In fact, Khan was not the source of the financial district plot "intelligence" which had actually been gathered years earlier, nor was there any intelligence to indicate that an attack on New York area and Washington, D.C. financial centers was imminent. On this count the Times article contained some serious mis-information:
"The American officials said the new evidence had been obtained only after the capture of the Qaeda figure. Among other things, they said, it demonstrated that Qaeda plotters had begun casing the buildings in New York, Newark and Washington even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
While the Times article seemed to suggest that the original leak about Khan had come from a "Pakistani Intelligence official," that also was not the case. The mainstream media did some reporting on the back end of this story, but a major debt of gratitude is owed to Middle East authority Juan Cole, who closely monitored and chronicled events on his respected and widely read web site, Informed Comment as they unfolded.
Within a few days a different version of events began to emerge, like this one in The Washington Post on August 4th:
"Bush administration officials said the terror alert for financial sectors in Washington, New York and Newark was based in part on the contents of a laptop computer, disks and other materials seized during an arrest of an al Qaeda fugitive in Pakistan in late July showing that al Qaeda operatives had conducted detailed surveillance of the five buildings. U.S. officials did not make clear until Tuesday that the surveillance was conducted three to four years ago and that authorities were not sure whether it had continued [Emphasis added]."
It soon became abundantly clear that the outing of Khan in the New York Times had seriously damaged the national security of the United States, Great Britain, and Pakistan, among others. Juan Cole's report dated August 7, 2004:
Did the Bush Administration Burn a Key al-Qaeda Double Agent?
Simon Cameron-Moore and Peter Graff of Reuters reveal the explosive information that the Bush administration blew the cover Monday of double agent Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. On Sunday August 1, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced a new alert against an al-Qaeda plot concerning financial institutions in New York and Washington, DC.
...Reuters alleges, "The New York Times published a story on Monday saying U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested secretly in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts... The newspaper... did not say how it had learned his name. U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations on Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al Qaeda suspects."
...Reuters implies that once the Americans blew Khan's cover, the Pakistani ISI were willing to give [New York Times reporter David] Rohde more details in Karachi.
...Anyway, Khan had been secretly apprehended by Pakistani military intelligence in mid-July, and had been turned into a double agent. He was actively helping investigators penetrate further into al-Qaeda cells and activities via computer, and was still cooperating when the "senior Bush administration" figure told [New York Times reporter Douglas] Jehl about him.
Pakistani military intelligence... 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... He was cooperating with interrogators on Sunday and Monday and sent e-mails on both days..."'
In other words, the Bush administration just blew the cover of one of the most important assets inside al-Qaeda that the US has ever had.
The announcement of Khan's name forced the British to arrest 12 members of an al-Qaeda cell prematurely, before they had finished gathering the necessary evidence against them via Khan. Apparently they feared that the cell members would scatter as soon as they saw that Khan had been compromised. (They would have known he was a double agent, since they got emails from him Sunday and Monday!) One of the twelve has already had to be released for lack of evidence, a further fall-out of the Bush SNAFU. It would be interesting to know if other cell members managed to flee.
Why in the world would Bush administration officials out a double agent working for Pakistan and the US against al-Qaeda? In a way, the motivation does not matter. If the Reuters story is true, this slip is a major screw-up that casts the gravest doubts on the competency of the administration to fight a war on terror. Either the motive was political calculation, or it was sheer stupidity...
On August 9th Juan Cole observed:
...Then on [August 6th], after Khan's name was revealed, government sources told CNN that counterterrorism officials had seen a drop in intercepted communications among suspected terrorists."
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