The Triple Agent

by Joby Warrick

  “We pray to God to give us the ability to destroy the White House, New York and London,” he told a television interviewer. “And we have trust in God. Very soon, we will be witnessing jihad’s miracles.”

  Baitullah’s insistence on his own supremacy in all things—military strategy as well as more mundane matters such as the divvying up of profits from contraband smuggling—sometimes sparked violent clashes with other Mehsuds. The diminutive commander also seemed to delight in agitating the Haqqanis and other militant groups by picking gratuitous fights with the Pakistani army and intelligence service, practically daring Islamabad to come after him, as eventually it did. Once, after surrounding and capturing an entire garrison of 250 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary troops, Baitullah proceeded to cut off the heads of three of his prisoners as the opening gambit in a negotiated prisoner swap.

  It was a far cry from the idealized holy war that Balawi had championed in his blog. Baitullah Mehsud was neither a revolutionary nor a prophet. He was a thug with a massively inflated ego, a murderer who enjoyed killing other Muslims. He presided over a town that was dirty, backward, and mean, where girls barely older than Balawi’s daughter Leila were condemned to lives of little or no formal education and no appreciable rights, in a region where a newborn is three times more likely to die in his first year of life than a child born in Balawi’s native Jordan.

  For the moment, though, Baitullah Mehsud was the best friend Balawi had. The two men could barely communicate except in fragments of Arabic or Pashto. But Baitullah had become convinced of the Jordanian’s sincerity. He had devised a singularly cruel test to prove it.

  The plan, according to a Pakistani Taliban official familiar with the details, called for Balawi to use his open channel to the CIA to order a missile attack on Baitullah Mehsud—only the real target would be a decoy, not the Taliban leader himself. Balawi was to send word that Baitullah would be traveling in a district called Ladha in a specific car, a Toyota hatchback model that local tribesmen have dubbed Ghwagai or “the cow.” Inside, posing as Baitullah, would be one of his trusted drivers. All other details about the car and its route would precisely match the description given to the CIA by Balawi.

  It worked exactly as planned, according to a version of events related by two Taliban officials. A missile flattened the car, killing the man who had posed as the Mehsud leader. The incident was never reported by local news media and never confirmed by the CIA. But it became instant legend among Baitullah’s men.

  Mehsud later claimed that the driver knew of the plan and consented to sacrifice himself to help his boss and assist Balawi’s efforts to prove his worth to the CIA. To outsiders it might seem an extravagant waste of a life. But the Taliban chief brought his own calculus to such decisions. Every American missile that lit up the sky over Pakistan, he said, was like a recruiting poster, driving more angry young men and boys into his camps.

  “Every drone strike,” he would say, “brings me three or four new suicide bombers.”

  On August 5, Baitullah Mehsud and a small group of trusted guards moved their quarters under cover of darkness to Zanghara, a tiny town a few miles east of the Taliban stronghold of Makeen. At the edge of the village was a large, high-walled compound well known to him. It was the home of his father-in-law, Malik Ikramuddin, and the young girl who had recently become his second wife. Now thirty-five and the father of four girls from another marriage, Mehsud had decided to put serious effort into producing a male heir.

  Unknown to the Pakistani, his every move was being recorded. Two sets of mechanical eyes—a Predator drone and a smaller one hovering at close range—had trailed him to Zanghara and watched him enter the mud-brick farmhouse where he was staying. One of the drones maneuvered to get a clear view into the second-floor room where Mehsud was staying. In Langley, Virginia, six thousand miles away, a series of urgent messages pulsed through the corridors of the executive wing: The target’s identity had been confirmed. It would be a clean shot.

  But suddenly Mehsud was moving again, padding around the upper floors of the house in his white shalwar kameez. The Predator’s pilot and weapons operator eased off on their controls and watched their screens. They would have to wait.

  It was a brutally hot night, and Mehsud was restless. His diabetes made him constantly thirsty, and his legs were swollen and achy. Shortly after midnight he opened a small door and, trailed by a second robed figure carrying medical equipment, climbed out onto the roof. A full moon bathed the rooftop in light and illuminated Mehsud’s bearded form as distinctly as if he were onstage. There was a small mattress on the roof, and Mehsud walked over to it and flopped down, belly first. The second figure knelt next to him and began to set up what appeared to be an intravenous drip. The CIA’s analysts quickly concluded that the other person was a doctor. Could it be Balawi? It didn’t matter. The Predator team armed their Hellfires a second time.

  The missile launch awaited only final approval from the CIA director, but now there was a hitch. Leon Panetta had authorized a strike on a second-floor bedroom, but Baitullah Mehsud was lying on the roof on the building. The change was not insignificant: Panetta had insisted on maximum precautions to prevent the deaths of innocents, particularly women and children. What if the missile caused the entire building to collapse? Panetta would have to sign off on the change, or not. And he would have to decide quickly or risk letting the opportunity slip away.

  At that precise moment Panetta was not in his CIA office but in downtown Washington, attending a meeting of the National Security Council at the White House. A little before 4:00 P.M. Washington time, he excused himself from the meeting and walked into the hallway to take an urgent call. He frowned as he listened, visibly worried. For several minutes he paced the floor with his cell phone to his ear, asking questions and going over details and options. By some accounts there were dozens of people staying in the same house as Mehsud, including mothers with children.

  “Is that thing going to collapse?” Panetta asked. “What’s in there? Are there women and family members around?”

  On the other end of the line, his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, and a senior counterterrorism adviser passed along updates. It was a tricky shot, from twenty-three thousand feet away, but the agency would use a smaller, less destructive missile, Panetta was told. The targeting would be extraordinarily precise. And the damage would be minimal.

  Panetta gave his consent.

  It was now 1:00 A.M. in the Pakistani village. Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban and chief protector of the Jordanian physician Humam al-Balawi, now lay on his back, resting as the IV machine dripped fluid into his veins. At his feet, a pair of young hands, belonging not to a doctor, as the CIA supposed, but to his new wife, were massaging his swollen legs. Barely aware of the buzzing of a distant drone, oblivious of the faint hissing of the missile as it cleaved the night air, he took a deep breath and looked up at the stars.

  The rocket struck Mehsud where he lay, penetrating just below the chest and cutting him in two. A small charge of high explosives detonated, hurling his wife backward and gouging a small crater in the bricks and plaster at the spot where she had knelt. The small blast reverberated against the nearby hills, and then silence.

  Overhead, the drones continued to hover for several minutes, camera still whirring. A report was hastily prepared and relayed to Panetta at the White House.

  Two confirmed dead, no other deaths or serious injuries. Building still stands.

  8.

  PRESSURE

  Langley, Virginia—August 2009

  On August 11, nearly a week after the CIA’s missile strike, a Taliban spokesman phoned Pakistani journalists to denounce “ridiculous” rumors about the death of Baitullah Mehsud. The Taliban leader was “alive, safe and sound,” he said, adding that the world would soon see proof.

  By that date Leon Panetta had already seen all the proof he could stomach. The missile impact that killed Mehsud had been captured on video and repl
ayed, in its grisly entirety, on the giant monitor in Panetta’s own office at Langley. As if that were not enough, a second video surfaced, showing the Taliban commander’s body as his comrades prepared to bury him. The CIA’s counterterrorism team looked into the face of the man whose death they had ordered, pale and serene now in his crude wooden coffin, his head resting on a pillow strewn with marigolds. The hand of an unseen mourner stroked the corpse’s face, brushing against the dozen or more fresh scars that pocked the skin around his eyes and forehead.

  Panetta had little time to dwell on the images. That week his staff was caught up in the drafting of a proposal that he would deliver in person to the White House in the coming days. The CIA had unfinished business in Pakistan’s tribal belt, and Panetta would make a personal appeal to the president for help. Of the many secret plans he would approve as CIA director, none was more likely to change the course of the country’s war against al-Qaeda than this one.

  The successful targeting of Mehsud had only served to underscore the urgent nature of the work that still lay ahead. For one thing, Mehsud’s “devices” remained unaccounted for. All summer, as the CIA searched for the Taliban leader, thousands of Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships swept the Taliban’s valley strongholds, picking off the forts and hideouts one by one. By the time the campaign ended, the Pakistanis were sitting on a mountain of small arms and enough explosives to supply a madrassa full of suicide bombers. But they found no trace of a dirty bomb. The radiation detectors never sounded at all. The CIA’s counterterrorism chiefs puzzled for weeks over the meaning of the missing devices. Many Taliban survivors had fled into neighboring North Waziristan to take shelter with that province’s dominant militant group, the Haqqani network. Had they taken their bombs with them? Had it all been some kind of trick? On this, the classified reports were silent. There was no further talk of devices in the agency’s intercepts, and back in Washington, Obama administration officials made no mention of the dirty bomb scare. Publicly, it was as though the threat had never existed.

  More ominously, Baitullah Mehsud’s Taliban faction had quickly regrouped and was veering off onto a dangerous new course. The missile strike on August 5 had created a temporary leadership vacuum and touched off several bloody rounds of street fighting among Mehsud’s would-be successors, but now Baitullah’s charismatic cousin, the recklessly ambitious Hakimullah Mehsud, was firmly in charge. While Baitullah Mehsud had contented himself with waging attacks against Pakistani soldiers and police, his cousin was more virulently anti-American and also more willing to commit his forces into alliances with al-Qaeda and other militant groups attacking American troops in Afghanistan. Greater numbers of Mehsud fighters were signing up with al-Qaeda’s Shadow Army, a paramilitary force led by a Libyan commander, Abdullah Said al Libi, that wore its own distinctive uniform and carried out lightning raids on military targets on both sides of the border. These were al-Qaeda’s new shock troops, and they were drawing funds and recruits from as far away as Saudi Arabia and Kashmir.

  This was Panetta’s dilemma. The CIA’s missiles were finding their marks, but it wasn’t enough. Slain commanders were being quickly replaced, often with younger leaders with more extreme views and international ambitions. Al-Qaeda was adapting, commanding a widening network of committed followers from the region’s patchwork of militant tribal groups. Meanwhile the terrorist group’s most senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his operational commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were coordinating strategy from secure hiding places. Something more was needed to flush them out.

  In the late summer and early fall Panetta and his team finalized the detailed plan the director would present to the president and his National Security Council, which was in the middle of a months-long review of its Afghanistan strategy. Panetta had a long wish list, but the lead item was the most critical one: more robot planes—lots of them. Not just Predators, but the newer, more powerful Reaper aircraft, along with operators and hardware to support them. Panetta wanted to dramatically increase the pressure on al-Qaeda, not only with increased firepower but also with blanket surveillance, enough human and mechanical eyes watching the tribal region around the clock to detect the movement of even small groups of fighters. It would be “the most aggressive operation in the agency’s history,” Panetta later said, and its chief aim would be to find and destroy the graybeards who were the root cause of all the trouble.

  “The leadership of al-Qaeda—from bin Laden down to the top twenty—these guys are located in a place that is our primary target,” Panetta said. “And we’re the point of the spear.”

  When it was time to make his case, Panetta made the trip to the White House to deliver his pitch to President Obama in person.

  “Mr. President,” he began, “in order to really accomplish our mission, these are the things I need.” He proceeded to describe al-Qaeda’s resilience in the tribal region and his plan for ratcheting up the pressure, denying the terrorists even the smallest space to hide or regroup.

  Obama looked at Panetta thoughtfully for a moment and turned to his aides.

  “We’re going to do what Leon wants,” he said.

  The discussion was over.

  It would take months to deploy the new orbits, as the systems of unmanned aircraft and operators were called, but the agency proceeded immediately to put pieces of the new plan into place. CIA targeters would be needed not only in Langley but also nearer to the front line, to coordinate a highly specific search for senior al-Qaeda leaders.

  The limits of the new strategy were understood. The Predator was an impressive machine, but air power and advanced robotics could accomplish only so much against a widely dispersed enemy that hid among the local population in Pakistan’s tribal region. The same kinds of technology had helped turn the tide against Iraq’s insurgents, but there was an important distinction: In U.S.-occupied Iraq, U.S. Special Forces commandos had free rein to go anywhere in the country. They worked in tandem with the drones and could rapidly act on new intelligence during any time of day or night, inserting small teams on the ground to kill or capture. No such possibilities existed in Pakistan.

  There was yet another problem. To eliminate al-Qaeda’s generals, the CIA first had to find them. Nine years after Osama bin Laden’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. intelligence officials had no idea where he was.

  It was even worse than the public knew. In the years since September 11, several U.S. officials suggested in interviews that the CIA knew roughly where Osama bin Laden was hiding. Those claims had been wishful thinking, at best. The last credible report of a bin Laden sighting came in 2002, shortly after the Saudi terrorist fled from his Tora Bora stronghold on the Afghanistan border into Pakistan. Since then there had been nothing: no near misses, no tangible leads, not even a single substantive tip. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a moment of candor, acknowledged in a 2009 television interview that “it has been years” since the bin Laden case had been active.

  “We don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is,” Gates said. “If we did, we’d go get him.”

  Occasionally, leads emerged that would revive interest in the hunt. One of the most promising involved an al-Qaeda courier reputed to deliver messages between the terrorist group’s operational commanders and bin Laden, who studiously avoided telephones and electronic messages. Nearly all the CIA’s targeters, including Jennifer Matthews and Elizabeth Hanson, had been caught up in the search for the courier in some way. After two years of hard work and lucky breaks, the agency finally deduced the man’s name in 2007; yet two years later, it had no idea where to find him, or whether he was even alive.

  The failure to find bin Laden was the fly in the ointment, the big black asterisk that overshadowed what had been the greatest tactical success in the CIA’s history: the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban and the routing of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Even as New York’s twin towers still smoldered, the agency had led an offensive so overwhelming that only a few hun
dred foot soldiers and a handful of senior leaders managed to slip away, leaving thousands of others dead or in prison camps.

  The Taliban’s defeat had been engineered by a small group of CIA officers who had been spoiling for a chance to go after bin Laden since long before he dispatched his teams of hijackers to crash airliners into buildings in New York and Washington. With their input, within hours of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA director George Tenet had a plan on President Bush’s desk that would allow the White House to immediately go on the attack against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, rather than wait for the Pentagon to organize a conventional military campaign. In a meeting with the president on September 13, J. Cofer Black, then the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, described how a force of CIA-led commando teams and friendly Afghan Northern Alliance fighters could defeat the planners of the September 11 attacks in a matter of weeks.

  “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black famously said.

  Bush approved, and Operation Jawbreaker was launched. Just three months later, in December 2001, the Taliban government toppled, and the remnants of the Taliban army were being pursued through southern and eastern Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and a rump force of a few hundred loyalists attempted a last stand in the mountain fortress of Tora Bora on the Pakistani border.

  Then, as Pentagon officials debated whether to send in American troops to finish the job, the terrorist leader escaped, reportedly after paying bribes to an Afghan warlord. He slipped through the lines of pro-U.S. Afghan fighters and sought refuge in Jalalabad and in villages in the eastern provinces of Kunar and Khost. He stayed briefly as a guest of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan warlord and former comrade from the civil war against the Soviets, before eventually disappearing again in the Pakistani hills.