The suicide bomber behind the Dec. 30 attack on a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan claims in a posthumously released recording that he lured U.S. and Jordanian intelligence officers into a trap by sending them misleading information about terrorist targets as well as videotapes he made of senior al-Qaeda leaders.
The bomber, a Jordanian physician named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, also claims that he intended only to kidnap a Jordanian intelligence officer but then stumbled on an unexpected opportunity to attack a large group of Americans and their Jordanian allies at once.
“It wasn’t planned this way,” Balawi says in an undated, 44-minute videotape released by as-Sahab, the media arm of al-Qaeda. He attributes the change to “the stupidity of Jordanian intelligence and the stupidity of American intelligence” services that invited him to Afghanistan to help set up a strike against al-Qaeda targets.
U.S. officials have acknowledged that Balawi was a double agent who provided valuable intelligence over several months before being allowed to meet with U.S. operatives at Chapman. Six Americans and three others were killed in the deadliest attack on the U.S. intelligence agency’s staff in a quarter-century.
In the video, the 32-year-old Balawi mocks his Jordanian handlers for thinking he could be lured into spying on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
“They tried to entice me with money and offered me amounts reaching into the millions of dollars,” he says, according to an English translation by IntelCenter, a private intelligence company that monitors jihadist websites. The Arabic-language video was provided to The Washington Post by SITE Intelligence Group, another private intelligence firm.
The CIA declined to comment publicly on the video. One U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with its contents suggested that Balawi’s account overstated the damage that the spy inflicted on U.S. capabilities in the region.
On Monday, Jordan denied Balawi’s allegations that its spy agency was involved in the killing of militant leaders. Government spokesman Nabil Sharif called the allegations “mere lies.”
