Despite even making it to the celebrity obsessed British tabloid, the Daily Mail, it has hardly been perceived as Earth-shattering news. Nor has it received widespread coverage because as a story it deviates from overriding media narratives over the dominance of technological surveillance as revealed by Edward Snowden. And the angle of much of the resultant media coverage has tended to fit nicely into American obsessions around the incompetence and/or secrecy of their intelligence agencies and/or their involvement in a cover-up of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Nevertheless, the story is worthy of attention for what it reveals about the potential significance of human intelligence to counter-terrorism. Technological surveillance may get most of the headlines and carry a certain trendiness but old fashioned human spies offer the potential to infiltrate terrorist groups at the highest levels. It has emerged that a one-time Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) human source, more commonly known as an informer or informant, managed to meet Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s while secretly in the employ of the American national police force. He later switched teams and began working for and reporting to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before his secret career ended in the mid-1990s in Bosnia when members of al-Qaeda, apparently suspecting him of being an informer, murdered him. Sudanese by birth, the individual, whose name still has not been made public, ended up as an immigrant in the United States. Eventually, he became a driver for Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an extremist Egyptian cleric with terrorist connections living in the United States and frequently referred to, and not in a kind way, as "The Blind Sheikh" because of his lack of sight. Several of Abdel-Rahman's American-based followers would be involved in the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993 in which a bomb placed in a rental truck detonated in the parking garage of the north tower killing six and injuring over a thousand more. Abdel-Rahman himself would later be convicted in relation to the attack and be sentenced to life in prison where he remains to this day. As for his Sudanese driver, in 1993 he came to the attention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and, in turn, to the FBI. With his name already on a terrorist watch list, he was a natural candidate for deportation. He was sent to Jordan which eventually moved him on to Yemen and it was here, likely after the WTC bombing when the FBI was desperate for intelligence, that he was recruited by a veteran FBI member and Arabic speaker named Bassem Youssef who posed initially as a friend who could connect the target to family in California. Even his wife later found herself assisting the FBI. His usefulness to the Bureau involved recording conversations with Abdel-Rahman and informing his handler about other terrorist activities he was aware of. These included connections to a group called al-Qaeda and its Saudi leader, the still relatively obscure, certainly compared to his later notoriety, Osama bin Laden. The FBI human source would later meet bin Laden in Sudan and told of travelling around Europe on fake passports. By then his work for the Bureau was coming to an end and he found himself on the payroll of the CIA who he apparently was working for when he was murdered in Bosnia. In many respects the story reflects standard techniques around the recruitment and handling of informers plus the profound risk involved for those who partake in such work. Furthermore, the entire tale speaks to the continuing importance of intelligence supplied by human sources, a point often forgotten in the race to focus on technology as an inherent component of the Snowden revelations. Although he may have been unique as an informer in meeting Obama, he was not the only FBI informer active at this time in relation to the activities of Abdel-Rahman. Another human source by the name of Emad Salem, whose employment was dispensed with by the Bureau before the 1993 bombing, quickly in its aftermath returned to spy for the FBI. His efforts, for which he received over $1 million, helped convict Abdel-Rahman and eleven others. Whether the informer who met bin Laden ever received such payments is unknown. What seems clear is that his work for the American intelligence services eventually cost him his life.
