KHARTOUM, Sudan, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama's White House is finding, as did the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, that it needs the troublesome Islamist regime in Sudan to help in the war against al-Qaida.
On Monday, the White House disclosed that it will renew sanctions on Khartoum over the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region but will seek to persuade the government of President Omar al-Bashir to cooperate against global terrorism.
One of the biggest problems facing the Central Intelligence Agency and other Western intelligence services in the U.S.-led war against terrorism is penetrating al-Qaida and its affiliates around the world.
To overcome this, the CIA has had to rely on the intelligence services of its allies, notably Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Pakistan. But it has also come to rely on others that it has counted among its adversaries at one time or another, such as Sudan, Libya and Syria.
This reliance on services that are pillars of regimes considered repressive has deepened concerns that U.S. foreign policy is being distorted in the cause of fighting terrorism.
But several times in recent years, one of Langley's most compliant allies has been Sudan, whose government, dominated by Muslim Arabs, has been condemned because of the alleged genocide it is waging in Darfur.
Sudan is also on the U.S. State Department's list of countries that support international terrorism. Thus the complex realities of the post-Sept. 11 world.
But according to Western intelligence sources, Sudan has secretly worked with the CIA to infiltrate the insurgency in Iraq and Islamist forces in strife-torn Somalia, as well as East Africa and the Horn of Africa, where the Americans are conducting a low-intensity campaign against al-Qaida.
"There's not much that blond-haired, blue-eyed case officers from the U.S. can do in the entire Middle East, and there's nothing they can do in Iraq," said a former CIA officer familiar with the Sudanese connection. "Arabs can."
In large part, this initiative has come from the Sudanese themselves, who are desperate to lose the "rogue state" label imposed by the Clinton administration in 1993 because of Khartoum's alleged sponsorship of terrorism and the refuge it gave Osama bin Laden after he fled Afghanistan.
Khartoum first approached the CIA in 1996, twice offering to hand over bin Laden along with voluminous files on him and what was to become al-Qaida. The Americans spurned the offer.
But even before Sept. 11 that attitude was changing. In early 2001 the newly installed Bush administration made some tentative efforts to establish an intelligence link with the Sudanese.
These included a clandestine meeting in London between Walter Kansteiner, U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and Maj. Gen. Yahia Hussein Babiker, deputy head of Sudan's intelligence service and now a senior member of the Khartoum government.
Within a month of Sept. 11, the CIA had discreetly established a full-fledged station in Khartoum. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were allowed to interrogate al-Qaida suspects, provided by the Sudanese, in safe houses set up by their intelligence organization.
After September 2002, Sudanese intelligence arrested or questioned large numbers of al-Qaida suspects. More than 400 were handed over to other Arab security agencies working with the CIA for interrogation.
Among those detained -- and subsequently interrogated by the FBI -- was Mohammed Bayazid, a Syrian who allegedly had been linked to Osama bin Laden since the 1979-89 Afghan war against the Soviets and who allegedly tried to acquire uranium for al-Qaida.
In April 2005 the CIA cemented the relationship when it flew the head of Sudan's national intelligence service, Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington in one of its jets for secret talks on expanding cooperation.
It's not clear how extensive Sudanese infiltration of the jihadist network was. But one U.S. source noted in 2007, "They've done things to save American lives."
The State Department said Khartoum has "provided critical information that has helped our counter-terrorism efforts around the globe."
It remains to be seen whether the Sudanese will play ball this time around.
But the recent assassination of several jihadist leaders in Somalia by helicopter-borne U.S. Navy SEALs indicated the Americans were escalating their low-intensity conflict there to prevent that country falling into bin Laden's hands. Sudan may prove to be a valuable asset.
