American officials say there is much they do not know about the last years of Bin Laden, who was shot dead by Navy Seal commandos last Monday in his third-floor bedroom, and the peculiar life of the compound. But what has emerged so far, in interviews with United States and Pakistani military and intelligence officials and Bin Laden’s neighbors in the middle-class hamlet where he had been hiding, is a portrait of an isolated man, perhaps a little bored, presiding over family life while plotting mayhem — still desperate to be heard, intent on outsize influence, musing in his handwritten notebooks about killing more Americans…

Contrary to a widely held belief that Bin Laden was on dialysis to treat a kidney ailment, Pakistani investigators said last week that his youngest wife told them that he was healthy. “He was neither weak nor frail,” one of the investigators quoted the wife as saying. She told them, they said, that Bin Laden had long recovered from two kidney surgeries a decade or more ago in southern Afghanistan, in part by using homemade medications, including watermelon…

In October, when American intelligence agencies were already close on the trail of the courier and spy satellites were taking detailed photographs of the house, Bin Laden issued two audio statements urging help for victims of floods in Pakistan. “We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” he said.

In 2007, he complained that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq, a fact he attributed to the pernicious influence of “big corporations.” In other messages he commented on the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at M.I.T., and praised former President Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights.