Gradually, Balawi began reporting that he was penetrating the core of the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan, trading on his credentials as Khorasani. Moreover, he was the best chance any intelligence service in the world had to find the path to bring justice to Zawahiri and maybe bin Laden. We don’t know all the details, but the professionals in the GID - one of the very best intelligence services in the world - became convinced of Balawi’s conversion from al-Qaida propagandist to Jordan’s asset. The trail for the senior leadership of the terrorists, Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, was ice cold for the CIA, and it was looking for help.īalawi convinced the GID that he was the asset they were looking for, and he was dispatched to Pakistan. President Barack Obama made defeating al-Qaida the goal of his Afghanistan-Pakistan policy in April 2009, and the GID was determined to help. The ultimate goal was to get an asset inside the leadership of al-Qaida in Pakistan. The GID wanted to turn Balawi into a double agent to penetrate al-Qaida, and Zeid would be his case officer. He spoke English with a New England accent and was well-known and liked by his American liaison counterparts. At 34, he was a 10-year veteran of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) who had studied in Boston and worked as an intern for then-U.S. The chief of the arrest team was a cousin of King Abdullah named Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid al Oun. In January 2009, the Jordanians arrested Balawi. The Americans were concerned that Khorasani was an exceptionally gifted propagandist with a flair for paroting the work of al-Qaida’s number two, another doctor: the Egyptian Ayman al Zawahiri. The American intelligence community reportedly gave the Jordanian intelligence service a tip that Balawi was Khorasani. Upon returning to Jordan, he took a job in the sprawling Marka refugee camp delivering medical aid to the poor.īehind the scenes, Balawi had another identity: He was a propagandist for al-Qaida, writing jihadi news and analysis on the internet using the nom de guerre Abu Dujjana al Khorasani. Humam Khalil al Balawi grew up in Jordan and then got a medical degree in Istanbul, Turkey, where he married a Turkish woman. In 1991, they became refugees again when the Kuwaiti government expelled the Palestinian community after the American-led coalition liberated the country from the Iraqis. The bomber was a Palestinian whose family had been become refugees in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, leaving Beersheva and ultimately settling in Kuwait. Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology