Anwar al-Awlaki

Anwar al-Awlaki AP

Did the CIA arrange a marriage in order to kill Al-Awlaki?

A Danish spy claims that the third marriage of the al-Qaeda terrorist was actually part of a CIA plot.

A Danish spy claims that the third marriage of terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki was actually part of a CIA plot to set up the al-Qaeda leader for a CIA assassination attempt. A former member of Denmark's intelligence service claims that he was paid by the CIA to introduce the American-born al-Awlaki to his future bride via letters and video proposals.

According to several reports in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten over the weekend, the spy is 36-year-old Morten Storm, a Dutch citizen who converted to Islam and moved to Yemen in the late 1990s. Storm says that he befriend many Islamic radicals during his time there, but became disillusioned with their cause and turned against them in 2006, offering to become a spy on behalf of PET, Denmark's intelligence agency.

Storm says that in 2009, al-Awlaki asked him to help find a European Muslim woman to become his third wife. So Storm recruited a Croatian woman, who's identified as "Aminah" in the reports, who was  sympathetic to al-Awlaki via Facebook and helped introduce them. All the while, Storm says he was paid $250,000 by the CIA to set up the marriage, and they also supplied a suitcase rigged with tracking devices that was given to the woman—who was not in on the plot—when she traveled to Yemen to meet al-Awlaki. The supposed idea behind the plot was to use the device to determine the terrorist's location and then kill them both with a bombing strike. The plan failed when the al-Awlaki's aides made her get rid of the suitcase upon her arrival, but al-Awlaki and Aminah did eventually marry. 

Read more at The Atlantic Wire