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.
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.”