New in SpyWeek: The CIA's Effort to Infiltrate Al Qaeda

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If the American John Walker Lindh, shown here captured in Dec. 2001, could find acceptance in al-Qaeda, the CIA thought, why not dispatch an undercover officer to try the same? (APTN/AP photo)

Did the CIA really think a white man from the Midwest with a bushy beard would manage to penetrate al-Qaeda? 

That’s the question posed in a deeply reported Rolling Stone exposé on the story of “Anthony Lagunas,” the pseudonym of an undercover CIA officer who spent several years in the Middle East as an Islamist radical, burrowing into extremist groups. “He was the CIA’s equivalent of a jihadist Donnie Brasco,” Zach Dorfman writes in Rolling Stone, citing 13 sources. 

If only.