Intelligence

CIA Informant Too Good to Be True

Agency was too excited about spy's potential.

He was a Jordanian doctor who fooled the CIA, posed as a double agent, and killed seven American intelligence officers in a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan on December 30. Now reviewing what went wrong with Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Jordanian and American officials are telling The Washington Post that his story was too good to be true and their excitement over Balawi's supposed climb through the al Qaeda ranks was misguided. It was too fast to be real, they say. Not everyone agrees with the assessment, though, as one official told the Post, "The caricatures of clumsy, heavy-handed approaches just don't fit."