CIA Drone Gets Taliban Leader in Payback for Deaths of Its Agents

Feb. 1, 2010 — -- The Pakistani Taliban is meeting to choose a new leader today after their chief appears to have died of wounds caused by a CIA drone strike, according to a Pakistani and an American official.

Hakimullah Mehsud was seriously injured in a mid-January drone attack, and the Pakistani officials have received "word of mouth" confirmation that he died in late January, as was first reported by ABC News last week.

The attack that injured Hakimullah Mehsud was part of a flurry of CIA airstrikes launched after a suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in late December and killed five CIA officers and two private security contractors, the deadliest attack on the CIA in more than 20 years.

Hakimullah Mehsud appeared in a video to take credit for that attack alongside the suicide bomber, a Jordanian double agent named Dr. Human Khalil al Malal al Bilawi.

After the devastating suicide bomber attacker, a CIA spokesman "vowed revenge."

"There are some very bad people who eventually are going to have a very bad day," one CIA official promised shortly after the Khost attack.

At least three names have been mentioned as Mehsud's successor. The new leader will become the group's third in just seven months. Mehsud's predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, was also killed by a CIA drone strike last August.

Mehsud's apparent death would mark another successful strike on senior al Qaeda and Taliban leadership by the covert drone program, which U.S. officials acknowledge is their most effective means to target commanders who carve safe havens out of the largely ungoverned Pakistani tribal areas. They say the program has killed at least 12 of a constantly updating list of 20 senior Taliban and al Qaeda commanders.

It would also signify that the CIA continues to work closely with the Pakistani spy agency, the ISI, a collaboration that is kept secret but increased in the months before Baitullah Mehsud was killed. U.S. officials acknowledge that that strike would not have been possible without ISI help, and the collaboration has continued on Pakistani Taliban targets.