Worst days for CIA since it missed the 9/11 attackers

The US Central Intelligence Agency is in the doghouse. Not only did it and other intelligence services miss the signs that might have stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab ever boarding the plane to Detroit which he tried to blow up on Christmas Day, but the agency's weaknesses have also been exposed on the ground in Afghanistan. It transpires that the man who killed seven of its agents in Afghanistan last week was not simply an insurgent, but a double agent who CIA operatives wrongly surmised was on their side in the war against the Taliban.

President Obama, in an unusually forthright - bordering on furious - mood, said yesterday in reference to the Detroit bomb plot that "the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way".

He said US intelligence services had had all the information they needed about the 23-year-old Abdulmutallab, but had failed to connect the dots and see the attack coming. "I will not accept that," he said. "We have to do better. We will do better and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line."

Many former CIA officers have come forward to criticise the agency, suggesting it is at its lowest point since it failed to foresee the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Many pin the blame on the fact that the CIA is no longer in total charge of intelligence gathering, having to share the role with up to a dozen different services following the post-9/11 panic. But others say the agency has become sloppy and ineffectual.

The most damning comments in recent days have come not from a former spook but from General Stanley McChrystal's senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Major General Michael T Flynn. In a report issued on Monday by a Washington thinktank, the Centre for a New American Security, Flynn said that such was the paucity of intelligence from Afghanistan that analysts in Washington were so starved of information "many say their jobs feel more like fortune-telling than detective work".

Flynn said US agents were "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 the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers".

As for the killing of seven CIA agents at the US Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan last week by a suicide bomber, it transpires that the killer was Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor, who the CIA believed had been successfully "turned" into a double agent.

As a result, when Balawi called to say he had information that might help the CIA find Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, he was allowed into the base without normal security checks. In a room filled with agents, he then blew himself up.

Balawi had written angry articles on the web calling for jihad against the US and Israel, but agents apparently assumed this was part of his cover as a double agent.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and counter-terrorism agent, told the /Guardian/ the tragedy would have been avioided if agents had followed customary procedures. A source supposedly as significant as Balawi should never have been brought inside the base, he said, because it risked exposing him. Nor should he have been debriefed by such a large number of agents: there were about a dozen in the room when Balawi detonated the bomb.

"You have a lot of inexperienced people being shoved out into the field without adequate mentoring and without proper training," Johnson said.

While Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has responded to the president's criticism over the Detroit "screw-up", promising the intelligence community will boost its efforts to prevent new attacks, no one at the CIA has yet to put up their hand and accepted responsibility for recent errors.

Under White House pressure, that could change in the coming days, though no one's putting money on Obama sacrificing his own man, Leon Panetta, appointed last year against the advice of observers to head the CIA. ·