The Triple Agent

1. OBSESSION

McLean, Virginia—One year earlier

For nearly three years the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and his top generals had been Michael V. Hayden’s daily obsession, a throbbing migraine that intruded on his consciousness at odd hours of the night. But as he turned the page on his final month as CIA director, it was a different Osama that was costing him sleep. Before New Year’s Day was over, Hayden would have to decide whether the man would live or die.

The man was called Osama al-Kini, and he had been the subject of an increasingly frantic search. The boyish onetime soccer player from Kenya had moved up in al-Qaeda’s ranks, starting as a truck driver and bomb maker and rising to become a top operations planner with a flair for the spectacular. He was preparing a list of targets for a wave of strikes across Western Europe when the CIA caught a lucky break. In late December, the agency had spotted one of al-Kini’s top deputies in a town in northwestern Pakistan, and now it was following him, with eyes on the ground and robot planes circling silently above. Cameras whirring, it trailed him as he wandered through the bazaars, sat for tea, or climbed the hilly street to the abandoned girls’ school where he sometimes stayed the night. Agents watched for hours, and then days, waiting to see who would come to meet him. As the graveyard shift at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters rang in the first minutes of 2009, the watchers sensed that they were finally getting close.

New Year’s Day found Hayden attempting to enjoy a rare day off. He tried to relax with family and even took in a couple of football games, but the phone summoned him back to the hunt. From his basement office, with its twenty-four-hour security detail and secure line to headquarters, he mulled the latest updates from Pakistan. Keep watching, he ordered. Then, when late evening arrived without further news, Hayden decided to turn in for the night. He switched on his TV and sat on the bed. It was the Orange Bowl game from Miami, and Virginia Tech was pounding Cincinnati. He stretched out and tried to concentrate on the game.

At sixty-three, Hayden was no one’s vision of a killer. The retired four-star general had been a career intelligence man in the air force who moved up to become head of the National Security Agency, overseeing the country’s vast overseas eavesdropping network. In 2006 he was President George W. Bush’s pick for the CIA’s third director in two years, inheriting a demoralized spy agency in need of a wise uncle to pay bail and clean up the damage. Hayden’s charge, simply put, was to restore stability and even a kind of bureaucratic blandness to the CIA after multiple scandals over the alleged kidnapping and torture of suspected terrorists. One of his stated ambitions going in: to get the CIA out of the headlines. “The agency needs to be out of the news, as source or subject,” he told the Washington Post in an interview.

Hayden was born to Irish Catholic parents in Pittsburgh and maintained lifelong ties to that working-class city, returning home on fall weekends to root for the Steelers or for the football squad at his alma mater, Duquesne University. He liked talking in sports analogies, and, as CIA director he enjoyed mingling with young analysts in the agency cafeteria, his bald pate and easy smile making him a reassuring, rather than an intimidating, presence for junior staffers. The mechanics of finding and eliminating specific terrorist threats seemed to fall more naturally to Hayden’s chief deputy, Stephen R. Kappes, a legendary case officer who had made his mark matching wits against the Soviet KGB in Moscow.

But now, in his third year as director, Hayden was in charge of the most relentlessly lethal campaign in the spy agency’s history. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA had devoted itself to hunting down bin Laden and his followers with the aim of capturing, imprisoning, and interrogating them. Now the agency had a different goal: killing the terrorists and their allies wherever they could be found. The agency had slowly built up a fleet of pilotless aircraft, called Predators, capable of firing missiles by remote control. In mid-2008, as the Bush administration entered its final months, the CIA unleashed the planes, commonly referred to as drones, in an all-out war against al-Qaeda. CIA missiles blasted terrorist safe houses and training camps week after week, and the finger on the trigger was Hayden’s.

The transformation had been years in the making. In the middle years of the decade, as the Bush administration poured troops and resources into Iraq, al-Qaeda had staged a comeback in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan. The demoralized bands of Arab fighters who had streamed out of Afghanistan in late 2001 regrouped under their old generals, bin Laden and his operations chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a new generation of aggressive commanders replaced those who had been killed or captured. From new sanctuaries in the rugged no-man’s-land between the two countries, they quietly began reopening training camps, raising money, and plotting new attacks against the United States and Western Europe. The agency’s wire intercepts crackled with vague but ominous talk about surveillance missions and dry runs targeting airliners, shopping centers, tourist resorts, and hotels—threats most Americans would never hear about.

By 2007 al-Qaeda’s ability to wreak havoc nearly rivaled the group’s pre-2002 peak. In some ways, the threat was even worse: Al-Qaeda had effectively merged with some of Pakistan’s extremist groups, while spawning new chapters in North Africa, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Qaeda’s propagandists harnessed the Internet’s formidable powers to spread al-Qaeda’s hateful gospel to millions of Muslims through Web sites and chat rooms. New streams of cash and recruits spilled into northwestern Pakistan and to regional affiliates from Yemen to Southeast Asia. Many of the newcomers signing up for jihad carried Western passports and could slip undetected into American and European capitals. Some had blond hair and light skin.

What Hayden saw as he surveyed the world in early 2008 truly frightened him. So early that year, during his weekly intelligence briefings at the White House, he began to make the case to President George W. Bush.

“This is now a bona fide threat to the homeland,” Hayden told the president during one Oval Office visit. Another September 11–style terrorist strike was inevitable, he said, and it would come from the tribal region of Pakistan.

To prevent such an attack, the United States must take the fight to the enemy, Hayden argued. That meant attacking al-Qaeda on its home turf inside Pakistan, disrupting its communications, killing its generals and field commanders, and depriving it of sanctuary. Only the CIA had the legal authority to reach targets deep inside Pakistan, and the agency already possessed the perfect weapon, the Predator. It was time to take the fetters off the CIA’s fleet of unmanned hunter-killer planes, he said.

Bush and his advisers listened sympathetically. The problem, everyone knew, was Pakistan. Islamabad was a crucial ally, and it officially opposed foreign missile strikes on its soil, no matter the target. Pakistani officials argued that American air strikes only worsened the terror problem by radicalizing ordinary Pakistanis and driving more of them to join with the extremists—a concern shared by some U.S. terrorism experts as well. In private discussions, Pakistani intelligence officials chided the Americans for what they perceived as two dangerous obsessions: an overdependence on expensive technology, and an absurd fixation on the person of Osama bin Laden.

“Al-Qaeda is not very strong, but you’ve made it into a ten-foot-tall giant,” one senior Pakistani government official recalled telling a visiting Bush administration delegation. “How can a handful of core al-Qaeda leaders seriously threaten the greatest empire in the world?”

Eventually, Pakistani leaders agreed to allow a limited number of Predator strikes, and for months Washington and Islamabad engaged in an awkward dance over when an attack was permissible. If the CIA discovered a potential target, the agency could pull the trigger only after both governments agreed. In practice, it rarely happened. “If you had to ask for permission, you got one of three answers: either ‘No,’ or ‘We’re thinking about it,’ or ‘Oops, where did the target go?’ ” said a former U.S. national security official who was involved at the time. A whole year passed without a single significant success against al-Qaeda on its home turf. “We’re at zero for ’07,” Hayden complained to the White House.

After months of debate Bush decided in July 2008 to give the CIA what it wanted. News reports later characterized the policy change as an informal agreement by Pakistan to allow more U.S. air strikes in remote tribal regions that were largely outside of Islamabad’s control. In reality, the shift was much simpler: The CIA stopped asking for permission. The new policy, communicated to Pakistani officials in a meeting that month, required only “simultaneous notification” when the strikes occurred.

Over the next six months Predators hit targets in Pakistan thirty times, more than triple the combined number of strikes in the previous four years.

U.S. elections in November 2008 signaled the coming end of Republican control of the White House and likely Hayden’s tenure at CIA. But in the final weeks, as the clock ran down on the Bush presidency, the number of Predator strikes soared, prompting speculation within the agency that Hayden was hoping to flush Osama bin Laden himself out of hiding as the Bush administration’s final payback for September 11. It was amid the scramble for big targets in the final days of 2008 that a familiar name popped up in one of the agency’s phone intercepts.

The name belonged to an East African man named Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, a midlevel al-Qaeda operative linked to several terrorist bombings. But Swedan was most interesting because of whom he worked for, the former soccer player known as Osama al-Kini, now the senior al-Qaeda commander in Pakistan. The two men had been on a bloody two-year rampage, killing hundreds of people in a series of increasingly spectacular attacks in Pakistani cities. On January 1, 2009, they were preparing to take their brand of mass murder on the road.

All by himself, Swedan would have made a worthy target. At the time he stumbled into the CIA’s surveillance net, he was on the most wanted lists for both the CIA and FBI and had been indicted in New York for assisting the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. His apparent hideout in late 2008—an abandoned girls’ school on the outskirts of a village called Karikot—had also drawn keen interest. The CIA’s informants identified the building as a training academy for al-Qaeda’s bomb makers.

Hayden mulled his options and decided to wait. As important as he was, Swedan was only a deputy, and he wasn’t going anywhere. On the morning of January 1 he was under constant surveillance, not only by CIA operatives on the ground but also by a pair of Predators flying above the village. Sooner or later Swedan would have to communicate with his boss, and then Hayden would have a much bigger prize.

The CIA had been waiting for such an opportunity for more than a decade. Like his deputy, Osama al-Kini was also linked to the 1998 African bombings and had a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. Slim and athletic with tightly curled locks, al-Kini had been part of Osama bin Laden’s entourage since the early days and had been promoted to operations planner. By 2007 he was al-Qaeda’s top regional commander for all of Pakistan, and he was good at his job. His cell assisted the Pakistani Taliban in the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and carried out bombings and suicide attacks against police stations, army camps, a civilian court, and a naval academy. Then, in September 2008, he achieved something far more ambitious, a massive truck bombing at Islamabad’s luxurious Marriott Hotel. The blast killed more than fifty workers and guests, wounded two hundred others, and made headlines around the world.

Al-Kini was now muscling his way into al-Qaeda’s senior ranks while putting his personal stamp on the organization. Aggressive and charismatic, he was popular with the group’s younger fighters, and he was beginning to pose a challenge to al-Qaeda’s more experienced leaders, particularly a commander named Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, a cruel-tempered Egyptian who controlled the group’s purse strings and claimed the top leadership spot after Zawahiri. Most ominously, al-Kini was preparing to go international, dispatching some of his top trainees to Western Europe. CIA officials concluded that the Kenyan was attempting to lay the groundwork for a network of terrorist cells across Europe that could begin casing major hotels and other landmarks for future attacks.

It was this threat that weighed most heavily on Mike Hayden on January 1 as he waited for news from northwestern Pakistan. The CIA director had not yet fallen asleep when the phone rang at 10:30 P.M. with fresh word from the hunt. Hayden rolled out of bed and trudged to his basement office to get on a secure phone line.

It was already daylight in Pakistan, and one of the CIA’s Predators had been hovering nearby as Swedan left the girls’ school for an early appointment. As the CIA watched, Swedan met with a man he appeared to know, and the two traveled back to the girls’ school together. The second man’s face was obscured, but everything about him matched the description of the terrorist commander the CIA had been looking for. The duty officer at the Counterterrorism Center had made a judgment call and phoned Hayden for his consent. Permission to strike?

Hayden had a standard set of questions for situations such as this, and he proceeded to go through them.

How long have you watched this location?

What is the history of this location, and how many times have you looked at it?

Have you seen women and children in this compound, ever?

From its vantage point a half mile above the village, the lead Predator, which had followed the two men, had already locked its video tracking system on the girls’ school while awaiting further instructions. The odd-looking aircraft with its narrow fuselage and bowling alley–length wingspan cut lazy circles in the sky above the town, moving at speeds barely above those of freeway traffic. With a full tank and the usual complement of missiles, it could have continued to hover for fourteen hours without a pause. Instead, with a subtle shift in the engine’s pitch, the aircraft widened its arc to line up its body with the building below. In Langley, the live video feed flickered on a pair of flat-screen TVs in the operations center, while the aircraft’s two-man crew, in a separate building, made small adjustments to the aircraft’s movements with joysticks and the click of a computer mouse.

Hayden thought for a moment. Swedan was inside the building; that was certain. The man with Swedan was doubtlessly an accomplice and very possibly al-Kini himself. The building was a known training facility for al-Qaeda that probably contained explosives and was far enough from the village to ensure that no one else would be harmed. Three for the price of one, Hayden thought.

One or two of the Predator’s Hellfire missiles would probably do the job, but Hayden wanted to be doubly sure.

Use the GBU, he ordered. At the command, the Predator’s flight crew bypassed the aircraft’s fourteen-pound Hellfire missiles and switched on a far larger weapon hidden inside the bomb cavity, a five-hundred-pound laser-guided GBU-12 Paveway. The weapons officer checked the guidance system, made one last tweak, and pressed a button. He counted backward as the missile hurtled toward the village at a speed slightly faster than sound. Three, two, one, the operator called. And then: “Impact.”

The building in the black-and-white screen erupted in a massive fireball.

The drone lingered for hours, to record the recovery of two mangled corpses. A local Taliban official confirmed the deaths of the two men he called foreign fighters and “close friends.”

By then, the drone operators had ended their shift and climbed into their cars for the journey home, a commute made refreshingly easy by Washington standards because of the holiday.

Hayden sat on his bed to watch the last few minutes of the football game and then fell into a deep sleep. The next morning an intercepted phone call in Pakistan confirmed the death of Osama al-Kini, the last high-ranking al-Qaeda leader to be killed by orders of the Bush administration.

The whereabouts of the other Osama remained unknown.

Weeks later, Mike Hayden was officially out of a job. Newly elected President Barack Obama had opted for a fresh start by naming an old Washington hand, Leon Panetta, to run the CIA. Panetta had no significant intelligence experience but was a proven manager, having been chief of staff in the Clinton White House. One of his first decisions was to retain Hayden’s popular deputy, Steve Kappes, as the agency’s deputy director and to keep the agency’s entire counterterrorism team intact.

Hayden’s initial meeting with his successor was cordial, if occasionally awkward. Panetta had gotten off to a poor start inside the CIA by publicly criticizing the agency’s harsh treatment of al-Qaeda captives, some of whom had been locked in secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding, an interrogation tactic that mimics the sensation of drowning. Panetta testified in his confirmation hearing that he believed such techniques constituted torture, a criminal offense.

Hayden made a curt reference to the controversy. “You should never use ‘torture’ and ‘CIA’ in the same paragraph,” he advised dryly. But the retired general was mostly interested in talking about something else. Using notes he had written on an index card, he cautioned Panetta against being lulled into underestimating al-Qaeda. Although the terrorist group was being hammered in northwestern Pakistan by Predator strikes—a practice Obama had already heartily embraced—it remained capable of hitting Americans in ways that were both unexpected and potentially devastating. Just three months earlier, a Taliban-allied terrorist group from Pakistan had launched commando-style attacks on Mumbai, raking hotels, rail stations, and other buildings with automatic weapons and grenades, and killing more than 170 people.

Hayden now looked directly at Panetta. This was the important part.

“I don’t know if you understand this yet, but you are America’s combatant commander in the war against terrorism,” he said. More than the Pentagon, the FBI, or anyone else, Hayden continued, the CIA was responsible for hunting down terrorists in foreign countries and stopping them before they could strike. Other CIA directors had carried out similar missions in bygone years, but now the job was different: For the first time in the agency’s history, “stopping” the bad guys meant killing them.

“You will be making decisions,” Hayden said, “that will absolutely surprise you.”

Panetta listened politely, but Hayden’s final point struck him as a bit dramatic. At military posts, a change of command was often greeted with ceremonial flourish: boot clicks and salutes and theatrical rhetoric. It would be weeks before Panetta fully understood what Hayden meant.

On his way out, Hayden stopped by the White House for a final meeting with the newly elected president. In an Oval Office briefing with Barack Obama, the general mentioned a pair of targets the agency had been monitoring in northwestern Pakistan. Hayden had authorized a strike, and the agency’s team was waiting for the right moment, he told the president.

Later that morning, after the meeting had moved into the White House’s Situation Room, Hayden was asked about the Pakistani operation. What about those two targets?

Hayden made a quick call on his secure phone.

“Check,” he said, “and check.”

Hayden left the meeting a few minutes later amid appreciative smiles and handshakes.

They certainly seem supportive, he thought, appraising the young president and his security team with guarded approval.

He had officially passed the baton. Now it was their turn.