Infiltration of al-Qaeda, Powerful New Weapon

The Washington post details what is being called, “the most important new weapon in the Western arsenal”. That weapon is said to be the recruitment of spies inside al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. “Human sources have begun to produce results,” Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations’ al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring group, said Tuesday in the Post’s report. Barrett is the former chief of Britain’s overseas counter- terrorism operations.

HotAir.com say’s,
The real scoop here is that this isn’t a scoop. If you follow the news about U.S. airstrikes in Pakistan even casually, as we do at HA, you know that something unusual’s been going on over the past 18 months. Check out the graph Bill Roggio put together over the summer, then scroll down and examine the dates on which most of the big jihadi fish were caught. Virtually all of them are from January 2008 or later, and Roggio’s list doesn’t even include now-liquidated Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was iced in August.

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Given all the above, I have no objection to intel agents leaking to WaPo that we have spies in place — surely AQ has figured that out by now — and frankly, I wish they’d do more of it as psyops to sow paranoia among the jihadist elite about turncoats in their midst. There are, reportedly, rifts inside Al Qaeda that a shrewd strategist could exploit.

From The Washington Post

Current and former senior U.S. officials, who spoke about intelligence matters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed what one former CIA official called “our penetration of al-Qaeda.” A senior administration official said that success had come “because of, first of all, very good intelligence capabilities . . . to locate and identify individuals who are part of the al-Qaeda organization.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair referred obliquely in an interview with reporters earlier this month to the use of spies, saying that “the primary way” that U.S. intelligence determines which terrorist organizations pose direct threats is “to penetrate them and learn whether they’re talking about making attacks against the United States.” News

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