-based Internet providers or free Internet-based e-mail services.
