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Reuters: "The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse," said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?
MSNBC: "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.
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Unmasking of Qaeda Mole a U.S. Security Blunder-Experts
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Saturday 07 August 2004
London - The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its "orange alert" this month has shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have set back the war on terror.
Reuters learned from Pakistani intelligence sources on Friday that computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, arrested secretly in July, was working under cover to help the authorities track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and the United States 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."
Last Sunday, U.S. officials told reporters that someone held secretly by Pakistan was the source of the bulk of the information justifying the alert. The New York Times obtained Khan's name independently, and U.S. officials confirmed it when it appeared in the paper the next morning.
None of those reports mentioned at the time that Khan had been under cover helping the authorities catch al Qaeda suspects, and that his value in that regard was destroyed by making his name public.
A day later, Britain hastily rounded up terrorism suspects, some of whom are believed to have been in contact with Khan while he was under cover. Washington has portrayed those arrests as a major success, saying one of the suspects, named Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eissa al-Hindi, was a senior al Qaeda figure.
But British police have acknowledged the raids were carried out in a rush. Suspects were dragged out of shops in daylight and caught in a high speed car chase, instead of the usual procedure of catching them at home in the early morning while they can offer less resistance.
"Holy Grail" od Intelligence
Security experts contacted by Reuters said they were shocked by the revelations that the source whose information led to the alert was identified within days, and that U.S. officials had confirmed his name.
"The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse," said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?
"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's on the front pages every time there's a development, is it?"
A source such as Khan - cooperating with the authorities while staying in active contact with trusting al Qaeda agents - would be among the most prized assets imaginable, he said.
"Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover."
Rolf Tophoven, head of the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy in Essen, Germany, said allowing Khan's name to become public was "very unclever."
"If it is correct, then I would say its another debacle of the American intelligence community. Maybe other serious sources could have been detected or guys could have been captured in the future" if Khan's identity had been protected, he said.
Britain, which has dealt with Irish bombing campaigns for decades, has a policy of announcing security alerts only under narrow circumstances, when authorities have specific advice they can give the public to take action that will make them safer.
Unnecessary Alarm
Home Secretary David Blunkett, responsible for Britain's anti-terrorism policy, said in a statement on Friday there was "a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately."
Kevin Rosser, security expert at the London-based consultancy Control Risks Group, said an inherent risk in public alerts is that secret sources will be compromised.
"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 the case of last week's U.S. alerts, officials said they had ordered tighter security on a number of financial sites in New York, Washington and New Jersey because Khan possessed reports showing al Qaeda agents had studied the buildings.
Although the casing reports were mostly several years old, U.S. officials said they acted urgently because of separate intelligence suggesting an increased likelihood of attacks in the runup to the presidential election in November.
U.S. officials now say Hindi, one of the suspects arrested after Khan's name was compromised, may have been the head of the team that cased those buildings.
But the Pakistani disclosure that Khan was under cover suggests that the cell had been infiltrated, and was under surveillance at the time Washington ordered the orange alert.
The security experts said that under such circumstances it would be extraordinary to issue a public warning, because of the risk of tipping off the cell that it had been compromised.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080804Z.shtml
Pakistan: U.S. Blew Undercover Operation
MSNBC
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."
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.