My best guess...One of the CIA agents killed was a mole.
Hurt Locker mentality. We gotta take some risks if we are to have a win here. That’s what got them killed. We sure like to agonize over this stuff, again and again. It’s a war. People die.
“Private First Class Eugene B. Sledge of the 1st Marine Division had been fighting in 1945 on the miserable island of Okinawa for six weeks. Continuous rain transformed the terrain into a sea of mud that clutched soldiers’ boots and stalled large vehicles, while Japanese mortar and artillery shells poured down in a violent fury that mangled bodies and twisted weapons.
The island, according to Sledge, was ‘the most ghastly corner of hell I had ever witnessed….Every crater was half full of water, and many of them held a Marine corpse. The bodies lay pathetically just as they had been killed, half submerged in muck and water, rusting weapons still in hand. Swarms of big flies hovered about them.’ Wherever he looked, Sledge saw ‘maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.’”
The Americans took over the management of Balawi from the Jordanians sometime in the second half of 2009, dictating how and when the informant would meet his handlers, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officers. Agency field officers faced unusual pressures from top CIA and administration officials in Washington keyed up by Balawi's promise to deliver al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current and former officers said.
But a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity, rejected assertions that the CIA had abandoned caution. "No one -- not in Washington, not in the field -- let excitement or anticipation run the show," the official said. The GID's approach was more subtle than simple blackmail, the official added. "Persuasion works better than coercion, and that's something the Jordanians understand completely," the official said. "The caricatures of clumsy, heavy-handed approaches just don't fit."
I also must comment on the Jordanian's use of "persuasion" rather than "coercion". As you probably know, Jordan is the home of the world famous "fingernail factory". That name didn't just drop out of the sky.
Well, it doesn’t seem to me that this story changes anything. It was not a mistake to try to turn and use him. It was a mistake to TRUST him.
There are conflicting accounts as to whether he gave the CIA any useful information in order to worm his way into their good graces. This article, too, doesn’t really say. They had some information that they used to take out al Qaeda leaders, but they won’t say whether Balawi provided any of it.
Even if his final loyalties were to the enemy, they might still have gotten useful stuff out of him if they handled him right.
But to let him into a meeting of high-level CIA operatives without searching him? That was a violation of tradecraft on the most elementary level.
*ping*
BTTT