WASHINGTON — The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda’s top leadership, former U.S. government officials said Monday.
The attacker, a physician-turned-mole, had been recruited to infiltrate al-Qaeda’s senior circles and had gained the trust of his CIA and Jordanian handlers with a stream of useful intelligence leads, according to two former senior officials briefed on the agency’s internal investigation. His track record as an informant apparently allowed him to enter a key CIA post without a thorough search, the sources said.
The bomber, identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was standing just outside an agency building on the base Wednesday when he exploded a bomb hidden under his clothes, killing the seven Americans along with a Jordanian officer who had been assigned to work with him. Six CIA operatives were wounded.
The agency has declined to publicly identify the victims, a mix of career officers and contractors with backgrounds ranging from law enforcement to military special-operations forces.
Details about the suicide bomber’s identity provided jarring insight into how a vital intelligence post in eastern Afghanistan was penetrated in the deadliest attack on the CIA in more than 25 years.
Initial reports suggested that the bomber was an Afghan soldier or perhaps a local informant who had been brought onto the base for debriefing.
Instead, the new evidence points to a carefully planned act of deception by a trusted operative from a country closely allied with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda. U.S. and Jordanian officials had come to regard Balawi as trustworthy, former officials said, despite a history of support for Islamic extremism — a view that he appeared to support in an interview with an al-Qaeda-affiliated publication as recently as this past fall.
“He was someone who had already worked with us,” said a former U.S. counterterrorism officer who discussed the ongoing investigation on the condition of anonymity. The official said Balawi had been jointly managed by U.S. and Jordanian agencies and had provided “actionable intelligence” over several weeks of undercover work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The CIA declined to comment on reports identifying Balawi as the bomber, first posted by al-Jazeera on its website.
A U.S. intelligence official said only that the agency is “looking closely at every aspect” of the attack on the facility known as Forward Operating Base Chapman, in the province of Khost near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
“The agency is determined to continue pursuing aggressive counterterrorism operations,” the official said. “Last week’s attack will be avenged. Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day.”
