The Triple Agent

Balawi had also had a flirtation, and possibly more, with a known terrorist organization in Turkey, it was learned. While living in Istanbul as a student, he had attended meetings of the Islami Büyükdoğu Akincilar-Cephesi, or Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front, a group that claims kinship with al-Qaeda and advocates the overthrow of secular governments in the Middle East, from Ankara to Amman to Cairo. Turkish police have credited the IBDA-C with several spectacular terrorist attacks, including bombings of two synagogues in Istanbul in 2003 that killed twenty-four people.

Balawi’s interest in the group was something he apparently shared with the woman he eventually married, Turkish sources revealed. Humam and Defne Bayrak were first introduced in 2001 in an Internet chat room for young Muslims. After the two began dating, they connected with other couples at social events that were essentially recruitment sessions for the Raiders’ Front: small-group lectures, fund-raisers to support Palestinian militants.

Defne, tall and lithe with a doll’s porcelain complexion, had admired Humam’s intelligence but really fell for his conservative politics, according to her own account. She had been living at her parents’ house in Istanbul, working as a journalist and brushing up on her Arabic-language studies, when the Jordanian medical student burst into her life. Three months later, they were making wedding plans.

“I liked his personality, his piousness, his strict following of the religion,” she said.

During their courtship the couple began to change. Neither had ever been considered devout in a traditional sense. Defne wore a head scarf in public, but so do a majority of Turkey’s adult women. Humam had memorized large portions of the Koran as a child but regularly skipped Friday prayers at the mosque and referred derisively to his native Jordan as “that Islamic country.” But as a couple he and Defne embraced a creed that was gaining popularity among Turkey’s college-educated elite and whose chief tenet was rage against the non-Muslim West. Rooted in the same decades-old resentments expressed by millions of other Muslims, but peculiar to privileged young adults who came into maturity in the age of al-Qaeda, this brand of faith perceived CIA and Israeli intelligence plots behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Its adherents saw the invasions and occupations of Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan as part of a Western crusade to destroy and corrupt Islam, loot natural resources, and slaughter thousands of innocents.

Humam and Defne’s new passion was partly driven by personal and family history: Humam was a son of Palestinian refugees and treated refugee children; Defne had worked for conservative Turkish newspapers, translating Arabic news accounts about fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defne, who friends say was the more strident of the two, had also translated laudatory books about al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The former had been titled Osama bin Laden, the Che Guevara of the East.

But in each other Humam and Defne had found a partner whose political views reinforced and amplified their own. Later, when they had children, even choosing their names became a means of asserting their beliefs.

The couple named their older girl after Leila Khaled, a Palestinian woman who hijacked a TWA jetliner in 1969 and served time in a British jail. The younger was named after a Swedish-born Palestinian filmmaker named Lina Makboul. Her best-known work is a documentary titled Leila Khaled: Hijacker.

Now bin Zeid did what he often did when he needed to think. From the high perch of his pilot’s seat in the cockpit of a Boeing 737, he checked his flaps and eased the throttle forward. The stripes of the runway began falling toward him in a quickening stream. He tugged on the yoke, and with a roar, the jet’s nose tilted skyward, clearing the trees and hills and soaring into an endless expanse of blue.

Bin Zeid took off his headset and leaned back in his chair, staring at the computer screen. Physically he was still in Jordan, in the house he had built overlooking the Dead Sea. Bin Zeid had set up the flight simulator on his computer so that it was just like a real cockpit, with controls and pedals and even realistic engine sounds that he downloaded to match the specific plane he was flying. He would set a course for a distant city and then, once the wheels were up, sit in silence for an hour or more as the plane moved over empty seas. His hobby mystified some of his family members, but bin Zeid claimed it was therapeutic.

It helps me think, he would say.

That’s your problem, was the usual retort. Too much thinking.