extract

'... [Egyptian president] Mubarak was quoted in the Egyptian press as saying "the sheikh has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan. The [US] visa he got was not issued by mistake. It is because of the services he did."

'The U.S. State Department has admitted that it should not have granted Sheik Abdel Rahman a multiple-entry visa in 1990 since he had been on the watch list for suspected terrorists since 1987. A classified report by the department's inspector general concludes that it was issued by mistake. But Egyptian fears will be fed by one discovery: sources have told TIME that the U.S. diplomat who approved the sheik's visa application in Khartoum was a CIA officer working under cover in the consular office when the sheik's case came up. A CIA spokesman says the agency found no record of any relationship of any sort with the sheik. Former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro, who once chaired the Interagency Afghanistan Working Group, also says that "the sheik was never an agent, he was never an informant," and he had no role in the CIA's Afghanistan operation. Moreover, he backed an anti-American rebel faction shunned by the CIA. ...'