The Perfect Kill (15 page)

After partition from India, the Pakistanis also never found a way to subdue the Pashtuns. Even today Pakistani military and Frontier Corps patrols rarely stray far off the main roads for fear of ambush. From time to time, the Pakistanis launch punitive raids, with a lot of air power and bluster, but with no more success than the British. (Why exactly the
United States thought that drones would succeed where the British and Pakistani air forces failed I'll get into in Law #12.)

In a lot of ways, Afghanistan reminds me of Lebanon. For one, its modern history's been one long and uninterrupted negotiated compromise. When the British gave up the ghost in 1919 and granted the Afghans their formal independence, the two main linguistic groups, the Tajiks and the Pashtuns, saw no point in forming a let's-get-along, homogeneous nation. Combine it with the Afghans' deeply rooted tribalism and, like Lebanon, Afghanistan becomes a perfect emporium for political violence . . . a place where one murder does end a conversation.

Also like Lebanon, Afghanistan is the victim of colonial cartographers who drew its borders in the interest of the metropolitan centers rather than local sensitivities. Take a look at a map: Matthews's new posting, Khost, is a thumb stuck in the eye of Pakistan's Pashtun tribal badlands. Legally speaking, it may sit on the right side of the border, but with the way Pakistan's North Waziristan province loops around it, it's a hangman's noose.

For true believers like the Taliban—a people who only care about divine demarcations—borders are of no importance. Which means they went to bed and woke up dreaming of ridding Allah's sacred vineyards of the American base at Khost. But with its high dirt berms, Jersey barriers, floodlights, machine-gun emplacements, and helicopter gunships flying night and day, Khost was a fortress as impregnable as any Crusader's castle. There was no easy way to sneak in and slaughter the infidels.

According to the newspapers, stopping the Taliban from coming over
the walls was the military's problem rather than Matthews's. The CIA had its own security people attached to the base, but they were meant only to keep the curious from poking around the CIA's little corner. In fact, the more deeply embedded and out of sight its people were, the happier Langley was. Whose orders, incidentally, were unambiguous: No one from the CIA was allowed to set foot outside Camp Chapman, not even for afternoon shopping in Khost. The CIA people arrived at base by helicopter or plane and left the same way. If they needed something from town, they'd send a local Afghan employee for it. If Khost felt like a prison, it's because it pretty much was. Stuck watching DVDs and eating communal meals in a trailer didn't improve anyone's mood.

And neither did the daily work routine. Days were spent reading through hundreds of intelligence reports, most of it pap. In between times, it was waiting for the occasional Afghan source to show up. They all arrived with big promises, such as they could find bin Laden if they had only a little more money. Since no one at the base spoke Pashto, there was no three-cups-of-tea chitchat. Which meant that the people who lived around them on that high Central Asian plain, with all of their bizarre tribal politics and ideas of justice and reprisal, were an alien and threatening mystery.

Matthews coped with the boredom by taking a daily run around the airfield. There were regular Skype calls home. On her first one, she posed for her children in a flak vest and toting an M4 assault rifle. But mostly life at the Khost base was a matter of dull endurance. Until, as it did to me in Kurdistan, fate found a way to turn the tables on Jennifer Matthews.

As the Jordanians told the story, they'd caught the young Palestinian doctor secretly writing for a militant Islamic blog. They knocked on his door, offering him the choice of either infiltrating al-Qaeda on their
behalf or rotting in jail. To spare his family, the doctor agreed to become a mole inside al-Qaeda. He even proposed moving to Pakistan to improve his chances.

It was only after the doctor was taken in by al-Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas that the Jordanians decided to come to the CIA. Having no station of their own in Pakistan, the Jordanians needed the CIA's assistance to meet the doctor. And as always, they hoped to curry favor in Washington with a potential goldmine of intelligence.

The CIA's seventh floor could barely hide its glee. The CIA had never had an al-Qaeda informer before, not even a foot soldier. And not only was the Palestinian doctor inside, he was where it counted: al-Qaeda's rear base in the Pashtun tribal belt. How could the White House not hope he'd be the one to finger bin Laden for assassination, fulfill Bush's promise to get him “dead or alive”?

Any lingering doubts about the doctor's bona fides were put to rest when he reported back that he'd started to treat Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who then was al-Qaeda's number two. The doctor described Zawahiri's condition in enough clinical detail to corroborate it using old Egyptian medical records.

Zawahiri may not have been the prize bin Laden was, but there was nothing to stop the doctor from worming his way into bin Laden's circle. My personal take is if that were to happen, the White House would have the option to assassinate both of them. All that was needed was for the Palestinian doctor to leave behind concealed beacons in their residences. (Beacons would emit signals for the drones to follow.)

The plan fit in nicely with the new cleaned-up and chlorinated CIA. There was no need for long-term vetting of the doctor, nor all the mess that comes with handling informers. Either the doctor would plant the beacons or he wouldn't. And if he planted them in the wrong house, who cared? It wasn't as if anyone was going to sue the White House or the CIA.

The only question now was where to meet the doctor. The CIA wasn't about to send an operative into North Waziristan or anywhere else in
Pakistan's tribal areas; the chances of a kidnapping or an assassination were too high. So why not let the closest CIA outpost in the region meet him, the one at Khost? It was only a short ten-minute drive from the border.

I can only imagine what went through Matthews's mind when she read the cable from headquarters informing her that she'd be the one meeting the doctor to start to organize the assassinations. She'd spent a career behind a desk and now she was handed a bat destined to hit a grand slam in the World Series of the Global War on Terror.

When the doctor e-mailed the Jordanians that he was ready for the meeting, his Jordanian handler started making preparations to fly to Khost. In the meantime, the CIA quickly started to prepare to debrief the doctor. If things went according to plan, Zawahiri's days were numbered . . . and just maybe bin Laden's were too.

Everything was set for the meeting with the doctor at the end of December. But a revolt had started to boil up in the ranks. Matthews's security chief wanted to run the doctor through a metal detector at the front gate, then search him by hand. He said it was the only way to treat someone who'd been living in a place where young men stand in line to go on suicide missions.

The security chief also didn't like Matthews's plan to have the entire CIA base turn out to meet the doctor. Were they hosting a diplomatic reception or something? When she announced she intended to throw a birthday party for the doctor, he shrugged his shoulders in resignation. Who bakes a birthday cake for an al-Qaeda mole?

There was also the creeping realization that the doctor was calling all the important shots about when, where, and under what circumstances the meeting would occur. The doctor had stubbornly refused to meet in Amman and now insisted that if he was to come onto an American base he must be treated with “respect” and not searched like a common criminal. To the jaundiced old hacks, the doctor was starting to smell like a “dangle.” A Pashtun Trojan horse.

Matthews didn't pay attention, and neither did anyone else up the line. The problem was that the president had already been briefed. How do you now tell the president that the whole thing had been called off because of a funny feeling about your best mole inside al-Qaeda? (Incidentally, cluing in the president is a flagrant violation of Law #10 about never ceding tactical control.)

The doctor was already a day late, and now the day was wearing away fast. But at 4:40 p.m. the Jordanian handler's cell phone finally rang. He listened for a moment, unable to hold back a grin: The doctor was en route. Matthews moved fast to assemble everyone for the meeting. In ten minutes, there were sixteen of them milling around the motor pool. There were only two officers missing: the two girls in the kitchen baking the doctor's birthday cake.

They all saw the base's old red Subaru station wagon at the same time as it nosed through the main gate.
Good
, Matthews must have thought.
They didn't ignore my orders and stop them
.

They kept their eyes on the Subaru as it skirted the airfield and picked up speed as it headed in the direction of the CIA's side of the base. Only the driver was visible.
It's okay
, Matthews must have thought. The doctor would be slouched down in the back behind the driver to keep him out of sight of the Afghans.

When the car pulled up in front of the motor pool, the Afghan driver shut off the engine and got out. It was a second before the doctor let himself out. Matthews had seen the doctor's picture, and this definitely looked like him—the CIA's first and only mole inside al-Qaeda.

The doctor unfolded himself and climbed out of the car. He looked uncertainly around himself at the dozen faces that couldn't help but stare back. He was half bent, a little unsteady, supporting himself on a metal crutch. He adjusted his crutch to better walk. When he was on the phone with his handler, he had told him that he'd been injured in a motor scooter accident in North Waziristan. So that explained the crutch. No one thought twice about it, and it wouldn't be until the
postmortem that it was concluded that the crutch was a prop to explain why the metal detector went off—that is, course, if he'd been run through one.

The doctor looked over at his Jordanian handler, but the doctor didn't seem to recognize him. Something was wrong. The handler stepped forward, his hand raised to shake the doctor's. But the doctor kept his hand inside his
salwar kameez
. The doctor started to mumble something. The handler couldn't understand him. He then realized the doctor was muttering a death prayer—
La ilah illa Allah.
There is no God but God.

The doctor looked up at the sky. He fumbled under his
salwar kameez
. Two of the security contractors lunged at the doctor to wrestle him to the ground. The handler hesitated, and then he too jumped on the doctor, grabbing for his arm. But it was too late. They call it the “great white light.” But is that really the last thing you see when you die of an explosion?

Matthews died in the helicopter on the way to surgery. Not counting the doctor, nine people died. It was the CIA's worst loss of life in a single attack.

In his Spanish Civil War memoir,
Homage to Catalonia
, George Orwell describes how one day a fascist soldier jumped out of a trench in front of him. The man was holding his pants up so they wouldn't fall off, which is what saved his life. “I did not shoot, partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come to shoot at ‘Fascists,' but a man that was holding up his trousers isn't a ‘Fascist,' he's visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.”

Orwell was thrown by the realization he didn't really know the enemy. Which brings me to the question, Shouldn't we be killing people
we know and all of the really evil shit that comes along with them? Isn't it the enemy you know, with a face and a past, you want to destroy, instead of the one you don't know? You're certain he's either done you harm or is about to. What I'm trying to say is that killing total strangers, especially at great distances, is something other than proper assassination. It's more like—I don't know—spraying insects from a crop duster.

Let me go back to the Lao assassins. There was no misidentifying the victim or mistaking the crime. The locals knew everything there was to know about the victim, in particular how exactly his murder would better everyone's chances of survival. They were able to put both a face and a price on blood.

At the other end of the scale, the CIA can murder as many Pashtuns as it likes, but with the Pashtuns' horizontal power structure and their opaque politics, it could never know what it was getting out of it. With a faulty understanding of an enemy, murder is a blind shot. Which in turn means we're making more enemies than we're eliminating.

Our military faces the same problem. While the Pentagon has permitted targeted killings in Afghanistan and can do things like number each and every house in every suspect Taliban village—they call them “battlefield maps”—it hasn't been able to identify the Taliban command well enough to eliminate it. Indeed, when U.S. troops do finally withdraw from Afghanistan, they'll be leaving the country in the same state as they found it—with the Taliban in charge.

It would be a mistake to lay the entire blame at the feet of the American military or the CIA. Washington is a capital so far from an age when assassination was the common fate of leaders that it's unable to understand its rules or workings. Couple that with Washington's devouring lack of interest in anything foreign and its near-sighted, one-dimensional view of the world, and it is all but inevitable that complicated, nuanced political murder is beyond its grasp.

In ancient Rome, prominent families kept mounted in the atrium of their houses what's called a
tabula patronatus
. It was a sort of brag wall, a certification of influence and wealth that let visitors know exactly who they were dealing with and what sort of respect was due them. Though it was never the intention, a
tabula
was a handy road map for exterminating a particular Roman clan, ruthlessly moving down the
tabula
until the clan's power was destroyed. A victim was ostracized, sent into exile, or assassinated.