New in SpyWeek: CIA Vetting, Ukraine Intel, Private Russia Deals, Kash in a Barrel

Loyalty Tests: “Let’s be clear on what the vetting system is and it isn’t,” Samantha Vinograd, a top counterterrorism official in the Obama administration, told Face the Nation on Sunday, in relation to ​​Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the former Afghan CIA asset facing murder and other charges for his Thanksgiving Eve assault on two West Virginia National Guard troopers in Washington, D.C. As President Trump and his minions predictably blamed the Biden administration for the tragedy, Vinograd explained that the vetting of a foreigner employed by the U.S. includes “an individual’s identifiers — their biographic information, iris scans, fingerprints, facial images,” which are “run against data sets of information about individuals with ties to terrorism and criminal history,” all of which would normally have been applied to Lakanwal when he was recruited for the CIA’s Zero Unit anti-Taliban kill teams. Lakanwal, who was evacuated from the chaos in Kabul in 2021, “applied for asylum in 2024,” CNN reported, which was granted by the Trump administration earlier this year. “The vetting system,” Vinograd pointedly added, “is not predicative of whether an individual with no derogatory information is or is not going to become violent.”

“Having a CIA ID would have put him in the ‘vetted’ category,” Jennifer Griffin, Fox News Senior National Security correspondent said on X. “I am told there was nothing in his background when he arrived in the US on Sept 8, 2021 that suggested links to terrorism.”

Except the CIA’s own brand. The Zero Units effectively performed as highly violent death squads, according to their many critics.

“Human Rights Watch said it had documented several instances in which the units were responsible for ‘extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities, and other violations of international humanitarian law,” the New York Times reported. “The C.I.A. has denied such allegations of brutality, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda.”

“Think about how thorough Lakanwal’s vetting had to be,” Seth Hettena noted in his After Action Report on Substack. “CIA and US special operations personnel regularly accompanied Zero Units on missions. The CIA Ground Branch, Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs had to trust men like Lakanwal with their lives. Biden’s supposed ‘sin,’ then, was evacuating an Afghan partner who had fought in a CIA-backed unit alongside US personnel, only to now be blamed for not foreseeing the consequences of the very system