The Triple Agent

17. RESOLVE

Langley, Virginia—January 2010

Sheikh Saeed al-Masri had slain a giant, and he was crowing.

“A successful epic,” the No. 3 al-Qaeda leader pronounced the suicide bombing in a rare public statement. He praised his star assassin, Humam al-Balawi, the “well-known preacher-writer … the migrant and the mujaid” who had penetrated the base of the terrorist group’s mortal enemy, the CIA.

Al-Masri’s message, posted on jihadist Web sites shortly after the suicide attack, stopped short of directly claiming responsibility, something that the old warrior knew would only increase the risk to himself. But he hinted at his knowledge of the intimate details of the plot, calling it a model of “patience, good planning and management.

“He detonated his fine, astonishing and well-designed explosive device, which was unseen by the eyes of those who do not believe,” al-Masri said. Then, addressing the dead bomber directly, he officially absolved Balawi of the doubts about him, questions that had lingered until the very end.

“You won, by the Lord of the Ka’aba, O Abu-Leila, God willing,” he said. “You were truthful, and you proved it.”

Al-Masri’s reaction was restrained in comparison to the Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud’s. Balawi’s former host had gone to the trouble of videotaping the Jordanian before his death, and so he had evidence of his ties to the suicide mission. But in the days after the attack, rival Taliban groups began to assert their own claims. One faction boasted that a disgruntled Afghan soldier was behind the bombing.

Hakimullah was so incensed that he began sending e-mails to Western journalists, using his real name.

“We claim the responsibility for the attack on the CIA in Afghanistan,” Hakimullah Mehsud wrote in the e-mails. The bombing was “revenge for the killing of Baitullah Mehsud and the killing of al-Qaeda’s Abdullah,” an apparent reference to Abdullah Said al-Libi.

The thirty-year-old Taliban leader also began to hint of a bold new phase for the Mehsud clan. The suicide bombing had been his group’s biggest operation outside its home base, and it gave a boost to Hakimullah Mehsud’s personal clout. He had been a local jihadist with parochial aspirations, but no longer. Like his slain cousin, he began to boast of plans to attack the West, starting with “America, the criminal state,” which he blamed for the death of Baitullah Mehsud.

“Our fidaeen have penetrated the terrorist America,” Hakimullah Mehsud brashly reported in a videotaped warning. “We will inflict extremely painful blows on the fanatic America.”

Balawi had predicted as much in the hours before his death. His sacrifice, he said in one of his final video recordings, was to be the “first of the revenge operations against the Americans and their drone teams, outside the Pakistani borders.”

In other words, Khost was only the beginning.

At 8:30 A.M. on January 4 the CIA’s senior managers gathered in the director’s office for the most solemn Monday staff meeting in nearly a decade. It began with a moment of silence, at Leon Panetta’s request. The agency’s top counterterrorism officials bowed their heads, some praying while others wept.

The normally loquacious Panetta was subdued, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. Soon after the meeting he would depart Langley for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet the military plane carrying the bodies home. He would stand on the tarmac in the bitter cold to watch the flag-draped coffins as they were carried, one by one, from the aircraft. He would huddle with the families in an empty hangar for a brief memorial, the first of many such services scheduled over the coming days.

Panetta had not known exactly when the meeting with Balawi would take place, but he had known how the operation was to unfold, and he had eagerly awaited the results. Now he bore the burden of knowing the names and faces of each of the dead and wounded. He realized he had met several of them in his travels to CIA bases, visits that nearly always included an informal town hall session where ordinary case officers and analysts could ask questions of the CIA director. He had felt proud to lead such smart, capable men and women. Now, in his private conversations with close friends, he agonized that Balawi’s treachery had not been spotted earlier. Panetta reread the files about the informant and studied the photos of the red Subaru with its blown-out windows and hundreds of shrapnel holes. He tried to project an aura of calm, but he was deeply frustrated. How could they have let a terrorist slip in like that? he asked repeatedly. “Leon felt accountable,” said an administration friend who met with him during the initial days after the attack. “We all did—everyone who knew about the meeting that day.”

But when Panetta at last stood up in front of the CIA’s division managers at their morning meeting, his voice was firm. After the moment of silence, he told the group to prepare to be exceptionally busy. There would be a full investigation in time, he said, but for the moment the CIA was to focus its energies on the tribal belt of northwestern Pakistan. The loss of seven officers in a day was historic—the worst in twenty-five years—but the agency could not allow the enemy to see even the slightest pause. In fact exactly the opposite would happen, he said.

“When you are at war there are risks that you take, but we are a family—we have to be family,” he said. “We now have to pull together to not only deal with the pain of this loss but also to pull together to make sure that we fulfill the mission.”

Panetta continued to speak as the agency’s veterans sat quietly.

“We hit them hard this past year, and they’re going to try to hit us back,” he said. “But we have to stay on the offensive.”

Indeed, a new offensive had already begun.

On New Year’s Eve, hours after the suicide bombing, a lone CIA Predator carried out the first retaliatory strike, hitting a Taliban safe house near the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. Among the four killed was a senior Taliban commander named Haji Omar Khan, a close ally of the Mehsud family and a veteran of the civil war against the Soviets.

Less than twenty-four hours later a second strike targeted three Taliban militants in a car a few miles from Mir Ali. Two more Taliban fighters were killed nearby in a third attack on January 3.

And the CIA was just warming up.

On January 6, two days after Panetta’s speech to his senior staff, robot planes converged over a training camp in Datta Khel, not far from the house where Humam al-Balawi’s suicide vest had been made. The first wave of missiles hit a mud-brick fortress that served as camp headquarters. Then, when insurgents swarmed over the wrecked buildings to look for bodies, a second salvo was launched. When the dust cleared, at least eleven people lay dead, including two Arab men whom Pakistani authorities identified as al-Qaeda operatives.

Another attack—the fifth in nine days—killed five people in a Taliban safe house on January 8. The next day a strike on a training camp in a village near Miranshah killed four more. Among the dead was a Jordanian al-Qaeda operative who had been serving as a bodyguard for Sheikh Saeed al-Masri. If al-Masri was present, he managed to slip away.

And so it continued. By January 19, less than three weeks after the suicide bombing, the CIA had launched eleven separate missile strikes over a small swath of North and South Waziristan, killing at least sixty-two people. It was drone warfare at its most furious: Never, since the first Predators were launched over Pakistan in 2004, had the pace been so intense.

The barrage was sanctioned all the way to the White House. As top administration officials later described the events, all the Taliban targets had been on the agency’s watch list before the suicide attack at Khost. But by the start of the new year, the CIA’s fleet of robot planes had grown; new orbits, approved by President Obama in the fall, were now being flown. More important, the agency had won approval to temporarily suspend one of the unwritten rules of its drone campaign. Before the Khost bombing, the CIA had largely avoided carrying out clusters of attacks that might provoke a popular backlash in Pakistan. Now the agency’s leaders, and the nation’s president, were in no mood to exercise such restraint.

“In the aftermath of Khost, political sensitivities were no longer a reason not to do something,” said one Obama administration security official who participated in discussions about the U.S. response to the bombing. “The shackles were unleashed.”

The strike that provoked the most excitement at Langley occurred on January 14 in a sparsely populated region called Shaktoi, near the border between the two Waziristans. A CIA aircraft had been flying a slow orbit above a former madrassa, a religious school, that now served as a Taliban base. Informants reported the presence in the camp of a tall, scruffy-bearded commander of obviously high rank. A phone intercept confirmed that it was Hakimullah Mehsud.

Just before dawn, two large explosions leveled the school building and an adjoining house. Among the ten bodies were several Uzbek fighters who were known members of the Taliban leader’s personal security team.

Pakistani media rushed to publish the news online: Hakimullah Mehsud, the man who had helped prepare Balawi for his suicide mission, had been inside the compound when the missiles struck and was believed to be buried in the rubble. One English-language news site posted a large headline on its main Web page. “Hakimullah feared dead,” the headline read.

Panetta remained tethered for days to his secure phone, giving orders and receiving reports from the Predator teams. But publicly his role was to lead the agency through a long period of grieving. He and his deputy, Steve Kappes, together attended more than twenty funerals and memorial services, beginning with the gathering at Dover and ending many weeks later with the final burials at Arlington National Cemetery. He traveled to Jordan to reassure top officials of the Mukhabarat, and he met with Darren LaBonte’s coworkers in the agency’s Amman station, pledging that he would personally see to it that his widow and child were cared for.

It was at Dover that the human dimensions of the disaster became fully clear. Panetta had flown to the Delaware base with General James E. “Hoss” Cartwright, the Marine Corps general and Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, to receive the bodies, and he expected to speak with family members of the dead in private bereavement rooms. But the sheer number of parents, children, and spouses forced the group to move into a large multipurpose room in the base chapel. When Panetta arrived, the room was crowded with mourners. Adults stood in clusters along the walls, while children played or sat in their parents’ laps.

“It was shocking to see so many people,” one of Panetta’s aides said afterward.

Panetta made his way through the crowd, shaking hands and giving hugs. Then he spoke briefly to the group.

“You should know two things,” he said. “We will honor your loved ones in an appropriate, dignified way, starting here at Dover. And we will keep up the fight, because that is what they would have wanted us to do.”

In Jordan, meanwhile, other CIA and State Department dignitaries gathered in Amman for a royal funeral for Ali bin Zeid, a ceremony that began with the red-carpeted arrival of the Mukhabarat captain’s body accompanied by an honor guard of twenty-four elite soldiers in traditional red and white kaffiyeh head scarves. A bag-pipe corps led an official funeral procession that included bin Zeid’s cousin King Abdullah II, along with Queen Rania and their oldest son, Crown Prince Hussein.

American families gathered to mourn in a series of private services that stretched from coastal Oregon, to Rockford, Illinois, to suburban Boston. Fellow SEALs gathered in a navy chapel in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to salute their fallen comrade, Jeremy Wise; while Harold Brown Jr.’s two oldest children, Paul, twelve, and Magdalena, eleven, played a duet on saxophone and clarinet to honor their father in services in a Catholic church in his boyhood home of Bolton, Massachusetts. Narcotics detectives and motorcycle cops wept over Scott Roberson’s coffin in Akron, Ohio, while in an Annapolis, Maryland, cathedral, one of Darren LaBonte’s CIA comrades recalled the bravery of the former Army Ranger known as Spartan. The officer compared his former comrade with Leonidas, the ancient warrior-king of Sparta, who, when ordered to surrender his weapons by a vastly superior Persian force, replied, “Molon labe”—“Come and get them!” Jennifer Matthews’s life was celebrated in separate services at the family’s church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and in the small brick congregation near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she had attended Sunday school as a girl. A hush fell over the packed church at Fredericksburg as Matthews’s oldest child, a twelve-year-old girl, stood up to sing, in a fine soprano, lyrics from Les Miserables, her mon’s favorite musical. Some will fall and some will live, she sang. Will you stand up and take your chance?

Mindy Lou Paresi, honoring her husband’s wishes, made arrangements for Dane Paresi’s burial in the same Willamette veterans’ cemetery in Portland where he had played army as a boy. The body, dressed in the Green Beret uniform and paratrooper’s boots Mindy Lou had carried with her to Dover Air Force Base, made its final cross-country trip in a metal casket. A closed-coffin reception was planned for a close circle of friends and family members, but before it started, Dane Paresi’s widow asked to spend some time alone with his body. She prayed quietly for a few minutes, then walked to the coffin and carefully opened the lid. Dane’s face was wrapped in gauze, and there were white gloves on his hands.

Mindy Lou needed to fully understand what her husband had endured, so she willed herself to touch his broken body. She caressed his swollen, shrouded face. She felt the empty parts of the glove where fingers were missing. She let her hands pass along the length of his uniform, feeling the broken bones through the fabric.

She kissed her husband one last time and then closed the coffin.

On February 5 the families of the dead officers and hundreds of their CIA colleagues gathered at Langley for a last tribute. A massive winter storm was bearing down on the capital as the motorcades arrived carrying the elites of Washington’s national security community, from the Pentagon to Congress to the White House. In the CIA’s marbled foyer, a large group of parents, spouses, and young children sat in folding chairs in front of a dais as a string ensemble played an adagio. Facing them from the platform was President Barack Obama, flanked by Panetta and Kappes.

The president spoke first, at one point addressing the children in the front rows.

“I know that this must be so hard and confusing, but please always remember this: It wasn’t always easy for your mom or dad to leave home,” Obama said. “But they went to another country to defend our country. And they gave their lives to protect yours.

“They served in secrecy, but today every American can see their legacy,” he continued. “For the record of their service is written all around us. It’s written in the extremists who no longer threaten our country—because they eliminated them. It’s written in the attacks that never occurred—because they thwarted them.”

Panetta’s words were largely aimed at the slain officers’ CIA family.

“We are on the front lines,” he began. “We will carry this fight to the enemy.”

The agency’s secret cables had brought initial reports of successes in northern Pakistan, but in recent days the storm clouds had again gathered, with warnings of new threats from al-Qaeda cells from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and signs of renewed resilience by al-Qaeda’s leaders. The agency confirmed that Hakimullah Mehsud had narrowly escaped the attempt on his life and was again furiously threatening to find ways to kill Americans. Osama bin Laden had just resurfaced with a new audiotape praising the attempted bombing of the Detroit-bound passenger jet on Christmas Day and promising that Americans would “never dream of peace.” Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, minus one of his bodyguards, was living somewhere in the Pakistani hills, listening for the buzzing of Predators and plotting his next move. The war was far from over.

“Our resolve is unbroken,” Panetta continued, “our energy undiminished.”

After the speeches a CIA officer sang a mournful ballad, and the crowd slowly filed out of the headquarters building. It was now dusk, and the first clots of thick snowflakes started to fall.