The Triple Agent

16. FALLEN

Langley, Virginia—December 30, 2009

At the moment of the bombing—it was still early morning in Washington—Michael V. Hayden happened to be in Langley visiting his old office. The former CIA director had been asked to give a policy speech in Pittsburgh, and he wanted to do some research. It was usually quiet at headquarters between Christmas and New Year’s, although this week was far from usual. There had been a near disaster on Christmas night when a Nigerian youth named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit. The case, like so many others lately, made no sense. How does a smart, highly educated kid from a wealthy family decide to kill himself and a couple of hundred strangers with a bomb hidden in his underwear?

Hayden finished his work and decided to check in on some friends on the executive floor. Director Leon Panetta was away for his holiday vacation, and so was Hayden’s old deputy, Steve Kappes, so he headed down the hall to say hello to Mike Sulick, the man he had promoted to run the agency’s Clandestine Service. At that moment two other managers were walking out of Sulick’s office. They looked sick.

“It’s really bad,” one of them said. “Seven officers are dead.”

The men had just broken the news to the most senior officer in the building.

Details were still coming in, and already a feeling akin to shell shock was spreading through the executive floor. Hayden, unsure of what else to do, wandered over to his old office and found Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, on the phone with his boss in California, relaying the latest updates.

The first reports had arrived at Panetta’s Monterey, California, home just before 5:00 A.M., with a rap on the director’s bedroom door by a member of his security detail. One of his aides urgently needed to speak with him on the secure line, Panetta was told.

“I’ve got terrible news,” the woman began. “We’ve lost seven of our officers in Khost.”

“What the hell happened?” Panetta shouted, instantly awake. He heard the words Jordanian informant and suicide bomber and the outlines of the disaster crystallized in his mind. The double agent. The long-awaited meeting. The chance to get Ayman al-Zawahiri. It had all been a trick.

Panetta pressed for details, but there were few at that hour. He hung up the phone and sat, hoping that it was somehow a bad dream.

As the chief of staff for the Clinton White House he had stood by the president in 1993, when news broke of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, an attack by American right-wing extremists that killed 168 people. But never had men and women fallen under his direct command.

This is truly war, he thought.

With Bash on the line he began to make phone calls, thinking that the bad news should come first from him. He called Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary. He tapped in the number for Vice President Joe Biden.

Then he called the president.

Barack Obama was on Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but after a moment the CIA director was patched through. We lost seven officers in Khost, Panetta began.

“This guy that we thought was going to take us to Zawahiri turned out to be a double agent and blew himself up,” he told the president.

The two talked for a few minutes while Panetta summarized the scant facts he had. Obama listened quietly at first, then stopped Panetta repeatedly to press for details. I want to understand what happened, he said.

The two talked about what would come next. Family notifications. Services. The White House should be part of it, Obama said, thinking out loud. The families should know that we’re with them.

Please keep me posted, Leon, the president said, finally. If there’s anything at all that I can do …

Back at Langley, Bash had invited Hayden to stay, so he did. Some of the names of the victims were starting to trickle in, and one of them pierced Hayden to his core.

Elizabeth Hanson.

He could still picture her young face from the times she had presented updates on al-Qaeda at senior staff meetings. He remembered her voice from late-night calls from the Counterterrorism Center, when the agency was hot on the trail of some senior commander in Pakistan. She was smart, confident, attractive, a walking recruitment poster for the agency. She exuded the kind of enthusiasm and competence that had made Hayden proud when he served as director.

Hayden sat for a long time in the director’s office with Bash and Sulick, talking about the events, the people, wondering what had gone wrong. Finally he said good-bye to the others and let himself out. He walked past the guard station and through the marble entranceway, with its famous engraving of the CIA seal on the floor. He passed the CIA’s fallen officer memorial, where dozens of granite stars honor slain intelligence operatives, including many whose names will forever remain secret.

Outside, it was overcast and freezing. Hayden hurried to his vehicle and sat for several minutes in the parking lot. He thought about Hanson and the others and the many families who at this hour did not yet know what lay ahead for them.

Alone in his car in the bitter cold, Michael Hayden wept.

Even before the extent of the losses was known, top CIA officials inaugurated a plan that would guide the agency’s response over the coming days. The first immediate step was to seal off Khost entirely, locking down the base itself and cutting communications to the outside world. A few cell phone calls made it to the United States before the access was shut. One of them was from a Special Forces officer who had witnessed the bombing’s aftermath and called a CIA friend with the news.

“Your base just got blown up,” he said.

The agency imposed a news blackout in an effort to keep details of the attack out of the public spotlight until the senior managers were clear on exactly what had happened and had started the process of notifying the families of the dead and wounded. Within hours, Internet news sites were buzzing about a major explosion at a secret CIA base, but the official response from Langley was silence. At headquarters and in the agency’s Amman station, teams were appointed to the grim task of locating wives and parents so they could be told in person.

The CIA had no one reasonably close to Tuscany on December 30, so it fell to the Amman station to deliver the news by phone to Racheal LaBonte. The station chief knew that the LaBonte family was in Italy, expecting Darren to show up at any time. In reality, his wife already sensed that something had gone badly wrong in Afghanistan.

Late in the afternoon she began receiving urgent text messages from Ali bin Zeid’s wife, Fida. The Jordanian woman had been watching news reports about an attack of some kind in Afghanistan, and she was worried. Bin Zeid had not phoned when he was supposed to, and now she was having trouble getting through to him. Had Racheal heard from Darren?

Racheal LaBonte figured it was just a problem with phone lines, but to ease both their minds, she punched in the number of the CIA duty officer back in Amman. The voice on the other end sounded a little nervous but was reassuring. There was no news from Khost, good or bad, Racheal was told.

A few hours later, as she put the couple’s daughter, Raina, to bed, the fear started to prick her like a thousand little knives. There was a knock on the door. It was the landlord, saying that someone from the U.S. government was trying to reach the family. A phone rang. It was the station chief from Amman.

“Are you sitting down? Is your father-in-law with you?” he was asking.

“Say what you’re going to say. I want to hear in person,” Racheal demanded.

“I don’t know how to tell you this. Darren was killed in a suicide bombing,” he began.

Racheal fell to her knees, the phone still pressed against her ear. Darren’s parents were hovering over her, asking questions. What happened?

“Darren didn’t do anything wrong,” the station chief was saying. “He was a hero.” Then: “Racheal, are you still there?”

Racheal was lost in a fog so deep it felt as though the events were happening to someone else. “You’ll have to tell Dave,” she said softly, and handed off the phone. She was dimly aware of her father-in-law, David LaBonte, shouting into the phone in a voice tinged with exasperation and pain.

“What do you mean?” he was shouting. “What are you saying?”

She looked up to see her mother-in-law, Camille, frightened and confused, fearing the worst but not yet knowing. Racheal took her hand to tell her gently that her son would not be coming home.

At the same hour small teams of CIA officers were boarding planes and cars heading to small towns in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Two of Elizabeth Hanson’s close friends trekked through a snowstorm to knock on the door of her mother’s house in suburban Chicago. Others sat with Janet Brown, whose husband, Harold, had been only a few weeks from completing his Khost assignment and was due to travel home soon; and with Molly Roberson, who was seven months pregnant with a baby girl that she and Scott Roberson had decided to call Piper. A fourth team tracked down Jennifer Matthews’s husband and children at a ski resort. Gary Anderson sat with his in-laws, Bill and Lois Matthews, in a hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to learn the details of how his wife had died.

Xe Services LLC, the company better known as Blackwater, sent its representatives to Virginia Beach, and DuPont, Washington, to meet with the wives of security guards Dane Paresi and Jeremy Wise. Dana Wise’s visitors showed up at her house as she was putting her son, Ethan, into the family truck for a quick errand. She sent the six-year-old to his room while she sat with the men in her living room. Before they left, she steeled herself for the task of breaking the news to her son.

Ethan was her child from an earlier marriage, but Jeremy had adopted him and loved him as his own. Once, when he was returning home from a long Iraq deployment, he decided to surprise Ethan by showing up at his school. It had been the happiest day in the young boy’s life.

Now there would be no more homecomings. With tears welling in her own eyes, Dana Wise scooped up her son and held him as the two sat on his bed surrounded by his toys and stuffed animals. Finally she worked up her nerve.

“Daddy’s gone,” she said softly.

Mindy Lou Paresi and daughter Santina had been relieved that evening to get a reassuring e-mail from Dane when they landed at Seattle’s airport after a holiday visit with family. It had been a rough trip, with endless lines and delays, and they were so exhausted when they arrived home that they left the suitcases packed and went to sleep. At 2:00 A.M. on New Year’s Eve, Mindy Lou was awakened by a knock. She looked out from an upstairs window to see three men at her door, one of them a police officer.

“Is Dane OK?” she called down.

“No, ma’am, he’s not.”

She let the men in, but she didn’t believe what they were saying. You’re wrong, I just got a text from him this evening, she said.

The Blackwater officials were startled, and one of them called the company to check again.

The reply was unambiguous. Dane Paresi was dead.

It would be nearly two days before Mindy Lou Paresi could allow herself to cry. She paced the apartment for hours that morning, folding laundry and making one phone call after another. Later she packed for the trip to Dover, Delaware, where she would meet the plane carrying the bodies from Afghanistan. She took her husband’s army uniform and boots out of the closet and put them into a separate bag. Dane would want to be buried in them.

On New Year’s Day she went to the airport, holding the bag with Dane’s uniform close to her on the car ride and in the airport terminal. At the security checkpoint, one of the attendants asked for the bag to put it through the metal detector. At first, she couldn’t bear to part with it. When she finally did, she broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.

Word of the bombing arrived in Jordan in the late evening. It came first to the intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, and then to the palace. An official with the royal court called Ali bin Zeid’s brothers and his wife and told them to gather at the family home in Amman.

After everyone was there, a delegation of top government officials assembled in front of the house. It included the king’s brother, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, the prime minister, the Mukhabarat chief, and the commander of the Jordanian armed forces. At 9:30 P.M., they walked in a somber procession to the front door.

The door opened, and for several minutes no one—neither the dignitaries nor the family members—spoke. “Everyone knew,” said Ali bin Zeid’s brother, Hassan.

Khalil al-Balawi, father of the suicide bomber, got no such visit. But on the morning of New Year’s Eve, the phone rang at both the Balawi house and at the home of Defne Balawi’s parents in Istanbul. Both times the caller was a man who spoke in Arabic and did not give his name.

To Khalil al-Balawi, the caller sounded as though he were delivering good news. Humam had killed seven CIA officers in a martyrdom operation in Afghanistan, he said.

“Do not be sad,” the man said. “Allah willing, he is in the most exalted heavens.”

Khalil al-Balawi was surrounded by family members at the time, but he could not bring himself to mention the call—or perhaps even to believe it—until hours later, when the story had spread through the community that Humam, the doctor who lived in the neighborhood, was behind the suicide bombing that was dominating coverage on the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera. Relatives and family friends began calling, some with condolences and others with messages that sounded more akin to congratulations.

Khalil al-Balawi said little, but at one point he excused himself and went into his bedroom and took out his diary to try to make sense of the thoughts swirling through his brain.

“At the beginning of 2009 he was arrested and detained for three days by the Mukhabarat,” the old man wrote. “Then he was released. His father will attest that from that day on, a severe change came over him.

“It is this,” he wrote, “that caused me to lose my son.”