If a senior Afghan Taliban commander is to be believed, Osama bin Laden was not as isolated in his final years as many people think. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, the guerrilla chieftain, who for years has provided information that proved reliable, says he visited the late al Qaeda leader two years ago in his high-walled hideout in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad. He says bin Laden, who was killed in a midnight raid by Navy SEALs on May 2, also received occasional visits from al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and Arab fundraisers…

In fact, the world’s most-wanted fugitive said, he had chosen to live in Abbottabad just because he considered it such an “unexpected” place for him to hole up. What scared him most wasn’t America’s spy agencies, he told the commander; it was Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. “The Sheik feared the ISI more than the CIA,” the commander says.

While discussing the Afghan insurgents’ war against the Americans, bin Laden said he had heard no news of the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, since 2001. Even so, the al Qaeda leader seemed upbeat. “The Sheik told me not to worry,” the commander recalls. “He said things will get better for the Taliban.” He nevertheless insists that although al Qaeda has provided moral and spiritual support to the insurgents, as well as some manpower, the Taliban never received “a single dollar” from bin Laden.