WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden was considering leaving his hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan, just months beforeNavy SEALs stormed his compound and killed him, according to a trove of documents seized from his compound during the raid and declassified this week by the Obama administration.

In one of those documents — a letter to one of his wives, who had sought refuge in Iran at one point — Bin Laden wrote that his hosts in Pakistan appeared to have grown weary of the toll of housing him and had denied his repeated requests to have his wife, Khairiyah, join him in Abbottabad.
“I have been living for years in the company of some of the brothers from the area, and they are getting exhausted — security wise — from me staying with them and what results from that,” the letter said. “Consequently, it is hard for them to do some of the things I ask them to.”
Bin Laden wrote that he had “used all my energy and I have tried so hard, as God is my witness, to convince them to agree. But sadly, I came to realize that they have reached a level of exhaustion that they are shutting down, and they asked to leave us all.”
The three-page letter, first reported by The Washington Post, appears to have been written about five months before the SEAL Team Six raid. Bin Laden says at one point that “we are awaiting the 10th anniversary of the blessed attacks on New York and Washington which will be in nine months.” The attacks took place on Sept. 11, 2001, which would put the writing of the letter around December 2010.
It is impossible to know how any change in location by Bin Laden might have altered the ability of American intelligence agencies to accurately track him to his secret compound, and for the C.I.A. and the Pentagon to have mounted the raid that killed him.
The letter is a mix of references to “God Almighty” and mundane housekeeping. At one point, Bin Laden urges his wife to make sure that she gets dental work done before joining him.
“I was informed that you visited an official dentist in Iran complaining about a filling she put in for you,” he writes. “If she put in the filling for you more than a year before your departure from Iran, then do not worry about it. Otherwise, you need to go to the doctor and complain about the filling in your molar and ask to have the filling replaced.”
Bin Laden writes that he has been with his hosts for so long that “they are in a state of shutdown.” He says that “I think that I have to leave them,” but it will take a few months “to arrange another place where you, Hamza, and his wife can join us.”
But he was still in Abbottabad in May of 2011, when SEALs stormed his compound.
The material in the declassified trove offers the deepest look yet into Bin Laden’s final years. He appears to have spent much of his time sending missives to subordinates, seeking to direct a terrorist network that appeared to have grown far beyond his control, and working his way through a pile of books that ranged from history and current affairs to conspiracy theories.