Ex-spies still agitated over CIA's Afghan losses

Jeff Stein
WashPost

Nearly three months after an al-Qaeda double agent obliterated an important CIA team in Afghanistan, veteran spies remain agitated over the incident and the agency’s seeming inability to fix longtime operational flaws.

The latest eruption over the Dec. 30 incident that killed seven CIA officers and contractors in a powerful suicide fireball comes from Robert Baer, the former clandestine operations officer who has been pillorying his former employer in books, articles and television interviews since shortly the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But other agency veterans have been weighing in as well, and increasingly, on the record.

Writing in the April issue of GQ magazine, Baer depicts a spy agency where "the operatives' sun started to set" in the 1990s and never recovered.

So it was that the spy agency sent an analyst to do an operative's work in Khost, in desolate southeast Afghanistan, last year. Traditionally, the CIA's station chiefs, or top agency officer in a country, and its base chiefs, deployed in outlying offices, were veteran case officers, or seasoned spy handlers.

(Original here.)