Intelligence personnel blamed for Afghan screening lapses before Brent Taylor assassination
Maj. Brent Taylor on a hike with a group of fellow American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan in 2018. The soldiers took a hike on most Fridays.
Maj. Brent Taylor plays a game of chess with Afghan and American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Civilian contractors hired to screen Afghan commandos for terroristic radicalization missed opportunities to thwart Asfar Khan from killing Maj. Brent Taylor, an Army investigation concluded.
A former counterintelligence officer interviewed by Army investigators described some of the civilian contractor employees at Camp Scorpion in Afghanistan as incompetent or exhibiting a poor work ethic.
During a regularly scheduled annual screening interview on Oct. 16, 2018, less than three weeks before he killed Taylor, Afghan army commando Khan argued vehemently with an interpreter about the definition of infidel and refused to answer questions about whether it was OK to commit violence against American or Afghan army troops.
During the investigation of Taylor’s death, various officials told investigators those were “red flag” items that should have resulted in Khan being removed from duty immediately.
Military and civilian intelligence personnel discussed Khan’s interview two days after the potentially ominous first screening and decided another interview was warranted. But none was scheduled and the interview report was not uploaded to an insider-threat recognition database within 48 hours as required, the investigation report said.
Had Khan, a sergeant in the Ktah Khas Army, or KKA, commando battalion, been removed at that point, he likely would not have been able to follow through with his plot to kill the major from Utah, the investigating officer said.
Khan shot Taylor from 10 feet away during a training hike Nov. 3, 2018, killing him instantly, the Army investigation said.
The Standard-Examiner obtained the report May 20 after an 18-month effort via the Freedom of Information Act. Large sections of the report were redacted, including the names of all involved other than Taylor and Khan.
The principal investigating officer interviewed several Army personnel and civilian screeners who were there during the critical three-week period, plus a former Camp Scorpion assignee who had knowledge of the operation.
The former Camp Scorpion intelligence operative said she saw a damaging personality conflict between leaders of the military and civilian intelligence teams and examples of “unprofessional” and “poor quality” work.
She said some civilian screeners filed prewritten “ghost” reports of screening interviews, with only the summaries containing original text.
“The Khan interview exhibited this character,” she said.
The investigative report said both civilian and military counterintelligence teams were understaffed based on the workload.
It could take months for a report to be reviewed by top commanders because of backlogs on both ends of the process, the report said.
“Moving through the process was more important than the contents of the reports,” the former operative said. “The interviewers are just going through the motions.”
She said the company with the civilian screeners contract, CACI International, “was not incentivized to fill the contract with quality people. They were more focused on filling their positions with whoever they could get so as to fill the empty positions across the country to fulfill the contract.”
Efforts to contact CACI and its corporate communications coordinator, Gavin McGuire, were unsuccessful.
According to its website, CACI is a $5.7 billion company that provides technology and services to the Department of Defense and others.
The contract employee who interviewed Khan told the investigator, “We all believed that there was no indication of impending violence based on Khan’s statements.”
The screener said a second interview with the commando “should have been designated a priority” and he did not know why it should take so long to schedule.
The screener said of the Khan interview that he had “never been called an infidel before in an interview” and that “I did not believe that would equate to violence.”
The screener added that room for human error increased with the number of screenings that had to be done.
Further, the screener said, the Afghan army had “bad records of its own people.” He estimated that 10% to 15% of Afghan soldiers “were deeply religious and could be radicalized at some future date.”
The screening operations that October were not up to speed anyway because the team leaders of the Army and civilian personnel were both new at the camp.
The top counterintelligence officer told the investigator he never heard Khan’s name prior to the attack, was never told about the screeners’ discussion about Khan and had not read the Khan interview report, which was not uploaded until Oct. 23, 11 days before Taylor was killed.
He added that Afghan soldiers who were potential insider threats “knew how to beat the interview and screening process.” The only way to get at such insiders is to direct investigations against those suspected, he said.
The civilian screeners, he said, may have become complacent because there never had been a “green on blue” insider attack in the KKA.
CORRECTIVE ACTIONS
Since Taylor’s death, the counterintelligence team has been conducting daily reviews of all screenings, the officer said.
In the investigating officer’s findings and the additional conclusions of the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, both civilian and military counterintelligence operations were faulted.
“I concluded the (civilian team) failed to adequately identify Asfar Khan as a threat and appropriately identify him as such,” the investigator wrote.
“Despite two clear violations of the expulsion criteria, (the team) concluded that Khan was not an immediate threat,” he added.
Further, “I found that the Khan screening discrepancies were never officially reported to the (military counterintelligence side) as required.”
Gen. Austin Scott Miller, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, faulted the civilian team for not following policy, said it did not document Khan’s red-flag responses and failed to “initiate requisite follow-on actions, including expulsion of Khan from Camp Scorpion.”
And military counterintelligence, Miller wrote, did not exercise direct, daily oversight of the civilians’ work as directed.
Miller ordered that the investigation report be sent to Army contracting units “for a review and determination of whether the contract standards were properly followed. If they were not, take appropriate action.”