The New Spymasters (33 page)

As the meeting with Humam was being planned, the pressure rose. This might be the only chance in years for the CIA to kill al-Qaeda's Number Two. According to Warrick, the agent, now code-named Wolf, had first proposed a meeting in Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan, but the ‘Taliban stronghold' didn't please the Jordanian intelligence officer. Humam was told that meeting in Miranshah was too dangerous and he was asked to find an excuse instead to slip across the border to Khost. Perhaps he could say he was going to buy medical supplies for Zawahiri? Normally a CIA meeting with an agent would involve one or at most two handlers, the location would be discreet, perhaps just the back seat of a moving car, and the meeting would not last long. But the CIA had much to accomplish with Humam. They needed to work out what he knew and if he could be trusted. They also needed to train and equip him with the latest technology. That was why Matthews wanted Humam brought on to the base and had a larger than usual team assembled to meet him. Darren LaBonte did not like the plan at all. As an ex-soldier, it went against all his training. But it was approved by headquarters.

Thomas Pickering, the former US ambassador who jointly led a review into the Khost attack, said, ‘We don't know if Darren ever articulated his concerns in a cohesive way.' But Pickering also said that circumstantial evidence suggested that Matthews did not heed warnings from her security advisers not to greet Humam with too many people – a breach of long-standing tradecraft.
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There were other warnings: in early December a Jordanian intelligence officer had warned a CIA officer in Amman of his concerns about Humam being a double agent. The officer discounted the warning and didn't pass it on to headquarters or the team.
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In the last days before the meeting, Humam claimed, while communicating with bin Zeid, that he was scared to go. He said he was afraid of being spotted by Taliban spies. The CIA base was well known; even the guards at the gate could be working for the Taliban. Bin Zeid promised Humam that he could be rushed straight past them so that no one would see him. He would be brought directly to the CIA and his handlers. Straight to his enemies.

It was Humam's thirty-second birthday on 25 December. As Warrick relates, Matthews had told colleagues that ‘he must be made to feel welcome' since he was going to be asked to do something phenomenally dangerous. She ordered a birthday cake to be made for him. In the weeks that followed, the CIA would be asked why it took such incredible risks on the case, bearing in mind Humam was a complete unknown. The CIA explained that it was precisely because it had realized the fact – that was why its officers needed to meet him so badly.

*   *   *

On the night before he died, Humam was trying to appear confident, so confident that he recorded hours of video statements and wrote thousands of words. He explained what he had planned, how he would do it, and he described all the events of the last year. Propaganda or not, most of his account has turned out to be true.

In his statements, Humam said the original plan had called for luring bin Zeid to Peshawar, where he would be captured or killed:

The initial objective was the arrest or killing of [bin] Zeid in Peshawar. The date had been set, and an operation had been planned to arrest him; but were he to offer any resistance whatsoever, he was to have been killed. However, due to security conditions, we decided that such an operation might be too dangerous at this particular time.

The Jordanians were still keen to hold a meeting, though, and bin Zeid ‘was able to convince an entire CIA team responsible for spy drones to come … We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah.'
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The change of plan provided Humam with, he said, ‘valuable prey'. It also meant this was no longer a kidnap plan. He was going to have to die. In one video he tried to speak in English. He sounded almost delirious: ‘Inshallah, we will get you, CIA team. Inshallah, we will bring you down. Don't think that just by pressing a button and killing Mujahideen, you are safe. Inshallah, we'll come to you in an unexpected way. Look, this is for you. It's not a watch, it's a detonator, to kill as many as I can, inshallah.'
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Was it bravado? Did he really want to carry out this mission? And had he really planned all along to betray bin Zeid? Had the CIA officers been the victims of a ‘dangle' – a trap laid from the start, into which the Jordanians and LaBonte had fallen? Or was it the case, as some speculated, that seeing the casualties of drone strikes had changed Humam's mind?

*   *   *

At about 4.30 p.m., a dust cloud could be seen swirling behind a car that was approaching Camp Chapman at speed, helter-skeltering down the track beside Khost airport. Normally, this would be a danger signal. The barriers were there to slow down such vehicles. But today, one after another, the barriers were raised and the car never stopped. The guards were even told to avert their eyes as the vehicle sped by.

Humam's car was being driven by Arghawan, a 30-year-old Afghan trusted by the CIA. He had picked him up at the border. No one else was in the car and Arghawan knew nothing of Humam's plans. As they approached the camp, Humam could see something he had never expected. He was getting a VIP's welcome. Beyond the perimeter of the base a knot of people were waiting in line. Most were in khaki cargo pants, the uniform of the modern-day adventurer. He could make out his handler, bin Zeid, and maybe ten others. About fifty yards short stood two men with rifles slung over their shoulders: CIA security guards.

The car pulled up with a screech of brakes next to the security guards. Matthews's plan required them to search Humam gently. One edged forward to open the door. Humam took a look at him and recoiled. He shuffled across to the other side of the vehicle and let himself out, for some reason carrying a crutch. As he had promised, Humam was now murmuring to himself, reciting the articles of Islamic faith: ‘
La Ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah
[There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger].' According to a hadith, the Holy Prophet had said, ‘The one who utters La Ilaha illallah as his last words before death will enter Paradise.'
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There were shouts now and guns were raised. Something was obviously wrong. Humam pressed the detonator. As he explained in the testaments he left behind, the attack was ‘revenge for the killing of Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi and the killing of many of our brothers by the spy drones in Waziristan'. He also said, ‘So this is a new era for the Mujahideen, Allah willing, in which the Mujahideen will use intelligence-based tactics and methods which rival or even exceed those of the security apparatuses of the strongest of states, like Jordan and America, with the permission of Allah, Lord of the worlds. So this was the fundamental reason.'
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*   *   *

The procedures followed by the CIA that day made no sense. For years, in covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I had passed through dozens of these US military installations, gone through innumerable searches and seen all the blast barriers built to protect those inside. It seemed incredible, unbelievable, that someone should be allowed in without even the simplest of searches. It also seemed to reflect a basic misunderstanding of Arab culture. Yes, to search someone's body might imply disrespect. But this was war and Humam was now on an American base with no means of turning back. A simple respectful search could have been carried out by one man, perhaps just bin Zeid, who could have met the vehicle at a distance, checked Humam with a cursory rub-down (even disguised as a hug, common between men in the Middle East) and only then allowed him to walk through and meet the others. It reflected not just a failure of spycraft but also a complete absence of common sense. Combined with the birthday cake idea, it illustrated an almost crass naivety.

It had not seemed so crazy at the time to Jennifer Matthews, despite the concerns of some. After all, when had the CIA ever had an exploding agent before? Never.

*   *   *

Back home in the US, Matthews's husband, Gary Anderson, was left to raise their three children. At the time of the attack they were aged six, nine and twelve. He became incensed at the blame attached to his late wife. When he spoke publicly, he told the
Washington Post,
‘The suicide bomber was a bad guy, but at the time, nobody could clearly see it. I think the agency prepared my wife to be a chief of the Khost base, but not in terms of preparing for this asset. This guy wasn't vetted.'
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What galled him most was the lack of preparation, together with the optimism: ‘When you look at the history of this guy, he was flipped in a matter of days, which is ridiculous. Why wasn't he checked in transit to the base?' He had heard that LaBonte raised concerns about Humam. ‘Why couldn't he convince Jennifer that they shouldn't let this guy on the base without being searched? This stuff should have gone back to headquarters and someone should have made a call.'
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The attack had killed seven US citizens: Jennifer Matthews, aged forty-five, CIA base chief; Elizabeth Hanson, aged thirty, CIA targeter; Harold Brown, aged thirty-seven, CIA officer, Afghanistan; Darren LaBonte, aged thirty-five, CIA officer, Amman station; Scott Roberson, aged thirty-nine, CIA base security officer; Jeremy Wise, aged thirty-five, and Dane Paresi, aged forty-six, security guards from Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater
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). The others killed were Sharif Ali bin Zeid (Jordanian GID) and the Afghan driver, Arghawan.

A poem appeared on the Internet soon after, written by one Asadullah Alshishani and entitled ‘Our James Bond'. It was dedicated to the ‘shaheed [martyr] Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani' with the hope that God would accept him and ‘bless him with palaces and the Hoor Al Ayn [the women of Paradise] in a garden where the flowers never wilt. Amen'.

Our James Bond, who is he?

He is Abu Dujanah!

His motto: Let me die or live free!

Our James Bond, what is he like?

A roaring lion, a stinging bee,

Not a cowardly kike.

Our James Bond, what did he seek?

Not power or money,

But justice for the weak.

Our James Bond, what drove his ambition?

It was love for Allah and a longing for Jannah [Paradise: lit. the garden]

That motivated his mission.
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Chapter 9

Faith in the Machine

‘As far as Washington was concerned, if the big eye in the sky didn't see it, it didn't happen'

– Bob Baer, former CIA officer
1

Early in the morning on 2 September 2010, four cars sped down the road in Takhar Province, Afghanistan, throwing up clouds of dust behind them. Inside the third car, a white Toyota Corolla, a little man was talking excitedly on his mobile phone. Friends called him Murcha, or the Ant. They said he never stopped talking. He had come that day because of national parliamentary elections, but after living away for many years it was also a kind of homecoming. ‘That day was like a celebration,' said a local schoolteacher, Ihsannullah, who was in the last vehicle. ‘We were campaigning for the elections. We were making friends, inviting them along with us.'

In the village of Kaiwan, a mile or so away, they were expecting the Ant. Two other cars had gone ahead to gather up a crowd. Flowers were being threaded on to strings. Banners were being put up across the road. They were hoping to welcome back a hero.

The little convoy had made its way up the switchback bends of the dusty mountain road, had crossed a high plateau and was now descending into Rustaq District, heading for another snake-like gully that would take them down to the village. ‘We had no idea they were all about to die,' said Ihsannullah.

It was about 8.15 a.m. Afghan time or 3.45 a.m. Zulu time, as the American military referred to GMT. Far away, the convoy was being watched on giant TV screens screwed to an unvarnished pine wall. Already, a set of cross hairs was trained on one of the vehicles. An operator sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup, waiting for the moment.

So far this had all the appearance of a normal scene in the long-running war in Afghanistan. But something was going particularly wrong that day and the events leading up to it would illustrate a key weakness of modern espionage, in particular when decisions are taken on the basis of technical intelligence alone, and in the absence of good human intelligence. This story also provided an insight into how intelligence and technology were evolving in modern warfare abroad, in a powerful combination that would be emulated by business and domestic law enforcement. As we have seen, human spies can be terribly frail and unreliable, but without any element of understanding and verification through human intelligence, and without basic common sense, terrible errors are bound to follow.

*   *   *

It was time. The order came. The lead pilot of a pair of F-16s lifted the guarded switch cover and armed a GBUI2 laser-guided bomb. He fired the laser and, watching intently through his targeting pod camera, he released the weapon and counted down to impact.

At the sprawling ex-Soviet airbase of Bagram, 150 miles south, an officer within a unit code-named Task Force 535 was in charge of the kill mission. He was watching events unfold from inside a super-secret building and – relayed by satellite – he could see the same bomb's eye view as it hurtled to the ground. He was in a ‘fusion centre', where all branches of the US secret intelligence machine came together with the military. They believed they were fighting the war with new tactics: a lethal combination of information and force that had been invented during the occupation of Iraq. ‘What we do has been nine years in the making,' said one senior US officer intimately involved, describing this new kind of warfare as a ‘magnificent story'. But sometimes the system failed and the wrong people were killed.