The Afghan Shooter and the Limits of Vetting

For former CIA soldier Rahmanullah Lakanwal, life just got too hard

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, looking at peace somewhere, sometime. (instagram)

Many decades ago in South Vietnam, I was running a spy targeted on communist troops headquartered in the jungles about 15 miles away from my office in Da Nang, a bustling former French colonial port on the central coast. When I arrived on scene in late 1969 we didn’t know much about Mr. Dao, a man twice my age, other than he’d worked for the French before us and was a fervent anticommunist. That was good enough for my predecessor, who had hired him a month or so before I arrived. I assumed Dao had been vetted, starting with a records check with the South Vietnamese police, and mission testing to see if he would carry out an assignment without question or raising suspicion. Frankly, I don’t remember whether I asked in my nervous first days. My job was to keep him and his network of informants gathering information on the enemy—and they were good at that—and to elicit more about him during our first secret meetings in ramshackle downtown hotels.

It turned out, though, he’d never been polygraphed, so we started with that.