Canadian blows alleged CIA cover
A Canadian man who says his family once lived side by side with Usama bin Laden has claimed he was a CIA double agent sent to spy on al-Qaida fighters at Guantanamo Bay and in Bosnia.
Abd al-Rahman Khadr told Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on Thursday he also led CIA agents hunting suspects after the 11 September attacks to al-Qaida safehouses in Kabul.
Currently living in Toronto with his family, Khadr is the son of Ahmad Said Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian killed last October in Pakistan.
Khadr senior was fingered by Western intelligence services as an al-Qaida operative and a leader of the network.
Abd al-Rahman was taken prisoner in Kabul in November 2001 as US forces hunted Taliban and al-Qaida holdouts, months after the 11 September attacks.
Kabul guide
In the two-part interview, he said that he agreed to work as a CIA agent to escape jail and travelled around the Afghan capital with US agents.
“I took people from the CIA, the FBI, and the military. We’d go around in a car in Kabul and I’d show them the houses of al-Qaida people, the guesthouses, the safe houses – the house they used (before September 11) and the houses they used after.”
He said he was offered $3000 a month to work for the CIA, then told he would be taken to Guantanamo Bay to spy on inmates.
To protect his cover, Khadr said he was treated like a normal prisoner, chained in a plane on the journey from Afghanistan, and kept in isolation for a month when he first arrived.
When the Guantanamo experiment failed, the CIA decided to send him to infiltrate al-Qaida operatives in Bosnia, Khadr said.
The US agents wanted him to volunteer to go to Iraq with al-Qaida fighters allegedly mounting attacks against the US occupation, but he declined, and was allowed to return to his family in Toronto on condition he did not reveal his CIA links.