AP

ON TUESDAY January 5th, Barack Obama met officials related to counterterrorism to discuss how Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, a Nigerian, was allowed to board a Detroit-bound plane and try to blow it up, despite the fact that America's spies had useful information on him. His father had told the American embassy in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, that his son was being radicalised. The CIA had heard about plans to develop a Nigerian suicide bomber. And it was known that Mr Abdul Mutallab had travelled to Yemen for training. But as Mr Obama said after the meeting, there was “a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had”.

Some have blamed the office of the Director of National Intelligence. The post, created in 2004, was meant to get spies to stop thinking in terms of “need to know” and instead to think that they “need to share”. A National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC) was also created. But critics of that approach think that centralisation and “all-source” analysis that is meant to produce comprehensive, authoritative reports, are inadequate. Rather, spies and decision-makers (such as consular officials who decide whether to grant visas) need more flexibility and fluidity, the ability to share information more quickly and freely without going through central channels.

In the wake of the attempted Christmas attack, further attempts to shake up intelligence methods and organisation will follow. So far, they have been piecemeal: the government has decreed that travellers from 14 countries where al-Qaeda is thought to have recruits will undergo full-body screening before flying to America. But it is unclear whether other countries will implement these rules immediately. The CIA, State Department and the NCTC are all reviewing what went wrong and are likely to come up with differing conclusions. As for more substantive intelligence shake-ups in the wake of the Christmas attack, Mr Obama is under pressure for quick action which may include sackings, even if such steps may not lead to good policy.

Less reported, but causing more devastation, was the bomb attack on the CIA's base in Khost, in Afghanistan. A Jordanian suicide bomber killed seven American employees and a Jordanian spy, the worst CIA death toll since a 1983 bombing in Beirut. It emerged on Monday that the CIA had not only been bloodied but duped. An Islamic extremist had pretended to be turned by Jordanian intelligence and apparently fed American and Jordanian handlers enough reliable information to make himself trusted. When he claimed to have urgent intelligence, he was whisked through security into the base.

This is a new kind of threat to the CIA. Few had suspected that al-Qaeda would be sophisticated enough to develop a double agent who could fool both the Jordanians and the CIA. Jordan's intelligence service is one of the most professional and trusted partners of the CIA. The agency depends strongly on other friendly spy services for cultural, linguistic and other kinds of expertise. The CIA will now have to add countering al-Qaeda's spy activities and worrying whether its allies are doing the same to its already daunting list of tasks. The government of Yemen, in particular, has become an important, if somewhat dubious, ally in the fight against al-Qaeda. Its security forces have claimed victories against al-Qaeda, but some worry that these too have been penetrated by the terrorist group.

The list of challenges goes on. The head of American military intelligence in Afghanistan complained in a report this week that American spies there are too focused on killing terrorists, and not on understanding the country's politics, economy and society. The spooks are re-thinking a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had given up working on a nuclear-bomb design; they now think that low-level work may indeed be going on. Spies like to say that their failures are known to the world, their successes hidden. At least half of that is true beyond a doubt.