WaPost: Former Gitmo prisoners, turned spies, provided tip about last week's mail bombs.

Spy agencies infiltrate al-Qaida
By PAISLEY DODDS
The Associated Press
Friday, November 5, 2010; 5:14 PM

LONDON -- Months after he was released from Guantanamo Bay, Abdul Rahman was back in the company of terrorist leaders along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But he was a double agent, providing Taliban and al-Qaida secrets to Pakistani intelligence, which then shared the tips with Western counterparts.

The ruse cost him his life, according to a former Pakistani military intelligence official, Mahmood Shah. The Taliban began to suspect him, and after multiple interrogations executed him.

The case of Rahman, which Shah recounted to The Associated Press, falls in line with a key aspect of the fight against terror - Western intelligence agencies, with help from Islamic allies, are placing moles and informants inside al-Qaida and the Taliban. The program seems to be bearing fruit, even as many infiltrators like Rahman are discovered and killed.

It was a tip from an al-Qaida militant-turned-informant that led international authorities to find explosives hidden in printer cartridges from Yemen to the United States a week ago, Yemeni security officials say. Officials say the explosives could have caused a blast as deadly as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in Scotland that killed 270 people.

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The Saudis have a terror rehab program that has hosted about 120 of the nearly 800 men who have passed through Guantanamo since it opened nine years ago. Of them, about two dozen have taken up arms again, while a handful are thought to be working as spies for the Saudis in exchange for stipends paid to their families and tribes, loans and other monetary incentives, according to two European government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of their work.

Yemeni authorities have said a tip on last week's mail bomb plot came from a Saudi who returned from Guantanamo in 2007, spent time in the rehab program and fled to Yemen before handing himself in to Saudi authorities in late September. Yemeni security officials say he may have been a double agent, planted by Saudi Arabia. But European government officials say that while the Saudi may have provided broad outlines about the plot, it appears Saudi Arabia had additional sources.

Earlier in the year, another Saudi who had been held in Guantanamo and put into the terror rehab program also fled to Yemen to rejoin a terror group, only to surrender to Saudi authorities, the European government officials said. The officials said it appeared that he, too, could have been working in Yemen as a double agent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/05/AR2010110502347.html