The Triple Agent

by Joby Warrick

  Key details of the proposed meeting, including Balawi’s willingness to submit to such a plan, were still far from clear. But from the day the informant invoked Ayman al-Zawahiri’s name in an e-mail, the mission to find Balawi and drain him of information became a priority of almost unrivaled importance.

  “The upper level of government was crying out for information and wanted answers to keep the country safe,” said former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, a career diplomat who co-led a classified, independent investigation of the events. “There were government servants who were intent on getting the job done, and they were prepared to go the last mile to do it.”

  “Yes, but …”

  Humam al-Balawi was not making it easy. Jordanian intelligence captain Ali bin Zeid, unsure how Balawi would react, had broached the idea of a meeting somewhat tentatively at first. Your reports have been most interesting, bin Zeid wrote in a late-November missive. Now we’d like to take things up a notch.

  Balawi seemed instantly agreeable to the idea of seeing bin Zeid again. But he put up so many conditions and qualifiers that bin Zeid was left wondering whether the meeting would ever come about.

  Yes, but I don’t want to meet with anyone except you, he wrote at one point.

  Yes, but it’s too dangerous to cross the border, he said in a separate note. And, finally: Yes, we should meet. But I think you should come to me.

  Over several days of exchanged messages, Balawi became increasingly insistent. The ideal meeting place, he declared, was Miranshah, North Waziristan’s sprawling market town just across the mountains from Afghanistan. Balawi knew the town and would find a secure place where both he and his Jordanian countryman would be safe. There were cafés and bazaars, shops and mosques, all of them crowded with people. The two Jordanians could meet discreetly without attracting attention, and then Balawi could be on his way again.

  Bin Zeid gently pushed back. North Waziristan was too risky, he said. Khost, on the other hand, was a fortified military camp guarded by Special Forces commandos and attack helicopters. Both men would be safer there.

  “I’m the one who’s taking all the risks over here,” Balawi protested. He was sure that Afghan spies at the American base would betray him, and then he’d be finished, killed in the most gruesome of ways. Balawi had seen what the Taliban did to suspected informants. He repeated his plea.

  Come to Miranshah, he wrote.

  Bin Zeid shared the e-mails with his CIA partner, Darren LaBonte, who was starting to feel queasy. LaBonte was getting hammered with requests for updates from his bosses in Amman and Langley, and his answers so far had not been popular. The two partners talked for hours about Balawi and his e-mails and what it all meant. This was shaping up as the biggest case either man had ever been associated with; yet more than anyone around them, they harbored doubts. The video evidence had been staggeringly impressive, but also perplexing. How was it that Balawi, this frightened mouse of a doctor who weeks earlier had begged to come home, had come up with something so spectacular? Was Balawi a con artist? Was he trying to scam the CIA for more money, as so many bogus informants had done in the past? Perhaps Balawi was everything he seemed, but as the two men hashed it over, they were less than convinced. It was too much, too soon.

  Later LaBonte tried to summarize his concerns in an internal memo. The bottom line, he wrote, was that the CIA didn’t yet know enough about the Jordanian agent to trust him entirely. He seemed real enough, but that wasn’t a sound basis for divining the man’s intentions.

  “We need to go slow on this case,” he wrote.

  The top CIA officer in Amman was a veteran operative who had served in Pakistan and understood the fickle art of running covert agents better than most. The station chief, whose name is classified, accepted LaBonte’s recounting of the key facts of the Balawi case, but he reached an entirely different conclusion: A meeting with Balawi was urgently needed precisely because the CIA knew so little about the informant and his motivations. Yes, there were risks, the station manager said. But if ever there was a moment for risk taking, it was this one.

  Let’s move forward, he said.

  Ali bin Zeid spent the first days of December preparing for what he believed would be a short trip. Winters in eastern Afghanistan are notoriously cold, so bin Zeid called his older brother, Hassan, and asked to borrow his heavy jacket, the one with the thick insulation and the North Face logo. He did some last-minute shopping and buffed up the black Desert Eagle .44 Magnum he liked to take on his business trips.

  Then, just days before his planned departure, bin Zeid was summoned unexpectedly to a meeting on the Mukhabarat’s executive floor. He entered a conference room to find his immediate supervisor and several other senior officials waiting for him, all dark suits and ties, their faces as dour as buzzards’.

  We’re sending someone else to Afghanistan to meet with Balawi, one of the officers said. The mission is simply too risky for someone from the royal family.

  Bin Zeid exploded. “But it’s my case,” he protested.

  He spent much of the day appealing the decision, from one end of the Mukhabarat’s headquarters building to the other. He argued and complained, and when neither worked, he threatened.

  “I’m going to Afghanistan, even if I have to make my own arrangements to get there,” bin Zeid said. Then, eyes narrowed to slits, he dropped the ultimate threat.

  “I’m going to Afghanistan,” he repeated, “even if I have to go with the Americans.”

  Bin Zeid had already laid the groundwork for this threat, and sure enough, a call was made from the CIA’s Amman station to the Mukhabarat headquarters, officially requesting bin Zeid’s presence at Khost. The Jordanian captain was the only one who knew Balawi, the Americans explained, and the informant might balk if he wasn’t around.

  “We need Ali,” the CIA caller said.

  The Mukhabarat relented.

  Bin Zeid and LaBonte were scheduled to leave for Afghanistan on December 6, but the Jordanian was fully packed a day early. There were tearful good-byes from family members, including bin Zeid’s sister-in-law, who had been plagued with feelings of dread since she first learned of the trip.

  The men’s wives had been unusually anxious as well. Racheal LaBonte was beginning to fret about the Italian vacation the couple had planned for the Christmas holidays, and she now worried that Darren LaBonte wouldn’t make it back in time. More important, she had managed to piece together the outlines of the mission from snippets of conversation, enough to know that her husband had grave doubts about the informant he was flying to Afghanistan to meet.

  “He could turn out to be a suicide bomber!” she finally blurted out.

  Often Darren LaBonte would crack a joke to relieve the tension when his wife expressed such fears about his work. This time he did not.

  “You’re right, he could be,” he said solemnly. Then, taking her hand, he tried to explain his conflicted feelings about the case. This one was worth the risk, he said, and what’s more, if it succeeded, it might finally be enough for him. He could even walk away from the terrorist-catching business forever.

  “If I don’t go, and this case is everything that it’s supposed to be, it would be a big mistake,” he said. “If it’s successful, then I can stop. I can finally say that I’ve done what I came here to do.

  “On the other hand, if I don’t go, and something happens …”

  He paused. Racheal knew he was thinking of bin Zeid.

  “Well, I could never forgive myself,” he said finally.

  The two couples gathered for last farewells at the LaBontes’ apartment at 5:00 A.M., just before the two men departed for the airport, and sat for coffee on the balcony. The usual weepy scenes in the terminal attracted too much attention, and besides, this time the wives had planned something different. Both women had been unusually anxious about the trip to Afghanistan, but they decided together to go out of their way not to show it.

  The women knew th
e men shared a fascination with ancient warrior culture, for the armies of Athens and Sparta. In ancient Greece the mothers of Spartan warriors exhorted their sons to bravery with the words that Fida Dawani and Racheal LaBonte now spoke to their departing husbands: “Return with your shields or on them.”

  But as the two officers gathered their bags, Fida could not restrain herself. She pulled Darren LaBonte aside, her dark eyes imploring.

  “Take care of Ali,” she said.

  The Mukhabarat tried once more to block Ali bin Zeid from meeting with the informant Humam al-Balawi. It happened on December 5, as the Jordanian intelligence captain and his CIA partner, LaBonte, were making final preparations for their journey.

  That evening one of the Jordanian spy agency’s senior managers phoned an old CIA friend at the Amman station to talk privately about the Balawi case.

  We have serious concerns, the Jordanian said before proceeding to lay out two of them.

  The first was a matter of historical precedent, he said. The Mukhabarat had been dealing with jihadists of all stripes for many years, and it knew a few things about them, including which ones could be flipped. The low-level types—the thugs and opportunists who glommed on to terrorist movements for personal advantage—could be transformed and might even become useful informants. But radicals and ideologues never truly switched sides. A true believer might lie and deceive, but deep down he could never betray his cause. And Humam al-Balawi had all the markings of a true believer.

  It was a compelling argument, coming from a Mukhabarat veteran who had interrogated scores of radical Islamists. The CIA officer listened attentively.

  The second concern derived from the Jordanian’s observations as the case had unfolded in recent weeks. Wasn’t it curious, he asked, that Balawi kept insisting that the meeting take place in Miranshah, rather than inside a fortified base where his security would be assured?

  He could be leading you into an ambush, the Jordanian officer warned.

  As he summed up his thoughts, the official acknowledged that the Mukhabarat had found nothing damning against Balawi and had no specific reason to doubt that the operative had truly made inroads into al-Qaeda’s senior ranks. There were just vague concerns, he explained, including a worry that bin Zeid might not be the right officer for this particular case. Perhaps over time bin Zeid had gotten too close to his recruit and had lost his ability to make dispassionate judgments.

  The Jordanian had finished unburdening himself, so the CIA officer thanked him for his insights and bade him good night. Afterward, as he thought about the warning, he focused in particular on one of the phrases the man had used: bin Zeid might not be the right officer.

  The Mukhabarat, for all its strengths, was known to be constantly roiled by rivalries and turf battles, as different factions sought to gain advantage. Even mild-mannered bin Zeid was reported to have numerous enemies among senior officers who feared that the king’s cousin would use his royal heritage and CIA connections to secure a plum position.

  The warning suddenly made sense. The Jordanians were worried all right: They were afraid that Ali bin Zeid would soon become their boss, the CIA officer reasoned. He filed the contact away mentally and mentioned it to no one outside of Amman.

  The next morning, under a slate gray sky, bin Zeid and LaBonte boarded a plane at Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport and departed for Afghanistan.

  12.

  REHEARSAL

  Khost, Afghanistan—December 2009

  Just after sunset on Christmas Day, Jennifer Matthews plopped down in front of her computer and switched on the small Web camera clipped to the top of the screen. It had been a rough day, and though she didn’t know it yet, things were about to get worse. At that hour a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam was closing in on Detroit, carrying a young Nigerian passenger who had hidden eighty grams of military explosive in his clothes. The Nigerian’s attempt to blast the plane from the sky would ring alarm bells at CIA stations around the world and keep counterterrorism officers busy through the night. Yet back home in snow-covered Fredericksburg, Virginia, it was still blissfully quiet, and Matthews’s kids would be waiting to open their Christmas presents. She would join them via Skype.

  She clicked “home” and waited for the connection. In a few seconds a small video panel appeared, and Matthews was looking at the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree in her own family room.

  “Hi, Mommy,” came the chorus of greetings from her three children.

  Matthews’s husband had set up the video connection so the kids could see their mother during their regular chats while she was overseas. The couple had planned in advance to celebrate Christmas morning this way, with Matthews’s parents joining the gathering to spend the holiday with their daughter’s likeness on the video screen. They would all try to make the day as normal as possible.

  Matthews caught up with the family news, and then everyone unwrapped presents, first the kids, then their mother, who opened gifts that had been sent to her in Afghanistan weeks earlier. After that was done and the small talk had waned, Matthews’s youngest child, a six-year-old boy, piped up with a question. “Mommy, can you show us your gun?”

  Everyone laughed, but Matthews dutifully complied. She picked up the rifle she kept in her hooch and then unholstered her pistol as well. Her questioner beamed. Not many of his friends’ moms had their own assault rifles.

  The conversation halted when an aide rapped on the door to announce that dinner was ready in the mess hall. It was a special holiday meal, and Matthews as base chief would be expected to attend. After a few good-byes and blown kisses, Matthews was back at work in Afghanistan. She grabbed her heavy coat and flak jacket and headed to the dining room.

  The day in Khost had been overcast and raw, adding to the gloomy pall that had settled over the base in the past two weeks. Until December life for Khost’s new base chief had seemed manageable and predictable and even somewhat ordinary. She had adjusted to the long hours and settled into roles that had initially seemed foreign to her. She went for a run almost every day and was losing weight. She was beginning to appreciate how quickly a year could pass at a busy base like Khost.

  Then Humam al-Balawi came along.

  Matthews had become aware of the Jordanian informant in the early fall, but until recently neither she nor Khost had had anything to do with him. Balawi was Amman’s recruit, and he was being managed by Langley and the CIA’s Islamabad station. But now it had been decided that Balawi would come to Khost and Matthews would play host.

  Normally such an opportunity would be thrilling for a new base chief looking to cement her reputation. But after weeks of waiting and endless quarreling about arrangements—with her staff, with Langley, and, indirectly, with the informant himself—her enthusiasm was gone.

  Multiple outsiders, including CIA chiefs in Langley, Amman, and Kabul, wanted to be in on the Balawi operation. But no one person was clearly in control. Meanwhile Balawi might show up at Khost tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe not at all.

  At least the first problem, of control, could be fixed. Matthews had never been shy about asserting herself. Yes, her decisions were being challenged, but if it happened on her base, Jennifer Matthews decided, she would be in charge.

  The pressure had been exquisite. Perhaps two dozen people in the world knew about the pending visit by Humam al-Balawi, but one of them happened to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. President Barack Obama, in his second briefing about Jordan’s “golden source,” had been told of CIA plans to meet with the informant in Afghanistan. He knew that the man would be scrutinized and vetted by an agency team and then armed for his mission against one of America’s most determined adversaries, al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The president of the United States would be awaiting news of the extraordinary events at Khost.

  As the person in charge of the details of Balawi’s visit, Matthews sat down at her computer one wintry afternoon to create the most im
portant ops plan of her life. She had to devise a way to transport Balawi to Afghanistan, win his cooperation, provide training, and send him home again without being missed or noticed. In two decades of CIA work, nothing she had written had come close to this. Many weeks later agency veterans studied Matthews’s plan and marveled at its elegant simplicity.

  Timing would be critical. As Matthews figured it, the CIA had about nine hours, just barely longer than a Washington workday, to accomplish all of it. The first hurdle was the extraction from Pakistan. Balawi could find his way to the border town of Ghulam Khan, but he would need help crossing the border and the Taliban-infested mountains beyond. Helicopters were out of the question, and sending SAD officers or other Americans would be too risky, she decided. They would draw attention to the informant, and if they were stopped, they would likely be kidnapped or killed. A trusted Afghan would be sent to the border instead.

  Balawi would need a cover story—a plausible reason to be away from his Taliban hosts for several hours—and the CIA came up with a clever one. As Zawahiri’s new doctor he needed to go to Miranshah to find medicine for his famous patient. The agency would provide Balawi with a package to take home with him: pills and salves to relieve the old diabetic’s poor circulation and skin problems.

  The next hurdle was getting Balawi in and out of the base without compromising his identity. The chief worry, Matthews knew, was the front gate. There could well be Taliban spies among the Afghan soldiers who manned the outer perimeter, and there almost certainly were some among the local civilians who congregated near the gate to apply for work or seek medical care. At Khost, the CIA had always whisked key informants through the main gate without an ID check so their faces would not be seen. An agent as valuable as Balawi would merit even greater precautions.

  Finally, there was the meeting itself. Matthews envisioned an all-hands event. Langley needed to know whether Balawi was real or just a talented con artist, so Matthews would call in her experienced case officers to ask questions and study the agent’s body language. Balawi presumably would know details about a great many terrorist operatives other than Zawahiri, so Matthews needed her best al-Qaeda and Taliban experts with her to take advantage of what might well be the agency’s only chance to interview an al-Qaeda double agent. Most important, if the Jordanian were indeed ready to lead the CIA to Zawahiri, he would need special training and perhaps tools. Technicians would show him how to send secret signals to communicate where and when a strike should take place. The agency had numerous gadgets in its tool kit, including a cell phone that could take and send digital photographs that appear ordinary in every way, except that they are encoded with hidden geographic coordinates. The image, once deciphered, would reveal exactly where on earth it was taken.