© AFP Photo / FilesRescuers work to help survivors amid the devastation brought in by a bomb explosion in Al-Qaeda's first major international attack near the US embassy and a bank in Nairobi on August 7, 1998 that killed about 200 people and left more than 1,000 injured.
The disclosure of Mr Tom Shah's and Ms Molly Huckaby Hardy's actual status comes 13 years after the bombing and coincides with Memorial Day on Monday when the US honours its war dead.
Comment: It also coincides with the recent "Osama's killing" charade. Hardly a coincidence, considering the fact that nothing is without an agenda when it comes to CIA. Otherwise Tom Shah's and Molly Huckaby Hardy's names would remain indefinitely unknown to the general public.
Mr Shah and Ms Hardy "are believed to have been the first CIA casualties" in the clandestine war against al-Qaeda, the Associated Press says in its investigative story.
Comment: Probably, not the first, nor the last. When we are dealing with CIA's dirty clandestine wars (while al-Qaeda, CIA's construct, is only one example of their mode of operation and deception), "there is no honor among thieves", and agents can be easily sacrificed in order to execute The Secret Team's agenda.
The news service says its account is based on interviews with half-a-dozen current and former US officials.
Until now, "their service remained a secret in both life and death, marked only by anonymous stars on the wall at CIA headquarters" outside Washington, the AP writes.
In the Nairobi CIA station, which operated secretly inside the US embassy, Ms Hardy handled finances, "including the CIA's stash of money used to pay sources and carry out spying operations", the AP reports.
Mr Shah worked for the CIA's Iraq Operations Group, which spied on Saddam Hussein's regime, the story says.
He had come to Kenya to meet a top Iraqi official, who was said to be willing to supply intelligence in exchange for a new life in the US.
"The meetings were set up in Kenya, former officials said, because it was considered relatively safe from Middle East intelligence services," says the AP report, adding:
"It was perhaps the most important operation being run under the Africa Division at the time, current and former officials said."
Mr Shah, the only child of an Indian immigrant father and a US mother, had to disguise his normally outgoing personality while working undercover in Nairobi, the report adds.
"This is the glory and the tragedy of discreet work," the AP quotes former US ambassador Prudence Bushnell saying.
"You keep a very low profile and you don't do things that make you memorable."
Mr Shah was 38 at the time of his death. Ms Hardy was 51.
Two hundred Kenyans died in the Nairobi attack, and 10 more Africans lost their lives in the simultaneous bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania.
Osama bin Laden attempted to justify the Nairobi blast partly on the grounds that the embassy harboured a major CIA station.
Nobody is listening anymore. The masses get tired of the same message and this stuff is rather boring or should I say monotonous? These message specialists have lost their targeted audience, which seems ever more up for grabs and given the conditioning, could turn them into a mob like those engaged in the 'Arab Spring'.
I do wonder about these 'agents' and whether they were part of the 'family' or not? The end of their stories would suggest they were not and thus 'expendable and convenient casualties of the last grab for power.