Writing for GQ, Robert Baer describes an incident in Khost, Afghanistan in which a CIA analyst was promoted beyond her capabilities and then proceeded to botch her job of handling the alleged informant. This incident occurred less than three months ago, yet I had never heard of it, despite it being a very significant blow to the CIA.
Baer describes agent “Kathy”’s (her name is withheld) abrupt rise from desk jockey to running the CIA base in Khost:
The base chief is a covert employee of the CIA; her identity is protected by law. I’ll call her Kathy. She was 45 years old and a divorced mother of three. She’d spent the vast majority of her career at a desk in Northern Virginia, where she studied Al Qaeda for more than a decade. Michael Scheuer, her first boss in Alec Station, the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden, told me she had attended the operative’s basic training course at the Farm, the agency’s training facility, and that he considered her a good, smart officer. Another officer who knew her told me that despite her training at the Farm, she was always slotted to be a reports officer, someone who edits reports coming in from the field. She was never intended to meet and debrief informants.
Kathy knew that there was a time when only seasoned field operatives were put in charge of places like Khost. Not only would an operative need to have distinguished himself at the Farm; he would’ve run informants in the field for five years or more before earning such a post. He probably would have done at least one previous tour in a war zone, too. And he would have known the local language, in this case Pashto. Kathy skipped all of this. Imagine a Marine going straight from Parris Island to taking command of a combat battalion in the middle of a war.
The 45-year-old divorced single mother was handed a job that was guaranteed to make her career, but sadly she bungled it badly, taking the bait from a dedicated jihadi who detonated a suicide vest in a bid to make it into Jannah, taking out a number of CIA officers with him.
The jihadi, a Jordanian Palestinian named Balawi, managed to fool Kathy by emailing pictures of himself whooping it up with various Al Qaeda leaders. He had first been identified after starting up a radical Islamic blog, which prompted the Jordanian government to haul him in for some serious interrogation, where he agreed to become an Al Qaeda mole. It seems the rough treatment at the hands of Jordanian intelligence only served to further radicalize Balawi, and he made up his mind to blow some people up.
There were a number of errors here, including the failure to search him before he got into the debriefing room (that’s pretty shocking, given that they were in Afghanistan), and the exposure of his identity to Afghan civilians.
One might be tempted to blame Kathy for her incompetence, but it was not her decision to be thrown into such a position without the requisite experience. Ultimately, the blame lies with ideologues in high positions, who thought it would be a good idea to put the poor woman in over her head.
If this kind of ideologically-driven blundering has made its way to the top levels of the CIA, one can only imagine what kind of inefficiencies and poor judgment plague the rest of America’s power structure, from our corporate boardrooms to the highest levels of military command.
