From Afghanistan to Yemen.. Times: The story of an agent who infiltrated Al-Qaeda and ISIS and now drives a taxi

The British newspaper, The Times, published exciting details about a spy who worked for the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as he was able to infiltrate Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, but his end, like his beginning, was very exciting, as he currently lives on the income from the taxi he drives.

Spy Blerim Skoro told the newspaper's Josie Ensor how the American intelligence agency managed to recruit him. It was on the morning of September 12, 2001, when agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CIA visited him at a detention center in Brooklyn, New York, where he was being held on drug trafficking charges.

The agents had an offer for the detainee, Blerim Skoro, that would change the course of his life. “They told me they needed my help,” says Skoro, who had fled the war in Kosovo in the 1990s and was serving a seven-year sentence for drug trafficking. “I just wanted to get out and go back to my family.”

Skoro, 53, said they watched from the window of their cell as the second plane hit one of the World Trade Center towers.

According to Ensor in her report, intelligence and FBI agents saw Skoro as the "perfect client," because no one would suspect a Muslim from Kosovo serving a harsh prison sentence, giving other inmates the impression that he would not cooperate with the government.

Skoro took his prison assignment seriously, immediately growing a beard and memorizing the Quran, and quickly won the respect and trust of hundreds of Muslim detainees, several of whom were famous fighters and some of whom met Osama bin Laden after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Skoro relayed what he heard from them to his superiors during their numerous calls in prison.

At the same time, Skoro was grateful to the United States for supporting the Kosovo people in their fight against Serbian forces, and said he never thought for a moment that "I wanted to give back to this country," and considered himself "an American patriot first and a Muslim second."

Detention, deportation and assignments

But when it came time for his release in 2007, Skoro was held for months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement before being deported to Kosovo, part of a deliberate CIA plan to send him to countries for spying, he told The Times.

He continues that these missions extended from Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq, Yemen and across the Balkans, where he infiltrated Al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan as part of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and intercepted ISIS “terrorist plots” in Syria.

All under the promise that he would one day be reunited with his wife, Susan, and their two daughters, Medina and Dafina, who were American citizens living in New York. Skoro was trained by the agency, which provided him with five different passports and a modest monthly salary.

He said that intelligence agents warned him of two things: not to tell anyone that he was working for them, and not to kill anyone. He admits that he soon broke the first warning by telling his wife, Susan, the Times explains.

Between 2007 and 2010, he spent time at an al-Qaeda training camp near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, before pledging allegiance to the Islamic group and working his way up its ranks.

What angered the CIA was that he never approached bin Laden despite the various promises he made to meet him.

Taxi driver

Skoro told The Times that one evening, while he was on his way to a CIA safe house in Macedonia to discuss plans for his upcoming trip to Yemen to meet with Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader, he was ambushed and shot in the leg.

Instead of flying him to the United States for his safety, the agency asked him to cross the border into neighboring Kosovo after giving him a sum of money in an envelope, and at that moment he decided that enough was enough. “They promised me a lot, that they would release me to go to the United States. It was all lies.”

He managed to travel to Canada, where he lived a normal life and earned a decent income from his work selling cars, but in October 2015 he sneaked into the United States hiding in a fishing boat.

He was arrested by FBI and New York Police Department agents after they discovered he was in the country illegally, and was released after spending six months in detention. Today, Scurro works as a taxi driver in New York, and the Times quoted him as saying that he would not recommend anyone work for the CIA.

Source: Times