It was among the greatest single days of loss in CIA history. On December 30, 2009, a suicide bomber detonated on a base in eastern Afghanistan, killing seven CIA officers and Blackwater contractors who thought he would take them to al Qaeda's leadership. Now, the agency has determined what went wrong: it didn't check out the killer thoroughly enough to determine his true loyalty, nor did it listen to agency skeptics who doubted the audacious operation could work.
In a statement emailed today to agency employees and shared with reporters, Director Leon Panetta announced that an internal review found that the killer, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, "was not fully vetted and that sufficient security precautions were not taken." The review's findings were not released. (You can read Panetta's full statement thanks to our pal Shane Harris at Washingtonian.)
Panetta didn't single any person or any directorate out for the failure. Agents' "intense determination to accomplish the mission" -- penetrating al Qaeda's inner circle in Pakistan -- overrode caution. But the operation suffered from "shortcomings across several Agency components in areas including communications, documentation, and management oversights," Panetta wrote.
While it's hard to judge without seeing the report, the recommendations Panetta said the agency will adopt indicate that "key guidance, operational facts, and judgments" about Balawi weren't "clearly flagged in formal channels." There's a need to "more carefully manage information sharing with other intelligence services," which may be a reference to the Jordanian spies that brought him to the CIA's attention. Two recommendations refer to the judgment of "veteran officers," suggesting that some of the agency's more experienced operatives had doubts about the operation. Indeed, the Washington Post reported that some CIA and Jordanian spies raised concerns that he "might be a fraud."
But Balawi sounds like a hard intelligence opportunity to pass up. Well-known on jihadi message boards where he used the alias Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, Balawi, a physician trained in Turkey and working in Jordan, wrote virulently enough for the Jordanian General Intelligence Department to detain him in 2009. They essentially gave him an ultimatum: help them get intelligence on al Qaeda or his family might suffer. He agreed to move to Pakistan, and while there produced intel on al Qaeda that Panetta said was "independently verified."
That led some within the CIA to believe Balawi when he said he could get close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy leader of al Qaeda. The Post reports that CIA briefed the White House and U.S. Central Command on the Balawi operation. Panetta's letter conspicuously does not mention any pressure from the White House that might have contributed to the insufficient vetting, but that's a possibility nevertheless.
Officials now believe that Balawi was playing the CIA all along, in order to get close enough to kill operatives, as he ultimately did at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. Panetta's letter conceded that Balawi had "not rejected his terrorist roots." Earlier this year, al Qaeda released a martyrdom tape Balawi made bragging about his imminent attack.
Panetta vowed to continue "the most aggressive counterterrorism operations in our history," an effort that has brought CIA drone strikes in Pakistan to an all-time high. And it's worth mentioning that a persistent knock on the CIA, from the 9/11 Commission and others, holds it to be unwilling to take risks for national security. Aversion to risk was clearly not a problem in the Balawi case -- something for agency critics to think about.
The CIA's new inspector general, David B. Buckley, will review the Balawi report. Whether he'll have more to say about what went wrong -- or if the Congressional intelligence committees will inquire further -- remains to be seen.
Update: Much more from the New York Times and the Washington Post, which report that a CIA officer in Jordan failed to pass along warnings from a Jordanian intelligence operative that Balawi was in fact an al-Qaeda double agent. (And that December 30, 2009, contrary to what I initially wrote, wasn't the worst single-day loss of CIA life in the agency's history; it's the worst since the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut.)
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