Around the Web: How did the double agent gain the CIA's trust?
Many news reports Tuesday explore the question of how a double agent could have infiltrated the CIA and set off a suicide bomb inside a U.S. base in Afghanistan, killing seven CIA officers and a Jordanian intelligence agent.
Joby Warrick and Peter Finn of the Washington Post report that the “attacker, a physician-turned-mole, had been recruited to infiltrate al-Qaeda's senior circles and had gained the trust of his CIA and Jordanian handlers with a stream of useful intelligence leads, according to two former senior officials briefed on the agency's internal investigation.”
“His track record as an informant apparently allowed him to enter a key CIA post without a thorough search, the sources said.”
Pakistan: Taliban brainwashing children
"When we got to this compound it was shocking for us," Lt. Col. Yusuf tells us, standing in the middle of what the Pakistani military says was a brainwashing center - for children.
It was here, according to the Pakistani military, that children aged 12 to 18 were turned from innocent youngsters into cold-blooded killers, willing to blow themselves to bits as suicide bombers.
The discovery of the compound was first reported in Pakistani media last month. Yusuf says his unit took it over after a three day battle with militants.
Part of the compound consists of four rooms - each wall adorned with brightly colored paintings in clear contrast to the barren and harsh landscape surrounding it. The children were told that this was what awaited them in heaven.
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Report slams spies in Afghanistan
U.S. spies "can do little but shrug" when commanders ask for the information they need to fight the Taliban insurgency, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan said in a blistering report.
U.S. military intelligence officers in Afghanistan spend too much time focusing on enemy groups and tactics and not enough on trying to understand Afghanistan's culture, people and networks, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote in a report published Monday.
The American intelligence community is "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers," Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote in a report published Monday.
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French troops search house-to-house
An Afghan girl watches as French soldiers and members of the Afghan National Police search house-to-house in Jalokhel in the Kapisa province just after a brush with insurgents on Tuesday.
French commanders have mobilized hundreds of troops searching for two kidnapped French journalists and three Afghan assistants. The group went missing on December 31, 2009.
