During his last months holed up in a villa in Pakistan, one of the concerns on Osama bin Laden's mind was image control: Al-Qaida's branches and allies were making the terror network look bad in the eyes of the Islamic world.

A newly released selection of letters captured in the US raid that killed bin Laden a year ago shows that the al-Qaida leader was meticulous in tracking how his associates' actions and public statements reflected on the cause of jihad, or holy war. And he frequently tried to keep them in line.

In an October 2010 letter to a top lieutenant, bin Laden complains about Faisal Shahzad, the militant recruited by the Pakistani Taliban to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square. The May 2010 bombing failed.