Bin Laden Offered Great HR Benefits

As the US combs through records found in Osama bin Laden’s compound, they’re getting an inside look at what the terrorist leader was like—as a "corporate" boss. One thing they’ve learned over the years: Al-Qaeda members got great HR benefits, including, for married members, a week of vacation for every three weeks of work. Bachelors, meanwhile, got five monthly days off. The group “didn't function as a traditional or typical terrorist organization did,” said a terrorism expert. “It functioned really like a multinational.”

That also meant top-notch record-keeping. Bin Laden, who had an economics degree, obsessively kept track of everything, NPR notes. Al-Qaeda bosses were tough about receipts, demanding that fighters who bought anything return with the accounting figures. That “may be an effective way to run any organization, but also results in a windfall of intelligence to any counterterrorist agency or intelligence community charged with dismantling that organization,” says the expert. (More Osama bin Laden stories.)