The Triple Agent (12 page)

“Go after him,” one Pakistani security official pleaded to one of the U.S. officials in Jones’s delegation.

In Langley, meanwhile, the search by Elizabeth Hanson and her fellow targeters was beginning to bear fruit, as daily cables from Kabul and Islamabad brought fresh reports on the movements of Taliban commanders close to Mehsud. Some in the CIA had developed a theory about the origins of the Taliban’s mysterious devices: They were part of an al-Qaeda project that had been disrupted by the relentless Predator strikes on the terrorist leaders. An al-Qaeda bomb maker named Khalid Habib had been aspiring to build a dirty bomb before his plans were cut short in October 2008, when a missile slammed into his car in northwestern Pakistan. Habib’s closest ally and the presumed heir to his bomb-making projects was Osama al-Kini, the al-Qaeda commander who died in the Predator strike on New Year’s Day. Had al-Qaeda bequeathed its dirty bomb factory to Baitullah Mehsud?

The CIA had long worried about collusion between al-Qaeda and
Pakistan’s loose confederation of militant groups, and now Hanson and her team were seeing increasing examples of it. In their natural state, many of the local extremist groups were rivals who fell regularly into spasms of bloody intertribal feuding. But lately, squeezed by encroaching Pakistani troops from the south and the constant threat of death from CIA missiles, the militants were consulting and cooperating in ways that could make them far more dangerous.

Hanson was skimming classified cables for the names of Mehsud lieutenants in late June, when Pakistani informants reported that a kind of pan-jihadist strategy session had taken place near Baitullah Mehsud’s ancestral home of Makeen, in South Waziristan. The eleven-member guest list included a top al-Qaeda emissary, Abu Yahya al-Libi, as well as Sirajuddin Haqqani, the charismatic young commander who presided over the powerful Haqqani network, and Baitullah Mehsud himself. The reputed purpose of the gathering was to persuade the Taliban leader to negotiate a truce with Pakistan; Haqqani and al-Qaeda leaders were watching the army’s advance through South Waziristan and worried that their territory might be next.

Hanson jotted some notes and leaned back to think.

Mehsud, al-Qaeda, and the Haqqanis, sipping tea and planning strategy
. The groups had maintained informal contacts for years. But this was something more.

James L. Jones was wrapping up his meetings in Islamabad on June 23, when the CIA caught a break in its search for Baitullah Mehsud and the weapon he was feared to be hiding: A midlevel commander in Mehsud’s organization was spotted in Taliban country. A plan was quickly hatched to strike Baitullah Mehsud when he attended the man’s funeral. True, the commander, a trusted aide named Khwaz Wali Mehsud, happened to be very much alive as the plan took shape. But he would not be for long.

Before sunrise on June 23 a lone Predator drone circled high over tiny Lataka, a mountain hamlet in Taliban country, forty miles
northeast of the provincial capital of Wana. Two missiles sliced through the humid predawn air, racing ahead of their own sound waves, sensors locked onto a mud-brick building on the village outskirts. Anyone watching from the street would have seen only a small impact flash and then an eruption of rock, dust, and smoke as the house burst apart from the inside. Neighbors clambering over broken walls and singed furniture and bed mats found the mangled bodies of five Taliban fighters and their leader, Khwaz Wali Mehsud.

It was a significant hit, but it was only the prelude to what CIA officials hoped would be a much bigger score.

The Mehsuds, like other Pashtun tribesmen who live along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, attach great significance to funerals, which often surpass weddings as social occasions. The passing of a prominent member requires a show of respect from his relatives, and often large crowds of mourners gather around the body to wail and chant prayers. Village elders and other prominent citizens then fall in line to escort the shrouded corpse to the gravesite.

As the smoke cleared in tiny Lataka, spy agencies watched and listened when Mehsud notables began pouring into the village to recover the bodies and organize a hasty burial. Among the names gleaned from phone intercepts was Qari Hussain Mehsud, Baitullah Mehsud’s top deputy and heir apparent. Qari Hussain was among the most ideological of the Mehsud clan, a man with deep hatred for Pakistan’s secular government and a vision for a broader alliance between the Pakistan Taliban and other jihadist movements. He had founded suicide bomber camps for young boys and was behind several deadly attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The second big name on the guest list was a surprise: Mullah Sangeen Zadran, a military commander in the Haqqani network. Sangeen was a top deputy to Sirajuddin Haqqani, Jalaluddin’s son, and a man with a bounty on his head. The Pentagon had targeted him twice during raids inside Afghanistan, but he had slipped away both times. Now his presence at a Mehsud clan funeral reinforced U.S. fears of a deepening alliance between the Mehsuds and the Haqqanis that would surely benefit al-Qaeda as well.

Among Pashtuns, burials frequently occur within hours of a
person’s death, so on this day the CIA immediately dispatched its drones to Makeen, the town nearest to Lataka and the presumed setting for Khwaz Wali Mehsud’s funeral. Agency officials in Khost and Langley watched on flat-screen TVs as cars arrived and mourners gathered, the men in long tunics and the women in burkas and veils. They watched as the shrouded body was carried through the streets and as prayers were chanted at the graveside. They listened as the officiating mullah urged the crowd to disperse quickly because the low-pitched humming of the
machays
or bees—the Pashto name for the pilotless planes—was drawing nearer.

Muhammad Saeed Khan, a thirty-five-year-old Pashtun tribesman, was leaving the gathering when the first two missiles hit almost simultaneously.

“
It created a havoc—there was smoke and dust everywhere,” Khan told a Pakistani journalist afterward from his hospital bed. “Injured people were crying and asking for help. They fired the third missile after a minute, and I fell on the ground.”

Pakistani news reports initially listed both Qari Hussain Mehsud and Sangeen Zadran, the Haqqani commander, as having been killed in the strike, and agency officials strained to hear if Baitullah Mehsud had been killed as well.

It took another two days before the truth was known. Both Qari Hussain Mehsud and Sangeen Zadran survived the attack, as they gleefully informed local broadcasters in interviews.

Baitullah Mehsud, if he attended the funeral at all, had slipped away before the missiles flew.

THE JIHADIST

H
umam al-Balawi arrived alone in northwestern Pakistan on March 19 with his two battered suitcases, and the vastness of the country swallowed him up. The CIA’s paid informants watched him pass through customs at Peshawar and spotted him again at the crowded bus terminal where he boarded a coach for the frontier city of Bannu. But then he vanished, disappearing into the blackness of one of the harshest and most isolated places on earth.

In Amman, Ali bin Zeid checked his in-box day after day for news. The Jordanian intelligence officer had set up a special e-mail account to be used only by his new informant, whom bin Zeid had code-named Panzer after the legendary German battle tank. Balawi had been cautioned to limit his e-mails in case he was being watched, but days had passed with no contact at all. Was the informant sick? Had he gotten lost? A possible explanation, bin Zeid knew, was that he had been killed. Any traveler from pro-Western Jordan would be viewed by the Taliban as a likely spy. Balawi’s Arabic and English skills would do little to help him out of a jam in Pashto-speaking Taliban country. Balawi had known it, too.

I’m afraid I will die in Pakistan
, Balawi had blurted out at one of their last meetings before leaving Amman.
I will be killed, and there will be no one to look after my family
.

Bin Zeid had been reassuring, but now he was consumed with worry and guilt. He began to prepare for the possibility that the Balawi experiment would utterly fail. It had happened before.

Then, one morning in late March, bin Zeid was sitting at his computer, sorting through the day’s e-mail, when he spotted an unusual item forwarded from one of his little-used accounts. The subject line was a series of code words, but there was no mistaking the sender.

The text was also in code, a few short phrases the two men had agreed upon as a way of verifying identity at the first contact. The translation was roughly this:
It’s Balawi. I’m here
.

In a series of notes that followed, Balawi reported that he was getting along tolerably well in his first assignment as a spy. He was living in the South Waziristan market town of Wana, using the cash the Mukhabarat had given him as start-up money. Like most of the larger towns, Wana had a public call house with computer terminals, which Balawi would use to communicate with Amman. He had a list of contacts, including Pakistani jihadists he had met online when he wrote under the name Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. The plan was for Balawi to approach the Taliban’s emissaries in Wana to ask for their help in setting up itinerant medical clinics in tribal villages. Balawi would pose as a devout physician looking to perform jihad by treating the Taliban’s sick and wounded. If it worked, Balawi would have the perfect cover to roam freely through Taliban country, gathering information for reports that he would send to bin Zeid from his home base in Wana.

Bin Zeid sent his new recruit encouraging replies. You’re doing important work, he wrote. He tried to appeal to the physician’s patriotism, thanking him for his sacrifices on behalf of his country and king. “
You have made us proud,” bin Zeid said.

Balawi also tapped out a note to his wife. Before his departure he had confided to Defne that he was traveling not to Turkey, as he had told his family, but to Pakistan.
I want to study medicine there
, he told her. The story made little sense, but Defne knew not to question it. Now Balawi’s wife and girls were living with her parents in Turkey, where she had gone that spring at the behest of her father-in-law to
search for her husband. After a few weeks she had finally told the elder Balawi the truth: Humam was in Pakistan. The Mukhabarat had sent him there.

The old man was incredulous. “How could Humam be in Pakistan?” he asked. “He can’t find his way around a traffic circle.” Later he began pressing Defne to return to her in-laws’ apartment in Jordan, the proper place for a married woman whose husband was away. But Humam would have none of it.

Stay in Turkey and I will come to you there
, he wrote. He promised to send money for an apartment and furniture and offered suggestions on finding a good place. Eventually they would live there together, he said.

The pep talks from bin Zeid seemed to work. Balawi continued his e-mail updates throughout April and early May, making cryptic references to low-level Taliban contacts he had made. Then, in mid-May, he made a startling announcement: He informed bin Zeid that he had accepted an invitation to move in with some members of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, the largest of the insurgent groups based in the province of South Waziristan. The Taliban needed Balawi’s medical skills, and the group had offered to allow the physician to participate in one of its training camps.

I will be busy and I will be closely watched
, he wrote to bin Zeid.
You may not hear from me for a while
.

It seemed rash to bin Zeid—very possibly, Balawi was being lured into a trap—but already it was too late to argue. Bin Zeid’s next e-mails to Balawi went unanswered. The final weeks of May passed, then all of June. Now it was July, and there had not been a word from the informant in two months.

Bin Zeid discussed the developments with Darren LaBonte, the CIA officer from Amman, who was now officially partnered with bin Zeid as the American case officer for Balawi. The long silence certainly was bad news, they agreed. Maybe Balawi was dead, or perhaps he had crossed the line and joined the Taliban, either voluntarily or by force.

The idea of sending the untrained, untested Balawi to Pakistan had been a gamble from the beginning, bin Zeid knew. It was one of
dozens of long shots and what-ifs that were being flung at an incredibly complex problem: getting inside the inner circle of al-Qaeda. Eventually, given enough time and the CIA’s deep pockets, one of them was sure to stick.

The recorder’s light flicked on. Humam Khalil al-Balawi shifted in his seat and waited for the question
from his Taliban interviewer.

“Abu Dujana is a personality known for articles and contributions posted on jihadist forums on the Internet. We would like the kind reader to know more about him. Who is he, then?”

Balawi regarded the reporter, an Arabic-speaking Pashtun writing for a midsummer edition of the online Taliban magazine
Vanguards of Khorasan
. It was exactly the right question.
Who was he, really?