Padilla terror trial meets world of espionage
In the case against Jose Padilla, a key witness – a CIA agent – testifies under a pseudonym.
from the May 18, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Witness names withheld before
In a public filing to the judge, prosecutors cited a series of cases withholding a witness's true name. Some involved Mafia trials and individuals in the witness-protection program. Others involved intelligence agents.
In one case, a US marine was convicted of passing classified information to a Soviet agent. A US intelligence agent testified under a pseudonym and his real name was never disclosed to the defense. That case was a court-martial rather than a jury trial in federal court.
Last year, for a pretrial hearing, two Israeli agents were permitted to testify using pseudonyms. And in 2005, Saudi intelligence officers offered videoconferenced testimony under pseudonyms, also in a pretrial hearing.
In 2004, a federal judge in Illinois permitted a former Iraqi intelligence officer to testify in a federal court trial using an assumed name.
"It seems the government is getting pretty much all they asked for," says Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.
In the Padilla case, the CIA agent's testimony is important because it relates to a key piece of evidence: a five-page "Mujahideen Data Form" Padilla allegedly filled out before he reportedly attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.
"The fact that this form even exists proves that Padilla was there," Assistant US Attorney Brian Frazier told the jury in his opening statement on Monday. "Al Qaeda kept files on everything."
But the government faces a challenge in establishing the authenticity of the data form. That's where the CIA agent's testimony is crucial.
The agent is the first US government official to take possession of a large volume of documents said to have included the Padilla data form. The agent told the jury that in December 2001 an Afghan drove a twin-cab pickup truck loaded with documents to a covert CIA office in Afghanistan. The Afghan told the agent that he'd recovered the documents from an office abandoned by "Arabs" in Kandahar after the US invasion.
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