Cia Officials

The bomber who killed seven CIA employees at an agency forward base in Afghanistan had never been to the compound or met with agency operatives before the attack, U.S. officials said Tuesday. The absence of any previous encounter adds to the confusion over how the attacker -- posing as an informant with valuable information on Al Qaeda -- was able to make it past security with a bomb apparently strapped to his body and lure seasoned CIA operatives to their deaths last week. A U.S. intelligence official said that the bomber had provided a stream of useful information to the CIA after being presented by the Jordanian intelligence service as an Islamic militant who had switched sides and was now willing to work against Al Qaeda.

The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say. The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards...

The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence "surge" that will make the agency's station there among the largest in CIA history, U.S. officials say. When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the CIA already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.

The CIA's decision to hire contractors from Blackwater USA for a covert assassination program was part of an expanding relationship in which the agency has relied on the widely criticized firm for tasks including guarding CIA lockups and loading missiles on Predator aircraft, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The 2004 contract cemented what was then a burgeoning relationship with Blackwater, setting the stage for a series of departures by senior CIA officials who took high-level positions with the North Carolina security company.

The House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation Friday into a secret CIA effort to assemble paramilitary teams to kill Al Qaeda leaders -- a probe that will focus in part on whether agency officials were instructed by former Vice President Dick Cheney to hide the program from Congress. The program, launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was ended by new agency Director Leon E. Panetta last month, shortly after he learned about it and before it became operational.

The secret CIA program halted last month by Director Leon E. Panetta involved establishing elite paramilitary teams that could be inserted into Pakistan or other locations to capture or kill top leaders of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, according to former U.S. intelligence officials. The program -- launched in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- was never operational.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) "ought to either present the evidence or apologize" in the wake of her comments that CIA officials misled her about the use of controversial interrogation techniques on terrorist suspects. "Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime," Boehner said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

Dick Cheney is right. President Obama should release any evidence the government has that shows whether torture -- sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- induced Al Qaeda detainees to give up information that saved American lives. But Obama shouldn't stop there.

Yuri Nosenko, a KGB agent whose defection to the United States in 1964 and subsequent three-year harsh detention and hostile interrogation by CIA officials remain immensely controversial, died Aug. 23 under an assumed name in a Southern state, according to intelligence officials. His death came after "a long illness." He was 81. Nosenko, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police and intelligence agency, interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald during his time in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962.

A Bush administration plan to issue new orders realigning the chain of command over U.S. spy services has triggered turf-related skirmishes across the intelligence community. The changes could erode the CIA's standing as the nation's lead spy service abroad by requiring agency station chiefs in certain countries to cede authority to officials from other U.S. spy agencies, officials said.