CIA and Bin Laden’s Inner Circle:

The Washington Post has a very interesting artice today on CIA efforts to infiltrate and destroy Osama Bin Laden’s leadership circle. Some excerpts:

  The CIA has intelligence agents inside Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network — as it did before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — but they are not within the terrorist leader’s inner circle where key information about any future attack would be discussed, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.
  “They are beyond foot soldiers but not in the inner circle,” the official said. The agents — Afghans, Pakistanis, Uzbeks and others recruited and run by CIA case officers — “are more senior than the agents [the U.S. had] three years ago who were on the periphery,” the official said.
  Aided by these agents, electronic intercepts, satellite imagery, and extensive help from foreign intelligence services, the United States over the past two years has captured or killed two-thirds of bin Laden’s top aides and broken up plots against U.S. embassies, U.S. and foreign aircraft, and ships and other targets worldwide.
  . . .
  
This is the first time that CIA officials have publicly described with such specificity the placing of agents and other steps aimed at cracking al Qaeda — the sort of information that the agency generally guards very closely.
  
. . .
   “We have busted plots repeatedly” that were undertaken by “serious al Qaeda players” involving both aircraft and ships — some in Northeast and Southeast Asia — one official at the briefing said.