The CIA may have missed an opportunity to save an apparent Western hostage being held by al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
According to U.S. officials per The Washington Post, the CIA failed to keep a potential hostage under drone surveillance while being held captive by al-Qaeda, and now suspect that the hostage may have been an American aid worker who was killed in an agency strike this year.
The surveillance lapse is being criticized as part of an internal CIA investigation of the death of Warren Weinstein, U.S. officials said, describing the sequence as a missed opportunity.
Officials later emphasized that the drone footage wasn’t conclusive enough, as the video remained unclear whether the heavily guarded figure was Weinstein.
Senior lawmakers have voiced concern in several hearings, in which they claim the CIA abandoned a potential lead on an al-Qaeda captive to remain focused on hunting terrorists – despite President Obama’s promise that the government was doing everything it could to find Weinstein.
“The agency’s main purpose is to go kill terrorists,” said a U.S. official familiar with the inquiry. “They will tell you it is not to rescue hostages.”
Officials from the president’s administration disputed such characterization, and said that critics of the agency’s failure to identify the hostage in the drone footage have the benefit of hindsight.
The intelligence community “prioritizes intelligence collection regarding U.S. hostages,” White House spokesman Ned Price said per a Washington Post report. “We take full responsibility for the counterterrorism operation that resulted in” Weinstein’s death.
Weinstein, of Rockville, Md., and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker, were killed in a CIA strike on an al-Qaeda complex in Pakistan in January after spending several years in al-Qaeda captivity. The agency claims it wasn’t aware that Weinstein, 73, and Lo Porto, 39, were at that particular location until the bodies were later discovered in rubble.
Obama promptly issued a public apology to their families in April and called for an investigation of the strike to determine if the outcome could have been avoided. The inquiry is an ongoing process.
CIA drones possibly spotting Weinstein was never brought up to family members, who grew frustrated waiting for the Obama administration to deliver on promises to provide results of the investigation and to compensate them for their loss.
“We believed the president when he told us that rescuing American hostages was his highest priority,” Elaine Weinstein, Warren Weinstein’s wife, said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. “They told us for three years ‘everything possible’ was being done to find and rescue Warren. We now feel deceived. . . . How do I explain to my grandkids that government could have saved their grandpa, but decided not to?”
