Hostage deaths a reminder of the difficulty of tracking captives

The U.S. drone strike that accidentally killed two hostages in Pakistan exposes intelligence shortfalls that former and current U.S. officials say appear to be growing more frequent as combatants expand their safe havens and as Washington gathers less on-the-ground human intelligence.

Obtaining timely intelligence on hostages has always been difficult, especially in volatile regions where the United States has limited access and where armed fighters have well-established operations.

But as unrest spreads, armed groups are acquiring more safe havens, from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq, complicating and often hampering U.S. intelligence-gathering. This is especially so in the wake of the Arab Spring as combatants exploit the vacuum left by shattered institutions.

That has forced American intelligence operatives to become more dependent on electronic eavesdropping and spy satellites rather than using informants and on-the-ground human intelligence, say the former and current U.S. officials.

The inadvertent killing of American contractor Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto in a January U.S. drone strike, acknowledged by U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday, follows two failed U.S. attempts in the past nine months to rescue Western hostages. Those efforts apparently relied on dated or incomplete information.

Last July, U.S. Delta Force commandos swooped into eastern Syria to try to rescue U.S. journalist James Foley and other hostages, only to find they had been moved. Foley was later executed by his captors, members of the armed group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

A December attempt to free American photojournalist Luke Somers and South African teacher Pierre Korkie in Yemen failed when their Al-Qaeda captors were alerted to U.S. commandoes' approach and executed them.

In 2010, the U.S. Navy's SEAL Team 6 tried to rescue Scottish aid worker Linda Norgrove from Taliban captors in Afghanistan. She was killed by a grenade thrown in haste by one of the American commandoes.

"Sometimes you get it wrong," said retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a professor of military history at Ohio State University. "There's no way to have a perfectly clean war."

Of all those regions, few have remained off limits for as long as Pakistan's rugged northwest North Waziristan, where Weinstein and Lo Porto were held and where a generation of Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants have built a stronghold for launching attacks on U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.

Some former U.S. officials say the problem is too few U.S. informants on the ground in danger zones such as Pakistan or Yemen. "You can't do intelligence operations without HUMINT," said one former senior U.S. intelligence official, using the acronym for "human intelligence."

Rescue missions in enemy territory are inherently risky and, officials say, based on imperfect information.

"The rule is, you almost never know where these guys are," a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The latest killings re-ignited criticism from hostages' family members about White House efforts to protect their loved ones, and stoked controversy over the lethal drone program.

In the drone strike that killed Weinstein and Lo Porto, sources said the Central Intelligence Agency had no idea the two were being held there despite hundreds of hours of surveillance of the Al-Qaeda compound.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that before the strike, U.S. government assessments had arrived at "near certainty" that civilians would not be harmed. An internal review of the operation is underway to see if reforms are needed to prevent similar incidents, Earnest said.

Whether mistakes were made or not, it is very difficult for U.S. spy agencies to acquire accurate information about where and how hostages are being held, the officials said.

"It's a very complex proposition," requiring the stitching together of multiple streams of intelligence from various data collection methods, said Dane Egli, a former senior White House adviser for hostage policy under President George W. Bush. "There's no one silver bullet."

To armed groups, hostages are an extremely valuable commodity and kidnappers make their captives' security a top priority, the officials said.

Egli said that opportunities to learn information from local inhabitants or interrogating detainees have been reduced as the United States has withdrawn troops and intelligence assets from Iraq and Afghanistan. Another obstacle is the expansion of safe havens and ungoverned spaces, from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Yemen.

"Any time they have secured real estate ... it's harder for us to penetrate the [U.S. military] Special Forces for us to do a surprise mission" and attempt rescue, Egli said.

Sometimes there is virtually no information at all. American journalist Austin Tice disappeared in Damascus in August 2012, and has not been heard from other than a brief video that surfaced five weeks later.

U.S. officials have given Tice's family no indication they know where he is, a person familiar with the situation said on Thursday.

Wire services