WE WILL probably never know what led Humam Khalil Abu- Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian physician in his 30s who studied medicine in Turkey, to become a double agent for the CIA and al-Qaeda, then a suicide bomber.
When Balawi blew himself up at a CIA base in Khost, eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, a week ago, he took the lives of seven CIA agents and his Jordanian handler.
He delivered the most severe blow to the US intelligence agency since a suicide bomber wiped out its Middle Eastern headquarters at the US embassy in Beirut 17 years ago.
Perhaps it was Balawi’s work in a Palestinian refugee camp near Zarqa – also home to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the slain leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq – that radicalised him.
Under the pseudonym Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, Balawi became a star columnist, known for his Koranic and literary flourishes, on the al-Qaeda website al-Hisba.
The young doctor’s jihadist sympathies led to his arrest by Jordanian authorities in 2007. While in custody, he was recruited to work for the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate (GID), which shared the catch with its CIA allies.
Last March, Balawi told family and friends he was returning to Turkey to continue his medical studies. He went to Afghanistan instead. It was apparently from Afghanistan that he gave an interview – still under the name Abu Dujana al-Khorasani – to al-Qaeda’s online magazine Vanguards of Khorasan in September.
“I have had a predisposition for love of jihad and martyrdom since I was little,” Balawi told Vanguards, as quoted by the Washington Post. The interview did not alarm Balawi’s CIA and GID mentors, who assumed he was building his cover.
As a medical doctor, al-Jazeera television reported, the CIA thought Balawi could lead them to the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man and the number two in al-Qaeda, who is thought to be hiding in the border region near Khost.
Indeed, Balawi proved to be such a valuable purveyor of “actionable intelligence” that when he sent word he had obtained important information, the CIA’s deputy station chief travelled from Kabul to Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost for the meeting. Balawi was so trusted an agent that when he arrived dressed in Afghan army fatigues, he was not searched.
Balawi detonated his explosives belt while being greeted by what the New York Times described as the “elite team” of CIA agents who operated as a paramilitary group in the mountains on the Pakistani border. It was from Chapman base that the CIA planned missile attacks by pilotless drones on presumed al-Qaeda targets in the area. Balawi’s suicide attack was initially viewed as retaliation for the CIA’s recent “Haqqani binge” against a local Islamist network allied with al-Qaeda.
You can be sure Balawi’s “martyrdom” was discussed at US president Barack Obama’s meeting with intelligence chiefs at the White House yesterday.
In a blunt report on the website of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, on Monday, Maj Gen Michael Flynn, the head of US military intelligence in Afghanistan, condemned the inadequacies of intelligence gathering.
Maj Gen Flynn’s report said the US intelligence apparatus “still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade”.
Intelligence analysts are so “starved for information from the field . . . that many say their jobs feel more like fortune telling than serious detective work”, he wrote.
Balawi’s complex plot as a double agent belied recent US claims that al-Qaeda was “on the run”. It also laid bare the intimate intelligence links between the US and Jordan, which started when the late King Hussein went on the CIA payroll in 1957.
There was a certain embarrassment in Amman about the death of Capt Sharif Ali bin Zeid, an intelligence officer and cousin of King Abdullah II, who was killed by Balawi along with the seven CIA agents.
The Jordanian news agency Petra reported only that Zeid was killed “as he performed his humanitarian duty with the Jordanian contingent of the UN peacekeeping forces”.
The Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate has interrogated – and, according to a UN inquiry, tortured – men who were kidnapped by the CIA and flown to Jordan under the Bush administration’s “rendition” process.