The Triple Agent

by Joby Warrick

  After high school, he had been a shoo-in for the University of Jordan’s biosciences program, but he chose instead to go abroad to study medicine. He won admission to the University of Istanbul and, though he initially spoke not a word of Turkish, earned both a bachelor’s degree and doctorate of medicine in six years. Balawi had returned to Jordan with a Turkish wife, a college-educated journalist, and settled in an apartment in his father’s house. A wide array of career choices beckoned him, but he eventually decided to turn down a hospital assignment for one of the least glamorous medical positions in the city: tending to mothers and young children at the sprawling Marka camp, home to tens of thousands of ethnic Palestinians who had moved there as refugees after the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. The camp’s denizens quickly took a liking to the soft-eyed doctor, who was gentle with children yet also oddly serious for such a young man.

  “He wasn’t flirty like some of the others,” said one single mother from the camp who saw Balawi frequently. “He seemed very shy, and he didn’t joke a lot.”

  The portrait that emerged of Balawi was that of a social introvert who lived modestly and rarely went anywhere other than work. He drove a banged-up Ford Escort that doubled on most days as a free taxi service for any neighbors or patients who happened to need a lift. The Mukhabarat’s spies found nothing that suggested he was quietly meeting with Hamas or other radical groups or even knew who they were.

  Still, there was the matter of Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Balawi’s secret online hobby had become a big deal, even bigger, no doubt, than Balawi had ever dreamed. More disturbingly, his writings seemed to suggest a hidden connection with al-Qaeda. Abu Dujana had always lionized the terrorist group and its founder, Osama bin Laden, but lately he seemed to be speaking for them. Anytime al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came out with a new statement or video message, Abu Dujana was there with fresh analysis, annotating and interpreting Zawahiri’s stilted Arabic. His essays defending al-Qaeda’s tactics so closely reflected Zawahiri’s own views that they might have been written by Zawahiri himself. Whether al-Qaeda intended it or not, Abu Dujana had become a mouthpiece and booster for the terrorist group. And Muslims around the world were paying attention.

  Worse, Abu Dujana’s views were skewing increasingly radical. He had launched a personal crusade to rehabilitate Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the thuggish leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who made videos of himself cutting off the heads of American hostages. Jordanians had poured into the streets to denounce Zarqawi in 2005 after he launched a series of coordinated attacks on hotels in Amman, killing sixty people, many of them women and children who had been attending a wedding reception. But Abu Dujana called him a “tiger” who embodied a robust, energetic faith that true Muslims should aspire to. Most recently, amid torrents of bile over Israel’s military assault on Gaza on December 27, 2008, he began hinting about moving into an operational phase. “When will my words taste my blood?” he wrote.

  Humam al-Balawi, the doctor, ambled along as before. But Abu Dujana was hurtling down a dangerous path, inciting others to violence and threatening to join them. By mid-January 2009, Ali bin Zeid and his bosses had made up their minds: Abu Dujana had to go. Whether Balawi survived or perished along with his jihadist avatar was up to him.

  In the dark, the headquarters of the Mukhabarat looms over western Amman like a medieval fortress, with high walls of limestone blocks that have leached over the years to produce an oozy reddish stain. The oldest part of the complex was once one of the most feared prisons in the Middle East, a labyrinth of stone-walled cells reserved for suspected terrorists and other enemies of the state. The few who ventured inside told stories of dark passageways, of whips made of knotted electric cords, of shrieks and screams coming from the interrogation room late at night. Among some in Jordan, the building had earned a grim nickname, the Fingernail Factory.

  Times were different now, at least on the surface. Jordan’s media-savvy, pro-Western monarch, King Abdullah II, disliked seeing reports from human rights groups of torture by the country’s intelligence service. He dismantled the old prison and, in 2005, fired the Mukhabarat’s ruthlessly efficient director, Saad Kheir, a man with genteel English manners and the icy regard of a rattlesnake.

  But despite the happy talk about detainee rights and due process, the spy agency could ill afford to be seen as soft. Jordan, with a population of just over six million, was a moderate Arab state allied with the United States and officially at peace with Israel, policies that automatically made it a target for most of the region’s Islamic terrorist groups as well as Iran, which funded many of them. The country has long been a way station for Iraqi criminal gangs, Iranian provocateurs, Hamas, and Hezbollah. It has endured savage attacks from al-Qaeda, including Zarqawi’s 2005 killing spree in which suicide bombers blew themselves up in three Amman hotels. Zarqawi, who had spent five years as the Mukhabarat’s prisoner in the 1990s, had tried repeatedly to exact revenge by destroying the agency itself. In 2004 the Mukhabarat narrowly averted an attack on its headquarters after Zarqawi loaded a couple of trucks with enough explosives and poison gas to wipe out tens of thousands of people. In the end, it was a Mukhabarat informant—a Zarqawi foot soldier in Jordanian custody—who gave up the location of Zarqawi’s safe house near Baqubah, Iraq. On June 7, 2006, a pair of U.S. fighter jets dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the building, killing Zarqawi along with his wife and child and four others.

  What Humam al-Balawi knew of the Mukhabarat and its reputation is unclear. But somewhere between his house and the intelligence headquarters, Abu Dujana and all his bluster had faded from sight. Balawi was handcuffed and sandwiched between Mukhabarat agents, who had squeezed into seats on either side of him. One of them reached over and shoved a cloth hood over his face, pulling the drawstring tight.

  The foul-smelling covering not only blinded him but also made it hard to breathe. Metal cuffs bit into his wrists and forced him to lean forward in his seat.

  Your handcuffs will be as silver bracelets.

  The convoy wound through nearly deserted streets, past the mosque Balawi had attended since boyhood, past the empty bazaar, and past the elementary school with its concrete playground. It eased onto the modern highway that leads to central Amman, whizzing by shopping malls and gleaming hotels with bars lit in neon at this hour and past the expensive fitness clubs where men and women were said to work out together, paying money to sweat in air-conditioned rooms in their booty shorts, sports bras, and muscle shirts.

  The procession turned north to enter a new section of town known as Wadi as-Seer, a district of broad avenues and heavy limestone buildings with military guards but no signs to identify the occupants. Balawi felt the car stop, twice, at security checkpoints, and then the vehicle was inside a gate. It rolled through a series of connected courtyards until it halted outside a large stone building that serves as headquarters for the Mukhabarat’s “Knights of Truth,” the elite counterterrorism division. Unseen by the hooded Balawi were the imposing portraits of the last two Jordanian kings and the black flag of the intelligence service, bearing its motto in Arabic script: “Justice has come.”

  4.

  HUMILIATION

  Amman, Jordan—January 20, 2009

  Who is Abu Dujana al-Khorasani?

  Balawi was groggily aware of the question and was forming his words when he felt the sharp sting of a slap across his cheek. He was fully awake now, and the hood was finally gone. He was in a small cell with solid white walls, sitting on a wooden stool, the room’s only furnishing other than a battered desk, a fluorescent light, and a metal pin to which his legs were shackled. Two men were standing on either side of him, and one of them drew an arm back as though to hit him again.

  Who is Abu Dujana?

  You already know that it’s me, Balawi said, wearily.

  It was barely midmorning, and already Balawi had endured four rounds of interrogation. The aim was to quickly exhaust him, and it was working. An hou
r in the interrogation room, then two hours in his cell, then back under the lights with fresh interrogators. Between sessions he would try to sleep, but the moment his eyes closed the guards were at him again, shouting curses and banging doors. Then he was back in the interrogation room again, questions flying at him like swarms of blackflies.

  Who controls the al-Hesbah Web site? Who are the other writers? Where do they live? Who is your contact?

  When this inquiry yielded nothing, the Mukhabarat’s men probed Balawi’s personal life, his family history, his brothers, his Turkish in-laws, his school years abroad. Questions were reasked, twisted slightly, and asked again. Sometimes they carried implicit warnings, reminders of the Mukhabarat’s ability to touch Balawi where he lived.

  Where did you get your medical license? Are you sure it’s valid?

  Your father is not Jordanian, is he? Are his papers up-to-date?

  What about your Turkish wife? Your children are Turks, too, aren’t they?

  The threats were real, as Balawi well knew. His father was one of more than a million Palestinians to whom Jordan has played reluctant host since the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948 sent them in search of refuge. For a noncitizen, crossing any of dozens of invisible lines could mean forfeiting the right to a Jordanian passport or residency papers. Work permits, including professional licenses, can be voided over mere suspicions. The message was clear: Cooperate or lose everything.

  By now Balawi could distinguish among his interrogators. The division chief, dubbed the Red Devil by other detainees, was Ali Burjak, the part-Turkish senior officer who was one of the most feared men in Jordan. Heavy and short, with reddish, close-cropped hair, he had famously broken some of the country’s most hardened criminals and terrorists, and he also had tangled with journalists, opposition figures, and others who had fallen afoul of the state. He took special delight, it was widely said, in humiliating his captives, sometimes by forcing them to confess gratuitously to incest or other sexual crimes.

  Working with Burjak was a small team of counterterrorism specialists from the Knights of Truth. They were considered the elite of the Mukhabarat, in part because they worked most closely with foreign intelligence agencies and also because they did everything: conducting surveillance; intercepting phone signals; making arrests; interrogating captives. The group took orders from Burjak and his deputy, a man called Habis. The other officer who stood out was the stout, hazel-eyed captain who had been present during the arrest. Though quieter and less abrasive than some of the others, he was treated by his peers with a deference that seemed disproportionate to his captain’s bars. The men called him Sharif Ali.

  When the Mukhabarat’s men ran out of questions, Balawi was led back to his cell, which was newly built and clean but tiny, measuring nine by six feet, and furnished with a cot and blanket, a two-way mirror, and a metal commode and sink. The hood was again pulled over his face, and the cell’s thick metal door was slammed shut, leaving Balawi alone in complete darkness. He felt his way to the cot, sat, and waited.

  Minutes passed, then an hour. Or was it two? From his darkened cocoon, there was no way to tell.

  The hooding was standard treatment, a way of softening up Balawi for an extended cycle of interrogation and isolation that was just getting under way. Nearly all detainees are blindfolded, sometimes for days at a time. Unable to see, and hearing only muffled sounds through the cell’s steel door, they quickly become disoriented and lose all sense of time. In medical studies, volunteers subjected to similar forms of sensory deprivation begin hallucinating in as little as fifteen minutes. Longer periods induce extreme anxiety, helplessness, and depression. In one study, British scientists discovered that people held under such conditions for forty-eight hours could be made to experience any symptom by mere suggestion. A comfortably dry room could suddenly become freezing cold, or filled with water, or alive with snakes.

  Balawi tried reciting prayers to keep his mind focused. But as he later admitted, he was pricked with fear about what was coming and when it would arrive. He would be beaten, no doubt, and probably worse. Was he tough enough to take it? Would he crack and give up the names of contacts? What if they threatened to hurt his wife or the girls? What if they went after his father? Balawi waited, straining for any meaningful sound—footsteps, jangling keys, the tap of a truncheon against cinder block as the guards paced the long corridor.

  At some point Balawi remembered his dream. A few weeks earlier he had had a vision of seeing Zarqawi. Balawi had idealized his fellow Jordanian and had wept like a child when the terrorist was killed in the U.S. missile strike in 2006. But in the dream Zarqawi was alive again and, to Balawi’s surprise, visiting his father’s house.

  “Aren’t you dead?” Balawi asked him. Zarqawi’s face fairly glowed in the moonlight, and he was busy preparing for something. Balawi guessed it was a bombing.

  “I was killed, but I am as you see me, alive,” Zarqawi said.

  Unsure of what to say to the man whose videotapes he had endlessly watched on the Internet, Balawi fumbled for the right words. Would Zarqawi accept his help? What if Balawi gave him his car? What if they could become martyrs together?

  Zarqawi said nothing, and the dream abruptly ended. Balawi awoke unsettled and days later was so haunted by the strange encounter that he told several friends about it. What could it mean?

  Everyone agreed that the dream was an omen. One friend told Balawi that the vision was a warning, a signal that he was about to be arrested. But another said Zarqawi was conveying a blessing. Balawi, he said, had been called by God for special service, an act of jihad for which he had been specially chosen.

  “You will mobilize in Allah’s path,” the friend said.

  Twenty-four hours after his arrest, Balawi was showing the strain of a second day without sleep. His voice rasped with exasperation, but there was no fight in his eyes. Across the table from him, the Mukhabarat’s men were just getting started.

  Who is Abu Shadiyah? Who is Yaman Mukhaddab?

  The questioners this time were Ali bin Zeid and a younger officer, and the subject had turned to the identities of other bloggers and commentators who shared the same Web space as Abu Dujana. Balawi could plausibly claim ignorance. Like him, the writers used fake names, and almost no one knew who they really were or where they lived. As far as Balawi knew, the other bloggers might be U.S. intelligence agents. Some of them almost certainly were.

  Then a new question: Tell us about your plans for a martyrdom operation.

  The younger of the interrogators pulled a page from Balawi’s file and began to read aloud. Balawi recognized his own words, from an essay he had written after watching a news broadcast about the recent Israeli air strikes in Gaza. News footage showed Israeli women and girls on a rooftop watching as U.S.-made F-16 attack planes pounded targets in Gaza City. The women were taking turns with a pair of binoculars, chatting and laughing as though they were witnessing a polo match. Laughing! As he watched, Balawi felt revulsion sweep over him until it slowly turned inward, filling him with a mixture of rage and loathing, much of it aimed at his cowardly self.

  That had been two weeks before. Now Balawi was silent. Spent.

  “When will my words drink from my blood?” continued the interrogator, reading from the printed sheet. “I feel my words have expired, and to those who preach jihad, I advise you not to fall into my dilemma and the nightmare I have that I may die one day in my bed.”

  Ali bin Zeid regarded the detainee for a long moment. Tough talk. But this man is no Zarqawi.

  Bin Zeid had worked with real terrorists, hard-core jihadis so fanatical that they welcomed death and refused to break no matter what the Mukhabarat threw at them. Balawi had run out of steam on the first day. His words were full of bluster, but the man with the drooping eyelids in front of him was soft and weak.

  He was also jarringly familiar, like someone bin Zeid might have known in school. They were roughly the same age. Both were college educated and had lived abro
ad. They both descended from tribes with ancestral roots in the Arabian Peninsula and claims of ties to the Prophet Muhammad. Their families were well traveled and understood the world outside Jordan. Balawi was married with young girls; bin Zeid was a newlywed hoping to have children soon.

  Bin Zeid could even appreciate, in an abstract way, the deep resentments that animated Balawi’s online persona. Despite his government’s official policy of peaceful coexistence with Israel, bin Zeid had often experienced a twinge of bitterness on mornings when he sat on his back porch, high on a ridge overlooking the Dead Sea, and gazed at the fertile plains to the north and west, lands that had once belonged to Arabs. Nearly all Jordanians had been angered when Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza in late December, killing more than five hundred Hamas militants and civilians in what Arabs viewed as a wildly disproportionate response to Palestinian rocket attacks.

  But somewhere Balawi had fallen off a cliff, bin Zeid and his colleagues reasoned. Against all logic and his own self-interest, he had embraced a virulent philosophy that threatened to destroy everything that Jordan had achieved in a half century of faltering progress toward modernity. He had risked his reputation and his own family in the service of fanatics living in caves two thousand miles away.

  How such a thing could happen to such a clever, world-wise young man as Balawi was unfathomable. But this much was clear: Abu Dujana would cease to exist, and Balawi’s life would radically change. From now on the doctor and the Mukhabarat would be permanently tethered. Balawi’s ability to work, travel, own a house, or clothe his children would depend on the spy agency’s generosity and Balawi’s good behavior. And if the Mukhabarat needed something—no matter how big or small—Balawi would have no choice but to comply.

  The man in the prisoner’s chair had not yet fully grasped this new reality, but he would. From the looks of him, it would not take much longer.