A Year Ago Today: The Khost Suicide Bombing – December 30, 2009-

A year ago today one of the most defining incidents of the upcoming year at war in Afghanistan occurred.  

Civilian Contractors and the  CIA working side by side were killed when a double agent set off a suicide vest  in Khost, Afghanistan.

Thank you for your service

Our Thoughts are with your families today and always

Jeremy Wise

Former Navy Seal  working for Blackwater

Dane Clark Paresi

Former Special Forces working for  Blackwater.

Harold Brown Jr.

Former Army Officer who specialed in Intelligence and had served as a contractor for military intelligence

and

Scott Michael Roberson

Former Detective with the Atlanta Police Department had served as a private security contractor

had recently become CIA Officers.

More on the Khost Suicide Bombing here

Officer Failed to Warn C.I.A. Before Khost Attack, Contractors Killed

Attack Killed Civilian Contractors and former Civilian Contractors

Jeremy Wise,

Dane Clark Paresi

Scott Michael Roberson

Harold Brown Jr.

by Mark Mazzetti

WASHINGTON — Three weeks before a Jordanian double agent set off a bomb at a remote Central Intelligence Agency base in eastern Afghanistan last December, a C.I.A. officer in Jordan received warnings that the man might be working for Al Qaeda, according to an investigation into the deadly attack.

But the C.I.A. officer did not tell his bosses of suspicions — brought to the Americans by a Jordanian intelligence officer — that the man might be planning to lure Americans into a trap, according to the recently completed investigation by the agency. Later that month the Qaeda operative, a Jordanian doctor, detonated a suicide vest as he stood among a group of C.I.A. officers at the base.

The internal investigation documents a litany of breakdowns leading to the Dec. 30 attack at the Khost base that killed seven C.I.A. employees, the deadliest day for the spy agency since the 1983 bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut. Besides the failure to pass on warnings about the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the C.I.A. investigation chronicled major security lapses at the base in Afghanistan, a lack of war zone experience among the agency’s personnel at the base, insufficient vetting of the alleged defector and a murky chain of command with different branches of the intelligence agency competing for control over the operation.

Some of these failures mirror other lapses that have bedeviled the sprawling intelligence and antiterrorism community in the past several years, despite numerous efforts at reform.

The report found that the breakdowns were partly the result of C.I.A. officers’ wanting to believe they had finally come across the thing that had eluded them for years: a golden source who could lead them to the terror network’s second highest figure, Ayman al-Zawahri.

As it turned out, the bomber who was spirited onto a base pretending to be a Qaeda operative willing to cooperate with the Americans was actually a double agent who detonated a suicide vest as he stood among a group of C.I.A. officers. “The mission itself may have clouded some of the judgments made here,” said the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, who provided details of the investigation to reporters on Tuesday.

Mr. Panetta said that the report did not recommend holding a single person or group of individuals directly accountable for “systemic failures.”

“This is a war,” he said, adding that it is important for the C.I.A. to continue to take on risky missions.

The investigation, conducted by the agency’s counterintelligence division, does, however, make a series of recommendations to improve procedures to vet sources and require that C.I.A. field officers share more information with their superiors.

Mr. Panetta said that he also ordered that a team of counterintelligence experts join the C.I.A. counterterrorism center, and to thoroughly vet the agency’s most promising informants. It is unclear whether any action will be taken against the C.I.A. operative in Jordan who chose not to pass on the warning.

The agency is a closed society that makes precious little public about its operations. It is sometimes loath to investigate itself, and at times has resisted punishing people for failures.

In 2005, for instance, Director Porter J. Goss rejected the recommendation of an internal review that “accountability boards” be established to determine which senior C.I.A. officials should be blamed for intelligence breakdowns before the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Goss said that punishing top officers “would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks.”

Current and former C.I.A. officials said that the decision not to hold officers directly responsible for the bombing was partly informed by an uncomfortable truth: some of those who may have been at fault were killed in the bombing.

In particular, the officials said there was particular care about how much fault to assign to Jennifer Matthews, a Qaeda expert at the C.I.A. who was the chief of the Khost base and who died in the attack.

One former C.I.A. officer with Afghanistan experience said there was bitter internal debate at the spy agency over whether Ms. Matthews — who had little field experience — ought to singled out for blame for the security lapses that allowed the bomber, Mr. Balawi, onto the base.

“There’s a lot of built-up emotion over this, because one of the primary people accused is Jennifer, and she’s not here to defend herself,” he said.

Several family members of the victims of the Khost attack, reached by telephone and e-mail on Tuesday, declined to comment about the C.I.A. report. Mr. Panetta said that families would be informed about the report’s conclusions in the coming days. Read more here

Blackwater and the Khost Bombing: Is the CIA deceiving Congress?

By Jeremy Scahill

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. “The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence,” said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. “Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?”

In December, the CIA announced that the agency had canceled its contract with Blackwater to work on the agency’s drone bombing campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said Director Leon Panetta ordered a review of all existing CIA contracts with Blackwater. “At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any CIA operations other than in a security or support role,” CIA spokesman George Little said December 11.

But Schakowsky said the fact that two Blackwater personnel were in such close proximity to the December 30 suicide bomber–an alleged double agent, who was reportedly meeting with CIA agents including the agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan when he blew himself up–shows how “deeply enmeshed” Blackwater remains in sensitive CIA operations, including those CIA officials claim it no longer participates in, such as intelligence gathering and briefings with valuable agency assets. The two Blackwater men were reportedly in the room for the expected briefing by the double agent, Humam Khalil Muhammed Abu Mulal al-Balawi, who claimed to have recently met with Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri.

“It’s just astonishing that given the track record of Blackwater, which is a repeat offender endangering our mission repeatedly, endangering the lives of our military and costing the lives of innocent civilians, that there would be any relationship,” Schakowsky said. “That we would continue to contract with them or any of Blackwater’s subsidiaries is completely unacceptable.”

Under the Obama administration, Blackwater continues to work for the Department of Defense, the State Department and, as evidenced by the December 30 bombing, the CIA in Afghanistan. The company even maintains its own forward operating bases in Afghanistan, including one along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “This is the closest base to the [Pakistani] border,” Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince recently bragged to Vanity Fair. “Who else has built a fob along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?”

Blackwater has been working for the CIA since at least April 2002. Prince recently claimed he was personally a CIA asset, conducting clandestine black operations around the globe. In June, Leon Panetta reportedly told Congress he had canceled the CIA assassination program involving Blackwater.

While the CIA said in December that Blackwater only continues its security and support role for the CIA, NBC News reported that the Blackwater men were not doing security at the time of the blast. The two Blackwater operatives killed in the bombing have been identified as Jeremy Wise, a 35-year old ex-Navy SEAL, and 46-year-old Dane Clark Paresi.