The Triple Agent

9. CHIEF

Khost, Afghanistan—September 19, 2009

At 4:58 A.M., two hours before sunrise, Jennifer Matthews was roused from sleep by a loud bang. It sounded close—it was hard to tell in the dark, and she was new to such things—and it was strong enough to rattle the picture frames in her tiny hooch. Instinctively she rolled out of bed, grabbed her flak jacket and helmet, and walked out the door toward the shelter. Rocket attack.

Outside, other figures stumbled along the same path, and some exchanged a grim greeting. The dark sky was still chalky with stars, with no trace of the new moon that would mark the end of the month-long Ramadan fast later that evening. Somewhere in town, a muezzin was sounding the predawn call to prayer, his lilting baritone rising and fading against the squawks and beeps of the base’s emergency loudspeakers.

Matthews felt the heaviness of the air, still warm even at that hour. The airfield lights glowed yellow through a dusty fog, casting a feeble light over the parched terrain beyond the fence. Farther up the valley, clusters of tiny lights from the army’s Salerno base shimmered like distant constellations.

It was a thrilling sight and oddly serene. The Haqqani fighters who lobbed occasional mortar rounds at the base rarely hit anything, so the perfunctory huddle in the concrete shelter was mostly an annoyance and a chance to catch up on gossip. But Matthews, barely twenty-four hours into her new job as Khost base chief, found even the little things fascinating. It was perhaps a strange admission, coming from a woman who a week earlier had been a suburban mom working in a sleek office building in northern Virginia, but she loved being in Afghanistan.

“It is exhilarating,” she told one close agency friend back home. Her Afghan assignment was going to take up a year of her life, and she would be absent from her three children for most of that time. She would miss twelve months’ worth of ball games and bedtime kisses, stomachaches and school projects, recitals and family dinners. And she would miss Christmas. But Matthews had volunteered for the posting, and she was now determined to extract every possible advantage from the experience. And to the extent she could, she would enjoy every bit of it, even the middle-of-the-night visits to the bomb shelter.

This one was mercifully short, as there were no other explosions. A chopper crew circling the base with a searchlight found the strewn body parts and quickly pieced together the story. A lone man had crept up the main approach to the base in the moonless blackness and attempted to bury an IED, or improvised explosive device, near a dip in the road where the morning convoys would pass in a few hours. But the bomb had exploded prematurely, leaving pieces of the man scattered across the highway. An almost identical incident had occurred near the same spot a few months earlier, only it ended with two would-be bombers lying dead, one of them a schoolteacher.

In an odd way, such attacks validated Matthews’s belief in the low risk of living in such a dangerous place. She would be safe at Khost, she told worried relatives and friends, because she would stay inside the wire. Local jihadist groups would fling themselves against the walls at regular intervals, but they never quite amounted to a serious threat.

“She told me, ‘I would never allow myself to be put in danger, because of my kids,’ ” said a CIA colleague who met with Matthews a few weeks before she went overseas. “I think she honestly believed it.”

Matthews had already concluded that life in a war zone wasn’t so bad. Her first glimpse of her temporary Afghan home was from the heaving side of a Black Hawk helicopter making the thirty-minute run from Kabul. The city and CIA base were perched on a high plateau surrounded by dun-colored hills, and the terrain reminded her of parts of the American Southwest. “I kept expecting to see the Marlboro Man show up,” she quipped to one of her e-mail pals back in Virginia.

The land had a kind of austere beauty best appreciated from the air. To the north, and visible from the base on a clear day, were the snowcapped White Mountains—home to the infamous al-Qaeda fortress Tora Bora, from which Osama bin Laden had escaped in 2001. The invisible line separating Afghanistan from Pakistan ran along another line of low hills just twenty miles to the east. The territory in between appeared almost lush, by Afghan standards, with irrigated fields and a scattering of trees, in contrast with the relentless brown of much of the country during the hot months.

Khost, home to 160,000 mostly ethnic Pashtuns, had survived a four-year military siege by Soviet forces during the 1980s, yet was remarkably intact. Instead of ravaged, the city appeared merely poor, a maze of dirty, mud-brick houses and shops with only a single noteworthy public structure, an elegant turquoise-domed mosque built by the patriarch of the Haqqani clan, Jalaluddin Haqqani. Bordering the city to the east was the concrete sprawl of Khost Airfield and the base itself, an American island isolated from the host country by concentric rings of HESCO barriers—the ubiquitous sandbags on steroids present at all U.S. military installations in Afghanistan—and concertina wire. A few crumbling relics from the Soviet occupation still stood; they included a squat two-story control tower built by the Russians that now served as a lookout post and the dozen or so wrecked 1980s-vintage aircraft that lined one side of the runway. Most of the newer buildings were prefabricated military structures, such as cargo containers converted into improvised barracks. All things natural and man-made—buildings, streets, houses, vehicles, uniforms—were muted shades of beige and brown, dulled further by an omnipresent coating of dust.

Life inside the wire came with not only a presumption of safety but better than average amenities. The mess hall served up surprisingly good food, including lobster or crab legs on Fridays. The main rec room’s satellite receiver beamed in live baseball and football and the newest Hollywood releases. A separate CIA lounge drew crowds of off-duty officers with its private stock of wine and ice-cold beer. The base gym gleamed with the latest fitness equipment, from elliptical machines to racks of Olympic barbell plates.

Matthews was a runner, and she quickly took up the habit of lacing up her sneakers just after dawn for a lap around the airfield with an eclectic group of CIA and military officers that called itself the Khost Running Club. After her workout she returned to her trailerlike quarters and one of the greatest perquisites accorded to her, the ranking officer on base: a private bathroom. Matthews had bargained hard for the extra privacy, perhaps the most coveted luxury of all.

The commute from her room to her CIA office was only a few steps, instead of the two hours of interstate and Beltway traffic she faced back home. But the new role that awaited her there would be her toughest adjustment by far. The subject matter, al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgency, she knew well. She had also managed people before. But now she commanded American and Afghan men and women in a place where the bombs and bullets were real. For the first time in her career, the hard choices she faced on the job carried profound consequences for the people working for her.

Matthews answered to her bosses in Langley, just as before, but now she sparred with a new set of partners who thought differently and had priorities separate from those of the CIA. They were the soldiers: Pentagon and NATO brass in Kabul, field commanders in and around Khost, and, most immediately, the Special Forces teams that operated out of the base. The commandos were military rock stars, supremely confident in their skills and used to being treated as elites. They formed natural alliances with their Special Forces brethren within the CIA’s ranks, including several of the paramilitary officers from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, as well as the base’s security detail, which included retired Green Berets and Navy SEALs now working for Blackwater. Some were disdainful of the CIA generally, mocking the newcomers as “children” or eggheaded “Clowns in Action.” It wasn’t just that the CIA lacked military skills; many of them also had little grasp of the local language and culture and rarely left the base to venture outside, military officers said.

The dislike was mutual. In private, the case officers and analysts complained about the gun toters as “knuckle-draggers” and “hot-house flowers” with egos to match their inflated biceps. Both views were stereotypes, but Matthews was hypersensitive to male skepticism about her ability to do a job. She had battled against it for her entire career.

The CIA still was very much a man’s world when Jennifer Matthews signed up on January 3, 1989. Three other women joined the agency the same day, and the foursome quickly concluded that they needed to stick together—“the only women in a sea of men,” one member of the quartet later recalled.

By chance, they shared a similar look: four white women in their mid-twenties, of roughly the same height and build, with brown hair and size 4 clothes. When they traveled together as a pack, as they often did, they turned heads in Langley’s buttoned-down corridors. The four lunched together in the cafeteria, took group vacations, and even planned one another’s weddings. Matthews felt obliged to serve as leader because she was the oldest by a few weeks. She also was the most ambitious. When the new recruits were asked during orientation about their future plans, Matthews answered without hesitation: “I’m going to be the DCI”—director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

That kind of unabashed ambition, and a belief that she could conquer anything through willpower and hard work, was a lifelong trademark. As a young girl, the middle of three children born to a press operator and a nurse in a working-class suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she bored into her books while her girlfriends chased boys and partied. She grew up with a strong feminist streak and a belief in a divine will that ultimately shapes all human destiny. Her social world as a child and teenager revolved around a small Christian fundamentalist congregation that embraced both patriotism and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Her theology evolved as she grew older, but she considered herself an evangelical Christian for the rest of her life.

After high school she attended a small Baptist university in western Ohio called Cedarville, a school that advertises its commitment to teaching a creationist approach to science. There she studied broadcasting and met a fellow cross-country runner whom she later married, a religiously devout chemistry student named Gary Anderson. Both later attended nearby Miami University of Ohio, where Matthews earned a master’s degree in political science. She worked briefly as a paralegal before deciding, with encouragement from a relative who served in the intelligence community, to try for a job at the CIA.

Very few women had been permitted to join the elite fraternity of case officers in those days, so Matthews and her three new CIA friends took positions that traditionally were open to women. Matthews became an imagery analyst and spent many hours poring over satellite photos of suspected chemical weapons factories in Libya. A natural writer, she later became a reports officer, a job that entailed translating raw intelligence from the field into concise prose.

Even there, Matthews was driven by a perceived need to outshine the men around her just to be accepted, remembered a female colleague who was part of her close circle of friends.

“We worked long, hard hours. We went the extra mile. And we routinely outran our male counterparts,” said the friend, who, like Matthews, eventually became an undercover operative with a protected identity.

Matthews briefly followed her husband to Geneva, where he worked for a Swiss company. But afterward the couple settled into a suburban Washington lifestyle that was organized largely to support her career. Because they worked in different cities—Matthews in the Washington suburbs, her husband in Richmond—they bought a house roughly in the middle, near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and logged more than a hundred miles a day in their commutes. But Matthews kept her maiden name, and when children arrived, the couple employed nannies so she could quickly return to the office. Friends say she adored her three children, but her brain was wired for work. Staying at home would have been as alien to her as growing fins and living in the ocean.

“She was very much a feminist in that way, yet she also was extremely traditional in her views about marriage and family,” said the agency friend. “There was a dichotomy about her that allowed her to separate different parts of her life. It’s part of what made her a good analyst.”

Matthews rejoined the agency after returning from Switzerland in 1996, but with entirely new aspirations. She shifted from the agency’s analytical division to the Directorate of Operations, the side of the CIA that runs clandestine missions overseas. The new job would require weeks of physically rigorous training at the CIA boot camp known as the Farm. Eventually she would also have to give up her right to her own name, becoming an officer “under cover.” Like Valerie Plame, her soon-to-be-famous colleague in the operations division, her very identity was a government secret.

Matthews truly hit her stride at the CIA when she joined a small unit within the directorate’s counterterrorism division known internally as Alec Station. It consisted of a mix of officers from different backgrounds, all devoted to the study of a little-known Islamic terrorist group that called itself the Base, or al-Qaeda. When she first joined in 1996, the unit was regarded as a CIA backwater. Terrorist groups were a second-rate threat, and al-Qaeda was a bit player compared with the better-funded Hezbollah and Hamas. But things began to change in 1998 after al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 220 people. The attacks catapulted bin Laden to a spot on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Suddenly Alec Station and its analysts were in demand.

As a group the officers became so al-Qaeda obsessed that they jokingly referred to themselves as the Manson Family. The hard part was convincing official Washington that Osama bin Laden was a threat to the U.S. homeland. Led by Matthews’s boss, a blunt-spoken analyst named Michael Scheuer, they eventually won the backing of senior CIA leaders, including Director George Tenet, and Cofer Black, who headed the Counterterrorism Center. The officers in the late 1990s drew up contingency plans for killing bin Laden and driving his terrorist allies out of Afghanistan, using friendly Afghan fighters and the agency’s newly acquired unmanned aerial vehicle, the Predator. But the Clinton administration passed on a chance to assassinate bin Laden in 1999, and the newly elected Bush administration deflected Tenet’s urgent requests for action and ultimately postponed any significant policy discussions about al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001. Seven days later al-Qaeda–trained hijackers crashed commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The morning of the attack was a normal workday at Langley, and many CIA employees were just arriving at the office as the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower at 8:46 A.M. When the second tower was struck seventeen minutes later, there was an audible gasp of recognition: This is the work of al-Qaeda.

Cofer Black, the CIA’s counterterrorism director, assuming that CIA headquarters was likely on the terrorists’ attack list, ordered most of the staff out of the building. He and the Alec Station analysts stayed behind and got to work. Some did not see their families again for days.

“We’re at war now, a different kind of war than we’ve ever fought before,” Black told the counterterrorism team as he prepared to issue marching orders. “We’re all going to have to do our part. And not all of us are going to make it back.”

Matthews’s close friends say her experiences during those weeks forever changed her. Before September 11 she had worked long hours with her Alec Station colleagues, trying to uncover the al-Qaeda plot they believed was in the works, but after the terrorist attacks she slept in a chair in her office and didn’t go home for days. Pregnant with her third child at the time, she became physically exhausted and eventually suffered a miscarriage, a misfortune that she suspected was due to the stress of her job. Yet she continued to work, telling friends repeatedly that she believed that a new attack was imminent, and only the CIA had the resources to stop it. Where al-Qaeda was concerned, Matthews had “drunk the Kool-Aid,” a CIA friend said.

Matthews was one of the first officers to be assigned the title of targeter, then a newly minted job in the agency’s counterterrorism division, and she soon acquired a high-profile case: She was to lead the agency’s search for an al-Qaeda logistics planner who went by the nom de guerre Abu Zubaida. Zubaida, a Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, ran a jihadist camp near Khost before September 11, and over the years he had facilitated the training or travel arrangements for scores of al-Qaeda militants in Afghanistan. Matthews believed that Zubaida knew details about a planned second wave of al-Qaeda attacks against the United States, and she convinced her CIA superiors to let her assemble a team of newly hired intelligence officers to coordinate a global search for him.

Matthews set up shop in a small conference room that was soon jammed with computers and bodies. Her team worked elbow to elbow for weeks until, in March 2002, they caught a break: They traced Zubaida to a safe house in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad. On March 28, Pakistani and American intelligence officers raided the house and captured the man after a firefight that left him gravely wounded. He was the first significant al-Qaeda operative to be nabbed by the CIA.

Within days of his capture, Zubaida handed his American interrogators an intelligence breakthrough, revealing the identity of the principal architect of the September 11 attacks: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Later, when Zubaida stopped cooperating with his interrogators, the Bush administration authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, to force him to talk. Among the witnesses to these sessions was Matthews, who was flown to Thailand to help guide the teams of CIA interrogators in questioning the new captive. Years later the case became the center of a roiling controversy. Human rights groups, congressional committees, and even former Bush administration officials questioned every facet of the CIA’s handling of Zubaida, who came to symbolize the debate over the agency’s use of secret prisons outside normal legal constraints, as well as interrogation practices that the International Committee of the Red Cross condemned as torture. Later evidence suggested that Zubaida was never truly an al-Qaeda leader, but rather a logistics man with limited knowledge of the terrorist group’s strategy and plans. Still, Matthews would be admired within the counterterrorism division as the officer primarily responsible for the takedown of the agency’s first high-value terrorist captive and the man who led the CIA to the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

By the middle of the decade Matthews was in management, directing the Counterterrorism Center’s teams of reports officers. She also forged alliances with a cadre of other tough women who were ascending into the division’s leadership ranks a few career jumps ahead of her. One of her new mentors was a notoriously sharp-tempered redhead who had played a key role in many of the agency’s most aggressive—and controversial—operations, from “enhanced interrogation” to a classified program known as rendition, in which suspected terrorists were abducted overseas by CIA operatives and flown to a third country to be interrogated and, in some cases, tortured. The two women shared an infatuation with tough guy actor Tommy Lee Jones, and they were fond of quoting a particularly apt line from his 2007 film No Country for Old Men: “You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waiting on you.”

As she moved up the hierarchy, Matthews was sometimes accused of being abrasive, stubborn, and impatient. Nothing riled her more than the suggestion that she as a woman was not adequate to a task—any task. In Langley several male colleagues began to refer to her by an unflattering nickname, Ruth, short for ruthless.

There, and later at Khost, she would feel obliged to prove herself time and again, fighting a never-ending battle for respect in a world that had long been dominated by men.

“You’re telling boys how to do their business,” said a CIA Afghan hand who counseled Matthews before she left for Khost. “Typically the answer is, ‘Missy, you don’t know what it’s like.’ ”

It was true that the Khost Matthews knew was nothing like the Khost of a few years before. Long before the base was safe enough for the likes of analysts and targeters, Khost belonged to America’s original black ops force, the paramilitary officers of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Recruited mostly from the ranks of Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other elite military units, the CIA’s SAD officers had been the country’s premier force since the 1950s for clandestine missions outside the writ of conventional troops, such as sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and targeted killings. Teams of SAD officers and Special Forces commandos spearheaded the assault against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001 that drove the Taliban government out of power. About a dozen of them set up camp in the eastern city of Khost that winter to begin cleaning up lingering pockets of Taliban resistance, and SAD officers had stayed there ever since.

In those final days of 2001, when Matthews and her team in Langley watched in anguish as Osama bin Laden slipped away into Pakistan, the Khost SAD team formed at an air base in the Pakistani city of Jacobabad and choppered across the mountains to take control of the airfield. They very nearly met with disaster in their first minutes on the ground.

They arrived in Khost at 2:00 A.M. on a bitterly cold morning, carrying light weapons and gear, along with a small trunkful of cash and a pledge of assistance from a local commander who opposed the Taliban. The local commander was waiting for them, as promised. But so were dozens of fighters from rival clans. Turbaned gunmen glowered at one another in a tense standoff with the Americans in the middle.

In the darkness, the U.S. team could see that several Afghans on different sides had pulled out grenades. They were prepared to fight to the death, as the CIA officers later learned, to decide who would get to play host and receive the bulk of American money and modern weapons.

“One of the factions knew we were coming, and then all the others found out,” said one American officer who was present. “It was early in the morning, and no one had had their tea. So the grenades came out.”

One of the CIA officers quickly stepped up and began lavishing praise on the Afghans for their hospitality and bravery. Uncle Sam’s pockets are deep, the man assured the group, a rough-looking assemblage of bandoliers and craggy, bearded faces that reminded some of the Americans of the cantina bar scene in Star Wars. The fighters drifted off, the crisis temporarily defused. Relieved, the weary officers proceeded to pick their way through the town in the darkness, with some of them bunking down at an abandoned elementary school that would serve as temporary outpost.

It was a poor choice for a fort. The school building was on a major thoroughfare and nearly impossible to defend against suicide bombers or rocket attacks. Nearby houses and trees offered hideouts for snipers. There was no running water or electricity. The town itself was dirty and sinister, overrun by armed gangs from as many as seven different clans, whose allegiances seemed to shift by the day. Random gunfire at odd hours kept the men on edge, never completely sure if the shots portended an attack or if it was just another Afghan wedding celebration.

The darkest moment came on January 4, 2002. After a meeting with elders in a nearby village, a gun-toting Afghan suddenly opened fire on the Khost team. One of the CIA paramilitary officers collapsed, struck by a bullet that pierced his chest through a gap in his body armor. Also hit was an energetic Green Beret sergeant named Nathan Chapman, a communications specialist and Desert Storm veteran who had been detailed to the CIA team at Khost. Chapman, thirty-one, had been shot through his thigh, and his wound was deemed less serious than that of the CIA officer.

Within minutes the two wounded men were in the air on their way back to Khost, where the CIA officer with the chest wound was eventually stabilized. Chapman meanwhile was rapidly losing blood from what turned out to be a severed femoral artery. By the time the helicopter touched down in Khost, the young soldier was dead. He was the first American GI from any service to die in combat in Afghanistan.

Soon afterward the CIA moved its headquarters to the grounds of the airfield outside town. Though abandoned for years, it offered ample space for sleeping and working, including a fully intact control tower with a roof that provided sweeping fields of fire for a machine gunner. The runway was salvageable, if littered with broken and bombed-out aircraft from the time of the Soviet occupation. The Americans got to work shoveling dirt into HESCO barriers to begin the fortification of what was to become the first CIA base in Afghanistan outside Kabul.

Someone suggested a name for the new facility: Forward Operating Base Chapman, after the Special Forces officer killed a few days earlier. It became the official name for the base, though most of the CIA inhabitants referred to it by its shorter handle, Khost.

The first order of business was deciding how to deal with the region’s largest militant group. Local warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani had spent years on the CIA’s payroll when he served as an Afghan rebel commander during the war against the Soviets, and he now controlled thousands of fighters along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He had nominally allied himself with the Taliban after that group’s rise to power in the 1990s. But Haqqani was a free agent, more interested in perpetuating his own smuggling empire and protection rackets than in theology or conquest.

Haqqani also was loyal to his friends, including his former comrade-in-arms Osama bin Laden. The two men had cemented their reputations in the 1980s fighting the Soviets in the mountains around Khost, a region that repeatedly proved impervious to Russian assaults. Bin Laden, the son of a wealthy construction magnate, used Saudi money and engineering connections to help the mujahideen guerrillas build a complex of tunnels and cave fortresses in the hills. Haqqani became a legendary military commander, personally leading his fighters into improbable David and Goliath victories against Soviet commandos and helicopter gunships. The Soviets occupied and expanded the airfield at Khost mainly in a failed attempt to bomb Haqqani and his allies out of their mountain redoubts.

Thus, when SAD teams and pro-U.S. Afghan forces closed in on bin Laden in late 2001, the al-Qaeda leader sought the protection of the tall, bushy-bearded warlord who had fought with him against the Soviets. Haqqani offered his friend sanctuary in a house outside Khost until it was safe to cross back into Pakistan to rejoin his followers.

Haqqani remained behind. He had been sanguine about the Taliban’s defeat and was prepared to switch loyalties, as he had done so often in the past. Pakistani officials who had dealt with him for decades strongly urged the Americans to accommodate him and perhaps even give him a token role in the new Afghan government.

But in Washington, Bush officials in the Defense Department were not in a mood to bargain. Haqqani had abetted the escape of Osama bin Laden and might still know his whereabouts. Two rounds of secret talks were held with Haqqani’s emissaries, in Islamabad and then in the United Arab Emirates, according to a former senior U.S. official intimately familiar with the events. But at both meetings, the official said, the U.S. side offered the same terms: unconditional surrender, including Haqqani’s personal acquiescence to donning an orange jumpsuit and joining the other detainees at the newly opened U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After a reasonable interval—presumably after Haqqani had told military interrogators everything he knew about bin Laden—he would be allowed to return home.

Haqqani’s refusal to accept such an offer was a given, the former intelligence official said.

“I personally always believed that Haqqani was someone we could have worked with,” the official said. “But at that time, no one was looking over the horizon, to where we might be in five years. For the policy folks, it was just ‘screw these little brown people.’ ”

Haqqani did refuse. Jalaluddin Haqqani had bedeviled the Russians over nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare in the 1980s. Now, at age fifty-one, he would go to war against the Americans. In time the so-called Haqqani network, led by Haqqani’s son Sirajuddin, became one of the greatest threats to U.S. forces in all of Afghanistan, and it was Haqqani’s fighters who now woke Matthews and her colleagues at all hours, firing rockets at the walls of the base at Khost.

In the years that followed bin Laden’s escape, some CIA paramilitary teams continued to operate as before, working out of small compounds where they lived and fought alongside Afghan soldiers. But the old SAD base at Khost expanded, bulked up, and assumed new responsibilities, mostly in support of Pentagon objectives. The hunt for Osama bin Laden shifted to Pakistan and relied largely on robot planes. And for the first time CIA reports officers, targeters, and analysts from Langley were routinely deployed to frontline bases to help with the collection and interpretation of intelligence, mingling with and sometimes directing the men with the guns.

Langley embarked on a program of cross-training for the two very different types of officers. SAD officers were drilled in classic intelligence-gathering techniques, while Afghanistan-bound civilian officers were required to take a three-week “overseas preparation course” to learn basic war zone survival. In the latter program, officers worked on their shooting skills, learned battlefield first aid, and practiced driving through roadblocks and ambushes. It was a start, but even some of the trainers acknowledged the program’s inadequacy.

“It’s just rudimentary, baseline, box-checking training,” said one career officer who taught one of the courses. “It’s familiarization, as opposed to proficiency.”

A decade earlier the same course had lasted twenty-one weeks and included extensive instruction on bombs and explosives, as well as lessons in team building, navigation, and even parachuting. But the longer program was dropped because it was judged to be expensive and time-consuming for an agency that needed to deploy operatives to the field quickly. Some of the skills taught in the longer course—parachuting, for example—were deemed irrelevant in an age in which so much of the business of spying depends on computer networks, satellites, and robotics.

“After September 11, the question was asked, ‘Do we need to teach these hard skill sets to everyone?’ And the answer was no,” said the retired officer who taught the overseas course. “You can simply subcontract those parts of the job to others.” The hard skill sets were the special domain of the soldiers and the paramilitary elites. The “meat eaters,” as some called themselves, were still needed at Khost. But they would no longer be in charge.

In the command center at Khost, with Baitullah Mehsud now confirmed dead, Matthews could focus her attention on the mission she had always regarded as the highest priority: locating and killing bin Laden, along with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their senior commanders.

Matthews had quickly come to appreciate the extraordinary assets that the base brought to the hunt. Foremost among them were the Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, a new force of CIA-funded Afghan commandos trained by the SAD. There were three thousand of these soldiers in the eastern half of Afghanistan, a mix of Pakistani- and Afghan-born ethnic Pashtuns who could slip across the border in local costume to kill or capture suspected terrorists or collect information. The intelligence they gathered was shared with the base’s contingent of American case officers and funneled, along with the usual phone and Internet chatter, into the CIA’s giant databases, to be teased and sifted by targeters—Elizabeth Hanson and others like her. Active leads about specific terrorists could be quickly transformed into hard geographic coordinates for the CIA’s growing fleet of Predators.

After eight years of practice, the cogs and wheels turned smoothly most of the time. And lately the men and women in charge of the CIA’s complex machine had seen new evidence of progress. After more than a year of relentless missile strikes, al-Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan appeared to be in complete disarray, an assessment based on intercepted conversations between the group’s demoralized operatives. Bin Laden had gone so deeply into hiding that he was effectively absent. Though Zawahiri still guided strategy, command of day-to-day operations had fallen to a handful of lieutenants, chiefly the man known as Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, the Egyptian who had filled the void after the death of Osama al-Kini. But CIA intercepts showed that al-Masri was a highly unpopular leader, tyrannical, manipulative, and controlling. Al-Qaeda fighters whose conversations were monitored complained bitterly about the group’s presumed acting leader.

And the best news of all had come not from Pakistan but from Amman. The Jordanian intelligence service had recruited a star informant who had been dropped into the tribal region with CIA help. The new agent, a Jordanian, had disappeared for several months but had just resurfaced with breathtaking new information. In the course of a few months he had somehow managed to penetrate first the Pakistani Taliban and then, by all accounts, al-Qaeda itself. At senior staff meetings back in Langley, top CIA managers were now speaking in hushed tones about a “golden source.”

A golden source, operating just across the hills in Pakistan, perhaps fifty miles from the small office where Jennifer Matthews now sat. She skimmed the daily cables and waited with increasing anticipation to see what would happen next.