Afghan accused of plotting terror attack worked as CIA guard, officials say

An Afghan man arrested on charges of planning a terrorist attack on Election Day worked as a security guard in Afghanistan for the CIA, two sources with knowledge of the matter told NBC News.

Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, was arrested on Monday in Oklahoma and accused of plotting to kill Americans with an assault rifle on behalf of ISIS. Court documents said he had contributed to an ISIS charity in March and accessed online ISIS propaganda, but they did not say whether he was radicalized before or after he came to the U.S. in 2021. 

One senior administration official said counterterrorism officials assess that Tawhedi became radicalized during the three years he lived in the U.S. A senior law enforcement official said the FBI is still investigating that question.

The CIA declined to comment.

Court documents say Tawhedi entered the country in September 2021, about a month after the U.S. military completed its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of war.

“Every Afghan resettled in the U.S. undergoes a rigorous screening and vetting process no matter which agency they worked with,” the official said. “That process includes checking against a full range of U.S. records and holdings,” the official said.

A senior administration official familiar with the details said that Tawhedi passed two rounds of vetting, with no derogatory information detected.  

The official said Tawhedi was first screened before he entered the U.S. on what is known as humanitarian parole in September 2021, about 10 days after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan. The source said he was vetted again while living in Oklahoma City when he applied for a Special Immigrant Visa. He was eligible for the visa because he had worked for the U.S. government. He was approved for the visa, the official said, but he had not taken the final steps to make it official. Special Immigrant Visas are given to Afghans who worked with the U.S. in Afghanistan after they pass DHS screening.

The screening process includes searching for any possible ties to terrorism, ISIS or the Taliban using data from the applicant’s electronic devices, biometrics and other sources to search the extensive databases the U.S. compiled over 20 years in Afghanistan. 

The Justice Department charging document says he entered on a Special Immigrant Visa “and is currently on parole status pending adjudication of his immigrant proceedings.”   

However, two U.S. officials familiar with the matter told NBC News the charging document is incorrect, and that Tawhedi entered the U.S. on humanitarian parole. 

Officials say humanitarian parole generally entails far less screening than a Special Immigrant Visa.

The Department of Homeland Security, which plays a lead role in the vetting, declined to discuss the case, saying in a statement that “Afghan evacuees who sought to enter the United States were subject to multi layered screening and vetting against intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism information. If new information emerges after arrival, appropriate action is taken.” 

But members of Congress and other U.S. officials have said that as the U.S. evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans in the waning days of the war, concerns emerged that not all of them were properly scrutinized. A report by the DHS inspector general said the agency “lacked critical data” as it sought to screen the refugees. 

The CIA undertook its own large-scale evacuation operation of Afghans who had worked for or helped the agency.

The question of how and why Tawhedi was in the country had become politically charged even before the revelation that he had worked for the CIA. Donald Trump Jr. wrote on the X platform Wednesday: “Border Czar Kamala Harris literally imported a terrorist from Afghanistan into our country. Enough is enough!” 

He was re-tweeting a post by Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney general, who said: “The American people need to know that this radical Islamic terrorist was imported directly to the United States by the Biden-Harris Administration as part of their controversial refugee resettlement program.”

It’s not clear whether Tawhedi was a radical Islamist when he came to the U.S.

The sources familiar with his work in Afghanistan say he would have had minimal interaction with Americans and he was not a CIA informant or a member of the U.S.-trained and armed paramilitary force known as the “Zero Units.” Many of those fighters were evacuated to the U.S. after rigorous screening and vetting.

According to court documents, Tawhedi indicated in seized communications that he planned his attack for Election Day, Nov. 5. Authorities said that in an interview after his arrest, he confirmed that the attack was intended to target large gatherings and that he expected to die a martyr. Authorities say he planned the operation along with a juvenile co-conspirator, described as an Afghan citizen with legal permanent resident status.

The pair were arrested after they met two confidential human sources and an undercover FBI agent, who posed as business partners, at a rural location in the Western District of Oklahoma, to buy the rifles, 10 magazines and ammunition for the planned attack. 

Biden administration officials note that the complaint says the unnamed juvenile co-conspirator entered the country in 2018, during the Trump administration. That person also passed the vetting, as well, a senior administration official said.