When Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound on May 2, the ensuing coverage focused on how the death of Al Qaeda’s leader might undercut terrorism worldwide. But the raid accomplished more than bin Laden’s removal: It yielded several computers, nearly a dozen hard drives, and about 100 other data-storage devices. Speaking on “Meet the Press” the weekend after the raid, presidential national security adviser Tom Donilon called it “the largest cache of intelligence derived from the scene of any single terrorist.”
Inside Al Qaeda’s hard drives
A stash of data yields up insights about the business of terrorism
After combing over this huge pool of data, a task force of analysts has already produced hundreds of intelligence reports geared to a primary goal: hunting down Al Qaeda operatives. Meanwhile, however, there is a second and longer-term task ahead. If studied diligently enough, the captured data is likely to provide an unparalleled look at how Al Qaeda functions. And that information may be as essential to disrupting Al Qaeda’s activities as it was to kill bin Laden.
I speak from experience, because I was part of a team at the RAND Corporation that performed a multiyear analysis of a similar, albeit much smaller, data dump - the data seized from Al Qaeda in Iraq. Over four years, we sought to provide as clear a picture as possible of Al Qaeda in Iraq for military commanders and intelligence officials. We mined information from two sources: declassified documents found on a hard drive at a residence in Julaybah, Iraq, in 2007 by Iraqi Awakening forces, and documents discovered by a patrol of Marines in Tuzliyah, Anbar, Iraq, in that same year. Based on this data, we were able to build a portrait of Al Qaeda in Iraq as a business - and a business that ran quite differently than conventional wisdom would suggest.
Today, analysts searching through data from the bin Laden raid have only just begun a similarly painstaking and time-consuming process. It is this process, beyond simply killing off leaders at the top, that is most likely to lead us to a deep understanding of how groups such as Al Qaeda work. And it is that knowledge, in turn, that will give us the tools to defeat them.
From 2007 to 2010, our team scoured a set of captured financial and organizational documents covering the years 2005 and 2006, and centering on Anbar Province, where Al Qaeda in Iraq was most powerful at that time. What we found there put to rest conflicting theories about Al Qaeda in Iraq’s funding and membership, and revealed it to be a highly systemized, bureaucratic organization. In particular, we learned a remarkable amount about Al Qaeda in Iraq’s franchise status, its flow of money, and its organizational structure.
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