CBC News Indepth: Khadr

INDEPTH: KHADR
Al-Qaeda Family: Working for the CIA
CBC News Online | March 4, 2004

Abdurahman says at the end of the training course he was told he would soon be leaving Guantanamo. He says his CIA handlers gave him a tour of the facility. He was issued a guest pass and checked in and out through the visitors' gate. Then he was told his next stop would be Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia. He says the CIA gave him a false passport.

"They made me a Moroccan second-hand passport, a forged passport," he says, "And they said 'when you go to Bosnia, when you get in the pipeline, you just use this passport. You say, you know, I got this passport when I was coming. I got it in Turkey. I paid $200 for it and I want to use it to get back into Iraq.'"

The agents were constantly rehearsing Abdurahman, saying, "What's your story, this is your story? They gave me the story, written on paper and they always told me to go over the story and tell it to us, all the time," he said.

Abdurahman says on the day he left Guantanamo, CIA officers took him for a tour of the harbour by speedboat. He says they even stopped for a little fishing. Then he says he was taken to the airstrip on the base and a CIA agent put him on a small jet aircraft.

Abdurahman says he spent nearly 14 hours on the CIA jet with a refueling stop on the Azores in the mid-Atlantic and then landed at an American base not far from Sarajevo, in Bosnia.

Afghanistan

Bosnia is well known in intelligence circles as a major centre of al-Qaeda activity. Many former al-Qaeda fighters from the Afghanistan war and other conflicts have settled there.

The Americans believe Bosnia has become the pipeline for al-Qaeda volunteers who want to join the resistance to the United States and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Abdurahman says the CIA asked him to blend in with the transient Muslim population in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

"You meet people, you sit with them and you watch them," he said. "You see how much people are working with them, what they're doing. They're buying weapons, they're selling weapons, they're recruiting people. You know, information, just any information at all."

Abdurahman says the CIA helped him settle in Bosnia. He was to tell people he had come in from Afghanistan after being released from Guantanamo. He says the CIA provided him with a nice apartment. Some Bosnian agents took him shopping.

"I bought a suit, I bought belts, I bought a Walkman and a cell phone. I just bought anything I wanted to. They gave me money every now and then, cash for expenses. They gave me 1,000 Bosnian marks, which is 1,000 Canadian dollars."

Abdurahman says the CIA asked him to go down to one of the largest Mosques in Sarajevo, the King Fahd mosque, which was known as a beehive of al-Qaeda activity. He became friendly with a suspected recruiter for al-Qaeda operations in Iraq.

"I took his name and gave it to them and they said 'well, this is a very good contact.' They were very happy that I made this contact. They told me just to stay in touch with him and go slowly on him and then 'in a week or two, tell him that you want to go to Iraq, that you change your mind about going back to Canada,'" he said..

He believes if al-Qaeda in Bosnia had found out he was working for the CIA, he would have been shot.

"It was always in the back of my mind and that's what I always told the CIA," Aburahaman said. "'You know what, you're paying me money and you think it's a lot, but you know there is that risk that I'll get shot. So don't think you're doing me a big favour by giving me that money. I'm doing you a big favour by working for you.'"

Abdurahman was in Bosnia when news arrived of the military attack in Pakistan, which killed his father, Ahmed Said Khadr. Abdurahman says he had long resented his father for dragging the whole family into the world of al-Qaeda.

"My reaction was, he's my father. There is no change to that. So as my father, I love him and I will always love him as my father, but not as what he did," he said.

"I've gone through so much that when they told me about it there was no reaction, there was no emotion," he said.

Abdurahman says he never gave the CIA information that could have led to his father's death.

"I didn't know anything about my father for two years. I didn't talk to him. I didn't communicate with him at all, so how could I know anything about him or where he was staying?"

After his first week in Bosnia, Abdurahman says the CIA asked him to volunteer to go into Iraq with al-Qaeda forces so that he could funnel information to the American military. They told him it would be dangerous.

"They really trusted that I would do this for them. But really later, when they suggested 'you're going to be in a gunfight. You're going to be in the middle of the storm. Do you understand what you're going through?' That's when I thought this is a good time to stop�and that's when I made the call to my grandmother."

^TOP

MENU