Getting Close to Terror, but Not to Stop It - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/world/despite-cia-fears-thomas-mchale-port-authority-officer-kept-sources-with-ti
Sur l’#alliance #Jundallah #Etats-Unis (et le #double-langage de ces derniers) contre l’#Iran (en sachant que le premier nommé est dans la liste des organisations #terroristes du second)
After a car bombing in southeastern Iran killed 11 Revolutionary Guard members in 2007, a C.I.A. officer noticed something surprising in the agency’s files: an intelligence report, filed ahead of the bombing, that had warned that something big was about to happen in Iran.
Though the report had provided few specifics, the C.I.A. officer realized it meant that the United States had known in advance that a Sunni terrorist group called Jundallah was planning an operation inside Shiite-dominated Iran, two former American officials familiar with the matter recalled. Just as surprising was the source of the report. It had originated in Newark, with a detective [Mr McHale] for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
(...)
(...) though the government now says Mr. McHale worked as a single operator, there are indications that senior officials knew of and approved of the relationship he developed with Jundallah. For example, in 2008, senior F.B.I. officials in Washington approved a trip Mr. McHale made to Afghanistan, where he met with his network of informants. By rule, the #C.I.A. would also have had to approve that trip.
Mr. McHale’s intelligence reports circulated widely throughout the intelligence community, former officials said. In 2009, the C.I.A.’s Iranian Operations Division gave Mr. McHale an award for his work, former officials said. The reason for his commendation is unknown. Dean Boyd, the C.I.A. spokesman, said the agency could not confirm having provided an award and declined to comment further.
By then, the State Department had begun considering whether to designate Jundallah as a terrorist organization. American officials denied repeated accusations by Iran that the United States and Israel were working with the group.
Iranian forces captured Abdolmalek Rigi in February 2010 and executed him that June. But Jundallah was undeterred. That July, two of its suicide bombers attacked the Grand Mosque in Zahedan, the provincial capital in southeastern Iran. Approximately 30 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Jundallah identified the bombers as Abdulbaset and Muhammad Rigi, relatives of their fallen leader.
President Obama condemned the carnage. “The United States stands with the families and loved ones of those killed and injured, and with the Iranian people, in the face of this injustice,” he said.
Keeping Ties After Terror
But the United States’s relationship with Jundallah’s leaders, through Mr. McHale and the F.B.I., did not change, even after the State Department formally designated Jundallah a terrorist organization in November 2010.