by Joby Warrick
On the third day of Humam al-Balawi’s incarceration, his father and oldest brother, Muhammad, hired a taxi and made the trip across town to Wadi as-Seer and the Mukhabarat headquarters. A Jordanian soldier armed with an M4 assault rifle motioned the car to stop a few dozen yards from the main security gate, forcing the old man to walk the rest of the way while his eldest son waited behind. The weather had been cold and gray all week, and a northeast wind tugged at Khalil al-Balawi’s white kaffiyeh as he crossed the parking lot and headed toward the small building where visitors were screened for weapons and bombs.
At the guard station, Khalil al-Balawi gave his name and asked to speak to a Mukhabarat officer, a Colonel Fawas, who was expecting him.
“I am here to pick up my son,” he said.
He was handed a number on a scrap of paper and shown to a waiting area, a small room with white marble floors and a few leather chairs. A large portrait of King Abdullah II, in military parade dress and festooned with sashes and medals, looked down disapprovingly.
All my life I have managed to avoid this place, he thought, until today.
By now the family had deduced the reason for Humam’s arrest. The government’s agents had seized computer equipment, and Defne had told them about her husband’s fascination with Internet chat rooms. Khalil al-Balawi, a teacher of Arabic literature and religion before his retirement, knew little of such things. But he had learned from a Mukhabarat official that his son was cooperating and would be ready for release on Thursday, ahead of the Muslim weekend.
The old man had been so anxious he had hardly slept. As he waited, his mind raced, and he thought of Humam as a young boy: whip smart, stubborn, insatiably curious, and—out of all of his ten children—the one most like himself.
Papa, why did God create people?
Why, Humam, the purpose of man is to worship his Creator.
{Silence.}
Papa, why did God create ants?
An hour ticked past, and then two. Other numbers were called, and now the waiting room was nearly empty. Worried that something bad had happened, Khalil al-Balawi shuffled back to the guard station and—an old man in failing health to a goodhearted servant of His Majesty—pleaded politely for information. A phone call was made, and the explanation obtained.
“I’m sorry, Ya ammo Balawi, but your son is no longer here,” the head officer said.
“Where is he?”
“He is at home, of course,” came the reply. “He was dropped off an hour ago.”
Khalil al-Balawi was soon tearing across Amman as fast as the afternoon traffic would permit, while he and Muhammad ran through a list of possible explanations for the abrupt change. Was Humam injured? Perhaps scarred? Since when did the Mukhabarat offer detainees a courtesy ride home?
As central Amman gave way to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, the old man gave in to brooding. The Balawis were cursed. It was happening again.
Life had begun badly for Khalil al-Balawi, who was born into turbulence in 1943 in a village near Beersheba, in what is now southern Israel. By his fifth birthday his family had witnessed massacres, reprisal killings, and finally the all-out warfare that split Palestine into two states and sent tens of thousands of Arabs, the Balawis included, into exile. The small lot where he played as a boy was now a cotton field owned by a Jewish consortium, off-limits to the Balawis forever.
His laborer father had eventually settled in Jordan, and the family, particularly Khalil, a gifted student whose high academic marks and college degree were the pride of the Balawi clan, had prospered. But with few jobs available in Jordan, Khalil had moved with his new bride to Kuwait, where he had accepted a teacher’s post. He was promoted to department head and was content to live out his days in safe, sensible Kuwait, with its moderate policies and flush, oil-fed economy. Then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard rolled into Kuwait City in August 1990 to kick off six months of military occupation, looting, and war. After the defeat of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition in 1991, the Kuwaitis immediately expelled more than three hundred thousand Jordanians living in the country, because of their government’s support for Iraq during the conflict. Khalil al-Balawi managed to save a few family treasures, but between the occupation and expulsion he lost everything else he owned.
In Jordan once again, he had scraped to put his children through college and was looking forward to a quieter time, surrounded by contented, prosperous children and grandkids. Now a half century of upheaval and misfortune could not match the pain he felt deep in his chest.
The car pulled up to the curb on Urwa bin al-Ward Street, and Khalil al-Balawi climbed out quickly and entered the house ahead of his eldest son. There in the living room, on the black sofa framed by the old man’s books, was Humam.
“Salaam alekum, Humam,” the father said. “Peace be with you.”
Humam said nothing. He could not bring himself to look into his father’s eyes.
The two sat in silence. Finally Humam spoke, his head still bowed.
“I have cleared the family’s name, Father,” he said.
“Humam, you did not have to do anything,” the old man said. “Our family name is clean.”
Days passed before Humam uttered another word to his family. His father believed his son would eventually open up about what had happened, so he did not pry. Five days went by, then a week. Finally, on a day when the two were again alone in the living room, Khalil al-Balawi could no longer contain himself.
“Did they beat you?” he asked softly.
Humam lifted his head, finally, to meet his father’s gaze. His cheeks were flushed, and when he finally spoke, his words, in Arabic, were a barely audible hiss.
“No,” he said. “They humiliated me.”
5.
THE INFORMANT
Amman, Jordan—February 8, 2009
Ali bin Zeid squeezed his big frame into his office chair and scowled at the computer screen. The half-written file, already coded “secret” but awaiting a conclusion that he would provide, if only he could decide what it should be, was still there. The report bore an Arabic caption that read “Assessment” and “Humam Khalil al-Balawi,” and it was entirely routine. Except for this last part, the ending.
What potential is seen for this subject? That was the stumper.
Bin Zeid was tired, feeling the strain of the Mukhabarat’s peculiarly erratic hours and the stress of so many difficult cases, including this one. It annoyed him that he rarely had time for a decent meal with his wife, let alone the honeymoon that he had been promising her for more than a year. The late-winter sun was just low enough in the sky to bathe his fourth-floor office in a golden glare that washed out electronic type and made the room stuffy. Bin Zeid turned away from the screen and again picked up Balawi’s paper file. He began to read.
Humam al-Balawi had talked, eventually.
On his third day in the Mukhabarat’s vise, and in a handful of secret meetings afterward, the physician gave up names of figures inside al-Hesbah and other jihadist Web sites. He told what he knew about networks of jihadist bloggers and their funding. He spoke so openly that the chains and cuffs came off, and the sessions became freewheeling conversations. Afterward he would sit quietly, face flushed, head cradled in his hands, awash in unspoken emotion.
Balawi swore to his interrogators that in his heart of hearts, he opposed terrorism in all its forms. It was a claim that seemed wildly at odds with his posts lauding such notorious butchers as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
“It is true that I like to express my feelings in my writing,” he said at one point. “But I’m against violence, including military action. Our religion forbids terrorism.” Balawi surveyed the skeptical faces around him. It’s not who I am, he protested. The blogs, the fake persona, the cries for blood—none of it was real.
It’s just a hobby, he said.
After his release the Mukhabarat’s men fanned out to try to corroborate his information. They also deepened their scrutiny of Balawi himself
, tapping his phones, trailing his movements, and reaching outside Jordan for evidence of ties to terrorist groups. The agency placed Captain Ali bin Zeid in charge of Balawi’s file and passed the essentials to the CIA, which shared space with the Jordanians in a joint counterterrorism center in a building on the outskirts of Amman. The American intelligence agency would want to check the names Balawi provided against its own database.
The more they probed, the murkier and more dangerous Balawi’s secret life appeared. Despite his claims about opposing violence, he had sought at least twice to join the Zarqawi-led Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the officers discovered. Why he had ultimately failed to do so was unclear. Perhaps his courage had flagged, or he had felt guilty about orphaning his children; possibly he had been forced to admit to himself that he was a poor candidate for guerrilla warfare, lacking in both physical strength and military training. As a backup plan, he canvassed friends and relatives to collect money for the insurgency and raised just over fourteen hundred dollars before abandoning the effort. After Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2008, he had tried to volunteer as a Hamas medic to treat Palestinian wounded.
Balawi had also had a flirtation, and possibly more, with a known terrorist organization in Turkey, it was learned. While living in Istanbul as a student, he had attended meetings of the Islami Büyükdoğu Akincilar-Cephesi, or Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front, a group that claims kinship with al-Qaeda and advocates the overthrow of secular governments in the Middle East, from Ankara to Amman to Cairo. Turkish police have credited the IBDA-C with several spectacular terrorist attacks, including bombings of two synagogues in Istanbul in 2003 that killed twenty-four people.
Balawi’s interest in the group was something he apparently shared with the woman he eventually married, Turkish sources revealed. Humam and Defne Bayrak were first introduced in 2001 in an Internet chat room for young Muslims. After the two began dating, they connected with other couples at social events that were essentially recruitment sessions for the Raiders’ Front: small-group lectures, fund-raisers to support Palestinian militants.
Defne, tall and lithe with a doll’s porcelain complexion, had admired Humam’s intelligence but really fell for his conservative politics, according to her own account. She had been living at her parents’ house in Istanbul, working as a journalist and brushing up on her Arabic-language studies, when the Jordanian medical student burst into her life. Three months later, they were making wedding plans.
“I liked his personality, his piousness, his strict following of the religion,” she said.
During their courtship the couple began to change. Neither had ever been considered devout in a traditional sense. Defne wore a head scarf in public, but so do a majority of Turkey’s adult women. Humam had memorized large portions of the Koran as a child but regularly skipped Friday prayers at the mosque and referred derisively to his native Jordan as “that Islamic country.” But as a couple he and Defne embraced a creed that was gaining popularity among Turkey’s college-educated elite and whose chief tenet was rage against the non-Muslim West. Rooted in the same decades-old resentments expressed by millions of other Muslims, but peculiar to privileged young adults who came into maturity in the age of al-Qaeda, this brand of faith perceived CIA and Israeli intelligence plots behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Its adherents saw the invasions and occupations of Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan as part of a Western crusade to destroy and corrupt Islam, loot natural resources, and slaughter thousands of innocents.
Humam and Defne’s new passion was partly driven by personal and family history: Humam was a son of Palestinian refugees and treated refugee children; Defne had worked for conservative Turkish newspapers, translating Arabic news accounts about fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defne, who friends say was the more strident of the two, had also translated laudatory books about al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The former had been titled Osama bin Laden, the Che Guevara of the East.
But in each other Humam and Defne had found a partner whose political views reinforced and amplified their own. Later, when they had children, even choosing their names became a means of asserting their beliefs.
The couple named their older girl after Leila Khaled, a Palestinian woman who hijacked a TWA jetliner in 1969 and served time in a British jail. The younger was named after a Swedish-born Palestinian filmmaker named Lina Makboul. Her best-known work is a documentary titled Leila Khaled: Hijacker.
Now bin Zeid did what he often did when he needed to think. From the high perch of his pilot’s seat in the cockpit of a Boeing 737, he checked his flaps and eased the throttle forward. The stripes of the runway began falling toward him in a quickening stream. He tugged on the yoke, and with a roar, the jet’s nose tilted skyward, clearing the trees and hills and soaring into an endless expanse of blue.
Bin Zeid took off his headset and leaned back in his chair, staring at the computer screen. Physically he was still in Jordan, in the house he had built overlooking the Dead Sea. Bin Zeid had set up the flight simulator on his computer so that it was just like a real cockpit, with controls and pedals and even realistic engine sounds that he downloaded to match the specific plane he was flying. He would set a course for a distant city and then, once the wheels were up, sit in silence for an hour or more as the plane moved over empty seas. His hobby mystified some of his family members, but bin Zeid claimed it was therapeutic.
It helps me think, he would say.
That’s your problem, was the usual retort. Too much thinking.
But bin Zeid craved space when working through a complicated puzzle. If he had a day to himself, he would slip into the desert in his Land Rover with his two dogs or head south to the Red Sea with his wife, Fida, to anchor his boat in a desolate cove with no other humans in sight. In photos he always seemed to be in the same place: alone on a beach chair in his shorts and floppy camouflage hat, eyes fixed on some indiscernible point on the horizon.
Bin Zeid had fallen in love with America as a land of endless horizons. During holiday weekends at Emerson College he would hit the road in his car, sometimes alone, sometimes with his brother, Hassan, who was attending school across town at Boston University. When time was short, he would drive to Cape Cod to wander the beaches or sit in the cheap seats at Fenway Park to ponder the mysteries of American baseball and the allure of the frankfurter. During longer breaks he would drive alone to snow-covered Montreal or discover a secluded lake hidden among the hills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
His need to roam was one of many traits that set him apart and made him something of an oddity at the Jordanian intelligence service. CIA acquaintances joked that the hardworking, plain-living bin Zeid was the “most unroyal of the royals.” But some Jordanian colleagues had trouble seeing past his ties to the monarchy and decidedly Western lifestyle. His superiors worried that family connections would eventually catapult bin Zeid to the top, pushing veterans aside and giving the royal family an even tighter grip on the spy agency. Fellow officers admired his energy but also were acutely aware of the gulf between their lives and his. It wasn’t just money and privilege, though everyone knew about bin Zeid’s Boston education and the small Bertram fishing yacht he and his brothers kept anchored in Aqaba Harbor. It was also bin Zeid’s apparent detachment from the conventions that governed the life choices of most Jordanian men his age. Though a Muslim, he had married a woman from Jordan’s tiny Christian minority, a dark-haired beauty named Fida Dawani. In a culture that considers dogs unclean, bin Zeid was openly affectionate toward Jackie, a German shepherd he had acquired as a puppy, and her shaggy offspring, Huskie. The two rode around Amman in bin Zeid’s truck as though they were a couple of cattle dogs on a Wyoming ranch.
Bin Zeid could shrug off the comments about his pets, but he detested it when people treated him differently because of his royal blood. Although colleagues persisted in calling him Sharif Ali, he introduced himself as Captain at work and as just Ali to nei
ghborhood shopkeepers. The local repairman who serviced bin Zeid’s desktop computer took a liking to the affable young man who would linger in his shop to dissect the day’s news, sometimes bringing in a pizza to share with the technicians. Years passed before he learned that low-key, jeans-wearing Ali was both a Mukhabarat officer and a cousin to the king.
At work, however, bin Zeid was all business. As a boy he had written in an essay that he planned to devote his life to serving his country, offering that it was “very important for an individual to be willing to die for his country.” He went to work at the Mukhabarat soon after graduating from college and poured himself into the job. He was pulled into some of the agency’s biggest terrorism cases, including the investigations into the Zarqawi-led suicide bombings in Amman in 2005. And increasingly, he became an indispensable conduit between the intelligence service and the CIA. The two agencies had worked closely since the 1960s, and by 2001 much of the Mukhabarat’s budget was underwritten by its cash-flush American partner. From Langley’s perspective, it was a smart investment: The Jordanian agency was a reliable partner, and its operatives were deemed among the best in the world.
Bin Zeid occupied a unique place within this special relationship. He understood Americans and their language better than anyone in the Mukhabarat, and the U.S. agency routinely asked for him whenever the two countries worked together on joint investigations. When the two agencies clashed over tactics, it fell to bin Zeid to serve as mediator and bridge.
The Balawi case was a perfect example. Two weeks after his arrest, Humam al-Balawi remained a cipher to the Mukhabarat. Yes, he had given up names of jihadist writers, but his confessions were looking less impressive on closer examination. The writers were either minor players or prominent figures whose identities were already known. Balawi had kept clean since his release and halted his Web columns—he never had a choice about that—but bin Zeid saw no hard evidence that he had changed his views or could be trusted.