KABUL - About $1 million of money which was provided by the CIA to a secret Afghan government fund ended up in the hands of Al-Qaeda in 2010 when it was used to pay a release for an Afghan diplomat, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

To release Abdul Khaliq Farahi, who was the Afghan consul-general in Peshawar of Pakistan, the Afghan officials first turned to a secret fund that the CIA bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, the times said citing several Afghan officials involved in the episode.

The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.

Farahi was kidnapped in 2008 and handed over to Al-Qaeda, according to the Times report. He was released two years later after Afghanistan paid Al-Qaeda $5 million, a fifth of which was CIA money that came from an Afghan government fund that received monthly cash deliveries from the agency.

The Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had at first been concerned about the payment, fearing the CIA knew about the money and had tainted it with poison, radiation or a tracking device, the newspaper reported.

The release payments were found in the 2011 raid by U.S. Navy Seals who killed bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The CIA's contribution to Qaeda's bottom line, though, was not well-laid trap. It was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting, the report said.

While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters. (Tolonews)