The Triple Agent

6. TARGETS

Langley, Virginia—May–June 2009

Throughout the spring America’s invisible army of spy satellites and eavesdroppers spread its nets across northwestern Pakistan, arraying the world’s most sensitive eavesdropping gear against one of the most backward regions on earth. Cameras scrutinized every mud house, barn, and goat stall across an area the size of Puerto Rico. Banks of computers trolled phone lines, Internet transmissions, and wireless signals, in an automated search for a single word or phrase that might signal trouble or lead to the capture of a long-sought foe.

In May one such phrase, plucked from routine phone intercepts, sent a translator bolting from his chair at the National Security Agency’s listening station at Fort Meade, Maryland. The words were highlighted in a report that was rushed to a supervisor’s office, then to the executive floor of CIA headquarters, and finally to the desk of Leon Panetta, now in his third month as CIA director.

Nuclear devices.

Panetta read the report and read it again. In a wiretap in the tribal province known as South Waziristan, two Taliban commanders had been overheard talking about Baitullah Mehsud, the short, thuggish Pashtun who had recently assumed command of Pakistan’s largest alliance of Taliban groups. It was an animated discussion about an acquisition of great importance, one that would ensure Mehsud’s defeat of Pakistan’s central government and elevate his standing among the world’s jihadists. One of the men used the Pashto term itami, meaning “atomic” or “nuclear.” Mehsud had itami devices, he said.

After the shock subsided at Langley, skepticism crept in. Was it a translation error? A tall tale? A ruse? Some of the agency’s most experienced hands were openly scornful. Baitullah Mehsud was a semiliterate gangster with a big mouth. His experience with bombs was limited to strapping a few pounds of homemade explosives on a hapless teenager and blowing up a bazaar. Mehsud lacked the resources to acquire a nuclear weapon, and no one would be stupid enough to give him one.

Still, the CIA would quietly dial up the volume on its surveillance of the hilly border region that was home to the Mehsud clan. The heightened listening continued fruitlessly for days, until one evening the agency’s trawlers snagged something big: a secret meeting among members of Baitullah Mehsud’s Taliban shura, or council. The advisers were overheard discussing an interesting ethical dilemma that had been recently thrust upon the group.

Was it permissible under the laws of Islam, the advisers were asking, to use Baitullah Mehsud’s new “devices”?

Now the attention of the Obama administration’s entire security infrastructure was fixed on a small patch of real estate in northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban had remorselessly slaughtered thousands of people, including many women and children, yet these devices had given them pause. The terrorist movement appeared to be taking the unusual step of acquiring religious cover for whatever it was about to do.

In Washington not a word about the new threat would be uttered publicly. But across the Obama administration, government agencies girded themselves to deal with a new crisis. The Energy Department, with its radiation-sniffing planes; the Pentagon; the Homeland Security chiefs responsible for ports and border security—all were put on heightened alert. At Langley, Panetta harangued his counterterrorism teams daily for specifics, his dark eyes flashing from behind his wire-rims. “What the hell are we talking about here?” he demanded. “Did they take something from one of those damned nuclear depots?”

Of all the devastating scenarios Panetta had ever allowed himself to imagine, the worst by far was a nuclear explosion in a U.S. city. There were only a handful of places in the world where agency officials feared that a terrorist might buy or steal a bomb or its key components, and nuclear-armed Pakistan topped the list. Yet it was all but inconceivable that a small-time rogue like Baitullah Mehsud could have gotten his hands on a functioning atomic bomb.

Panetta and his top aides eventually settled on a more plausible explanation: The Pakistani terrorist had acquired a dirty bomb. Sometimes called the poor man’s nuclear weapon, a dirty bomb fuses conventional explosives with lethal quantities of radioactive waste, such as the radioactive cobalt used to remove cancerous tumors or irradiate food. Dirty bombs are far less deadly than an actual atom bomb, but they are cheap and easy to make, and they can spread radioactive contamination over wide areas. One well-made bomb detonated in lower Manhattan could kill scores of people, wreak economic havoc, and render parts of the city uninhabitable for months or even years. Was this the itami device the Taliban was planning to set loose?

Faced with a potentially grave threat, the five-month-old Obama administration prepared to take action, starting with the dispatching of a high-level delegation to Pakistan to secure that country’s help in locating Baitullah Mehsud and his mysterious devices. “The entire U.S. policy-making community was very alarmed,” said an administration official who participated in meetings convened to discuss the White House’s response. “It was an all-hands-on-deck mentality.”

It had already been a rough spring for Panetta, who, at seventy, sometimes found himself looking back wistfully at the comfortable semiretirement he had been enjoying before being summoned by Obama to head the CIA. The former California congressman had been suggested for the intelligence job by his longtime friend Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, but his nomination quickly stirred up controversy. Panetta’s prior brushes with the spy world had been limited mainly to the White House briefings he attended as staff director for the Clinton administration, and even Democrat stalwarts in the Senate publicly questioned if he had the necessary experience to lead the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. Obama, seeing the pounding his candidate was taking on Capitol Hill, wondered aloud to Emanuel whether the nomination was worth the political price he was paying.

“Are you sure this was the right choice?” he asked.

Emanuel was convinced. Panetta was a shrewd manager who knew Washington and possessed formidable political skills. Though tough and profane, Panetta had an easy laugh and the natural charm of a small-town mayor—a combination that made him nearly impossible not to like. Panetta would protect the administration’s interests while also finding ways to fight and win the agency’s battles with other intelligence agencies, White House bean counters, the Pentagon, and Congress. “This will turn out,” Emanuel assured the president.

Yet Panetta’s troubles persisted. He angered Republicans and many CIA managers with his comments condemning waterboarding. Then, just two months after his arrival at Langley, he infuriated Democrats when he opposed the administration’s decision to release Bush-era legal memos that justified the use of waterboarding. Panetta’s stance on the so-called torture memos won him new friends inside the CIA, but it also put him at odds with powerful members of the administration he was now serving.

A bright spot for Panetta was the CIA’s continuing successes against al-Qaeda, as the new administration embraced and even expanded the agency’s campaign of missile strikes against terrorist bases in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. In his daily intelligence briefings, Panetta could see the impact the strikes were having. For the first time in years, al-Qaeda’s leaders faced a mortal threat within their own sanctuary, the prospect of instant annihilation from robot planes that hovered continuously overhead, their mechanical humming filling the evening silence and making men fearful in their own beds.

But for Panetta even these successes came at a price. The son of Italian immigrants, Panetta was a lifelong Catholic who regularly attended mass, and the responsibility for deciding life and death for other individuals—even suspected terrorists living thousands of miles away—weighed heavily on him. His predecessor, Mike Hayden, had warned that the job would require “decisions that will absolutely surprise you.” It was true: Once a week, on average, Panetta was approving what amounted to a death sentence for a group of strangers on the other side of the globe. The CIA’s new weapons systems were impressively precise, with capabilities that exceeded the accounts most people would read in newspapers. The agency’s Predators could put a missile through the window of a moving car or nail a target the size of a dinner plate in a narrow alley at night without harming buildings on either side. The aircraft’s operators could—and, on at least one occasion, did—change a missile’s trajectory in midflight to avoid an unintended target that suddenly wandered into its path. According to the agency’s closely held body count, its missile strikes had inadvertently killed nine people by the time Panetta took office, or an average of one unintended death for every forty al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters targeted.

Still, friends kidded Panetta about becoming a CIA hit man so late in his life. “Does your bishop know what you’re doing?” one close friend quipped when Panetta talked about his work. But the CIA director wasn’t amused.

“I don’t take it lightly,” Panetta protested.

Yet week after week, when Panetta was confronted with the choice, his personal qualms would fall away against what he perceived as the far greater evil. Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies were contemplating acts of mass murder, unburdened by remorse. In all the world, only the CIA had both the means and the will to reach into the terrorists’ mountain sanctuary to stop them.

Now, in his third month as CIA director, Panetta was facing the same life-or-death calculation for a Pakistani man who the CIA believed was preparing to detonate a dirty bomb. Until that spring the United States had never regarded Baitullah Mehsud as a significant threat to Americans, and the CIA was just beginning to redirect its vast surveillance network toward the task of searching for him. Inevitably, the agency would find Mehsud. When it happened, Panetta would know what to do.

One of the most talented of Langley’s new crop of terrorist hunters arrived at work, as always, in flip-flops. Elizabeth Hanson liked wearing beach shoes, even in the dead of winter. The snap of her sandals as she padded around the CIA’s corridors was as familiar to her colleagues as her blond mane, with the couple of rebellious curls that resisted her efforts to flat iron them into submission. She kept a pair of dressier shoes under her desk for the days when she was unexpectedly summoned to the executive floor to talk about al-Qaeda, and she could quickly turn on the glamour when the situation demanded it. But on normal working days Hanson believed in making herself comfortable: jeans, flip-flops, and sometimes even pigtails. After all, she routinely worked long hours, and when things were busy at the office, she often stayed up through the night, watching the live video feed from the CIA’s Predator aircraft as they stalked one of her targets. And June was already shaping up to be a remarkably busy month.

She plopped down at her small cubicle desk, pushing aside papers to make room for her caramel macchiato, then switched on her computer monitor and began sifting through the morning’s secret cables from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The agency’s senior targeters were caught up in an urgent search for one Baitullah Mehsud, and that group included Hanson, who was developing a reputation for her ability to track down the country’s most dangerous foes. Terrorist figures of greater importance than Mehsud had been on Hanson’s list in the past, and some of them were no longer among the living.

Coworkers sang out greetings as they wandered by, and Hanson acknowledged them with a smile. It was early, but the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was humming with a kind of low-grade tumult that never completely subsided. The place was divorced from normal time distinctions of day and night, early and late, weekday and holiday. The cavernous main room was perpetually awash in a fluorescent brightness that compensated for the lack of windows. (Any portal to the outside world is viewed as a security risk, new hires are told.) The center’s warrens of cubicles and flat-panel TV monitors took up much of the ground floor of the agency’s sleek new headquarters building, a facility that was built, for security’s sake, into a hillside. Workers in the Counterterrorism Center arrived on the fourth floor through a gleaming glass atrium festooned with scale-model spy planes and statues, then descended four levels below to the bunker where the agency’s most sensitive operations are managed.

Hanson stood out in this subterranean world, and not just because of her footwear. Barely thirty, she had a kind of understated midwestern girl-next-door beauty that men adored and women admired. Coworkers loved her for her outsize sense of humor, which ranged from slyly sarcastic to scatological to downright silly. She could quote endlessly from comedies like The Hangover or put her coworkers in stitches with a dead-on impression of Beavis from the cartoon series Beavis and Butt-Head. The most mundane CIA-speak would be transformed into off-color puns (“OK, who had weekend doody?” and “Have you been debriefed?”), and when she needed a favor from a boss or colleague, she would preface the request by demanding, “I want a pony.” A small circle of close friends knew her by a family nickname, Monkie, an artifact from her girlhood fascination with the famous sock puppet monkeys originally manufactured in her hometown of Rockford, Illinois.

Hanson’s playful demeanor belied the utter seriousness with which she approached the core business of the Counterterrorism Center. For more than two years, she had worked as a targeter, a job that entailed tracking terrorists on the CIA’s wanted list, by whatever means available, from a tiny cubicle a few miles outside Washington. She had her own list of targets and access to raw data from every surveillance tool in the agency’s sizable kit. Like an artist assembling a giant mosaic, she could summon bits of information from wiretaps, cell phone intercepts, surveillance videos, informant reports, and even news accounts, blending them with a mix of imagination and conjecture to develop a profile that the agency’s spies, drone operators, and undercover case officers could use to physically spot the target. More recently Hanson had become a group leader for other targeters, overseeing multiple efforts to track down terrorist leaders. Often she spent hours monitoring the hour-by-hour surveillance of a terrorist target, and she personally made the call to the CIA director to request the go-ahead to launch one of the agency’s Hellfire missiles. Hanson had helped track down some of al-Qaeda’s most senior leaders, including Osama al-Kini, the man killed by a CIA missile on New Year’s Day. And her intricate knowledge of Pakistani terrorist networks made her an indispensable source of expertise when agency officers were on the trail of lesser terrorists, some of them al-Qaeda’s closest allies. These included the cagey Pashtun warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, the longtime ally of Osama bin Laden’s whose fighters were attacking U.S. troops around the eastern Afghan city of Khost; and, more recently, leaders of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan alliance headed by Baitullah Mehsud.

“Her career trajectory was straight up, like a rocket,” said a CIA colleague who worked closely with her in the Counterterrorism Center. “She was helping put bad people out of business, permanently. It was getting to the point that it was getting harder to hide in the tribal areas.”

Some coworkers compared Hanson with Jennifer Matthews, another female officer and onetime targeter who had shot up through the ranks. The two had worked together briefly and were friendly, but their paths had been markedly different. Matthews had joined a vastly different CIA in the late 1980s, a place where women still were relatively rare, the Cold War still raged, and most of the glamour jobs were held by male case officers who had secret meetings with informants in seedy bars in Vienna or Budapest. By contrast, Hanson was part of a class of new officers hired after September 11. Some referred to themselves as the Windows generation: young, highly educated, and confident in the power of their technology. Case officers and informants would always be needed, but in the post–September 11 era, they were no longer kings.

“It’s now about connecting dots,” said another of Hanson’s coworkers. “It’s about multitasking, going through reams of data from different sources. It’s putting two and two together to stop a plot or to find a leader who is trying not to be found.”

It was also about personal toughness. Friends recalled being startled one day when Hanson, then twenty-nine, got into a heated argument with an army colonel over a potential target. When the military officer tried to dismiss the young targeter, Hanson moved within inches of his face. “The target is correct, sir,” she said. “Either you take it out, or we will.”

As spring turned to summer, Elizabeth Hanson was preparing for a transfer to Kabul, Afghanistan, her first overseas posting with the CIA. But before her departure she would set her sights on the elusive and newly dangerous Baitullah Mehsud.

On the morning of June 22 the Obama administration’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, traveled to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, for urgent meetings with the country’s civilian and military leaders. In press releases the meetings were described as routine consultations on Washington’s Afghanistan strategy. In reality the top items on the agenda were Mehsud and his “devices.”

Pakistani officials adamantly insisted that the country’s nuclear stockpile was secure, but they could not rule out the possibility of a Taliban dirty bomb. If anything, the government of President Asif Ali Zardari was even more worried than the Americans about Mehsud’s intentions. If a dirty bomb was to explode in one of the world’s major cities in the coming weeks, officials reasoned, it was more likely to happen in Karachi or Peshawar than in New York or London.

The only bright spot for Islamabad was the Obama administration’s newfound interest in Baitullah Mehsud. The Taliban leader was officially blamed for the assassination of the country’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, on December 27, 2007, and in the months since then he had declared war on Pakistan’s government. Mehsud had targeted Pakistani police and military barracks with suicide bombings, and he had famously cut off the heads of captured army recruits. Pakistan’s generals were preparing to expand their military offensive against Taliban strongholds, and they were engaging in fierce clashes in villages along the border. Yet the CIA and its robot planes—so controversial in Pakistan—had done little to help. U.S. officials had long viewed the Mehsud clan as a local problem for the Pakistanis and were reluctant to agitate yet another militant faction that might cross into Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops.

The dirty bomb threat changed everything. Now the Obama administration was privately talking about targeting Mehsud, and Pakistani officials, for once, were wholeheartedly embracing the idea of a U.S. missile strike on their soil.

“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.