The Triple Agent (8 page)

When the Mukhabarat’s men ran out of questions, Balawi was led back to his cell, which was newly built and clean but tiny, measuring nine by six feet, and furnished with a cot and blanket, a two-way mirror, and a metal commode and sink. The hood was again pulled over his face, and the cell’s thick metal door was slammed shut, leaving Balawi alone in complete darkness. He felt his way to the cot, sat, and waited.

Minutes passed, then an hour. Or was it two? From his darkened cocoon, there was no way to tell.

The hooding was standard treatment, a way of softening up Balawi for an extended cycle of interrogation and isolation that was just getting under way. Nearly all detainees are blindfolded, sometimes for days at a time. Unable to see, and hearing only muffled sounds through the cell’s steel door, they quickly become disoriented and lose all sense of time. In medical studies, volunteers subjected to similar forms of sensory deprivation begin hallucinating in as little as fifteen minutes. Longer periods induce extreme anxiety, helplessness, and depression. In one study, British scientists discovered that people held under such conditions for forty-eight hours could be made to experience any symptom by mere suggestion. A comfortably dry room could suddenly become freezing cold, or filled with water, or alive with snakes.

Balawi tried reciting prayers to keep his mind focused. But as he later admitted, he was pricked with fear about what was coming and when it would arrive. He would be beaten, no doubt, and probably worse. Was he tough enough to take it? Would he crack and give up the names of contacts? What if they threatened to hurt his wife or the girls? What if they went after his father? Balawi waited, straining for any meaningful sound—footsteps, jangling keys, the tap of a truncheon against cinder block as the guards paced the long corridor.

At some point
Balawi remembered his dream. A few weeks earlier he had had a vision of seeing Zarqawi. Balawi had idealized his fellow Jordanian and had wept like a child when the terrorist was killed in the U.S. missile strike in 2006. But in the dream Zarqawi was alive again and, to Balawi’s surprise, visiting his father’s house.

“Aren’t you dead?” Balawi asked him. Zarqawi’s face fairly glowed in the moonlight, and he was busy preparing for something. Balawi guessed it was a bombing.

“I was killed, but I am as you see me, alive,” Zarqawi said.

Unsure of what to say to the man whose videotapes he had endlessly watched on the Internet, Balawi fumbled for the right words.
Would Zarqawi accept his help? What if Balawi gave him his car? What if they could become martyrs together?

Zarqawi said nothing, and the dream abruptly ended. Balawi awoke unsettled and days later was so haunted by the strange encounter that he told several friends about it. What could it mean?

Everyone agreed that the dream was an omen. One friend told Balawi that the vision was a warning, a signal that he was about to be arrested. But another said Zarqawi was conveying a blessing. Balawi, he said, had been called by God for special service, an act of jihad for which he had been specially chosen.

“You will mobilize in Allah’s path,” the friend said.

Twenty-four hours after his arrest, Balawi was showing the strain of a second day without sleep. His voice rasped with exasperation, but there was no fight in his eyes. Across the table from him, the Mukhabarat’s men were just getting started.

Who is Abu Shadiyah? Who is Yaman Mukhaddab?

The questioners this time were Ali bin Zeid and a younger officer, and the subject had turned to the identities of other bloggers and commentators who shared the same Web space as Abu Dujana. Balawi could plausibly claim ignorance. Like him, the writers used fake names, and almost no one knew who they really were or where
they lived. As far as Balawi knew, the other bloggers might be U.S. intelligence agents. Some of them almost certainly were.

Then a new question:
Tell us about your plans for a martyrdom operation
.

The younger of the interrogators pulled a page from Balawi’s file and began to read aloud. Balawi recognized his own words, from an essay he had written after watching a news broadcast about the recent Israeli air strikes in Gaza. News footage showed Israeli women and girls on a rooftop watching as U.S.-made F-16 attack planes pounded targets in Gaza City. The women were taking turns with a pair of binoculars, chatting and laughing as though they were witnessing a polo match. Laughing! As he watched, Balawi felt revulsion sweep over him until it slowly turned inward, filling him with a mixture of rage and loathing, much of it aimed at his cowardly self.

That had been two weeks before. Now Balawi was silent. Spent.

“When will my words drink from my blood?” continued the interrogator, reading from the printed sheet. “I feel my words have expired, and to those who preach jihad, I advise you not to fall into my dilemma and the nightmare I have that I may die one day in my bed.”

Ali bin Zeid regarded the detainee for a long moment.
Tough talk. But this man is no Zarqawi
.

Bin Zeid had worked with real terrorists, hard-core jihadis so fanatical that they welcomed death and refused to break no matter what the Mukhabarat threw at them. Balawi had run out of steam on the first day. His words were full of bluster, but the man with the drooping eyelids in front of him was soft and weak.

He was also jarringly familiar, like someone bin Zeid might have known in school. They were roughly the same age. Both were college educated and had lived abroad. They both descended from tribes with ancestral roots in the Arabian Peninsula and claims of ties to the Prophet Muhammad. Their families were well traveled and understood the world outside Jordan. Balawi was married with young girls; bin Zeid was a newlywed hoping to have children soon.

Bin Zeid could even appreciate, in an abstract way, the deep resentments that animated Balawi’s online persona. Despite his government’s official policy of peaceful coexistence with Israel, bin Zeid had often experienced a twinge of bitterness on mornings when he sat on his back porch, high on a ridge overlooking the Dead Sea, and gazed at the fertile plains to the north and west, lands that had once belonged to Arabs. Nearly all Jordanians had been angered when Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza in late December, killing more than five hundred Hamas militants and civilians in what Arabs viewed as a wildly disproportionate response to Palestinian rocket attacks.

But somewhere Balawi had fallen off a cliff, bin Zeid and his colleagues reasoned. Against all logic and his own self-interest, he had embraced a virulent philosophy that threatened to destroy everything that Jordan had achieved in a half century of faltering progress toward modernity. He had risked his reputation and his own family in the service of fanatics living in caves two thousand miles away.

How such a thing could happen to such a clever, world-wise young man as Balawi was unfathomable. But this much was clear: Abu Dujana would cease to exist, and Balawi’s life would radically change. From now on the doctor and the Mukhabarat would be permanently tethered. Balawi’s ability to work, travel, own a house, or clothe his children would depend on the spy agency’s generosity and Balawi’s good behavior. And if the Mukhabarat needed something—no matter how big or small—Balawi would have no choice but to comply.

The man in the prisoner’s chair had not yet fully grasped this new reality, but he would. From the looks of him, it would not take much longer.

On the third day of Humam al-Balawi’s incarceration, his father and oldest brother, Muhammad, hired a taxi and made the trip across town to Wadi as-Seer and the Mukhabarat headquarters. A
Jordanian soldier armed with an M4 assault rifle motioned the car to stop a few dozen yards from the main security gate, forcing the old man to walk the rest of the way while his eldest son waited behind. The weather had been cold and gray all week, and a northeast wind tugged at Khalil al-Balawi’s white kaffiyeh as he crossed the parking lot and headed toward the small building where visitors were screened for weapons and bombs.

At the guard station, Khalil al-Balawi gave his name and asked to speak to a Mukhabarat officer, a Colonel Fawas, who was expecting him.

“I am here to pick up my son,” he said.

He was handed a number on a scrap of paper and shown to a waiting area, a small room with white marble floors and a few leather chairs. A large portrait of King Abdullah II, in military parade dress and festooned with sashes and medals, looked down disapprovingly.

All my life I have managed to avoid this place
, he thought,
until today
.

By now the family had deduced the reason for Humam’s arrest. The government’s agents had seized computer equipment, and Defne had told them about her husband’s fascination with Internet chat rooms. Khalil al-Balawi, a teacher of Arabic literature and religion before his retirement, knew little of such things. But he had learned from a Mukhabarat official that his son was cooperating and would be ready for release on Thursday, ahead of the Muslim weekend.

The old man had been so anxious he had hardly slept. As he waited, his mind raced, and he thought of Humam as a young boy: whip smart, stubborn, insatiably curious, and—out of all of his ten children—the one most like himself.

Papa, why did God create people?

Why, Humam, the purpose of man is to worship his Creator
.

{Silence.}

Papa, why did God create ants?

An hour ticked past, and then two. Other numbers were called, and now the waiting room was nearly empty. Worried that something
bad had happened, Khalil al-Balawi shuffled back to the guard station and—an old man in failing health to a goodhearted servant of His Majesty—pleaded politely for information. A phone call was made, and the explanation obtained.

“I’m sorry,
Ya ammo
Balawi, but your son is no longer here,” the head officer said.

“Where is he?”

“He is at home, of course,” came the reply. “He was dropped off an hour ago.”

Khalil al-Balawi was soon tearing across Amman as fast as the afternoon traffic would permit, while he and Muhammad ran through a list of possible explanations for the abrupt change. Was Humam injured? Perhaps scarred? Since when did the Mukhabarat offer detainees a courtesy ride home?

As central Amman gave way to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, the old man gave in to brooding. The Balawis were cursed. It was happening again.

Life had begun badly for Khalil al-Balawi, who was born into turbulence in 1943 in a village near Beersheba, in what is now southern Israel. By his fifth birthday his family had witnessed massacres, reprisal killings, and finally the all-out warfare that split Palestine into two states and sent tens of thousands of Arabs, the Balawis included, into exile. The small lot where he played as a boy was now a cotton field owned by a Jewish consortium, off-limits to the Balawis forever.

His laborer father had eventually settled in Jordan, and the family, particularly Khalil, a gifted student whose high academic marks and college degree were the pride of the Balawi clan, had prospered. But with few jobs available in Jordan, Khalil had moved with his new bride to Kuwait, where he had accepted a teacher’s post. He was promoted to department head and was content to live out his days in safe, sensible Kuwait, with its moderate policies and flush, oil-fed economy. Then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard rolled into Kuwait City in August 1990 to kick off six months of military occupation, looting, and war. After the defeat of Iraq by
a U.S.-led coalition in 1991, the Kuwaitis immediately expelled more than three hundred thousand Jordanians living in the country, because of their government’s support for Iraq during the conflict. Khalil al-Balawi managed to save a few family treasures, but between the occupation and expulsion he lost everything else he owned.

In Jordan once again, he had scraped to put his children through college and was looking forward to a quieter time, surrounded by contented, prosperous children and grandkids. Now a half century of upheaval and misfortune could not match the pain he felt deep in his chest.

The car pulled up to the curb on Urwa bin al-Ward Street, and Khalil al-Balawi climbed out quickly and entered the house ahead of his eldest son. There in the living room, on the black sofa framed by the old man’s books, was Humam.

“Salaam alekum, Humam,”
the father said. “Peace be with you.”

Humam said nothing. He could not bring himself to look into his father’s eyes.

The two sat in silence. Finally Humam spoke, his head still bowed.

“I have cleared the family’s name, Father,” he said.

“Humam, you did not have to do anything,” the old man said. “Our family name is clean.”

Days passed before Humam uttered another word to his family. His father believed his son would eventually open up about what had happened, so he did not pry. Five days went by, then a week. Finally, on a day when the two were again alone in the living room, Khalil al-Balawi could no longer contain himself.

“Did they beat you?” he asked softly.

Humam lifted his head, finally, to meet his father’s gaze. His cheeks were flushed, and when he finally spoke, his words, in Arabic, were a barely audible hiss.

“No,” he said. “They humiliated me.”

THE INFORMANT