(Guardian-UK) Suzanne Goldenberg - In 1998, Melissa Mahle was the CIA station chief in Jerusalem when a call came in that Palestinian police had seized two bags of explosives at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Though five months pregnant, she arrived at the scene focused on the mission, as she describes in her new book, Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA from Iran-Contra to 9/11. She also describes the bureaucratic wrangling that allowed the escape of al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, just as Mahle was closing in on him. Muhammad was the destructive visionary behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. In 1995, a man fitting Muhammad's description turned up in Qatar. At the time, his exact importance to al-Qaeda was unknown - as indeed was Bin Laden's, but the CIA believed Muhammad was involved in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. In her reports back to CIA headquarters, Mahle was all for a "snatch," spiriting Muhammad out of the country in secret. She argued her case to the highest reaches of the National Security Agency, where she was eventually overruled. Had she had her way, she believes, the post-September 11 world might have been a very different place.
2005-03-31 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive