The killing in Khost

An article in the Washington Post provides the most details seen so far on the suicide murder of seven CIA operatives at the CIA base in Afghanistan’s remote Khost province near the Pakistan border. My main question is: before he went to work for the CIA, Balawi, the Jordanian double agent / suicide bomber, had posted extremist messages on the Web. Why, then did CIA believe that he would be at all willing to work for the Americans and help them to kill al Qaeda higher ups? It doesn’t make any sense, and no story that I’ve seen has made sense of it.

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January 11

Chris H. writes:

I don’t understand your misunderstanding of the situation leading up to the CIA massacre. The killer posted radical messages on the internet. He was an agent ostensibly working for us. How else was he to fit in to the Al Qaeda network? The CIA must have asked him to post radical messages—or could have—or should have—anyway. But in reality he was writing from his heart. Am I missing your point?

LA replies:

From more than one story, I had the impression that he posted those radical messages before he was working for us. But the sequence of events was never made entirely clear. I’ll have to look at the stories again.

Chris replies:

Well, we don’t have any idea at what point he started “working for us” relative to when he posted radical stuff on the internet. My point is that it would not be unreasonable to think—or suspect—that the CIA might instruct a prospective agent to establish cover for himself. That would be the whole point of the exercise, would it not? What better way to infiltrate a jihadist organization then to make it appear that one is a radical. How else would one do it? But, of course, he was a double agent. Apparently, the Jordanians and our boys were fooled. Or were the Jordanian agents complicit?

LA replies:

Obviously it’s that the case then there would be no mystery. I only raised the question because I had the impression from two different news stories that he had posted the extremist postings back in Jordan before he ever worked for the Americans.

James P. writes:

You wrote:

“My main question is: before he went to work for the CIA, Balawi, the Jordanian double agent / suicide bomber, had posted extremist messages on the Web. Why, then did CIA believe that he would be at all willing to work for the Americans and help them to kill al Qaeda higher ups?”

The CIA wanted Balawi to get close to the AQ higher-ups so the CIA could target them for drone strikes. To do this, Balawi actually had to look and act like an AQ bad guy. Posting extremist messages on the web was part of that act. I am sure he told the CIA, “Don’t worry, those messages are just designed to reinforce my bona fides with Zawahiri so he’ll meet with me and you can kill him.” Obviously the CIA believed his act was just a charade, when in fact it was for real.

This is not a new dilemma. Good guys can’t infiltrate groups of bad people. If you want to penetrate a group of narcotics traffickers, you have to use another narcotics trafficker as your agent. If you want to penetrate a terrorist group, you have to use a terrorist as your agent. If you want to penetrate the mob, you have to use a mobster as your agent.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 11, 2010 12:42 AM | Send