Osama Bin Laden wanted Joe Biden to be president, letters reveal

One year after the raid in Abbottabad, the U.S. government released a trove of documents seized from Osama bin Laden's compound — and buried in the correspondence was one of the strangest political judgments of the post-9/11 era: bin Laden wanted Barack Obama assassinated, and wanted Joe Biden left alone, precisely so that Biden would become president.

The reasoning, laid out in bin Laden's own letters, was coldly strategic. Obama, he wrote, was "the head of infidelity," and killing him would throw the United States into crisis. Biden, in bin Laden's assessment, was "totally unprepared" for the presidency — which made him the ideal successor from al-Qaeda's point of view. Bin Laden instructed his followers to focus their efforts on Obama (and on General David Petraeus), and not to waste resources targeting Biden.

The documents were released in May 2012 by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, which published 17 declassified letters and memos from the compound on the first anniversary of the raid. Counterterrorism analysts who reviewed them found a leader increasingly isolated, frustrated with affiliates who ignored his guidance, and obsessed with spectacular attacks on American soil — including plots against airliners and a fixation on the tenth anniversary of September 11.

There were caveats worth keeping in mind. The letters were selected for release by U.S. intelligence agencies, and analysts cautioned that a curated sample could not be taken as a representative picture of bin Laden's thinking or of al-Qaeda's operational state. The release also served an obvious public purpose: on the anniversary of the raid, it reinforced the narrative of a degraded, deluded leadership.

Still, the Biden passage landed with particular force in an American election year. That the world's most wanted terrorist had rated the sitting vice president as the man whose promotion would most damage America was, depending on one's politics, either a dark joke or a genuinely unsettling data point. The White House declined to engage with the substance of the letters, and the 2012 campaign moved on.

What the episode really revealed was less about Biden than about bin Laden's worldview: a man who believed American power rested so heavily on individual leaders that removing the right one — and installing the wrong one — could break it.