What was the CIA thinking?

On Tuesday, the CIA offered a startling admission: The agency’s internal system of vetting and security broke down, failing to protect its agents from betrayal at the hands of the informant-turned-suicide-bomber who killed seven CIA officers and contractors in Afghanistan last year. The report, presented by CIA chief Leon Panetta, details how the agency did not follow its own guidelines for vetting sources and protecting itself from countermeasures from hostile entities.

Panetta’s admission is a sharp departure from his defense of the agency last January, when he angrily defended the CIA from charges that "poor tradecraft" allowed Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian al Qaeda sympathizer, to detonate a suicide vest at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman in Khost Province. "This was not a question of trusting a potential intelligence asset," he wrote at the time, "even one who had provided information that we could verify independently."

The new Panetta report, however, finds that the agency did in fact trust al-Balawi far too much. "Besides the failure to pass on warnings about the bomber," the New York Times reports, "the C.I.A. investigation chronicled major security lapses at the base in Afghanistan, a lack of war zone experience among the agency’s personnel at the base, insufficient vetting of the alleged defector and a murky chain of command with different branches of the intelligence agency competing for control over the operation."

In other words, it was precisely "poor tradecraft" that allowed al-Balawi to kill so many American spies.

Far more worrisome, however, than the agency’s ability to talk to itself — a problem so well known it has its own genre of spy thriller — and questions of the dead agents’ experience and interagency coordination is how magical thinking seems to have poisoned any efforts to run this human intelligence asset responsibly. Panetta said, "It was the intense determination to accomplish the mission that influenced the judgments that were made." In other words, caught up in wishful thinking that al-Balawi might be the ticket to al Qaeda’s inner circle, the CIA skipped the proper, sober vetting it should have conducted of its source.

While the CIA is not alone in allowing wishful thinking to get in the way of winning the war in Afghanistan — the U.S. foreign policy community writ large often does much the same thing — its reliance on wishing instead of evidence could potentially be much more problematic than any breakdown in communication between field agents. The news that a case officer in Jordan had evidence to doubt al-Balawi’s intentions — the officer suspected that Jordanian intelligence was trying to scuttle its relationship with al-Balawi — never made it out of Jordan. But there was also a problem with how agents and the agency communicate: Panetta’s letter indicated that several agents relied on instant messaging and email to communicate with each other. It poses a nasty catch-22: Official cables take a long time to draft and publish; email and IMs are far more efficient for coordinating activity in real-time. How will agents balance the need to act quickly with the institutional requirement to pass all information up the chain for review and possible coordination?

There’s another angle to this as well. Given the intensity of the CIA’s operations in Pakistan — which by all accounts have increased dramatically under President Obama — it is appropriate to question the reliability of the intelligence the CIA is using. We don’t know how well the agency’s sources’ intelligence is cross-checked against verifiable data. If the al-Balawi incident in Afghanistan is any indication, it often isn’t.

This muddled picture is one of the many ambiguities that accompany the so-called fog of war — even when everything works perfectly, we don’t really know what we’re accomplishing until long after the fact. In the case of the CIA, when seemingly every check and balance against hasty or ill-considered action breaks down, we know even less. This makes it difficult for analysts, agents, and outsiders to have any confidence in the government’s ability to wage war properly.

The CIA, too, has some soul-searching to do. The agency’s handling of the incident, from before al-Balawi’s suicide vest exploded to Panetta’s misguided PR campaign afterward, indicates a troubling breakdown of operating procedures and review processes. It shouldn’t take the CIA almost a year to admit that its agents were, indeed, killed because of poor tradecraft and wishful thinking. Panetta owes the agency’s critics, many of whom correctly assessed what happened immediately after the fact, an apology for being so dismissive.