The official who was leading the CIA's efforts against al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden at the time says he never saw any sign that the agency was getting intelligence from such a source from its European allies -- raising significant questions about transatlantic cooperation.

In a memoir published last week in Europe and America, Omar Nasiri (a pseudonym) says he worked first for the French external security service, the DGSE, who sent him in 1995 to infiltrate the training camps springing up in Afghanistan in the chaos following the defeat of the Soviet Union.

When he returned the following year having met with key al-Qaida recruiter Abu Zubaydah, Nasiri writes in the memoir "Inside the Jihad," the DGSE sent him to London, where he worked for them and British intelligence in a highly unusual joint operation, keeping tabs on Islamic extremists at the Finsbury Park mosque and other meeting places.

But Nasiri says, after he dropped out of contact with his handlers the day of the August 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa, they hustled him out of the country, with his British contact telling him to "Leave behind everything that connects you to London -- phone numbers, addresses, photographs. Everything."

He says that the French kept him stashed in a luxury hotel in Dakar, Senegal -- paying him handsomely for nearly six months, and talking about sending him back to Afghanistan.

Eventually, believing that they had lost trust in him and would never send him back to the camps, Nasiri decided to retire to Germany and get married. Even then, he had to threaten to leave under his own steam before the French provided him with a passport and ticket.

"They must have worried that I was a sleeper and that I had disappeared (on the day of the bombings) to pursue some mission. I couldn't blame them. I was a trained killer. From the beginning they hadn't trusted me; I knew that," writes Nasiri.

The broad outlines of Nasiri's story have been confirmed to several news organizations by officials from European intelligence agencies, but many of the details, including his account of events after the embassy attacks, remain unverified.

Claude Moniquet, a Brussels-based security analyst, says Nasiri's real name is Said al-Madja, and that he is a "mythomaniac," a drug trafficker and low-level DGSE source trying to embroider tales of derring-do.

Nonetheless, several experts and former officials, including Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit 1996-1999, have reviewed the book and found it convincing, and say it raises troubling questions about the level of European cooperation with U.S. intelligence on counter-terrorism prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I certainly wasn't aware of any reporting along those lines, any source like that," Scheuer told United Press International.

He said that the European services didn't share the U.S. evaluation of the threat posed by Sunni extremism. "Our best partners in Europe at the time, the British and the Italians," he said, "were focused on Iran and Shiite groups. They didn't give much credence to the reporting we were doing about the threat from Sunni jihadists" like bin Laden.

Scheuer says U.S. intelligence regarded Europe as an effective sanctuary for al-Qaida in the 1990's. "In 1996, we knew there were key operatives in Europe ... The Europeans didn't want us sticking our noses in."

Roger Cressey, who was the White House's deputy counter-terror czar at the end of the 1990's, agreed that the Europeans' cooperation on the issue was "episodic at best."

"They believed (al-Qaida) was a U.S. problem that the United States should solve," he told UPI.

Former staff members of the Sept. 11 commission also told UPI that their review of CIA files from the period had turned up no evidence of potential "penetration sources," of the kind that Nasiri was, if his account is to be believed.

Having graduated from one of the more advanced jihadi training camps, and having met Abu Zubaydah, who later become bin Laden's primary recruiter for western jihadis, Nasiri would have had the chance to return to Afghanistan and infiltrate al-Qaida's inner circle

"He clearly had that potential," said Scheuer, adding that, after the embassy bombings the U.S. government began to evidence a "real high-level interest in (what was going on in) the camps."

Nasiri says in his book that he had contact information for Abu Zubaydah, and that the British gave him money to send to him in Afghanistan.

A former British intelligence official said it was "almost unthinkable" that the British would have kept any "actionable intelligence" from the Americans.

"That relationship was very close and we relied on it very heavily, especially in terms of technical collection," the former official told UPI. "It was in our interests" and jeopardizing it by withholding material like Nasiri's reports would have required a decision at the highest levels of government.

One possible factor is the role of the French. Nasiri says it was them who first sent him to London, and he describes how he was handed off to his British handlers in a series of awkward meetings.

Scheuer said that "next the Saudis, the French were the worst (U.S. ally) for getting information about bin Laden and al-Qaida."

Jack Cloonan, a retired FBI agent who led the bureau's efforts against al-Qaida at the time said that, when they did get intelligence from the French, U.S. officials were often skeptical about it. "We didn't believe much of it was good quality material," he said.

Cressey said one possible factor in the decision to cut Nasiri loose after the embassy bombings was that in the murky world of espionage, there is always concern about how things will look in hindsight, if they are exposed.

"When things go boom, there is always an instinct in intelligence agencies to wash their hands of anything that could be misconstrued," he said.

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