Washington ? Surrounded by the din of his multiple families within walls that were both his sanctuary and prison, Osama bin Laden pecked endlessly at a computer, issuing directives to his scattered and troubled terrorist empire. It’s not clear who really listened.

Go big, he told al-Qaida operatives and affiliates.

They mostly went small.

The latest intelligence from the wealth of material found at bin Laden’s last hideout paints a complicated picture of the fugitive, both deeply engaged in his life’s violent mission and somewhat out to pasture.

Inside the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound, he kept busy scheming plots, rehearsed and recorded propaganda and dispatched couriers to distant Internet cafes to conduct his email traffic, using computer flash drives to relay messages he would write and store from his shabby office. He dyed his gray beard black to keep up appearances for the videos.

To U.S. officials, who possess bin Laden’s handwritten personal journal as well as an enormous cache of his digital documents, the still-unfolding discoveries show he was more involved in trying to plan al-Qaida’s post-9/11 operations than they had thought possible for a man in perpetual hiding.

Even so, he was disconnected from his organization in real time, lacking phones or the Internet at his hideout and with loyalists hunted at every turn. Essential elements of a command and control function from Abbottabad appear to be missing.

Among the items found was an unreleased audiotape, recorded about a week before the raid, in which bin Laden praises those who rebelled in the “Arab spring,” referring to revolts in the Mideast and North Africa, a U.S. official says. But bin Laden only mentions Egypt and Tunisia, though he would have been aware through news broadcasts on his cable TV feed of the uprisings in Libya, Syria, and the Gulf state Bahrain, the official noted, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

Another discovered video shows bin Laden channel surfing with a tiny TV while wrapped in a wool blanket, wearing a knit cap and looking anything but content. Toward its own propaganda ends, the U.S. released selective excerpts of these odd home movies, choosing clips that only show the Prince of jihad in an unflattering, even pathetic, light.

The U.S. raiders who killed him, a grown son and others May 2 encountered 23 children and nine women on the grounds of the three-story complex behind walls stained with mold, including three of his wives, officials said afterward. The U.S. has questioned those widows, the Pentagon said Friday without revealing if anything was learned.