Breaking news: CIA officers were killed by Jordanian double spy

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Ever since I posted “The Meaning of the Suicide Attack on the CIA” on this blog, I have been telling reporters who contacted me that the attack at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman was probably carried out by a double agent. I dismissed claims on other websites that the bomber had been just a “potential recruit” who was “not required to go through full security checks [at Chapman FOB] in order to help gain [his] trust”. Instead, as I wrote on Saturday, I suggested that “the bomber was able to evade safety search standards [at the US base] by relying on a long-term informant-handler relationship with CIA personnel stationed at the outpost. This would lead to the strong possibility that the informant-turned-bomber had been groomed as a double agent from the very start by local Taliban operatives”. A news report has just appeared on NBC, which appears to confirm just that: namely that the suicide bomber had been “an al-Qaeda double agent” who was “arrested by Jordanian intelligence more than a year ago”, and turned over to the Americans by his Jordanian handlers, who believed he “had been successfully reformed”. NBC cites intelligence sources who identified the bomber as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a medical doctor from the Jordanian town of Zarqa, who had been working for the CIA and Jordan’s General Intelligence Department for at least a year. His Jordanian handler appears to have been Sharif Ali bin Zeid, a senior intelligence officer related to the Jordanian royal family. The Jordanian connection was confirmed yesterday in Jordan news reports, which revealed that a GID spy, Ali bin Zeid, was killed at FOB Chapman “on Wednesday evening as a martyr while performing the sacred duty of the Jordanian forces”.