"The Triple Agent" (Doubleday), by Joby Warrick: When I first learned the title of a new book that details a botched CIA operation in Afghanistan that claimed the lives of seven agency employees, I worried that the author hadn't done his homework. Called "The Triple Agent," the term is the stuff of fiction in the world of professional counterintelligence officers, and the terrorist at the center of this book was a double agent. He was being jointly run by Jordanian intelligence and the CIA when al-Qaida flipped him.
Warnings were ignored, security was lax and good judgment was lacking, leading to one of the worst tragedies in CIA history, when a double-agent suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan in December.
U.S. officials on Wednesday charged the leader of Pakistan's Taliban with planning violent attacks against American forces in Afghanistan, including last year's suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees.
