“And to hurry the overwhelming of our intelligence efforts against them, al Qaeda decapitated our bin Laden base in Khost.”
Hi Kristinn,
Can you (or anyone else) point to more information on the Khost base being “our bin Laden base?” I apologize for my ignorance if this is common knowledge. Is there open source information about this?
What has alarmed the US is the fact that al-Qaeda and the Taleban managed, despite an intense US bombing campaign, to mount an operation that wiped out the top CIA experts involved in the hunt for bin Laden. “It’s a huge blow,” a former CIA officer said. “If you are Osama bin Laden, your biggest enemy is the CIA. This is a big hit.”
SNIP
He detonated his bomb soon after entering the base, killing four CIA field agents, three CIA security guards and a Jordanian intelligence officer. One of the dead was the CIA’s chief at the base, a woman in her mid-thirties.
“Several of the [dead] were ... among the top five experts on al- Qaeda in the United States,” Mr Scheuer said. “When you lose that type of expertise, it’s very hard to replace it; impossible in the near term.”
Former CIA officials told The Times that the high number of CIA officers travelling from Kabul to meet al-Balawi reflected how desperate the agency was for information on bin Laden.
SNIP