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When George W. Bush was president, a week didn't go by when the press wasn't dismissing his intelligence and proclaiming his administration's incompetence. Over the weekend, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan. Someone on his staff demonstrated truly jaw-dropping incompetence by accidentally releasing to 6,000 journalists the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan as part of Obama's welcoming delegation. That is a death sentence, not just for the agent but for all those around him. Try to imagine the media firestorm this would have created had the transgression occurred during the W...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fired CIA agent, who a newspaper says told superiors in 2001 that Iraq had abandoned part of its nuclear program, is asking the FBI to investigate allegations that the spy agency dismissed him for refusing to falsify intelligence. A July 11 letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller from the former agent's attorney suggests CIA officials may be guilty of criminal violations involving intelligence he produced on weapons of mass destruction in 2000 that contradicted an official agency position. The former agent's attorney, Roy Krieger, said his client initially asked the CIA's inspector general to investigate charges...

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department is investigating whether Guantanamo Bay detainees charged with roles in the Sept. 11 attacks were improperly given photos of CIA officers or contractors, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The investigation, headed by the Justice Department's counterespionage chief, John Dion, is trying to determine if military lawyers defending the detainees divulged classified information or compromised covert CIA officers, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke only on condition of anonymity. It is a violation of federal law to identify CIA covert personnel, and it is a...

A former staffer for Bay State Sen. John F. Kerry has been charged with leaking the names of CIA operatives, including one who was involved in the interrogation of terror suspects held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and Kerry’s office.

AMMAN, Jordan - He was an ambitious young doctor from a large family who had a foreign wife and two children -- details that officers of Jordan's intelligence service viewed as exploitable vulnerabilities, not biography. -snip- The Americans took over the management of Balawi from the Jordanians sometime in the second half of 2009, dictating how and when the informant would meet his handlers, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officers. Agency field officers faced unusual pressures from top CIA and administration officials in Washington keyed up by Balawi's promise to deliver al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current...

The suicide strike on the key U.S. intelligence base in Afghanistan had hallmarks of an operation carried out by a national intelligence service, a leading U.S. think-tank has said, apparently hinting that it could be the handiwork of Pakistan’s ISI or its rogue elements. “The hit was by all account a masterful piece of trade craft beyond the known abilities of a group like Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan,” U.S. think-tank Stratfors said. “The Jordanians penetration of the CIA was less like the product of an insurgency than an operation carried out by a national intelligence service. And this is the most troubling...

Suicide Terrorist who Killed the CIA Agents Threatened Terrorist Attacks Inside the US Al Jazeera TV broadcast a video where the suicide terrorist “Abou Dajana Al Kharasani” (real name “Hamam Khalil Abou Melal”) gave his “will” few days before he conducted his suicide terrorist attack against the CIA in Afghanistan and killed seven CIA officers. In the video terrorist “Abou Dajana Al Kharasani” said that there will be terrorist attacks coming inside the US and outside the US. Our terrorist enemies are now greatly emboldened and it would be very prudent that we take very seriously what terrorist “Abou Dajana...

* The Wall Street Journal * OPINION * JANUARY 7, 2010, 11:12 P.M. ET The Meaning of al Qaeda's Double Agent The jihadists are showing impressive counterintelligence ability that the CIA seems to have underestimated. By REUEL MARC GERECHT The recent death in Afghanistan of seven American counterterrorist officers, one Jordanian intelligence operative, and one exploding al Qaeda double agent ought to give us cause to reflect on the real capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency and al Qaeda. The report card isn't good. America's systemic intelligence problems were partially on display in the bombing at the CIA's Forward Operating...

New details have emerged of the failures that led to the deaths of seven CIA agents in Afghanistan. Christina Lamb and Miles Amoore reportIt was the week after Christmas and there was a line of paper Santas hanging in the small chow house at Forward Operating Base Chapman, sent to Afghanistan by loved ones back home. Among the CIA agents waiting in the morning chill, amid the exercise bicycles and weights, were a mother of three and a father of three who had had to tell their children they would not be home for Christmas. This was not the first...

The Jordanian doctor arrived in a red station wagon that came directly from Pakistan and sped through checkpoints at a CIA base in Afghanistan before stopping abruptly at an improvised interrogation center. Outside stood one of the CIA's top experts on al-Qaeda, ready to greet the doctor and hear him describe a way to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organization's No. 2 and a man long at the top of U.S. target lists. The Jordanian exited the car with one hand in his pocket, according to the accounts of several U.S. officials briefed on the incident. An American security guard approached...

SNIPPET: "Hakeemullah Mehsud (left), the Leader of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan. and Humam Khalil Muhammed Abu Mulal al Balawi (right), the suicide bomber who carried out the attack at Combat Outpost Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. The al Qaeda operative who killed seven US CIA operatives and guards, and a Jordanian intelligence official, was on a martyr's videotape with the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Humam Khalil Muhammed Abu Mulal al Balawi, a Jordanian Islamist who was thought to have been turned against al Qaeda, appeared on a videotape with Hakeemullah Mehsud, the leader of the Movement of...

Could The CIA Have Achieved What al-Qaeda Did? The audacious al-Qaeda attack in Khost, Afghanistan and the failures to detect the Detroit bomb plot are indications of a broken CIA, writes Toby Harnden in Washington Toby Harnden 09 Jan 2010 At the George Bush Center for Intelligence – better known as CIA headquarters – in Langley, Virginia there is a crisis of confidence. Last week, seven of its personnel returned to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in flag-draped coffins. They were killed in an audacious attack in which a triple agent detonated a suicide bomb as he was debriefed...

The Jordanian doctor arrived in a red station wagon that came directly from Pakistan and sped through checkpoints at a CIA base in Afghanistan before stopping abruptly at an improvised interrogation center. Outside stood one of the CIA's top experts on al-Qaeda, ready to greet the doctor and hear him describe a way to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organization's number two and a man long at the top of U.S. target lists. The Jordanian exited the car with one hand in his pocket, according to the accounts of several U.S. officials briefed on the incident. An American security guard approached...

The man believed to be the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees and contractors last month appears in a newly released video, in which he vows revenge for the killing of a Taliban leader. The video shows Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, whom a former U.S. intelligence official identified as the suicide bomber. Al-Balawi's brother told CNN Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson that the man in the video was his sibling. In the tape, which aired Saturday on the Arabic satellite news channel Al-Jazeera, al-Balawi says his message is for the CIA and Jordanian intelligence. The December 30 bombing at...

The recent death in Afghanistan of seven American counterterrorist officers, one Jordanian intelligence operative, and one exploding al Qaeda double agent ought to give us cause to reflect on the real capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency and al Qaeda. The report card isn't good. America's systemic intelligence problems were partially on display in the bombing at the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province. Worse, al Qaeda showed skill that had been lacking in many of its operations. In response, President Barack Obama will likely be obliged to adopt counterterrorist methods that could make his administration as tough...

Yet, of the Americans who died last week in the suicide bombing at the CIA’s most sensitive outpost in Afghanistan, it is the seventh whose presence has raised the most urgent questions as the US scrambles to repair — and avenge — the damage done to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. According to a security official in Kabul with close ties to the CIA, when Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi carried out his deadly mission at Forward Operating Base Chapman, he managed to kill the agency’s deputy head of station for the whole of Afghanistan. The senior agent was waiting...

In terms of loss of life, the bombing of the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, may be the costliest mistake in the agency's history. So it's important to look carefully for clues about how it happened, and lessons for the future. CIA veterans cite a series of warning signs that the agency wasn't paying enough attention to the counterintelligence threat posed by al-Qaida. These danger signals weren't addressed because the agency underestimated its adversary and overestimated its own skills and those of its allies. The time to fix these problems is now — not with a spasm of second-guessing that...

I’ve been watching new info trickle in for the past 24 hours, and the more I see, the number I get. He fed the agency honest-to-goodness actionable intelligence about jihadis to build up his credibility, to the point where he came to be regarded as their best asset in years. They looked the other way when he posted on jihadist online forums, accepting his assurances at face value that he was only saying what he was saying to fool the enemy — even though, of course, he wasn’t. Finally he told them that he had big news about Zawahiri, which...

The wife of the suspected Jordanian double agent who killed seven CIA workers in Afghanistan said Wednesday her husband regarded the United States as an adversary. Defne Bayrak, the Turkish wife of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, told Turkish media by telephone she was shocked at the news that her husband blew himself up at a base in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, killing himself and the officers. Bayrak, who lives in Istanbul, said her husband had plans to become a specialist in surgery in Turkey and doubts he was working for the CIA.

US intelligence officials believe the suicide bomb attack that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan last month was planned with the help of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle, raising fears that the al-Qaeda leader is enjoying a lethal resurgence. The attack, carried out by a Jordanian triple-agent whom the CIA believed was about to divulge the whereabouts of al-Qaeda's deputy leader, could not have taken place without the prior knowledge and assistance of the Haqqani network, US officials believe. The powerful Taleban faction is thought to be shielding bin Laden. Against all normal security protocol, al-Balawi was allowed onto the...