Read an interesting article in the british press a few months ago.

wish I had kept it, so I quote directly, but the gist of it was as follows (The source was an Ex CIA operative who had resigned a while before 9/11 in disgust)

The US had decided in the seventies and eighties to invest virtually all thier intellignce assets in satellites monitoring electronic communications. A field the US had a substantial lead in. The theory was that field agents and/or thier sources could not be trusted not to exaggerate or outright lie about what they knew, but intercepted mobile phone calls could be treated as hard data.

Furthermore... there had been more then one case of field agents going maverick with embarressing consequences.

By the late eighties the US intelligence services essentially consited of billion dollar satellites and thousands of people sitting at comfortable desks reading transcripts.

Of course.. people like Bin Laden were well aware of this and simply chose to use human messengers and avoided electronic communications.

The source went on to point out that human intelligence ( infiltrating one of your own men into the target organisation) could mean months or years living in a third world country as one of them.

Few people can be persuaded that Dysentry as a way of life might be a good career to follow.

Nevertheless the source stated that the "Afghan" desk pre 9/11 comprised a handful of people... none of whom would stay on that desk more then a year or two, and that if one or two of them could actually speak Afghan, that was a bonus.