No Western spies in Al Qaida after all these years
Thursday, April 10, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
U.S. intelligence agencies remain unable to plant agents inside the Al Qaida terrorist organization, according to a recent report in an Australian daily.
U.S. and European intelligence officials quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald stated that the inability to plant spies in the terrorist group comes a decade after Al Qaida declared war on the United States.
Counterterrorism officials said spy agencies missed early chances to attack Al Qaida from within and tried to co-opt terrorists with cash while failing to understand fully the religious motivation of the terrorist group.
Additionally, Al Qaida has tightened its internal security by relying more on personal and tribal loyalties.
The difficulty of running agents in a terrorist group was highlighted by the arrests in Barcelona in January of 14 men who were planning to bomb subways in Europe. Disclosures in court revealed that the arrests were triggered based on information from a French intelligence informant, who was forced to flee his operational status.
According to the report, U.S. and European spy agencies have largely avoided sending undercover officers to training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Intelligence operatives lack the skills, backgrounds and knowledge to penetrate the camps, despite the presence of western-looking Islamists in the camps.