Port Authority Officer Kept Sources With Ties to Iran Attacks

[88m3]

Getting Close to Terror, but Not to Stop It
Port Authority Officer Kept Sources With Ties to Iran Attacks
By JAMES RISEN and MATT APUZZONOV. 8, 2014

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A detective based in Newark cultivated contacts with Jundallah, responsible for a lethal attack on a bus in Iran in 2007.CreditIslamic Republic News Agency, via Reuters

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• C.I.A. officer noticed something surprising in the agency’s files: an intelligence report, filed ahead of the bombing, that had warned that something big was about to happen in Iran.
  
  Though the report had provided few specifics, the C.I.A. officer realized it meant that the United States had known in advance that a Sunni terrorist group called Jundallah was planning an operation inside Shiite-dominated Iran, two former American officials familiar with the matter recalled. Just as surprising was the source of the report. It had originated in Newark, with a detective for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
  
  The Port Authority police are responsible for patrolling bridges and tunnels and issuing airport parking tickets. But the detective, a hard-charging and occasionally brusque former ironworker named Thomas McHale, was also a member of an F.B.I. counterterrorism task force. He had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and developed informants inside Jundallah’s leadership, who then came under the joint supervision of the F.B.I. and C.I.A.
  
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  MAKING CONTACTS Thomas McHale in Afghanistan.
  Reading the report, the C.I.A. officer became increasingly concerned. Agency lawyers he consulted concluded that using Islamic militants to gather intelligence — and obtaining information about attacks ahead of time — could suggest tacit American support for terrorism. Without specific approval from the president, the lawyers said, that could represent an unauthorized covert action program. The C.I.A. ended its involvement with Mr. McHale’s informants.
  
  Despite the C.I.A.’s concerns, American officials continued to obtain intelligence from inside Jundallah, first through the F.B.I., and then the Pentagon. Contacts with informants did not end when Jundallah’s attacks led to the deaths of Iranian civilians, or when the State Department designated it a terrorist organization. Senior Justice Department and F.B.I. lawyers at the time say they never reviewed the matter and were unaware of the C.I.A. concerns. And so the relationship persisted, even as American officials repeatedly denied any connection to the group.
  
  The unusual origins and the long-running nature of the United States’s relationship with Jundallah are emblematic of the vast expansion of intelligence operations since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With counterterrorism a national priority, new players — the F.B.I., the Pentagon, contractors and local task forces — have all entered the spy business. The result is a sometimes-muddled system in which agencies often operate independently and with little oversight.
  
  “Every agency wants to be involved in counterterrorism and intelligence now,” said Representative Rush ****, a New Jersey Democrat who sat on the House Intelligence Committee and said he did not recall being briefed on the Jundallah matter. “We have these Joint Terrorism Task Forces everywhere, and there’s so many of these antiterrorism thrusts in our bureaucracy. There’s so much more going on.”
  
  The C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Pentagon and the office of the director of National Intelligence all declined to comment for this article. But more than half a dozen current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it, confirmed both American involvement with Jundallah and the way it evolved. Several current officials who discussed the operation played down its significance, attributing it to lapses in oversight, rather than a formal effort to ally with a terrorist group.
  
  At the center of the operation was Mr. McHale. Those who know him paint a contradictory picture — someone whose skill in developing sources was highly regarded by the F.B.I. but who bristled at the restrictions of bureaucracy and whose dealings with Jundallah were conducted largely “off book.”
  
  Mr. McHale, 53 and now retired from the Port Authority, refused to comment. A high-school graduate from Jersey City, Mr. McHale became a law enforcement celebrity after 9/11, helping to rescue survivors and recover victims at ground zero, and playing himself in Oliver Stone’s movie, “World Trade Center,” in which Nicolas Cage starred as a Port Authority police officer.
  
  His work on Newark’s Joint Terrorism Task Force took him to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he helped capture leaders of Al Qaeda alongside F.B.I. and C.I.A. colleagues. He received the Port Authority’s Medal of Honor for bravery in 2006.
  
  “If there’s a new Greatest Generation, then McHale would certainly define it,” The New York Post wrote in a 2011 profile.
  
  But friends say he could be brash and opinionated, the kind of guy who, if he thought your email was stupid, would immediately say so — and copy your boss on the reply for good measure.
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• http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/w...73522000&smtyp=aut&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id

Fully article in link. Thanks, Obama.


Kind of odd time for this to come out or at least it's the first I've heard of it.

 

[88m3]

You guys are going to sleep on this? It's the front page article of Sunday NYT.

 

[Big Daddy]

It's not surprising, to say the least. If anything, I'm actually surprised that the agent who found the files spoke up.