Terrorist or CIA agent? Maybe both?

US citizen David Headley, who was arrested in connection with last year's Mumbai terrorist attacks, may have been a double agent for the CIA at the time of the incident, according to US journalists.

More than 160 people were killed in the financial hub of Mumbai in three days of attacks by a group of 10 gunmen, beginning on November 26, 2008.

Headley had allegedly helped plan the attack by conducting reconnaissance missions in Mumbai.

More than two months after Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley was held in Chicago, India’s intelligence services are divided on whether they were told the whole truth about the Lashkar-e-Taiba clandestine agent’s operations.

Many in the intelligence services even suspect that the United States is less than committed to letting the whole truth be known.

Public debate has focused on claims that Headley—who served as a Drug Enforcement Administration informant after being arrested with two kg of heroin in 1988—may have been planted by US covert services inside Lashkar after his release in 2002.

“If this David Headley was working for the CIA all along, which is a very plausible conclusion,” says writer and journalist Webster Tarpley, “It means that the CIA implicated and was running and masterminding the Mumbai terror attack of 2008.”