Posted on 07/24/2004 12:47:43 PM PDT by Pikamax
Bin Laden's Inner Circle Eludes CIA
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 24, 2004; Page A10
The CIA has intelligence agents inside Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network -- as it did before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- but they are not within the terrorist leader's inner circle where key information about any future attack would be discussed, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.
"They are beyond foot soldiers but not in the inner circle," the official said. The agents -- Afghans, Pakistanis, Uzbeks and others recruited and run by CIA case officers -- "are more senior than the agents [the U.S. had] three years ago who were on the periphery," the official said.
Aided by these agents, electronic intercepts, satellite imagery, and extensive help from foreign intelligence services, the United States over the past two years has captured or killed two-thirds of bin Laden's top aides and broken up plots against U.S. embassies, U.S. and foreign aircraft, and ships and other targets worldwide.
Although the U.S. intelligence community believes that al Qaeda today is far less capable than the team that put together the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden "looks to the United States still as the brass ring," another senior intelligence official said. "They still want to continue to attack us in the ways they did three years ago," he said during a Wednesday briefing, which was held on the condition that reporters not disclose his name or the identity of two other senior intelligence officials who spoke.
This is the first time that CIA officials have publicly described with such specificity the placing of agents and other steps aimed at cracking al Qaeda -- the sort of information that the agency generally guards very closely.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It's not so bad. Picture this: Osama becomes paranoid after reading this article and shoots 50 of his Lieutenants.
Iran.
Pincus...the worst.
Haven't I said we had a mole inside AQ.
Just maybe they tell the press what they want them to 'know'.
Love your tag line!!
This will make Binny and crew so totally paranoid.....he won't know who to trust.
No doubt the doors to the inner circle slammed shut after 9/11. Gonna be very hard to penetrate it now. If that a**hole Clinton had been doing his job, we would've had people in there long ago.
It's not that hard to elude the CIA. The disintegration of the Soviet Union eluded the CIA without breaking a sweat.
It's not that hard for stealth terrorists to elude people glued to computer monitors in office cubicles.
As disinformation -- OK. If really true -- STFU!
I'm sure we have people on the inside, but any time a 3 letter agency tells you more than you expect to hear, best practice is to wonder why.
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