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Flying has become a nightmare thanks to the CIA, not al-Qaeda
The world's largest intelligence agency is always one step behind

For the millions of Britons who will soon be obliged to submit to the indignity of full body scans every time they take a flight, the overwhelming temptation will be to curse the al-Qaeda masterminds responsible for the increased disruption to our normal travel routines.
If it weren't for the terrorists' obsession with targeting transatlantic aircraft, the public would not be subjected to these tiresome, and increasingly intrusive, checks on their persons and belongings before boarding a flight.

The last vestiges of glamour were removed from air travel after al-Qaeda operatives hijacked a number of American aircraft on September 11. Since then, they have proved to be an extremely convenient means of attacking the West, in increasingly ingenious fashion. There was Richard Reid, who made a failed attempt to detonate his shoes on an American Airlines flight in December 2001, which resulted in passengers being required to remove their belts and footwear at security. Then there were the severe restrictions imposed on bringing fluids on board after the failed 2006 Heathrow bomb plot, in which Islamist terrorists tried to smuggle liquid explosives on to 10 transatlantic flights, which would have killed an estimated 3,000 people.
Our enemies' latest brainwave again involved flights into the US, with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempting to detonate explosives sewn into his underpants. The authorities have responded by promising to introduce body scanners, the electronic equivalent of conducting a strip search on every passenger boarding a flight out of the UK.
Yet the fundamental problem facing those charged with protecting the world's air traffic is that no sooner have they devised a new security system to counter the latest al-Qaeda tactic, then the terrorists come up with yet another ploy. In Saudi Arabia last September, a suicide bomber went one better than Abdulmutallab and concealed an explosive device in his anal cavity. One shudders to think how British security officials would respond after a similar attempt here.
Security checks at airports undoubtedly serve their purpose in protecting flights from terrorist attacks, but they have their limits. By far the best way to prevent al-Qaeda from achieving its objectives is to have good intelligence, as was the case in the 2006 Heathrow plot. And the main reason the world's transport network has again been plunged into chaos is that Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it prepared to land at Detroit on Christmas Day was as much a failure of intelligence as a mark of al-Qaeda's resourcefulness.
America's intelligence agencies, in particular, failed miserably to process the wealth of information they had on the Abdulmutallab plot, and must share much of the blame for the extreme discomfort passengers will now suffer as a result of the invasive new security procedures.
Since September 11, Western democracies have conceded much in terms of privacy and civil liberties in order to assist the intelligence-gathering operation against Islamist extremists. We have granted the police and other security agencies greater surveillance powers, and have amended the criminal justice system to take account of this existential threat to our freedom.
But as the war on Islamist terror enters its ninth year, we find that, despite the billions of dollars that the Americans have invested in giving their intelligence-gathering capability a serious upgrade, the approach to tackling the threat remains as naive today as it was on the morning that three hijacked aircraft caused the worst terrorist atrocity in American history.
The official report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission blamed, in part, the lack of co-operation between America's rival intelligence agencies, so President Bush set up a new structure to ensure improved co-ordination. And yet in Abdulmutallab's case, those agencies still managed to overlook basic intelligence leads, such as an explicit warning from the terrorist's father that his son had been radicalised by Islamist extremists, and highly credible reports that a Yemen-based al-Qaeda plot was in the offing.
The CIA and America's other main intelligence-gathering agencies have now been subjected to a stinging rebuke by President Obama for their collective failure "to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had".
And, as if Abdulmutallab's bombing attempt was not a crushing blow for the CIA's morale, the organisation is also trying to come to terms with a suicide bomb attack that killed seven CIA officers last month at their base at Khost, close to Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. US officials say that those killed included five of their leading experts on al-Qaeda, who agreed to attend the meeting because they believed they would receive key information as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
Instead, it now appears they were set up by the Haqqani clan, the pro-Taliban tribe that is widely held to be protecting bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership in north-west Pakistan. The CIA officers were so convinced of the bona fides of their source, a Jordanian doctor, that they did not even bother with basic security procedures – such as searching his belongings – before allowing him on to the base, with the inevitable catastrophic consequences.
If this is how the CIA takes care of its own security, we should not be surprised by its failure to address that of the wider public. Professional and effective intelligence-gathering lies at the heart of the battle to defeat Islamist extremists. Unless there is an immediate improvement in the approach and performance of the world's largest intelligence-gathering operation, we stand little chance of success.