By Benjamin Weiser

New York Times

One evening in February, a man entering the subway at Barclays Center in Brooklyn was detained by the police for using a discounted student MetroCard — his daughter’s, it turned out.

It was, he would say later, a stupid mistake that would lead to absurd consequences: The man, Blerim Skoro, a citizen of Kosovo, now sits in jail, facing potential deportation.

But Skoro was no mere hapless fare-beater.

“I was working for U.S. government,” he told a U.S. asylum officer in May, explaining his past life overseas and why he was now afraid of being sent back to Kosovo, a transcript shows. “I was trained for Washington. I was a spy.”

A native of the old Yugoslavia, Skoro, 45, appears to have lived a remarkable, if hidden, life that sprang from his arrest in 2000 on federal drug charges; he began cooperating with prosecutors in his case and others, pleaded guilty and received a seven-year sentence.

After Sept. 11, 2001, he says in an affidavit, he became a prison informer for the FBI, providing leads on fellow inmates with terrorist ties. After completing his sentence, he said, he was deported in 2007, but agreed to continue working for the government overseas.

He says he posed as a willing operative and insinuated himself with members of al-Qaida in the Balkans, secretly supplying the CIA with information about plots and the people behind them.

After the CIA cut ties with him in 2010, he says, he eventually returned to the United States via Canada — illegally, he admits — and last year, with the help of a lawyer, met separately with the FBI and counterterrorism officials with the New York Police Department, trying unsuccessfully to offer clandestine assistance in the fight against the Islamic State group.

Spy stories, by their nature, are often unverifiable, and government officials typically are loath to discuss such accounts. Indeed, a bureau spokesman, asked about Skoro, said he could not “confirm or deny” any part of the story. The CIA, the police department and the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn also declined to comment.

Skoro, in several hours of interviews at the Bergen County Jail in northern New Jersey and by phone, showed a deep command of people, places and other facts, and said his information was corroborated through videos, photographs and copies of texts he had given his lawyers.

Skoro, whose wife and three children, all U.S. citizens, live in New York City, said he still had much to offer the authorities. “I dealt with the most ruthless, dangerous terrorists in Balkans and Middle East,” he said.

Skoro, a practicing Muslim, said others of his faith should be willing to covertly assist in the fight against the Islamic State group. But he suggested that his detention would send the opposite message.

Muslims, he said, will ask, “How we can trust our government when you’re going to put the spies in the prison?”

Skoro first entered the United States in 1994. In the 2000 drug importation case that led to his cooperation with the government, he transported at least 14 kilograms of heroin and cocaine and laundered about $670,000 in drug proceeds, the judge said at his sentencing.

Prosecutors recommended leniency, citing his assistance and noting he had provided significant intelligence about drug traffickers in the city’s Albanian community.

Skoro says the FBI promised he would be allowed to stay in the country after serving his sentence and acting as a prison informer. But after being told in 2007 that he would be deported, he said he left his bitterness behind and agreed to work for the agency abroad.

In 2010, Skoro says, he was shot and wounded on the way to a CIA debriefing in Macedonia. He managed to escape, but the agency ended the relationship, paying him the equivalent of about $35,000 to $40,000 in euros, he said.

The next year, while seeking asylum in Canada, Skoro was interviewed by journalist Vincent Larouche for the online publication Rue Frontenac. The article, titled “The Fugitive With 1,000 Secrets,” referred to him by the pseudonym Abu; it characterized his story as “convincing” but noted that much of his account could not be confirmed.

Aspects of his story also emerged in a 2015 court decision in Canada, related to an asylum request he had made that used his actual name, and cited his claim to have been a CIA spy who had infiltrated Islamic terror cells.

Stéphane Handfield, a Montreal lawyer who represented Skoro in Canada, said his asylum request was rejected in 2013, and a request to a federal court for review was dismissed in 2015. But Skoro had already slipped into the United States illegally in November 2014.

In New York, he says, he made contact with several lawyers who said recently that they found his story to be credible. One, Rene A. Kathawala, who leads the pro bono practice at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliff, said his firm would do everything possible to assist Skoro and his immigration lawyer, Irwin Berowitz, in his deportation case.

Berowitz said an asylum officer who recently interviewed Skoro found him credible and that he had established a “reasonable fear of persecution” if deported to Kosovo. That finding allowed the case to be sent to an immigration judge for further proceedings, Berowitz said.

Skoro was also referred to Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer who has developed a national security practice. Skoro approached him in April 2015, intent on providing “proactive undercover assistance to law enforcement” with respect to the Islamic State group, Dratel said in a declaration that is also part of the immigration case.

After Skoro’s illegal re-entry arrest in March, he was jailed without bond after federal prosecutors in Brooklyn argued he might flee.

But on March 23, one day after the Islamic State group’s deadly attacks in Brussels, a prosecutor called Dratel and said the government was now interested in meeting with Skoro to determine whether he could be of assistance.

Dratel said he met with prosecutors alone, outlining what his client knew and providing copies of screen shots of certain text messages between Skoro and a purported Islamic State operative in Syria. Two days later, the government, without elaboration, moved to dismiss Skoro’s illegal re-entry charge. The prosecutors did not pursue a meeting with him directly, Dratel said.

He was then moved into immigration custody, where he remains today.