Taliban Spies: In The Cross Hairs

How the Taliban's intelligence network killed one opposition leader and is gunning for another

The Taliban has no spy-in-the-sky satellites. It can't bug a telephone or crack an enemy code. But even so, its intelligence service is murderously effective--both inside Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan, where Taliban spies are suspected of having carried out several assassinations in the past two years.

The Taliban is strongest where U.S. intelligence is weakest: in the bazaars, mosques and teahouses of Afghanistan. It has thousands of informers inherited from KHAD--the feared secret police of the former Afghan communist regime--working alongside Muslim clerics in nearly every Afghan village. And it has no monolithic central headquarters that can be taken out...

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