The destruction of the CIA’s Forward Operating Base Chapman on
December 30 by an Afghan suicide bomber who had been a trusted
informant was surprising only because it had not happened sooner.
Bringing bombs to intelligence officers is infinitely easier than
getting them to accept misleading information. But hostile
intelligence services have foisted such information onto CIA ever
since its inception, easily. Just so, it seems that the Chapman
bomber, Hammam al Balali, had long been providing CIA with the
information it used to direct drone strikes against what CIA was
led to believe were America’s enemies. That may explain why,
after each strike, the U.S. government would claim success
against terrorists while Afghans and Pakistanis would claim that
innocents had died. In short, before CIA officers got themselves
killed by letting Mr. al Balali bring them a bomb, they caused
wider harm by letting him and his friends help pick America’s
targets. CIA will rush to protect itself against physical attack,
but will resist protecting the rest of us against its own
incompetence.
CIA’s model of operations practically invites all forms of
betrayal, because its operatives are by no means clandestine, and
because they have always been averse to serious
counterintelligence. Ever since 1943, when Allen Dulles set up
spy shop on Bern’s Herrengasse with full coverage by the local
press, nearly all of CIA’s case officers have been “covered” only
by the useless pretense that they work for another part of the
U.S. government. But to the people they try to recruit, CIA
officers make no pretense at all about who they are. They could
not if they tried, because they are linguistically and culturally
incapable of passing for anything other than what they are. As a
result, CIA officers end up having far more contact with people
who want to use them than with those whom they might wish to use.
Perpetually starved for high grade information, CIA accepts
sources as valid with only the thinnest pretense of quality
control. Even before 1975, when CIA made the operators themselves
responsible for their own operations’ integrity,
counterintelligence had been the Agency’s stepchild. Thus, not
only did the Soviet KGB routinely control CIA’s operations
through double agents: so did the East Germans, the Cubans, and
the Iraqis, who penetrated the CIA’s vaunted ROCKSTARS network
from the start.
CIA’s performance regarding terrorism is worsened by its
increasing reliance on foreign intelligence services. The Chapman
case, in which an agent provided by Jordanian intelligence proved
to be hostile, is all too typical. Our officers simply had
neither alternatives to the Jordanian agent, nor means
independently to vet him. All they could do was to note that he
had provided facts that proved to be true. How many false ones
were mixed in, no one seems to have asked. And so the agent was
invited to take part in deciding who America’s friends and
enemies are. Alas, this is a very old story. The only new part is
that he decided to end the charade by killing his hosts.
Probably, he would have done more harm by keeping it up.
For CIA to exercise judgment independent of foreign liaison
services, to penetrate hostiles rather than to be penetrated by
them, it would have to consist of people who derive security from
blending into foreign environments unrecognizably rather than
from guards; who derive effectiveness from their capacity to
distinguish between true facts and true lies; who have the
integrity to tell themselves and others the difference between
what they know and what they want to believe. But CIA has never
consisted of such people.
The CIA bureaucrats whose inertial navigation of personnel and
procedures placed a thirty-ish suburban mother of three young
children in charge of Base Chapman, exposing her to be euchred
and then killed by people who proved to be beyond her ken, bear a
heavy responsibility.
