Bin Laden's Secret Courier Revealed

The AP reports:

The courier who led U.S. intelligence to Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan hailed from the Swat Valley, a one-time stronghold of militant Taliban fighters, Pakistani officials said on Wednesday.

The officials identified the courier as Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. He and his brother Abrar were shot dead in the daring U.S. Navy SEAL raid May 2 that also killed bin Laden and two other people.

The brothers apparently linked up with bin Laden after they returned to Swat Valley from Kuwait, where their parents had immigrated.

Swat is about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of the city of Abbottabad, where bin Laden had been hiding for about five years. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the real names of the two brothers, said they were from the Swat village of Martung.

The U.S. commando attack, conducted without notification of Pakistani officials, was a huge embarrassment for the country given that bin Laden's compound was in a military garrison city and only about 35 miles (60 kilometers) from the capital Islamabad.

Pakistan has denied suspicions of involvement in sheltering bin Laden and set up an independent commission to probe possible links and intelligence failures. Among the challenges is trying to determine whether bin Laden's support network spread beyond the brothers.

"I am sure he could not have lived without a local network. He had to get messages out. The kind of help that he needed to be there meant he had help from somewhere, some groups maybe," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said on Wednesday on the usual condition that his name not be used.

"Every possible link is being looked into," he said. He flatly denied involvement of the Pakistani intelligence agency known by its acronym ISI. While the U.S. administration has publicly said there is no evidence that anyone in a position of leadership harbored bin Laden, they have not ruled out lower level assistance.

The CIA first learned Ahmed's nom de guerre in 2002 from a detainee being held by another country and wouldn't learn his real name until years later.

Ahmed, who is said to be in his early 30s, was a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind, and a close associate of Faraj al-Libi, a top al-Qaida operative captured in 2005 about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Abbottabad.

Both Mohammed and al-Libi lied about their association with Ahmed while being held in CIA secret prisons. But a top al-Qaida operative named Hassan Ghul also in CIA custody helped the agency connect the dots: Finding Ahmed, who had been identified as someone important, could lead to bin Laden.

The captives said the courier was known by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, which he adopted because their parents lived in Kuwait.