leader Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi and the US claimed he later started working for Abu Ayyub Al-Masri after Zarqawi's death. The US had reportedly known about Abu Ghadiya for "months or years" and had been pressing the Syrian government to hand over, capture, or kill him. According to The New York Times, Abu Ghadiya was either killed near his tent or died after being taken by the American troops; his body was flown out of Syria. American officials have stated that Ghadiya was killed in the raid along with several other members of his cell. The Syrian government disputed American claims, stating that these were "lies from the United States" and that the American troops had violated international law and Syrian sovereignty. A 2009 investigation by Vanity Fair that interviewed Syrian eyewitnesses, including a man shot during the raid, cast doubt on the Ghadiya assertion. Former Clinton administration official Robert Malley, who met with State Department officials at the time, was quoted in the article affirming that Ghadiya was killed in the raid. However, an al-Qaeda in Iraq obituary released in August 2006 says that Abu Ghadiya was killed by the Saudi-Iraqi border sometime in November 2004. Furthermore, former CIA officer Robert Baer was highly skeptical, saying, "If they brought back an al-Qaeda body, why don't they have something? There's no conceivable way they would have killed him and not shown it". Syrian permission given pre-attack On October 28, Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman reported that Syrian intelligence had cooperated with the US against al-Qaeda, and that Syria had told the US that it would not intervene in a US strike. Several days later, The Times also reported that the Syrians had agreed to the raid through a backchannel established with the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate. According to the report, after the Syrians gave the U.S. information pertaining to the location of Abu Ghadiya, they agreed to allow the U.S. to apprehend him and take him to Iraq; as such, when Syrian air defenses, on high alert since the Israeli-led Operation Orchard, detected the American helicopters and requested permission to engage them, it was denied. One tribal leader told the paper that an hour and a half after the attack, Syrian intelligence officers came to the area, warning the villagers that if they spoke about what had just occurred, their family members would die. He also claimed that a rocket-propelled grenade