The Triple Agent

Moreover, Matthews’s superiors saw in her exactly the qualities the agency needed in its escalating war against al-Qaeda: leadership skills, mental toughness, enthusiasm, ambition, and an unquestioned mastery of the subject matter. One of her bosses had a pet name for her: STRAC. It was an old Navy acronym that stood for “Standing Tall, Ready Around the Clock.” The CIA had big plans for Matthews, it was clear, and the point of sending her to Afghanistan was to help her gain the experience she needed. With the agency stretched thin by years of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, it was getting harder to find willing volunteers whose job skills lined up perfectly with the opening. But in Matthews’s case, the candidate in question seemed to have the important ones, said a retired senior officer who weighed in on her professional appraisal.

“She was so smart and so careful,” the officer said. “The best people are simply the best people. An excellent case officer can also be an excellent analyst, and vice versa.”

Matthews, by all accounts, spent even less time worrying about her fitness for the job. Khost offered everything she was looking for: both a way to move up and a path to personal redemption. The mere fact that some were questioning her ability made her even more determined, friends said.

Matthews did finally seek the advice of one dissenter, a retired CIA officer whom she respected, someone who knew the bureaucracy well and was unfailingly blunt in his opinions. The two spent an afternoon together on his porch overlooking the Virginia foothills. Then they got on his computer to look at satellite images on Google Earth. In the photographs, the CIA base at Khost is clearly identifiable because it sits on an airfield with a packed-dirt runway, expanded by the Soviets in the 1980s to support bombing sorties against Afghan rebels dug in to the mountains. Just east of the base was the border crossing at Ghulam Khan, gateway to Pakistani strongholds controlled by notorious warlords and militants such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, Baitullah Mehsud, and perhaps bin Laden himself.

The retired officer attempted to distill his advice in a way that he hoped would penetrate Matthews’s reflexive defenses. For the CIA’s sake and for yours, he told her, Khost is the last place you should want to go.

“I understand the drive you’re feeling to go there,” the officer told her, according to his account of the conversation. “But you’re not thinking clearly. This is a paramilitary environment, and you have no experience with that.”

He ticked off a list of other concerns. Khost ran covert agents, something that Matthews knew little about. The drone strikes she helped orchestrate could kill innocent civilians and possibly expose her to legal jeopardy. Even her gender would work against her, he said, as Afghan tribesmen would be loath to negotiate as equals with a woman, particularly one wearing fatigue pants and a T-shirt.

Matthews’s eyes flashed at the suggestion that she as a woman would be at a disadvantage. The conversation became heated, and the more the two argued, the more adamant Matthews became.

“She already knew she was going to Afghanistan,” Matthews’s adviser later said. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was hearing something else. She thought I was saying she couldn’t handle it.”

Unable to dissuade Matthews, the retired officer instead wished her good luck. It was the last time they would meet.

3. THE DOCTOR

Amman, Jordan—January 19, 2009

The raiding party gathered in the street just before 11:00 P.M. and waited, as always, for the bedroom lights and TV sets to flicker out. Darkness would mean fewer witnesses, and a sleeping household would allow the agents of Jordan’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence service to work quickly, with a minimum of noise and fuss. There would be no knock at the door and no spoken commands. Just a crash of metal against wood and a single coordinated movement that would sweep the hapless suspect from his bedclothes to the back of a waiting car.