CIA Bomber Provided Drone Strike Intel

By Steve Hynd

The more information surfaces about Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the spy-cum-suicide bomber who blew himself, three guards (at least two of whom were Blackwater mercs), his Jordanian handler and four CIA operatives to bits at a CIA base in Afghanistan last week, the more bizarre the whole story sounds.

It appears that al-Balawi was a triple agent, an extremist jailed and coerced by Jordanian intelligence into becoming a spy on Al Qaida. However, he never truly renounced his first allegiance, only pretending to do so until the CIA brought him from Pakistan to Afghanistan and invited him onto Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province, where security was obviously lax enough for him to walk into a meeting strapped with explosives.

If someone put all that in a work of fiction, there would be protests that it was unrealistic, that no CIA operatives would ever be so dumb as to give such trust to such a source.

But it gets worse. Spencer Ackerman passes along the NYT's observation that al-Balawi chose "to kill his American contacts at their first meeting, rather than establish regular communication to glean what the C.I.A. did � and did not � know about Al Qaeda" and suggests that this means "al-Qaeda might think it knows all it needs to know about U.S. intelligence operations in eastern Afghanistan". On the other hand, Robert Mackay says Al Qaida has just given an object lesson in how not to run a double agent.

And then there's this shocker:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said al-Balawi had provided high-quality intelligence that established his credibility with Jordanian and U.S. intelligence.

The former official said that information led to drone-launched missile strikes that led the CIA to kill a number of Al Qaeda leaders. CBS News first reported al-Balawi's connection to the missile strikes.

Which raises the serious possibility that several vaunted drone attacks on AQ key leadership may have struck patsies rather than their claimed targets, or that those leaders killed were ones AQ felt were acceptable losses in order to lull the CIA into a false sense of security. It may even partly explain why so many drone strikes have ended up hitting wedding parties and other civilian gatherings instead.

Someone at the CIA has a lot of 'splaining to do.