I'm told the NYT's Douglas Jehl is going to reveal the identity of Imperial Hubris author Anonymous in the coming days.

Update: Well, partially identify him, as "a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999."

Former intelligence officials identified the officer to The Times and noted that he was an overt employee of the C.I.A., but an intelligence official asked that his full name not be published because it could make him a target of Al Qaeda...

In a report issued in March, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission described the bin Laden unit as a place where a "sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities." Another new book, "Ghost Wars," by Steve Coll of The Washington Post, was based in part on interviews with the officer, identified by his first name, Mike.

More: Reader JM writes, "If Steve Coll's 'Mike,', who headed the Bin Laden or 'Alec' Station from 1996-99 is, in fact, Anonymous, then this excerpt about him from James Bamford's just published "A Pretext For War" becomes interesting":

Increasingly under Mike ____, its CIA chief, Alec Station began taking on the feel of the king's executioner. After the decision against blowing up the Tarnak Farm and the hunting camp, Mike unleashed a blast of angry e-mails to an assortment of officials.

Some saw him as an unkempt, tactless, annoying manager who had little understanding of the international ramifications of some of his suggestions. Killing innocent women, children and members of the royal families in harebrained, and likely to fail, cruise missile assassinations was the best way to increase, not decrease, hatred and terrorism directed against the United States.

Complaints began coming in, even from the White House. Mike later acknowledged that many even within his own agancy believed he and his unit had gone off the deep end. "The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and, at times, fanatic" he said. In 1999, after three years as head of Alec Station, Mike transferred to another job at CIA headquarters.

-- from p.216, James Bamford A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, Doubleday, 2004.

Reader BH points out that Anonymous' "first book also says that Anonymous 'trained as a professional historian specializing in the diplomatic history of the British Empire.' (p. 277)."

I'm told he is one of the few high ranking CIA people to have served in both the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence.

Posted by Laura at June 22, 2004 11:13 PM