What we do know is that one evening, the principal agent and his boyhood pal, now his betrayer, had dinner at a shabby seaside restaurant; that they sat at the same table they had occupied the night before; that a group of four men in a car drove slowly around the block twice; that two of the men entered the restaurant and strolled over in front of the principal agent’s table; that each then emptied his pistol into the agent’s chest.

Image Credit... Ruth Gwily

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In the wake of President Obama’s speech on intelligence last week, there is much soul-searching going on, at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley and elsewhere, about what happened in Khost on Dec. 30. We are told that a Jordanian-born informant betrayed his spymasters and ignited a suicide bomb at a military base, killing those seven C.I.A. employees and wounding at least six more in the greatest blow to American intelligence in two decades. It comes as a cold slap in the face, but one that implicates us all. For these men and women, like the uniformed troops they serve alongside, have assumed great risks, and they have assumed them to keep the rest of us safe at home.

As the wildly divergent news accounts attest, none of us on the outside knows what really happened. But this hasn’t stopped the armchair geniuses who dispense grave platitudes on the enormity of the mistakes made, or the “former officials” who preen for reporters, spouting revelations regarding international intelligence relationships that, if true, are best not spoken of at all.

There may well have been some element of human error or incaution. Young operatives might have allowed their desire to strike a blow against America’s enemies to override their professional caution. (As perhaps I did myself so many years ago.) Or, perhaps, having weighed the risks and gains of the alternatives, the officers simply came up short. In the wilderness of mirrors that defines human intelligence in counterterrorism, the threat of disaster is an inescapable presence.

But for the grace of God, my colleagues and I could have come up similarly short on any number of occasions in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the run-up to 9/11 and the resulting American-led invasion. Brave young men and women met in wild and obscure places with dubious characters; had they not done so, we would not have had the human information network that was vital in routing Al Qaeda and the Taliban so quickly in 2001. Some flew on helicopters deep into Taliban-controlled areas to meet with tribal leaders whom we felt we could trust, but whose followers might have had the means and motivation to murder my colleagues. We fully expected to lose many of our people in those days. That our losses were light in the end was a testament to their courage, their professionalism and, yes, their luck.

The importance of the human intelligence work done by officers like those we lost at Khost is only increasing over time. The growing sophistication of our enemies, as they react to the grievous losses they have suffered, makes us all the more reliant on human spies.

To outsiders, the counterterrorism struggle along the Pakistani-Afghan border can seem antiseptic  a war of drones, of terrorists who simply disappear in a puff of smoke. But make no mistake: the intelligence-led struggle fought in our name is, at its core, every bit as gritty and as visceral as conventional combat. But in this war, you come to know your enemies as well as your friends, and the battlefield encompasses the full scope of human character.