The suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. officers and one Jordanian intelligence officer last week in southeastern Afghanistan was an asset of the Jordanian intelligence service who had been brought to Afghanistan to help hunt down top members of the Qaeda network, according to a Western official briefed on the matter.
The bomber had been arrested in Jordan and recruited by that country’s intelligence service — which believed that it had turned him into an ally — and then brought to Afghanistan to infiltrate the Qaeda organization by posing as a foreign jihadi.
“He was definitely someone who could be seen as very helpful for something very important,” the official said.
But the supposed intelligence asset was actually a double-agent who was given explosives by militants in the frontier region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he wore to a meeting last Wednesday at Forward Operating Base Chapman, the C.I.A. base in the southeastern province of Khost.He was able to elude base security and was not closely searched because of his perceived value as someone who could lead American forces to senior Qaeda leaders, and because the Jordanian intelligence officer who was his handler identified him as an intelligence asset...
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