[Wash Times] They wanted him dead.For years, a clandestine U.S. intelligence team had tracked a man they knew was high in the leadership of al Qaeda ‐ an operative some believed had a hand in plotting the gruesome 2009 suicide attack in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers.
Referring to the FOB Chapman attack.
Their pursuit was personal, and by early 2014, according to a source directly involved in the operation, the agency had the target under tight drone surveillance. "We literally had a bead on this guy’s head and just needed authorization from Washington to pull the trigger," said the source.
Then something unexpected happened. While agents waited for the green light, the al Qaeda operative’s name, as well as information about the CIA’s classified surveillance and plan to kill him in Pakistan, suddenly appeared in the U.S. press.
Abdullah al-Shami, it turned out, was an American citizen, and President Obama and his national security advisers were torn over whether the benefits of killing him would outweigh the political and civil liberties backlash that was sure to follow.
In interviews with several current and former officials, the al-Shami case was cited as an example of what critics say was the Obama White House’s troublesome tendency to mishandle some of the nation’s most delicate intelligence ‐ especially regarding the Middle East ‐ by leaking classified information in an attempt to sway public opinion on sensitive matters.