The Triple Agent

by Joby Warrick

  Matthews rejoined the agency after returning from Switzerland in 1996, but with entirely new aspirations. She shifted from the agency’s analytical division to the Directorate of Operations, the side of the CIA that runs clandestine missions overseas. The new job would require weeks of physically rigorous training at the CIA boot camp known as the Farm. Eventually she would also have to give up her right to her own name, becoming an officer “under cover.” Like Valerie Plame, her soon-to-be-famous colleague in the operations division, her very identity was a government secret.

  Matthews truly hit her stride at the CIA when she joined a small unit within the directorate’s counterterrorism division known internally as Alec Station. It consisted of a mix of officers from different backgrounds, all devoted to the study of a little-known Islamic terrorist group that called itself the Base, or al-Qaeda. When she first joined in 1996, the unit was regarded as a CIA backwater. Terrorist groups were a second-rate threat, and al-Qaeda was a bit player compared with the better-funded Hezbollah and Hamas. But things began to change in 1998 after al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 220 people. The attacks catapulted bin Laden to a spot on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Suddenly Alec Station and its analysts were in demand.

  As a group the officers became so al-Qaeda obsessed that they jokingly referred to themselves as the Manson Family. The hard part was convincing official Washington that Osama bin Laden was a threat to the U.S. homeland. Led by Matthews’s boss, a blunt-spoken analyst named Michael Scheuer, they eventually won the backing of senior CIA leaders, including Director George Tenet, and Cofer Black, who headed the Counterterrorism Center. The officers in the late 1990s drew up contingency plans for killing bin Laden and driving his terrorist allies out of Afghanistan, using friendly Afghan fighters and the agency’s newly acquired unmanned aerial vehicle, the Predator. But the Clinton administration passed on a chance to assassinate bin Laden in 1999, and the newly elected Bush administration deflected Tenet’s urgent requests for action and ultimately postponed any significant policy discussions about al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001. Seven days later al-Qaeda–trained hijackers crashed commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

  The morning of the attack was a normal workday at Langley, and many CIA employees were just arriving at the office as the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower at 8:46 A.M. When the second tower was struck seventeen minutes later, there was an audible gasp of recognition: This is the work of al-Qaeda.

  Cofer Black, the CIA’s counterterrorism director, assuming that CIA headquarters was likely on the terrorists’ attack list, ordered most of the staff out of the building. He and the Alec Station analysts stayed behind and got to work. Some did not see their families again for days.

  “We’re at war now, a different kind of war than we’ve ever fought before,” Black told the counterterrorism team as he prepared to issue marching orders. “We’re all going to have to do our part. And not all of us are going to make it back.”

  Matthews’s close friends say her experiences during those weeks forever changed her. Before September 11 she had worked long hours with her Alec Station colleagues, trying to uncover the al-Qaeda plot they believed was in the works, but after the terrorist attacks she slept in a chair in her office and didn’t go home for days. Pregnant with her third child at the time, she became physically exhausted and eventually suffered a miscarriage, a misfortune that she suspected was due to the stress of her job. Yet she continued to work, telling friends repeatedly that she believed that a new attack was imminent, and only the CIA had the resources to stop it. Where al-Qaeda was concerned, Matthews had “drunk the Kool-Aid,” a CIA friend said.

  Matthews was one of the first officers to be assigned the title of targeter, then a newly minted job in the agency’s counterterrorism division, and she soon acquired a high-profile case: She was to lead the agency’s search for an al-Qaeda logistics planner who went by the nom de guerre Abu Zubaida. Zubaida, a Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, ran a jihadist camp near Khost before September 11, and over the years he had facilitated the training or travel arrangements for scores of al-Qaeda militants in Afghanistan. Matthews believed that Zubaida knew details about a planned second wave of al-Qaeda attacks against the United States, and she convinced her CIA superiors to let her assemble a team of newly hired intelligence officers to coordinate a global search for him.

  Matthews set up shop in a small conference room that was soon jammed with computers and bodies. Her team worked elbow to elbow for weeks until, in March 2002, they caught a break: They traced Zubaida to a safe house in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad. On March 28, Pakistani and American intelligence officers raided the house and captured the man after a firefight that left him gravely wounded. He was the first significant al-Qaeda operative to be nabbed by the CIA.

  Within days of his capture, Zubaida handed his American interrogators an intelligence breakthrough, revealing the identity of the principal architect of the September 11 attacks: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Later, when Zubaida stopped cooperating with his interrogators, the Bush administration authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, to force him to talk. Among the witnesses to these sessions was Matthews, who was flown to Thailand to help guide the teams of CIA interrogators in questioning the new captive. Years later the case became the center of a roiling controversy. Human rights groups, congressional committees, and even former Bush administration officials questioned every facet of the CIA’s handling of Zubaida, who came to symbolize the debate over the agency’s use of secret prisons outside normal legal constraints, as well as interrogation practices that the International Committee of the Red Cross condemned as torture. Later evidence suggested that Zubaida was never truly an al-Qaeda leader, but rather a logistics man with limited knowledge of the terrorist group’s strategy and plans. Still, Matthews would be admired within the counterterrorism division as the officer primarily responsible for the takedown of the agency’s first high-value terrorist captive and the man who led the CIA to the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

  By the middle of the decade Matthews was in management, directing the Counterterrorism Center’s teams of reports officers. She also forged alliances with a cadre of other tough women who were ascending into the division’s leadership ranks a few career jumps ahead of her. One of her new mentors was a notoriously sharp-tempered redhead who had played a key role in many of the agency’s most aggressive—and controversial—operations, from “enhanced interrogation” to a classified program known as rendition, in which suspected terrorists were abducted overseas by CIA operatives and flown to a third country to be interrogated and, in some cases, tortured. The two women shared an infatuation with tough guy actor Tommy Lee Jones, and they were fond of quoting a particularly apt line from his 2007 film No Country for Old Men: “You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waiting on you.”

  As she moved up the hierarchy, Matthews was sometimes accused of being abrasive, stubborn, and impatient. Nothing riled her more than the suggestion that she as a woman was not adequate to a task—any task. In Langley several male colleagues began to refer to her by an unflattering nickname, Ruth, short for ruthless.

  There, and later at Khost, she would feel obliged to prove herself time and again, fighting a never-ending battle for respect in a world that had long been dominated by men.

  “You’re telling boys how to do their business,” said a CIA Afghan hand who counseled Matthews before she left for Khost. “Typically the answer is, ‘Missy, you don’t know what it’s like.’ ”

  It was true that the Khost Matthews knew was nothing like the Khost of a few years before. Long before the base was safe enough for the likes of analysts and targeters, Khost belonged to America’s original black ops force, the paramilitary officers of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Recruited mostly from the ranks of
Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other elite military units, the CIA’s SAD officers had been the country’s premier force since the 1950s for clandestine missions outside the writ of conventional troops, such as sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and targeted killings. Teams of SAD officers and Special Forces commandos spearheaded the assault against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001 that drove the Taliban government out of power. About a dozen of them set up camp in the eastern city of Khost that winter to begin cleaning up lingering pockets of Taliban resistance, and SAD officers had stayed there ever since.

  In those final days of 2001, when Matthews and her team in Langley watched in anguish as Osama bin Laden slipped away into Pakistan, the Khost SAD team formed at an air base in the Pakistani city of Jacobabad and choppered across the mountains to take control of the airfield. They very nearly met with disaster in their first minutes on the ground.

  They arrived in Khost at 2:00 A.M. on a bitterly cold morning, carrying light weapons and gear, along with a small trunkful of cash and a pledge of assistance from a local commander who opposed the Taliban. The local commander was waiting for them, as promised. But so were dozens of fighters from rival clans. Turbaned gunmen glowered at one another in a tense standoff with the Americans in the middle.

  In the darkness, the U.S. team could see that several Afghans on different sides had pulled out grenades. They were prepared to fight to the death, as the CIA officers later learned, to decide who would get to play host and receive the bulk of American money and modern weapons.

  “One of the factions knew we were coming, and then all the others found out,” said one American officer who was present. “It was early in the morning, and no one had had their tea. So the grenades came out.”

  One of the CIA officers quickly stepped up and began lavishing praise on the Afghans for their hospitality and bravery. Uncle Sam’s pockets are deep, the man assured the group, a rough-looking assemblage of bandoliers and craggy, bearded faces that reminded some of the Americans of the cantina bar scene in Star Wars. The fighters drifted off, the crisis temporarily defused. Relieved, the weary officers proceeded to pick their way through the town in the darkness, with some of them bunking down at an abandoned elementary school that would serve as temporary outpost.

  It was a poor choice for a fort. The school building was on a major thoroughfare and nearly impossible to defend against suicide bombers or rocket attacks. Nearby houses and trees offered hideouts for snipers. There was no running water or electricity. The town itself was dirty and sinister, overrun by armed gangs from as many as seven different clans, whose allegiances seemed to shift by the day. Random gunfire at odd hours kept the men on edge, never completely sure if the shots portended an attack or if it was just another Afghan wedding celebration.

  The darkest moment came on January 4, 2002. After a meeting with elders in a nearby village, a gun-toting Afghan suddenly opened fire on the Khost team. One of the CIA paramilitary officers collapsed, struck by a bullet that pierced his chest through a gap in his body armor. Also hit was an energetic Green Beret sergeant named Nathan Chapman, a communications specialist and Desert Storm veteran who had been detailed to the CIA team at Khost. Chapman, thirty-one, had been shot through his thigh, and his wound was deemed less serious than that of the CIA officer.

  Within minutes the two wounded men were in the air on their way back to Khost, where the CIA officer with the chest wound was eventually stabilized. Chapman meanwhile was rapidly losing blood from what turned out to be a severed femoral artery. By the time the helicopter touched down in Khost, the young soldier was dead. He was the first American GI from any service to die in combat in Afghanistan.

  Soon afterward the CIA moved its headquarters to the grounds of the airfield outside town. Though abandoned for years, it offered ample space for sleeping and working, including a fully intact control tower with a roof that provided sweeping fields of fire for a machine gunner. The runway was salvageable, if littered with broken and bombed-out aircraft from the time of the Soviet occupation. The Americans got to work shoveling dirt into HESCO barriers to begin the fortification of what was to become the first CIA base in Afghanistan outside Kabul.

  Someone suggested a name for the new facility: Forward Operating Base Chapman, after the Special Forces officer killed a few days earlier. It became the official name for the base, though most of the CIA inhabitants referred to it by its shorter handle, Khost.

  The first order of business was deciding how to deal with the region’s largest militant group. Local warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani had spent years on the CIA’s payroll when he served as an Afghan rebel commander during the war against the Soviets, and he now controlled thousands of fighters along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He had nominally allied himself with the Taliban after that group’s rise to power in the 1990s. But Haqqani was a free agent, more interested in perpetuating his own smuggling empire and protection rackets than in theology or conquest.

  Haqqani also was loyal to his friends, including his former comrade-in-arms Osama bin Laden. The two men had cemented their reputations in the 1980s fighting the Soviets in the mountains around Khost, a region that repeatedly proved impervious to Russian assaults. Bin Laden, the son of a wealthy construction magnate, used Saudi money and engineering connections to help the mujahideen guerrillas build a complex of tunnels and cave fortresses in the hills. Haqqani became a legendary military commander, personally leading his fighters into improbable David and Goliath victories against Soviet commandos and helicopter gunships. The Soviets occupied and expanded the airfield at Khost mainly in a failed attempt to bomb Haqqani and his allies out of their mountain redoubts.

  Thus, when SAD teams and pro-U.S. Afghan forces closed in on bin Laden in late 2001, the al-Qaeda leader sought the protection of the tall, bushy-bearded warlord who had fought with him against the Soviets. Haqqani offered his friend sanctuary in a house outside Khost until it was safe to cross back into Pakistan to rejoin his followers.

  Haqqani remained behind. He had been sanguine about the Taliban’s defeat and was prepared to switch loyalties, as he had done so often in the past. Pakistani officials who had dealt with him for decades strongly urged the Americans to accommodate him and perhaps even give him a token role in the new Afghan government.

  But in Washington, Bush officials in the Defense Department were not in a mood to bargain. Haqqani had abetted the escape of Osama bin Laden and might still know his whereabouts. Two rounds of secret talks were held with Haqqani’s emissaries, in Islamabad and then in the United Arab Emirates, according to a former senior U.S. official intimately familiar with the events. But at both meetings, the official said, the U.S. side offered the same terms: unconditional surrender, including Haqqani’s personal acquiescence to donning an orange jumpsuit and joining the other detainees at the newly opened U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After a reasonable interval—presumably after Haqqani had told military interrogators everything he knew about bin Laden—he would be allowed to return home.

  Haqqani’s refusal to accept such an offer was a given, the former intelligence official said.

  “I personally always believed that Haqqani was someone we could have worked with,” the official said. “But at that time, no one was looking over the horizon, to where we might be in five years. For the policy folks, it was just ‘screw these little brown people.’ ”

  Haqqani did refuse. Jalaluddin Haqqani had bedeviled the Russians over nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare in the 1980s. Now, at age fifty-one, he would go to war against the Americans. In time the so-called Haqqani network, led by Haqqani’s son Sirajuddin, became one of the greatest threats to U.S. forces in all of Afghanistan, and it was Haqqani’s fighters who now woke Matthews and her colleagues at all hours, firing rockets at the walls of the base at Khost.

  In the years that followed bin Laden’s escape, some CIA paramilitary teams continued to operate as before, working out of small compounds where they lived and fought alongside Afghan soldiers. B
ut the old SAD base at Khost expanded, bulked up, and assumed new responsibilities, mostly in support of Pentagon objectives. The hunt for Osama bin Laden shifted to Pakistan and relied largely on robot planes. And for the first time CIA reports officers, targeters, and analysts from Langley were routinely deployed to frontline bases to help with the collection and interpretation of intelligence, mingling with and sometimes directing the men with the guns.

  Langley embarked on a program of cross-training for the two very different types of officers. SAD officers were drilled in classic intelligence-gathering techniques, while Afghanistan-bound civilian officers were required to take a three-week “overseas preparation course” to learn basic war zone survival. In the latter program, officers worked on their shooting skills, learned battlefield first aid, and practiced driving through roadblocks and ambushes. It was a start, but even some of the trainers acknowledged the program’s inadequacy.

  “It’s just rudimentary, baseline, box-checking training,” said one career officer who taught one of the courses. “It’s familiarization, as opposed to proficiency.”

  A decade earlier the same course had lasted twenty-one weeks and included extensive instruction on bombs and explosives, as well as lessons in team building, navigation, and even parachuting. But the longer program was dropped because it was judged to be expensive and time-consuming for an agency that needed to deploy operatives to the field quickly. Some of the skills taught in the longer course—parachuting, for example—were deemed irrelevant in an age in which so much of the business of spying depends on computer networks, satellites, and robotics.

  “After September 11, the question was asked, ‘Do we need to teach these hard skill sets to everyone?’ And the answer was no,” said the retired officer who taught the overseas course. “You can simply subcontract those parts of the job to others.” The hard skill sets were the special domain of the soldiers and the paramilitary elites. The “meat eaters,” as some called themselves, were still needed at Khost. But they would no longer be in charge.