The Triple Agent

14. NO GOD BUT GOD

Khost, Afghanistan—December 30, 2009

Dane Paresi rose early on December 30 and was instantly mindful of two things. One was the cold—twenty-three degrees at daybreak outside the Blackwater employees’ quarters, and not so balmy inside either. Another was food. Paresi’s Special Forces call sign was Jackal, a tribute to his legendary appetite and reputation for mooching from his comrades’ plates. He had developed a special fondness for the Khost mess hall, which he judged to be superior to most of the dozens of others he had sampled in Afghanistan. By this hour, just after 6:00 A.M., the pancakes would be flying off the griddle, and the aroma of greasy bacon and black coffee would be strong enough to grab an ex–Green Beret by the collar from half a block away.

There was a weightier matter as well, one that tugged at his thoughts as he dressed in the frigid room: The CIA’s prized informant was at last on his way to Khost. Paresi had dealt with scores of informants over his career, but never had he seen a case that could simultaneously kick up so much excitement and rancor. Plans for the agent’s debriefing had preoccupied the base’s senior staff for weeks, and tempers had boiled over. For his part, Paresi was highly skeptical of the security plan the officers had rehearsed, and he had said so, sharing his concerns with both his supervisor back in Virginia and the CIA’s security chief at Khost, Scott Roberson. Roberson had independently reached the same conclusion about what he believed was the fundamental problem: too many people, standing too close to an agent who had been living undercover and, by definition, could not be trusted.

Normally, such disagreements would have been considered part of the natural order. In nearly twenty-seven years of army service, including nearly six years of Special Forces work in Afghanistan, Paresi had seen endless skirmishing over tactics. Soldiers clashed and sometimes got mad, but in the end the officers decided, and everyone did his job. Today was looking like another of those days, yet it wasn’t. Paresi couldn’t yet put a finger on what was different.

Paresi dressed quickly and dug around his hooch for his heavy coat and weapon. Space-wise, the room was just a notch above an army tent, but there were plywood walls for privacy and just enough room for his cot, clothes, and gear, along with the books and journals he brought along to pass the idle hours. The hallway outside his room led to a small lounge with a leather sofa where the contract workers could play cards, read, or just sit with their laptops to skim the headlines and check e-mail. The place smelled vaguely of dogs, a legacy of the many strays that wandered through the base and were sometimes adopted as pets. The newest of the Blackwater arrivals, a Navy SEAL named Jeremy Wise, had taken up with a white, lop-eared mongrel he named Charlie that slept in the guards’ quarters and liked chewing on the men’s beards when they sat on the sofa. Paresi hardly minded. He loved dogs and missed his, a black-and-white Boston terrier so earnestly loopy Paresi had given it the nickname Retard. Dogs reminded him of home, where he planned to be in February, putting Afghanistan and military work behind him for good.

Dane Paresi had spent his entire adult life saluting. He had wanted to be a soldier since childhood, when he played army in the woods around the Willamette veterans’ cemetery near his home in Portland, Oregon. He joined the army on the day after high school graduation, and he later became a paratrooper and served in the First Iraq War. He left the army briefly but was inevitably drawn back again, this time determined to join the army’s elite Special Forces. He sweated off thirty pounds in the grueling tryouts and training courses, but in 1995, at age thirty-two, he earned his Green Beret.

Not long afterward, while window-shopping at a strip mall near the base in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he noticed a pretty brunette eating ice cream inside a Bath & Body Works store and wandered in to try to talk to her. The young woman initially recoiled from the bone-thin man in a Batman T-shirt, white socks, and ugly, oversize glasses—“birth control glasses,” she later called them. Her friends nearly phoned security, but within a few minutes the two were laughing and making plans to meet for coffee. The future Mindy Lou Paresi wrote her name and phone number in lipstick on a paper napkin. Eight months later they were married.

Life for the newlyweds was an unending series of separations during Dane Paresi’s overseas deployments; he served in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Philippines, among other hot spots. He happened to be home at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but both husband and wife instinctively knew that things were about to get worse.

“Got to go to work, babe,” he said.

Paresi shipped out to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. He returned home for a few weeks at a time to reconnect with Mindy Lou and the couple’s two daughters, Alexandra and Santina. He said little at home about his time overseas, except to complain about the sandstorms and lousy weather and, in private moments, about what he saw as the futility of the U.S. efforts to graft a Western-style democracy onto a corrupt, clannish society where two-thirds of adults cannot read. Mindy Lou learned about his Bronze Star commendation when her husband handed her the official letter from the Pentagon and said, “Read this.” It was the army’s official account of how Paresi had helped spring a trap on an al-Qaeda convoy that included one of the terrorist group’s senior commanders. Sixteen insurgents were killed and another was wounded in the 2002 operation.

Among his peers, Paresi was known for his unflappable calm and his Zen-like insistence on looking after small details. He stormed Taliban hideouts in the dead of night, and went on deep-cover assignments in Afghan garb, infiltrating villages infested with insurgents, sometimes with only one other American beside him.

“These were missions where you knew that no one was coming back for you,” said one comrade who fought beside Paresi. “You had to know that the other person was capable and would get you back, dead or alive. That was him. He never got excited, and you knew he always had your back.”

Afterward, back at camp, Paresi would find a quiet place to unwind, usually with a book and his pipe and a bottle of water. He never drank alcohol or talked loudly. When he was worried or troubled about something, he paced or found some way to busy himself.

He had just turned forty-five in the fall of 2008 and was in prime condition physically when the Defense Department informed him he was no longer needed. After twenty-six years of service he had been on track for making the rank of sergeant major, but instead of a promotion he received his separation papers. The army, flush with middle-aged master sergeants, gave him thirty days to clear out.

Paresi had dreamed of retiring in the mountains of western Oregon, fishing and growing old with Mindy Lou. But an army pension at his rank could not begin to pay the bills, so he started the search for his first civilian job. Weeks passed, then months. With money running low and few good prospects, he decided to sign up with the security contractor Blackwater for a one-year stint. The job was equally split between instructor assignments at home and security duties overseas, mostly in Afghanistan, where Blackwater had been hired to protect CIA installations and officers. The daily rate for overseas work was seven hundred dollars, enough to enable the Paresis to pay some bills and save for retirement. By late February, less than four months from his arrival in Khost, he would again be on his way home, this time finished with Afghanistan for good.

The housing assignment was certainly better than the dozen or more firebases where he had previously bunked, awful places where Americans and Afghans slept with their guns, lined up like Crayolas inside smelly group tents, and slipped out at dawn to relieve themselves by squatting in the open over crude pits. But now he was no longer a Green Beret, or even a soldier, but a highly paid security guard whose employer had been tarnished by multiple scandals in the press, including allegations that its employees killed innocent Iraqi civilians. Practically, though, Paresi’s real bosses were CIA officers, most of them younger than he and none of them as experienced in surviving the dangers of Afghanistan. When their decisions exasperated him, he spoke up, but Paresi also understood his place. He had a family to feed and would do his job, even if he didn’t like it.

The breakfast trays had been put away, and there was time to kill before the informant arrived, so Paresi wandered down to the motor pool, as he had been doing off and on for several days. He had been an army mechanic once, and he had learned a few tricks in previous Afghanistan tours about hardening a vehicle against a roadside bomb. He had given up hours of free time there, without pay, just keeping his mind busy. And he would do so again this morning, working alone in the cold on old jalopies the CIA’s Afghan agents used for meetings in the countryside.

Paresi’s journals, his usual outlet for his thoughts, had not been touched for days, because he couldn’t sit still long enough to write. When he called home, his voice sounded different, as though he were distracted or preoccupied. Mindy Lou Paresi knew the tone and became instantly concerned.

“Dane, are you safe?” she asked. She knew his reply before the words were uttered.

“Yeah, babe,” is all he would say.

Humam al-Balawi scanned the line of cars and taxis, crutch in hand, looking for his ride. It was midafternoon on December 30 when he finally arrived at Ghulam Khan, the only border crossing between Pakistan’s North Waziristan Province and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Balawi was now more than twenty-four hours late for his meeting at Khost. Would anyone still be waiting for him?

The checkpoint, a cluster of mud-brick buildings on the Pakistani side, was manned by a handful of nervous guards with rifles and one antique machine gun with its barrel pointed toward Afghanistan. Passengers crossing to the Afghan side queued up here for taxis and private cars that would ferry them across the dividing line, a mile farther up the road, and to points as far west as Kabul. The line inched forward as Balawi wavered, watching the guards in their heavy coats as they peered into trunks, checked IDs, and picked through suitcases, looking for drugs or weapons.

Physically Balawi was a wreck. His injured leg still ached, and he had spent a jarring afternoon on the rutted road from Miranshah with thirty pounds of metal and explosives strapped to his chest. Now he waited in line for a border check, clutching a Jordanian passport with a Pakistani visa that had expired seven months earlier, and wearing a bomb under his shirt. The line lurched forward again.

Balawi looked up to see someone waving to him from the cluster of taxis waiting for passengers to Afghanistan. He was tall, well built, and Afghan, to judge from his clothes. When the two were close enough to speak, he greeted Balawi softly in Pashtun-accented English.

He opened the door of a white sedan, and Balawi climbed inside. The car started and edged forward into the queue of westbound vehicles. With a flash of the driver’s ID card, the vehicle was waved through. It rumbled along a steep incline for several minutes until at last it passed the boundary marker and was in Afghan territory.

The driver mumbled a few words into his cell phone, and the two men began an hour-long descent from the mountains to the semiarid valley that is home to most of Khost Province’s one million inhabitants. The road snaked precariously along steep ridges and switchbacks here, and drivers were forced to swerve or brake to avoid craters gouged by flash floods or bombs.

The Afghan officer sat alone in the front, with his passenger directly behind him. Arghawan was one of the CIA’s favorites at Khost, hardworking and as dependable as the morning sun. Just thirty, with hazel eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, he had been an early graduate of Afghanistan’s indigenous Special Forces school and had risen to head the detachment of Afghan guards employed by the CIA to help protect the base. It was a measure of the agency’s trust that he was sent alone to pick up such an important source. An American might have begun the debriefing in the car, after a quick pat-down for weapons. But an American would not have been able to slip in and out of Pakistan as easily as a Pashtun speaker from outside Khost.

Just at the point where the hilly terrain finally leveled out, the car veered off the highway into a small village. Arghawan drove slowly along an unpaved street, looking for something, then pulled up next to a red Subaru hatchback that was idling behind a mud wall with a man sitting at the wheel. The two drivers got out of their cars and exchanged words; then Arghawan returned and opened the rear door next to Balawi.

Get out. We’re switching cars, he said. It’s a precaution.

Soon the two men were under way again, moving faster now on flat roads lined on either side by irrigated fields. It was already 4:15 P.M., nearly twenty-six hours after Balawi’s scheduled appointment at Khost.

The initial delay had been the Taliban’s fault. The CIA had expected Balawi to arrive in the Pakistani town of Miranshah on Tuesday, December 29, and then hire a car to ferry him to the border crossing, where Arghawan would be waiting. But Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud seemed determined to extract every possible propaganda benefit from Balawi’s martyrdom, so the Jordanian’s departure was delayed while the terrorist group’s videographers set up one recording session after another. By the time Balawi arrived in Miranshah, it was too late to make the sprint to the border before the checkpoint closed for the night.

Balawi was nearly worn out by the multitude of efforts to document his final thoughts. In the last days of December he had written at least two essays and held forth in at least three lengthy video interviews and a few shorter snippets. In one video, Balawi sat outdoors, sandwiched between a pair of masked gunmen, to talk about the virtues of martyrdom. Another was set up as a standard talk show interview in which Balawi answered questions from an unseen “host.” In a third, Balawi sat, somewhat nervously, next to Hakimullah Mehsud himself, as the two men proclaimed their intention to avenge the death of the Taliban leader’s cousin Baitullah.

In the latter piece, the two men spoke in different languages—Mehsud in Pashto, Balawi in Arabic and English—and barely looked at each other as they sat cross-legged on a mat surrounded by weapons and sticks of C4 explosive. The Taliban leader spoke directly to the camera and praised Balawi as a man who “wants to go on a martyrdom-seeking mission.

“His conscience did not allow him to spy on Muslim brothers for the infidels,” Mehsud said. He acknowledged that the CIA’s attack planes had inflicted “pain and sadness” and said the Taliban had finally found a way to “infiltrate the American bases through a fidayeen in order to cause them a huge blow that they will remember for a hundred years.”

Balawi, wearing military fatigues, looked small and pale as he read from written notes. “We arranged this attack together,” he said, “to let the Americans understand that the belief in God, our faith, and the piety that we strive for cannot be exchanged for all the wealth in the world.”

The piety that we strive for. From where he sat, Balawi could see Arghawan in the rearview mirror, his eyes trained on the highway, instinctively watching, as all Afghan drivers do, for freshly turned earth that could signal a roadside bomb. The guard was earning a living for his family, but he also was a servant of the Americans. Two days earlier, Balawi had declared that such people were apostates and unfit to live—“even their cooks and drivers … even he who works in the garden or carwash.”

“Killing him is more permissible than killing the American himself,” Balawi had said in one of his video recordings. “These are the hired dogs.”

A large airfield had loomed in the distance for several miles, and now Arghawan was pointing to it. Khost.

The car had been out of cell phone range for nearly two hours, but with the city outskirts fast approaching, Balawi gestured to the driver to ask for his mobile phone. He dialed a number he had written on a scrap of paper, and in a moment a voice in familiar Arabic came on the line.

“Salam alekum,” Ali bin Zeid said. Peace be with you.

Balawi apologized for the delay and repeated his concerns about being poked and prodded by Afghan guards who might well be spies. “You’ll treat me like a friend, right?” he asked.

Bin Zeid was reassuring.

The car was roaring along now, its wheels kicking up clouds of fine dust. Then it slowed at the approach to the main gate. The car passed through a canyon of high walls that narrowed at one end, squeezing traffic into a single lane at the checkpoint. The last few yards were a gauntlet of barriers and razor wire that channeled vehicles into the kill zone of a 50-caliber machine gun. Balawi sat low in his seat, the weight of the heavy vest pressing against his gut, but as bin Zeid had promised, there was no search. Arghawan turned left into the main entrance, and the car barely slowed as it zigzagged around a final series of HESCO barriers and into the open expanse of the Khost airfield.

The car turned left again to travel along the edge of the runway, past the tanker trucks, the dun-colored armored troop carriers, and an odd-looking green helicopter that stood idle on the tarmac, its main rotor blades drooping slightly like the wings of some giant prehistoric bird at rest. To the right were more high walls and barbed wire, and beyond them, the metal roofs of buildings Balawi could not yet see.

Balawi sank back into his seat. For days he had pondered what this moment would be like. In his writings he had imagined the djinn—devils—and their whispered doubts nudging him back from the edge.

“Are you going to perform jihad and get yourself killed, and let your wife remarry and your children become orphans?

“To whom are you leaving your pretty wife? Who will be dutiful to your frail mother?

“How can you abandon your wonderful work?”

There was an opening in the wall, and Arghawan steered the Subaru through a second open checkpoint and then turned left through a third. Balawi was now inside a fortified compound with walls of stacked HESCO barriers ten feet high and topped with razor wire. On the side of the compound opposite from the gate were five newly constructed buildings with metal roofs and a few smaller ones. The next-to-last building in the row had a wide awning. Balawi could see a large cluster of people scattered in a line in front of it. Behind him, the gate to the inner compound was pulled shut.

Arghawan stopped the vehicle in the middle of a gravel lot in front of the building, parallel to the awning but several car lengths away from it. From his spot in the backseat behind the driver, Balawi could finally see the line of people waiting to meet him. There were at least a dozen, including some women. Now he spotted Ali bin Zeid, wearing a camouflage hat and standing next to a larger man in jeans and a baseball cap. The two were at the end of the column of welcomers, but farther to the side and close enough that Balawi could see bin Zeid smiling at him.

Balawi was staring blankly at the group when the car door opened and he was suddenly face-to-face with a bear of a man with a close-cropped beard and piercing blue eyes. One gloved hand reached for Balawi, and the other clutched an assault rifle, its barrel pointed down. Balawi froze. Then, slowly, he began backing away, pushing himself along the seat’s edge away from the figure with the gun.

Balawi squeezed the door handle on the opposite side and climbed out of the car, swinging his injured leg onto the gravel lot, and then the good one. Painfully he pulled himself erect, leaning on his metal crutch for support. He was dimly aware of bin Zeid calling out to him, but he would not look up.

When will my words taste my blood?

Balawi began walking in a slow-motion hobble as his right hand felt for the detonator.

Just at the brink, the djinn would pose the most awful questions, he had written.

“Who will take care of your little child? And your elderly father?”

Men were shouting at him now, agitated, guns drawn.

“It is said in the Hadith that he who says, ‘There is no God but God alone and praise be to Him,’ he is protected by God from Satan on that day,” Balawi had written. “On the day of the martyrdom-seeking operation, the enemy of God will not reach you.”

Now Balawi mouthed the words softly in Arabic. “La ilaha illa Allah!” There is no god but God.

Men were shouting loudly now, yelling about his hand, but still Balawi walked. He could hear his own voice growing more distinct.

“La ilaha illa Allah!”

Balawi’s path was now blocked. He looked up to see that he was surrounded on two sides by men with guns drawn. The bearded man who had opened the car door had circled around him and was shouting at him from his left, and two other heavily armed officers stood directly in front of Balawi, trapping him against the car with no way forward or back. One of the men, blond and younger than the others, was crouching as though preparing to lunge.

Balawi turned slightly, finger locked on the detonator, and looked across the top of the car. The smiles had vanished, and bin Zeid was starting to move toward him. As he did, the tall man beside him grabbed his shoulder to pull him back.

Balawi closed his eyes. His finger made the slightest twitch.