The Triple Agent

by Joby Warrick

  “She already knew she was going to Afghanistan,” Matthews’s adviser later said. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was hearing something else. She thought I was saying she couldn’t handle it.”

  Unable to dissuade Matthews, the retired officer instead wished her good luck. It was the last time they would meet.

  3.

  THE DOCTOR

  Amman, Jordan—January 19, 2009

  The raiding party gathered in the street just before 11:00 P.M. and waited, as always, for the bedroom lights and TV sets to flicker out. Darkness would mean fewer witnesses, and a sleeping household would allow the agents of Jordan’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence service to work quickly, with a minimum of noise and fuss. There would be no knock at the door and no spoken commands. Just a crash of metal against wood and a single coordinated movement that would sweep the hapless suspect from his bedclothes to the back of a waiting car.

  The target on this raw January night was a four-story house on Urwa Bin Al-Ward Street, a narrow alley in a Palestinian immigrant neighborhood of neatly scrubbed stone houses the color of beach sand. Just before midnight, two black sedans moved from their parking spot on cue and pulled into the alley with headlights off, while a third parked diagonally across the street to block traffic. Police and Mukhabarat agents in dark clothing dispersed to take positions around the front and rear of the house, and a small breach team gathered by the front door to await the signal. One of them, a stout intelligence captain wearing a black commando sweater, clutched a warrant with orders for the arrest of a young physician named Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi. The man they were seeking was thirty-one years old and had never been accused of anything more serious than a traffic violation. Yet in forty-eight hours Balawi had emerged as one of the most dangerous men in all Jordan.

  Just as the raid was set to begin, a scuffle broke out between some of the Mukhabarat’s officers and a group of young men walking home from a party. The men gathered around the strange car straddling the alley and began hectoring the driver for blocking the street. Another plainclothes officer arrived, and soon there were shouts and shoving.

  I’m calling the police, one of the men was yelling.

  Inside the house, the commotion roused the suspect’s father, Khalil al-Balawi. The sixty-six-year-old retired schoolteacher had dozed off while reading on the living room sofa and awoke to angry voices just outside his front window. The bearded pensioner peered through the curtain and, seeing nothing, tied his robe and hobbled to the front door. He had opened it only a crack when the door burst inward, flinging him back. Three figures in leather coats brushed past him without a word, while a fourth moved toward the old man as though to block him.

  Balawi, still foggy, guessed that the intruders were trying to escape the fight under way in the street. But now three of the men were bounding up the stairs, toward the apartments where Balawi’s adult children lived with their families. He started to protest but felt a viselike grip on his shoulder. It was a large man in a black sweater.

  “Mukhabarat,” the man said quietly, using the Arabic term for the spy service known officially as the General Intelligence Department, or GID. He handed Balawi a creased document. “We’re here for Humam.”

  Balawi felt his knees buckle. Was he dreaming? From upstairs came desperate sounds: A child’s piercing scream. Bangs and thumps. His daughter-in-law’s voice shouting, then pleading, then wailing. Finally a single thought crystallized in his brain: This is a mistake. It was the wrong house, the wrong Humam. His son was a healer, not a criminal.

  “Whatever you’re looking for—it doesn’t exist!” he stammered to the captain. “We don’t have weapons or drugs. We don’t keep anything against the law!”

  The officer’s hazel eyes met the old man’s with a look that seemed to convey sympathy, but he said nothing. Khalil al-Balawi’s mind raced. Was it possible that Humam had a secret life? Was he stealing from the clinic? No, not possible, he thought. Humam is a homebody. He has no use for money. He doesn’t go to the nightclubs in the Western hotels downtown. He barely leaves the house.

  More shouts and thumps. Then two of the officers thundered down the steps with what Khalil al-Balawi recognized as his son’s belongings. One carried a desktop computer, and the other was struggling with a box crammed with books, papers, and a rack of computer disks. The first man set down the computer and presented the elderly Balawi with a handwritten list under a heading that read, “Prohibited items.” It was an inventory of the electronics and paper records seized as evidence.

  “Sign here to say we didn’t break anything,” the man ordered.

  Khalil al-Balawi was wide awake now, and his skin flushed beneath his red beard. “Where are you taking him? What’s this about?” he demanded.

  “You can ask about him tomorrow,” the officer replied, “at the Mukhabarat.”

  The old man stared at the pen that had been thrust into his hand, then looked up to see his son being led down the stairs by one of the officers. Humam Khalil al-Balawi was wearing a knee-length kurta shirt, pajama pants, and he was walking slowly, eyes fixed on the steps. At five feet seven he was slightly taller than his father, but narrow at the waist and shoulders, and he had the delicate skin of a man who keeps company with books and computers. His brown curls and wispy beard were matted from sleep, so that he looked more like a scrawny teenager than an accomplished physician with a practice and two kids of his own.

  At the bottom of the staircase the procession stopped. To his father, the younger Balawi seemed oddly, inexplicably detached, as though he were sleepwalking. Then he caught his son’s eyes. They were inordinately large and as soft and brown as a doe’s. They were also incapable of hiding emotion, quick to betray fear or anger or whatever passion Humam happened to be feeling. But on this day they were ablaze with something the older man could not immediately grasp. It wasn’t fear, or nervousness, or even anger, exactly, but something more akin to contempt, like a champion boxer who had just taken a sucker punch.

  “It was defiance I saw,” the elder Balawi said afterward. “I knew the look. It was very Humam.”

  Neither man spoke. There was a brief jostling at the door, and then the old man watched the officers shove his son into the back of one of the cars. In an instant, Dr. Humam al-Balawi, the gifted scholar and pediatrician who had dreamed of practicing in the United States, disappeared behind tinted glass, along with his reputation and all traces of his former life. From now on, no matter what else happened, he would live his life as a man who had been marked by the Mukhabarat.

  The only unknown was where precisely his path would end. Humam could choose defiance and see his career destroyed, the family name tarnished, and his children reduced to poverty. Or he could cooperate and endure the ignominy of becoming an informant for the government. Some Jordanians who chose the latter course had gone slowly insane, isolated from friends and mistrusted by coworkers. Others had fled the country, and still others had simply disappeared behind the walls of the Mukhabarat’s fortresslike headquarters, never to be heard from again.

  Khalil al-Balawi shivered as he stood in the doorway in his thin robe, watching the slow-motion demolition of his son’s life and his own hopes for a quietly comfortable old age. He strained his eyes, hoping for a last glimpse, but the windows of the dark sedan revealed nothing. The lead car with Humam inside made a tight U-turn in the alley, rounded the corner, and was gone.

  “Your handcuffs will be as silver bracelets. The hangman’s noose will be a medal of honor.”

  The Arabic characters skittered across the computer screen as Humam al-Balawi typed, pressing the keys softly to avoid waking his wife and two girls asleep in the room next door. It was June 2007, nineteen months before his arrest, and he was doing the thing he loved most. In a few hours it would be daylight and he would be on his way to the children’s clinic to prescribe antibiotics and treat tummy aches and fevers. But at this moment, in the quiet of the family kitchen, he was Abu Dujana al-Khora
sani, cyberwarrior for Islam and scourge of the Americans and their Arab lackeys around the world.

  “Brothers, download these videos until your Internet cable gets overheated because of how hot the clips are,” Balawi wrote, pausing to insert coding that would allow readers to view a collage of Iraqi insurgent attacks on U.S. troops whose Humvees erupted in clouds of flame, smoke, and shrapnel. “Watch how the Americans get killed as if they were in PlayStation video games.”

  Balawi read the sentences back to himself and, satisfied, clicked a button to transmit. In seconds, his column would appear as the billboard item on the Web site al-Hesbah, one of the leading outlets for radical Islamic views and teachings in the Arabic-speaking world.

  “Abu Dujana” was a mere invention, a fake identity created by Balawi initially so he could express himself in chat rooms without fear of getting arrested. But over time the character had evolved a personality of its own. Where the young physician was respectful and reserved, Abu Dujana was aggressive, blunt, and bitingly sarcastic, an evil twin with a devilish sense of humor. He was also an instant hit. New postings by Abu Dujana al-Khorasani were among the most widely read items on al-Hesbah and received the most comments. Soon he was asked to serve as moderator of the Web site’s discussion groups, a position that put him in charge of the daily online conversation and gave him a showcase for his own columns.

  Abu Dujana had been thrust into a small elite of jihadist writers and pundits with large online audiences and global reach. Yet no one knew who he really was. The speculation among his most ardent online followers was that he was a Saudi and very likely a senior official within al-Qaeda. But in fact even the al-Hesbah managers who gave Abu Dujana the moderator’s job did not know his true name or nationality. Nor did the Mukhabarat or the CIA, which employs teams of specialists to monitor jihadist Web sites full-time and write reports deciphering and analyzing their content. Balawi’s father and brothers joked about his love affair with his computer, but even they knew nothing about the secret life he created on the flickering blue screen.

  The transformation would occur at home, usually at night or on weekends, when he was free from his duties at the clinic. Balawi would hunch over his small desktop computer for hour after hour until his eyes reddened and his wife, Defne, began to worry. Already Balawi had a reputation for being a recluse, rarely going out or socializing with friends or even attending Friday prayers at the local mosque. Balawi would deflect Defne’s questions by insisting that he had to study, but when she came into the room, the books would be tossed to the side and her husband would be where he always was, perched on his favorite chair with eyes locked on the computer screen. The more Abu Dujana grew, the smaller Balawi and his old life became.

  “He was preoccupied,” Defne said later. “He was living in fantasy in another world.”

  Balawi had written online columns under several other fake names before Abu Dujana al-Khorasani made his first appearance in 2007, just as Balawi was hitting his stride as an essayist. The pseudonym itself was a mash-up of historical names instantly recognizable to devout Muslims; Al-Khorasani means “from Khorasan,” the ancient name for the vast swath of Muslim lands stretching from the old Persian empire to the Hindu Kush mountains, encompassing much of modern-day Afghanistan. Abu Dujana was a seventh-century Arab warrior who was a favorite of the Prophet Muhammad’s. A skilled swordsman who relished the mayhem of hand-to-hand combat, he was also arrogant and showy. Before battle he would don a red headband and taunt his enemies by strutting mockingly in front of their lines.

  Abu Dujana the pundit was a showman as well, prone to verbal bluster and fireworks. His first articles quickly cemented his reputation as one of the most engaging and colorful writers in the online community of radical Islam. He raged against all the usual targets—Israel, the West, and U.S.-friendly Arab governments—but his writings also reflected an understanding of Western culture and a knack for appealing to younger Muslims who grew up with instant messaging and social networks. In one passage he would excoriate ordinary Muslims as being unthinking clones, “like Dolly, the cloned sheep,” and in another he would write wistfully about a future in which even the Barbie doll “will wear the veil and recite the Koran when you touch it.”

  He would also entice his audience with images of battlefield carnage, fresh from amateur jihadi photographers in Tikrit or Ramadi, served up with a gleefully ghoulish commentary that became Abu Dujana’s trademark.

  “Welcome to the al-Hesbah café,” he wrote to open one Internet session. “Go to the menu and pick today’s dish:

  “Roasted Humvee with sauce of human remains.

  “Exploded tank by an IED [improvised explosive device] with no survivors.

  “Or a pastry made of Americans’ brains taken out with snipers’ bullets.”

  Thousands of Muslims sampled Abu Dujana’s offerings and paused to read his words. And each week the appetite for his articles grew larger still. Abu Dujana—whoever he was, wherever he was—was becoming a true celebrity.

  He had to be stopped.

  Inside the headquarters of the secretive National Security Agency in suburban Washington is a computer search engine unlike any other in the world. Code-named Turbulence, it is a five-hundred-million-dollar-a-year network that continuously vacuums up terabytes of data from across the Internet and scours them for possible security threats. When specific targets are identified—a new Web site or an unknown militant group, for instance—it can burrow into a single computer on the other side of the world to steal files or drop off eavesdropping software. Agents on the ground can then follow up with portable surveillance gear so sensitive it can detect individual strokes on a computer keyboard from hundreds of feet away.

  The precise methods used for tracking a specific target overseas are a closely guarded secret. But what is known is that sometime in late 2008, such tools were used to hunt down a popular jihadist blogger who called himself Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Working backward through a maze of servers and trunk lines spanning continents, U.S. officials narrowed the search to Jordan, then to Amman, and finally to a single house in a working-class neighborhood called Jabal Nuzha.

  The man’s true identity came as a shock, most especially to Jordan’s Mukhabarat intelligence service: One of radical Islam’s rising stars was an obscure pediatrician living right under its noses.

  What happened next was up to the Mukhabarat. While the CIA and its foreign counterparts closely monitor jihadist Web sites and occasionally shut them down, more often they prefer to quietly study them for insights into how terrorist movements are evolving. The Mukhabarat would have to decide if the man who called Muslims to holy war as the fictitious Abu Dujana posed a flesh-and-blood threat to Jordan and beyond. Someone would have to go to school on Humam Khalil al-Balawi, and that person ultimately turned out to be a midlevel officer who understood the phenomenon of Internet jihad as well as anyone in the agency’s counterterrorism division. His name was Ali bin Zeid, but he was known among his peers as Sharif Ali, an honorific that denoted noble birth. Bin Zeid was a direct descendant of Jordan’s first monarch, Abdullah I, and a cousin to the king.

  Just thirty-four, bin Zeid was already a ten-year veteran of the intelligence service, with a number of medals and commendations to his credit, including one from the CIA. Sensitive to perceptions that his royal blood accorded him privileges, he worked long hours and never mentioned his ties to the crown unless there was something to be gained for his entire unit. Once, during a training exercise in the desert, he pulled rank to arrange for a special lunch delivery to his campsite: Big Macs and fries for everyone in his company. But he was also serious and intense. His weapon of choice was a fat .44 Magnum pistol known as a Desert Eagle, which he hoped would even the odds in case he encountered a would-be assassin looking to make his mark by killing a son of the monarchy.

  The stocky, thick-chested bin Zeid was also more Western than most of his colleagues, having attended college in Boston and worked as an intern for M
assachusetts’ junior U.S. senator, Democrat John Kerry. He spoke immaculate East Coast–accented English, and he was tight with his American counterparts in the CIA’s station in Amman, particularly a former Army Ranger named Darren LaBonte. The two men were frequently partners when the two agencies worked together on terrorism cases, and they had traveled the world together, from Eastern Europe to the Far East. Both newlyweds with young wives, they sometimes spent lazy weekends in a foursome on the Red Sea near Aqaba in bin Zeid’s boat.

  Bin Zeid and LaBonte would brainstorm about difficult cases, and few were more perplexing than that of the mysterious doctor the Jordanian was assigned to watch. The Mukhabarat had gathered reams of material on Balawi and had trailed him for weeks on his excruciatingly dull ten-mile trek from central Amman to the United Nations’ Center for Motherhood and Children, where he worked in the Marka refugee camp. Bin Zeid read the files and daily reports and pondered them, set them aside, then read them again.

  Who was this guy? bin Zeid wondered aloud to his colleagues.

  Nothing about Balawi fitted the usual pattern for terrorist or supporter of outlaw groups. There had been no brushes with the law, no record of violence, no known association with radical groups or even with Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, the creaky eighty-year-old social movement that by now was noted mostly for its fund-raising dinners for Iraqi orphans and widows.

  Instead the files depicted a young man of extraordinary ability and achievement. Balawi came from a stable college-educated family with no hint of scandal. He was faithful to his wife and doted on his two young girls. He had a do-gooder streak a mile wide, yet he showed no outward signs of religious fanaticism.

  His school records were singularly impressive. A graduate of Amman High School with top honors and a 97 percent grade point average. Winner of a college scholarship from the Jordanian government. Fluent in English.