by Pamela Hess and Adam Goldman
WASHINGTON — The suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in Afghanistan was a Jordanian-born terrorist working as a double agent who had been invited to the base because he claimed to have information targeting Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a foreign government official confirmed Monday.
The bombing killed seven CIA employees — four officers and three contracted security guards — and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former U.S. intelligence official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.
The former senior intelligence official and the foreign official said the bomber was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year old doctor from Zarqa, Jordan, who had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence. Zarqa is the hometown of slain al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. NBC News first reported the bomber’s identity.
He was arrested more than a year ago by Jordanian intelligence and was thought to have been persuaded to support U.S. and Jordanian efforts against al-Qaida, according to the NBC report. He was invited to Camp Chapman, a tightly secured CIA forward base in Khost province on the fractious Afghan-Pakistan frontier, because he was offering urgent information to track down Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man.
The CIA declined to comment on the report.
Hajj Yacoub, a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan, identified the bomber on Muslim militant Web sites as Hammam Khalil Mohammed, also known as Abu-Dujana al-Khurasani. There was no independent confirmation of Yacoub’s statement.
Al-Balawi was not searched for bombs when he got onto Camp Chapman, according to both former officials and a current intelligence official.
He detonated the explosive shortly after his debriefing began, according to one of the former intelligence officials. In addition to the eight dead, there were at least six wounded, according to the CIA.
The bodies of seven CIA employees arrived Monday at Dover Air Force Base in a small private ceremony attended by CIA Director Leon Panetta, other agency and national security officials, and friends and family, said CIA spokesman George Little.
” These patriots courageously served their nation. The agency extends its gratitude to the United States military for their unwavering support since the attack, including their assistance at Dover,” Little said in a statement issued Monday.
The former senior intelligence official said one of the big unanswered questions is why so many people were present for the debriefing — the interview of the source — when the explosive was detonated.
A half-dozen former CIA officers told The Associated Press that in most cases, only one or two agency officers would typically meet with a possible informant along with an interpreter. Such small meetings would normally be used to limit the danger and the possible exposure of the identities of both officers and informants.
San Francisco Examiner for more
(submitted by reader)
(The following comments and a synopsis of the movie Body of Lies are submitted by reader.)
I have been recommending this movie to my friends- the reality is getting closer to the unreal!
The Hollywood Film Body of Lies released in 2008 tells the story of a double agent run by a high-placed Jordanian Intelligence officer. Unlike the story above, the movie ends on a happy/better note.
Body of Lies (2008)
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Oscar Isaac, Simon McBurney
Director: Ridley Scott
Screenwriter: William Monahan
Producer: Donald DeLine, Ridley Scott
Composer: Marc Streitenfeld
Synopsis: Leonardo DiCaprio fights terrorists for the CIA in this rapid-fire thriller from director Ridley Scott (GLADIATOR, BLACK HAWK DOWN). While Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) gets his hands dirty on the teeming Arab streets, his handler Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) watches from Washington via spy satellite, cheerfully giving bull-in-a-china-shop style orders while picking up his kids from school. Innocent lives are lost, buildings blow up, and the threat of winding up beheaded on the internet is always one move away. LIES is decked out from front to back with fascinating bits of Arabic and espionage minutiae as it races along its wild mission to track down an elusive terrorist sect leader. Crowe has fun in his portly Southern-accented INSIDER mode, while DiCaprio does his usual anguished moral suffering over the fate of individuals (To Crowe’s Hoffman, it’s all just part of war and nobody’s innocent). As the suave head of Jordanian intelligence, Mark Strong gives a scene-stealing, cobra-like performance that clashes beautifully with Crowe’s “ugly American” bullying. The beautiful Golshifteh Farahani plays the obligatory love interest, the nurse who treats Ferris’s regularly occurring battle and torture wounds. When most action heroes are completely healed within minutes of every fight, it’s refreshing–in a grisly sort of way–to see how Ferris’s wounds bruises pile up. The solid, punchy script is by William Monahan (THE DEPARTED) from the David Ignatius novel.