The Triple Agent

18. MEMORIAL DAY

Arlington, Virginia—May 21, 2010

Nearly five months passed without a proper burial for Elizabeth Hanson, but at last it was happening. There had been hurdles to overcome, including initial Pentagon resistance to burying non-veteran CIA officers in the nation’s most prestigious military cemetery. Leon Panetta, who was accustomed to plowing through bureaucracies when he needed to, called on his old friend Robert Gates, a former CIA director and now the Obama administration’s defense secretary. Soon it was settled: Though a civilian, Hanson would receive the Arlington burial her family wanted. The date for this, the last of the Khost interments, was set for May 21, and Panetta, as always, would be there.

But the date arrived to find the agency’s senior leadership unusually distracted. That same morning the CIA director returned home from two days of urgent meetings in Islamabad with Pakistani government officials. Panetta and National Security Adviser James L. Jones made the trip together to share information about a young Pakistani-American charged with trying to blow up New York’s Times Square with a car bomb on May 1. The suspect, an out-of-work financial analyst named Faisal Shahzad, had told police he had received training for the bombing attempt during a 2009 trip to Pakistan’s border region. Eventually a video turned up of the Bridgeport, Connecticut, suspect embracing his Pakistani sponsor, Hakimullah Mehsud.

The car bomb, fortunately, had been a flop, but U.S. intelligence officials were stunned to discover Mehsud’s fingerprints all over the plot. A year earlier, Hakimullah Mehsud had been an obscure aide to a semiliterate tribal gangster living in the remote mountains of northwestern Pakistan. Now, catapulted into Taliban leadership by the death of his cousin Baitullah in a CIA missile strike, Hakimullah Mehsud had managed to threaten American lives in the heart of its greatest city. Was this what Mehsud meant when he warned that his fighters had “penetrated the terrorist America”? How many other bombers were on their way or perhaps already here?

But Panetta had even bigger things on his mind as he climbed into his limousine for Hanson’s graveside service. All morning his aides had been calling about a possibly momentous discovery, something unexpected that had emerged from the day’s trolling for terrorist suspects. The picture from the Pakistani tribal belt was still coming into focus, but the agency’s targeters believed they had located an al-Qaeda operative they had been seeking for a long time.

It was Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, the No. 3 terrorist commander and the man who had presided over Humam al-Balawi’s suicide attack at Khost.

Panetta, still exhausted from his overnight flight, snapped to attention. He flung questions at the counterterrorism chief. What do we know? How did we find him? How certain are you?

The reply from Langley: Not certain enough. Not yet.

From his car, Panetta thought through the possible implications. Sheikh Saeed al-Masri—if that was who it was—would be one of the important terrorist figures ever to fall into the CIA’s sights. At the moment he was the most prominent al-Qaeda operative after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. As a practical matter, he was more influential than either one of them.

As the big black car rolled into Arlington National Cemetery for Hanson’s burial, the CIA’s robot planes were prowling the sky over a house outside Miranshah, waiting. What an amazing ending to a truly awful chapter in the agency’s history, Panetta thought.

But was it really the sheikh?

Panetta phoned the White House to relay the latest information to Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff.

“It’s not a ‘go’ mission yet,” he said.

The questioning started before the dust had even settled at Khost. How could it have happened?

Surviving officers in Khost relayed the known facts within hours of the explosion, and the base’s Special Forces team prepared its own separate report summing up what was immediately obvious. A CIA double agent—in fact a triple agent—had managed to gain access to the agency’s secure base with an extraordinarily powerful bomb strapped to his body. He was able to come within a few dozen feet of a group of sixteen intelligence operatives before blowing himself up. Immediate intervention by experienced battlefield medics and surgeons had saved lives, but ten people had been killed, including the bomber and the CIA-trained Afghan driver.

The hard questions would take longer to sort out. Panetta’s senior staff focused on the key decisions and began tracing the steps backward, from Khost to Kabul and Amman and, inevitably, Langley. Panetta shared what he knew with White House advisers, including White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and National Security Adviser James L. Jones. Both he and Steve Kappes recounted the details in closed-door sessions with the Senate and House intelligence committees. Lawmakers had been sympathetic but also distracted by the near disaster that had occurred in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day. Thus there would be no formal congressional inquiry into the events.

Panetta, with the White House’s blessing, decided to launch two investigations of his own. One was a task force of veteran CIA officers experienced in counterterrorism and counterintelligence. A second, independent review was led by a pair of longtime Washington hands known and respected within the intelligence community, former United Nations ambassador Thomas Pickering and Charles E. Allen, a former CIA manager who had served as intelligence chief for the Department of Homeland Security during the second Bush administration. The two teams would examine thousands of secret cables, memos, and e-mails, and interview surviving CIA officers as well as their coworkers and superiors, from Khost to Kabul, Islamabad, Amman, and Langley.

Nearly a year passed before the teams’ reports were completed. In the intervening months scores of former intelligence operatives and terrorism experts offered their own judgments, drawing from the scant details available. In op-ed pieces, news articles, and blogs, commentators focused on two perceived failures, missteps that were said to have contributed to the disaster at Khost while pointing to deeper flaws in the country’s premier intelligence agency. Several of the agency’s retired executives pinned the blame on Khost base chief Jennifer Matthews and, more broadly, the CIA managers in Langley who had approved her promotion to a frontline post despite her lack of experience in a war zone. Other observers argued that the fatal errors in judgment at Khost stemmed from the agency’s growing aversion to risk. Even in Iraq and Afghanistan, these critics noted, many CIA officers lived in secure compounds where no one ever got hurt, while relying on technology and foreign allies to do the dirty work of finding and destroying terrorist threats. Somewhere along the way, basic rules of spycraft, including time-honored procedures for assessing and running informants and double agents, had been all but forgotten.

The criticisms hit at legitimate problems within the CIA. But they did not fully capture what had gone wrong at Khost in the hours before New Year’s Eve.

The agency’s Khost review did confirm numerous missteps. It concluded that Jennifer Matthews and her Khost team—with the support of more senior officials at Kabul and Langley—failed to follow standard safety procedures in their meeting with Balawi, apparently out of an eagerness to secure the informant’s cooperation. Warnings that might have alerted the CIA to Balawi’s deception were never passed along, in part because the messages weren’t entirely trusted, investigators concluded. Critical insights were not shared with decision makers because they were expressed in private e-mails and text messages that never became part of the agency’s reservoir of knowledge about Humam al-Balawi. At the same time, expectations were raised in high-level meetings in Washington before key facts were known.

As a result, both Matthews and senior managers at Langley believed that Balawi was a trusted Jordanian agent, investigators found, and the cautions raised by those who knew him best—Ali bin Zeid and Darren LaBonte—were trumped by the “evidence” the officers could see with their own eyes: the words and images Balawi e-mailed from inside al-Qaeda’s tent.

“All they had seen and read, plus the urgency of getting to the top leadership of al-Qaeda, led to a situation in which the major preoccupation was the good health and safety of the man who was intent on becoming a suicide bomber,” said Ambassador Thomas Pickering, coleader of the independent review.

The agency’s investigators recommended significant reforms, several of which were quickly implemented by Panetta and his team. The agency raised its standards for training and experience for overseas managers, even though the investigators concluded that inexperience was not a decisive factor at Khost. CIA officials also tightened security procedures for their overseas bases and established a system of “red teams” to probe the agency’s defenses as an enemy would do, as well as internal reviews to guard against double agents and spies.

No single person or failure caused the disaster at Khost, the investigators found. Yet just as had happened before the September 11 terrorist attacks, managers at every level were blinded to warnings and problems that would seem screamingly obvious in hindsight.

After September 11 a bipartisan commission sought to distill in a single report why so many government departments had failed to prevent al-Qaeda’s plot to turn commercial jets into missiles against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The 9/11 Commission identified scores of tactical mistakes by the CIA, the FBI, and others, but it said the larger lapse was the agencies’ inability to conceive of the inconceivable.

“The most important failure was one of imagination,” the panel said in its 2004 report.

The suicide attack on Khost, while hardly comparable in scale, shared in at least this one root cause. Before December 30, 2009, no one at the CIA had dreamed that an informant would set up a meeting with his handlers just so he could kill them along with himself. Over the course of the CIA’s first sixty-two years, a multitude of double agents, informants, and spies had lied, defrauded, betrayed, stolen money, or skipped town. Not one had ever blown himself up.

Balawi, through the power of his manufactured evidence, put himself on a path that would inevitably end with a confrontation. Foresight might have limited the number of deaths, yet even the most powerful and prescient observer could not have constrained the two singular forces that collided in Khost in the fading light of December 30, 2009.

One was the mind of Humam al-Balawi, a man who scudded and wove between towering waves, unsure of his destination and never exactly what he seemed.

The other was the eagerness of war-weary spies who saw a mirage and desperately wanted it to be real.

Arlington’s marble headstones had lain beneath a thick blanket of snow when Leon Panetta visited in January to preside over the burials of Jennifer Matthews and Darren LaBonte. Now the cemetery was ablaze with color, from crimson tulips and pink dogwood blossoms to the emerald green of new grass, all bathed in brilliant sunshine. More than three hundred people, including a large contingent of Elizabeth Hanson’s CIA friends, trooped quietly through the rows of headstones to stand with her parents and brother at her graveside. Two of them walked with crutches because of leg wounds suffered in the bombing at Khost.

The crowd gathered beneath a giant oak tree that shaded the spot where Hanson’s ashes, in a mahogany box bearing the CIA seal, was to be buried. An honor guard folded an American flag, which was presented to Hanson’s mother. “She guarded the flag, and now the flag guards her forever,” the military chaplain said.

As the eulogies were spoken, Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, stood near the back of the crowd with an eye on his muted cell phone. The wait was nearly over. It was time for a decision, and this one would be harder than most.

Near the Pakistani town of Miranshah, two of the agency’s drones had been monitoring the same mud-brick building for hours, watching for any sign of movement. The man inside was believed to be Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, but the truth was, the agency was less than sure. Earlier in the spring the CIA’s targeters had come close, but the sheikh slipped away before the Predators were in place. This time a tip led the agency to a cluster of buildings a few miles northwest of Miranshah. The structures were watched for days as counterterrorism officers narrowed down where precisely al-Masri was staying and who else shared the space with him.

The CIA did know that there were noncombatants in the compound, because at least two women and several children had been seen entering. The risks were grave this time, but the potential prize was huge: al-Qaeda’s No. 3 commander, on this day of all days.

If it was really him.

The service ended with no further word from Pakistan. Panetta paid his respects to Hanson’s family, and the CIA director’s black car pulled out of the cemetery and headed north, away from Washington and toward Baltimore. Panetta had an appointment at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic eavesdropping service, and the hunt for al-Masri would follow him there.

Panetta had scarcely arrived at the NSA building when he was summoned to one of the agency’s secure phones. The CIA’s counterterrorism chief had fresh news, not all of it good.

“We think we’ve got this guy, but there may be some collateral damage,” the chief was saying, referring to the women and children believed to be in the building the agency’s drones were watching.

Panetta’s heart sank. Nothing was coming easy with this one. He called Emanuel’s office again. The White House was nervous too.

“It’s your decision,” Panetta was told.

The CIA director sat quietly for a moment, the day’s events replaying in his brain. He picked up the phone again and called his counterterrorism director.

“Look, I need to know how certain you feel about the target,” he began. “This is really important.”

“Eighty percent,” the counterterrorism chief was saying. “Maybe ninety percent, in terms of knowing we have the right target.”

The numbers weren’t the ones Panetta was hoping for. But this might well be the best chance the agency would ever get.

“I don’t see how I can’t do it,” he finally said. “Go ahead.”

Panetta hung up the phone and tried to focus on his meeting. Later in the afternoon he received reports about the missiles’ deadly flight and the utter destruction of the targeted building. He learned of the recovery of bodies, and he was given the news—painful to contemplate for him—that two women and a child were among the dead. As for the fate of al-Masri himself, there was only silence out of Pakistan. Nothing more was learned during the rest of the day, or the following morning, or the day after that.

Then, on Memorial Day, the agency’s surveillance network picked up the first snippet of conversation hinting of a momentous change in al-Qaeda’s highest ranks. The terrorist group had lost one of its leaders, and the formal announcement would be posted soon on one of the usual jihadist Web sites. Al-Masri, the operational commander, had been targeted by a CIA missile at a safe house near Miranshah on May 21 and was now dead.

Panetta immediately picked up the phone and called his friend Emanuel at the White House.

“Rahm,” he said, “we just took out Number Three.”

The whereabouts of No. 1, bin Laden, and No. 2, Zawahiri, remained unknown.