'A Huge Screw-Up': CIA Attacker May Have Been Well-Known Al Qaeda Blogger

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball 

The suicide bomber who penetrated a CIA base in Afghanistan last week and killed seven officers was not just any Al Qaeda double agent: he may have been a well-known Al Qaeda blogger who boasted of his “love of jihad and martyrdom” in a Taliban Web magazine just a few months ago.

The new details emerging Monday about the Al Qaeda background of the attacker have stunned former agency officials and intelligence experts and raised the possibility of a major security lapse that permitted the bomber access to the base.

“It’s a huge screw-up,” said one former senior CIA official who had worked with some of the CIA officers killed in the attack. “The question is, why did they think they could trust this guy? What was the level of confidence that would allow somebody like this access to a place where there were this many officers?”

Initial reports last week identified the suicide bomber who blew up the CIA team based in Khost, Afghanistan, as a member of the Afghan National Army. That appeared to explain how the attacker was able to get inside the base without being closely searched.

But NBC News and other outlets on Monday identified the bomber as a Jordanian physician who was working for Jordanian intelligence while secretly serving as an Al Qaeda double agent. After being arrested by the Jordanians more than a year ago, the physician, identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, had reportedly promised Jordanian intelligence and the CIA that he would help U.S. officers find Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2. (Among those killed in last week’s attack was a senior Jordanian intelligence officer who is a cousin of Jordan's King Abdullah.

Al-Jazeera’s Arabic language Web site, citing unidentified sources as well as a Taliban spokesman, added what may be the most surprising wrinkle of all to the story: the Jordanian doctor is the same person known as “Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani”—a frequent contributor to jihadi Web sites who once served as the administrator for the Al Hesbah Forum, a major Al Qaeda Web site. 

The Al-Jazeera story quotes the Taliban spokesman as saying that the blogger was able to “mislead U.S. and Jordanian intelligence for a whole year,” adding that the Taliban plans to release a video soon to confirm its account.

There is no way to independently confirm that Balawi and Abu Dujinah is the same person. But Evan Kohlmann, a U.S. government consultant who monitors jihadi Web forums, said that many of the details emerging about Balawi─including his age and background─seem to match comments that Abu Dujinah has made on various Web postings. There "are pretty compelling reasons to believe it's the same person," he said. Kohlmann also noted that, in a lengthy interview he gave to a Taliban magazine known as Vanguard of Khorasan last September, Abu Dujinah “essentially announced he was going to fight jihad in Afghanistan.”

The former CIA official─who requested anonymity because of the ongoing probe into the attack─said that even if some people at the CIA believed that the Jordanian jihadi could lead them to Zawahiri, it was puzzling that he would have had access to a base with multiple officers. “You never trust a person like that,” the former official said.

“This is something that is unprecedented,” said Ali Al-Ahmed, president of the Institute of Gulf Affairs, a Washington think tank that monitors Persian Gulf developments. “This is the first time a terrorist has managed to infiltrate the CIA and carry out an attack.”

The CIA declined to comment on the identity of the attacker of the Khost base.