Emails by courier, a raft of terror plots ...secrets of Osama's lair are revealed.(News)

Byline: Laura Mannering

CHILLING secrets of Osama Bin Laden's terrorist hideout began to emerge last night.

On their initial discovery of his secret compound, U.S. intelligence officials had believed him to be a reclusive figure, completely cut off from the world. But the enormous cache of evidence seized during the raid in Abbottabad has revealed that he was in constant contact with Al Qaeda operatives, and was planning terror attacks across the globe.

Despite having no phone and email connections, the 200 million pages of documents now in the hands of the CIA have revealed that Bin Laden was a prolific email writer who built a painstaking system that kept him one step ahead of the U.S. government.

Intelligence officials revealed that Bin Laden would type a message on his computer, without an internet connection, then save it using a thumb-sized flash drive, a portable memory device. He then passed the drive to a trusted courier, who would head for a distant internet cafe.

At that location, the courier would plug the memory drive into a computer, copy Bin Laden's message into an email and send it. Reversing the process, the courier would copy any incoming email to the flash drive and return to the compound, where Bin Laden would read his messages offline.

More than 100 flash drives, five desktop computers, laptops and ten years' worth of handwritten journals show that Bin Laden was plotting attacks on New York, Los Angeles and other American cities as well as Europe.

His personal diaries reveal his determination to achieve a 'body count of thousands' by targeting trains and planes on significant dates such as the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attack. Bin Laden's greatest ambition was to attack 'the Great Satan' and kill thousands more Americans.

His secret communications have been unpicked by a large team of experts brought in from around the world, who are working in a secure facility in northern Virginia.

President Barack Obama's National Security Adviser, Tom Donilan, yesterday revealed the extent of the haul of information from the Abbottabad compound, which will take the CIA months to sift through. He said: 'This is the largest cache of intelligence derived from the scene of any single terrorist. It's about the size, the CIA tells us, of a small college library.'

While the intelligence has not revealed specific plans to target the UK, it was reported last night that his plans to hit trains and planes led to a security alert across Europe in January, which prompted British Transport Police to call in extra officers.

SHOT IN JUST HIS UNDERPANTS

THE first U.S. politician to see pictures of Osama Bin Laden's corpse has revealed that the Al Qaeda leader was shot through the eye - wearing only his underpants.

Republican Senator James Inhofe said he was left in no doubt that the terror leader is dead.

Mr Inhofe, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, had seen a number of photos taken at the scene of the May 2 raid on Bin Laden's secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and said some may be released as proof of death.

'They're gruesome, of course,' he said in an interview on Fox News. 'It wasn't a very pretty picture.' He added: 'I would say [he had] what you would call underwear on, that was about it.'

Despite the graphic nature of the images, the senator, a proponent of releasing the pictures, said he had not changed his mind after viewing them.

CAPTION(S):

Fugitive: Bin Laden appears in a 1998 video broadcast