01-01-2010, 10:55 AM
[url="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126225941186711671.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories"]Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan Devastates Critical Hub for CIA Activities[/url]
Quote:Several former intelligence officials described the attack in Afghanistan as "devastating" to the agency. A number of the officers killed had been counterterrorism operatives since before the 9/11 attacks.
The loss of seven officers is significant for a relatively small agency whose workforce is estimated to be 10,000 or more, [color="#FF0000"]but it's all the more damaging because those lost represented so much collective experience.[/color]
Canadian soldiers patrol in the southern city of Kandahar on December 31.
They were "experienced frontline officers and their knowledge and expertise will be sorely missed" and not easily regenerated, said Henry A. Crumpton, who led the CIA campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002.
The number of casualties in Wednesday's attack was second to those sustained in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983, which killed eight CIA officers. The Beirut bombing hit the agency's Middle East group hard, and was one of the key events that drove the creation of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center a few years later.
"It will mark this generation the same way Beirut marked mine," said Ron Marks, a 16-year CIA veteran, who left the agency in 1999. With CIA officers deployed to the far reaches of Afghanistan and Pakistan for extended periods, he said, the agency has been lucky to have avoided such attacks for as long as it did.
Quote:The CIA's Khost base was established in the months after the 9/11 attacks as the U.S. launched its CIA-led offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It began as a makeshift center for CIA-Afghan operations. By mid-2002, it had grown into a major counterterrorism hub for joint operations with CIA, military Special Operations forces and Afghan allies.
The Taliban says it's responsible for two deadly bombings Wednesday, one inside a CIA base and another that killed Canadian troops and a journalist embedded with them. Video courtesy of Reuters.
Its primary role has been to run informant networks in Afghanistan and over the border, said one former agency official. "That was one of the bases where they were paying people and running people and sending them into Pakistan," he said.
The CIA's activities on the base were an open secret locally, he added, "al Qaeda knows it and the townspeople know it and the Taliban know it."
The attack in Afghanistan came during an already difficult week for the CIA, which has taken a beating in Washington with President Barack Obama issuing a blunt critique of intelligence failures in advance of the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack.