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CIA Sent Him Deep Undercover to Spy on Islamic Radicals. It Cost Him Everything
How one man infiltrated Al Qaeda and the broader jihadist world — and how his double life likely led to PTSD, depression, and ultimately his death.
Recruited into an ultra-secret agency program in the aftermath of 9/11, he lived undercover for roughly half a decade in the Middle East as an Islamist radical, burrowing into extremist groups, a U.S. intelligence officer embedded deeply behind the War on Terror’s front lines. It “may be generous” to say he penetrated Al Qaeda, says a former senior official, who muses that the “legend” of Lagunas may derive partly from “the fact that he was a white guy” living deep undercover as a Muslim radical, more than from any actual intelligence he produced. He was part of a select corps of intelligence officers pushed beyond their limits during a bloody shadow war, one fought with a secret and amorphous logic, in a conflict whose higher mathematics still constitutes forbidden knowledge to the American people.
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