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. {snip}

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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