In the final months of his life, Osama bin Laden worried that an Iranian dentist had implanted a tracking chip in his wife’s tooth.
“I was told that you went to a dentist in Iran, and you were concerned about a filling she put in for you,” he wrote in a letter to his wife in January 2011. “Please let me know in detail about anything that bothers you about any hospital in Iran or any suspicions that any of the brothers may have about chips planted in any way.”
{mosads}The letter was in a batch of 113 documents released by the Obama administration Tuesday that Navy SEALs collected during the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011.
It’s the second release of documents from the compound. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has been poring over thousands of documents to see what can be made public.
The first release, in May, showed bin Laden surrounded himself with conspiracy theories, U.S. government documents and video game guides.
The most recent batch highlights the al Qaeda leader’s paranoia as U.S. forces closed in.
In bin Laden’s letter to his wife, written under the pseudonym Abu Abdallah, he theorized the dentist could have used a syringe to plant a chip under his wife’s skin.
“The size of the chip is about the length of a grain of wheat and the width of a fine piece of vermicelli,” he wrote.
He instructed his wife to destroy the letter after reading it.
In a letter about releasing an Afghan prisoner, he worried about American surveillance and tracking devices.
“There will never be a meeting with the negotiators inside Waziristan (meaning any area that is within the photography parameters of the American aircraft), unless there is a tight plan that prevents the enemy from following these negotiators, and accordingly, following the brothers. It is obvious that the news may reach the Americans that the specific entity is negotiating with the mujahidin to secure the release of their prisoner,” bin Laden wrote in a letter addressed to an aide named Shaykh Mahmud.
“It is important to get rid of the suitcase in which the funds are delivered, due to the possibility of it having a tracking chip inside it,” bin Laden added in the undated letter.
The documents released Tuesday also include bin Laden’s will. In it, he claimed to have $29 million, which he kept in Sudan. He asked that the money be used for jihad.
“I hope, for my brothers, sisters, and maternal aunts, to obey my will and to spend all the money that I have left in Sudan on Jihad,” he wrote, “for the sake of Allah.”