The Times
Giles Whittell in Washington and Jerome Starkey in Kabul

One was the station chief, a mother of three with an encyclopaedic knowledge of al-Qaeda’s leadership gained in the course of eight years as one of the CIA’s top specialists in the field.

Another, also a woman, wrote a college thesis on religion and economics and accepted her Afghan assignment even though her father begged her not to go. She would have been 31 next month.

Two were male staffers: a “softspoken patriot” from Boston whose friends had learnt not to ask precisely what he did, and a former narcotics detective from Georgia who loved motorcycles and was expecting his first child. Two more, a former Navy Seal and an army reservist, were security specialists from the firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide.

Yet, of the Americans who died last week in the suicide bombing at the CIA’s most sensitive outpost in Afghanistan, it is the seventh whose presence has raised the most urgent questions as the US scrambles to repair — and avenge — the damage done to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. According to a security official in Kabul with close ties to the CIA, when Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi carried out his deadly mission at Forward Operating Base Chapman, he managed to kill the agency’s deputy head of station for the whole of Afghanistan.

The senior agent was waiting at the base near Khost to meet al-Balawi, debrief him on the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, and convey his findings directly to the White House. (Read more…)