Continued from the first Q&A
There is a growing demand in India that the Indian investigators should be allowed independent access to David Coleman Headley, the Chicago-based American member of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), who had visited India five times before 26/11 to collect pre-attack operational information for the LET. Will the FBI continue to resist this demand?
Any professional intelligence or investigation agency will, if it is worth its salt. Deniability is an important operational principle followed by all intelligence agencies. Once an intelligence agency grants free access to another agency to one of its sensitive sources, deniability is gone. The Intelligence Bureau will not grant the Research & Analysis Wing free access to any of its sensitive sources and vice versa. It is unrealistic to expect that any US agency--whether the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the FBI -- will grant to their Indian counterparts free access to Headley, since it has clearly come out that he was a conscious agent of the DEA at least since 1998.
How about Tahawwur Hussain Rana, the other member of the LET’s Chicago cell?