The Triple Agent

From his car, Panetta thought through the possible implications. Sheikh Saeed al-Masri—if that was who it was—would be one of the important terrorist figures ever to fall into the CIA’s sights. At the moment he was the most prominent al-Qaeda operative after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. As a practical matter, he was more influential than either one of them.

As the big black car rolled into Arlington National Cemetery for Hanson’s burial, the CIA’s robot planes were prowling the sky over a house outside Miranshah, waiting. What an amazing ending to a truly awful chapter in the agency’s history, Panetta thought.

But was it really the sheikh?

Panetta phoned the White House to relay the latest information to Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff.

“It’s not a ‘go’ mission yet,” he said.

The questioning started before the dust had even settled at Khost. How could it have happened?

Surviving officers in Khost relayed the known facts within hours of the explosion, and the base’s Special Forces team prepared its own separate report summing up what was immediately obvious. A CIA double agent—in fact a triple agent—had managed to gain access to the agency’s secure base with an extraordinarily powerful bomb strapped to his body. He was able to come within a few dozen feet of a group of sixteen intelligence operatives before blowing himself up. Immediate intervention by experienced battlefield medics and surgeons had saved lives, but ten people had been killed, including the bomber and the CIA-trained Afghan driver.

The hard questions would take longer to sort out. Panetta’s senior staff focused on the key decisions and began tracing the steps backward, from Khost to Kabul and Amman and, inevitably, Langley. Panetta shared what he knew with White House advisers, including White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and National Security Adviser James L. Jones. Both he and Steve Kappes recounted the details in closed-door sessions with the Senate and House intelligence committees. Lawmakers had been sympathetic but also distracted by the near disaster that had occurred in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day. Thus there would be no formal congressional inquiry into the events.

Panetta, with the White House’s blessing, decided to launch two investigations of his own. One was a task force of veteran CIA officers experienced in counterterrorism and counterintelligence. A second, independent review was led by a pair of longtime Washington hands known and respected within the intelligence community, former United Nations ambassador Thomas Pickering and Charles E. Allen, a former CIA manager who had served as intelligence chief for the Department of Homeland Security during the second Bush administration. The two teams would examine thousands of secret cables, memos, and e-mails, and interview surviving CIA officers as well as their coworkers and superiors, from Khost to Kabul, Islamabad, Amman, and Langley.

Nearly a year passed before the teams’ reports were completed. In the intervening months scores of former intelligence operatives and terrorism experts offered their own judgments, drawing from the scant details available. In op-ed pieces, news articles, and blogs, commentators focused on two perceived failures, missteps that were said to have contributed to the disaster at Khost while pointing to deeper flaws in the country’s premier intelligence agency. Several of the agency’s retired executives pinned the blame on Khost base chief Jennifer Matthews and, more broadly, the CIA managers in Langley who had approved her promotion to a frontline post despite her lack of experience in a war zone. Other observers argued that the fatal errors in judgment at Khost stemmed from the agency’s growing aversion to risk. Even in Iraq and Afghanistan, these critics noted, many CIA officers lived in secure compounds where no one ever got hurt, while relying on technology and foreign allies to do the dirty work of finding and destroying terrorist threats. Somewhere along the way, basic rules of spycraft, including time-honored procedures for assessing and running informants and double agents, had been all but forgotten.

The criticisms hit at legitimate problems within the CIA. But they did not fully capture what had gone wrong at Khost in the hours before New Year’s Eve.