Cia, Al Qaeda | featured news

A would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged. The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.

The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials said.

Leaders of the nation's largest police organizations, briefed in the aftermath of the raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistani compound, have been told that there are no immediate threats of reprisals or active terrorist plots that have been gleaned from an initial review of intelligence seized from the compound, police officials told USA TODAY.

In one of the most devastating attacks in CIA history, officers failed to search an Al Qaeda double agent before he entered a December meeting at their base in a remote part of Afghanistan, and he detonated a huge bomb.

The suicide attacker killed eight people at a CIA compound in Afghanistan last week. He had been recruited to help U.S. spy agencies penetrate Al Qaeda, a former U.S. intelligence official says.

The young Afghan immigrant at the center of an expanding investigation holds the key to unlocking the details of an alleged bomb plot that authorities believe is the first Al Qaeda-linked terrorist operation on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, law enforcement and intelligence officials said Sunday.

Secret CIA program to kill terrorist leaders was outsourced in 2004 to security contractor whose operations in Iraq prompted scrutiny, officials say.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said on Thursday the U.S. intelligence agency believes al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan and hopes joint operations with Pakistani forces will find him.

In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government's use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Former Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice verbally approved CIA's request to waterboard suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.