Cia Officer

The CIA ignored warnings that a potential Jordanian asset might be an Al Qaeda double agent, then failed to search him as he entered a high-security base in Afghanistan where he detonated a suicide bomb that killed seven agency personnel in December, an internal investigation has revealed. CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said the investigation found widespread security and communication breakdowns that led to the devastating attack on the remote agency base in Afghanistan's eastern Khowst province, which killed two contractors and five employees, including the base chief, who was one of the agency's foremost experts on Al Qaeda.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Rochester, N.Y. -- A bomber slipped into a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday and detonated a suicide vest, killing eight CIA officers in one of the deadliest days in the agency's history, current and former U.S. officials said. The attack took place at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khowst province, an area near the border with Pakistan that is a hotbed of insurgent activity. An undisclosed number of civilians were wounded, the officials said.

Milan C. "Mike" Miskovsky, a onetime CIA lawyer who quietly worked behind the scenes in high-profile prisoner negotiations and also investigated the causes of racial turmoil in the 1960s, died Oct. 15 of lung cancer at his home in Washington. He was 83. Miskovsky's varied career began when he was a forester in the western United States and took him to flash points of the Cold War and civil rights movement. He negotiated a prisoner exchange that freed U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers and helped arrange the release of Cuban Americans captured during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

The CIA's former top officer in Algeria has been indicted by a federal grand jury on a charge of sexually assaulting a woman in the North African country last year. Andrew Warren, 41, was released on personal recognizance after a brief appearance in federal court. The sexual abuse charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. A CIA spokesman said that Warren had been fired.

The Senate confirmed Leon E. Panetta as director of the CIA on Thursday, placing the spy agency in the hands of a government veteran valued for his skills as a lawmaker and policy manager rather than an expert at intelligence-gathering and analysis. Approval came by voice vote.

In a demonstration of growing U.S. frustration, the CIA's deputy director flew to Islamabad this month to warn Pakistani officials that they need to do more to address dangerous ties between the country's spy agency and resurgent Al Qaeda-linked militants, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

Although the "war on terrorism" remains a consuming focus of the U.S. government, the Bush administration appears poised to leave behind a situation not unlike the one it inherited nearly eight years ago: a resurgent Al Qaeda ensconced in South Asia, training new recruits, plotting attacks against the West, and seemingly beyond the United States' reach. In dozens of interviews, senior U.S.

Philip Agee, a former undercover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency whose disillusionment with U.S. policy in support of dictatorial regimes prompted him to name names and reveal CIA secrets, died Monday in Cuba. He was 72. His wife, Giselle Roberge Agee, told the Associated Press that Agee was hospitalized in Havana on Dec. 16 and underwent surgery for perforated ulcers. His death, she said, was the result of a related infection.

Back in 1982, Congress passed a law designed to guard against the disclosure of the names of U.S. spies. The lawmakers acted because two obscure publications, "CounterSpy" and the "Covert Action Information Bulletin," were printing the names of undercover CIA officers.