The Triple Agent (24 page)

The shooting took place in late August. Al-Rahman and Balawi took their places and pretended to engage in conversation as the camera rolled. The scene was blocked so that the video footage would have the appearance of an amateur’s casual recording of an ordinary gathering. Afterward the production team extracted a short digital snippet. All that remained was for the Jordanian to attach the file to an e-mail and wait.

The first stage was to be followed by a series of small enticements, spread out over weeks to keep the Western analysts interested and eager. Balawi would appear to help the CIA in its quest to find targets, offering advice here and authentic detail there, appearing to move ever closer to, but never quite achieving, a big score. Al-Qaeda would wait for the aftershocks from the al-Rahman video to die down before unveiling the ultimate dangle. Al-Masri knew how hungry the Americans were for information about bin Laden and Zawahiri. The No. 2 leader, despite his secretiveness, could plausibly want to meet with Balawi because of his health problems. Al-Qaeda would supply the details of an imagined medical visit that would ring true to the CIA’s analysts, down to the last scar and tooth filling.

Each piece of bait was eagerly snapped up. Whether the Jordanian and American intelligence agencies were entirely convinced
was impossible to tell from Pakistan, but Balawi now commanded their rapt attention. Bin Zeid praised his most successful recruit in a November e-mail that Balawi shared with his hosts. “You have lifted our heads in front of the Americans!” bin Zeid had gushed.

Balawi was thrilled to be part of it. The storied American spy agency had ensnared so many jihadists with its technology, money, and clever tricks. Now it appeared to have fallen victim to al-Qaeda’s clever ruse, one surely as clever as any dreamed up in the West.

“
All praise is due to God, the bait fell in the right spot,” Balawi said, “and they went head over heels with excitement.”

Humam al-Balawi’s handlers were surely interested, but they were not foolhardy. The Jordanian physician was dealt one disappointment after another as his intended target refused to leap into al-Qaeda’s trap.

The initial scheme centered on a meeting in Peshawar, the ancient Pashtun capital and now a metropolis of one and a half million people in northwestern Pakistan. Balawi would insist on meeting bin Zeid alone, and at the right moment al-Qaeda operatives would burst in with guns and the Mukhabarat officer would be kidnapped—or “arrested,” as Balawi would say. The CIA would almost certainly be watching, and its agents would try to interfere, so there was a Plan B. If the kidnappers were trapped or cornered in their escape, they would execute their hostage as their final act.

Bin Zeid was initially receptive to a Peshawar meeting, since CIA officials knew the city well and had many operatives there. It was the CIA’s Islamabad office that nixed the plan. There were too many risks, including the high likelihood that Pakistan’s spy agency would learn of the meeting and possibly compromise Balawi’s identity.

After Peshawar, the North Waziristan hub city of Miranshah was the militants’ obvious next choice. Al-Qaeda’s close allies, the Haqqani network, practically owned the town, and the Mehsud-led
Taliban alliance now operated out of villages in the outskirts. Bin Zeid could disappear inside the town’s maze of mud walls, alleys, and bazaars before the CIA knew what had happened.

When bin Zeid said no to Miranshah, Balawi kept asking. He offered variations on the plan, and he tried to lay on the guilt. “I’m the one taking all the risks,” he repeated.

Balawi’s insistence was starting to grate, but veteran CIA officers chalked it up to the agent’s greenness. The informant clearly was afraid, and he hadn’t yet grasped the limits of the CIA’s reach. If given any choice at all, the Americans would never consent to having such an important meeting in a place like Miranshah, a town where the agency’s absolute control over conditions was far from guaranteed.

Only one location made sense for the meeting, bin Zeid wrote. It was the American base at Khost, just across the border and over the mountains from Miranshah. Balawi could travel there quickly and return to Pakistan before anyone missed him. Khost offered complete security and protection from accidental discovery by Taliban spies.

For his part, Balawi wasn’t interested in the CIA base. As he well knew, going to Khost would be akin to breaking into a prison. There would no chance for an ambush or kidnapping, and no al-Qaeda fighters waiting for the command to attack. Even if he could somehow smuggle a gun onto the base, he would almost certainly be disarmed or killed before he could squeeze off a single round.

Not possible
, he wrote back.

Balawi’s invitation to visit a known CIA base did present one intriguing option, one that conceivably could allow him to strike a blow against Jordanian intelligence and possibly the Americans as well. Balawi knew it, and his al-Qaeda hosts were almost certainly thinking about it as well. Unlike the other plans they had discussed, this would be a solo mission and a guaranteed one-way trip. It would also be the longest of long shots. For Balawi to have any chance of succeeding as a suicide bomber, he would have to somehow make it past layer after layer of security, starting with multiple rings of Afghan and American guards, followed by pat-downs,
bomb-sniffing dogs, and metal detectors. The best he could realistically hope for would be to take out a few of the low-paid Pashtun wretches who stood sentry outside the base to feed their families.

Balawi’s feelings about a possible suicide mission can be deduced from the urgency of his efforts to avoid Khost. Through early December, and continuing for weeks after bin Zeid arrived at the American base, he pelted the Mukhabarat officer with requests to come to him. When it was at last clear that Miranshah was out of the question, he proposed still another option, a meeting outdoors at Ghulam Khan, the checkpoint on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on the highway that runs from Miranshah to Khost.

The haggling was still under way on December 17, when the CIA unleashed one of its most powerful missile barrages in months in Datta Khel district, not far from the village where the special suicide vest was being made. At least ten missiles hit a compound where several al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives had gathered, killing sixteen of them. It was a costly strike.
Among the dead was Abdullah Said al-Libi, the al-Qaeda operations chief with whom Balawi had briefly lived.

The pressure for some kind of response was now becoming exquisite. The old warriors cursed the Americans, cast nervous glances at the drones overhead, and eyed the Jordanian doctor expectantly. An opportunity beckoned—the flimsiest of threads, perhaps, but at least it was something. When, exactly, would Balawi’s words taste his blood?

His options dwindling as December neared its end, Balawi’s mind raged with the desperation of a condemned man. One evening he sat down to try to write, as though he could somehow exorcise his doubts by putting them on paper. As he started, he was struck by the irony of what he was attempting to do.

“I have often wished to know
what is going on in the head of a martyr before the martyrdom-seeking operation,” he wrote. “It is now my turn today to fulfill the wishes of others.”

He began to list his private fears, pausing to admit deep misgivings about the value of suicide attacks. The problem, he acknowledged, is that one could “only do it once in your life,” and there
was a real chance that he would fail and squander his life for nothing. Why not instead fight on the front lines? he asked himself. Or why not use his brain to come up with something better, a “bigger operation that hurts the enemies of God”?

Balawi tried to convince himself that “intent” was the only thing that mattered: God would honor his sacrifice, even if he were shot and killed before he could press the detonator switch. The harder question was whether he could go through with it. How would he feel in those final seconds, with only a slight twitch separating him from permanent annihilation?

“Do you not fear to be cowardly at the last moment,” he asked himself, “and be unable to press the button?”

On December 28, Humam al-Balawi returned to the public call office to compose a brief note to his countryman Ali bin Zeid.
You win
, he wrote.

I’ll meet your driver in Miranshah this afternoon as requested
, Balawi continued.
See you tomorrow in Khost
.

Afterward Balawi and two al-Qaeda associates drove to a field to record some video footage of the Jordanian firing a few rounds from an AK-47, the gun jerking upward as bullets kicked up dust spouts in the distance. He put his crutch aside for the photos, so he wouldn’t appear injured, but as he walked, he limped badly from his leg injury.

Later that morning Balawi went to his room and tried on the suicide vest. He tightened the straps, and the weight of thirty pounds of explosive and metal cut into his thin shoulders. He put on his kameez shirt and gray patou, the shawl-like blanket that doubles as a cloak and mobile prayer mat, and walked back outside where his friend with the video camera was waiting beside a white hatchback. Balawi looked tired, he had aged visibly in nine months, and his face below his right eye still bore scars from the motorcycle crash.

Balawi sat in the driver’s seat as the camera rolled. He had decided
that his martyr’s message should be in English, to ensure the widest audience if the video made its way to the Internet, and he chose lines intended to project a kind of cinematic, bad-guy toughness, as though he were a Hollywood mobster delivering an ultimatum.

“
We will get you, CIA team.
Insha’ Allah
—God willing—we will bring you down,” he said. “Don’t think that just by pressing a button and killing mujahideen, you are safe.
Insha’ Allah
, we’ll come to you in an unexpected way.”

Balawi raised his left hand to reveal what appeared to be a wrist-watch beneath his kameez sleeve. “Look, this is for you: It’s not a watch, it’s a detonator,” he said. But the tough-guy routine was falling short. Balawi seemed agitated and bitter, and he turned his head from the camera whenever he finished a thought. His eyes were red as he spit out his last words.

“This is my goal: to kill you, and to kill your Jordanian partner, and
Insha’ Allah
, I will go to
al-Firdaws
—paradise,” he said. “And you will be sent to hell.”

With the final phrase his voice cracked, as though he were straining to fight back tears. Balawi looked away, and the image went dark.

NO GOD BUT GOD

D
ane Paresi rose early on December 30 and was instantly mindful of two things. One was the cold—twenty-three degrees at daybreak outside the Blackwater employees’ quarters, and not so balmy inside either. Another was food. Paresi’s Special Forces call sign was Jackal, a tribute to his legendary appetite and reputation for mooching from his comrades’ plates. He had developed a special fondness for the Khost mess hall, which he judged to be superior to most of the dozens of others he had sampled in Afghanistan. By this hour, just after 6:00
A.M.
, the pancakes would be flying off the griddle, and the aroma of greasy bacon and black coffee would be strong enough to grab an ex–Green Beret by the collar from half a block away.

There was a weightier matter as well, one that tugged at his thoughts as he dressed in the frigid room: The CIA’s prized informant was at last on his way to Khost. Paresi had dealt with scores of informants over his career, but never had he seen a case that could simultaneously kick up so much excitement and rancor. Plans for the agent’s debriefing had preoccupied the base’s senior staff for weeks, and tempers had boiled over. For his part, Paresi was highly skeptical of the security plan the officers had rehearsed, and he had said so, sharing his concerns with both his supervisor back in Virginia
and the CIA’s security chief at Khost, Scott Roberson. Roberson had independently reached the same conclusion about what he believed was the fundamental problem: too many people, standing too close to an agent who had been living undercover and, by definition, could not be trusted.

Normally, such disagreements would have been considered part of the natural order. In nearly twenty-seven years of army service, including nearly six years of Special Forces work in Afghanistan, Paresi had seen endless skirmishing over tactics. Soldiers clashed and sometimes got mad, but in the end the officers decided, and everyone did his job. Today was looking like another of those days, yet it wasn’t. Paresi couldn’t yet put a finger on what was different.

Paresi dressed quickly and dug around his hooch for his heavy coat and weapon. Space-wise, the room was just a notch above an army tent, but there were plywood walls for privacy and just enough room for his cot, clothes, and gear, along with the books and journals he brought along to pass the idle hours. The hallway outside his room led to a small lounge with a leather sofa where the contract workers could play cards, read, or just sit with their laptops to skim the headlines and check e-mail. The place smelled vaguely of dogs, a legacy of the many strays that wandered through the base and were sometimes adopted as pets. The newest of the Blackwater arrivals, a Navy SEAL named Jeremy Wise, had taken up with a white, lop-eared mongrel he named Charlie that slept in the guards’ quarters and liked chewing on the men’s beards when they sat on the sofa. Paresi hardly minded. He loved dogs and missed his, a black-and-white Boston terrier so earnestly loopy Paresi had given it the nickname Retard. Dogs reminded him of home, where he planned to be in February, putting Afghanistan and military work behind him for good.