The Triple Agent

“The worst part was that her children would know,” said the CIA lawyer who visited with her. “She would be indelibly tarnished, forever linked to the failures of September 11.”

London had served as a welcome respite for Matthews and her family, at a time when she really needed it. She had relished her long weekends and holidays traveling with the family around Europe. She savored repeat performances of her favorite musical, Les Miserables, on the London stage, and she bought cases of French wine to add to a growing collection back home. At work, Matthews was caught up in the investigations of several international terrorism plots, including the 2006 al-Qaeda plan to blow up commercial airliners using liquid explosives. British colleagues came to respect her knowledge of the subject matter and quickly adjusted to her take-no-prisoners style. “I could always tell which of my office mates had met with Jennifer on any day,” one British intelligence officer would later recall. “It was always the busiest person in the room.”

But now it was over, and Matthews was torn over what to do next. Most of the typical slots for someone with her background involved a desk somewhere back in Langley, an unappealing prospect for multiple reasons. Career-wise she was near the top of the government’s civilian pay scale, yet she lacked the experience in key areas necessary to make the jump into upper management, the so-called senior executive service, where minimum salaries start at $111,000 a year.

During trips to Washington she rode the elevator to the CIA’s seventh-floor administrative wing to seek advice. The guidance was consistent: There were gaps in Matthews’s résumé that had to be filled before she could advance. Matthews was already an experienced manager who had led ably in London and Langley. But in two decades of counterterrorism work, she had never served in Kabul or Baghdad, front-line posts that were central to the CIA’s core mission. If Matthews really wanted to move up, she had to go to war.

But not all war zone jobs were the same, she discovered. A stint in Baghdad’s Green Zone would mean three years of hard work away from family. But within the constellation of CIA facilities were a few dismal outposts where conditions were so harsh or so dangerous that a one-year assignment was considered equivalent to three years anywhere else.

A base chief’s slot was due to open up in the early fall in just such a place, Matthews was told. It was in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan not far from Tora Bora, in what historically had been considered one of the roughest locales in that most violent of countries. It also was next door to a pair of Pakistani provinces that were the heartland of the Taliban and the location of the last confirmed sighting of Osama bin Laden.

Matthews knew the place. It was called Khost.

Other officers already were vying for the position, but Matthews quickly claimed the inside track. Several of the CIA’s most senior officers supported her for the job, telling Matthews that her one-year stint would be as beneficial to the agency as it would be to her own career.

Some of her closest friends and mentors were divided on whether she was suited for such a position. Some worried that it was too much, too soon. Matthews had no experience in dealing with the security demands of living and traveling in a war zone. She also had little background in the science of running covert agents, a separate tradition within the spy agency with its own highly specialized training and skills. Much of the Pakistani work at Khost involved working with networks of undercover operatives.

Then there was the personality factor. CIA peers who worked with Matthews regularly knew her to be passionate and direct, but also impatient and stubborn.

“She didn’t take questions well, and she had no patience for people who didn’t know as much about a subject as she did,” recalled a former covert officer who met with her regularly at Langley. “She had this way of sighing audibly, as if to say, ‘I know this; why don’t you?’ ”

Yet it was hard to argue that she lacked experience. Matthews had helped run operations against al-Qaeda from Washington and London for nearly fifteen years, and her role in the CIA’s takedown of Abu Zubaida had been roundly praised. Matthews’s team had led the agency’s two-year search for al-Qaeda’s former logistics man, tracking him at last to a safe house in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad, where he was surrounded and captured by dozens of Pakistani commandos and CIA paramilitary officers.