The Triple Agent

13. THE TRIPLE AGENT

Datta Khel, North Waziristan—December 2009

The Pashtun tribesman known as al-Qaeda’s tailor lived in a house near the village of Datta Khel in North Waziristan, where he made a living making suicide vests. One morning in mid-December he sat at his antique sewing machine to fill yet another order, this one very different from the vests he usually made.

The man was celebrated for his ingeniously simple designs that were both reliable and cheap, two key selling points for a terrorist organization that waged suicide bombings on an industrial scale. He started with a sturdy cotton vest, often surplus military gear from the local bazaar, and attached thick straps so it could be secured snugly against the torso. He added fabric pouches and stuffed them with packets of white acetone peroxide powder, an explosive popular in Pakistan’s tribal region because it can be cooked up at home using common ingredients. Next came the shrapnel layer, which consisted of hundreds of nails or other bits of metal glued to sheets of thick, adhesive-backed paper or cloth. Finally, he inserted blasting caps in the powder and attached them to wires that ran to a small nine-volt battery and a cheap detonator switch. The latter item he sewed into a separate pouch that closed with a zipper. That, he explained, was to prevent excitable young martyrs-to-be from blowing themselves up too quickly. An extra second or two of fumbling with the zipper would remind the bomber to move in closer to his target to ensure the maximum possible carnage.

The vest’s tight constraints and the positioning of the explosive pouches would channel the energy of the blast outward, toward whoever stood directly in front of him. Some of that energy wave would inevitably roll upward, ripping the bomber’s body apart at its weakest point, between the neck bones and lower jaw. It accounts for the curious phenomenon in which suicide bombers’ heads are severed clean at the moment of detonation and are later found in a state of perfect preservation several yards away from the torso’s shredded remains. When waves of suicide bombers attacked Israeli commuter buses and cafés during the Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, police discovered that they could often distinguish the dead bomber from his victims by finding the corpse that was minus its head.

On this day a group of young Pakistani recruits, some of them tapped as future suicide bombers, gathered to admire the vest maker as he worked. One of them took photos with his cell phone as the man reached into his explosives chest and pulled out a surprise: not the usual bags of powder, but doughy sticks of a far more powerful military explosive called C4. He kneaded the sticks to flatten them and began to pack them into a row of thirteen fabric pouches he had sewn into the outside of the vest. Next he dipped a paintbrush into a bucket of industrial adhesive and slathered the white goo over a large square of sturdy cotton. The man then patiently studded the sheet with metal bits, piece by piece and row by row, alternating marble-size steel ball bearings with nails and scrap and, finally, some shiny twisted pieces that would have been recognizable to any American who happened to be in the room: children’s jacks.

Among the spectators, there had been lively discussions about the man who would likely wear the special vest. Most speculation centered on the young foreigner whom the recruits called Abu Leila, using the Arab practice of referring to adult men by the name of their oldest child and the word Abu, or “father of.” But Leila’s father wasn’t nearly so certain. When he left for Pakistan, Humam al-Balawi imagined himself a mujahideen, a holy warrior, fighting and maybe even dying in a righteous struggle against the enemies of God. What he hadn’t pictured for himself was a suicide vest. The one in the tailor’s shop in Datta Khel was still coming together, row after metal-studded row, but there was still time. In the coming days Balawi tried his best to make sure that the vest ended up belonging to someone else. Anyone but him.

Nothing had turned out as Balawi expected.

The death of Baitullah Mehsud had seemed like the end of the line and maybe the end of his life. The diminutive Mehsud had been Balawi’s host and principal defender when other Taliban leaders and even his own aides eyed the physician warily. Now that he was gone, the suspicions returned. Perhaps it had been the Jordanian who had directed the missiles against Taliban commanders, including Baitullah Mehsud himself.

Fortunately for Balawi, there were plenty of other possible suspects. Fifteen months of relentless Predator strikes had given rise to outlandish theories about how the CIA’s missiles found their targets with such precision. Much of the speculation centered on an “invisible ink” sprayed on automobiles with syringes or on mysterious microchips, called ghamay or “ring stones” by some Pakistanis, that served as homing beacons for missiles and could supposedly be hidden inside cigarettes or even disguised as ordinary stones. Many a tribesman had been executed by the Taliban on suspicion of planting the devices around the homes of prominent fighters.

But the search for spies was interrupted when Baitullah Mehsud’s followers began skirmishing over who would replace the dead Taliban leader. One of the disputes turned into a gun battle that very nearly killed Hakimullah Mehsud, Baitullah’s charismatic younger cousin and the presumed front-runner in the leadership contest. The wounded Hakimullah needed a doctor, and Balawi’s skills likely saved the young man’s life and perhaps his own.

Barely thirty, Hakimullah was tall and handsome, a shaggy Che Guevara to Baitullah’s diminutive Karl Marx, but the men shared the same impetuousness, and both took a liking to the Jordanian physician. Hakimullah had been affected deeply by his cousin’s death, and the moral obligation of badal, the Pashtun tribal tradition of blood vengeance, fell on his shoulders as the new chief. Balawi possessed useful abilities, apparently including the means to plant messages inside the CIA. Could he help avenge Baitullah’s death?

For the moment, Hakimullah decided, Balawi could use military training. The Mehsud clan ran training camps for jihadist recruits, and soon the doctor was on his way to a dusty camp in a North Waziristan village called Issori, with a few dozen other young men who aspired to fight for the Taliban.

Now Balawi’s days started at 5:30 A.M. and continued through the midday with calisthenics, target practice, and obstacle courses. In the afternoons the trainees studied bomb making, including the mechanics of suicide vests and roadside bombs. The group broke for meals and for mandatory daily prayers at the mosque and gathered in the evenings for discussions of theology and tactics. The local Pashtun youths in their teens and twenties who made up the bulk of the class eagerly welcomed the older Arab doctor who was said to be the famous essayist Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. But the camp’s physically taxing regimen showed up Balawi’s shortcomings in embarrassing ways. When the course ended, he still struggled with the basics of firing the AK-47 assault rifle, consistently allowing the barrel to jerk upward with the recoil so his shots flew well high of the target.

The worst moment occurred during a practice session for one of the Taliban’s favorite tactics, a vehicle ambush involving a pair of motorcycle assassins. Balawi had never driven a motorcycle, yet he found himself roaring along a dirt road, trying to simultaneously cling to the handlebars and to a weapon. Balawi lost control of his bike in the soft dirt and slammed into the second motorcycle, knocking both vehicles to the ground. Balawi felt a painful pop in his lower right leg and then the scrape of gravel against his face and arm as he skidded across the road. He lay still for a moment, mentally assessing the damage. The fibula bone in his left leg was broken.

The injury to his reputation, no doubt, was even worse. What good was a jihadist who had no aptitude for fighting?

Unbeknownst to Balawi, he had been watched and studied for months by men who saw potential in him. Finally, in the weeks after Baitullah Mehsud’s death, al-Qaeda made its move.

Balawi was invited to meet with a midlevel commander named Abdullah Said al-Libi, an operations chief for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Soon afterward, the Libyan native made room for the physician in his compound, and Balawi moved in for a short stay. The Jordanian gradually was introduced to others within the small circle of al-Qaeda leaders in North Waziristan. Balawi drank tea with Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s religious adviser and diplomat. Finally he was introduced to the man who, for all practical purposes, was the chief tactical commander for all of al-Qaeda. In the leadership charts back in Langley, the man known as Sheikh Saeed al-Masri was ranked as the terrorist group’s No. 3. In reality, al-Masri called the shots while al-Qaeda’s top two communicated only rarely, through trusted messengers.

Al-Masri squinted at Balawi through a pair of narrow, oddly feminine glasses. The cagey old warrior was fifty-three but looked ancient, his long face weathered and deeply creased and his unkempt beard flecked with gray. On his forehead, just below his white turban, was a thumb-shaped bruise, a legacy of years of pressing his head against the floor during daily prayers.

The sheikh was not one for small talk. As a young radical growing up in Cairo, the man born as Mustafa Ahmed Abu al-Yazid had been imprisoned and tortured, along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, for conspiring to kill Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. He had joined Zawahiri’s Egyptian terrorist cell, and been present at the merger with al-Qaeda. He had survived numerous attempts on his life, including a close call in 2006, when CIA missiles struck a house in northern Pakistan where Zawahiri was believed to be a guest.

Now nearing the end of his third decade as a wanted terrorist, he was scrupulously attentive to his own safety and utterly indifferent to that of others. The CIA’s classified profile, drawn from informants and intercepted communications, was a portrait of an insecure cynic who was hypercontrolling, manipulative, cunning, and deeply disliked by his subordinates. He surrounded himself with machine gun–toting guards, while goading his followers to self-sacrifice with his trademark warning: “If you do not march forth, Allah will punish you with a painful torment.”

As al-Masri contemplated Balawi, he pondered the opportunity before him. Al-Qaeda’s leadership had lost more than a dozen senior managers and hundreds of fighters in less than a year. Here, perhaps, was a way to strike back. The cost to the terrorist group, if any, would be minimal: one obscure Jordanian doctor who would not be missed.

As they talked, a tentative plan began to take flesh, focusing on the person of Ali bin Zeid, Balawi’s Jordanian handler. As a symbolic target bin Zeid was close to perfect. He was an officer with Jordan’s Mukhabarat intelligence service, an organization that had inflicted more wounds on al-Qaeda than any single organization other than the CIA itself. He was working closely with the American spy agency, and he was blood kin to Jordan’s modern monarch, King Abdullah II, an Arab who had made peace with Israel and thus, in al-Qaeda’s eyes, was one of the Muslim world’s leading apostates. If they could manage to kill him, the jihadists could strike an unforgettable blow against a mortal enemy. Even better, if they could capture bin Zeid, they could humiliate him and his government before the entire world. He could be tried before an al-Qaeda judge, then convicted, sentenced, and executed in a spectacle broadcast over the Web for all to see.

Al-Masri had the bait for such a trap: Humam al-Balawi. All that remained was for the doctor to somehow convince bin Zeid to come to Pakistan. Here al-Qaeda could help. Al-Masri and the other jihadist veterans were students of the Western intelligence agencies and paid close attention to the CIA’s pronouncements in the Western news media. Some in the group had been interrogated in U.S. detention camps, including the prison at Guantánamo Bay. They knew the kinds of details that the Americans would find most enticing.

Thus began the al-Qaeda–led campaign to transform Balawi into the indispensable agent. It would happen in stages. The informant would start with a grabber, something that would instantly command the CIA’s attention. It would have to be solid and credible, yet not so outrageous as to raise suspicions. It would have to be something the technology-obsessed Americans would immediately appreciate.

The video was al-Masri’s fiendishly clever idea. Al-Qaeda’s propaganda arm already had a crude production studio with cameras and mixing software. Now it would supply the actors, al-Rahman and a handful of terrorist leaders and Balawi, all appearing as themselves.

The shooting took place in late August. Al-Rahman and Balawi took their places and pretended to engage in conversation as the camera rolled. The scene was blocked so that the video footage would have the appearance of an amateur’s casual recording of an ordinary gathering. Afterward the production team extracted a short digital snippet. All that remained was for the Jordanian to attach the file to an e-mail and wait.

The first stage was to be followed by a series of small enticements, spread out over weeks to keep the Western analysts interested and eager. Balawi would appear to help the CIA in its quest to find targets, offering advice here and authentic detail there, appearing to move ever closer to, but never quite achieving, a big score. Al-Qaeda would wait for the aftershocks from the al-Rahman video to die down before unveiling the ultimate dangle. Al-Masri knew how hungry the Americans were for information about bin Laden and Zawahiri. The No. 2 leader, despite his secretiveness, could plausibly want to meet with Balawi because of his health problems. Al-Qaeda would supply the details of an imagined medical visit that would ring true to the CIA’s analysts, down to the last scar and tooth filling.

Each piece of bait was eagerly snapped up. Whether the Jordanian and American intelligence agencies were entirely convinced was impossible to tell from Pakistan, but Balawi now commanded their rapt attention. Bin Zeid praised his most successful recruit in a November e-mail that Balawi shared with his hosts. “You have lifted our heads in front of the Americans!” bin Zeid had gushed.

Balawi was thrilled to be part of it. The storied American spy agency had ensnared so many jihadists with its technology, money, and clever tricks. Now it appeared to have fallen victim to al-Qaeda’s clever ruse, one surely as clever as any dreamed up in the West.

“All praise is due to God, the bait fell in the right spot,” Balawi said, “and they went head over heels with excitement.”

Humam al-Balawi’s handlers were surely interested, but they were not foolhardy. The Jordanian physician was dealt one disappointment after another as his intended target refused to leap into al-Qaeda’s trap.

The initial scheme centered on a meeting in Peshawar, the ancient Pashtun capital and now a metropolis of one and a half million people in northwestern Pakistan. Balawi would insist on meeting bin Zeid alone, and at the right moment al-Qaeda operatives would burst in with guns and the Mukhabarat officer would be kidnapped—or “arrested,” as Balawi would say. The CIA would almost certainly be watching, and its agents would try to interfere, so there was a Plan B. If the kidnappers were trapped or cornered in their escape, they would execute their hostage as their final act.

Bin Zeid was initially receptive to a Peshawar meeting, since CIA officials knew the city well and had many operatives there. It was the CIA’s Islamabad office that nixed the plan. There were too many risks, including the high likelihood that Pakistan’s spy agency would learn of the meeting and possibly compromise Balawi’s identity.

After Peshawar, the North Waziristan hub city of Miranshah was the militants’ obvious next choice. Al-Qaeda’s close allies, the Haqqani network, practically owned the town, and the Mehsud-led Taliban alliance now operated out of villages in the outskirts. Bin Zeid could disappear inside the town’s maze of mud walls, alleys, and bazaars before the CIA knew what had happened.

When bin Zeid said no to Miranshah, Balawi kept asking. He offered variations on the plan, and he tried to lay on the guilt. “I’m the one taking all the risks,” he repeated.

Balawi’s insistence was starting to grate, but veteran CIA officers chalked it up to the agent’s greenness. The informant clearly was afraid, and he hadn’t yet grasped the limits of the CIA’s reach. If given any choice at all, the Americans would never consent to having such an important meeting in a place like Miranshah, a town where the agency’s absolute control over conditions was far from guaranteed.

Only one location made sense for the meeting, bin Zeid wrote. It was the American base at Khost, just across the border and over the mountains from Miranshah. Balawi could travel there quickly and return to Pakistan before anyone missed him. Khost offered complete security and protection from accidental discovery by Taliban spies.

For his part, Balawi wasn’t interested in the CIA base. As he well knew, going to Khost would be akin to breaking into a prison. There would no chance for an ambush or kidnapping, and no al-Qaeda fighters waiting for the command to attack. Even if he could somehow smuggle a gun onto the base, he would almost certainly be disarmed or killed before he could squeeze off a single round.

Not possible, he wrote back.

Balawi’s invitation to visit a known CIA base did present one intriguing option, one that conceivably could allow him to strike a blow against Jordanian intelligence and possibly the Americans as well. Balawi knew it, and his al-Qaeda hosts were almost certainly thinking about it as well. Unlike the other plans they had discussed, this would be a solo mission and a guaranteed one-way trip. It would also be the longest of long shots. For Balawi to have any chance of succeeding as a suicide bomber, he would have to somehow make it past layer after layer of security, starting with multiple rings of Afghan and American guards, followed by pat-downs, bomb-sniffing dogs, and metal detectors. The best he could realistically hope for would be to take out a few of the low-paid Pashtun wretches who stood sentry outside the base to feed their families.

Balawi’s feelings about a possible suicide mission can be deduced from the urgency of his efforts to avoid Khost. Through early December, and continuing for weeks after bin Zeid arrived at the American base, he pelted the Mukhabarat officer with requests to come to him. When it was at last clear that Miranshah was out of the question, he proposed still another option, a meeting outdoors at Ghulam Khan, the checkpoint on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on the highway that runs from Miranshah to Khost.

The haggling was still under way on December 17, when the CIA unleashed one of its most powerful missile barrages in months in Datta Khel district, not far from the village where the special suicide vest was being made. At least ten missiles hit a compound where several al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives had gathered, killing sixteen of them. It was a costly strike. Among the dead was Abdullah Said al-Libi, the al-Qaeda operations chief with whom Balawi had briefly lived.

The pressure for some kind of response was now becoming exquisite. The old warriors cursed the Americans, cast nervous glances at the drones overhead, and eyed the Jordanian doctor expectantly. An opportunity beckoned—the flimsiest of threads, perhaps, but at least it was something. When, exactly, would Balawi’s words taste his blood?

His options dwindling as December neared its end, Balawi’s mind raged with the desperation of a condemned man. One evening he sat down to try to write, as though he could somehow exorcise his doubts by putting them on paper. As he started, he was struck by the irony of what he was attempting to do.

“I have often wished to know what is going on in the head of a martyr before the martyrdom-seeking operation,” he wrote. “It is now my turn today to fulfill the wishes of others.”

He began to list his private fears, pausing to admit deep misgivings about the value of suicide attacks. The problem, he acknowledged, is that one could “only do it once in your life,” and there was a real chance that he would fail and squander his life for nothing. Why not instead fight on the front lines? he asked himself. Or why not use his brain to come up with something better, a “bigger operation that hurts the enemies of God”?

Balawi tried to convince himself that “intent” was the only thing that mattered: God would honor his sacrifice, even if he were shot and killed before he could press the detonator switch. The harder question was whether he could go through with it. How would he feel in those final seconds, with only a slight twitch separating him from permanent annihilation?

“Do you not fear to be cowardly at the last moment,” he asked himself, “and be unable to press the button?”

On December 28, Humam al-Balawi returned to the public call office to compose a brief note to his countryman Ali bin Zeid. You win, he wrote.

I’ll meet your driver in Miranshah this afternoon as requested, Balawi continued. See you tomorrow in Khost.

Afterward Balawi and two al-Qaeda associates drove to a field to record some video footage of the Jordanian firing a few rounds from an AK-47, the gun jerking upward as bullets kicked up dust spouts in the distance. He put his crutch aside for the photos, so he wouldn’t appear injured, but as he walked, he limped badly from his leg injury.

Later that morning Balawi went to his room and tried on the suicide vest. He tightened the straps, and the weight of thirty pounds of explosive and metal cut into his thin shoulders. He put on his kameez shirt and gray patou, the shawl-like blanket that doubles as a cloak and mobile prayer mat, and walked back outside where his friend with the video camera was waiting beside a white hatchback. Balawi looked tired, he had aged visibly in nine months, and his face below his right eye still bore scars from the motorcycle crash.

Balawi sat in the driver’s seat as the camera rolled. He had decided that his martyr’s message should be in English, to ensure the widest audience if the video made its way to the Internet, and he chose lines intended to project a kind of cinematic, bad-guy toughness, as though he were a Hollywood mobster delivering an ultimatum.

“We will get you, CIA team. Insha’ Allah—God willing—we will bring you down,” he said. “Don’t think that just by pressing a button and killing mujahideen, you are safe. Insha’ Allah, we’ll come to you in an unexpected way.”

Balawi raised his left hand to reveal what appeared to be a wrist-watch beneath his kameez sleeve. “Look, this is for you: It’s not a watch, it’s a detonator,” he said. But the tough-guy routine was falling short. Balawi seemed agitated and bitter, and he turned his head from the camera whenever he finished a thought. His eyes were red as he spit out his last words.

“This is my goal: to kill you, and to kill your Jordanian partner, and Insha’ Allah, I will go to al-Firdaws—paradise,” he said. “And you will be sent to hell.”

With the final phrase his voice cracked, as though he were straining to fight back tears. Balawi looked away, and the image went dark.