Videotapes of a Qaeda Informer Offer Glimpse Into a Secret Life

It was an extraordinary coup: in the late 1990's, federal prosecutors sat down to interview their first major informer against Al Qaeda — Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a former payroll manager for Osama bin Laden who would become the government's chief witness in its first trial of Qaeda operatives. But it was followed by an extraordinary blunder: for two years, even as the authorities cloaked Mr. Fadl in the secrecy of the federal witness-protection program, keeping him in undisclosed locations and communicating with him in videoconferences through a special telephone hookup, many hours of those conversations were recorded on videotape.

The taping, which the government says was done by someone in the federal marshals service and discovered in 2002 by prosecutors and the F.B.I., violated the established practice and the very mission of witness protection. Such recordings are not made because they could reveal deadly clues about the identity and location of the informer — particularly one as high risk as Mr. Fadl, who is unharmed but still hidden and may be called again to testify in terrorism trials.

Now the videotapes, 28 hours of them, are complicating the government's case against the four men Mr. Fadl helped convict of conspiring in the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa and other terrorist acts.

After prosecutors learned of the tapes' existence, months after the trial, they gave the defense 647 pages of transcripts under a strict court order of confidentiality. Defense lawyers are now requesting new trials, contending in papers unsealed this week in Federal District Court in Manhattan that the tapes should have been disclosed earlier and would have helped them discredit Mr. Fadl, an assertion that prosecutors reject. But whoever wins that legal tussle, the transcripts — excerpted in the defense papers — offer an unusually intimate look at the government's complex and often delicate dealings with its primary witness in the war on terrorism before 9/11.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/nyregion/01WITN.html