by Joby Warrick
Racheal LaBonte figured it was just a problem with phone lines, but to ease both their minds, she punched in the number of the CIA duty officer back in Amman. The voice on the other end sounded a little nervous but was reassuring. There was no news from Khost, good or bad, Racheal was told.
A few hours later, as she put the couple’s daughter, Raina, to bed, the fear started to prick her like a thousand little knives. There was a knock on the door. It was the landlord, saying that someone from the U.S. government was trying to reach the family. A phone rang. It was the station chief from Amman.
“Are you sitting down? Is your father-in-law with you?” he was asking.
“Say what you’re going to say. I want to hear in person,” Racheal demanded.
“I don’t know how to tell you this. Darren was killed in a suicide bombing,” he began.
Racheal fell to her knees, the phone still pressed against her ear. Darren’s parents were hovering over her, asking questions. What happened?
“Darren didn’t do anything wrong,” the station chief was saying. “He was a hero.” Then: “Racheal, are you still there?”
Racheal was lost in a fog so deep it felt as though the events were happening to someone else. “You’ll have to tell Dave,” she said softly, and handed off the phone. She was dimly aware of her father-in-law, David LaBonte, shouting into the phone in a voice tinged with exasperation and pain.
“What do you mean?” he was shouting. “What are you saying?”
She looked up to see her mother-in-law, Camille, frightened and confused, fearing the worst but not yet knowing. Racheal took her hand to tell her gently that her son would not be coming home.
At the same hour small teams of CIA officers were boarding planes and cars heading to small towns in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Two of Elizabeth Hanson’s close friends trekked through a snowstorm to knock on the door of her mother’s house in suburban Chicago. Others sat with Janet Brown, whose husband, Harold, had been only a few weeks from completing his Khost assignment and was due to travel home soon; and with Molly Roberson, who was seven months pregnant with a baby girl that she and Scott Roberson had decided to call Piper. A fourth team tracked down Jennifer Matthews’s husband and children at a ski resort. Gary Anderson sat with his in-laws, Bill and Lois Matthews, in a hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to learn the details of how his wife had died.
Xe Services LLC, the company better known as Blackwater, sent its representatives to Virginia Beach, and DuPont, Washington, to meet with the wives of security guards Dane Paresi and Jeremy Wise. Dana Wise’s visitors showed up at her house as she was putting her son, Ethan, into the family truck for a quick errand. She sent the six-year-old to his room while she sat with the men in her living room. Before they left, she steeled herself for the task of breaking the news to her son.
Ethan was her child from an earlier marriage, but Jeremy had adopted him and loved him as his own. Once, when he was returning home from a long Iraq deployment, he decided to surprise Ethan by showing up at his school. It had been the happiest day in the young boy’s life.
Now there would be no more homecomings. With tears welling in her own eyes, Dana Wise scooped up her son and held him as the two sat on his bed surrounded by his toys and stuffed animals. Finally she worked up her nerve.
“Daddy’s gone,” she said softly.
Mindy Lou Paresi and daughter Santina had been relieved that evening to get a reassuring e-mail from Dane when they landed at Seattle’s airport after a holiday visit with family. It had been a rough trip, with endless lines and delays, and they were so exhausted when they arrived home that they left the suitcases packed and went to sleep. At 2:00 A.M. on New Year’s Eve, Mindy Lou was awakened by a knock. She looked out from an upstairs window to see three men at her door, one of them a police officer.
“Is Dane OK?” she called down.
“No, ma’am, he’s not.”
She let the men in, but she didn’t believe what they were saying. You’re wrong, I just got a text from him this evening, she said.
The Blackwater officials were startled, and one of them called the company to check again.
The reply was unambiguous. Dane Paresi was dead.
It would be nearly two days before Mindy Lou Paresi could allow herself to cry. She paced the apartment for hours that morning, folding laundry and making one phone call after another. Later she packed for the trip to Dover, Delaware, where she would meet the plane carrying the bodies from Afghanistan. She took her husband’s army uniform and boots out of the closet and put them into a separate bag. Dane would want to be buried in them.
On New Year’s Day she went to the airport, holding the bag with Dane’s uniform close to her on the car ride and in the airport terminal. At the security checkpoint, one of the attendants asked for the bag to put it through the metal detector. At first, she couldn’t bear to part with it. When she finally did, she broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.
Word of the bombing arrived in Jordan in the late evening. It came first to the intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, and then to the palace. An official with the royal court called Ali bin Zeid’s brothers and his wife and told them to gather at the family home in Amman.
After everyone was there, a delegation of top government officials assembled in front of the house. It included the king’s brother, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, the prime minister, the Mukhabarat chief, and the commander of the Jordanian armed forces. At 9:30 P.M., they walked in a somber procession to the front door.
The door opened, and for several minutes no one—neither the dignitaries nor the family members—spoke. “Everyone knew,” said Ali bin Zeid’s brother, Hassan.
Khalil al-Balawi, father of the suicide bomber, got no such visit. But on the morning of New Year’s Eve, the phone rang at both the Balawi house and at the home of Defne Balawi’s parents in Istanbul. Both times the caller was a man who spoke in Arabic and did not give his name.
To Khalil al-Balawi, the caller sounded as though he were delivering good news. Humam had killed seven CIA officers in a martyrdom operation in Afghanistan, he said.
“Do not be sad,” the man said. “Allah willing, he is in the most exalted heavens.”
Khalil al-Balawi was surrounded by family members at the time, but he could not bring himself to mention the call—or perhaps even to believe it—until hours later, when the story had spread through the community that Humam, the doctor who lived in the neighborhood, was behind the suicide bombing that was dominating coverage on the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera. Relatives and family friends began calling, some with condolences and others with messages that sounded more akin to congratulations.
Khalil al-Balawi said little, but at one point he excused himself and went into his bedroom and took out his diary to try to make sense of the thoughts swirling through his brain.
“At the beginning of 2009 he was arrested and detained for three days by the Mukhabarat,” the old man wrote. “Then he was released. His father will attest that from that day on, a severe change came over him.
“It is this,” he wrote, “that caused me to lose my son.”
17.
RESOLVE
Langley, Virginia—January 2010
Sheikh Saeed al-Masri had slain a giant, and he was crowing.
“A successful epic,” the No. 3 al-Qaeda leader pronounced the suicide bombing in a rare public statement. He praised his star assassin, Humam al-Balawi, the “well-known preacher-writer … the migrant and the mujaid” who had penetrated the base of the terrorist group’s mortal enemy, the CIA.
Al-Masri’s message, posted on jihadist Web sites shortly after the suicide attack, stopped short of directly claiming responsibility, something that the old warrior knew would only increase the risk to himself. But he hinted at his knowledge of the intimate details of the plot, calling it a model of “patience, good planning and management.
“He detonated his fine, astonishing and well-designed explosive device, whi
ch was unseen by the eyes of those who do not believe,” al-Masri said. Then, addressing the dead bomber directly, he officially absolved Balawi of the doubts about him, questions that had lingered until the very end.
“You won, by the Lord of the Ka’aba, O Abu-Leila, God willing,” he said. “You were truthful, and you proved it.”
Al-Masri’s reaction was restrained in comparison to the Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud’s. Balawi’s former host had gone to the trouble of videotaping the Jordanian before his death, and so he had evidence of his ties to the suicide mission. But in the days after the attack, rival Taliban groups began to assert their own claims. One faction boasted that a disgruntled Afghan soldier was behind the bombing.
Hakimullah was so incensed that he began sending e-mails to Western journalists, using his real name.
“We claim the responsibility for the attack on the CIA in Afghanistan,” Hakimullah Mehsud wrote in the e-mails. The bombing was “revenge for the killing of Baitullah Mehsud and the killing of al-Qaeda’s Abdullah,” an apparent reference to Abdullah Said al-Libi.
The thirty-year-old Taliban leader also began to hint of a bold new phase for the Mehsud clan. The suicide bombing had been his group’s biggest operation outside its home base, and it gave a boost to Hakimullah Mehsud’s personal clout. He had been a local jihadist with parochial aspirations, but no longer. Like his slain cousin, he began to boast of plans to attack the West, starting with “America, the criminal state,” which he blamed for the death of Baitullah Mehsud.
“Our fidaeen have penetrated the terrorist America,” Hakimullah Mehsud brashly reported in a videotaped warning. “We will inflict extremely painful blows on the fanatic America.”
Balawi had predicted as much in the hours before his death. His sacrifice, he said in one of his final video recordings, was to be the “first of the revenge operations against the Americans and their drone teams, outside the Pakistani borders.”
In other words, Khost was only the beginning.
At 8:30 A.M. on January 4 the CIA’s senior managers gathered in the director’s office for the most solemn Monday staff meeting in nearly a decade. It began with a moment of silence, at Leon Panetta’s request. The agency’s top counterterrorism officials bowed their heads, some praying while others wept.
The normally loquacious Panetta was subdued, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. Soon after the meeting he would depart Langley for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet the military plane carrying the bodies home. He would stand on the tarmac in the bitter cold to watch the flag-draped coffins as they were carried, one by one, from the aircraft. He would huddle with the families in an empty hangar for a brief memorial, the first of many such services scheduled over the coming days.
Panetta had not known exactly when the meeting with Balawi would take place, but he had known how the operation was to unfold, and he had eagerly awaited the results. Now he bore the burden of knowing the names and faces of each of the dead and wounded. He realized he had met several of them in his travels to CIA bases, visits that nearly always included an informal town hall session where ordinary case officers and analysts could ask questions of the CIA director. He had felt proud to lead such smart, capable men and women. Now, in his private conversations with close friends, he agonized that Balawi’s treachery had not been spotted earlier. Panetta reread the files about the informant and studied the photos of the red Subaru with its blown-out windows and hundreds of shrapnel holes. He tried to project an aura of calm, but he was deeply frustrated. How could they have let a terrorist slip in like that? he asked repeatedly. “Leon felt accountable,” said an administration friend who met with him during the initial days after the attack. “We all did—everyone who knew about the meeting that day.”
But when Panetta at last stood up in front of the CIA’s division managers at their morning meeting, his voice was firm. After the moment of silence, he told the group to prepare to be exceptionally busy. There would be a full investigation in time, he said, but for the moment the CIA was to focus its energies on the tribal belt of northwestern Pakistan. The loss of seven officers in a day was historic—the worst in twenty-five years—but the agency could not allow the enemy to see even the slightest pause. In fact exactly the opposite would happen, he said.
“When you are at war there are risks that you take, but we are a family—we have to be family,” he said. “We now have to pull together to not only deal with the pain of this loss but also to pull together to make sure that we fulfill the mission.”
Panetta continued to speak as the agency’s veterans sat quietly.
“We hit them hard this past year, and they’re going to try to hit us back,” he said. “But we have to stay on the offensive.”
Indeed, a new offensive had already begun.
On New Year’s Eve, hours after the suicide bombing, a lone CIA Predator carried out the first retaliatory strike, hitting a Taliban safe house near the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. Among the four killed was a senior Taliban commander named Haji Omar Khan, a close ally of the Mehsud family and a veteran of the civil war against the Soviets.
Less than twenty-four hours later a second strike targeted three Taliban militants in a car a few miles from Mir Ali. Two more Taliban fighters were killed nearby in a third attack on January 3.
And the CIA was just warming up.
On January 6, two days after Panetta’s speech to his senior staff, robot planes converged over a training camp in Datta Khel, not far from the house where Humam al-Balawi’s suicide vest had been made. The first wave of missiles hit a mud-brick fortress that served as camp headquarters. Then, when insurgents swarmed over the wrecked buildings to look for bodies, a second salvo was launched. When the dust cleared, at least eleven people lay dead, including two Arab men whom Pakistani authorities identified as al-Qaeda operatives.
Another attack—the fifth in nine days—killed five people in a Taliban safe house on January 8. The next day a strike on a training camp in a village near Miranshah killed four more. Among the dead was a Jordanian al-Qaeda operative who had been serving as a bodyguard for Sheikh Saeed al-Masri. If al-Masri was present, he managed to slip away.
And so it continued. By January 19, less than three weeks after the suicide bombing, the CIA had launched eleven separate missile strikes over a small swath of North and South Waziristan, killing at least sixty-two people. It was drone warfare at its most furious: Never, since the first Predators were launched over Pakistan in 2004, had the pace been so intense.
The barrage was sanctioned all the way to the White House. As top administration officials later described the events, all the Taliban targets had been on the agency’s watch list before the suicide attack at Khost. But by the start of the new year, the CIA’s fleet of robot planes had grown; new orbits, approved by President Obama in the fall, were now being flown. More important, the agency had won approval to temporarily suspend one of the unwritten rules of its drone campaign. Before the Khost bombing, the CIA had largely avoided carrying out clusters of attacks that might provoke a popular backlash in Pakistan. Now the agency’s leaders, and the nation’s president, were in no mood to exercise such restraint.
“In the aftermath of Khost, political sensitivities were no longer a reason not to do something,” said one Obama administration security official who participated in discussions about the U.S. response to the bombing. “The shackles were unleashed.”
The strike that provoked the most excitement at Langley occurred on January 14 in a sparsely populated region called Shaktoi, near the border between the two Waziristans. A CIA aircraft had been flying a slow orbit above a former madrassa, a religious school, that now served as a Taliban base. Informants reported the presence in the camp of a tall, scruffy-bearded commander of obviously high rank. A phone intercept confirmed that it was Hakimullah Mehsud.
Just before dawn, two large explosions leveled the school building and an adjoining house. Among the ten bodies were several Uzbek fighte
rs who were known members of the Taliban leader’s personal security team.
Pakistani media rushed to publish the news online: Hakimullah Mehsud, the man who had helped prepare Balawi for his suicide mission, had been inside the compound when the missiles struck and was believed to be buried in the rubble. One English-language news site posted a large headline on its main Web page. “Hakimullah feared dead,” the headline read.
Panetta remained tethered for days to his secure phone, giving orders and receiving reports from the Predator teams. But publicly his role was to lead the agency through a long period of grieving. He and his deputy, Steve Kappes, together attended more than twenty funerals and memorial services, beginning with the gathering at Dover and ending many weeks later with the final burials at Arlington National Cemetery. He traveled to Jordan to reassure top officials of the Mukhabarat, and he met with Darren LaBonte’s coworkers in the agency’s Amman station, pledging that he would personally see to it that his widow and child were cared for.
It was at Dover that the human dimensions of the disaster became fully clear. Panetta had flown to the Delaware base with General James E. “Hoss” Cartwright, the Marine Corps general and Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, to receive the bodies, and he expected to speak with family members of the dead in private bereavement rooms. But the sheer number of parents, children, and spouses forced the group to move into a large multipurpose room in the base chapel. When Panetta arrived, the room was crowded with mourners. Adults stood in clusters along the walls, while children played or sat in their parents’ laps.
“It was shocking to see so many people,” one of Panetta’s aides said afterward.