The Triple Agent

7. THE JIHADIST

Amman, Jordan—July 2009

Humam 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?

Balawi began with the basics, lightly fudged. “Your little brother comes from the Arabian Peninsula, may Allah liberate it,” he said. “I am a little over thirty years old, married and I have two little daughters.”

It was a surreal moment for a man who had worked hard to conceal so much about himself, from his Internet alter ego to his decision to travel to Pakistan. Now he was submitting to the jihadist equivalent of a celebrity interview, revealing to the world at large that he—or the part of him that was Abu Dujana al-Khorasani—had quit the writing business to perform jihad. There were real risks to going public; every word in the article would be scrutinized, by intelligence officers from the CIA and Jordan’s Mukhabarat, of course, and also by al-Qaeda. At this moment everyone was watching, and no one on either side was sure what to make of Balawi.

The topic turned to Abu Dujana’s Internet columns, and Balawi was able to breezily recount the circumstances behind his first online essay about al-Qaeda’s defeat in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. He talked about other writers he admired. He threw in a hearty denunciation of the “Hagana dogs, the Jews,” who had covertly hacked their way into jihadist Web sites, including the former al-Hesbah site for which he had once served as moderator. The cyberattacks had “closed forums and destroyed links to jihadist publications,” he complained.

But again, he was asked about himself. What changed in you after you stepped into the land of jihad?

“You should rather ask, what did not change in me?” Balawi said. “I was reborn here.”

That much was true. What was less certain at this time was whether Balawi would survive infancy in his alien new world. Balawi had indeed received an invitation to board with the region’s most powerful Taliban group. It had come from the leader of the group, a short, paunchy man with an outlandish black beard and a sadistic sense of humor. His name was Baitullah Mehsud, and he was, at the moment, the most wanted man in all of South Asia.

Baitullah could barely read and spoke little Arabic and thus could scarcely appreciate the Jordanian’s writerly gifts. But Baitullah was a man who lived according to his instincts, and they had pronounced the young physician trustworthy after their first meeting. The two had a mutual acquaintance—one of Baitullah’s Arab supporters knew Balawi from his days as a Web site moderator and had vouched for him—and the Taliban commander had been impressed by Balawi’s tale of being pressed into service by Jordan’s intelligence agency. Balawi’s training as a physician held immense appeal to Baitullah, who was afflicted with diabetes and leg ailments and desperately short of medical care for his sick and wounded fighters. Any lingering doubts were resolved when Balawi pulled out a large wad of bills, travel money given to him by the Mukhabarat.

But not everyone was ready to believe in Balawi. In the Mehsud camp, Baitullah’s opinions were often contested by his own kinsmen, particularly his cousin Qari Hussain Mehsud. Just six months earlier, Qari had beheaded a kidnapped Polish geologist in a grisly, videotaped execution, in defiance of Baitullah’s orders. The killing had strained relations between the cousins for months. Now Qari was eyeing the Jordanian suspiciously.

Outside the Mehsud clan, other groups also were openly suspicious of Balawi. Certain that he was a spy, Sirajuddin Haqqani joined al-Qaeda commanders in refusing to meet Balawi or even be in the same building with him. If Baitullah Mehsud were to suddenly disappear, Balawi might well share the same fate as the Polish geologist.

That is, if the Americans didn’t kill him first. The unrelenting threat of death from a missile strike had begun to gnaw at Balawi, just as it did others in the tribal belt. The low buzzing of the CIA drones was nearly constant now, and it so unnerved Balawi that he often had trouble sleeping. There had been eight Predator strikes in North or South Waziristan since early June, including two in the village, Makeen, where Balawi and a small entourage of Mehsud fighters had been bedding in different houses, moving every few days for security. They traveled in groups of two or three and avoided cars when possible.

Feeling safer outdoors, Balawi sometimes moved his pallet into the courtyard. He stared into a black sky thick with humidity and unseen threats, the interviewer’s question still flicking at his addled brain: Who are you?

The seed had been planted by Balawi himself. I could go to FATA, he told Ali bin Zeid one day. FATA is the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the strip of mountainous country in northwestern Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan. The very name is a synonym for rugged, ungovernable, backward, extreme. It is al-Qaeda country. And Balawi was saying he had contacts there.

Bin Zeid was listening.

It had happened in February, during one of their dinners in Amman. The two had spent several evenings together, and the conversations had become relaxed. Doctor and spy had even found a few common interests, such as a mutual dislike for Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, the formerly radical Sunni Islamic movement that had cut a deal with the monarchy that allowed it to become a legitimate political party. Balawi had attended a few of the Brotherhood’s mansaf dinners, named after the rice and lamb dish that is a national favorite in Jordan and a popular choice at fund-raising banquets.

“The people of mansaf,” bin Zeid said mockingly. “They eat mansaf and talk about jihad without actually doing anything.”

Perhaps sensing an interest, bin Zeid also began to slowly pull back the curtain on the world of the Mukhabarat. The spy service’s reach is vast, he said, and many of its greatest achievements have never been publicly acknowledged. Bin Zeid explained how he himself had set up sting operations in which volunteers for holy war in Iraq were lured to a pickup point near the border, only to find the Mukhabarat waiting for them, he said.

Balawi respectfully nodded his approval.

It was also true, bin Zeid continued, that Jordan had supplied the evidence that led to the fatal missile attack against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. And the Mukhabarat had netted much bigger prey. He claimed that a Jordanian spy had been behind one of the greatest and most mysterious assassinations of a terrorist figure in decades, the 2008 slaying of former Hezbollah security chief Imad Mughniyeh. The man who was dubbed Abu Dokhan—the “father of smoke”—because of his uncanny ability to elude capture had been killed by a bomb hidden in the headrest of his car in Damascus. Initial speculation had pointed to a rival Hezbollah faction or Syrian agents. But U.S. terrorism experts came to suspect Israel’s Mossad spy agency, despite Israel’s strong denials, simply because the hit had been so exquisitely planned and executed. Mughniyeh’s name had been on numerous most wanted lists, including that of the FBI, which blamed the Lebanon-born militant for separate bombings in 1983 of the marines’ barracks in Beirut and the U.S. Embassy there. The latter strike had killed more than sixty people, including eight CIA employees. It was the deadliest single event in the history of the U.S. intelligence agency. And it was the Mukhabarat, bin Zeid said, that had exacted vengeance.

There was yet another surprise. One of the most enduring mysteries since the founding of the modern jihadist movement was who had killed Abdullah Azzam, the revered Palestinian cleric who helped lead the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Azzam had been a mentor and teacher to Osama bin Laden, but in his later years he had clashed with bin Laden’s followers over the terrorist group’s willingness to spill Muslim blood to advance their cause. His death in 1989 by a remote-control bomb in Peshawar, Pakistan, was the Muslim world’s equivalent of the John F. Kennedy assassination, drawing legions of conspiracy theorists, who variously linked the slaying to the Soviets, Israelis, Americans, Pakistanis, Afghans, and even bin Laden himself. Now bin Zeid said flatly that Azzam’s death too had been the work of the Mukhabarat. He even offered the name of the assassin: bin Zeid’s own boss, Ali Burjak, the “Red Devil.”

“If you go and kill any leader of the mujahideen, you’ll become the top man in Jordan, like my chief,” bin Zeid had said.

It was now clear what bin Zeid was looking for, and Balawi, after some thinking, decided to float his idea. I could go to FATA, he offered.

The proposal sparked furious discussions at the Mukhabarat and at the Amman counterterrorism center run jointly with the CIA. Balawi was no agent, that was clear; he had no training, spoke no Pashto, and could hardly be considered reliable after a few nights in detention and a handful of dinners and coffees with bin Zeid. On the other hand, there was little to lose.

A quick consensus was reached on the key points. For the cost of only a few thousand dollars, Balawi could be set loose in Pakistan with a serviceable cover story. Fortunately for him, he already possessed assets that would accord him instant credibility in Taliban country, including a medical degree and an Internet persona. He would essentially work on spec, earning significant rewards only in the unlikely event that he could deliver someone important. He would not be given fancy communication gadgets or anything that might expose him as a spy if he were discovered. If he were killed—the chances were judged to be high—few outside Balawi’s own family would notice or care.

Questions were raised about why Balawi would even consider leaving his home and job for such a dangerous assignment. To judge from his behavior in his meetings with bin Zeid, the answer seemed obvious: money. In reports summarizing Balawi’s views about his possible assignment, the physician appeared to vacillate between deep concern over his safety and endless curiosity about the size of his reward.

With the CIA now fully on board, the logistics of Balawi’s journey came together with remarkable speed. Balawi would need an expedited Pakistani visa, so a letter inviting the Jordanian physician to a diabetes conference in Pakistan was drafted. E-mail accounts were created and tested. Code words were forged and memorized.

Balawi would also have a new code-name. No longer Panzer—the handle bin Zeid had chosen—he would now be known by his CIA name, Wolf.

A critical decision that fell to the CIA was whether to inform Pakistan, a U.S. ally, of the plan to insert an undercover operative into its sovereign territory. Langley quickly rejected the idea. Top CIA officials were convinced that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency harbored agents sympathetic to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Pashtun warlord who had been backed by Islamabad during the 1980s and was now a supporter of the Afghan insurgency. Balawi could be betrayed and killed before he had time to unpack his bags.

The final step was airline tickets. An open-ended return flight was purchased and hand-delivered by bin Zeid, along with a fat envelope stuffed with dollars.

Months later some U.S. intelligence officials still marveled over how quickly the plan came together and also over the eagerness with which agency veterans bought into the notion that the untrained Balawi could survive in a lawless FATA, let alone penetrate a dangerous terrorist network. Such a thing had never happened, not like this. By luck of timing, Balawi had turned up on the Mukhabarat’s doorstep with his unique set of assets—a physician with impeccable jihadist credentials, seemingly willing to put his life on the line—at the precise moment the CIA and a new U.S. administration were scrambling to find new methods and agents for a ramped-up global hunt for Osama bin Laden.

“Balawi dangled that he could go,” said one recently retired agency official privy to internal conversations about the Jordanian. “And he happened to match with a beautiful priority.”

Sleep eluded Humam Khalil al-Balawi. The day had been insanely hot, and the temperature was still in the nineties well after sundown. Worse, as he lay still in the dark, the humming of drones grew even louder, like a mosquito he could never swat away.

Balawi’s home through midsummer was in one of the Mehsud clan’s walled compounds in Makeen, a small town of loosely clustered mud-brick houses and shops surrounded by scrubby hills. At bedtime he had taken his mat into the outer courtyard and unrolled it near one of the guard posts to try to sleep. In the dim light he could make out a familiar form, a paralyzed man whom the fighters called Ahmad. The Pashtun man had lost his legs to disease, but Ahmad insisted on taking his turn at guard duty and refused to be relieved when his shift ended. He sat in his wheelchair with his rifle in his lap until sunrise. Humam could hear the man praying softly and occasionally sobbing. It was an impressive display of devotion that was, in true Taliban fashion, carried to a pointless extreme.

The same was true for Baitullah Mehsud himself. There were little things, like his behavior during group dinners. Baitullah would make a dramatic display of personally dishing out the choicest cuts of meat to his dinner guests until there was nothing left for himself but bones and fat. The performance made Balawi so uncomfortable that he made excuses to avoid eating with his host.

Baitullah Mehsud also appeared to have bought into the myth of his own invincibility. Two years after becoming chief of the Pakistan Taliban, he had grown fond of media attention, and he enjoyed staging news conferences, allowing the cameras full view of the head that was said to be worth more than five million dollars in bounty payments. Between staged events he would engage in long interviews over an open phone line, talking and laughing with journalists, seemingly oblivious of the possibility that his phone signal might be a beacon guiding a CIA missile to his compound. His swagger extended to absurd boasts about how his small band of illiterate, ill-equipped mountain fighters were poised to defeat not only Islamabad but also the great powers of the West.

“We pray to God to give us the ability to destroy the White House, New York and London,” he told a television interviewer. “And we have trust in God. Very soon, we will be witnessing jihad’s miracles.”

Baitullah’s insistence on his own supremacy in all things—military strategy as well as more mundane matters such as the divvying up of profits from contraband smuggling—sometimes sparked violent clashes with other Mehsuds. The diminutive commander also seemed to delight in agitating the Haqqanis and other militant groups by picking gratuitous fights with the Pakistani army and intelligence service, practically daring Islamabad to come after him, as eventually it did. Once, after surrounding and capturing an entire garrison of 250 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary troops, Baitullah proceeded to cut off the heads of three of his prisoners as the opening gambit in a negotiated prisoner swap.

It was a far cry from the idealized holy war that Balawi had championed in his blog. Baitullah Mehsud was neither a revolutionary nor a prophet. He was a thug with a massively inflated ego, a murderer who enjoyed killing other Muslims. He presided over a town that was dirty, backward, and mean, where girls barely older than Balawi’s daughter Leila were condemned to lives of little or no formal education and no appreciable rights, in a region where a newborn is three times more likely to die in his first year of life than a child born in Balawi’s native Jordan.

For the moment, though, Baitullah Mehsud was the best friend Balawi had. The two men could barely communicate except in fragments of Arabic or Pashto. But Baitullah had become convinced of the Jordanian’s sincerity. He had devised a singularly cruel test to prove it.

The plan, according to a Pakistani Taliban official familiar with the details, called for Balawi to use his open channel to the CIA to order a missile attack on Baitullah Mehsud—only the real target would be a decoy, not the Taliban leader himself. Balawi was to send word that Baitullah would be traveling in a district called Ladha in a specific car, a Toyota hatchback model that local tribesmen have dubbed Ghwagai or “the cow.” Inside, posing as Baitullah, would be one of his trusted drivers. All other details about the car and its route would precisely match the description given to the CIA by Balawi.

It worked exactly as planned, according to a version of events related by two Taliban officials. A missile flattened the car, killing the man who had posed as the Mehsud leader. The incident was never reported by local news media and never confirmed by the CIA. But it became instant legend among Baitullah’s men.

Mehsud later claimed that the driver knew of the plan and consented to sacrifice himself to help his boss and assist Balawi’s efforts to prove his worth to the CIA. To outsiders it might seem an extravagant waste of a life. But the Taliban chief brought his own calculus to such decisions. Every American missile that lit up the sky over Pakistan, he said, was like a recruiting poster, driving more angry young men and boys into his camps.

“Every drone strike,” he would say, “brings me three or four new suicide bombers.”

On August 5, Baitullah Mehsud and a small group of trusted guards moved their quarters under cover of darkness to Zanghara, a tiny town a few miles east of the Taliban stronghold of Makeen. At the edge of the village was a large, high-walled compound well known to him. It was the home of his father-in-law, Malik Ikramuddin, and the young girl who had recently become his second wife. Now thirty-five and the father of four girls from another marriage, Mehsud had decided to put serious effort into producing a male heir.

Unknown to the Pakistani, his every move was being recorded. Two sets of mechanical eyes—a Predator drone and a smaller one hovering at close range—had trailed him to Zanghara and watched him enter the mud-brick farmhouse where he was staying. One of the drones maneuvered to get a clear view into the second-floor room where Mehsud was staying. In Langley, Virginia, six thousand miles away, a series of urgent messages pulsed through the corridors of the executive wing: The target’s identity had been confirmed. It would be a clean shot.

But suddenly Mehsud was moving again, padding around the upper floors of the house in his white shalwar kameez. The Predator’s pilot and weapons operator eased off on their controls and watched their screens. They would have to wait.

It was a brutally hot night, and Mehsud was restless. His diabetes made him constantly thirsty, and his legs were swollen and achy. Shortly after midnight he opened a small door and, trailed by a second robed figure carrying medical equipment, climbed out onto the roof. A full moon bathed the rooftop in light and illuminated Mehsud’s bearded form as distinctly as if he were onstage. There was a small mattress on the roof, and Mehsud walked over to it and flopped down, belly first. The second figure knelt next to him and began to set up what appeared to be an intravenous drip. The CIA’s analysts quickly concluded that the other person was a doctor. Could it be Balawi? It didn’t matter. The Predator team armed their Hellfires a second time.

The missile launch awaited only final approval from the CIA director, but now there was a hitch. Leon Panetta had authorized a strike on a second-floor bedroom, but Baitullah Mehsud was lying on the roof on the building. The change was not insignificant: Panetta had insisted on maximum precautions to prevent the deaths of innocents, particularly women and children. What if the missile caused the entire building to collapse? Panetta would have to sign off on the change, or not. And he would have to decide quickly or risk letting the opportunity slip away.

At that precise moment Panetta was not in his CIA office but in downtown Washington, attending a meeting of the National Security Council at the White House. A little before 4:00 P.M. Washington time, he excused himself from the meeting and walked into the hallway to take an urgent call. He frowned as he listened, visibly worried. For several minutes he paced the floor with his cell phone to his ear, asking questions and going over details and options. By some accounts there were dozens of people staying in the same house as Mehsud, including mothers with children.

“Is that thing going to collapse?” Panetta asked. “What’s in there? Are there women and family members around?”

On the other end of the line, his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, and a senior counterterrorism adviser passed along updates. It was a tricky shot, from twenty-three thousand feet away, but the agency would use a smaller, less destructive missile, Panetta was told. The targeting would be extraordinarily precise. And the damage would be minimal.

Panetta gave his consent.

It was now 1:00 A.M. in the Pakistani village. Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban and chief protector of the Jordanian physician Humam al-Balawi, now lay on his back, resting as the IV machine dripped fluid into his veins. At his feet, a pair of young hands, belonging not to a doctor, as the CIA supposed, but to his new wife, were massaging his swollen legs. Barely aware of the buzzing of a distant drone, oblivious of the faint hissing of the missile as it cleaved the night air, he took a deep breath and looked up at the stars.

The rocket struck Mehsud where he lay, penetrating just below the chest and cutting him in two. A small charge of high explosives detonated, hurling his wife backward and gouging a small crater in the bricks and plaster at the spot where she had knelt. The small blast reverberated against the nearby hills, and then silence.

Overhead, the drones continued to hover for several minutes, camera still whirring. A report was hastily prepared and relayed to Panetta at the White House.

Two confirmed dead, no other deaths or serious injuries. Building still stands.