[Mb-civic] U.S. Blew undercover Operation

[Barbara Siomos]

    Pakistan: U.S. Blew Undercover Operation 
    MSNBC from Truthout
    Friday 06 August 2004

    ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The al-Qaida suspect named by U.S.
officials as the source of information that led to this week’s
terrorist alerts was working undercover, Pakistani intelligence sources
said Friday, putting an end to the sting operation and forcing Pakistan
to hide the man in a secret location.

    Under pressure to justify the alerts in three Northeastern
cities, U.S. officials confirmed a report by The New York Times that the
man, Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, was the source of the intelligence that
led to the decision.

    A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that
Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively
cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al-Qaida operatives
when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

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

    “After his capture [in July], he admitted being an
al-Qaida 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.â€

    The Times published a story Monday saying U.S. officials had
disclosed that a man arrested in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of
information leading to the security alerts. The Times identified 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 Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan
was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al-Qaida suspects.

    British swoop

    In addition to ending the Pakistani sting, the premature
disclosure of Khan’s identity may have affected a major British
operation in which 12 suspects were arrested in raids this week, one of
whom U.S. officials said was a senior al-Qaida figure. One of the men
was released Friday.

    British police told Reuters on Friday that they had been
forced to carry out the raids more hastily than planned, a day after
Khan’s name appeared in the Times.

    Such raids are usually 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 he 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.

    U.S. officials told NBC News this week that one of the 12
British detainees, known as Abu Eisa al-Hindi, was a key al-Qaida
operative in Britain.

    ‘Genius student’ Britain’s Press
Association, quoting his father and one of his professors, described
Khan as an unusually gifted computer expert in his mid-20s from Karachi,
Pakistan.

    The PA said Khan, who was arrested in Lahore on July 13, led
authorities to another major al-Qaida figure, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a
Tanzanian with a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head for his role in the
1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed
more than 200 people.

    Zafar Qasim, a computer science professor at Nadir Eduljee
Dinshaw Engineering University, where Khan graduated in 2001, told the
PA that Khan was a “genius student” who finished near
the top of his class. He said Khan never appeared interested in any
militant activity and never missed a class.

    A senior intelligence official said Khan's wife was the
sister of a “top ranking” leader of the Taliban, the
former rulers of Afghanistan. The official said Khan had been to Britain
four times, always on reduced-price tickets he got through his father, a
flight attendant with Pakistan International Airlines, the PA reported.

    Experts taken by surprise

    Intelligence and security experts said they were surprised
that 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. It’s also a
monumental foreign relations blunder,” security expert Paul
Beaver, a former publisher of Jane’s Defense Weekly, told
Reuters.

    Kevin Rosser, a 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 supposed 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.

    MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson and Reuters contributed to
this report.