I infiltrated al-Qaeda for the CIA. This month, I was arrested by ICE

“The power of the presidency is nothing compared to the power of the people.” —Sen. Jon Ossoff

I infiltrated al-Qaeda for the CIA. This month, I was arrested by ICE

Blerim Skoro, a Kosovan refugee who spent a decade helping the US stop terror attacks after 9/11, is being held in a New Jersey cell. He doesn’t know why

A former spy who infiltrated al-Qaeda and Isis for the CIA has been detained by ICE and is now facing deportation, The Times can reveal.

Blerim Skoro, 55, a Kosovan refugee, played a crucial role in intercepting terror plots in the wake of the September 11 attacks. He worked for America for almost a decade, risking his life to infiltrate al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan during the hunt for Osama bin Laden. 

A prized informant of the American intelligence services whose work took him to some of the most dangerous parts of the Middle East, he passed on vital information that prevented al-Qaeda from supplying weapons to jihadists. 

After ending his career as an informant in 2010, Skoro claims the intelligence services promised him US residency. Yet on August 3 this year he was detained by officers from Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) while attending a routine biometrics appointment in New Jersey to renew his work permit.

Skoro wanted to join his family in the United States 

The father of three, who works as a taxi driver, was granted leave to remain in 2022 under the United Nations Convention against Torture. Skoro successfully argued that, if he was to be deported to Kosovo, his life would be in danger as a result of his undercover work with jihadist groups.

“I worked for the CIA and did all these things for this nation and now I’m here,” Skoro told The Times from the ICE detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. “I went to the office for my scheduled appointment, I handed them my work permit and driver’s licence and suddenly they were handcuffing me. It makes no sense.

Speaking to The Times from his cell 

“My nature is very strong, I’ve been in wars, I have military training, but this time it feels like I’ve been hit with a hammer,” he said. 

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“If they think I will be silent, they are wrong. I cannot accept this is happening to me. What message does this send to people thinking of working with the CIA? It shows you will not be protected, you will not be looked after or given safe haven. I was betrayed.”

He was recruited by the CIA a day after the 9/11 attacks while serving a seven-year sentence for drug trafficking at FCI Allenwood in Pennsylvania. Skoro, who fled to the US in 1994 claiming asylum after deserting the then-Yugoslav Army. He said he trafficked narcotics briefly in the late 1990s to support his young children and refugee parents who had just fled the Kosovan conflict.

Speaking to The Times in November 2024, when this newspaper first covered his story, he said: “I didn’t give it a second’s thought. I considered myself a patriot of America first and a Muslim second. I wanted to pay back this country.”

Agents saw him as the perfect recruit. As a Kosovar Muslim, his handlers believed his background and religious knowledge would be useful in infiltrating jihadist networks. Skoro, meanwhile, felt a huge sense of gratitude to the US for its support for Kosovans in their fight against Serbia.

• I gave my life to the CIA. They betrayed me

Spy stories, by their nature, are difficult to verify. But much of Skoro’s account of those years has been corroborated by other evidence, including video footage he shot while undercover and meticulous book-keeping of his correspondence with handlers. The footage was used in a 2024 documentary, The Accidental Spy. Details of his espionage work also emerged in legal documents filed in Canadian and US immigration courts.

While still serving his sentence, he began sharing information with the FBI and CIA on his cellmates, including Mokhtar Haouari, an Algerian behind the so-called Millennium Plot to bomb Los Angeles airport. 

Skoro believed he would receive a reduced sentence for his work, but was instead deported to Kosovo in 2007. His role as an informant took him on missions spanning Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and across the Balkans. 

He infiltrated al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan during the hunt for bin Laden and intercepted Isis terror plots in Syria — all under a promise from his handlers, he claims, that he would be welcomed to live legally with his wife, Susan, and their daughters and son, who are all US citizens.

He said he provided intelligence on bin Laden, terrorist plots, weapons and financing networks. Skoro never got close to the al-Qaeda chief despite various promises of a meeting. 

Skoro as an al-Qaeda spy 

However, he gained the trust of senior leaders in al-Qaeda who tasked Skoro with procuring and smuggling weapons — anti-aircraft missiles, stingers and rocket launchers — to the growing legion of jihadists in the Balkans. Skoro alerted the CIA, which managed to intercept the delivery.

Skoro claims he also helped intercept shipments of uranium to Kosovo, preventing a possible “dirty bomb” plot.

Skoro said he was travelling to a CIA safe house in Macedonia in 2010 when he was ambushed and shot. Instead of being flown to the US for his safety, he was given a cash payment in an envelope and told to cross back into Kosovo.

Skoro decided he had had enough of waiting for the CIA to help him acquire a green card and travelled on his own to Canada. From Canada, he smuggled himself across the border into the US in 2015 to join his family.

He was arrested by immigration agents after using his daughter’s Metro card on the subway. He spent six months in federal detention before he was released in 2016. 

A still from the documentary

After a six-year legal fight in the immigration courts, Skoro was granted leave to remain in 2022 under the UN convention after stating he would be tortured, or possibly even killed, if he was to be sent back home because of his time undercover. It means he cannot be sent back to Kosovo, however could be sent to a safe third country, such as Albania or another European country willing to accept him. 

ICE officers are under pressure to meet daily arrest targets, reported to be between 2,000-3,000 a day, raising concerns that people who were not the intended targets will be detained. “They have to arrest a certain number a day and I was just a random pick-up,” Skoro told The Times. “I am one million per cent clean, I have not committed any crimes since [the 2022 verdict], I have filed tax returns every year.”

The Department for Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to a request for comment.

• Chinese students sent to ‘ICE camp’ to prepare for life in US

Skoro, who has at times during his detention been held in a room with more than 50 others, said he tried to explain his identity and his work with the CIA to the arresting agents. 

“I’m telling the officer, ‘Google my name and see who I am, I am a public person’. He said, ‘I see who you are but I’m sorry I just have to do my job’. I heard one supervisor tell other agents: ‘I don’t see how the president would want to put in prison someone who has served our nation for a decade’.”

Skoro’s lawyers have filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court on his behalf, requesting his immediate release from detention and a stay on any deportation. The petition claims he was promised residency after years of significant work as a “CIA agent”.

Skoro in New York City

JOHN BECK FOR THE TIMES

In a filing to the New Jersey district court on August 17, Skoro wrote: “The United States government failed to honor its obligations and grant me the immigration relief I had been promised: lawful status in the United States with my United States-born wife and three children.”

Skoro wrote to the judge: “I have lived very productively and happily in the United States. I am a driver and work very hard, up to 70 hours per week to support my family. I believe I will be killed if I am removed to any third country based on my work infiltrating global terrorist networks. Against this background, I seek my immediate release from ICE custody.”

Renee Kathawala, Skoro’s pro-bono lawyer, said: “Blerim is the face of why immigration is such a positive force in our country — he is patriotic, he sacrificed his life for ours, and he dedicated himself to the most challenging job possible.”

Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned! Trump has a Harp

 

The truth inflames MAGA

Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned! Trump has a Harp.

The incredible reaction to Jon Ossoff saying just one word about our emperor's new clothes -- "Natalie" -- shows what Democrats can do if they just speak the truth about what all of us can see with our own eyes

The Computer That Helped Win World War II

IEEE Spectrum – Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications: “One summer day in 1941, a British radio operator was monitoring German military frequencies and heard something unexpected in her headphones. A later report called it “strange new music.” 

Sounding unlike the familiar Morse dit-dit-dah of enciphered messages sent over the German Enigma network, the “new music” was a rhythmic warble of binary teletype code being transmitted at high speed. Germany’s wartime engineers had developed a radically new encryption and transmission system. It was way more advanced than Enigma, which was patented in 1920. 

To break the complex new cipher, engineer Tommy Flowers built Colossus, the world’s first large-scale programmable electronic digital computer. Flowers previously built Enigma-related codebreaking equipment for Alan Turing, the British mathematician. Colossus was installed in the British codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, about 80 kilometers from London. The room-size machine weighed around a tonne. The computer is being commemorated as an IEEE Milestone. The dedication ceremony is scheduled to be held 29 September at Bletchley Park.”

Google Buys All of Spirit Airlines’ Data to Feed Its AI Models

CNN: “Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worked there? Then your information will soon be feeding Google’s artificial intelligence model. The discount airline halted all operations in May, and it’s been selling off its remaining assets through the bankruptcy process ever since. While most of that is planes, equipment, and real estate, there’s other things that are valuable, too. It was disclosed late Monday that the company agreed to sell its data to Google for $10 million. 

That includes emails and internal communications, spreadsheets, transactions with the public including bookings and frequent flyer information as well as human resources information on its employees. The data has been stripped of anything that would allow individuals to be identified, according to the court filing. But it is still a massive amount of useful intelligence…”

See also Ars Technica: “Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data. Bankrupt Spirit accused of selling out workers in massive data sale to Google….

In a court filing Tuesday, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), a collective bargaining unit that represents Spirit workers, argued that Google relied on consumer protection laws to guarantee the data wouldn’t contain personally identifying information (PII). However, those laws do not cover worker confidentiality, and that allegedly leaves a huge privacy loophole in Google’s deal, especially when you consider that the tech giant is buying worker data, not consumer data…”

The Minns government has yet to respond to a recommendation by Adam Bell, SC, in his 2022 review of The Star

One patron, Patricia Zalavros, a 62-year-old pensioner who lives nearby in Department of Housing accommodation, has played the pokies until 4am six or seven nights a week in the Diamond Suite since its opening a decade ago.

The apparent disparity between Zalavros’ income and spending is known to Club Marconi. Her de facto partner, club director Angelo Ruisi, has had his membership recently suspended following an alleged altercation, but been allowed to continue to sit on the board.

Club Marconi reported $46 million in revenue last financial year – about 95 per cent from poker machines. The club has been the subject of several complaints over the conduct of executives and directors, some of whom have business relationships with the club.

Zalavros’ Diamond Suite spree is not unusual. Mounties, one of Australia’s largest club groups, last April admitted allowing 13 customers to launder up to $226 million through poker machines.

After decades of controversy over money laundering, NSW casinos had their own moment of truth when reforms resulted in board restructures, prosecutions and oversight by a new regulator, the NSW Independent Casino Commission. The casinos are also obliged to be mindful of ASX corporate governance principles that stress the importance of an effective board. Their directors are required to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest.

That said, they continue to display the lack of ethics common in gambling organisations: the state’s casino regulator on Wednesday fined Sydney’s Crown and The Star a combined $2.25 million for allowing a 16-year-old boy to gamble tens of thousands of dollars using a fake ID.

But registered clubs, whose business models are underpinned by gambling, are not held to the same scrutiny as casinos and have not been forced to undergo any cultural change.

The Minns government has yet to respond to a recommendation by Adam Bell, SC, in his 2022 review of The Star, to consider extending harm minimisation obligations imposed on the casino to all gambling venues, or the NSW Crime Commission’srecommendation to introduce mandatory cashless gambling to pubs and clubs to prevent money laundering.

Nor has there been a formal response to the 2024 NSW Independent Panel on Gaming Reform report recommending mandatory cashless gaming and stronger harm minimisation. However, last month’s state Labor conference unanimously called for its implementation.

Stopping the use of poker machines to launder money would be a start. Government recognised the nefarious practice in casinos but incredulously allow dirty money, coupled with poker machines, to wreak harm on the lives of many in NSW.

Reforms cannot come soon enough.

Books are good for your brain. But fiction has a surprising added benefit

Reading fiction may strengthen the social skills we use to understand and connect with others.

Curling up with a good book isn’t just enjoyable. It’s also good for your brain.

Reading in general — newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books — has been linked to slower rates of cognitive decline in older adults and even longer lives. 

But reading fiction may have unique benefits. For example, the amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place. 

Why? Fiction forces you to imagine a story’s world and characters. It makes you grapple with different perspectives, mentally inhabiting distinct points of view, according to Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This can help us find “better insight into our own experiences, insight into the experiences of others who are very different from us,” said Raymond Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, who recently wrote a review on the benefits of reading narrative fiction. “It just tends to evoke a form of reflection and contemplation, which can only be good for us.”

Why reading is actually social

Social health is important for overall health. And it turns out that reading, though often thought of as a solitary activity, can boost our social abilities. 

To understand why, it helps to look at how reading shapes us as we grow.

Between ages 4 and 6, children develop a theory of mind — the ability to understand that others have different beliefs, perspectives and feelings. Studies find that children exposed to more storybooks are further along this developmental milestone than those exposed to fewer ones, Mar said. 

A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 studies found that children who read more storybooks had more empathy. And there is evidence that empathy and reading go both ways. Better reading comprehension was a predictor of empathy later in life, while empathy also was a predictor of better reading ability, according to a 2024 study of more than 900 children. And adolescents who read more for fun became more social adults, a 2023 study found. 

Reading fiction “presents to us a complex cognitive and emotional simulation of the social world,” which is useful in the real world, Mar said. 

The power of storytelling

These benefits may be due, in part, to the power of storytelling. 

Neuroimaging studies find that brain networks involved in understanding stories overlap with brain networks needed for theory of mind. This suggests that “while engaging with stories, we’re also pulling online the same kinds of brain networks that we use to understand other people,” said Mar, who wrote a review about these studies.

Other forms of storytelling, such as television and movies, may provide similar benefits, but “one of the things that you do when you read is you have to construct the world” in your head, Buttrick said. “The world is not given to you. You have to do the work of imagining.” 

This extra work may amplify the benefits of engaging in a story. 

Spending time with our favorite story characters may also help us feel connected. “Even if our friends aren’t around and can’t get together, we can always open up a book,” Mar said. 

Reading can be a social activity, too, one that reinforces the joys and benefits of reading. Book clubs, shared reading organizations and social media communities like BookTokcan connect us with other readers and add yet another layer to building our social cognitive abilities. 

Talking to others about the books you read means you’re not only imagining the characters in a story, but also gaining an understanding of how other people respond to those characters, Buttrick said.

Exposure to difference

Beyond helping our social cognition, reading fiction can expand our world and our understanding of its complexities. Good authors are master observers of the human condition and can expose us to experiences outside our comfort zone. 

“Reading is an encounter with difference, with a different kind of mind, a different place, a different approach to the world,” Buttrick said. “And so a lot of the places where I think reading is most interesting are in places where it smashes this up with difference as strongly as it can.”

In a 2022 study of more than 5,000 people published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Buttrick and his colleagues found that those who grew up reading more literary fiction were more likely to become adults with more complex worldviews — with more nuance, more psychological richness and intellectual humility. 

“I think if we want to live in a world in which everyone’s treated as something like an individual, knowing that the world is complex, especially socially complex, is probably really good,” he said. 

But there are inherent difficulties with studying the effects of reading because “reading is a part of a person’s life,” Buttrick said. “And when people have more time, more space to read, more inclination to read, they’re not doing that at random.” 

Benefits probably take time to accrue, and socioeconomic status is a strong predictor of reading behavior and ability, though a 2025 study of more than 14,000 students found that leisure reading had the largest benefits for children whose parents had less education. 

“Successful art resonates with a great number of people because it captures something about being human that appeals to us and maybe that we don’t fully understand,” Mar said.

How to read more

Start slow. Mar recommends getting off your phonebefore going to bed and spending that time reading instead. “Maybe you have to build up to an hour,” he said. “But you can start with 15 minutes and then work to 30 minutes, then 45 in an hour before you go to sleep. It’s probably a good thing.” 

Cultivate a habit. Consistency is key. “I don’t think that any one book will change a person’s life,” Buttrick said. “I think it’s the accretion of lots of books, you know, reading again and again and again, that really has an effect on how people think about the world more broadly.”

Dive into the vast diversity of reading. Different forms of reading — short stories, graphic novels and fan fiction, for example — also count. Given his busy work schedule and reading of academic journals, Mar prefers to read short stories. “It’s hard for me to commit to a book,” said Mar, who has most recently read the works of Irish writer Claire Keegan. 

(Buttrick is currently reading Spencer Ackerman’s “Reign of Terror” and gearing up to read William Vollmann’s 3,000-plus-page novel, “A Table for Fortune.” And I’ve been reading through my collection of Terry Pratchett, who is a hilarious satirical writer, including “Small Gods,” which tackles religion, and “The Truth,” which is about journalism.)

Audiobooks can be beneficial, too. Buttrick said audiobooks still count as reading. In fact, the format may make certain books easier to grasp. Listening to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” not only makes it easier to understand and funnier, but also makes “you realize how much of it is just a song,” Buttrick said. 

Remember that reading should be enjoyable. “I don’t think of reading as a monastic experience that you have to do alone at night in order to grow as a person,” Buttrick said. Lean into what you enjoy. 

Make it social. Book clubs are excellent and flourishing. It’s nice to have an accountability partner and others with whom to share perspectives, Buttrick said. 

Read unselfconsciously. Reading is for enjoyment. “A lot of times people seem embarrassed about the things that they’ve been reading,” Mar said. But “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about whatever you’re reading.”

Do you have a question about human behavior or neuroscience? Email BrainMatters@washpost.com and we may answer it in a future column.