264 AMERICAN SPYproject in Macedonia and Kosovo. Unrelated to me or the Kosovo project,
my client found himself in some legal hot water of the white-collar-crime
variety. The federal government investigated his company’s accounting
practices, and the US Attorney’s Office successfully prosecuted him for
insider trading. Before sentencing, as in any criminal case, the judge would
assess my former client’s lifetime behavioral “balance sheet” and take his
positive contributions to society into account when deciding his fate.
While my client was dealing with his legal problems, I continued to
work with his company, which operated as usual in all parts of the world.
The company happened to have direct access inside the Taliban’s only
foreign “diplomatic mission” in Pakistan, a country that recognized the
Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. With my client’s per-
mission, I proposed to my US government contacts that they exploit this
unique access to the Taliban, which at the time was providing safe haven
to Usama bin Laden (UBL) and al-Qaeda inside Afghanistan. My assump-
tion was that the Taliban’s support for UBL might be discussed inside their
Pakistan mission, and we might be able to gain access to those discussions
and documents. In my proposal to the government, I spelled out in detail
the kinds of critical intelligence they might expect to collect if they were
to take advantage of this unique window of opportunity. At the top of
my printed list of possible intelligence targets and topics was UBL, fol-
lowed by al-Qaeda and their terrorist-related activities inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan.
Keep in mind, this was an opportunity to collect intelligence on al-
Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. The US intelligence community was already
well aware of the threat posed by UBL and al-Qaeda, who were respon-
sible for the August 7, 1998, US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tan-
zania, and in Nairobi, Kenya, killing over two hundred people.^1 Al-Qaeda
also carried out the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in Yemen’s
Aden harbor, killing seventeen American sailors.^2 Terrorists tied to and
trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan also carried out the 1993 bombing of
the World Trade Center.
Although the government was interested in principle, the agent in
charge of investigating my client was vehemently opposed to the US gov-
ernment taking advantage of my—and in effect my client’s—offer. He sus-
pected my client would then use proof of that cooperation in an effort to