How Did John Walker Join the Taliban?

Dec. 20 -- John Walker, the 20-year-old American who was found earlier this month fighting alongside the Taliban is presenting a challenge to the American intelligence establishment in more ways than one.

While he is said to be cooperating, Walker's very existence appears to be a blow to those already under pressure over the failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot that left 3,000 dead.

Critics explained the failure by pointing to an increasing reliance on SIGINT — expensive, satellite-gathered, signals intelligence — instead of HUMINT — old-fashioned tiptoeing-in-the-shadows human intelligence.

But the U.S. community of spies said such access was nearly impossible, considering the exclusive world that Muslim fundamentalists operate in.

In the week after the attacks, Cliff Van Zandt, a former FBI agent, expressed an opinion common to those in the intelligence community: "The CIA isn't really geared to develop a lot of assets to infiltrate groups like this," he told National Public Radio.

He said the alleged attackers came from "mostly [a] blood-tied family organization, clan organization that have known each other's families for generations."

"Somebody graduating from Yale and spending a couple years studying Urdu or something is not going to be very capable of infiltrating an organization like that."

A middle-class white kid who didn't have a college degree and — at first — spoke only a smattering of Arabic, shows that U.S. intelligence may actually have been aiming too high.

John Walker even claims to have been in the presence of Osama bin Laden.

Unusual, But Not Unexpected

Most intelligence experts acknowledged that it was unusual to see a white, English-speaking U.S. native among the Taliban, but also easily identified conditions which might have allowed him to join.

One of those bona fides, or proof of his sincerity, would probably have been his youth, they said.

At 20 years old, Walker's innocent confidence in Islamic fundamentalism could be credible, said Loch Johnson, author of Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World.