Terrorism Weekly: The CIA's Failure to Get Inside Al Qa'eda

This past week, amidst around-the-clock reports of government budget cuts, an American story made it into the BBC’s top 5 news items. The surprise entry? An internal CIA investigation into an attack in Afghanistan in December 2007 in which a suicide bomber killed 7 Agency officers.

The bomber was a Jordanian, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who was being used as a Jordanian and CIA informer in the hunt for senior al-Qaeda members, in particular Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Unbeknownst to the CIA, because the Agency hadn’t properly vetted al-Balawi, his loyalty remained to the terrorists.

The media coverage, not surprisingly, focused on the CIA’s culpability, as the Agency announced twenty-three changes to ensure such a mistake could not happen again. (I confidently predict that eventually these changes will be derided as having made the CIA, in its use of informers, gun-shy and reactive --- there was a backlash after the CIA brought in new regulations when it emerged that an Agency informer in the Guatemalan military had been involved in the murder of a spouse of an American citizen.)

Missing in the chatter is how the CIA found itself in this position in the first place and what the incident says about the difficulty of counter-terrorism efforts against al-Qaeda.

First, it has long been recognised that human intelligence through informers is a crucial tool in counter-terrorism. Immediately after 9-11, smart people took to the media to declare that the CIA had become too dependent on technology and that it needed to get back to the human spying business. A former senior CIA officer admitted publicly in 2002 that the one sure way 9-11 could have been prevented was if the Agency had someone within the senior ranks of al-Qaeda.

Expressing such truisms after the fact is the easy part. The hard part is obtaining that intelligence against a terrorist organization like al-Qaeda. There are essentially two choices: penetrate the organization from the outside or recruit from within. In a prescient piece that appeared in The Atlantic in August 2001, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA agent, explained why penetration from the outside, particularly by the CIA, is almost impossible. Essentially, members of the CIA were unable, due to lack of language skills and a relevant background, and unwilling to endure long years of deprivation to do what was required to infiltrate al-Qaeda.

Recruiting from within, at least from the al-Qaeda inner circle, is no easier according to the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden team, Michael Scheuer, because those at the top are the most ideologically committed and thus the least likely to be swayed into helping the Americans. Scheuer argues that this is the reverse of the Cold War where it was easier to penetrate the higher Communist ranks within the Soviet Union because there cynicism prevailed while an idealistic belief in communism dominated at the lower ranks.

As a result of these very real obstacles, the CIA has suffered and continues to suffer from a lack of human intelligence about al-Qaeda. In turn, this makes it more dependent on partner intelligence agencies, such as Jordan’s, and at risk of the type of disaster that occurred in December 2009. 

Next week: a major element in the Jordanian failure....