LONDON — Months after he was released from Guantánamo Bay, Abdul Rahman was back in the company of terrorist leaders along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But he was a double agent, providing Taliban and al-Qaida secrets to Pakistani intelligence, which then shared the tips with Western counterparts.
The ruse cost him his life, according to a former Pakistani military intelligence official, Mahmood Shah. The Taliban began to suspect him and after multiple interrogations executed him.
The case of Rahman, which Shah recounted to The Associated Press, falls in line with a key aspect of the fight against terror — Western intelligence agencies, with help from Islamic allies, are placing moles and informants inside al-Qaida and the Taliban. The program seems to be bearing fruit, even though many infiltrators like Rahman are discovered and killed.
It was a tip from an al-Qaida militant-turned-informant that led international authorities to find explosives hidden in printer cartridges from Yemen to the United States a week ago, Yemeni security officials say. Officials say the explosives could have caused a blast as deadly as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in Scotland that killed 270 people.
Intelligence agencies such as MI6 and the CIA have hired more agents from diverse backgrounds since the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and others that followed. Many say the tactics have worked: Several plots, also including the 2006 trans-Atlantic airline plot, were thwarted because intelligence agents were able to use tips to track the would-be terrorists.
In recent years, U.S., European and Pakistani intelligence officials have said al-Qaida has been weakened by CIA drone strikes along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and by governments planting agents within terror cells. Trust has been eroded enough that militants have begun to turn on one another.
