The Triple Agent

10. THE DOUBLE AGENT

Langley, Virginia—September–October 2009

See attached.

Humam al-Balawi’s first big score as a spy, the one that would surely cement his reputation as the decade’s greatest, arrived at CIA headquarters on a late August morning as a jumble of computer code attached to an e-mail. The agency’s data forensics specialists had been warned, and they set upon it like an army of sushi chefs. They sliced and filleted, separating larger chunks of data into bits and bytes and then reassembling them again.

Several days of scrutiny later the agency’s initial impression stood: The file was authentic. And it was nothing short of miraculous.

Nearly a month after Mehsud’s death, Balawi had seemed to vanish from the earth. There had been no e-mail, phone call, or even intercepted Taliban transmission to explain what had happened to him. Then he suddenly resurfaced in late summer in a short message to bin Zeid. He was back, and he had a gift, he wrote, one that bin Zeid would find to be worth the wait.

The gift was a small image file, a few seconds of low-quality video taken by a handheld camera, the type that can be purchased at any electronics store for a few hundred dollars. The video depicted a small gathering of men in traditional Pashtun dress talking in a dimly lit room. In the foreground was a young man, seen mostly in silhouette, until a sideways turn clearly revealed him to be Balawi. Seated near him was a slim, dark-bearded man in his early forties who was doing most of the talking. His face was instantly recognizable to the agency’s counterterrorism experts, even though no American officer had seen the man in eight years. His name was Atiyah Adb al-Rahman, and he was one of the closest associates of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden known to be alive.

Al-Rahman, a Libyan and an Islamic scholar, had been a top aide to bin Laden since the 1980s, and the two had escaped together into Pakistan after the Tora Bora debacle in late 2001. Afterward he was believed to have fled to Iran, but he emerged again in 2006 as one of al-Qaeda’s top strategic thinkers and spiritual advisers. It was al-Rahman who had tried unsuccessfully to rein in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, when his sadistic attacks against Shia Muslims began to shift the tide of Iraqi public opinion against al-Qaeda. There had been no confirmed sightings of al-Rahman in years; yet here he was, holding forth on video, with a CIA informant seated at his feet.

The images left jaws agape and unleashed a torrent of questions. Yet this much was undeniably true: The Jordanian physician Humam al-Balawi had been in the same room with one of al-Qaeda’s top commanders. He had managed to capture the encounter on videotape. And he had delivered the evidence to the very doorstep of the CIA.

In the eight years since the start of the war against al-Qaeda, no one had ever gotten so close.

Three times a week Leon Panetta opened his seventh-floor office for a gathering of the CIA’s top counterterrorism officials. His deputy, Steve Kappes, attended, along with the directors of the agency’s National Clandestine Service and Counterterrorism Center and a phalanx of aides and briefers. Squeezed around Panetta’s mahogany table, beneath the tattered American flag that had once flown above the World Trade Center, they sipped coffee from china cups and discussed the latest events in Pakistan. One afternoon in early September, the group gathered to pore over an extraordinary transmission from an obscure agent known as Wolf.

There were still photos and a blow-by-blow description of a video—at the time, still undergoing evaluation by technical teams—that showed a presumed CIA informant conversing with one of al-Qaeda’s senior advisers. The agency’s senior managers were bursting with questions. Where did the agent come from? How did he get such amazing access? No one was yet sure what to make of it, except that it was extraordinarily good news.

Two snippets of information about Balawi were particularly intriguing to Panetta. One was the fact that the informant had managed to get his nose under al-Qaeda’s tent with such speed. The time frames for running agents in this region are always very long, the CIA director thought. This one is going from asset to target incredibly fast.

The other surprise was how little the agency seemed to know about the operative in the video.

“Nobody from the CIA has really had any person-to-person contact with him,” Panetta marveled.

There were plausible explanations for all of it. The informant was one of the Mukhabarat’s recruits, and he was already in Pakistan before any American officers could take a look at him. As for his access, it was simple: Balawi was a doctor. Al-Qaeda desperately needed doctors.

Balawi was talented, no doubt. Exactly how good was something the agency needed to find out, and with all possible speed.

“You have lifted our heads,” Ali bin Zeid wrote to Balawi one morning in one of his regular missives from Amman. “You have lifted our heads in front of the Americans.”

Bin Zeid was receiving verbal high-fives from his Jordanian colleagues over the stunning performance of his star recruit, and he wanted to pass the compliments along. Balawi had surprised everyone, bin Zeid most of all. How had he managed it? What else could he provide?

The encouragement seemed to work. In the weeks after Balawi resurfaced, as the dry northerly winds of autumn swept away the last traces of summer’s heat, his e-mails crackled with interesting tidbits. He described jihadist fighters he met, passed along rumors, and sketched out the complex web of relations among local militant groups.

More intriguingly, he began to serve up graphically detailed descriptions of the damage wrought by CIA missile strikes, down to conditions of the corpses and body parts pulled from the shattered cars and flattened houses. He wrote about the frustration and rage among Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, all of whom now lived in dread of the buzzing machays.

Balawi could rarely be precise about locations—he was still a stranger to the area and spoke little Pashto—but his reports helped the agency’s Predator teams narrow their search for targets. Some agency officials concluded that as many as five Taliban soldiers were killed as a result of Balawi’s detailed accounts. After a missile strike, the informant would e-mail bin Zeid with his on-the-scene accounts of death and mayhem, along with words of encouragement. You’re on the right track now, he would say.

CIA analysts in Amman and Langley studied the messages with increasing fascination. The agency collected its own bomb damage assessments, usually based on video taken by Predators lingering in the area after a strike. Its reports matched Balawi’s with striking accuracy. The Jordanian was clearly present at the targeted sites, presumably giving medical aid, because his reporting was unfailingly spot-on.

Technically Balawi was communicating only with bin Zeid, who had been assigned to the case full-time. But increasingly CIA officials discovered that they could ask questions and get rapid answers. Balawi was displaying the hallmarks of a true double agent, despite his utter lack of training.

The CIA had recruited a handful of successful double agents during the Cold War, most famously the Soviet military intelligence colonel Oleg Penkovsky, code-named Agent Hero. It was Penkovsky who alerted the Kennedy administration in 1962 to secret, Soviet-built missile launch sites in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a tip that started the Cuban missile crisis. Penkovsky was himself betrayed by a Soviet double agent and executed in 1963.

More recently the CIA had used informants, most of them recruited by the spy networks of friendly governments, to dismantle terrorist groups. Secret agents were instrumental in defeating Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terrorist cell in Iraq, as well as the al-Qaeda–allied Indonesian terrorist ring known as Jemaah Islamiyah. In the latter case, the group’s leader, Riduan Isamuddin, better known by his nom de guerre, Hambali, was ratted out by an informant and captured in a joint operation by the CIA and Thai police near Bangkok in 2003. His organization in tatters, Hambali was shuffled among CIA secret prisons before finally landing at the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Could Balawi become the greatest double agent of them all?

The other intelligence officer assigned full-time to the Balawi case wasn’t so sure. CIA case officer Darren LaBonte was wary by nature. He also was extremely protective of bin Zeid, a man he had known for only nine months but regarded as a close friend or perhaps even a younger brother. Though the two men were seasoned intelligence officers of roughly the same age, LaBonte was taller by half a head and battle hardened from multiple tours of Afghanistan. The two traveled together on joint assignments as far as Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, sharing information and coordinating tactics in a way that mirrored the close ties between their two countries. But as they worked, LaBonte secretly kept watch, worrying about his friend’s vulnerability to kidnapping, assassination, or even mistreatment by the Mukhabarat, with its rivalries and inscrutable internal politics.

“He needs me,” he explained to an associate in Amman. “I have to be there for Ali.”

LaBonte had initially moved to the Middle East from South Asia to cool off. The former Army Ranger had been running covert missions as a CIA paramilitary officer in violent eastern Afghanistan for nearly two years, a job that fitted him as easily as the hard-knuckled military gloves he liked to wear during firefights. But in early 2009, when the CIA offered a new position in relatively tranquil Jordan, LaBonte decided to take it. At thirty-four, he was now a family man. Besides, he had been getting signals lately that it was time to ease off on the adrenaline.

The first sign was the rocket-propelled grenade that came within a whisker of creasing his face. LaBonte had been deep inside Taliban country at the time, near an Afghan border town called Asadabad, when an insurgent pointed a launching tube directly at him. The projectile whooshed past within easy arm’s reach, so close that LaBonte could feel the rush of wind and smell the propellant. He was still shaky when he called his wife over Skype hours later, just to hear her voice.

A second message arrived on the day his daughter, Raina, was born. LaBonte had flown all night from Afghanistan to make it home for the delivery, and he arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport to discover that his wife, Racheal, was already in labor. He jumped into his father’s waiting car, and the pair cut and swerved through sixty-five miles of traffic to the Annapolis, Maryland, hospital where the doctors were trying their best to slow the clock. The car roared up to the hospital door, and LaBonte leaped out and blew past orderlies and wheelchairs in a sprint to the maternity ward. The nurses draped a gown over the sweaty, unwashed father-to-be and led him into the delivery room just in time to see his first child brought into the world.

Just over a year later LaBonte put the body armor and night-vision goggles away and said good-bye to Afghanistan, perhaps forever. His new posting, the CIA’s largest counterterrorism hub in the Middle East, was hardly sleepy, but the Jordanian capital was stable enough to accommodate officers’ families. For the first time in years, LaBonte could look forward to evenings at home with his wife, and Racheal could be spared the constant worrying that her husband had been wounded in an ambush or blown up by a roadside bomb.

But Amman was no rest stop. By March 2009, three months after the move, the contours of LaBonte’s new role were finally clear. As he had hoped, he now hunted even bigger quarry, international terrorists, rather than the Taliban hirelings he had often chased in the Afghan hills. Soon he was busier than ever, routinely working late into the evening and traveling abroad for secret meetings with a whirligig of turncoats, hustlers, and informants.

He and bin Zeid had become a remarkable team. Bin Zeid brought a deep knowledge of Arab culture and years of experience investigating jihadist networks throughout the Middle East. LaBonte was a combat veteran expert at all the practical skills essential to covert work, from stakeouts to kicking in doors.

LaBonte’s call sign among his Ranger comrades had been Spartan. It was a name that particularly suited LaBonte, a man who was forever being compared to action heroes. Relatives playfully called him Captain America because of his earnest patriotism and the way he unabashedly spoke about wanting to protect his country. His agency friends joked about his “spidey sense,” his uncanny knack for sniffing out danger like Spider-Man.

He even looked the part. Six feet tall and broad-shouldered, LaBonte was two hundred pounds of rugged good looks and muscle, a born athlete who was said to bench-press four hundred pounds and run a marathon after barely bothering to train for it. He radiated a kind of unforced confidence that made him a natural leader, first as a standout baseball player and later as a martial arts champion, an Army Ranger, and an FBI cadet. He liked being in charge because he liked playing the role of older brother or protector.

“He was the sheepdog who protects the sheep,” said one close friend from his army days. “It’s how he saw himself.”

Finding the job that suited his protective instincts was a years-long struggle. LaBonte’s strong pitching arm earned him an invitation to play minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians, but he turned down the offer, explaining to family members that a professional sports career would distract him from more important goals he had set for his life. He found himself increasingly drawn to the military but rejected a chance to go to officers’ school. Instead he decided to test his mettle against the punishing physical standards of one of the army’s Special Forces units, the elite Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment. He quickly earned his Ranger’s tab and later a prestigious position as a member of the regimental color guard.

The army also introduced him to a pretty dance student named Racheal. In March 1999, LaBonte found himself in need of a date for the year’s big formal event, the Ranger Ball. At the last minute—just hours before the first dance—a mutual friend persuaded Racheal to help one of his army buddies out of a jam.

“Is he cute?” Racheal asked.

“He looks a little like Daniel Day-Lewis,” said the friend, referring to the actor best known at the time for portraying Hawkeye in the film The Last of the Mohicans, “but without the long hair.”

As Racheal said later, the tall young Ranger who arrived at her door that evening in his dress uniform was more than just handsome.

“I knew in the first minute that this was someone important in my life,” she said of her future husband. “From that point on, life would be different.”

The two married the following year, and by 2001 Darren LaBonte was out of the army and serving as a SWAT team officer for the Libertyville Police Department in Chicago’s northern suburbs. He was working the graveyard shift, chasing rowdy teenagers and feeling restless, when the day came that was to change his life forever.

He had just gotten home from work on the morning of September 11 when the TV news anchor broke in with reports that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. LaBonte watched for a moment mesmerized, then phoned his mother, who lived in another suburb a few minutes away.

“You need to turn on the news,” he said.

Like many Americans that morning, Camille LaBonte assumed at first that the crash was accidental. But her son was convinced that something more sinister had occurred.

“That wasn’t dumb. That was intentional,” he said.

He drove to his parents’ house and arrived in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. He and his mother then watched in disbelief as one tower collapsed, and then the other. When Camille turned to her son, he was crying.

Within weeks, LaBonte was privately taking Arabic lessons while sorting through his options for landing a meaningful role in the fight against terrorism that was just getting under way. He considered, and then rejected, the idea of reenlisting in the army; it was unlikely that he would end up in the job or unit that he wanted, he reasoned. Instead he decided to sign up with the U.S. Marshals Service, a law enforcement arm of the Justice Department that tracks down fugitives and protects federal courts. His Ranger experience landed him a coveted spot on the marshals’ special operations team, yet it quickly became clear to LaBonte that the job was not the one he was looking for. Instead of searching for suspected terrorists, he was spending his days tracking down drug dealers.

LaBonte then applied simultaneously for positions at the FBI and CIA. The FBI called back first, so he enrolled in the bureau’s academy in Quantico, Virginia. He won commendations as a cadet for leadership and shooting skills, and after graduation he landed a prime spot in the bureau’s New York office, working for an organized crime unit investigating the city’s Mafia families. Still, he burned for something more.

At last, in 2006, the CIA came through with the offer he had been waiting for. The intelligence agency saw in LaBonte a combination of skills that were most in demand five years into the global war against al-Qaeda: the tactical abilities of a Special Forces soldier, combined with the resourcefulness of a classic CIA case officer. LaBonte was among a handful of CIA recruits who would be trained for both jobs. He catapulted to the front of the waiting list for the agency’s training school, the former Defense Department reservation in southern Virginia known as the “Farm.” Months later he was on his way to Iraq and then to Afghanistan.

This job felt right, at last. His comrades and commanders were impressed by the enthusiasm of the young ex-Ranger who was always the first to volunteer for difficult assignments and the last to complain about the hardships the group endured. Though less experienced than some of the older combat veterans, he distinguished himself for his clearheadedness and sharp instincts during firefights. One officer who fought next to him in Afghanistan was struck by LaBonte’s “total confidence in who and what he was.

“He was living his calling, without pretense or guile, brag or boast,” the former comrade said. “Darren believed his predestined role was to serve as a professional warrior, a protector for those less able to protect themselves.”

Such qualities were on display one summer night when LaBonte led a two-man surveillance mission in Kunar Province. The men were walking alongside a river when a sudden noise alerted them to an approaching Taliban patrol. The Americans froze and hugged the riverbank as the insurgents filed into view, then paused in a clearing a few yards from their hiding place. A dozen fighters arrived, then two dozen, and still more. At last the group swelled to more than one hundred Taliban fighters, all armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and obviously staging for some kind of attack. They lingered for several minutes, so close that the two Americans could hear their conversations. If any one of them had wandered a few feet toward the river, the pair would almost certainly have been discovered.

The other man was new to the CIA base and had never been in such a scrape. LaBonte kept a hand on his shoulder and whispered words of encouragement.

“Don’t worry, everything is going to be OK,” he said.

Eventually the insurgents moved on, and the two men scurried back to their base—but only after relaying the Taliban group’s coordinates to the nearest NATO dispatcher.

As the months passed, though, LaBonte slowly lost some of his early optimism about the tide of battle against al-Qaeda. By the time he arrived in Jordan, he was convinced that bin Laden and his followers were winning the ideological struggle, appealing to ever larger numbers of young Muslims who could serve as fodder in the next wave of suicidal strikes against the West. He brooded about the attacks that were surely coming and worried about how to safeguard those he cared about most.

That list was topped by his wife and baby daughter, now with him in a Middle Eastern country in which American officials had been targeted for assassination. It also included bin Zeid, who he feared, was being swept along by the collective enthusiasm for Balawi, a double agent whose achievements already bordered on the implausible.

“This guy is too good to be true,” LaBonte flatly told an ex-military friend in late autumn.

Among most of the intelligence community, though, Balawi fever was real and about to get much worse.