Officials fear CIA missed opportunity to identify Western hostage held by Al Qaeda

The possibility that Weinstein was spotted by CIA drones had not been shared with members of his family, who have grown frustrated waiting for the Obama administration to deliver on promises to provide results of the investigation of his death and compensate them for their loss.

“We believed the president when he told us that rescuing American hostages was his highest priority,” Elaine Weinstein, Warren Weinstein’s wife, said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. “They told us for three years ‘everything possible’ was being done to find and rescue Warren. We now feel deceived. . . . How do I explain to my grandkids that government could have saved their grandpa, but decided not to?”

U.S. officials said that the CIA and other spy agencies devoted significant resources to finding Weinstein but never had clear intelligence on where he was being held. The drone imagery showing an apparent hostage was collected as long as a year before Weinstein was killed, according to officials who said that agency analysts initially assessed that it was unlikely that the captive was the American.

It is unclear why the CIA reached that preliminary determination. The agency declined to comment.