A Mole in Bin Laden's Compound?

The Daily Mail (UK) reports that SEAL TEAM Six dropped something akin to a facebook during the raid on bin Laden's compound, and that the existence of a previously unknown picture of bin Laden's youngest wife, Amal, suggests there was a mole within the compound providing intelligence to U.S. intelligence.

Um, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no, there wasn't a mole in bin Laden's camp.

One of the things that made bin Laden so difficult to track during the 13-year manhunt was the intense loyalty of his followers.  Former U.S. counterterrorist official Roger Cressey once told Peter Bergen that an al-Qaeda operative betraying bin Laden would be like "a Catholic giving up the Pope."  Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of Al Quds al Arabi newspaper, said: "I don't believe they will surrender him.  He's adored by the people around him.  For them, he is not a leader.  He is everything.  He's the father; he's the brother; he is a leader; he is the imam."  And Maulana Sami al-Haq, head of Pakistan's largest religious academy explained, "He's a hero to us."

What is true of his followers is likely doubly so for his spouses, who after Tora Bora returned to their families in either Saudi Arabia or Yemen.  All three chose to return to bin Laden at some point while he was in hiding in Pakistan despite having the option of obtaining a divorce and remaining safely at home. 

Although it is possible that one may have been tracked to Abbottabad, this would have been an inadvertent revelation of bin Laden's location, not a conscious betrayal as suggested by the word "mole" or implied by Pakistan's Interior Minister.  Even this scenario is far fetched, as bin Laden and his family/families supposedly had been living in Abbottabad for five years.  If they had tracked Amal from Yemen to Pakistan the raid should have been launched a long time ago.  

As I noted last week, a significant portion of the stories that emerge in the week's after bin Laden's death are as likely to be speculation based upon bare threads as actual reality.