by Joby Warrick
Balawi was staring blankly at the group when the car door opened and he was suddenly face-to-face with a bear of a man with a close-cropped beard and piercing blue eyes. One gloved hand reached for Balawi, and the other clutched an assault rifle, its barrel pointed down. Balawi froze. Then, slowly, he began backing away, pushing himself along the seat’s edge away from the figure with the gun.
Balawi squeezed the door handle on the opposite side and climbed out of the car, swinging his injured leg onto the gravel lot, and then the good one. Painfully he pulled himself erect, leaning on his metal crutch for support. He was dimly aware of bin Zeid calling out to him, but he would not look up.
When will my words taste my blood?
Balawi began walking in a slow-motion hobble as his right hand felt for the detonator.
Just at the brink, the djinn would pose the most awful questions, he had written.
“Who will take care of your little child? And your elderly father?”
Men were shouting at him now, agitated, guns drawn.
“It is said in the Hadith that he who says, ‘There is no God but God alone and praise be to Him,’ he is protected by God from Satan on that day,” Balawi had written. “On the day of the martyrdom-seeking operation, the enemy of God will not reach you.”
Now Balawi mouthed the words softly in Arabic. “La ilaha illa Allah!” There is no god but God.
Men were shouting loudly now, yelling about his hand, but still Balawi walked. He could hear his own voice growing more distinct.
“La ilaha illa Allah!”
Balawi’s path was now blocked. He looked up to see that he was surrounded on two sides by men with guns drawn. The bearded man who had opened the car door had circled around him and was shouting at him from his left, and two other heavily armed officers stood directly in front of Balawi, trapping him against the car with no way forward or back. One of the men, blond and younger than the others, was crouching as though preparing to lunge.
Balawi turned slightly, finger locked on the detonator, and looked across the top of the car. The smiles had vanished, and bin Zeid was starting to move toward him. As he did, the tall man beside him grabbed his shoulder to pull him back.
Balawi closed his eyes. His finger made the slightest twitch.
15.
THE MARTYR
Khost, Afghanistan—December 30, 2009
In a fraction of a second, Humam al-Balawi disappeared in a flash of unimaginable brightness. The detonator caps sent a pulse of energy through the bars of C4 explosive until they ignited with a force powerful enough to snap steel girders. The heat at the center of the explosion soared briefly to more than four thousand degrees before the molecules themselves were hurled outward on a blast wave traveling at fifteen thousand feet per second.
The wave lifted the car off the ground and slammed into humans like a wall of concrete, blowing out eardrums and collapsing lungs. The three security men closest to the bomber were flung backward, with Dane Paresi thrown against a truck dozens of feet away. A great thunderclap shook the compound, followed by the crunch of hundreds of steel ball bearings ripping through glass, metal, and flesh.
The hail of fragments caused the most grievous damage to human tissue. The car’s driver and the five officers with an unobstructed view of the bomber—the three security guards, Darren LaBonte, and Ali bin Zeid—were killed outright. The eleven others standing on the far side of the Subaru were cut down by tiny steel missiles that passed over and under the car and sometimes through it. Shrapnel pierced the compound’s metal gate more than two hundred feet away.
All were hit, though the degree of bodily damage was random. Jennifer Matthews fell with grievous wounds, while a man standing near her was largely spared. Elizabeth Hanson, seemingly unharmed, staggered to her feet and ran between two buildings before collapsing to the ground.
The explosion shook buildings at the far end of the base, a half mile distant, and reverberated against the mountains through which Balawi had just passed. Then there was silence, broken only by the thud of falling debris.
Balawi’s head, blown skyward at the instant of detonation, bounced against the side of a building and landed in the gravel lot. It was the only recognizable piece of him that remained.
Among the witnesses to the explosion was a CIA medical officer who had been summoned to the Balawi meeting to tend to the agent’s leg and other ailments. Knocked briefly unconscious by the blast wave, he recovered to find himself surrounded by carnage and debris.
Though injured himself, he began crawling from body to body, surveying wounds, feeling for pulses, and screaming for assistance. He quickly stumbled upon Jennifer Matthews, moaning and apparently partially conscious with gaping wounds on her neck and one of her legs. Nearby, Elizabeth Hanson, bleeding from a small chest wound, lay motionless on the ground.
More help arrived within seconds as army Special Forces officers, some of them with advanced training in battlefield trauma, sprinted from buildings across the compound at the sound of the explosion, rifles and medical kits at the ready. Their snap assessment was dire in the extreme. The blast victims were so scattered and debris covered that it took minutes to find them all. Six were clearly dead, including the driver, and multiple victims had sustained life-threatening injuries, including penetrating head wounds. The CIA medic checked the badly wounded again as the soldiers applied field dressings and tourniquets. Without immediate surgery, five would die within minutes, he concluded. Matthews and Hanson were among them.
From the airfield across from the compound came the whine of a helicopter’s engine roaring to life. A Russian-built MI-17, property of the Afghan army, happened to be at Khost at the time of the bombing and was immediately pressed into service. A world-class battlefield hospital lay just a few miles north of Khost City, in the U.S. base known as Camp Salerno, but the only way to reach it quickly was by chopper. On many an evening, the CIA officers had watched from Khost as specially equipped Black Hawk helicopters rushed American and Afghan casualties to the base from firefights all across eastern Afghanistan. On this night, the incoming wounded would be Khost’s own.
Once airborne, the MI-17 could make the dash to Salerno in less than five minutes. It was a lucky break, the CIA medic thought as he helped load the stretchers into aircraft.
But would it be soon enough?
Army surgeon Captain Josh Alley was nearing the end of his shift at the Camp Salerno Combat Support Hospital when the word came of an incident at the CIA base across town.
“Chapman just got a direct mortar hit,” one of the medical officers called out as he rushed down the hall. “We’re getting an unknown number of casualties.”
Alley, a veteran battlefield physician who had served in Iraq, changed into his surgical scrubs and started to wash up as details of the attack began trickling in. The first reports had a mortar round striking the CIA base’s gym, news that hit close to home for Alley, who used Salerno’s fitness room almost daily. Like its CIA neighbor, the Salerno base was a frequent target of rocket fire.
Minutes later the doctors learned of the suicide bombing and rushed to prepare trauma beds for as many as six patients. A small team of technicians assembled at each station and listened for the rumble of choppers approaching.
The first casualties arrived at dusk. In the landing zone just steps from the hospital, one of the doctors set up a hasty triage, eyeballing wounds and sorting out the priorities by a numbered code. That’s a two. That’s a three. In field hospital parlance, a “two” is a critical, life-threatening wound. A “one” rating means “expectant,” or not likely to survive.
Two patients were rolled into the surgical prep area, and Alley was questioning one of them, a man who was badly wounded but conscious, when another doctor called out to him with a more serious case.
“She’s got a chest wound,” the doctor shouted.
Alley rushed over to look. On the operating table was a young blonde wearing a red tank top and necklace. He
judged her to be twenty-five or perhaps younger, and she had no pulse. Alley was used to seeing American soldiers and ordinary Afghans with frightening wounds. He had performed hundreds of hours of what he called meatball surgery, picking shards of shattered bone from legs that had been blown apart by land mines, but this beautiful, intact young girl was a first. Alley found the pea-size opening in Elizabeth Hanson’s chest and decided to immediately operate to explore what could be extensive damage within. He cut quickly through bone and muscle and then, with his finger, found the aorta, the main artery leaving the heart. It was flattened and empty. Desperately, he began squeezing and massaging the woman’s heart while an assistant inserted a tube into the opening in her chest. The tube filled instantly with bright red blood, a sign of massive internal bleeding.
He had run out of options. A single piece of shrapnel smaller than a marble had shredded the veins and arteries closest to her heart and snuffed out her life.
“Does anyone know her name?” Alley called out. No answer.
There was no time to think. Another patient was brought in, this time an older woman in cargo pants with extensive injuries from shrapnel. Like Hanson, Jennifer Matthews had stopped breathing during the short chopper ride from Khost, but Alley would try to save her.
He assessed quickly. Shrapnel had torn away a large chunk of the woman’s neck. One of her legs, just below a field tourniquet, had been nearly stripped of skin and muscle, exposing the bone. A small piece of shrapnel had penetrated her abdomen, and the wound had swollen in a way that suggested internal bleeding. Alley pressed an ultrasound probe against the woman’s chest to get a look at her heart. It was motionless.
He couldn’t fix this.
The frantic efforts continued for hours without letup. Working in tandem with another surgeon, Alley patched up severed veins and mangled legs. He treated, as best as he could, a young officer who had a piece of shrapnel lodged dangerously in his brain. All the others were stabilized and placed on helicopters for the one-hour flight to the U.S. military’s Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where other doctors would take over.
It was late when the last of the wounded had cleared out. Alley went outside and, drenched with sweat from the adrenaline and the eighty-five-degree operating room, sat in the cold for a few minutes. Other bodies, those of fallen CIA officers who had been instantly killed in the explosion, were still arriving, to be brought to Salerno’s morgue. Among the remains, he learned, were a few fragments of Humam al-Balawi, collected, he presumed, for DNA testing.
Alley gnawed on a Popsicle to soothe his parched throat. More than 90 percent of the American soldiers who made it alive to his field hospital ended up surviving. At Khost that evening, Alley knew, each of the dozens of factors that were subject to human control had worked perfectly, from the first aid by battlefield medics to the availability of the helicopter to the presence of a first-rate surgical team less than five minutes from the scene of the explosion. Everything had gone right, and it still had not been enough.
He thought again about the two civilian women he had been unable to save. He still didn’t know their names. Were they aid workers? Journalists? Each day brought a fresh dose of human suffering to his operating room, and he was used to dealing with it and pushing on. But war was usually men fighting men. This felt different.
More helicopters were heading to the landing zone now. Alley got up and turned to go back to work.
16.
FALLEN
Langley, Virginia—December 30, 2009
At the moment of the bombing—it was still early morning in Washington—Michael V. Hayden happened to be in Langley visiting his old office. The former CIA director had been asked to give a policy speech in Pittsburgh, and he wanted to do some research. It was usually quiet at headquarters between Christmas and New Year’s, although this week was far from usual. There had been a near disaster on Christmas night when a Nigerian youth named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit. The case, like so many others lately, made no sense. How does a smart, highly educated kid from a wealthy family decide to kill himself and a couple of hundred strangers with a bomb hidden in his underwear?
Hayden finished his work and decided to check in on some friends on the executive floor. Director Leon Panetta was away for his holiday vacation, and so was Hayden’s old deputy, Steve Kappes, so he headed down the hall to say hello to Mike Sulick, the man he had promoted to run the agency’s Clandestine Service. At that moment two other managers were walking out of Sulick’s office. They looked sick.
“It’s really bad,” one of them said. “Seven officers are dead.”
The men had just broken the news to the most senior officer in the building.
Details were still coming in, and already a feeling akin to shell shock was spreading through the executive floor. Hayden, unsure of what else to do, wandered over to his old office and found Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, on the phone with his boss in California, relaying the latest updates.
The first reports had arrived at Panetta’s Monterey, California, home just before 5:00 A.M., with a rap on the director’s bedroom door by a member of his security detail. One of his aides urgently needed to speak with him on the secure line, Panetta was told.
“I’ve got terrible news,” the woman began. “We’ve lost seven of our officers in Khost.”
“What the hell happened?” Panetta shouted, instantly awake. He heard the words Jordanian informant and suicide bomber and the outlines of the disaster crystallized in his mind. The double agent. The long-awaited meeting. The chance to get Ayman al-Zawahiri. It had all been a trick.
Panetta pressed for details, but there were few at that hour. He hung up the phone and sat, hoping that it was somehow a bad dream.
As the chief of staff for the Clinton White House he had stood by the president in 1993, when news broke of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, an attack by American right-wing extremists that killed 168 people. But never had men and women fallen under his direct command.
This is truly war, he thought.
With Bash on the line he began to make phone calls, thinking that the bad news should come first from him. He called Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary. He tapped in the number for Vice President Joe Biden.
Then he called the president.
Barack Obama was on Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but after a moment the CIA director was patched through. We lost seven officers in Khost, Panetta began.
“This guy that we thought was going to take us to Zawahiri turned out to be a double agent and blew himself up,” he told the president.
The two talked for a few minutes while Panetta summarized the scant facts he had. Obama listened quietly at first, then stopped Panetta repeatedly to press for details. I want to understand what happened, he said.
The two talked about what would come next. Family notifications. Services. The White House should be part of it, Obama said, thinking out loud. The families should know that we’re with them.
Please keep me posted, Leon, the president said, finally. If there’s anything at all that I can do …
Back at Langley, Bash had invited Hayden to stay, so he did. Some of the names of the victims were starting to trickle in, and one of them pierced Hayden to his core.
Elizabeth Hanson.
He could still picture her young face from the times she had presented updates on al-Qaeda at senior staff meetings. He remembered her voice from late-night calls from the Counterterrorism Center, when the agency was hot on the trail of some senior commander in Pakistan. She was smart, confident, attractive, a walking recruitment poster for the agency. She exuded the kind of enthusiasm and competence that had made Hayden proud when he served as director.
Hayden sat for a long time in the director’s office with Bash and Sulick, talking about the events, the people, wondering what had gone wrong. Finally he said good-bye to t
he others and let himself out. He walked past the guard station and through the marble entranceway, with its famous engraving of the CIA seal on the floor. He passed the CIA’s fallen officer memorial, where dozens of granite stars honor slain intelligence operatives, including many whose names will forever remain secret.
Outside, it was overcast and freezing. Hayden hurried to his vehicle and sat for several minutes in the parking lot. He thought about Hanson and the others and the many families who at this hour did not yet know what lay ahead for them.
Alone in his car in the bitter cold, Michael Hayden wept.
Even before the extent of the losses was known, top CIA officials inaugurated a plan that would guide the agency’s response over the coming days. The first immediate step was to seal off Khost entirely, locking down the base itself and cutting communications to the outside world. A few cell phone calls made it to the United States before the access was shut. One of them was from a Special Forces officer who had witnessed the bombing’s aftermath and called a CIA friend with the news.
“Your base just got blown up,” he said.
The agency imposed a news blackout in an effort to keep details of the attack out of the public spotlight until the senior managers were clear on exactly what had happened and had started the process of notifying the families of the dead and wounded. Within hours, Internet news sites were buzzing about a major explosion at a secret CIA base, but the official response from Langley was silence. At headquarters and in the agency’s Amman station, teams were appointed to the grim task of locating wives and parents so they could be told in person.
The CIA had no one reasonably close to Tuscany on December 30, so it fell to the Amman station to deliver the news by phone to Racheal LaBonte. The station chief knew that the LaBonte family was in Italy, expecting Darren to show up at any time. In reality, his wife already sensed that something had gone badly wrong in Afghanistan.
Late in the afternoon she began receiving urgent text messages from Ali bin Zeid’s wife, Fida. The Jordanian woman had been watching news reports about an attack of some kind in Afghanistan, and she was worried. Bin Zeid had not phoned when he was supposed to, and now she was having trouble getting through to him. Had Racheal heard from Darren?