Zawahiri set up bin Laden to become al-Qaeda chief: Book

"Despite knowing that this operative was blown, Zawahiri used Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti to make repeated trips to bin Laden's compound," says the book "Seal Target Geronimo" written by former US SEAL commando Chuck Pfarrer.

"Based on this accumulation of information, one can draw conclusion that it was Zawahiri who led the US to bin Laden's hiding place in Abbottabad, accomplishing this through a complex and persistent series of lapses in security," he said.

"Some of these slips were subtle and some of them were so obvious that they were laughable," Pfarrer wrote in his book, which also claims that Zawahiri even tried to get the Russians to kill bin Laden and he also wrongly diagnosed bin Laden.

"Zawahiri tried to get the Russians to kill bin Laden; they did not. He hoped that Addison's disease would take him, but it did not. Now Zawahiri played his final card -- he deliberately used a blown courier to communicate with Osama, and the inevitable happened. The Americans found him," Pfarrer wrote in his 225-page book.

He said that for 30 years, 60-year-old Zawahiri had been willing to use violence to bring about his idea of Islamic government. Now, the Muslim faithful were throwing off the chains of dictatorship, the book said.

"Zawahiri had worn himself out trying to get Osama to escalate his attacks against the West. Repeated plans to smuggle chemical weapons into the US had come to naught and now Zawahiri had had enough. By late in 2009, he had determined to wrest control of al-Qaeda from bin Laden," the book says.