The recent incident of attempted jail-break by Boko Haram members at the State Security Service (SSS) headquarters detention facility in Abuja should be blamed not only on professional lapses of the operatives but also a weak crackdown on mole and secrecy leaks.
It is a signal that, there is possibility of presence of agents like CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who beat polygraph on two occasions while spying for the Soviet Union and Russia but later caught in 1994, after his betrayal had resulted in the deaths of a number of CIA assets and compromised more than a hundred Western intelligence operations.
The awkward truth is: what prompted the Boko Haram suspects to plan such moves and to believe that they can escape successfully from the environment in a broad daylight?
To forestall further incidents and damage to national intelligence, it is high time for SSS and other intelligence agencies to re-emphasize a culture of lie-detector tests.
Ayodele Paul,
Ikire, Osun state
