“C.I.A. John,” the AP-profiled analyst-of-mystery responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden for more than a decade, has been spotted in a photo posted to the White House’s Flickr account.
The Observer now claims to have used the photo to identify John — John is his middle name — though it has yet to publish his full name. In exchange for keeping mum, The Observer reporter Aaron Gell was granted off-the-record conversations with John’s associates.
“An acquaintance volunteered that he recognized the man in the photo and proceeded to put a name to the face,” Gell writes of the identification. “A few web searches turned up details of the man’s personal life. In college, he’d played basketball. No superstar by any means — he was mostly a practice player — he’d been aggressive enough to catch the eye of the team’s coach, who later spoke glowingly of John’s unusual shooting style.”
The photo at the center of the accidental reveal is one of the now famous behind-the-scenes Situation Room photos the White House uploaded to Flickr in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death.
“C.I.A. John” makes an appearance in two of these photos, one clearly depicts the proclaimed hero standing tall in the back of the room, behind Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta, with his eyes shut as President Obama addresses members of the national security team on May 1, 2011.
How do we know that this is, in fact, “C.I.A. John”, the man the Associated Press calls the most important person in the hunt for bin Laden? As The Observer notes, “the story also dangled a more tantalizing clue.”
That clue actually comes in the second paragraph of the piece. “Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst,” the AP reveals.
After the AP piece was published on Tuesday, July 5, Cryptome’s John Young took just nine hours to locate John in the photos.
“He did it with the sort of simple deductive reasoning that wouldn’t be out of place in a Miss Marple novel,” Gell writes. “It seems that although the man’s face was cropped out of the famous Situation Room photo, his pale yellow necktie was not. He also appeared to be unusually tall. The White House, as part of an all-out effort to trumpet its signature intelligence triumph, had released a number of photos on that day to media outlets around the world. Mr. Young simply checked the administration’s Flickr feed for shots of a man with the same build and taste in neckwear.”
Now, John’s appearance in the official press photos is raising questions as to whether the White House intended its hero to be publicly celebrated after all. Some, like Young, believe this incident to be intentional, while others will find this to be an epic blunder of an administration that has been perhaps too avant garde in its approach to social media.
Source : Mashable
