Where intelligence failed in the fight against terror

Intel Wars
The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror
By Matthew M. Aid
Bloomsbury Press. 272 pp. $28

In June 2008, major news organizations that cover the U.S. intelligence community reported on a secret trip to Pakistan by the CIA's then-deputy director, Stephen Kappes.

Kappes, the stories said, confronted Pakistani officials about ties between their country's spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, and tribal militants sympathetic to al-Qaeda, including a notorious group called the Haqqani network that had attacked American troops.

What the stories didn't say, and what historian Matthew M. Aid tells us in his fascinating book, Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror, is that earlier that month, the Haqqanis had been tipped by Pakistani officials that the CIA intended to launch drone strikes against a Haqqani compound in Pakistan's North Waziristan.

After the CIA notified the government of Pakistan of the impending strikes, the ISI "worked feverishly to delay the drone attack until they could get their clients out of the way," Aid writes. Pakistani air force officers cited "technical difficulties" in delaying the drones from taking off at Shamsi Air Base, a remote facility 200 miles southwest of Quetta in western Pakistan. By the time the drones reached their target, the Haqqani officials had fled. Cellphone intercepts revealed that the terrorists had been warned, Aid's sources tell him.

Aid's book is full of these sorts of revelatory anecdotes. It's one thing to say that the ISI has helped America's enemies; it's another thing to show precisely how.

Weaving together information from once-secret State Department cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, little-noticed military documents, and the author's own interviews with current and former officials, Intel Wars delves into some of the recent successes, failures, and contradictions of the covert war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The book also examines counterterrorism efforts at home, including what many consider to be domestic spying by the FBI.