TerrorismDetails of al Qaeda’s “next generation” bomb, aborted effort to take out its designer, emerge
Al Qaeda engineers have been working on designing a sophisticated bomb powerful enough to bring down passenger planes but which is designed to avoid detection by explosives detection machines or trained dogs at airports. “All of our explosive detection equipment wasn’t calibrated to detect [this type of bomb]” TSA director John Pistole said. “And all of our 800 bomb-sniffing dogs had not been trained for that specific type.” A CIA informant inside a Yemeni cell of al Qaeda volunteered to place the bomb on a U.S.-bound plane, but instead delivered it to his CIA handlers in Saudi Arabia. A CIA effort to learn more about the bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, and take him out was aborted when someone leaked the story to AP. The news service refused pleas by the administration to postpone publication of the story until the end of the operation. The AP did agree to delay publication by a week to ten days to allow the CIA to extricate the agent and his family from Saudi Arabia to safety before publication. Asiri and his bomb-making assistants are still at large.
Al Qaeda engineers have been working on designing a sophisticated bomb powerful enough to bring down passenger planes but which is designed to avoid detection by explosives detection machines or trained dogs at airports.
John Pistole, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), who spoke at the Aspen Security Forum, said that the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies were able to get their hands on the device after a CIA agent infiltrated an al Qaeda cell in Yemen and disrupted a plot to place the device on a U.S.-bound passenger plane on the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden’s death.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Pistole said Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, a Saudi-born bomb maker, has built the device and the instructed al Qaeda operatives in Yemen – among them the CIA infiltrator – in how to use it.
Asiri – who was described by Pistole as “our greatest threat. All the intel folks here know that is a clear and present danger” — remains at large.
After the CIA had learned the details of the sophisticated bomb Asiri had designed, the agency set in motion an operation to kill him and the few operatives he had instructed about it. The effort was thwarted when the Associated Press learned details of the operation, and refused pleas by the administration to postpone publication of the story until the end of the operation.
The news agency was not persuaded by arguments that infiltrating a tight al Qaeda cell is nearly impossible, and would become even more difficult after the publication of the story, or by the argument that publishing the story before Asiri and his assistant were taken out meant that they would live to place their sophisticated device on another civilian plane another day.
The AP did agree to delay publication by a week to ten days to allow the CIA to extricate the agent and his family from Saudi Arabia to safety before publication.
The U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community were enraged by the leak of the story to AP, and launched an investigation to identify the leaker. The investigation included phone tapping of twenty phone lines at the AP offices in Washington, D.C. and New York.
ABC News quoted Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, telling lawmakers in May 2012 that “Leaks such as this threaten ongoing operations, puts at risk the lives of sources, makes it much more difficult
