senior al-Qaeda leaders. A former U.S. counter-terrorism officer, as well as Jordanian government officials, said that he had already provided useful and actionable intelligence to the CIA over several weeks of undercover work in the region. A former intelligence official stated that al-Balawi was "feeding us low-level operatives and we were whacking them." He was seen by the CIA and the U.S. administration as the best hope of tracking down the al-Qaeda leadership. The CIA had come to trust al-Balawi and the Jordanian spy agency vouched for him, according to officials. The deputy chief of Kabul station was present for the meeting, more evidence that al-Balawi was highly valued. The CIA was "expecting the meeting to be of such substance that following the meeting their next directive was to call President Obama," a security official in Kabul said. Statements from relatives Al-Balawi's wife, Defne Bayrak, a journalist who lives in Istanbul, Turkey, has translated several Arabic books into Turkish, including Osama bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East. She said the radicalization of al-Balawi started in 2003 because of the Iraq War. She doubted that al-Balawi worked as a double agent for the CIA and Jordan's intelligence agency or that he was an al-Qaeda member. Bayrak said that al-Balawi would have acted of his own volition because he regarded the United States as an adversary. She also said that she was proud of her husband. In her view, al-Balawi had carried out a "very important mission in such a war." Turkish police questioned and released Bayrak on January 7, 2010. Al-Balawi's family is of Palestinian origin, from a tribe in the Beersheba region. His brother said al-Balawi had been "changed" by the 2008–09 Israeli offensive in Gaza, and that he had been arrested by Jordanian authorities after volunteering with medical organizations to treat wounded Palestinians in Gaza. Other family members said that al-Balawi had been pressured to become an informant after Jordanian authorities arrested him in January 2009. Al-Balawi's father said he was called by an Afghan after the attack who told him his son died as a hero in an operation to kill CIA agents. He also said his son "sacrificed his body and soul for the oppressed." He blamed the intelligence agencies for turning his son "from a human, a doctor, to a person with a heart full of negative and hostile emotions towards others." Jordanian authorities cautioned