The Triple Agent

by Joby Warrick

Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader fled on horseback into Pakistan along a different route. In the coming years, occasional sightings of Ayman al-Zawahiri sparked furious activity and a failed attempt to capture or kill him. Bin Laden appeared only on video, his beard longer and grayer and his usual camouflage fatigues replaced by robes and an Arab-style kaffiyeh. Officially, the search for him continued, but in reality there were no clues or leads to chase.

  The CIA’s Alec Station, which had been established initially to search for bin Laden, gradually lost its targeters to other units that were hunting for lesser al-Qaeda figures and Taliban warlords. In 2005 it was shut down for good.

  Panetta’s new Predators would not arrive in Afghanistan until nearly the end of the year. In the meantime, the agency would send scores of new officers to the Kabul station, including some of its best targeters. One of them was Elizabeth Hanson.

  The thirty-year-old chief targeter was coming off an extraordinary run, having worked on more than a dozen high-profile cases that ended in Hellfire explosions in Pakistan’s tribal belt. She had helped the CIA locate some of the biggest players in the jihadist world, from Osama al-Kini to Baitullah Mehsud. Now she was being dispatched to Afghanistan as part of a renewed push to find the biggest names of all.

  She arrived in Kabul in August to a pungent stew of odors, dust, and broiling heat, her mother’s admonitions still ringing in her ears. The elder Hanson, also named Elizabeth, had been unhappy when her daughter joined the CIA, and she had been horrified by her decision to move to such a dangerous place as Afghanistan. She tried for weeks to talk her out of it and continued to fret long after it was clear that the decision was final.

  “Don’t you think you should at least try to learn karate before you go over there?” the mother asked one day before the departure.

  “Mom,” she replied, “if the time comes when you find that you need karate, the game is already over.”

  That was typical Elizabeth—Bitsy or Monkie to her family—frustratingly stubborn, but with a wry twist that made it impossible for anyone to stay angry with her. Mrs. Hanson would have no choice but to let her daughter go, but she would insist on a call home nearly every day, and she would keep a handset strapped to her body at all hours, in case there was bad news.

  The truth was, Hanson’s mother had seen this day coming for a long time. Once, as a little girl of about four years, Bitsy had plopped into her chair at the family dinner table and announced, in very mature English, that she “wanted to try everything in life, and learn everything there is to learn.” With that, she picked up a crystal goblet of ice water and bit into it so sharply that it shattered.

  “The glass broke in her mouth,” her mother remembered. “But it didn’t faze her.”

  Years later she joined the CIA for the same reason, prizing romance and adventure above the easy money she could have earned with her private school education and economics degree. She was a girl’s girl who adored children and appreciated nice clothes and a good manicure, yet she would leap at any chance to get her hands dirty, whether from rock climbing and bungee jumping, or from shooting grenade launchers and slogging through the mud at the CIA’s training academy. She was a self-professed nerd who read physics textbooks in her spare time, yet was so naturally funny that her friends encouraged her, quite seriously, to become a stand-up comic. The career might have pleased her mother more but for the fact that her taste in humor was, as Mrs. Hanson explained, “not very ladylike.”

  Volunteering for duty in Afghanistan was in keeping with Hanson’s adventurous side, and she was thrilled at the chance to go, her friends say. There were serious risks in living even in the relatively safe Afghan capital, a place where suicide bombers occasionally rammed into military convoys and where gunmen sometimes shot their way into five-star hotels. Hanson would work and live in the CIA station inside the ultrasecure U.S. Embassy, but her job sometimes required meetings with informants outside the steel-plated gates. Hanson was again a targeter, but now she would be leading a focused effort to find and kill the top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders who were driving the Afghan insurgency and plotting terrorist attacks against the West—including bin Laden and Zawahiri.

  Her mother never pressed Hanson for details of her work, but she knew the essentials, and she never fully understood how her daughter was able to adjust mentally to work that involved the killing of other human beings, even terrorists. Sometimes she asked her daughter about it.

  Elizabeth Hanson leaned to the left politically, and “she hated war,” her mother said. And yet she seemed to have no doubts about where she belonged.

  “Whether you approved of the war or not made no difference,” the elder Hanson said, recalling her daughter’s words. “You don’t run away from a fight, and you always have to take care of the people who are over there, fighting your war.”

  In her daughter’s words, she said, it would usually boil down to this: “It’s just what you have to do.”

  Hanson quickly settled into the daily rhythm of her new job. Her living quarters consisted of a tiny dorm room with a shared bath, and there was precious little to do in the way of socializing, so she worked. Fourteen-hour days, seven-day workweeks. Dinner and lunch at her desk. Gym breaks in the afternoon. She would put in a full day before Langley was awake, and another full day while the Counterterrorism Center’s senior officers were at their desks, asking questions and demanding updates.

  Hanson’s targets were closer now, just a half hour’s chopper ride to the east, hiding in the steep valleys of Kunar and Khost and in the Pakistani tribal lands beyond. Baitullah Mehsud was gone, but his Taliban minions were still there. So were the Haqqanis and the Shadow Army paramilitary troops loyal to al-Qaeda. Somewhere among the mountain villages, Sheikh Saeed al-Masri was plotting his next move, perhaps in consultation with Ayman al-Zawahiri or even Osama bin Laden himself.

  If they could be found, Elizabeth Hanson would find them.

  9.

  CHIEF

  Khost, Afghanistan—September 19, 2009

  At 4:58 A.M., two hours before sunrise, Jennifer Matthews was roused from sleep by a loud bang. It sounded close—it was hard to tell in the dark, and she was new to such things—and it was strong enough to rattle the picture frames in her tiny hooch. Instinctively she rolled out of bed, grabbed her flak jacket and helmet, and walked out the door toward the shelter. Rocket attack.

  Outside, other figures stumbled along the same path, and some exchanged a grim greeting. The dark sky was still chalky with stars, with no trace of the new moon that would mark the end of the month-long Ramadan fast later that evening. Somewhere in town, a muezzin was sounding the predawn call to prayer, his lilting baritone rising and fading against the squawks and beeps of the base’s emergency loudspeakers.

  Matthews felt the heaviness of the air, still warm even at that hour. The airfield lights glowed yellow through a dusty fog, casting a feeble light over the parched terrain beyond the fence. Farther up the valley, clusters of tiny lights from the army’s Salerno base shimmered like distant constellations.

  It was a thrilling sight and oddly serene. The Haqqani fighters who lobbed occasional mortar rounds at the base rarely hit anything, so the perfunctory huddle in the concrete shelter was mostly an annoyance and a chance to catch up on gossip. But Matthews, barely twenty-four hours into her new job as Khost base chief, found even the little things fascinating. It was perhaps a strange admission, coming from a woman who a week earlier had been a suburban mom working in a sleek office building in northern Virginia, but she loved being in Afghanistan.

  “It is exhilarating,” she told one close agency friend back home. Her Afghan assignment was going to take up a year of her life, and she would be absent from her three children for most of that time. She would miss twelve months’ worth of ball games and bedtime kisses, stomachaches and school projects, recitals and family dinners. And she would miss Christmas. But Matthews had volunteered for the posting, and she was now determined to extract every po
ssible advantage from the experience. And to the extent she could, she would enjoy every bit of it, even the middle-of-the-night visits to the bomb shelter.

  This one was mercifully short, as there were no other explosions. A chopper crew circling the base with a searchlight found the strewn body parts and quickly pieced together the story. A lone man had crept up the main approach to the base in the moonless blackness and attempted to bury an IED, or improvised explosive device, near a dip in the road where the morning convoys would pass in a few hours. But the bomb had exploded prematurely, leaving pieces of the man scattered across the highway. An almost identical incident had occurred near the same spot a few months earlier, only it ended with two would-be bombers lying dead, one of them a schoolteacher.

  In an odd way, such attacks validated Matthews’s belief in the low risk of living in such a dangerous place. She would be safe at Khost, she told worried relatives and friends, because she would stay inside the wire. Local jihadist groups would fling themselves against the walls at regular intervals, but they never quite amounted to a serious threat.

  “She told me, ‘I would never allow myself to be put in danger, because of my kids,’ ” said a CIA colleague who met with Matthews a few weeks before she went overseas. “I think she honestly believed it.”

  Matthews had already concluded that life in a war zone wasn’t so bad. Her first glimpse of her temporary Afghan home was from the heaving side of a Black Hawk helicopter making the thirty-minute run from Kabul. The city and CIA base were perched on a high plateau surrounded by dun-colored hills, and the terrain reminded her of parts of the American Southwest. “I kept expecting to see the Marlboro Man show up,” she quipped to one of her e-mail pals back in Virginia.

  The land had a kind of austere beauty best appreciated from the air. To the north, and visible from the base on a clear day, were the snowcapped White Mountains—home to the infamous al-Qaeda fortress Tora Bora, from which Osama bin Laden had escaped in 2001. The invisible line separating Afghanistan from Pakistan ran along another line of low hills just twenty miles to the east. The territory in between appeared almost lush, by Afghan standards, with irrigated fields and a scattering of trees, in contrast with the relentless brown of much of the country during the hot months.

  Khost, home to 160,000 mostly ethnic Pashtuns, had survived a four-year military siege by Soviet forces during the 1980s, yet was remarkably intact. Instead of ravaged, the city appeared merely poor, a maze of dirty, mud-brick houses and shops with only a single noteworthy public structure, an elegant turquoise-domed mosque built by the patriarch of the Haqqani clan, Jalaluddin Haqqani. Bordering the city to the east was the concrete sprawl of Khost Airfield and the base itself, an American island isolated from the host country by concentric rings of HESCO barriers—the ubiquitous sandbags on steroids present at all U.S. military installations in Afghanistan—and concertina wire. A few crumbling relics from the Soviet occupation still stood; they included a squat two-story control tower built by the Russians that now served as a lookout post and the dozen or so wrecked 1980s-vintage aircraft that lined one side of the runway. Most of the newer buildings were prefabricated military structures, such as cargo containers converted into improvised barracks. All things natural and man-made—buildings, streets, houses, vehicles, uniforms—were muted shades of beige and brown, dulled further by an omnipresent coating of dust.

  Life inside the wire came with not only a presumption of safety but better than average amenities. The mess hall served up surprisingly good food, including lobster or crab legs on Fridays. The main rec room’s satellite receiver beamed in live baseball and football and the newest Hollywood releases. A separate CIA lounge drew crowds of off-duty officers with its private stock of wine and ice-cold beer. The base gym gleamed with the latest fitness equipment, from elliptical machines to racks of Olympic barbell plates.

  Matthews was a runner, and she quickly took up the habit of lacing up her sneakers just after dawn for a lap around the airfield with an eclectic group of CIA and military officers that called itself the Khost Running Club. After her workout she returned to her trailerlike quarters and one of the greatest perquisites accorded to her, the ranking officer on base: a private bathroom. Matthews had bargained hard for the extra privacy, perhaps the most coveted luxury of all.

  The commute from her room to her CIA office was only a few steps, instead of the two hours of interstate and Beltway traffic she faced back home. But the new role that awaited her there would be her toughest adjustment by far. The subject matter, al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgency, she knew well. She had also managed people before. But now she commanded American and Afghan men and women in a place where the bombs and bullets were real. For the first time in her career, the hard choices she faced on the job carried profound consequences for the people working for her.

  Matthews answered to her bosses in Langley, just as before, but now she sparred with a new set of partners who thought differently and had priorities separate from those of the CIA. They were the soldiers: Pentagon and NATO brass in Kabul, field commanders in and around Khost, and, most immediately, the Special Forces teams that operated out of the base. The commandos were military rock stars, supremely confident in their skills and used to being treated as elites. They formed natural alliances with their Special Forces brethren within the CIA’s ranks, including several of the paramilitary officers from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, as well as the base’s security detail, which included retired Green Berets and Navy SEALs now working for Blackwater. Some were disdainful of the CIA generally, mocking the newcomers as “children” or eggheaded “Clowns in Action.” It wasn’t just that the CIA lacked military skills; many of them also had little grasp of the local language and culture and rarely left the base to venture outside, military officers said.

  The dislike was mutual. In private, the case officers and analysts complained about the gun toters as “knuckle-draggers” and “hot-house flowers” with egos to match their inflated biceps. Both views were stereotypes, but Matthews was hypersensitive to male skepticism about her ability to do a job. She had battled against it for her entire career.

  The CIA still was very much a man’s world when Jennifer Matthews signed up on January 3, 1989. Three other women joined the agency the same day, and the foursome quickly concluded that they needed to stick together—“the only women in a sea of men,” one member of the quartet later recalled.

  By chance, they shared a similar look: four white women in their mid-twenties, of roughly the same height and build, with brown hair and size 4 clothes. When they traveled together as a pack, as they often did, they turned heads in Langley’s buttoned-down corridors. The four lunched together in the cafeteria, took group vacations, and even planned one another’s weddings. Matthews felt obliged to serve as leader because she was the oldest by a few weeks. She also was the most ambitious. When the new recruits were asked during orientation about their future plans, Matthews answered without hesitation: “I’m going to be the DCI”—director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  That kind of unabashed ambition, and a belief that she could conquer anything through willpower and hard work, was a lifelong trademark. As a young girl, the middle of three children born to a press operator and a nurse in a working-class suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she bored into her books while her girlfriends chased boys and partied. She grew up with a strong feminist streak and a belief in a divine will that ultimately shapes all human destiny. Her social world as a child and teenager revolved around a small Christian fundamentalist congregation that embraced both patriotism and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Her theology evolved as she grew older, but she considered herself an evangelical Christian for the rest of her life.

  After high school she attended a small Baptist university in western Ohio called Cedarville, a school that advertises its commitment to teaching a creationist approach to science. There she studied broadcasting and met a fellow cross-country runner whom she lat
er married, a religiously devout chemistry student named Gary Anderson. Both later attended nearby Miami University of Ohio, where Matthews earned a master’s degree in political science. She worked briefly as a paralegal before deciding, with encouragement from a relative who served in the intelligence community, to try for a job at the CIA.

  Very few women had been permitted to join the elite fraternity of case officers in those days, so Matthews and her three new CIA friends took positions that traditionally were open to women. Matthews became an imagery analyst and spent many hours poring over satellite photos of suspected chemical weapons factories in Libya. A natural writer, she later became a reports officer, a job that entailed translating raw intelligence from the field into concise prose.

  Even there, Matthews was driven by a perceived need to outshine the men around her just to be accepted, remembered a female colleague who was part of her close circle of friends.

  “We worked long, hard hours. We went the extra mile. And we routinely outran our male counterparts,” said the friend, who, like Matthews, eventually became an undercover operative with a protected identity.

  Matthews briefly followed her husband to Geneva, where he worked for a Swiss company. But afterward the couple settled into a suburban Washington lifestyle that was organized largely to support her career. Because they worked in different cities—Matthews in the Washington suburbs, her husband in Richmond—they bought a house roughly in the middle, near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and logged more than a hundred miles a day in their commutes. But Matthews kept her maiden name, and when children arrived, the couple employed nannies so she could quickly return to the office. Friends say she adored her three children, but her brain was wired for work. Staying at home would have been as alien to her as growing fins and living in the ocean.

  “She was very much a feminist in that way, yet she also was extremely traditional in her views about marriage and family,” said the agency friend. “There was a dichotomy about her that allowed her to separate different parts of her life. It’s part of what made her a good analyst.”