The world of mirrors and shadows

The NYTimes has an interesting story today about an aborted operation in early 2005 aimed at senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (Emphasis is mine.)

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.
...
The officials acknowledge that they are not certain that Mr. Zawahri attended the 2005 meeting in North Waziristan, a mountainous province just miles from the Afghan border. But they said that the United States had communications intercepts that tipped them off to the meeting, and that intelligence officials had unusually high confidence that Mr. Zawahri was there.

My primary interest in this story has to do with my (purely speculative) theory of what led to another attack aimed at Zawahiri, the attack on the compound at Damadola in Pakistan's Bajaur Agency in January 2006, a year after the events in this NYT story.

That attack killed several high-ranking Al Qaeda members, including Abd Rahman al-Masri al-Maghribi, who was Zawahiri's son-in-law. Sadly, Zawahiri was in fact not at that meeting, and missed an early shot at his 72 virgins.

Al-Maghribi was a senior propagandist with Al Qaeda. In this post, I pointed to a Stratfor analysis that speculated that US Intelligence found its way to the meeting through al-Maghribi.

I then looked at a series of intelligence successes in Iraq, and speculated that perhaps that chain led US Intelligence to al-Maghribi. Read the post for the full reasoning, but here's the central point.

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You may recall I had several posts in the last months of 2005 detailing some key successes that Coalition Forces achieved in taking down key propaganda officials in Iraq. The arrests seemed to come in a chain, with one arrest of a propaganda official or terrorist leading to another.

Name	Role
Abu Khalil	exec. assistant and banker to Abu Assam
Abu Assam	#2 AQI official
Abu Dijana	senior AQI propaganda cell leader
Yasir Ibrahim	top financier to Iraqi insurgency
Abu Hassen	senior AQI propaganda cell leader in Baghdad
Abu Ibrahim	supplied equipment to Abu Hassen
Abu Shihab	a senior propaganda chief in Baghdad
Abu Naba	chief propagandist in Mosul

The chain of events seems to be this.

The capture of Abu Khalil leads to the death of Abu Assam, the capture of Abu Dijana, and the capture of Yasir Ibrahim.

The capture of Yasir Ibrahim leads to the capture of Abu Hassen and Abu Shihab.

The capture of Abu Hassen leads to the capture of Abu Ibrahim.

The capture of Abu Shihab leads to the capture of Abu Naba.

Now, how does all this relate to al-Maghribi and Damadola? Here is where we can only speculate.

Since al-Maghribi was a senior propaganda official, he could have had reason to interact with some of these officials in Iraq. al-Maghribi might have been in contact with someone like Abu Ibrahim, who supplied computer equipment to propganda cells in Iraq.
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Then, in this post, I mused about what started this chain in the first place. I speculated that perhaps it was related to a letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi, dated July 9 2005. News that the letter had been intercepted was released October 11 2005. The ODNI said at the time "The contents were released only after assurances that no ongoing intelligence or military operations would be affected by making this document public."

Abu Khalil, the first person mentioned in the table above, was captured Sept 24. However, news of his capture was not released until October 15. This was four days after news of the letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi was released.

I wrote:

My speculation is this: Did the interception of the letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi play a role in the intelligence operation that led to the capture of Abu Khalil? Perhaps the letter was carried by a trusted courier who also had knowledge of Abu Khalil's whereabouts.

I also said in that post:

The ONDI said the letter's existence was revealed only after officials were sure doing so wouldn't jeopardize any ongoing operations. With the capture of Abu Khalil, had the letter, and the means by which it was intercepted, served its usefulness, and so it was safe to reveal the letter's existence?

If the letter did play a role in the capture of Abu Khalil, it had to have been intercepted before September 24. Starting with the interception of the letter, then, did a plan start to develop aimed at targeting Zawahiri?

With the interception of the letter, US intelligence must have learned a little bit about how it got from Zawahiri to Iraq. If it did play a role in the capture of Abu Khalil, whoever was carrying it somehow had information that could be tied to some very important terrorist officials.

Now, in today's NYT story, there is this detail:

Months later, in early May 2005, the C.I.A. launched a missile from a remotely piloted Predator drone, killing Haitham al-Yemeni, a senior Qaeda figure whom the C.I.A. had tracked since the meeting.

So, this story tells us that the US had "communications intercepts" that gave them good intelligence about Zawahiri's possible location, and that even though the operation was aborted, they were able to track Haitham al-Yemeni after that meeting and kill him in May 2005, only two months before Zawahiri's letter to Zarqawi.

Now, in his letter to Zarqawi, Zawahiri said two interesting things. He said:

Please take every caution in the meetings, especially when someone claims to carry an important letter or contributions. It was in this way that they arrested Khalid Sheikh.

and

However, the real danger comes from the agent Pakistani army that is carrying out operations in the tribal areas looking for mujahedeen.

Zawahiri was warning about the possibility of couriers being compromised.

Again, this is speculation, but perhaps in the mix of obtaining these communications intercepts and tracking Haitham al-Yemeni, US Intelligence got on to the courier that brought the letter to Zarqawi, and from that, built into another operation that almost got Zawahiri a year after this aborted operation.

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Others commenting on this story are Captain's Quarters, Hot Air, Kevin Drum, Macsmind and Riehl World View.

The indispensable Andy McCarthy has a good column at NRO on the aborted operation, and puts it in context.

(linked at OTB's Beltway Traffic Jam)

(linked at Mudville Gazette's Dawn Patrol)