CIA steals FBI’s al Qaeda mole and gets him killed
Ex-PH2 sends us a link to NBC News about the mole that the FBI recruited among the membership of al Qaeda It’s a pretty interesting story until the part where the CIA snags him away from the FBI who had originally recruited him and then sends him off to be killed;
In 1994, a civilian female working for the CIA was able to convince the informant, with the help of a large sum of money, to work for the CIA instead of the FBI.
In 1994 or 1995, the CIA dispatched the informant to Bosnia, where jihadis were aiding Bosnia’s Muslim majority in a war against Serbian forces.
The FBI did not know at the time that its informant had started working for the CIA, or why he had disappeared. His former handler, Bassem Youssef, who by then was working undercover in Los Angeles as a supposed member of al Qaeda, began asking his al Qaeda sources what had become of the driver.
They told Youssef that the driver had gone to Bosnia, and that al Qaeda operatives there had killed him because they believed that he was a mole for the CIA. Later, Youssef was able to confirm that the al Qaeda operatives’ suspicions were justified, and that the driver had been working for the CIA.
Yeah, until the CIA got their grubby fingerprints on him, it looked like he’d have been a good asset and might have been in a position to stop al Qaeda’s plans for 9/11/01. FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in his book Black Banners, lays 9-11-01 at the feet of the CIA, too.
Category: Terror War
The CIA has a nice long history of just missing the mark when it comes to keeping assets alive or providing a believable cover story…while we all understand the necessity of an agency that gathers foreign intelligence on foreign soil the CIA has been for too long an agency without appropriate oversight. It’s led to a long list of embarrassing entanglements and operations with bodies in their wake…
The CIA has a nice long history of running on egotism and a lack of common sense. And sometimes, when their stupid mistakes become public, my reaction is that they not only can’t find their own shoes with a map and a flashlight, they couldn’t untangle the shoelaces to tie them properly without help.
Agreed this is classic CIA behavior. Like when they orchestrated bureaucratic coups of the the Navy and Air Forces’ submarine intelligence program and the Air Force Satellite Intelligence program during the Cold War to create the National Reconaissance Office and National Underwater Reconaissance Office. They promptly started handing out security clearances to anyone who wanted them and seriously compromised both programs through security leaks such as the Walker Ring that never would have been allowed to happen under the old Navy OPSEC requirements. The CIA also utilized both programs poorly, since the people they had given the whip hand of the new bureaucratic entities had no experience with submarines or satellites. However, they were more than happy to engage in ridiculous ego-feeding projects like Project Sand Castle to raise a Soviet Golf Submarine, which cost $500mil (then), used up valuable time and resources, and yielded absolutely nothing in the end when the Golf broke in half as it was being raised and lost the radio room (the reactor room was already gone), depriving the US of anything valuable. Nice going, CIA. There should be some sort of liaison command to make sure intelligence is shared, but the programs themselves need to be in the hands of people who actually know how to operate them. I think we’ve gotten better at this, though, which is good (I highly recommend “Blind Man’s Bluff”, which is an excellent book about submarines during the Cold War and which, among other things, details all of this extensively).
There’s no independent confirmation the asset is dead other than NBC News’ story from anonymous sources, which was meant to answer questions put forth by the Washington Times exclusive, which did not say what happened to the asset after 1994. Now suddenly the CIA is being blamed by the FBI agent. The asset is dead but not named. The fact he died in Bosnia in 1995 is being used as the excuse for why the 9/11 commission was not informed.
Richard Clarke blames the CIA for not telling the FBI (and him) about the hijackers coming into San Diego before 9/11, yet now we find out the FBI had an agent embedded in AQ cells on the west coast in the early 90s (which is a fairly starting revelation).
Not an expert on either intel agency, just trying to make sense of these reports. Seems to be than meets the eye. Rep Wolf’s committee says they will investigate, so maybe all will be revealed. Then again, still waiting for the Benghazi attackers to be brought to justice (the filmmaker doesn’t count).
FWIW: remember that in the world of intelligence, you virtually always only read about the failures in the press. The successes almost always take literally decades to surface.
Case in point: the U-2 program. The failure (Powers’ downing in 1960) made the papers pretty quickly. The immense success (the development of the craft in about a year, plus nearly 4 years of operational success overflying the USSR – and a good decade-plus of operations elsewhere in the world after Powers’ downing) was only made public decades later.
Like any other human endeavor, the US Intel Community has a mixed record. You just usually don’t hear much about the successes until decades have passed.
@3 HS, the Golf-class was diesel-powered, and had no reactor. And there are some inconsistencies in the story of the failed recovery of the K-129. It may not have been such a failure after all. It certainly might have, but we will likely never know. It’s interesting, however, that the Ship’s Bell was recovered from the K-129’s bridge, which officially was part of the segment of the wreck that broke off. The USS Halibut’s offboard ROV’s that surveyed the wreck in the late 60s and early 70s weren’t capable of opening the bell’s locker, much less dismounting the bell itself, and there were no other expeditions to the wreck site after the recovery attempt. Some scary shit went on surrounding that incident in ’68.
Anyway, I’m straying close to conspiracy theory territory. In any case, we hear a lot about the CIA’s failures. We never hear about their successes, and with good reason. It sort of defeats the purpose if everybody finds out about how well your covert operation went. Not saying they’re awesome, just that we are judging based on a very incomplete picture. Though to be fair, that incomplete picture includes some fine examples of monumental buttfuckery.
HS Sophomore: Walker was a Navy guy, not CIA. The CIA had nothing to do with his treachery – or Whitworth’s, or his son’s, or his brother’s. All of those folks were Navy, w/o any CIA connection whatsoever.
The Walker spy ring was simply a case of a guy in a critical position (crypto custodian) selling out to the other side for $$$$.
I dearly hope Walker dies in prison before he’s scheduled to be released.
Hondo, didn’t Walker get life w/o parole?
Anyway, I read somewhere that he had something to do with the loss of the Scorpion. If that’s true, all the more reason why the son of bitch should be burned at the stake or fed alive to the pigs.
@7-That’s right, but the problem was that the CIA made the loop way too wide. It involved too many people from both sides.