WW-I German Terror Plot Planned in Baltimore

A World War I-era Terror Plot Hatched Downtown
Jacques Kelly
Baltimore Sun
January 30, 2010

The father and son enjoying lunch at the Maryland Club in 1915 would not have attracted any attention. The Hilkens, Henry and Paul, were pillars of Baltimore's German community. The son, Paul Hilken, ran the Baltimore operations of the North German Lloyd Steamship Co., as his father did before him. The elder Hilken was such an outstanding citizen that his 1937 obituary called him "the dean of the local shipping men," and Baltimore Mayor Howard Jackson and the German ambassador were honorary pallbearers. But what no one knew in 1915 was that Paul Hilken was working as a German spy.

I've recently been reading of this little-recalled enemy conspiracy with deep Baltimore roots. Paul Hilken was the paymaster for a World War I German espionage-terrorism ring responsible for blowing up, spectacularly, a New York harbor arms depot, among other acts of terrorism. His name turns up in Nicholas Thompson's new book, "The Hawk and the Dove," because he was the uncle and namesake of U.S. diplomat Paul Nitze. The author led me to Chad Millman's 2006 work, "The Detonators." I had already read Jules Witcover's "Sabotage at Black Tom."

This is the account that Millman and Witcover give:

Paul Hilken, a Baltimorean, was educated at City College, Lehigh and MIT, where he studied shipbuilding. While working here, he was being groomed to become the managing director of the North German Lloyd line in New York. Summoned to the Reichstag in Berlin and tapped for undercover work, he accepted readily.

His Baltimore office was the quaint, nicely preserved Hansa Haus at the northwest corner of Charles and Redwood streets. (Redwood's former name was German Street; the name change came during a burst of patriotism during World War I.) His clandestine meetings were held in its attic in private quarters. His German handlers chose him because he regularly handled huge amounts of currency, and money could pass through the doors of 2 E. Redwood St. with no questions asked.

The U.S. was then technically a neutral nation, but it was an open secret that we were supplying the Allied countries with explosives. Millions of pounds were awaiting transfer to ships anchored in Gravesend Bay in New York's harbor. The ammunition was stored at the Black Tom piers in Jersey City. Paul Hilken paid off operatives with $1,000 bills. After meeting for three hours on Redwood Street, the conspirators agreed the fires should start early on July 30, 1916. The resulting Black Tom explosions killed at least five people. Concussions could be felt in Maryland.

Germany denied all responsibility, citing evidence that fires were started by rail yard watchmen using smoke to keep down mosquitoes.

After the end of World War I, the legal fighting began (damage estimates were $20 million), and it continued for an agonizing 18 years at the Mixed Claims Commission in Washington.

Hilken, who was never charged, was a major sinner but also a saint. He provided state's evidence, but it was his word against those who called him a liar. He testified for hours before U.S. Attorney Simon E. Sobeloff.

Hilken needed to link his co-conspirators. It was now 1932, and he had to find evidence from 1916. He had returned at Christmas to 512 Woodlawn Road in Roland Park, where he lived before a divorce, and said he was hiding gifts for his daughter in the attic when he remembered a sealed wooden box he'd stashed behind the eaves. He found the box. It contained a directory, The Blue Book, whose pages had coded information concealed with disappearing ink. In addition, his ex-wife emptied the contents of a trunk used for doll clothes and found his 1916 checkbook.

This evidence was not enough. The case dragged on until the intrepid Sobeloff returned to 2 E. Redwood and the shipping lines offices. There he found business correspondence conclusively linking the ring. The letter referred to Hilken as the "von Hindenburg of Roland Park," a friendly term used by Hilken's associates who were in on the scheme. The verdict, which found the German government liable for the Black Tom explosion, came in September 1939 as Hitler was rolling through Poland. Germany made the last payment of the $50 million claim in 1976. Hilken moved to New York and became a wholesale paint salesman.

The last chief of the Mixed Claims Commission was attorney John McCloy, who was given an assignment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to relocate 120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast. On giving McCloy the assignment, the president said, "We don't want another Black Tom."Sphere: Related Content

Vietnam Sentences Lawyer Over Subversion

WALL STREET JOURNAL -- OPINION ASIA ~ JANUARY 25, 2010, 6:49 P.M. ET
Hanoi and the Lawyer
A 'political' crackdown ensnares a well-known commercial litigator.

Hanoi's practice of jailing dissenters isn't new, but even so the case of Le Cong Dinh stands out. For as much as Hanoi tries, it can't lock up prominent businessmen like Mr. Dinh without sending a message to the foreign business community it so desperately needs.

Mr. Dinh was arrested in June and accused of traveling to Thailand to meet with members of the banned pro-democracy Vietnam Reform Party, to which he "confessed" in state-run media. For that, the government charged him with subversion, a capital charge not used against political dissenters since the 1980s. He was sentenced in a Ho Chi Minh City court to five years in jail on Wednesday, his jail time reduced apparently in exchange for publicly admitting his "crimes." One of his three co-defendants, Huynh Duy Thuc, was sentenced to 16 years.

Mr. Dinh's case, including the application of the stricter subversion law, marks another step in a crackdown gathering steam ahead of next year's Communist Party Congress. The political tightening has included trials and prison terms for bloggers and dissidents who have criticized Hanoi over a range of issues, from its handling of a territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea to a bauxite mine in the center of the country. Mr. Dinh represented several of these defendants.

This latest trial, however, brings the crackdown close to home for foreign investors. Mr. Dinh is a former vice-chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Bar Association and studied law at Tulane University in New Orleans on a Fulbright Scholarship. His firm, DC Law, has represented companies such as Yahoo and Michelin. He successfully defended the Vietnamese government in a trade case before the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2003.

Foreigners aren't immune to the country's questionable rule of law. Hanoi has prevented two Australian Qantas Airways executives from leaving the country since mid-December to assist in an "investigation" against a former colleague, even though neither has been charged with a crime. Then there was the 2006 ABN-AMRO case, when authorities detained foreign bank employees and then extracted a ransom for their release.

The United States condemned Mr. Dinh's sentencing last week. Ambassador Michael Michalak in December criticized Hanoi's broader crackdown, noting that free access to information and discussion "are absolutely essential to technical innovation and economic prosperity." But so far U.S. businesses have been slow to react to Mr. Dinh's case. Adam Sitkoff of the American Chamber in Hanoi says the group is reluctant to comment on "political" matters.

Companies may conclude that a withdrawal from Vietnam, a la Google from China, isn't the appropriate course. But Hanoi can't take such corporate goodwill for granted forever. Foreign businesses could help by reminding the government that investors do indeed notice when their lawyers get sent to jail for "crimes" that wouldn't be illegal in any normal country.

Sphere: Related Content

Cambridge Espionage Exhibition

Cambridge Exhibition Drags Spies in from the Cold
By Paul Casciato
Fri Jan 22, 2010 11:23am GMT
Reuters


CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) - The shadowy world of espionage is dragged into the spotlight at a new exhibition from the British university which gave the world the Cold War double spies Philby, Burgess and Blunt.

Cambridge University Library (www.lib.cam.ac.uk) will use recently declassified documents and "top secret" material from its own archives in its free exhibition "Under Covers: Documenting Spies" to examine the art of espionage from Biblical times to the modern era.

The show draws on personal archives, printed books, official publicity material, popular journals, specialist photographs and maps, mostly from the university library's own collections, to illustrate a few of the ways in which spies have been documented through the centuries.

"Under Covers brings together an astonishing variety of different kinds of material, all throwing light on the business of uncovering and keeping secrets," university librarian Anne Jarvis said of the show which runs until July.

Exhibits range from a 12th-century manuscript recounting the story of King Alfred the Great entering a Danish camp disguised as a harpist to a Soviet-era map of East Anglia.

John Ker's 18th-century "licence to spy," granted by Queen Anne, shows that the underworld of spies was well-established long before James Bond earned his fictional license to kill.

Other highlights include papers used by a parliamentary committee investigating the Atterbury Plot to capture the royal family in the 1720s, a telegram from the British spymaster of the day confirming news of Rasputin's murder, and letters to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin from Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill, only declassified in 2007.

Incensed at being denied access to intercepted Japanese telegrams already seen by more junior personnel, Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), wrote to Prime Minister Baldwin in February 1925.

"How can I conduct the controversies on which the management of our finances depends, unless at least I have the same knowledge of secret state affairs freely accessible to the officials of the Admiralty? The words "monstrous" and "intolerable" leap readily to mind."

MAPS, PLOTS AND MASQUERADES

A 1985 Soviet map of eastern England shows English towns and cities in Cyrillic script. Maps of this sort were produced by the Soviet military for more than 50 years before, during, and after the Cold War. Classified as secret, these maps were unknown outside the Soviet military machine until the break-up of the USSR -- when they became available on the open market.

The Atterbury Plot papers from the personal archive of Robert Walpole are among the jewels of the exhibition.

The plot aimed to restore the Stuart monarchy in Britain between the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. One of these is a deposition of William Squire concerning the arrest of Christopher Layer on September 18, 1722. Layer was later hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn for his part in the plot.

Twentieth-century material includes a copy of Compton MacKenzie's book "Greek Memories" that belonged to MI5 Deputy-Director Eric Holt-Wilson. The book resulted in MacKenzie being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act after he gave details of his time as MI6 station chief in the eastern Mediterranean. Holt-Wilson's copy shows the spy chief's own crossings-out of offending passages.

An Allied escape map of the German-Swiss frontier, a bogus map of the D-Day target area (accurate except for meaningless place names), and detailed dossiers of information gathered by the Nazis for their planned invasion of Britain, form part of the examination of espionage in the Second World War.

The "Cambridge Spies" also feature with, among other items, student record cards for Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and John Cairncross, and a 1933 copy of The Granta magazine including a mock interview with Donald Maclean which reveals his ability to take on different personae.

"A library might seem a strange place for an exhibition of secret service, given its association with guns, fast cars, and high-tech gadgetry," said intelligence historian Nicholas Hiley, who has lent rare material from his collections for the show.

"But the one thing that both espionage and counter-espionage have depended upon for centuries is paper -- for agent reports, ciphers and codes; for maps and plans; for reports on suspects and advice to government; and for the hundreds of thousands of files on which secret service depends."

Sphere: Related Content

DoD "Clarifies" PsyOps

Subversion & Espionage has covered the dangerous intersection of Public Affairs, PsyOps, Propaganda and Perception Management ~ occasionally asking annoying questions and raising legal issues. DoD has finally come around to clarifying some definitions and practices, as detailed in this blog item from "Secrecy News" . . .

DoD “Clarifies” Doctrine on Psychological Operations

An S&E archive of earlier stories:

• "Pentagon Propaganda & 'Retired Military Analysts'"
• "PsyOps and the American Public"
• "This Didn't Take Too Long . . ."
• "Violating the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948"

Sphere: Related Content

German Federal Prosecutor Reviewing CIA Operation?

Claim of CIA Spy Mission in Germany Referred to Federal Prosecutors
Jan 16, 2010, 14:36 GMT
Monsters & Critics

Karlsruhe, Germany - German officials said Saturday they have asked the country's anti-espionage prosecutor to study news media claims that the CIA mounted a secret operation on German soil to kidnap or kill a man suspected of al-Qaeda links. [Comment: One assumes the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has a thing or two to contribute to the conversation.]

The northern city-state of Hamburg began the investigation but has now referred it to the federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe, a Hamburg prosecutions spokesman, Wilhelm Moellers, said.

He said any claim of foreign espionage on German soil was up to the federal prosecutor to deal with.

The federal prosecutor's office could not immediately be reached for comment, but a news magazine, Focus, reported a federal spokesman had confirmed the transfer of the case and said, 'We are checking if there is sustainable suspicion of illicit espionage.'

So far Hamburg officials have not said if they believe the allegations that a German national of Syrian extraction, Mamoun Darkazanli, was shadowed in Hamburg by the US Central Intelligence Agency in early 2005 without German permission.

An account published in the US magazine Vanity Fair in late December said the aim had been to assassinate him because the United States believed he had been a fund-raiser for al-Qaeda, but the agents, who worked for a CIA-backed firm, Blackwater, were withdrawn.

Later accounts in the German news media have suggested the aim was to quietly abduct him, but Washington officials gave up when they realised this would anger Germany. Darkazanli has told German TV he was aware he was being tailed.

Several years ago, the federal prosecutions office said it had concluded that Darkazanli was in liaison from 1993 to 1998 with various al-Qaeda leaders and was a member of the Hamburg 'cell' which provided three hijack pilots for the September 11, 2001 attacks.

But it said there was not enough evidence to prosecute him. The attacks on New York and Washington killed nearly 3,000 people. Germany also refused to extradite him to Spain on terrorism charges.

###

Comment: So much for the security of U.S. unilat operations in GM.

Sphere: Related Content

DIA Officer vs. Polygraph

Intelligence Officer Claims He's No Commie
By RYAN ABBOTT

Courthouse News Service

WASHINGTON (CN) - The Defense Intelligence Agency accused an intelligence officer with a decorated military past of "consorting with known Communist agents" in the early '90s and fired him without due process, John Dullahan claims in Federal Court. And he says a simple typographical error contributed to his headaches.

Dullahan, an Irish immigrant who worked his way up the ranks in the U.S. Army to become a politico-military adviser for Eastern Europe to Gen. Colin Powell, says the DIA used three false polygraph tests to fire him, and used "national security" as a pretext.

Dullahan emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1967 to enlist in the Army, he says. He was commissioned as an officer in 1970 and served in Vietnam as an artillery forward observer. He became a U.S. citizen in 1973.

He commanded a U.S. artillery unit attached to a German artillery battalion in 1979 and from 1985 to 1986 served in a U.S. military contingent assigned to the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. He says that "In the course of these duties, officers from seventeen countries - including the Soviet Union - routinely worked and socialized together, a practice understood and approved by military managers, including Dullahan's former supervisor in Jerusalem."

Dullahan claims he played an "important and distinguished role in U.S. military relations" with Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led to an adviser position to then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell, from 1990 to 1992. Dullahan says Powell awarded him with a Defense Meritorious Service Medal for his work in U.S.-Eastern European military relations.

During this time, he says, the FBI began watching and photographing him while he met his foreign counterparts from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary for visits and working lunches. He says the visits were to "facilitate planning official exchanges and support Department of Defense policy formulation."

In 1990, he says, the FBI told him he was believed to be "consorting with known Communist agents," but took no action against him until the events that led to his termination, which began in late 2008.

In 1997, Dullahan says, he returned to the DIA as a civilian employee, successfully passing a polygraph exam in the process, but in 2008 a different polygraph examiner accused him of meeting "Soviet handlers" while on official trips to Europe, including trips with Gen. Powell.

During his polygraph, he says the "FBI examiner alleged that [his] participation in Ranger, Airborne training, and combat duty (as well as his enjoyment of hang-gliding) demonstrated risk-taking behavior which made him more likely to seek contact with a foreign intelligence service."

Dullahan says the examiner alleged that Dullahan had adopted Communist beliefs through mere association with his foreign counterparts. He says the examiner's supervisor likewise "accused Dullahan of spying for the Soviets," and informed him that "he had 'failed' and was 'in big trouble'."

Dullahan says he was subjected to a second unfair and inaccurate polygraph that prompted FBI agents to ask him about "an unspecified foreign intelligence service 'offer'" referred to in one of Dullahan's letters.

Dullahan claims that he had simply misspelled "officer," so instead of writing that he had traveled to the home of a Soviet officer, the agents read, "I went to the home of the Soviet offer."

He says a third polygraph, this time conducted by a DIA examiner, detected deception, but he says no other details were provided to explain the results.

In February 2009, Dullahan says, he was placed on administrative leave and his clearance was suspended without explanation, actions that Dullahan claims were "a result of the technical results of the polygraph examinations."

In his termination and clearance revocation letter, Dullahan says the only reason cited was "national security" with no explanation. He says a letter from DIA counsel later explained that a rarely used summary dismissal rule had been invoked.

Dullahan says he was offered the option of resigning with a full pension, but chose to clear his name and appeal the decision.

He says he was then promptly terminated.

Dullahan is suing the DIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense and the Office and Director of National Intelligence for violations of the First and Fifth Amendments, the Administrative Procedures Act and unreasonable interpretation of internal regulations.

He seeks $201,000 in damages and a declaration that would clear his name.

He is represented by Mark Zaid.

Sphere: Related Content

France's "School for Spies" [Annotated]

January 11, 2010

Sarkozy Puts Woman in Charge of 'Spy School'
By John Lichfield in Paris
The Independent

Academy designed to stop infighting between rival intelligence chiefs

President Nicolas Sarkozy is to create a "school for spies", whose principal job will be to discourage French intelligence chiefs from spying on, and fighting against, one another.

The first head of the new "intelligence academy" is likely to be named in the next few days. According to Le Monde, the Professor Dumbledore of the French spy world will be a woman with no previous experience of espionage. She is at present a senior figure in one of the grandes écoles, or elite university-level French colleges.

The job of the spy school will not be to teach aspiring James Bonds or Mata Haris how to hide bugs or choose dead letter drops or murder opponents with poisoned umbrellas (or toxic baguettes). The school - to be based in the Ecole Militaire, near the Eiffel Tower - will admit only senior spy chiefs. It will be, in effect, an espionage "staff academy", whose principal role will be to forge a single culture and esprit de corps from the complex, and often antagonistic, alphabet soup of the French spy world.

French intelligence and security agencies have often been accused of fighting one another as much as France's enemies. Their bosses have sometimes been associated with domestic political figures or factions and have occasionally become pawns in a power game.

President Sarkozy - who believes he was the victim of such practises during his rise to power - is determined to create a single French "intelligence community", based on the US model. His plan for a French equivalent of the US National Security Council - the Conseil de défense et de sécurité nationale (CDSN) - took shape by official decree on Christmas Eve. The CDSN will have an intelligence arm, uniting the chiefs of the six French spying and security agencies, the Conseil National du Renseignement or CNR. The chairman of both bodies will be President Sarkozy.

There will also be, for the first time, a "national intelligence coordinator", Bernard Bajolet, 60, whose task will be to ensure that the half-dozen different intelligence and security agencies cooperate with one another.

The new espionage academy will be created over the next six months with the same objective, according to Le Monde. Its job will be to instruct spy chiefs in the ethics and legal constraints of intelligence and counter-intelligence and to keep them abreast of the latest security threats and the latest espionage techniques.

Most of all, the academy will seek to "encourage a spirit of community", in which senior officials work willingly together and can be moved from agency to agency as they are promoted within the French intelligence hierarchy. There will be an intelligence "brevet" or diploma, recognised by all the spy organisations.

President Sarkozy has already simplified the French security world by merging the two, mutually-hating French equivalents of MI5, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) and the Renseignements Généraux (RG). The new single internal security agency - called the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI) - is one of six which will participate in the new spy school.

The others include the main French external espionage agency, broadly equivalent to MI6, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) and the two military spying and security agencies, La Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM) and La Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense (DPSD). The other participants will be specialised, anti-money laundering and anti-drug trafficking intelligence agencies.

###

Comment: The French are imitating the US. A school that isn't a school ~ run for intelligence officers by someone with no intelligence background ~ all to stop in-fighting & bickering.

Sphere: Related Content

Yet MORE on the CIA's "Italian Job" [Article + Audio]

Federal News Radio 1500 AM: Out in the Cold: Intel Agent Says U.S. Betrayed Her

Excerpt: Sabrina De Sousa's job in 2003 as a State Department officer in the political/military section of Milan, Italy was to "provide Washington with the ground truth."

What's ground truth?

"It could be the economic situation of the country, how the country views us (the United States) or it could be an incident that happened on any given day. Our job is to report that information back to Washington," she says.

But it was an event that took place on one of those "any given days" that resulted in her conviction in absentia along with 22 U.S. State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and military officers on kidnapping charges by the Italian government on Nov. 4, 2009.

Sphere: Related Content

Feds: Accused Israeli Spy Breached Top-Secret Policy in '02

Feds: Accused scientist spy breached top-secret policy in '02 | Washington Examiner

Excerpt: A Maryland scientist accused of giving classified defense information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer was under suspicion of breaching top-secret protocols as early as 2002, court documents said.

Sphere: Related Content

Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan

Comment: The problems being experienced in Afghanistan are the pay out from the "Peace Dividend." The Peace Dividend -- remember that? The United States didn't quite know how to act/react to winning the Cold War. Among other Defense and Intelligence moves, HUMINT and offensive counterintelligence operations were cut-off at the knees. Sources were left standing on street corners of foreign capitals, waiting to meet their American "friends." The friends often did not show. Case officers sought greener pastures. Professionals retired. A huge void was created at what was then the "journeyman" experience level of our intelligence operations. An understanding and appreciation for something a little more sophisticated than "Order of Battle" templates and overwhelming military power was lost. Sophisticated human intelligence operations are not conducted in unit tour rotation increments of time. They're not conducted based on the occupation of a particular operating base. The seasoned leadership and experience "lost" with the Peace Dividend has now manifested itself in a theater of war that -- on a good day -- is extremely challenging. The intelligence solution does not fit very well with the usual "Big Army" answers and doctrine on how to organize and operate. Let's see if we are able to adapt.

MG Flynn & Co. have released a paper through a think tank -- not the Pentagon or DIA -- which in itself is most unusual. I've included a link to the full PDF of the document -- and listed the summary bullets of their recommendations.

Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan | Center for a New American Security

Among the initiatives Major General Flynn directs:

• Empower select teams of analysts to move between field elements, much like journalists, to visit collectors of information at the grassroots level and carry that information back to the regional command level.

• Integrate information collected by civil affairs officers, PRTs, atmospherics teams, Afghan liaison officers, female engagement teams, willing non-governmental organizations and development organizations, United Nations officials, psychological operations teams, human terrain teams, and infantry battalions, to name a few.

• Divide work along geographic lines, instead of functional lines, and write comprehensive district assessments covering governance, development, and stability.

• Provide all data to teams of "information brokers" at the regional command level, who will organize and disseminate all reports and data gathered from the grassroots level.

• The analysts and information brokers will work in what the authors call "Stability Operations Information Centers," which will be placed under and in cooperation with the State Department's senior civilian representatives administering governance, development and stability efforts in Regional Command East and South.

• Invest time and energy into selecting the best, most extroverted, and hungriest analysts to serve in the Stability Operations Information Centers.

Sphere: Related Content

Taking Toll of the Taliban's Bombing of CIA Base

From The Sunday Times
January 3, 2010
Taliban Bomber Wrecks CIA’s Shadowy War
Christina Lamb in Washington

A middle-aged mother of three and a warm-hearted man called Harold are a long way from the image most Americans have of their top spies in one of the wildest regions of Afghanistan.

But they will be among the seven stars added this week to the 90 on the Memorial Wall at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, after a Taliban suicide bomber killed seven agents and wounded six at a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan. The attack has thrown the CIA’s whole strategy into disarray.

The clandestine nature of the agents’ work means the stars carry no names. The few details that have emerged since Wednesday’s attack have, however, lifted the veil on the most shadowy aspect of the war in Afghanistan.

The bombing took place at Forward Operating Base Chapman in the volatile province of Khost, which borders Pakistan. The area is dominated by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, perhaps Afghanistan’s most deadly warlords.

Although Chapman was officially a camp for civilians involved in reconstruction, it was well-known locally as a CIA base. Over the past couple of years, it focused on gathering information on so-called high-value targets for drone attacks, the unmanned missile planes that have played a growing role in taking out suspected terrorists since President Barack Obama took office. The Haqqanis were their principal target.

“That far forward they were almost certainly from the CIA’s paramilitary rather than analysts,” said one agent.

The head of this intelligence-gathering operation was a mother of three. Although the Chapman base chief has not been named, she was described as a loving mother and an inspiration by a fellow CIA mum.

“She was a dear friend and a touchstone to all of the mums in CTC [counter-terrorism],” she said.

Another CIA official said the base chief had worked on Afghanistan and counter-terrorism for years, dating back to the agency’s so-called Alec Station. That unit was created to monitor Osama Bin Laden five years before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Wednesday’s bomb wiped away decades of experience. Eight years into the war, the agency is still desperately short of personnel who speak the language or are knowledgeable about the region.

“It’s a devastating blow,” said Michael Scheuer, a former agent and head of Alec Station. “We lost an agent with 14 years’ experience in Afghanistan.”

A CIA investigation is under way into how the bomber was able to circumvent security at the base, apparently passing unchecked through an outer perimeter manned by Afghan contractors to enter the gym and detonate his explosive vest. He was said to be wearing Afghan army uniform, but the Afghan Ministry of Defence has denied he was a member of the security forces.

What is clear, given the number of CIA agents at the meeting, is that he was considered an important informant. One agent had flown in specially from Kabul.

The only victim to have been publicly identified was Harold Brown, a 37-year-old father of three, whose mother Barbara thought he worked for the State Department.

“He wanted to make the world a better place,” she said, recounting how he would take clothes outgrown by his two-year-old and give them to Afghan children. She added that he often told her: “My most important things in life are God, my family and my country.”

The attack has left the agency in a quandary, according to Gary Berntsen, a CIA officer for 23 years who led a team to Tora Bora to try to capture Bin Laden.

“The job is gathering human intelligence and for that you have to meet people whether it’s on or off a facility,” he said.

“In the old days when we were running Russian operations, if you had a double agent the worst that happened was he feeds you false information. These days if you have a double agent he detonates in your face.”

The attack raises fresh doubts about coalition plans to turn over security to Afghans to enable western troops to leave.

“This calls into question the whole strategy of using Afghans to guard the perimeter of camps,” said Scheuer.

Both the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban have claimed credit for the attack. The Afghan Taliban said one of their men had infiltrated the Afghan army; the Pakistani group said the bomber was a CIA informer who had switched sides.

One military official said the bombing may have been retaliation for a US push against the Haqqani network. American officials have been putting pressure on Pakistan to send troops to take on the Haqqanis, but the Pakistani military has refused to comply.

The Haqqani network is also thought to have been behind Friday’s bombing at a volleyball match at Shah Hassan Khel in Pakistan in which 96 villagers were killed. The attack is believed to be in revenge for the formation of an anti-Taliban militia. More than 600 people have died in bombings in Pakistan since last October.

Afghanistan’s parliament dealt a rebuke to President Hamid Karzai yesterday, rejecting 17 of his 24 nominees for a new cabinet, including a powerful warlord and the country’s only female minister.

Sphere: Related Content