Did the Americans botch it?

An unashamed copy from metafilter.com:

Are the London bombings a possible long-term result of an Administration undercover operative outing? And, why exactly was this deep mole agent blown by the US Administration in August of 2004, concurrent with raising the DHS Threat Level to Orange for NYC and Washington DC financial services? While the Plame blame game and investigation carries on, we now have another old news story about a rara avis Al Qaeda double-agent undercover operative outing that is suddenly rising from the ashes of dusty newsprint almost like a phoenix seeking it's own special prosecutor. -- Following the thread of the story is a bit of a tangle, so an attempt to unsnarl the imbroglio is provided inside....


Remember the Al Qaeda operative Naeem Khan, and his infamous communications hub of a laptop, an arrest widely reported in the news during the first week of August, 2004? While on

Coincidentally, August 1st the Homeland Security Threat Level was raised to Code Orange for the financial services sector in New York City, Northern New Jersey and Washington, DC.

I remember it well because a client of our security firm was one of the NYC stock exchanges, and there was some concern afoot.

ABC News just reported that the British authorities say they have evidence that the London attacks last week were an operation planned by Al Qaeda for the last two years.

Not reported by ABC was that after his arrest Khan started working for our side - sending emails to his other Al Qaeda buddies, working as our mole.

What is the Khan connection to the London bombings? Well, intelligence officials at the time said that the plans discovered on Khan's computer included attacks on London's transport system as well as Heathrow Airport.

Furthermore, according to Americablog, " ABC reports that names in Khan's computer matched a suspected cell of British citizens of Pakistani decent, many of who lived near the town of Luton, England - Luton is the same town where, not coincidentally, last week's London bombing terrorists began their day. According to ABC, authorities thought they had stopped the subway plot with the arrest of more than a dozen people last year associated with Khan. Obviously, they hadn't.

“This was an operation the Brits thought they caught and stopped in time, but they were wrong. The piece of the puzzle ABC missed is that this is an operation the Bush administration helped botch last year. It seems at the time it was notable, yet basically ignored in the reportage of the event, that Khan was a deep undercover mole who had been flipped to work for the West."

Security experts in 2004 were quoted as being "shocked" when administration officials outed Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan as an al Qaeda mole.

Jane's Defense security expert Tim Ripley pondered, "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place? It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's on the front pages every time there's a development, is it?"

At the time, Juan Cole noted that "The announcement of Khan's name forced the British to arrest 12 members of an al-Qaeda cell prematurely, before they had finished gathering the necessary evidence against them via Khan." At least one of those people was subsequently released due to lack of evidence.

Connecting the dots between the Khan story leak and the London bombing: Seems that some of the non-arrested cell members that were tipped by the news announcement of Khan's capture took the hint, fled, and escaped the ensuing dragnet.

According to some reports coming out of the current investigation of the London bombing, some of the actors involved in the London transport bombing may have ties to those escapees. This investigation (resonating the immortal words of Scott McClellan in not commenting on Karl Rove) is still developing.

However, if this blowback is in any part true about as having arisen from our blowing Khan, we just may have a serious problem with outing our own critical anti-terrorism undercover agents in Washington...and that's true even without referencing Plamegate.