The Triple Agent

5. THE INFORMANT

Amman, Jordan—February 8, 2009

Ali bin Zeid squeezed his big frame into his office chair and scowled at the computer screen. The half-written file, already coded “secret” but awaiting a conclusion that he would provide, if only he could decide what it should be, was still there. The report bore an Arabic caption that read “Assessment” and “Humam Khalil al-Balawi,” and it was entirely routine. Except for this last part, the ending.

What potential is seen for this subject? That was the stumper.

Bin Zeid was tired, feeling the strain of the Mukhabarat’s peculiarly erratic hours and the stress of so many difficult cases, including this one. It annoyed him that he rarely had time for a decent meal with his wife, let alone the honeymoon that he had been promising her for more than a year. The late-winter sun was just low enough in the sky to bathe his fourth-floor office in a golden glare that washed out electronic type and made the room stuffy. Bin Zeid turned away from the screen and again picked up Balawi’s paper file. He began to read.

Humam al-Balawi had talked, eventually.

On his third day in the Mukhabarat’s vise, and in a handful of secret meetings afterward, the physician gave up names of figures inside al-Hesbah and other jihadist Web sites. He told what he knew about networks of jihadist bloggers and their funding. He spoke so openly that the chains and cuffs came off, and the sessions became freewheeling conversations. Afterward he would sit quietly, face flushed, head cradled in his hands, awash in unspoken emotion.

Balawi swore to his interrogators that in his heart of hearts, he opposed terrorism in all its forms. It was a claim that seemed wildly at odds with his posts lauding such notorious butchers as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

“It is true that I like to express my feelings in my writing,” he said at one point. “But I’m against violence, including military action. Our religion forbids terrorism.” Balawi surveyed the skeptical faces around him. It’s not who I am, he protested. The blogs, the fake persona, the cries for blood—none of it was real.

It’s just a hobby, he said.

After his release the Mukhabarat’s men fanned out to try to corroborate his information. They also deepened their scrutiny of Balawi himself, tapping his phones, trailing his movements, and reaching outside Jordan for evidence of ties to terrorist groups. The agency placed Captain Ali bin Zeid in charge of Balawi’s file and passed the essentials to the CIA, which shared space with the Jordanians in a joint counterterrorism center in a building on the outskirts of Amman. The American intelligence agency would want to check the names Balawi provided against its own database.

The more they probed, the murkier and more dangerous Balawi’s secret life appeared. Despite his claims about opposing violence, he had sought at least twice to join the Zarqawi-led Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the officers discovered. Why he had ultimately failed to do so was unclear. Perhaps his courage had flagged, or he had felt guilty about orphaning his children; possibly he had been forced to admit to himself that he was a poor candidate for guerrilla warfare, lacking in both physical strength and military training. As a backup plan, he canvassed friends and relatives to collect money for the insurgency and raised just over fourteen hundred dollars before abandoning the effort. After Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2008, he had tried to volunteer as a Hamas medic to treat Palestinian wounded.

Balawi had also had a flirtation, and possibly more, with a known terrorist organization in Turkey, it was learned. While living in Istanbul as a student, he had attended meetings of the Islami Büyükdoğu Akincilar-Cephesi, or Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front, a group that claims kinship with al-Qaeda and advocates the overthrow of secular governments in the Middle East, from Ankara to Amman to Cairo. Turkish police have credited the IBDA-C with several spectacular terrorist attacks, including bombings of two synagogues in Istanbul in 2003 that killed twenty-four people.

Balawi’s interest in the group was something he apparently shared with the woman he eventually married, Turkish sources revealed. Humam and Defne Bayrak were first introduced in 2001 in an Internet chat room for young Muslims. After the two began dating, they connected with other couples at social events that were essentially recruitment sessions for the Raiders’ Front: small-group lectures, fund-raisers to support Palestinian militants.

Defne, tall and lithe with a doll’s porcelain complexion, had admired Humam’s intelligence but really fell for his conservative politics, according to her own account. She had been living at her parents’ house in Istanbul, working as a journalist and brushing up on her Arabic-language studies, when the Jordanian medical student burst into her life. Three months later, they were making wedding plans.

“I liked his personality, his piousness, his strict following of the religion,” she said.

During their courtship the couple began to change. Neither had ever been considered devout in a traditional sense. Defne wore a head scarf in public, but so do a majority of Turkey’s adult women. Humam had memorized large portions of the Koran as a child but regularly skipped Friday prayers at the mosque and referred derisively to his native Jordan as “that Islamic country.” But as a couple he and Defne embraced a creed that was gaining popularity among Turkey’s college-educated elite and whose chief tenet was rage against the non-Muslim West. Rooted in the same decades-old resentments expressed by millions of other Muslims, but peculiar to privileged young adults who came into maturity in the age of al-Qaeda, this brand of faith perceived CIA and Israeli intelligence plots behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Its adherents saw the invasions and occupations of Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan as part of a Western crusade to destroy and corrupt Islam, loot natural resources, and slaughter thousands of innocents.

Humam and Defne’s new passion was partly driven by personal and family history: Humam was a son of Palestinian refugees and treated refugee children; Defne had worked for conservative Turkish newspapers, translating Arabic news accounts about fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defne, who friends say was the more strident of the two, had also translated laudatory books about al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The former had been titled Osama bin Laden, the Che Guevara of the East.

But in each other Humam and Defne had found a partner whose political views reinforced and amplified their own. Later, when they had children, even choosing their names became a means of asserting their beliefs.

The couple named their older girl after Leila Khaled, a Palestinian woman who hijacked a TWA jetliner in 1969 and served time in a British jail. The younger was named after a Swedish-born Palestinian filmmaker named Lina Makboul. Her best-known work is a documentary titled Leila Khaled: Hijacker.

Now bin Zeid did what he often did when he needed to think. From the high perch of his pilot’s seat in the cockpit of a Boeing 737, he checked his flaps and eased the throttle forward. The stripes of the runway began falling toward him in a quickening stream. He tugged on the yoke, and with a roar, the jet’s nose tilted skyward, clearing the trees and hills and soaring into an endless expanse of blue.

Bin Zeid took off his headset and leaned back in his chair, staring at the computer screen. Physically he was still in Jordan, in the house he had built overlooking the Dead Sea. Bin Zeid had set up the flight simulator on his computer so that it was just like a real cockpit, with controls and pedals and even realistic engine sounds that he downloaded to match the specific plane he was flying. He would set a course for a distant city and then, once the wheels were up, sit in silence for an hour or more as the plane moved over empty seas. His hobby mystified some of his family members, but bin Zeid claimed it was therapeutic.

It helps me think, he would say.

That’s your problem, was the usual retort. Too much thinking.

But bin Zeid craved space when working through a complicated puzzle. If he had a day to himself, he would slip into the desert in his Land Rover with his two dogs or head south to the Red Sea with his wife, Fida, to anchor his boat in a desolate cove with no other humans in sight. In photos he always seemed to be in the same place: alone on a beach chair in his shorts and floppy camouflage hat, eyes fixed on some indiscernible point on the horizon.

Bin Zeid had fallen in love with America as a land of endless horizons. During holiday weekends at Emerson College he would hit the road in his car, sometimes alone, sometimes with his brother, Hassan, who was attending school across town at Boston University. When time was short, he would drive to Cape Cod to wander the beaches or sit in the cheap seats at Fenway Park to ponder the mysteries of American baseball and the allure of the frankfurter. During longer breaks he would drive alone to snow-covered Montreal or discover a secluded lake hidden among the hills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

His need to roam was one of many traits that set him apart and made him something of an oddity at the Jordanian intelligence service. CIA acquaintances joked that the hardworking, plain-living bin Zeid was the “most unroyal of the royals.” But some Jordanian colleagues had trouble seeing past his ties to the monarchy and decidedly Western lifestyle. His superiors worried that family connections would eventually catapult bin Zeid to the top, pushing veterans aside and giving the royal family an even tighter grip on the spy agency. Fellow officers admired his energy but also were acutely aware of the gulf between their lives and his. It wasn’t just money and privilege, though everyone knew about bin Zeid’s Boston education and the small Bertram fishing yacht he and his brothers kept anchored in Aqaba Harbor. It was also bin Zeid’s apparent detachment from the conventions that governed the life choices of most Jordanian men his age. Though a Muslim, he had married a woman from Jordan’s tiny Christian minority, a dark-haired beauty named Fida Dawani. In a culture that considers dogs unclean, bin Zeid was openly affectionate toward Jackie, a German shepherd he had acquired as a puppy, and her shaggy offspring, Huskie. The two rode around Amman in bin Zeid’s truck as though they were a couple of cattle dogs on a Wyoming ranch.

Bin Zeid could shrug off the comments about his pets, but he detested it when people treated him differently because of his royal blood. Although colleagues persisted in calling him Sharif Ali, he introduced himself as Captain at work and as just Ali to neighborhood shopkeepers. The local repairman who serviced bin Zeid’s desktop computer took a liking to the affable young man who would linger in his shop to dissect the day’s news, sometimes bringing in a pizza to share with the technicians. Years passed before he learned that low-key, jeans-wearing Ali was both a Mukhabarat officer and a cousin to the king.

At work, however, bin Zeid was all business. As a boy he had written in an essay that he planned to devote his life to serving his country, offering that it was “very important for an individual to be willing to die for his country.” He went to work at the Mukhabarat soon after graduating from college and poured himself into the job. He was pulled into some of the agency’s biggest terrorism cases, including the investigations into the Zarqawi-led suicide bombings in Amman in 2005. And increasingly, he became an indispensable conduit between the intelligence service and the CIA. The two agencies had worked closely since the 1960s, and by 2001 much of the Mukhabarat’s budget was underwritten by its cash-flush American partner. From Langley’s perspective, it was a smart investment: The Jordanian agency was a reliable partner, and its operatives were deemed among the best in the world.

Bin Zeid occupied a unique place within this special relationship. He understood Americans and their language better than anyone in the Mukhabarat, and the U.S. agency routinely asked for him whenever the two countries worked together on joint investigations. When the two agencies clashed over tactics, it fell to bin Zeid to serve as mediator and bridge.

The Balawi case was a perfect example. Two weeks after his arrest, Humam al-Balawi remained a cipher to the Mukhabarat. Yes, he had given up names of jihadist writers, but his confessions were looking less impressive on closer examination. The writers were either minor players or prominent figures whose identities were already known. Balawi had kept clean since his release and halted his Web columns—he never had a choice about that—but bin Zeid saw no hard evidence that he had changed his views or could be trusted.

Yet the CIA and senior Mukhabarat officials were increasingly interested in the doctor. Abu Dujana al-Khorasani was an emerging opinion leader in the world of radical Islam, and now the man behind the persona was the property of the Mukhabarat. What could he accomplish if he were working for their side?

Jordan already employed hundreds of informants, who came in two varieties: low-level snitches of dubious reliability and elite double agents who were highly trained and spent years developing their cover. Balawi was neither of those, but surely there was a role for him. It fell to bin Zeid to assess what that role might be. To do so, he would have to become Balawi’s new best friend.

Complicating matters was the pressure on him from above. Cultivating an informant takes time, yet time was suddenly in short supply. In Washington, the newly inaugurated Obama administration swept into office with a promise to redraw the country’s counterterrorism priorities, starting with a renewed commitment to capture Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The CIA was in a rush to find and deploy scores of new informants and operatives throughout the Middle East and around the world. In Jordan, Mukhabarat officers were being asked to write assessments describing promising new contacts and what they could potentially deliver.

As bin Zeid set out to write such an assessment for Balawi, he worried aloud to colleagues that inflating expectations could lead to disappointments and mistakes.

One evening after work bin Zeid put the case aside to watch a movie at a friend’s house. The film was Body of Lies, a Hollywood spy thriller starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. Set mostly in Jordan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the movie depicts an amoral CIA official, played by Crowe, whose miscalculations repeatedly risk the lives of subordinates as well as Arabs who happen to get caught in the crossfire. As he watched the video, bin Zeid seemed mesmerized by the film’s portrayal of American and Jordanian agents at war with Middle Eastern terrorists and sometimes one another.

When the DVD ended, the friend asked bin Zeid for his impressions. The two laughed about the convoluted plot twists; then bin Zeid turned serious.

“Here’s what’s true about it,” he said. “It’s the way it shows the Americans in too much of a hurry. Always, they want everything to happen right now.”

Late February brought some of the coldest, iciest weather Amman had seen in years. Temperatures hovered near freezing for days, and a rare heavy snowfall closed schools and left an army of snowmen plodding the usually dusty sidewalks. Humam al-Balawi had spent much of his time out of the house during the cold snap, but one afternoon he returned from his appointments with a surprise announcement: He had sold his car.

His parents and brothers stared at him stunned. Humam’s sturdy little Ford was one of his most cherished possessions. It was also his only means of getting to work at the distant Marka clinic.

“Why did you do that?” his father finally asked.

Humam shrugged. “It needs a lot of maintenance,” he said. “I’m tired of keeping it up.”

To judge from his appearance, Humam was more than just tired. He said little these days, spending his time at home on his computer—the Mukhabarat had kindly returned it—or lost in his thoughts. He would disappear for hours at a time, saying vaguely that he was visiting the mosque or meeting with friends.

At the clinic, his patients had noticed his newly baggy clothes and sallow skin and worried about him. One who confronted him was Hannan Omar, forty-two, a mother with four children who sold snacks from a cart in the clinic lobby. When Omar’s blood pressure had suddenly dropped a few months earlier, Balawi had hounded her for weeks to make sure she was taking her medicine.

“You’ve lost weight!” she said scoldingly to Balawi after he arrived for work one morning. “Are you sick?”

The doctor smiled weakly and said diabetes was making him thin. It was the last time she would see him; later she learned that Balawi had handed the clinic manager his letter of resignation.

Balawi was gradually checking out of his old life. In some ways, the old Balawi was already gone.

Defne Bayrak tried to understand what was happening to her husband but was getting only small glimpses. After his three days in the Mukhabarat’s prison he was almost unrecognizable: jittery, sullen, distracted. Never one to pray openly, he now prayed all the time, asking for God’s guidance with the smallest decisions. He sat in the apartment with an open Koran for hours at a time, and when the girls’ noisy playing got to him, he would run—sometimes literally—down the block to the neighborhood mosque and the serenity of its prayer room.

Occasionally he would allow her to pull back the curtain slightly. Defne was able to extract a few details about her husband’s detention, as Balawi described the sleep deprivation and how he was pressured to reveal the true identities of prominent writers. I gave up no names, he lied. He repeated to her what he told his father: that the Mukhabarat had not used torture but had sought to shame him. He would not say how.

He also talked about his new minder, an intelligence officer whose name was Ali and who was blood kin to the king. Since his release he had begun meeting with this officer for friendly chats, he told Defne, first over chai and then for longer sessions. For Balawi, there was no real choice but to agree to bin Zeid’s coffee klatches. Gradually he became intrigued by what bin Zeid was saying.

They would meet in a prearranged pickup spot, with bin Zeid usually showing up in his blue-gray Land Rover. If it was dinnertime, bin Zeid would choose the restaurant and pick up the tab, which sometimes ran to seventy-five dollars or more—outlandishly expensive compared with the shawarma and kebab joints in Balawi’s neighborhood. Once bin Zeid asked the physician to accompany him on an errand, and the two spent a half hour cruising Amman’s massive Western-style Safeway supermarket, with its dizzying array of fresh and imported foods and the small room where customers could discreetly purchase wine and whiskey. After the checkout line, bin Zeid tucked a case of dog food under his arm and handed several bags of groceries to Balawi—a gift, he said, for the doctor and his family.

Bin Zeid’s pitch was subtle, especially at first, but the message was always the same: We need you to help us. For your sake. For your country’s sake. He dissected some of the more strident essays Balawi had written as Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, trying gently to upend the jihadists’ use of the Koran to justify suicide bombings and terrorist attacks.

Osama bin Laden’s vision of Islam is distorted, he would say. The Koran forbids the taking of innocent lives.

Bin Zeid even suggested that Jordan’s King Abdullah II was a purer manifestation of Islamic principles than bin Laden. After all, the king, a man with Western affinities and a glamorous wife who traveled the world promoting education for women, was a Hashemite, a descendant of a clan that traced its lineage directly to the Prophet Muhammad.

Balawi nodded in tacit agreement. Maybe there was a way he could help the monarchy.

The precise role that Balawi might play was not immediately clear, but bin Zeid was clear about one thing: If the doctor could use his connections to help track down wanted terrorists, the potential reward could be immense. Enough to change his life and that of his entire family.

How much money? It depended on the target, but the CIA, the agency that wrote the checks, had put bounties on the heads of bin Laden and his wily No. 2, the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, promising sums that were difficult even to imagine.

How much, exactly? Defne would ask later, when her husband was at home. Humam had been contemptuous of the Mukhabarat agent when he related details of their meetings to his wife in the privacy of their apartment. But now he was distracted again, lost in his thoughts.

Millions, he finally said.

On the morning of March 18, Humam al-Balawi packed two small bags and prepared for what he said would be a brief trip. He announced that he had decided to apply to study medicine in the United States, but he first had to pass a qualifying exam. The exam was being offered in Istanbul.

The story was mostly plausible. Long before his arrest Balawi had talked about studying in America, and he had fretted about whether he could decipher the highly technical English on the exam that would determine his eligibility. But when the subject came up previously, the test was always to be in Amman. Still, Balawi was well connected in Turkey from his school days, and no one questioned his reasons for going there. He hugged his girls and wife and left the house with his younger brother, Assad, who agreed to drive him to the airport. Humam said nothing to his father about the trip, and he would not bring himself to say good-bye to him.

At Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, Humam motioned for his brother to bypass the check-in gate for Istanbul. Instead they queued up at an Emirates airline counter for a flight to Dubai, the transit hub of the United Arab Emirates. Humam dropped off his bags and asked that they be checked all the way through to his final destination: Peshawar, Pakistan.

Afterward Humam shook hands with his younger brother, who eyed him with a mixture of puzzlement and concern.

I think we should talk to our father about this, Assad al-Balawi finally said.

No, he is not to know, came the reply. Will you promise?

Assad consented.

Peace be with you, he said.

And with you.

Humam al-Balawi shoved his ticket and passport in his pocket, turned, and walked up the steps to the gate.