by Joby Warrick
There was another critical ingredient, and Matthews gave it considerable thought. The CIA was asking Balawi, more than ever, to risk his very life. The agency would have to do everything it could to keep him happy and motivated. Matthews had listened carefully to the Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zeid, when he described the informant’s moodiness and fragile ego. Balawi came from a culture that demanded social courtesies in business dealings, and after ten months of dangerous work in Pakistan, he felt entitled to some respect, bin Zeid explained. Matthews would make certain that he got it. There would be Arab-style formality, including an extensive reception with introductions, handshakes, and exchanged pleasantries. Balawi would be offered medical care and food. And as a personal gesture intended to cement the friendship, he would be surprised with a birthday cake. It was a sheet cake with chocolate frosting, made by the base’s own chefs.
“He has to be made to feel welcomed,” she repeatedly told her subordinates.
Matthews reviewed what she had written. Including the security detail and Balawi himself, there would be sixteen people at the meeting, and possibly more. It was an unusual plan, but then, Balawi was a highly unusual agent. What he offered was far beyond the kind of typical Taliban gossip that gets whispered in a café or alley. Balawi promised payback for September 11 and a hundred other infamous crimes. Very possibly, he could point the way to the destruction of al-Qaeda itself.
When she finished, Matthews reviewed the essence of her plan with Langley and solicited opinions. Some of the details invited haggling, and the CIA announced it would send two officers from Kabul, the deputy station chief and Elizabeth Hanson, to help manage the meeting. But top CIA managers were in full agreement on the key points. Balawi must be protected at all cost, shielded from harm and from prying eyes. He should be treated with the respect accorded a trusted asset, Matthews was told.
Was he trustworthy? In calmer times, before the agency was simultaneously managing intelligence collection for two wars, the CIA would assign a specialist to monitor each double agent and foreign spy for evidence of possible duplicity. Screening for spies was the domain of the agency’s counterintelligence division, masters of the science of rooting out double agents and other intelligence threats. But there was precious little time for screening once the Iraq War began and the sheer number of informants overwhelmed any effort to track them all. Unreliable or difficult operatives were simply dismissed and replaced. There would be no formal counterintelligence review for Balawi, an operative who had been recruited by a friendly intelligence service and had already been deployed as a spy before American officers had had a chance to size him up.
Many weeks later, counterintelligence officers who knew about the case told CIA investigators they had found Balawi’s behavior suspicious. Like the Mukhabarat officer in Amman, they worried that events in Pakistan were coming together too quickly, too easily.
None of these concerns, however, reached Matthews, who in late December won approval for her careful, well-written plan that revolved around a single objective: keeping Humam al-Balawi safe.
Darren LaBonte surveyed the throng that gathered outside the CIA’s debriefing center and shook his head. It was rehearsal day, a practice run for the meeting with the still-absent Jordanian informant, and everything seemed wrong.
“This is a gaggle,” he scoffed, using his pet term for useless bureaucratic gatherings. “It’s a clown show.”
The ex-Ranger, now two weeks into his Khost stay, was standing with Ali bin Zeid and thirteen other officers on a gravel lot, reviewing how they would welcome Humam al-Balawi, should the elusive Jordanian decide to show up. A ragged receiving line of men and women in jeans and military surplus clothing stretched along the front of the building where the meeting was to take place, while Jennifer Matthews went over their parts. The building, a gray, concrete structure with a metal awning supported by steel pillars, was at the far end of the CIA’s minifortress inside the base, a few yards from a guard tower that looked out over Khost City. After two tedious weeks in the CIA compound, LaBonte knew the place well.
He regarded the woman in charge of the drill. He liked Matthews, but as he explained to a close friend in a late-night Skype call during Christmas week, her my-way-or-the-highway management style quickly grated on him.
“They butted heads constantly over Balawi,” said the friend, describing LaBonte’s portrayal of events. “He was the case officer so it was his case. But he didn’t like how it was being handled.”
LaBonte’s chief complaint: too many people. Fourteen intelligence operatives and a driver were about a dozen too many, by his way of thinking. Both LaBonte and bin Zeid had worked with numerous undercover agents in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and in their world, informant meetings were almost always small. One officer would drive to the pickup point while his partner would sit in the backseat to pat down the agent for wires or weapons. At Khost the officers from Amman were barred from leaving the base—the risk of kidnapping was judged to be too great—but still, LaBonte believed in small meetings for security’s sake. Even the most trusted informant was usually kept in the dark about the agency’s operations and was never allowed to know the names or faces of CIA operatives other than his handlers. That was for everyone’s protection: The less the informant knew, the less he could give up if he was caught by the other side and threatened with torture or execution.
Logistics aside, LaBonte had a bad feeling about where things were heading, a sense of foreboding that he mentioned both to bin Zeid and to the friend he spoke to on Skype. Whether it was just anxiousness spilling over from two weeks of uncertainty and boredom or something more—his famous “spidey sense,” perhaps—was unclear.
“Both he and Ali [bin Zeid] were feeling skeptical,” the friend said. “They were not aloof to the fact that this guy could be bogus, and maybe just looking for money. There were no red flags, and nothing that suggested the guy had flipped. But who sits next to Zawahiri and then takes part in an operation to kill him?”
Others, including several of the heavily armed men in charge of keeping the CIA officers safe, had similar misgivings. During the practice run, security chief Scott Roberson and Matthews clashed sharply in an incident later described to CIA investigators.
Roberson, though also new to the base, had spent much of the decade protecting top U.S. government officials in Baghdad, honing his instincts during the worst years, when insurgents were staging hundreds of attacks a day. On the day of the rehearsal, several officers witnessed Roberson and Matthews stepping away from the group for a heated argument conducted in hushed tones. Afterward, witnesses said, Roberson walked to where security guard Dane Paresi was standing and shrugged. Whatever the nature of the dispute, it seemed to those watching to be settled.
Around this time, Paresi, the former Green Beret, complained to colleagues at Blackwater about the security arrangements. And ex-SEAL Jeremy Wise, just two weeks into his assignment at Khost, e-mailed a SEAL friend on December 21 hinting that he had had differences with the agency’s civilian managers in the lead-up to an important operation. “Sometimes it’s your job to say something—‘Sir, I don’t think you should do that. It’s not a good idea,’ ” he wrote.
After days of such conflict, LaBonte finally decided to appeal to his CIA supervisors in Jordan. He sat down to type out an e-mail to the Amman station chief, copying several of the station’s other managers, warning that the Balawi case was in danger of veering off the rails.
There are three problems, he wrote, according to an officer who read the note. Then he listed them.
There are too many people involved.
We’re moving too quickly.
We’re giving up too much control by letting Balawi dictate events.
The e-mail created a stir in Amman. The station chief read the contents carefully, but decided not to intervene. The case was too important and must proceed, he told colleagues.
Whether CIA managers in Langley saw the note
before Balawi’s arrival is unclear. It was never forwarded to Matthews, who in any case knew LaBonte’s concerns by heart.
Later, as final arrangements for Balawi’s visit were being made, Khost’s security chief offered a word of advice to a colleague who was planning to go to the meeting to see the informant who had generated such excitement.
Roberson cautioned the officer, Stay far away from this.
The passing of Christmas only deepened the misery bin Zeid and LaBonte were feeling. When they arrived at Khost, the two Amman officers had planned on a short visit and a quick meeting, but now they were in their third week on the base with little to do and no Balawi in sight.
LaBonte’s efforts to alter the arrangements for the meeting had failed. Matthews was in charge at Khost, and both Kabul and Langley were solidly behind her. There had been small concessions on security. Matthews agreed that Balawi would be searched immediately when he entered the CIA’s inner sanctum inside the base, while the other officers stood a respectful fifty feet away. But there was to be no compromise on the meeting’s location and no retreat from the view that a debriefing of such importance demanded a large and diverse team. LaBonte was beginning to wonder if it mattered: Balawi was still insisting on a meeting in Pakistan that everyone knew would never happen. There was now a real chance that the meeting would be scrubbed, and the entire mission deemed a failure.
Adding to the gloom, both men were feeling homesick. LaBonte was already a week late to join his family at the Tuscan vacation home he had personally picked out over the Internet. Instead he was sleeping on a cot in a smelly guesthouse with strange men. Bin Zeid, meanwhile, was going stir-crazy from weeks of close confinement. Fearing that a Jordanian royal would make an all-too-tempting target for any Afghan soldiers who might be secret Taliban sympathizers, the CIA had restricted him to a small area of the base.
Bin Zeid had given the CIA officers a rare moment of levity when he nearly burned down one of the compound’s bathhouses. A confirmed germophobe, he had tried to sterilize a toilet by dousing the seat with a chemical cleaner. When he lit a match, the small fireball that erupted nearly singed his eyebrows.
Others on the base sought to extract whatever small bits of pleasure they could salvage from the occasion of Christmas. There were toasts in the CIA’s lounge, one of the rare places to buy a beer in the otherwise bone-dry constellation of U.S.-run installations in Afghanistan. Care packages of Christmas cookies and cakes were opened and shared. Wise, the former Navy SEAL and Blackwater guard, showed off an illustrated Christmas list his young son Ethan had colored and sent by e-mail.
Three days later the last of the Christmas treats had been eaten, and all expectations for a meeting with Balawi had dried up. LaBonte used bin Zeid’s cell phone to share the news with his wife: The business in Afghanistan was over, and he would be on his way to Italy as soon as he could book the flight.
The announcement quickly proved premature. Within hours of the call, bin Zeid finally received the e-mail with the news everyone had been waiting for. Humam al-Balawi had agreed to come to Khost after all. He would be at the base the next day.
LaBonte decided against calling his family again. He didn’t want to disappoint them, and besides, Balawi’s change of heart meant only a slight delay in his departure. He could still be in Italy by New Year’s Eve.
Balawi’s imminent arrival also meant that Elizabeth Hanson would soon be on her way back to Kabul. She called her mother in Rockford, Illinois, to tell her so.
Hanson always tried to sound upbeat in conversations with her mom to keep her from worrying. She had told her mother that an important meeting was coming up but said little else about it.
But on this evening, with Balawi at last on his way, Hanson was not her usual breezy self. She ended the conversation with words her mother had not heard her utter since childhood. “Pray for me,” Hanson said. “Just say a prayer that it goes well.”
13.
THE TRIPLE AGENT
Datta Khel, North Waziristan—December 2009
The Pashtun tribesman known as al-Qaeda’s tailor lived in a house near the village of Datta Khel in North Waziristan, where he made a living making suicide vests. One morning in mid-December he sat at his antique sewing machine to fill yet another order, this one very different from the vests he usually made.
The man was celebrated for his ingeniously simple designs that were both reliable and cheap, two key selling points for a terrorist organization that waged suicide bombings on an industrial scale. He started with a sturdy cotton vest, often surplus military gear from the local bazaar, and attached thick straps so it could be secured snugly against the torso. He added fabric pouches and stuffed them with packets of white acetone peroxide powder, an explosive popular in Pakistan’s tribal region because it can be cooked up at home using common ingredients. Next came the shrapnel layer, which consisted of hundreds of nails or other bits of metal glued to sheets of thick, adhesive-backed paper or cloth. Finally, he inserted blasting caps in the powder and attached them to wires that ran to a small nine-volt battery and a cheap detonator switch. The latter item he sewed into a separate pouch that closed with a zipper. That, he explained, was to prevent excitable young martyrs-to-be from blowing themselves up too quickly. An extra second or two of fumbling with the zipper would remind the bomber to move in closer to his target to ensure the maximum possible carnage.
The vest’s tight constraints and the positioning of the explosive pouches would channel the energy of the blast outward, toward whoever stood directly in front of him. Some of that energy wave would inevitably roll upward, ripping the bomber’s body apart at its weakest point, between the neck bones and lower jaw. It accounts for the curious phenomenon in which suicide bombers’ heads are severed clean at the moment of detonation and are later found in a state of perfect preservation several yards away from the torso’s shredded remains. When waves of suicide bombers attacked Israeli commuter buses and cafés during the Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, police discovered that they could often distinguish the dead bomber from his victims by finding the corpse that was minus its head.
On this day a group of young Pakistani recruits, some of them tapped as future suicide bombers, gathered to admire the vest maker as he worked. One of them took photos with his cell phone as the man reached into his explosives chest and pulled out a surprise: not the usual bags of powder, but doughy sticks of a far more powerful military explosive called C4. He kneaded the sticks to flatten them and began to pack them into a row of thirteen fabric pouches he had sewn into the outside of the vest. Next he dipped a paintbrush into a bucket of industrial adhesive and slathered the white goo over a large square of sturdy cotton. The man then patiently studded the sheet with metal bits, piece by piece and row by row, alternating marble-size steel ball bearings with nails and scrap and, finally, some shiny twisted pieces that would have been recognizable to any American who happened to be in the room: children’s jacks.
Among the spectators, there had been lively discussions about the man who would likely wear the special vest. Most speculation centered on the young foreigner whom the recruits called Abu Leila, using the Arab practice of referring to adult men by the name of their oldest child and the word Abu, or “father of.” But Leila’s father wasn’t nearly so certain. When he left for Pakistan, Humam al-Balawi imagined himself a mujahideen, a holy warrior, fighting and maybe even dying in a righteous struggle against the enemies of God. What he hadn’t pictured for himself was a suicide vest. The one in the tailor’s shop in Datta Khel was still coming together, row after metal-studded row, but there was still time. In the coming days Balawi tried his best to make sure that the vest ended up belonging to someone else. Anyone but him.
Nothing had turned out as Balawi expected.
The death of Baitullah Mehsud had seemed like the end of the line and maybe the end of his life. The diminutive Mehsud had been Balawi’s host and principal defender when other Taliban leaders and even his own
aides eyed the physician warily. Now that he was gone, the suspicions returned. Perhaps it had been the Jordanian who had directed the missiles against Taliban commanders, including Baitullah Mehsud himself.
Fortunately for Balawi, there were plenty of other possible suspects. Fifteen months of relentless Predator strikes had given rise to outlandish theories about how the CIA’s missiles found their targets with such precision. Much of the speculation centered on an “invisible ink” sprayed on automobiles with syringes or on mysterious microchips, called ghamay or “ring stones” by some Pakistanis, that served as homing beacons for missiles and could supposedly be hidden inside cigarettes or even disguised as ordinary stones. Many a tribesman had been executed by the Taliban on suspicion of planting the devices around the homes of prominent fighters.
But the search for spies was interrupted when Baitullah Mehsud’s followers began skirmishing over who would replace the dead Taliban leader. One of the disputes turned into a gun battle that very nearly killed Hakimullah Mehsud, Baitullah’s charismatic younger cousin and the presumed front-runner in the leadership contest. The wounded Hakimullah needed a doctor, and Balawi’s skills likely saved the young man’s life and perhaps his own.