The Triple Agent

11. DANGLE

Langley, Virginia—November 2009

Humam al-Balawi’s breakthrough as a spy was one hundred megabytes of flash and sizzle, titillating and wholly unexpected. But his next big score would blow everyone away.

It arrived, again by e-mail to his handler, bin Zeid, this time in the form of a simple typed message. Balawi, the doctor, had a new patient. His name was Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Jordanian had made direct contact with the deputy commander of al-Qaeda, second only to Osama bin Laden himself.

As Balawi described the events, he had been as surprised as anyone. One day he was told that Zawahiri was experiencing problems, and then suddenly the bearded, bespectacled terrorist leader was standing in front of him, asking him for medical treatment. Zawahiri, himself a doctor, was suffering from a range of complications related to diabetes, and he needed advice and, he hoped, some medicine. It was not so easy for Zawahiri, a wanted man with a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head, to write his own prescriptions.

Balawi happily consented, and within minutes he was alone with Zawahiri, checking the vital signs of the man who had helped dream up the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In his e-mail, Balawi supplied a summary of Zawahiri’s physical condition as well as his medical history, providing details that perfectly matched records the CIA had obtained years earlier from intelligence officials in Egypt, Zawahiri’s home country. Most important, Balawi revealed that he had scheduled a follow-up visit with his patient. He would be seeing Zawahiri again in a few weeks.

From Kabul to Amman to Langley, marble buildings seemed to shift on their foundations. The last time the CIA had caught a whiff of Zawahiri was in 2006, when the agency bombed a house in southwestern Pakistan on the basis of faulty intelligence that suggested he was eating dinner there; there had been no verified sighting of Zawahiri by a Westerner or government informant since 2002.

Now, everyone with a top secret clearance wanted to know about the “golden source” who had been in the terrorist’s presence.

Even the White House would have to know.

Leon Panetta met with members of the Obama administration’s national security team to apprise them of the stunning developments. The CIA director himself served as chief briefer, and among those seated around the table were the national security adviser, James L. Jones; Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence; and Rahm Emanuel, Panetta’s old friend and White House chief of staff. Afterward Panetta would repeat the briefing in a private audience with the president of the United States.

“There are indications that he [Balawi] might have access to Zawahiri,” Panetta announced, his tone deliberately low-key. The next step, he said, was to meet with the informant and train him for an important new role.

“If we can meet with him and give him the right technology, we have a chance to go after Zawahiri,” Panetta said.

The reaction was instantaneous and dramatic. How quickly can we make this happen? NSC officials wanted to know.

“Everyone was very enthusiastic,” said one of the security officials present at the briefing, with considerable understatement, “that for the first time in a long time, we had a chance of going after Number Two.”

If Balawi had offered up bin Laden himself, it could hardly have evoked more excitement. After so many years deep in hiding, al-Qaeda’s reclusive founder was merely a figurehead. It was Zawahiri, together with his old friend Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, who now steered al-Qaeda’s ship. The two Egyptians decided strategy for the group, raised money, and planned operations. If al-Qaeda were to unleash another September 11–style attack on the United States, it would almost certainly be Zawahiri’s handiwork.

The physician, fifty-eight now and scarred, physically and mentally, from years in Egyptian prisons, was the al-Qaeda version of a mad scientist, a man who was forever scheming up sensational ways to kill large numbers of people, using chemicals or viruses or even nuclear weapons, if he could get them. He was also al-Qaeda’s great escape artist, ever managing to elude death or capture by slipping away just as the trap was being sprung. Once, before September 11, 2001, he traveled to the United States without being noticed, raising money for terrorist causes under a fake name and departing, still undetected. After the plane attacks the CIA came close to killing him on three different occasions, but each time he walked away unharmed. The older counterterrorism hands at Langley who had battled with him over the years respected his capabilities and loathed everything he stood for.

Zawahiri had been on the CIA’s watch list since the mid-1980s, long before anyone had heard of bin Laden, and over the years the agency witnessed his rise from Egyptian revolutionary to international terrorist. He was the intellectual force behind many of al-Qaeda’s grandest ambitions, including its fledgling efforts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons. It was Zawahiri who decreed that al-Qaeda must take on the “far enemy”—the United States—before it could defeat its principal target, the “near enemy,” the pro-Western Arab regimes that stood in the way of the group’s dream of uniting all Muslims under a global Islamic caliphate.

“To kill Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country in which it is possible to do it,” Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto.

As documented in the CIA’s case files, Zawahiri’s early life bore striking similarities to Balawi’s. Both were born to educated, middle-class parents from religiously tolerant communities, and both were drawn simultaneously to medical studies and radical Islamist ideology. Zawahiri, who grew up in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, was the son of a well-known professor of pharmacology, and his maternal grandfather was a president of Cairo University. As an earnest, bookish teenager Zawahiri was introduced to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author and intellectual who became one of the founders of modern Islamic extremism. Qutb’s execution by Egyptian authorities inspired the young Zawahiri to organize a group of like-minded friends into a secret society he called al-Jihad, or the Jihad Group. He continued his studies and eventually earned a medical degree, but all the while he looked ahead to a day when his al-Jihad would seek to overthrow Egypt’s secular government.

As a new doctor, Zawahiri spent time volunteering in refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There, while patching up the wounds of anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters, he first crossed paths with a charismatic young Saudi, bin Laden, who had also come to Afghanistan to support the ragtag rebels in their struggle against the Communist superpower. Not long afterward, upon returning to Egypt, Zawahiri and his small cell joined with other antigovernment factions in a series of plots to assassinate Egyptian leaders, culminating in the fatal attack on Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, as he sat in a reviewing stand to watch a military parade. Zawahiri was imprisoned for allegedly participating in the conspiracy to silence one of the Arab world’s most moderate and pro-Western leaders. He later claimed in a memoir that he was tortured by Egyptian security officials.

The experience left Zawahiri even more determined to undermine secular Arab governments and their financial underpinnings through spectacular acts of terrorism. His signature attack during his pre–al-Qaeda years was a savage 1997 assault on foreign tourists at Egypt’s famous Luxor ruins, in which gunmen systematically slaughtered sixty-two people, including Japanese tourists, a five-year-old British child, and four Egyptian tour guides.

Ordinary Egyptians, previously accustomed to thinking of al-Jihad as engaged in a grassroots struggle against corrupt and autocratic rulers, were repelled by the wanton slaughter, and support for Zawahiri and his Jihad Group evaporated. Soon afterward Zawahiri told followers that operations inside Egypt were no longer possible, and the battle was shifting to Israel and its chief ally, the United States. In 1998 the Jihad Group officially merged with bin Laden’s larger and better-financed al-Qaeda.

The newly expanded terrorist group immediately set out to make a splash with attacks on U.S. interests. First on the list were the U.S. embassies in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania, which were bombed in 1998 in coordinated attacks that killed hundreds of people.

Three years later, working from al-Qaeda’s new base in Afghanistan, Zawahiri helped oversee the planning of the September 11 attacks. His primary mission, however, was to plan follow-on waves of terrorist strikes that would continue for months and years to come. He personally took command of an ambitious biological weapons program, establishing a laboratory in Afghanistan and dispatching disciples to search for sympathetic scientists.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that Zawahiri’s efforts to launch a large-scale anthrax attack might have succeeded had he not run out of time. Within weeks of the collapse of New York’s World Trade Center towers, the U.S.-backed military campaign that drove al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies out of power in Afghanistan forced Zawahiri to abandon his bioweapons lab and flee the country. U.S. forces were to discover the lab, along with Zawahiri’s detailed instructions to his aides to acquire a highly lethal strain of the bacterium that causes anthrax.

By 2002 Zawahiri, like bin Laden, was in hiding in Pakistan, with a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head. But unlike bin Laden, he continued to personally direct numerous terrorist operations, including an alleged 2003 plot to attack New York City’s subway system using chemical weapons. Zawahiri himself called off the attack for reasons that remain unclear.

Because of his willingness to insert himself into terrorist operations, CIA officials clung to hopes that Zawahiri eventually would make a mistake, yet each time the agency’s targeters managed to locate him, he slipped out of their grasp.

The last attempt was in January 2006, when CIA informants learned of a gathering of al-Qaeda leaders in Damadola, a town in the northern Pakistani province of Bajaur. Zawahiri was known to have visited the same province two years earlier, and agency officials were highly confident when they dispatched a Predator aircraft to orbit a mud compound a few miles outside the town. CIA missiles destroyed the building, killing eighteen people, including several al-Qaeda figures, but not Zawahiri. Pakistani intelligence officials said afterward that the al-Qaeda deputy changed his mind at the last minute and sent aides to the meeting instead.

Days later Zawahiri appeared in a new video to taunt the White House.

“Bush, do you know where I am?” he said. “I am among the Muslim masses.”

The CIA never came close again after that until the morning in November 2009 when a little-known Jordanian physician surfaced with a story about an ailing Zawahiri entrusting himself to his care.

In the days that followed, a single imperative emerged: The CIA must meet Humam al-Balawi.

As CIA officials in Langley prepared a summary for the classified digest known as the President’s Daily Brief, the files on Balawi were distressingly thin.

The Jordanians seemed to trust him, but no American had ever met him. He had bombarded Islamic Web sites with violently anti-Western screeds, yet he had flipped after only three days of relatively light interrogation by the Mukhabarat. Nothing in his lifestyle suggested a fondness for material wealth, yet he seemed only too happy to risk his life and sell out his ideological brethren in exchange for U.S. greenbacks.

Nothing about the case made sense. On the other hand, there was the matter of the al-Rahman video and Zawahiri’s medical data. In the dozen years since al-Qaeda emerged as a global threat, no one had seen anything like it.

In meetings and in conference calls between Langley and Amman, a series of options for a meeting with Balawi were weighed and rejected. Under one proposal the Jordanian would be flown back to the Middle East for an extensive debriefing. It was an appealing prospect, since Balawi’s Mukhabarat and CIA case officers were based in Amman. But it was finally rejected out of fear that Balawi’s lengthy absence from Pakistan might raise suspicions among his Taliban sponsors.

An alternative plan called for a secret meeting in a Pakistani city—Islamabad or Karachi, perhaps—but it also was ruled out. The Americans had intentionally kept Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency in the dark since Balawi’s arrival in that country, and no one wanted to risk blowing the Jordanian’s cover at such a sensitive moment. Pakistan’s major cities were chockablock with ISI agents, and a high-level CIA gathering would almost certainly draw attention.

A safer bet, it was decided, would be to meet Balawi in Afghanistan, presumably in a place near the border that would be easily accessible for Balawi but also discreet and utterly secure. The meeting spot would have to be reachable by car from Pakistan’s tribal region, yet also firmly under the CIA’s control, with no possibility of detection by Taliban spies.

The CIA commanded at least six bases along the Afghan frontier, but only one of them sat on an asphalt highway that connected directly with Miranshah, the town in North Waziristan, Pakistan, closest to Balawi’s last known position. Thus, by accident of geography, the CIA’s choice for its much-anticipated first meeting with the Jordanian agent was the agency base known as Khost.

Key details of the proposed meeting, including Balawi’s willingness to submit to such a plan, were still far from clear. But from the day the informant invoked Ayman al-Zawahiri’s name in an e-mail, the mission to find Balawi and drain him of information became a priority of almost unrivaled importance.

“The upper level of government was crying out for information and wanted answers to keep the country safe,” said former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, a career diplomat who co-led a classified, independent investigation of the events. “There were government servants who were intent on getting the job done, and they were prepared to go the last mile to do it.”

“Yes, but …”

Humam al-Balawi was not making it easy. Jordanian intelligence captain Ali bin Zeid, unsure how Balawi would react, had broached the idea of a meeting somewhat tentatively at first. Your reports have been most interesting, bin Zeid wrote in a late-November missive. Now we’d like to take things up a notch.

Balawi seemed instantly agreeable to the idea of seeing bin Zeid again. But he put up so many conditions and qualifiers that bin Zeid was left wondering whether the meeting would ever come about.

Yes, but I don’t want to meet with anyone except you, he wrote at one point.

Yes, but it’s too dangerous to cross the border, he said in a separate note. And, finally: Yes, we should meet. But I think you should come to me.

Over several days of exchanged messages, Balawi became increasingly insistent. The ideal meeting place, he declared, was Miranshah, North Waziristan’s sprawling market town just across the mountains from Afghanistan. Balawi knew the town and would find a secure place where both he and his Jordanian countryman would be safe. There were cafés and bazaars, shops and mosques, all of them crowded with people. The two Jordanians could meet discreetly without attracting attention, and then Balawi could be on his way again.

Bin Zeid gently pushed back. North Waziristan was too risky, he said. Khost, on the other hand, was a fortified military camp guarded by Special Forces commandos and attack helicopters. Both men would be safer there.

“I’m the one who’s taking all the risks over here,” Balawi protested. He was sure that Afghan spies at the American base would betray him, and then he’d be finished, killed in the most gruesome of ways. Balawi had seen what the Taliban did to suspected informants. He repeated his plea.

Come to Miranshah, he wrote.

Bin Zeid shared the e-mails with his CIA partner, Darren LaBonte, who was starting to feel queasy. LaBonte was getting hammered with requests for updates from his bosses in Amman and Langley, and his answers so far had not been popular. The two partners talked for hours about Balawi and his e-mails and what it all meant. This was shaping up as the biggest case either man had ever been associated with; yet more than anyone around them, they harbored doubts. The video evidence had been staggeringly impressive, but also perplexing. How was it that Balawi, this frightened mouse of a doctor who weeks earlier had begged to come home, had come up with something so spectacular? Was Balawi a con artist? Was he trying to scam the CIA for more money, as so many bogus informants had done in the past? Perhaps Balawi was everything he seemed, but as the two men hashed it over, they were less than convinced. It was too much, too soon.

Later LaBonte tried to summarize his concerns in an internal memo. The bottom line, he wrote, was that the CIA didn’t yet know enough about the Jordanian agent to trust him entirely. He seemed real enough, but that wasn’t a sound basis for divining the man’s intentions.

“We need to go slow on this case,” he wrote.

The top CIA officer in Amman was a veteran operative who had served in Pakistan and understood the fickle art of running covert agents better than most. The station chief, whose name is classified, accepted LaBonte’s recounting of the key facts of the Balawi case, but he reached an entirely different conclusion: A meeting with Balawi was urgently needed precisely because the CIA knew so little about the informant and his motivations. Yes, there were risks, the station manager said. But if ever there was a moment for risk taking, it was this one.

Let’s move forward, he said.

Ali bin Zeid spent the first days of December preparing for what he believed would be a short trip. Winters in eastern Afghanistan are notoriously cold, so bin Zeid called his older brother, Hassan, and asked to borrow his heavy jacket, the one with the thick insulation and the North Face logo. He did some last-minute shopping and buffed up the black Desert Eagle .44 Magnum he liked to take on his business trips.

Then, just days before his planned departure, bin Zeid was summoned unexpectedly to a meeting on the Mukhabarat’s executive floor. He entered a conference room to find his immediate supervisor and several other senior officials waiting for him, all dark suits and ties, their faces as dour as buzzards’.

We’re sending someone else to Afghanistan to meet with Balawi, one of the officers said. The mission is simply too risky for someone from the royal family.

Bin Zeid exploded. “But it’s my case,” he protested.

He spent much of the day appealing the decision, from one end of the Mukhabarat’s headquarters building to the other. He argued and complained, and when neither worked, he threatened.

“I’m going to Afghanistan, even if I have to make my own arrangements to get there,” bin Zeid said. Then, eyes narrowed to slits, he dropped the ultimate threat.

“I’m going to Afghanistan,” he repeated, “even if I have to go with the Americans.”

Bin Zeid had already laid the groundwork for this threat, and sure enough, a call was made from the CIA’s Amman station to the Mukhabarat headquarters, officially requesting bin Zeid’s presence at Khost. The Jordanian captain was the only one who knew Balawi, the Americans explained, and the informant might balk if he wasn’t around.

“We need Ali,” the CIA caller said.

The Mukhabarat relented.

Bin Zeid and LaBonte were scheduled to leave for Afghanistan on December 6, but the Jordanian was fully packed a day early. There were tearful good-byes from family members, including bin Zeid’s sister-in-law, who had been plagued with feelings of dread since she first learned of the trip.

The men’s wives had been unusually anxious as well. Racheal LaBonte was beginning to fret about the Italian vacation the couple had planned for the Christmas holidays, and she now worried that Darren LaBonte wouldn’t make it back in time. More important, she had managed to piece together the outlines of the mission from snippets of conversation, enough to know that her husband had grave doubts about the informant he was flying to Afghanistan to meet.

“He could turn out to be a suicide bomber!” she finally blurted out.

Often Darren LaBonte would crack a joke to relieve the tension when his wife expressed such fears about his work. This time he did not.

“You’re right, he could be,” he said solemnly. Then, taking her hand, he tried to explain his conflicted feelings about the case. This one was worth the risk, he said, and what’s more, if it succeeded, it might finally be enough for him. He could even walk away from the terrorist-catching business forever.

“If I don’t go, and this case is everything that it’s supposed to be, it would be a big mistake,” he said. “If it’s successful, then I can stop. I can finally say that I’ve done what I came here to do.

“On the other hand, if I don’t go, and something happens …”

He paused. Racheal knew he was thinking of bin Zeid.

“Well, I could never forgive myself,” he said finally.

The two couples gathered for last farewells at the LaBontes’ apartment at 5:00 A.M., just before the two men departed for the airport, and sat for coffee on the balcony. The usual weepy scenes in the terminal attracted too much attention, and besides, this time the wives had planned something different. Both women had been unusually anxious about the trip to Afghanistan, but they decided together to go out of their way not to show it.

The women knew the men shared a fascination with ancient warrior culture, for the armies of Athens and Sparta. In ancient Greece the mothers of Spartan warriors exhorted their sons to bravery with the words that Fida Dawani and Racheal LaBonte now spoke to their departing husbands: “Return with your shields or on them.”

But as the two officers gathered their bags, Fida could not restrain herself. She pulled Darren LaBonte aside, her dark eyes imploring.

“Take care of Ali,” she said.

The Mukhabarat tried once more to block Ali bin Zeid from meeting with the informant Humam al-Balawi. It happened on December 5, as the Jordanian intelligence captain and his CIA partner, LaBonte, were making final preparations for their journey.

That evening one of the Jordanian spy agency’s senior managers phoned an old CIA friend at the Amman station to talk privately about the Balawi case.

We have serious concerns, the Jordanian said before proceeding to lay out two of them.

The first was a matter of historical precedent, he said. The Mukhabarat had been dealing with jihadists of all stripes for many years, and it knew a few things about them, including which ones could be flipped. The low-level types—the thugs and opportunists who glommed on to terrorist movements for personal advantage—could be transformed and might even become useful informants. But radicals and ideologues never truly switched sides. A true believer might lie and deceive, but deep down he could never betray his cause. And Humam al-Balawi had all the markings of a true believer.

It was a compelling argument, coming from a Mukhabarat veteran who had interrogated scores of radical Islamists. The CIA officer listened attentively.

The second concern derived from the Jordanian’s observations as the case had unfolded in recent weeks. Wasn’t it curious, he asked, that Balawi kept insisting that the meeting take place in Miranshah, rather than inside a fortified base where his security would be assured?

He could be leading you into an ambush, the Jordanian officer warned.

As he summed up his thoughts, the official acknowledged that the Mukhabarat had found nothing damning against Balawi and had no specific reason to doubt that the operative had truly made inroads into al-Qaeda’s senior ranks. There were just vague concerns, he explained, including a worry that bin Zeid might not be the right officer for this particular case. Perhaps over time bin Zeid had gotten too close to his recruit and had lost his ability to make dispassionate judgments.

The Jordanian had finished unburdening himself, so the CIA officer thanked him for his insights and bade him good night. Afterward, as he thought about the warning, he focused in particular on one of the phrases the man had used: bin Zeid might not be the right officer.

The Mukhabarat, for all its strengths, was known to be constantly roiled by rivalries and turf battles, as different factions sought to gain advantage. Even mild-mannered bin Zeid was reported to have numerous enemies among senior officers who feared that the king’s cousin would use his royal heritage and CIA connections to secure a plum position.

The warning suddenly made sense. The Jordanians were worried all right: They were afraid that Ali bin Zeid would soon become their boss, the CIA officer reasoned. He filed the contact away mentally and mentioned it to no one outside of Amman.

The next morning, under a slate gray sky, bin Zeid and LaBonte boarded a plane at Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport and departed for Afghanistan.