Gleanings and Musings, Courtesy of a Veteran Cold Warrior: CIA/DOD RECKLESS ON JIHAD: FALLEN CIA OPERATIVE FAMILY SPEAKS

Sunday, February 5, 2012

CIA/DOD RECKLESS ON JIHAD: FALLEN CIA OPERATIVE FAMILY SPEAKS

from Atlas Shugs:

Sunday, January 29, 2012

CIA/DOD RECKLESS ON JIHAD: FALLEN CIA OPERATIVE FAMILY SPEAKS

Gary Anderson is the husband of Jennifer Matthews, his college sweetheart, his wife of 22 years and a CIA operative on assignment almost 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan, who was killed by a CIA "prized informant" who was actually a jihadi double agent willing to blow himself up to kill the elite CIA team of seven:

Anderson, 50, is seething. He’s angry with the teachings in the Koran that he believes incited the suicide bomber to kill Americans; he’s upset with the CIA for failing to realize that a prized informant was a double agent willing to blow himself up; and he’s hurt by the legion of critics, including Matthews’s uncle, who have questioned her qualifications for the job she was doing.
“The suicide bomber was a bad guy, but at the time, nobody could clearly see it,” Anderson said. “I think the agency prepared my wife to be a chief of the Khost base, but not in terms of preparing for this asset. This guy wasn’t vetted.” And the mother of his three children is dead because of it.

Once again we suffer the bloody consequences when reality meets the fantasists' delusions. And we see it daily. This same newspaper, TheWashington Post, just this week ran a headline that the motive was unclear in the jihad attack on the Pentagon, despite the accompanying video of the Muslim recording himself shooting up the Pentagon screaming allahu akbar while incessant Islamic prayer played in the background. The DoD classified an act of war, the Fort Hood jihad, as ''workplace violence" and made no mention of motive in its investigation of Major Hasan's mass murder.

The media, the government, the State department, and the military are hardwired for delusion, and they are taking us all down with them.

For CIA family, a deadly suicide bombing leads to painful divisions The Washington Post (hat tip Doc Washburn)
— Jennifer Matthews was on assignment in Afghanistan in 2009 when a suicide bomber killed her and six other CIA operatives. Now, her relatives break their silence on how her death affected them.
By Ian Shapira, Saturday, January 28, 5:59 PM
The call from the Central Intelligence Agency came on a December afternoon in 2009 while Gary Anderson was skiing with his three children. It’s about your wife, the agency man said.
Standing inside Eagle Rock ski lodge in Pennsylvania, Anderson pleaded for details. The CIA official said simply: Where are you? We’ll meet you.
Anderson suspected dreadful news about Jennifer Matthews, his college sweetheart, his wife of 22 years and a CIA operative on assignment almost 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. With several hours until the CIA meeting, Anderson and his three children — then 12, 9 and 6 — hit the slopes for one more hour. The father wanted to cling a little longer to normalcy, to a life betweenbefore and after.
Finally, the Fredericksburg family got into their silver minivan and headed to a nearby motel. There, in a sterile conference room, CIA officials told Anderson the news: His wife, one of the CIA’s top al-Qaeda experts, had just been killed in an explosion at a base in Khost province, in eastern Afghanistan. There was no mention of a double agent, no indication that six other CIA operatives had died in the deadliest attack on agency personnel in decades.
Anderson, who is commenting publicly on the loss of his wife for the first time, was so stunned that he couldn’t formulate questions, except: Are you sure she’s dead?
Then he summoned his children, who were waiting outside.
“I just said to them, ‘Your mom has died.’ The two oldest fell apart. They started crying,” he remembered. “One of them asked, ‘Is this really true?’ I just kind of hugged them. And then the craziness started after that.”
* * *
A Jordanian double agent’s suicide bombing of the CIA base received days of media coverage. The CIA had been tricked into welcoming one of al-Qaeda’s own onto the agency’s base, enabling him to detonate a vest laden with explosives. On television, pundits and agency retirees called the incident a catastrophe, Langley’s “Pearl Harbor.” Initially, commentators did not utter Matthews’s name, but they did describe the Khost base chief as a “mother of three.” Anderson felt that his wife, however anonymously, was bearing all the blame.
Five months after her burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Matthews’s name became public at a CIA ceremony honoring fallen employees.
Then, in October 2010, the CIA released results of the agency’s internal investigation into the Khost attack, fueling another round of stories that Matthews was partially responsible. Matthews and her team, the report concluded, failed to follow the agency’s procedures for vetting informants. One of Matthews’s severest critics was her uncle, Dave Matthews, a retired CIA official who had helped inspire his niece to join the agency.
Now Anderson and other relatives who once agreed not to speak with the media are breaking their silence to talk about Matthews’s life and death and about how her promotion to a perilous CIA posting has divided them.
On the surface, Anderson, a chemist and devoted churchgoer, accepts his wife’s fate even as he continues to mourn her death at the age of 45. “I loved being married to her,” he said. “She was a great lady.”
But underneath, Anderson, 50, is seething. He’s angry with the teachings in the Koran that he believes incited the suicide bomber to kill Americans; he’s upset with the CIA for failing to realize that a prized informant was a double agent willing to blow himself up; and he’s hurt by the legion of critics, including Matthews’s uncle, who have questioned her qualifications for the job she was doing.
“The suicide bomber was a bad guy, but at the time, nobody could clearly see it,” Anderson said. “I think the agency prepared my wife to be a chief of the Khost base, but not in terms of preparing for this asset. This guy wasn’t vetted.” And the mother of his three children is dead because of it.
[...]
Jennifer Matthews hadn’t always aspired to be a CIA operative. In 1986, she graduated with degrees in broadcast journalism and political science from Cedarville University, a small Christian college in Ohio where she met Anderson. Back then, she was an avid runner with auburn hair who believed deeply in God but also reveled in arguing about theology and politics.
“There were a lot of submissive types there,” Anderson recalled. “She wasn’t that way.”
In 1987, they married and moved to the Washington area, where she wanted to find a job that would enable her to serve God and have an impact on the world.
She sent an application to Langley and landed a job as an intelligence analyst in 1989. Her first assignment involved interpreting aerial photographs from Iran, said Anderson, who was excited about his wife’s new career but quickly realized that he would have to abide by a certain spousal code: Don’t expect too many details about her work.
Her uncle was proud that Matthews was following in his footsteps and thought that his beloved niece was destined to vault up the the agency’s hierarchy. “Hell, I thought she’d be the director of the CIA,” he said. “But then, she got sucked into operations.”
* * *
Matthews became fixated on Osama bin Laden long before most Americans had ever heard of him. By the mid-1990s, she had been assigned to Alec Station, a special unit based in Northern Virginia that was responsible for targeting al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
“Jennifer was one of the visionaries who recognized the threat of al-Qaeda,” said one of Matthews’s colleagues, a CIA counterterrorism officer made available by the agency.The officer works undercover and cannot be named.
Al-Qaeda’s attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 intensified Matthews’s job. “They were understaffed and overworked,” Anderson said. “It was demoralizing for her. Pre-9/11, they knew something big was going to happen.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, Matthews and Anderson were in Switzerland on vacation when they learned about the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Anderson won’t describe how she reacted. “It was just horror,” he said.
[.....]
* * *
On Dec. 30, 2009, Matthews and six other CIA operatives at Forward Operating Base Chapman were waiting for Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor who they believed had infiltrated al-Qaeda’s upper ranks. Balawi had been sending tantalizing video of the cell’s leaders. The CIA thought Balawi might ultimately lead the agency to bin Laden, the world’s No. 1 wanted man.
The CIA arranged for Balawi to be driven to its Khost base for a secret debriefing with several agency officers, including Matthews. She and her team were so eager to meet Balawi that they arrayed themselves in front of his car to greet him.
Balawi, sitting in the back, climbed out and yelled to Allah. Then Balawi, who was wearing a vest laden with C-4 explosives, hit the detonator. A flash lit up the base as the explosion unleashed bits of shrapnel and ball bearings. Shrapnel tore through Matthews’s neck, and one of her legs was so badly burned the bone was exposed, according to “The Triple Agent.”
She died in a helicopter on the way to a hospital. Six other CIA employees and contractors also were killed: Elizabeth Hanson, Darren LaBonte, Scott Michael Roberson, Dane Clark Paresi, Jeremy Wise and Harold Brown Jr.
****
Anderson is grateful to the CIA for etching his wife’s name in the legendary Book of Honor on display in the agency’s main lobby. He appreciates that then-CIA Director Leon E. Panetta attended her memorial service and her graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery, where the spymaster handed Anderson an American flag.
But he is critical of the CIA for being so easily seduced by Balawi, who was discovered in 2008 writing screeds on jihadist Web sites. He was arrested and supposedly turned by the Jordanian spy agency in mere days. The CIA joined in handling him.
“When you look at the history of this guy, he was flipped in a matter of days, which is ridiculous,” Anderson said. “Why wasn’t he checked in transit to the base?”
Anderson was even more baffled after he learned that LaBonte, one of the CIA officers killed in the attack, was sounding alarms about Balawi’s trustworthiness before the Khost meeting.