The Clipboard: Did the Bush Administration Burn an al-Qaeda Double Agent?

From an article¹:

Intelligence and security experts said they were surprised Washington would reveal information that could expose the name of a source during an ongoing law enforcement operation.

"If it's true that the Americans have unintentionally revealed the identity of another nation's intelligence agent, who appears to be working in the good of all of us, that is not only a fundamental intelligence flaw its also a monumental foreign relations blunder," security expert Paul Beaver, a former publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, told Reuters.

Kevin Rosser, security expert at the London-based consultancy Control Risks Group, said such a disclosure was a risk that came with staging public alerts, but that authorities were meant to take special care not to ruin ongoing operations.

"When these public announcements are made they have to be supported with some evidence, and in addition to creating public anxiety and fatigue you can risk revealing sources and methods of sensitive operations," he said. (link)

Juan Cole has more. It seems that in their rush to manipulate the American public with their latest terrorism alert, the Bush Administration managed to not only burn the double agent but potentially jeopardized a British anti-terrorism operation as well. Are people so blinded by Bush's "tough" rhetoric that they don't notice he's incompetent at what he's claiming to do? And that doesn't even get into the cynical manipulation of the terrorist alert in the first place, let alone the debacle that is Iraq. I shudder at the thought of four more years of this.

---

Complete text of the article, Pakistan Source Under Cover When U.S. Confirmed Name, by Simon Cameron-Moore and Peter Graff

U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources said on Friday.

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

"After his capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz."

"He was cooperating with interrogators on Sunday and Monday and sent e-mails on both days," the source said.

The New York Times published a story on Monday saying U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested secretly in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts.

The newspaper named him as Khan, although it did not say how it had learned his name. U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations on Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al Qaeda suspects.

President Bush defended the "orange alert" raised in New York and Washington on Sunday and said his government had an obligation to inform the public of genuine threats.

"When we find out intelligence that is real, that threatens people, I believe we have an obligation as government to share that with people," Bush told journalists.

BRITISH SWOOP

A U.S. official said on Friday one of 12 suspects caught in raids in Britain this week was a senior al Qaeda figure, and Washington would try to extradite him.

But British police said they had been forced to carry out their swoop more hastily than planned -- a day after Khan's name appeared in the New York Times as the source of information behind the U.S. alerts.

On Monday evening, after Khan's name appeared, Pakistani officials moved him to a secret location.

The next day British police mounted the sweep that caught the 12 suspects. Such raids are normally carried out late at night or in the early morning, when suspects might be at home and less likely to resist.

But showing clear signs of haste, British police pounced in daylight. Some suspects were taken in shops; others were caught in a high-speed car chase.

A British anti-terrorism police source would not comment on the reason for their quick action, but confirmed the raids were carried out faster than planned: "It would be a fair assessment to say there was an urgency. Something can happen that prompts us to take action faster than we would," he told Reuters.

A U.S. counterterrorism official told Reuters on Friday that one of the 12 British detainees, known as Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eisa al-Hindi, was a key al Qaeda operative in Britain: "This arrest is a big one."

WASHINGTON TO SEEK EXTRADITION

He said Hindi was centrally involved in an effort to case possible targets in the United States for al Qaeda attacks, and said Washington would seek to extradite him.

Britain has yet to identify or charge any of the suspects or confirm whether Hindi is among them.

Intelligence and security experts said they were surprised Washington would reveal information that could expose the name of a source during an ongoing law enforcement operation.

"If it's true that the Americans have unintentionally revealed the identity of another nation's intelligence agent, who appears to be working in the good of all of us, that is not only a fundamental intelligence flaw its also a monumental foreign relations blunder," security expert Paul Beaver, a former publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, told Reuters.

Kevin Rosser, security expert at the London-based consultancy Control Risks Group, said such a disclosure was a risk that came with staging public alerts, but that authorities were meant to take special care not to ruin ongoing operations.

"When these public announcements are made they have to be supported with some evidence, and in addition to creating public anxiety and fatigue you can risk revealing sources and methods of sensitive operations," he said.

In a separate case, British police have arrested Londoner Babar Ahmad under a U.S. warrant alleging that he helped fund militants in Afghanistan and Chechnya. At his first court appearance on Friday Ahmed said he would fight extradition.

reference=http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20040806/ts_nm/security_dc