The logo of the Central Intelligence Agency is seen at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (AFP photo)

WASHINGTON: The United States doesn’t forget its dead who are killed in combat, goes the popular belief, particularly when it comes to its soldiers and spies. In the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is a memorial wall, also called the Wall of Stars. It now contains are 113 stars carved into the white Alabama marble wall, each one representing an employee who died in the line of service.

Among those commemorated on the wall are Lansing Bennett, a physician who worked as an analyst assessing the health of foreign leaders, and Frank Darling, an agent working in covert operations. They were shot dead in January 1993 at a traffic light just across the CIA headquarters by Mir Qazi aka Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani immigrant, who then fled to the wilds of Pakistan where he remained in hiding even as the US launched a manhunt.

He was finally tracked down in 1997 by US intelligence, lured out of his hole in Pakistan where his hosts sold him down the drain for bounty. He was spirited back to the US, put on trial, convicted, and executed by lethal injection in 2002.

No such reprisal has followed for seven other stars commemorating the death of CIA personnel in the same broad region Kansi fled to. They include two women, Jessica Matthews, a 45-year old mother of three who headed CIA’s Camp Chapman base in Afghanistan just across the border with Pakistan, and Elizabeth Hanson, 30, a targeting analyst at the base.

As far as Washington is concerned, they were killed by a suicide bomber, and the case is closed- at least that is the impression the U.S government conveyed on Thursday.

US officials made light of disclosures in declassified cables that Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI had bankrolled the second-largest single-day slaughter of CIA agents by giving Haqqani group terrorists $200,000 to execute suicide bombing, saying the report was ''unverified and uncorroborated.''

While the State Department spokesman declined to go into intelligence matters, unnamed US officials told wire agencies that what the cable contained was ''raw intelligence'' of the kind that routinely lands on the desk of analysts and U.S officials abroad.

''The Haqqanis are brutal terrorists who continue to target innocent people, including Americans,'' the official said, adding, ''Nonetheless, the general consensus is that the 30 December attack was primarily an al-Qaeda plot and did not involve the Haqqani network.''

This despite the cable stating explicitly that Haqqani group members were met and mentored by Pakistani ISI officers who also gave them $ 200,000 to execute the mission.

While the United States shielding Pakistan from charges of state-sponsorship of terrorism has a long history going back to 1993 (when it came close to designating Islamabad with that tag), the security failure surrounding the bombing became contentious enough in Washington for the CIA and successive administrations to take their eyes off the perpetrators of the attack even if the suicide bomber died in the episode.

An internal CIA investigation into the bombing held Matthews and her team ''partially responsible'' for failing to follow the agency’s procedures for vetting informants, allowing the suicide bomber to get into the CIA base perimeter without being searched. There was no word about who equipped the bomber, a Jordanian doctor who had worked in Pakistan for several months, and who financed the operation.

''All of us bear responsibility, and all of us have to fix this,'' said then CIA Director Panetta. ''It would have been easier to go after one person, so then everyone else could just go back to business as usual.''

No word on the one country and one organization- its intelligence agency -- that now stands accused in the U.S government’s own cables of bankrolling the slaughter of seven CIA personnel, notwithstanding Washington glossing over it. Evidently, those seven stars will not see any reprisal.

