The Triple Agent Read online

  Yet the CIA and senior Mukhabarat officials were increasingly interested in the doctor. Abu Dujana al-Khorasani was an emerging opinion leader in the world of radical Islam, and now the man behind the persona was the property of the Mukhabarat. What could he accomplish if he were working for their side?

  Jordan already employed hundreds of informants, who came in two varieties: low-level snitches of dubious reliability and elite double agents who were highly trained and spent years developing their cover. Balawi was neither of those, but surely there was a role for him. It fell to bin Zeid to assess what that role might be. To do so, he would have to become Balawi’s new best friend.

  Complicating matters was the pressure on him from above. Cultivating an informant takes time, yet time was suddenly in short supply. In Washington, the newly inaugurated Obama administration swept into office with a promise to redraw the country’s counterterrorism priorities, starting with a renewed commitment to capture Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The CIA was in a rush to find and deploy scores of new informants and operatives throughout the Middle East and around the world. In Jordan, Mukhabarat officers were being asked to write assessments describing promising new contacts and what they could potentially deliver.

  As bin Zeid set out to write such an assessment for Balawi, he worried aloud to colleagues that inflating expectations could lead to disappointments and mistakes.

  One evening after work bin Zeid put the case aside to watch a movie at a friend’s house. The film was Body of Lies, a Hollywood spy thriller starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. Set mostly in Jordan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the movie depicts an amoral CIA official, played by Crowe, whose miscalculations repeatedly risk the lives of subordinates as well as Arabs who happen to get caught in the crossfire. As he watched the video, bin Zeid seemed mesmerized by the film’s portrayal of American and Jordanian agents at war with Middle Eastern terrorists and sometimes one another.

  When the DVD ended, the friend asked bin Zeid for his impressions. The two laughed about the convoluted plot twists; then bin Zeid turned serious.

  “Here’s what’s true about it,” he said. “It’s the way it shows the Americans in too much of a hurry. Always, they want everything to happen right now.”

  Late February brought some of the coldest, iciest weather Amman had seen in years. Temperatures hovered near freezing for days, and a rare heavy snowfall closed schools and left an army of snowmen plodding the usually dusty sidewalks. Humam al-Balawi had spent much of his time out of the house during the cold snap, but one afternoon he returned from his appointments with a surprise announcement: He had sold his car.

  His parents and brothers stared at him stunned. Humam’s sturdy little Ford was one of his most cherished possessions. It was also his only means of getting to work at the distant Marka clinic.

  “Why did you do that?” his father finally asked.

  Humam shrugged. “It needs a lot of maintenance,” he said. “I’m tired of keeping it up.”

  To judge from his appearance, Humam was more than just tired. He said little these days, spending his time at home on his computer—the Mukhabarat had kindly returned it—or lost in his thoughts. He would disappear for hours at a time, saying vaguely that he was visiting the mosque or meeting with friends.

  At the clinic, his patients had noticed his newly baggy clothes and sallow skin and worried about him. One who confronted him was Hannan Omar, forty-two, a mother with four children who sold snacks from a cart in the clinic lobby. When Omar’s blood pressure had suddenly dropped a few months earlier, Balawi had hounded her for weeks to make sure she was taking her medicine.

  “You’ve lost weight!” she said scoldingly to Balawi after he arrived for work one morning. “Are you sick?”

  The doctor smiled weakly and said diabetes was making him thin. It was the last time she would see him; later she learned that Balawi had handed the clinic manager his letter of resignation.

  Balawi was gradually checking out of his old life. In some ways, the old Balawi was already gone.

  Defne Bayrak tried to understand what was happening to her husband but was getting only small glimpses. After his three days in the Mukhabarat’s prison he was almost unrecognizable: jittery, sullen, distracted. Never one to pray openly, he now prayed all the time, asking for God’s guidance with the smallest decisions. He sat in the apartment with an open Koran for hours at a time, and when the girls’ noisy playing got to him, he would run—sometimes literally—down the block to the neighborhood mosque and the serenity of its prayer room.

  Occasionally he would allow her to pull back the curtain slightly. Defne was able to extract a few details about her husband’s detention, as Balawi described the sleep deprivation and how he was pressured to reveal the true identities of prominent writers. I gave up no names, he lied. He repeated to her what he told his father: that the Mukhabarat had not used torture but had sought to shame him. He would not say how.

  He also talked about his new minder, an intelligence officer whose name was Ali and who was blood kin to the king. Since his release he had begun meeting with this officer for friendly chats, he told Defne, first over chai and then for longer sessions. For Balawi, there was no real choice but to agree to bin Zeid’s coffee klatches. Gradually he became intrigued by what bin Zeid was saying.

  They would meet in a prearranged pickup spot, with bin Zeid usually showing up in his blue-gray Land Rover. If it was dinnertime, bin Zeid would choose the restaurant and pick up the tab, which sometimes ran to seventy-five dollars or more—outlandishly expensive compared with the shawarma and kebab joints in Balawi’s neighborhood. Once bin Zeid asked the physician to accompany him on an errand, and the two spent a half hour cruising Amman’s massive Western-style Safeway supermarket, with its dizzying array of fresh and imported foods and the small room where customers could discreetly purchase wine and whiskey. After the checkout line, bin Zeid tucked a case of dog food under his arm and handed several bags of groceries to Balawi—a gift, he said, for the doctor and his family.

  Bin Zeid’s pitch was subtle, especially at first, but the message was always the same: We need you to help us. For your sake. For your country’s sake. He dissected some of the more strident essays Balawi had written as Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, trying gently to upend the jihadists’ use of the Koran to justify suicide bombings and terrorist attacks.

  Osama bin Laden’s vision of Islam is distorted, he would say. The Koran forbids the taking of innocent lives.

  Bin Zeid even suggested that Jordan’s King Abdullah II was a purer manifestation of Islamic principles than bin Laden. After all, the king, a man with Western affinities and a glamorous wife who traveled the world promoting education for women, was a Hashemite, a descendant of a clan that traced its lineage directly to the Prophet Muhammad.

  Balawi nodded in tacit agreement. Maybe there was a way he could help the monarchy.

  The precise role that Balawi might play was not immediately clear, but bin Zeid was clear about one thing: If the doctor could use his connections to help track down wanted terrorists, the potential reward could be immense. Enough to change his life and that of his entire family.

  How much money? It depended on the target, but the CIA, the agency that wrote the checks, had put bounties on the heads of bin Laden and his wily No. 2, the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, promising sums that were difficult even to imagine.

  How much, exactly? Defne would ask later, when her husband was at home. Humam had been contemptuous of the Mukhabarat agent when he related details of their meetings to his wife in the privacy of their apartment. But now he was distracted again, lost in his thoughts.

  Millions, he finally said.

  On the morning of March 18, Humam al-Balawi packed two small bags and prepared for what he said would be a brief trip. He announced that he had decided to apply to study medicine in the United States, but he first had to pass a qualifying exam. The exam was being
offered in Istanbul.

  The story was mostly plausible. Long before his arrest Balawi had talked about studying in America, and he had fretted about whether he could decipher the highly technical English on the exam that would determine his eligibility. But when the subject came up previously, the test was always to be in Amman. Still, Balawi was well connected in Turkey from his school days, and no one questioned his reasons for going there. He hugged his girls and wife and left the house with his younger brother, Assad, who agreed to drive him to the airport. Humam said nothing to his father about the trip, and he would not bring himself to say good-bye to him.

  At Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, Humam motioned for his brother to bypass the check-in gate for Istanbul. Instead they queued up at an Emirates airline counter for a flight to Dubai, the transit hub of the United Arab Emirates. Humam dropped off his bags and asked that they be checked all the way through to his final destination: Peshawar, Pakistan.

  Afterward Humam shook hands with his younger brother, who eyed him with a mixture of puzzlement and concern.

  I think we should talk to our father about this, Assad al-Balawi finally said.

  No, he is not to know, came the reply. Will you promise?

  Assad consented.

  Peace be with you, he said.

  And with you.

  Humam al-Balawi shoved his ticket and passport in his pocket, turned, and walked up the steps to the gate.

  6.

  TARGETS

  Langley, Virginia—May–June 2009

  Throughout the spring America’s invisible army of spy satellites and eavesdroppers spread its nets across northwestern Pakistan, arraying the world’s most sensitive eavesdropping gear against one of the most backward regions on earth. Cameras scrutinized every mud house, barn, and goat stall across an area the size of Puerto Rico. Banks of computers trolled phone lines, Internet transmissions, and wireless signals, in an automated search for a single word or phrase that might signal trouble or lead to the capture of a long-sought foe.

  In May one such phrase, plucked from routine phone intercepts, sent a translator bolting from his chair at the National Security Agency’s listening station at Fort Meade, Maryland. The words were highlighted in a report that was rushed to a supervisor’s office, then to the executive floor of CIA headquarters, and finally to the desk of Leon Panetta, now in his third month as CIA director.

  Nuclear devices.

  Panetta read the report and read it again. In a wiretap in the tribal province known as South Waziristan, two Taliban commanders had been overheard talking about Baitullah Mehsud, the short, thuggish Pashtun who had recently assumed command of Pakistan’s largest alliance of Taliban groups. It was an animated discussion about an acquisition of great importance, one that would ensure Mehsud’s defeat of Pakistan’s central government and elevate his standing among the world’s jihadists. One of the men used the Pashto term itami, meaning “atomic” or “nuclear.” Mehsud had itami devices, he said.

  After the shock subsided at Langley, skepticism crept in. Was it a translation error? A tall tale? A ruse? Some of the agency’s most experienced hands were openly scornful. Baitullah Mehsud was a semiliterate gangster with a big mouth. His experience with bombs was limited to strapping a few pounds of homemade explosives on a hapless teenager and blowing up a bazaar. Mehsud lacked the resources to acquire a nuclear weapon, and no one would be stupid enough to give him one.

  Still, the CIA would quietly dial up the volume on its surveillance of the hilly border region that was home to the Mehsud clan. The heightened listening continued fruitlessly for days, until one evening the agency’s trawlers snagged something big: a secret meeting among members of Baitullah Mehsud’s Taliban shura, or council. The advisers were overheard discussing an interesting ethical dilemma that had been recently thrust upon the group.

  Was it permissible under the laws of Islam, the advisers were asking, to use Baitullah Mehsud’s new “devices”?

  Now the attention of the Obama administration’s entire security infrastructure was fixed on a small patch of real estate in northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban had remorselessly slaughtered thousands of people, including many women and children, yet these devices had given them pause. The terrorist movement appeared to be taking the unusual step of acquiring religious cover for whatever it was about to do.

  In Washington not a word about the new threat would be uttered publicly. But across the Obama administration, government agencies girded themselves to deal with a new crisis. The Energy Department, with its radiation-sniffing planes; the Pentagon; the Homeland Security chiefs responsible for ports and border security—all were put on heightened alert. At Langley, Panetta harangued his counterterrorism teams daily for specifics, his dark eyes flashing from behind his wire-rims. “What the hell are we talking about here?” he demanded. “Did they take something from one of those damned nuclear depots?”

  Of all the devastating scenarios Panetta had ever allowed himself to imagine, the worst by far was a nuclear explosion in a U.S. city. There were only a handful of places in the world where agency officials feared that a terrorist might buy or steal a bomb or its key components, and nuclear-armed Pakistan topped the list. Yet it was all but inconceivable that a small-time rogue like Baitullah Mehsud could have gotten his hands on a functioning atomic bomb.

  Panetta and his top aides eventually settled on a more plausible explanation: The Pakistani terrorist had acquired a dirty bomb. Sometimes called the poor man’s nuclear weapon, a dirty bomb fuses conventional explosives with lethal quantities of radioactive waste, such as the radioactive cobalt used to remove cancerous tumors or irradiate food. Dirty bombs are far less deadly than an actual atom bomb, but they are cheap and easy to make, and they can spread radioactive contamination over wide areas. One well-made bomb detonated in lower Manhattan could kill scores of people, wreak economic havoc, and render parts of the city uninhabitable for months or even years. Was this the itami device the Taliban was planning to set loose?

  Faced with a potentially grave threat, the five-month-old Obama administration prepared to take action, starting with the dispatching of a high-level delegation to Pakistan to secure that country’s help in locating Baitullah Mehsud and his mysterious devices. “The entire U.S. policy-making community was very alarmed,” said an administration official who participated in meetings convened to discuss the White House’s response. “It was an all-hands-on-deck mentality.”

  It had already been a rough spring for Panetta, who, at seventy, sometimes found himself looking back wistfully at the comfortable semiretirement he had been enjoying before being summoned by Obama to head the CIA. The former California congressman had been suggested for the intelligence job by his longtime friend Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, but his nomination quickly stirred up controversy. Panetta’s prior brushes with the spy world had been limited mainly to the White House briefings he attended as staff director for the Clinton administration, and even Democrat stalwarts in the Senate publicly questioned if he had the necessary experience to lead the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. Obama, seeing the pounding his candidate was taking on Capitol Hill, wondered aloud to Emanuel whether the nomination was worth the political price he was paying.

  “Are you sure this was the right choice?” he asked.

  Emanuel was convinced. Panetta was a shrewd manager who knew Washington and possessed formidable political skills. Though tough and profane, Panetta had an easy laugh and the natural charm of a small-town mayor—a combination that made him nearly impossible not to like. Panetta would protect the administration’s interests while also finding ways to fight and win the agency’s battles with other intelligence agencies, White House bean counters, the Pentagon, and Congress. “This will turn out,” Emanuel assured the president.

  Yet Panetta’s troubles persisted. He angered Republicans and many CIA managers with his comments condemning waterboarding. Then, just two months after his
arrival at Langley, he infuriated Democrats when he opposed the administration’s decision to release Bush-era legal memos that justified the use of waterboarding. Panetta’s stance on the so-called torture memos won him new friends inside the CIA, but it also put him at odds with powerful members of the administration he was now serving.

  A bright spot for Panetta was the CIA’s continuing successes against al-Qaeda, as the new administration embraced and even expanded the agency’s campaign of missile strikes against terrorist bases in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. In his daily intelligence briefings, Panetta could see the impact the strikes were having. For the first time in years, al-Qaeda’s leaders faced a mortal threat within their own sanctuary, the prospect of instant annihilation from robot planes that hovered continuously overhead, their mechanical humming filling the evening silence and making men fearful in their own beds.

  But for Panetta even these successes came at a price. The son of Italian immigrants, Panetta was a lifelong Catholic who regularly attended mass, and the responsibility for deciding life and death for other individuals—even suspected terrorists living thousands of miles away—weighed heavily on him. His predecessor, Mike Hayden, had warned that the job would require “decisions that will absolutely surprise you.” It was true: Once a week, on average, Panetta was approving what amounted to a death sentence for a group of strangers on the other side of the globe. The CIA’s new weapons systems were impressively precise, with capabilities that exceeded the accounts most people would read in newspapers. The agency’s Predators could put a missile through the window of a moving car or nail a target the size of a dinner plate in a narrow alley at night without harming buildings on either side. The aircraft’s operators could—and, on at least one occasion, did—change a missile’s trajectory in midflight to avoid an unintended target that suddenly wandered into its path. According to the agency’s closely held body count, its missile strikes had inadvertently killed nine people by the time Panetta took office, or an average of one unintended death for every forty al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters targeted.