Long-term weaknesses in United States intelligence gathering have been ruthlessly exposed over the past fortnight by the Christmas Day airline plot and the Afghanistan suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers, according to former and serving intelligence officers.
They are scathing about the way the operation in Afghanistan has been run and say it is part of an institutional weakness of the CIA and other intelligence-gathering agencies. The biggest crisis in intelligence gathering since 9/11 has been brought about mainly because no single agency is in charge, they say, leaving a dozen US intelligence agencies to fight for turf.
The former officers were speaking as President Barack Obama held an inquest at the White House into the communication breakdown between the CIA and other agencies that allowed the Nigerian bomb suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to come close to blowing up a US passenger plane on Christmas Day.
A report published on the eve of that meeting by the deputy head of military intelligence, Major General Michael Flynn, offered a damning assessment of intelligence gathering in Afghanistan. He said the vast apparatus there was only marginally relevant. Analysts in Washington were so starved of information that “many say their jobs feel more like fortune-telling than detective work”.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and counter terrorism agent, said the CIA had become “sloppy” in its field intelligence gathering and the suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan, was a result of that.
The CIA thought it had turned Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor, into one of their agents and it allowed him on to the base after he asked for a meeting, promising to provide information about al-Qaeda. He then blew himself up.
A school friend, Mohammed Yousef, said Balawi had deceived family and friends, telling them in March he was going to Turkey for medical studies when in fact he had travelled to Afghanistan to join the militants. He had wanted to die in a holy war and wrote angry articles on the web calling for jihad against the US and Israel.
Johnson pointed to tactical failures at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, where the attack was made. He said an intelligence source as significant as Balawi should never have been brought inside the base, because it risked exposing him. Balawi should also have been debriefed by a much smaller group than the dozen or so CIA employees present when he set off the bomb.
He described those errors as symptomatic of a larger trend within the agency of putting desk workers into the field. “You have a lot of inexperienced people being shoved out into the field without adequate mentoring and without proper training,” Johnson said.
The CIA has suffered one crisis after another since its inception in the middle of the past century. A low point was the failure to prevent 9/11, while last year the Obama administration revealed details of waterboarding and other torture.
Pat Lang, a veteran of military intelligence, who was head of the analysis and clandestine human intelligence for the Defence Intelligence Agency, echoed Johnson’s criticism of the Khost operation.
“A number of basic rules were violated. One that comes to mind is you never trust foreign agent assets,” he said. —