[OKCSubmariner]

This article claims that moles within the USG and US intelligience agencies aided and abetted the Bin Laden terrorists.

Is this really true, and if so how extensive?

If this is true, we need not only to look for terror cells but also terror moles within the USG and US intelligence agencies (and Congressional committees?).

[roughrider]

"Furthermore, U.S. counterintelligence has strived for two decades at least to penetrate the militant Islamic fundamentalist world by planting its own moles and double agents – with very little success. In most cases, those plants remained faithful to their religious tenets, not their American handlers, using their covert American connections to spread the fundamentalist net inside U.S. intelligence itself."

Whoever wrote this was reading my mind. What the writer is really saying is that FBI and CIA counterintelligence falsely believed that informants and provacateurs recruited and planted in the cells by these agencies (Freeh's term was "populating" the cells) deceived the agencies. The informants fed misleading and misdirecting information to FBI and CIA, took their money, some of which had to be generous for this kind of work, and then double crossed the agencies.

There is a possibility that the double agents managed to plant or recruit moles in the agencies, and that might not be as hard as it looks with the FBI, because it is hard for them to find people with even Spanish language skills. To find an Arabic speaker would be a real coup for them. So, it is possible that double agent informants managed to plant moles, and the Soviets had moles in there. The Soviets used the Islamic terrorists a lot, and there were reports that the Soviets helped with the OKC bombing.

What we are looking at is going off 10,000 miles to fight a war when the enemy has at least a brigade of soldiers already in the country, and maybe some people in the security agencies helping to hide them. Not a good way to go off to war.

[roughrider]

You know, sometimes a fact is so simple, and right out there in front of you, that you don't immediately grab it. Must be too obvious, I guess. When Freeh bragged about "populating" that Abu Nidal cell during an OPEN HEARING before Congress, Freeh was informing Abu Nidal that the FBI planted informants in that terrorist cell operating within the United States. Now, why would an FBI Director let that kind of information out to the general public?

[LSJohn]

There are probably some moles, but I think the greater danger is the practice of letting people with obvious red flag backgrounds to circulate freely in order to monitor and/or "turn" them. I place "turn" in quotation marks because the idea that more than an infinitessimal number of these people can be turned is foolhardy or worse.