The Triple Agent

by Joby Warrick

  Like many Americans that morning, Camille LaBonte assumed at first that the crash was accidental. But her son was convinced that something more sinister had occurred.

  “That wasn’t dumb. That was intentional,” he said.

  He drove to his parents’ house and arrived in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. He and his mother then watched in disbelief as one tower collapsed, and then the other. When Camille turned to her son, he was crying.

  Within weeks, LaBonte was privately taking Arabic lessons while sorting through his options for landing a meaningful role in the fight against terrorism that was just getting under way. He considered, and then rejected, the idea of reenlisting in the army; it was unlikely that he would end up in the job or unit that he wanted, he reasoned. Instead he decided to sign up with the U.S. Marshals Service, a law enforcement arm of the Justice Department that tracks down fugitives and protects federal courts. His Ranger experience landed him a coveted spot on the marshals’ special operations team, yet it quickly became clear to LaBonte that the job was not the one he was looking for. Instead of searching for suspected terrorists, he was spending his days tracking down drug dealers.

  LaBonte then applied simultaneously for positions at the FBI and CIA. The FBI called back first, so he enrolled in the bureau’s academy in Quantico, Virginia. He won commendations as a cadet for leadership and shooting skills, and after graduation he landed a prime spot in the bureau’s New York office, working for an organized crime unit investigating the city’s Mafia families. Still, he burned for something more.

  At last, in 2006, the CIA came through with the offer he had been waiting for. The intelligence agency saw in LaBonte a combination of skills that were most in demand five years into the global war against al-Qaeda: the tactical abilities of a Special Forces soldier, combined with the resourcefulness of a classic CIA case officer. LaBonte was among a handful of CIA recruits who would be trained for both jobs. He catapulted to the front of the waiting list for the agency’s training school, the former Defense Department reservation in southern Virginia known as the “Farm.” Months later he was on his way to Iraq and then to Afghanistan.

  This job felt right, at last. His comrades and commanders were impressed by the enthusiasm of the young ex-Ranger who was always the first to volunteer for difficult assignments and the last to complain about the hardships the group endured. Though less experienced than some of the older combat veterans, he distinguished himself for his clearheadedness and sharp instincts during firefights. One officer who fought next to him in Afghanistan was struck by LaBonte’s “total confidence in who and what he was.

  “He was living his calling, without pretense or guile, brag or boast,” the former comrade said. “Darren believed his predestined role was to serve as a professional warrior, a protector for those less able to protect themselves.”

  Such qualities were on display one summer night when LaBonte led a two-man surveillance mission in Kunar Province. The men were walking alongside a river when a sudden noise alerted them to an approaching Taliban patrol. The Americans froze and hugged the riverbank as the insurgents filed into view, then paused in a clearing a few yards from their hiding place. A dozen fighters arrived, then two dozen, and still more. At last the group swelled to more than one hundred Taliban fighters, all armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and obviously staging for some kind of attack. They lingered for several minutes, so close that the two Americans could hear their conversations. If any one of them had wandered a few feet toward the river, the pair would almost certainly have been discovered.

  The other man was new to the CIA base and had never been in such a scrape. LaBonte kept a hand on his shoulder and whispered words of encouragement.

  “Don’t worry, everything is going to be OK,” he said.

  Eventually the insurgents moved on, and the two men scurried back to their base—but only after relaying the Taliban group’s coordinates to the nearest NATO dispatcher.

  As the months passed, though, LaBonte slowly lost some of his early optimism about the tide of battle against al-Qaeda. By the time he arrived in Jordan, he was convinced that bin Laden and his followers were winning the ideological struggle, appealing to ever larger numbers of young Muslims who could serve as fodder in the next wave of suicidal strikes against the West. He brooded about the attacks that were surely coming and worried about how to safeguard those he cared about most.

  That list was topped by his wife and baby daughter, now with him in a Middle Eastern country in which American officials had been targeted for assassination. It also included bin Zeid, who he feared, was being swept along by the collective enthusiasm for Balawi, a double agent whose achievements already bordered on the implausible.

  “This guy is too good to be true,” LaBonte flatly told an ex-military friend in late autumn.

  Among most of the intelligence community, though, Balawi fever was real and about to get much worse.

  11.

  DANGLE

  Langley, Virginia—November 2009

  Humam al-Balawi’s breakthrough as a spy was one hundred megabytes of flash and sizzle, titillating and wholly unexpected. But his next big score would blow everyone away.

  It arrived, again by e-mail to his handler, bin Zeid, this time in the form of a simple typed message. Balawi, the doctor, had a new patient. His name was Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Jordanian had made direct contact with the deputy commander of al-Qaeda, second only to Osama bin Laden himself.

  As Balawi described the events, he had been as surprised as anyone. One day he was told that Zawahiri was experiencing problems, and then suddenly the bearded, bespectacled terrorist leader was standing in front of him, asking him for medical treatment. Zawahiri, himself a doctor, was suffering from a range of complications related to diabetes, and he needed advice and, he hoped, some medicine. It was not so easy for Zawahiri, a wanted man with a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head, to write his own prescriptions.

  Balawi happily consented, and within minutes he was alone with Zawahiri, checking the vital signs of the man who had helped dream up the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

  In his e-mail, Balawi supplied a summary of Zawahiri’s physical condition as well as his medical history, providing details that perfectly matched records the CIA had obtained years earlier from intelligence officials in Egypt, Zawahiri’s home country. Most important, Balawi revealed that he had scheduled a follow-up visit with his patient. He would be seeing Zawahiri again in a few weeks.

  From Kabul to Amman to Langley, marble buildings seemed to shift on their foundations. The last time the CIA had caught a whiff of Zawahiri was in 2006, when the agency bombed a house in southwestern Pakistan on the basis of faulty intelligence that suggested he was eating dinner there; there had been no verified sighting of Zawahiri by a Westerner or government informant since 2002.

  Now, everyone with a top secret clearance wanted to know about the “golden source” who had been in the terrorist’s presence.

  Even the White House would have to know.

  Leon Panetta met with members of the Obama administration’s national security team to apprise them of the stunning developments. The CIA director himself served as chief briefer, and among those seated around the table were the national security adviser, James L. Jones; Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence; and Rahm Emanuel, Panetta’s old friend and White House chief of staff. Afterward Panetta would repeat the briefing in a private audience with the president of the United States.

  “There are indications that he [Balawi] might have access to Zawahiri,” Panetta announced, his tone deliberately low-key. The next step, he said, was to meet with the informant and train him for an important new role.

  “If we can meet with him and give him the right technology, we have a chance to go after Zawahiri,” Panetta said.

  The reaction was instantaneous and dramatic. How quickly can we make this happen? NSC officials wanted to
know.

  “Everyone was very enthusiastic,” said one of the security officials present at the briefing, with considerable understatement, “that for the first time in a long time, we had a chance of going after Number Two.”

  If Balawi had offered up bin Laden himself, it could hardly have evoked more excitement. After so many years deep in hiding, al-Qaeda’s reclusive founder was merely a figurehead. It was Zawahiri, together with his old friend Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, who now steered al-Qaeda’s ship. The two Egyptians decided strategy for the group, raised money, and planned operations. If al-Qaeda were to unleash another September 11–style attack on the United States, it would almost certainly be Zawahiri’s handiwork.

  The physician, fifty-eight now and scarred, physically and mentally, from years in Egyptian prisons, was the al-Qaeda version of a mad scientist, a man who was forever scheming up sensational ways to kill large numbers of people, using chemicals or viruses or even nuclear weapons, if he could get them. He was also al-Qaeda’s great escape artist, ever managing to elude death or capture by slipping away just as the trap was being sprung. Once, before September 11, 2001, he traveled to the United States without being noticed, raising money for terrorist causes under a fake name and departing, still undetected. After the plane attacks the CIA came close to killing him on three different occasions, but each time he walked away unharmed. The older counterterrorism hands at Langley who had battled with him over the years respected his capabilities and loathed everything he stood for.

  Zawahiri had been on the CIA’s watch list since the mid-1980s, long before anyone had heard of bin Laden, and over the years the agency witnessed his rise from Egyptian revolutionary to international terrorist. He was the intellectual force behind many of al-Qaeda’s grandest ambitions, including its fledgling efforts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons. It was Zawahiri who decreed that al-Qaeda must take on the “far enemy”—the United States—before it could defeat its principal target, the “near enemy,” the pro-Western Arab regimes that stood in the way of the group’s dream of uniting all Muslims under a global Islamic caliphate.

  “To kill Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country in which it is possible to do it,” Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto.

  As documented in the CIA’s case files, Zawahiri’s early life bore striking similarities to Balawi’s. Both were born to educated, middle-class parents from religiously tolerant communities, and both were drawn simultaneously to medical studies and radical Islamist ideology. Zawahiri, who grew up in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, was the son of a well-known professor of pharmacology, and his maternal grandfather was a president of Cairo University. As an earnest, bookish teenager Zawahiri was introduced to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author and intellectual who became one of the founders of modern Islamic extremism. Qutb’s execution by Egyptian authorities inspired the young Zawahiri to organize a group of like-minded friends into a secret society he called al-Jihad, or the Jihad Group. He continued his studies and eventually earned a medical degree, but all the while he looked ahead to a day when his al-Jihad would seek to overthrow Egypt’s secular government.

  As a new doctor, Zawahiri spent time volunteering in refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There, while patching up the wounds of anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters, he first crossed paths with a charismatic young Saudi, bin Laden, who had also come to Afghanistan to support the ragtag rebels in their struggle against the Communist superpower. Not long afterward, upon returning to Egypt, Zawahiri and his small cell joined with other antigovernment factions in a series of plots to assassinate Egyptian leaders, culminating in the fatal attack on Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, as he sat in a reviewing stand to watch a military parade. Zawahiri was imprisoned for allegedly participating in the conspiracy to silence one of the Arab world’s most moderate and pro-Western leaders. He later claimed in a memoir that he was tortured by Egyptian security officials.

  The experience left Zawahiri even more determined to undermine secular Arab governments and their financial underpinnings through spectacular acts of terrorism. His signature attack during his pre–al-Qaeda years was a savage 1997 assault on foreign tourists at Egypt’s famous Luxor ruins, in which gunmen systematically slaughtered sixty-two people, including Japanese tourists, a five-year-old British child, and four Egyptian tour guides.

  Ordinary Egyptians, previously accustomed to thinking of al-Jihad as engaged in a grassroots struggle against corrupt and autocratic rulers, were repelled by the wanton slaughter, and support for Zawahiri and his Jihad Group evaporated. Soon afterward Zawahiri told followers that operations inside Egypt were no longer possible, and the battle was shifting to Israel and its chief ally, the United States. In 1998 the Jihad Group officially merged with bin Laden’s larger and better-financed al-Qaeda.

  The newly expanded terrorist group immediately set out to make a splash with attacks on U.S. interests. First on the list were the U.S. embassies in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania, which were bombed in 1998 in coordinated attacks that killed hundreds of people.

  Three years later, working from al-Qaeda’s new base in Afghanistan, Zawahiri helped oversee the planning of the September 11 attacks. His primary mission, however, was to plan follow-on waves of terrorist strikes that would continue for months and years to come. He personally took command of an ambitious biological weapons program, establishing a laboratory in Afghanistan and dispatching disciples to search for sympathetic scientists.

  U.S. intelligence officials believe that Zawahiri’s efforts to launch a large-scale anthrax attack might have succeeded had he not run out of time. Within weeks of the collapse of New York’s World Trade Center towers, the U.S.-backed military campaign that drove al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies out of power in Afghanistan forced Zawahiri to abandon his bioweapons lab and flee the country. U.S. forces were to discover the lab, along with Zawahiri’s detailed instructions to his aides to acquire a highly lethal strain of the bacterium that causes anthrax.

  By 2002 Zawahiri, like bin Laden, was in hiding in Pakistan, with a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head. But unlike bin Laden, he continued to personally direct numerous terrorist operations, including an alleged 2003 plot to attack New York City’s subway system using chemical weapons. Zawahiri himself called off the attack for reasons that remain unclear.

  Because of his willingness to insert himself into terrorist operations, CIA officials clung to hopes that Zawahiri eventually would make a mistake, yet each time the agency’s targeters managed to locate him, he slipped out of their grasp.

  The last attempt was in January 2006, when CIA informants learned of a gathering of al-Qaeda leaders in Damadola, a town in the northern Pakistani province of Bajaur. Zawahiri was known to have visited the same province two years earlier, and agency officials were highly confident when they dispatched a Predator aircraft to orbit a mud compound a few miles outside the town. CIA missiles destroyed the building, killing eighteen people, including several al-Qaeda figures, but not Zawahiri. Pakistani intelligence officials said afterward that the al-Qaeda deputy changed his mind at the last minute and sent aides to the meeting instead.

  Days later Zawahiri appeared in a new video to taunt the White House.

  “Bush, do you know where I am?” he said. “I am among the Muslim masses.”

  The CIA never came close again after that until the morning in November 2009 when a little-known Jordanian physician surfaced with a story about an ailing Zawahiri entrusting himself to his care.

  In the days that followed, a single imperative emerged: The CIA must meet Humam al-Balawi.

  As CIA officials in Langley prepared a summary for the classified digest known as the President’s Daily Brief, the files on Balawi were distressingly thin.

  The Jordanians seemed to trust him, but no American had ever met him. He had bombarded Islamic Web sites with violently anti-Western scree
ds, yet he had flipped after only three days of relatively light interrogation by the Mukhabarat. Nothing in his lifestyle suggested a fondness for material wealth, yet he seemed only too happy to risk his life and sell out his ideological brethren in exchange for U.S. greenbacks.

  Nothing about the case made sense. On the other hand, there was the matter of the al-Rahman video and Zawahiri’s medical data. In the dozen years since al-Qaeda emerged as a global threat, no one had seen anything like it.

  In meetings and in conference calls between Langley and Amman, a series of options for a meeting with Balawi were weighed and rejected. Under one proposal the Jordanian would be flown back to the Middle East for an extensive debriefing. It was an appealing prospect, since Balawi’s Mukhabarat and CIA case officers were based in Amman. But it was finally rejected out of fear that Balawi’s lengthy absence from Pakistan might raise suspicions among his Taliban sponsors.

  An alternative plan called for a secret meeting in a Pakistani city—Islamabad or Karachi, perhaps—but it also was ruled out. The Americans had intentionally kept Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency in the dark since Balawi’s arrival in that country, and no one wanted to risk blowing the Jordanian’s cover at such a sensitive moment. Pakistan’s major cities were chockablock with ISI agents, and a high-level CIA gathering would almost certainly draw attention.

  A safer bet, it was decided, would be to meet Balawi in Afghanistan, presumably in a place near the border that would be easily accessible for Balawi but also discreet and utterly secure. The meeting spot would have to be reachable by car from Pakistan’s tribal region, yet also firmly under the CIA’s control, with no possibility of detection by Taliban spies.

  The CIA commanded at least six bases along the Afghan frontier, but only one of them sat on an asphalt highway that connected directly with Miranshah, the town in North Waziristan, Pakistan, closest to Balawi’s last known position. Thus, by accident of geography, the CIA’s choice for its much-anticipated first meeting with the Jordanian agent was the agency base known as Khost.