Afghan Who Plotted Election Day Massacre Worked For The CIA

The Afghan national who was arrested Monday for allegedly plotting an Election Day terrorist attack worked as a security guard for the CIA in Afghanistan, NBC News reported citing sources familiar with the matter.

Twenty-seven-year-old Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was allegedly planning a “violent attack in the United States in the name of and on behalf of ISIS, which was planned for Election Day,” according to the criminal complaint filed against him. While the CIA has not publicly commented on the revelation, “sources familiar with [Tawhedi’s] 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 ‘Zero Units,’” according to NBC News.

Tawhedi was allegedly planing the attack with his juvenile brother-in-law, who was described in the complaint as an Afghan citizen with legal permanent resident status.

Tawhedi entered the United States on Sept. 9, 2021 on “a special immigrant visa and is currently on parole status pending adjudication of his immigration proceedings,” the complaint states. Tawhedi was residing in Oklahoma. NBC News reports that “two U.S. officials familiar with the matter [say] the charging document is incorrect, and that Tawhedi entered the U.S. on what’s known as humanitarian parole. Officials say humanitarian parole generally entails far less screening than a Special Immigrant Visa.”

Tawhedi’s arrival came less than a month after the Biden-Harris Administration oversaw the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal that left 13 U.S. service members dead. Notably, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general released a report in 2022 finding the agency did not properly “screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees arriving as part of Operation Allies Refuge/Operation Allies Welcome.”

“U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees,” the report found. “We determined some information used to vet evacuees through U.S. Government databases, such as name, date of birth, identification number, and travel document data, was inaccurate, incomplete, or missing. We also determined Customs and Border Protection admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States.”

The report concedes that the government may have “paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”

More than 97,000 individuals designated as evacuees were flown into the country following the chaotic withdrawal, approximately 77,000 of which were admitted through Operation Allies Welcome which grants entry to the United States via humanitarian parole.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said Tawhedi was “imported directly to the United States by the Biden-Harris Administration as part of their controversial refugee resettlement program.”

“It is clear they failed to properly vet all refugees, which poses a significant threat to national security,” Drummond continued in a post on X. “Tawhedi is one of many thousands sent to America after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. While it is indisputable that many Afghan refugees are law-abiding and deserve our gratitude for helping U.S. forces as we fought the Taliban, we face the unsettling prospect that Tawhedi is not the only terrorist brought here by our own government.”