The Triple Agent

Osama bin Laden (left) went deep into hiding after 2002, becoming so isolated that his influence over al-Qaeda’s decisions diminished. His top deputy, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri, narrowly avoided a CIA attempt on his life in 2006, and afterward taunted President George W. Bush in a videotaped diatribe, saying, “Bush, do you know where I am?” (Courtesy of SITE Intelligence Group)

Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, al-Qaeda’s long-time financial chief, rose to take charge of the terrorist group’s day-to-day operations. He gradually came to see an opportunity in the young Jordanian doctor who turned up in Pakistan’s tribal belt in the spring of 2009. (Courtesy of SITE Intelligence Group)

Jennifer Matthews helped lead the CIA’s search for al-Qaeda terrorists in Washington and London, and by early 2009 she was in line for her first command posting in a war zone. She had been in Afghanistan only three months when CIA officials put her in charge of the agency’s first meeting with Balawi. (Courtesy of David Matthews)

Elizabeth Hanson was barely thirty and already a seasoned CIA “targeter” when she was dispatched to Kabul to help the CIA track down senior al-Qaeda operatives. She helped put the agency’s unmanned Predator aircraft on the trail of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. (Courtesy of the Hanson family)

The CIA relied on its fleet of Predators to strike terrorists in places where U.S. troops couldn’t go. The pilotless planes can hover for hours to conduct surveillance and can fire laser-guided missiles at targets with unparalleled accuracy. The Predators have killed hundreds of suspected terrorists in Pakistan in dozens of strikes since 2008. (U.S. Air Force photo by Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Pratt)

Michael V. Hayden, who became the Bush administration’s third CIA director in 2006, saw signs that al-Qaeda’s strength was increasing in Pakistan’s tribal belt in 2007. He pressed the Bush administration to ramp up lethal Predator strikes in an effort to prevent another September 11–style terrorist attack against the West. (Courtesy of Nikki Khan/The Washington Post)

The leader of the Taliban alliance in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, became the focus of a massive U.S.-Pakistani search in 2009 after intelligence linked him to a possible dirty-bomb plot. A CIA missile struck him on August 5, 2009, on the roof of his father-in-law’s house in northwestern Pakistan. (Courtesy of SITE Intelligence Group)

After the killing of his cousin Baitullah, the charismatic Hakimullah Mehsud (middle) took the reins of Pakistan’s Taliban alliance and talked openly of targeting the American heartland. Initially suspicious of Balawi, he came to regard the Jordanian physician as an instrument for exacting revenge on the CIA. (Courtesy of SITE Intelligence Group)

The town of Khost lies on Afghanistan’s eastern fringe in territory long controlled by the Haqqani network, allies to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The city’s greatest landmark, a blue-domed mosque, was built by the clan’s patriarch, Jalaluddin Haqqani, a friend of Osama bin Laden. (Joby Warrick)

The first Americans to arrive in Khost after the fall of the Taliban were a CIA-led team of Special Forces troops and paramilitary officers. They established Forward Operating Base Chapman, now known to most officers simply as Khost, at an airfield outside of town. It became a key outpost for gathering intelligence in eastern Afghanistan and in the Taliban heartland just across the border. (Courtesy of Charles McComes)

Jeremy Wise, thirty-five, fought in Iraq as a Navy SEAL before leaving the armed services in 2009. Newly married with a young son, he received an offer to work for the security contractor Xe Services LLC, formerly known as Blackwater. Wise traveled to Khost in mid-December 2009 for his first deployment protecting CIA operatives in Afghanistan. (Courtesy of Dana Wise)

At forty-six, Dane Paresi was one of the oldest and most battle hardened of the Americans at Khost. As a Green Beret, he had won a Bronze Star for his role in destroying a column of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan. Paresi also had recently joined Blackwater in hopes of building up a nest egg for retirement. (Courtesy of Mindy Lou Paresi)

Harold Brown Jr., thirty-seven, was a onetime army intelligence specialist who worked in private industry before returning to government to work for the CIA. At Khost, his first overseas posting, he was invited to help evaluate the Jordanian informant, Balawi, who claimed to have connections to al-Qaeda’s inner circle. (Courtesy of Janet Brown)