The reporter was probably CIA and coordinating the attack.
Actually, the Times boasted earlier that it had not one but two “reporters” there, both of them young Muslim males who had previously been “waging jihad” with some local group but decided that they should devote themselves instead to “helping” the foreign press to “understand” what was happening. Neither one of them was a journalist in any sense of the term, but they apparently became the Times’ source for everything. This, of course, was because they came up with the pro-jihadist version that the Times wanted to hear.
He was probably one of the muzzies doing the attack.