If you have dived into some of CIA's problematic behavior in the War on Terror, you might remember hearing about a mysterious red headed female CIA agent who seems to be involved in several of the major intelligence screwups of the era, from torture, to double-agents blowing up CIA bases, to the CIA's decisions to prohibit the FBI from knowing about the Flight 77 hijackers al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar having multiple-entry Visas to the US well before 9/11.
Jane Mayer described the mystery woman in her book, The Dark Side:
"After [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed was captured, the woman, who headed the Al Qaeda unit in the CTC, was so excited she flew at government expense to the black site where Mohammed was held so that she could personally watch him being waterboarded. The CIA declined to discuss the matter, to make the officer available for comment, or to allow her to be named. . . . Coworkers described her, however, as the same hard-driving, redheaded former Soviet analyst who had been in the Bin Laden Unit during Michael Scheuer's supervision . . . word leaked out about her jaunt and superiors at the CIA scolded her for treating the painful interrogation as a show"
There are other press reports of the woman, for example the Associated Press article by Goldman and Apuzzo from 2011 that describes her causal role in the Khalid el-Masri case. This case would later became the infamous court case el-Masri v Tenet, in which judge T. S. Ellis III declared that state secrets privilege would not allow a German citizen falsely beaten, anally raped, and tortured by the CIA to sue the government.
What did the Red Headed Woman have to do with the hijackers al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar? Before 9/11, inside the CIA's Bin Ladin unit (Alec Station) there were two FBI agents named Mark Rossini and Doug Miller. The unit learned that two al-Qaeda figures, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, who had visited the infamous Malaysian al-Qaeda meeting, had gotten US entry visas. When Rossini and Miller tried to alert FBI headquarters, the CIA refused to allow it. Rossini and Miller were prohibited from telling anyone that these two dangerous terrorists were headed for the United States. The CIA officer who told them "no" was referred to by Nowosielski and Duffy refer to as "Michael". In late 2000, The Red Headed Woman came to Alec Station, and was Michael's "direct supervisor". As the months ticked by, there was still no word between the 50 or so people at CIA who knew about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, and the FBI headquarters, nor, according to Richard Clark, the Whitehouse. The hijackers moved around the US and eventually to American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy are the indie journalists who have figured this out - the true position of the Red Headed Woman in the history of the War on Terror, including 9/11. They are the ones that strung together the examples I have listed above. Their website is at http://www.secrecykills.com. These two men have been studying 9/11 for several years, including making a documentary 9/11: Press for Truth in 2006. In an interview with Sibel Edmond's Boiling Frogs, they describe the lack of interest their work has gotten from the "main stream media".
Ray and John are trying to release a new documentary, entitled "Who is Rich Blee?". Ray and John claim to know the Red Headed Woman's real identity, using, apparently, "Savvy internet searches based on minimal background details" and interviews with various knowledgable people. They were planning to tell us her name with the release of their documentary. For now, they call her "Frances".
Of course, the CIA objected to the 'outing' of a working CIA agent, and threatened them with the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, something that Scooter Libby and Robert Novak were apparently unafraid of when they outed Valerie Plame, whose greatest crime was being married to a critic. Perhaps if Valerie Plame had been directly involved in some of the biggest intelligence failures of the War on Terror she would have been promoted up the ranks and be heading up a big operation in Obama's administration now. Because that's where Frances is. Right there in the upper sections of the org chart.
For now, Nowosielski and Duffy have held off on releasing Frances full identity, but if they discovered it with "savvy internet searches", and several other reporters know a lot about the agent already, then it doesn't seem likely that it will remain a public secret forever.