The Boston Globe reported the following day:
...several senior intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed dismay at the level of information that has been revealed to the media -- particularly the role that Khan's arrest has played.
''Most of the people I talk to are most shocked by some of the recent details being revealed about Al Qaeda," said one senior CIA analyst who works on terrorism issues.
On August 7, 2004 John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor and a terrorism expert, told FOX News that "By exposing the only deep mole we've ever had within al-Qaeda, it ruined the chance to capture dozens if not hundreds more."
On September 16, 2004, more than seven weeks after Kahn's identity was leaked to The New York Times, then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, in London for consultation with British officials, publicly acknowledged that the U.S. had been responsible for the leak and apologized for it. He told reporters that the leaking of the intelligence about alleged terrorist suspects in London was "regrettable."
THE AFTERMATH
The story does not end here. Remember those alleged plans to attack financial centers in New York, Newark and Washington? It turns out that wasn't true either. Michael Isakoff and Mark Hosenball reported in on the real targets in Newsweek two weeks after the November 2004 election:
The latest analysis of evidence that led to last summer's Code Orange alert suggests that Al Qaeda operatives were plotting a "big bomb" attack against a major landmark in Britain-but had no active plans for strikes in the United States, U.S. intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK.
The reassessment of Al Qaeda plans is the latest indication that much of the Bush administration's repeatedly voiced concerns about a pre-election attack inside the United States was based in part on an early misreading of crucial intelligence seized months ago in Pakistan.
The new view is that there was indeed an active Al Qaeda plot underway earlier this year-one that involved coded communications between high-level operatives in Pakistan and a British cell headed by a longtime associate of September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
The plot was aimed at setting off a large bomb at a prestigious economic or political target inside the United Kingdom-in effect to make a political statement against the British government...
Some U.S. law-enforcement officers based in London, NEWSWEEK has learned, have become extremely concerned about evidence regarding possible active Al Qaeda plots to attack targets in Britain. According to a U.S. government official, fears of terror attacks have prompted FBI agents based in the U.S. Embassy in London to avoid traveling on London's popular underground railway (or tube) system...[Emphasis added]
...The indications that plotters linked to a big election-season terror alert actually were actively planning to attack Britain rather than the United States is at least the second revelation which seems to partly undermine administration assertions that the U.S. homeland faced a heightened risk of attack during the presidential campaign.
Shortly before the election, administration officials quietly acknowledged that at least one informant who last winter had provided lurid intelligence about a possible pre-election attack in the U.S. had apparently fabricated his allegations. Yet given the importance that waging the war on terror had assumed during the presidential campaign, administration officials apparently were reluctant to announce a lowering of the Orange-alert threat until after the election...
THE LEAK COMES FULL CIRCLE
Fast forward to July 7, 2005 when a series of suicide terrorist attacks upon the London public transportation system left 52 dead and hundreds injured. Were these the attacks being planned in 2004 when the U.S. government outed Khan? Did members of a terrorist cell who escaped following Khan's exposure go on to carry out their plans after all, a year later? ABC News reported on July 17, 2005:
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