Word: khost
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...attack in context, what we need to understand is that it is not the CIA's standard operating procedure to bring informants into bases, as was done with Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi in Khost. Under more favorable circumstances, the CIA's field officers always prefer to meet with informants one on one and in carefully scouted, out-of-the-way places chosen to protect the anonymity of the informant. But things have to be done differently in Afghanistan, where the CIA has a well-grounded fear that its operatives will be kidnapped or killed - a risk that applies...
Last week's suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers in Khost, Afghanistan, underscores just how difficult a mission the agency - and the U.S. as a whole - faces in the country. Given the size of the CIA, the loss it suffered when a Jordanian assumed to have been an asset penetrating al-Qaeda instead detonated an explosives belt at a gathering of agency personnel, was the equivalent of the Army losing a battalion. It was a major setback for the CIA after eight years at war, not to mention the fact that it coincided with a moment when the Agency...
...Wednesday that al-Balawi's offer of information on al-Zawahiri was deemed important enough for the local CIA station to alert top officials at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and in the White House. Al-Balawi was taken seriously, and trusted enough to warrant a trip to Khost by the CIA's second-in-command in Afghanistan, an unidentified mother of three, to attend the spy's debriefing at a U.S. base. But al-Balawi, who was allowed onto Forward Operating Base Chapman without a body search, was wearing a suicide belt and blew himself up as soon...
...fired on a U.K. training team inside a checkpoint in Helmand Province. But Grenier says that given the breadth and depth of the CIA's operations in Afghanistan, the death toll among employees has been "almost miraculously light." He adds: "Fate may have caught up with us today." The Khost death toll is second only to the record for the number of CIA staffers killed in a single day. On April 18 1983, eight members of the Agency were killed when the US Embassy in Beirut was blown up by a Hizballah suicide bomb. A retired officer who was then...
...Khost is just across the border from North Waziristan, the lawless Pakistani tribal area from where al-Qaeda and the Taliban routinely launch attacks on U.S. and NATO positions in Afghanistan. The Taliban has already claimed responsibility for Wednesday's attack, but U.S. authorities have released few details. "We mourn the loss of life in this attack," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. Hank Crumpton, who headed the CIA's counterterror ops in Afghanistan after 9/11: "This horrible attack underscores the risk that CIA officers, men and women, undertake every day in Afghanistan and around the world. They are America...