Ok, I think I know what happened to this thread...the first underwear bomber was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and he attempted to blow up a plane IAW al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula on Xmas day 2009. It was at this point that intelligence agencies realized that there may be an opening for an offensive counterintelligence operation in Yemen (e.g. Double agent operation), and that's where the second underwear bomber comes in. According to various open source reporting the source was being run by the mukhabarat, cia, and/or mi6. Nobody on this forum can definitively say but it appears that all three intelligence organizations were involved. The source was obviously recruited and under the control of intelligence organizations hostile to AQAP. He was a double agent, not just a non-recruited source (eg. Informer). I hope I cleared this up and contributed to a better understanding of the topic involved.
