Outed CIA Chief in Afghanistan Still Luckier Than Locals

Over the Memorial Day weekend, President Obama hopped on over to Afghanistan to shake some hands, take some meetings, and generally do the President-Visits-Troops thing. And, as per usual on these excursions, a reporter tagged along to file pool reports, on the off chance that anything newsworthy happened while everyone was out and about.

This turned out to be a decidedly mixed thing. There was a big news event: the White House revealed the identity of the top CIA boss (the chief of station) in Afghanistan, which got sucked into the pool report, and duly sent out to thousands of reporters.

Which may leave you wondering: Is this a really big deal, or what?

VICE News spoke with Robert Baer, former CIA case officer, author of several books on intelligence, and all-round smart guy on this kind of stuff. His take is that this isn’t a great big deal in the grand scheme of things and was probably just an accidental staffer screw-up resulting from all the madness and chaos that surround a presidential visit.

Baer did point out, however, that: “It’s serious for [the station chief]. He’ll probably have to leave the post and this leak will exclude him from a lot of jobs [in the future]. But, still, it’s just a clerical oversight of some sort.”

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In a lot of situations, the fact that there are various spooks and spies operating about can be an open secret. Articles about attacks on the Ariana Hotel in Kabul in 2011 and 2013 freely mentioned that there was a CIA station in the complex. So if the Taliban and the BBC both know that there’s a CIA station at the hotel, it’s probably fair to assume that the existence of said station isn’t a well-kept secret.

But in this case, it’s not at all clear that the identity of the station chief would have been well known, in part because the station chief probably didn’t interact with too many locals. Baer told VICE News: “He would have official contacts, but he wouldn’t be debriefing people at the hotel, or going out at all.” Aside from a few high-level contacts in the Afghan government, his identity would have been secret, simply because he wouldn’t have many opportunities to leave secured areas, and certainly little opportunity to interact with locals or get to know the country first hand. But now, after the leak, Baer explained, the station chief has a “target painted on his back.”

In part, because of the difficult security situation, the US relies heavily on help from the Afghans, who are trained, equipped, and paid, courtesy of the US taxpayer. Afghans speak the language and do a better job of passing as a local without attracting attention than any American can; this means it’s often a good idea to hire them, instead of getting some pasty State Department folks in khakis shot at once they’ve leave the compound. Besides, hiring and training locals is good preparation for the day when the US has completely run away, and Afghanistan has to get by on its own.

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The US is (understandably) reticent about lavishing training, equipment, and pay on serial abusers of human rights, and so has put some measures in place to make sure our training and equipping doesn’t benefit too many really bad guys. The Leahy Law, which was passed in 1997 and upgraded in 2011, helps keep the US from getting too cozy with super unsavory folks (it probably isn’t perfect, but it’s a step up from nothing at all). Under the law, the local State Department contingent in whatever country are required to vet people and entities that the US is going to work with. Embassies do this by running the relevant data through a big database back in the US, checking to make sure the prospective partners haven’t been running around violating human rights all over the place.

Which is where another leak comes into play. When Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning dumped thousands of State Department cables into the wild, these cables included Leahy Vetting Requests (which are still available online — search for “Leahy Vetting Request” here). These include all the people the US vetted for training in things like police work, counter-narcotics operations, counter-terrorism training, translation, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The cables include name, date of birth, place of birth, ethnicity, father’s name, and grandfather’s name, as well as information about training course, location, and date.

To be sure, not all (or maybe even any) of the Afghans whose information has been plastered all over are actually working with the CIA, so there’s a little bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Nonetheless, “It’s a very dangerous place,” Baer explained, “and any association [of an Afghan] with the American government is not a good thing.”

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In all likelihood, the US will probably replace the CIA station chief who was outed as a precaution, which seems like a sensible idea. However, unlike the CIA station chief, the Afghans who we’ve worked with don’t really have much of a place to go once someone paints a metaphorical target on their back. While there are provisions for granting special immigrant visas to interpreters (which is only one of the groups outed in Manning’s document dump), the State Department has been very slow indeed about granting any visas to translators in large measure, because it usually doesn’t deem the security threat severe enough to merit issuing special papers.

Afghanistan increasingly seems like a sinking ship, where the last seats on the lifeboat are assigned by Kafka.

Follow Ryan Faith on Twitter: @Operation_Ryan

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