I n the weeks following the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by United States forces, U.S. Intelligence Community analysts sifted through the recovered digital and hard copy materials in search of clues that would reveal ongoing al-Qa`ida plots, identities and locations of al-Qa`ida personnel, and other information of immediate importance. On May 20, 2015, the ODNI released a sizeable tranche of documents recovered from the compound used to hide Osama bin Laden. On March 1, 2016, the ODNI released a second tranche of material gleaned from the Abbottabad raid. On January 19, 2017, the ODNI released the final tranche of documents. These releases, which followed a rigorous interagency review, align with the President’s call for increased transparency–consistent with national security prerogatives–and the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act, which required the ODNI to conduct a review of the documents for release.

I n the weeks following the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by United States forces, U.S. Intelligence Community analysts sifted through the recovered digital and hard copy materials in search of clues that would reveal ongoing al-Qa`ida plots, identities and locations of al-Qa`ida personnel, and other information of immediate importance. On May 20, 2015, the ODNI released a sizeable tranche of documents recovered from the compound used to hide Osama bin Laden. On March 1, 2016, the ODNI released a second tranche of material gleaned from the Abbottabad raid. On January 19, 2017, the ODNI released the final tranche of documents. These releases, which followed a rigorous interagency review, align with the President’s call for increased transparency–consistent with national security prerogatives–and the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act, which required the ODNI to conduct a review of the documents for release.

Editor's note: After the raid on Abbottabad, an interagency task force worked 24/7 to identify which of the recovered materials presented intelligence value. Once the task force pinpointed which materials were most useful to the Intelligence Community, they produced intelligence cables that were shared throughout the IC. The underpinning materials—hundreds of documents—that informed those cables were then reviewed for declassification and public release. All interagency declassification reviews of the Abbottabad materials were scoped specifically to this distilled set of materials—those with intelligence value—as opposed to the entire trove recovered at Abbottabad. Career intelligence professionals executed this interagency effort, with CIA as Executive Agent. On November 1, 2017, CIA released nearly 470,000 files that included draft versions of items previously reviewed as well as other correspondence and materials outside the scope of previous declassification reviews.