A lot of people have wondered why our intelligence agencies announce the captures of various terrorists. It would seem that the wiser course would be to keep their Islamist comrades in the dark while we extract as much information from the captured individuals as possible. As soon as the terrorists read in the papers that someone who knows about them has been caught they are certain to change their methods, procedures, plans, addresses, and anything else they can in order to avoid capture.
Yet there is the hope that our intelligence personnel know what they're doing. We trust that their decisions, policies, and methods are well-thought out so we give them the benefit of the doubt. That benefit, however, is going to be much harder to concede after
this MSNBC account of the leak of the name of the Pakistani who was the source of information for all the terrorist arrests in Europe that have occured in the last couple of days. Some excerpts:
A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al-Qaida operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers. Monday evening, after Khan's name appeared, Pakistani officials moved him to a secret location.
"After his capture [in July], he admitted being an al-Qaida member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker, and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz."
The Times published a story Monday saying U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts. The Times identified him as Khan, although it did not say how it had learned his name.
U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al-Qaida suspects.
Intelligence and security experts said they were surprised that Washington would reveal information that could expose the name of a source during an ongoing law enforcement operation.
"If it's true that the Americans have unintentionally revealed the identity of another nation's intelligence agent, who appears to be working in the good of all of us, that is not only a fundamental intelligence flaw. It's also a monumental foreign relations blunder," security expert Paul Beaver, a former publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, told Reuters.
The key word here is "unintentionally". It may be that the name was released deliberately to sow confusion or deception. Nevertheless, if whoever revealed the identity of this man did it recklessly, he/she should be fired. Naming Khan may have unnecessarily alerted dozens of terrorists who might survive to murder in the future. If so, whoever made the decision to expose Khan's arrest will be partly responsible for the deaths of the victims.
