The Triple Agent

Yet the CIA and senior Mukhabarat officials were increasingly interested in the doctor. Abu Dujana al-Khorasani was an emerging opinion leader in the world of radical Islam, and now the man behind the persona was the property of the Mukhabarat. What could he accomplish if he were working for their side?

Jordan already employed hundreds of informants, who came in two varieties: low-level snitches of dubious reliability and elite double agents who were highly trained and spent years developing their cover. Balawi was neither of those, but surely there was a role for him. It fell to bin Zeid to assess what that role might be. To do so, he would have to become Balawi’s new best friend.

Complicating matters was the pressure on him from above. Cultivating an informant takes time, yet time was suddenly in short supply. In Washington, the newly inaugurated Obama administration swept into office with a promise to redraw the country’s counterterrorism priorities, starting with a renewed commitment to capture Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The CIA was in a rush to find and deploy scores of new informants and operatives throughout the Middle East and around the world. In Jordan, Mukhabarat officers were being asked to write assessments describing promising new contacts and what they could potentially deliver.

As bin Zeid set out to write such an assessment for Balawi, he worried aloud to colleagues that inflating expectations could lead to disappointments and mistakes.

One evening after work bin Zeid put the case aside to watch a movie at a friend’s house. The film was Body of Lies, a Hollywood spy thriller starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. Set mostly in Jordan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the movie depicts an amoral CIA official, played by Crowe, whose miscalculations repeatedly risk the lives of subordinates as well as Arabs who happen to get caught in the crossfire. As he watched the video, bin Zeid seemed mesmerized by the film’s portrayal of American and Jordanian agents at war with Middle Eastern terrorists and sometimes one another.

When the DVD ended, the friend asked bin Zeid for his impressions. The two laughed about the convoluted plot twists; then bin Zeid turned serious.

“Here’s what’s true about it,” he said. “It’s the way it shows the Americans in too much of a hurry. Always, they want everything to happen right now.”

Late February brought some of the coldest, iciest weather Amman had seen in years. Temperatures hovered near freezing for days, and a rare heavy snowfall closed schools and left an army of snowmen plodding the usually dusty sidewalks. Humam al-Balawi had spent much of his time out of the house during the cold snap, but one afternoon he returned from his appointments with a surprise announcement: He had sold his car.

His parents and brothers stared at him stunned. Humam’s sturdy little Ford was one of his most cherished possessions. It was also his only means of getting to work at the distant Marka clinic.

“Why did you do that?” his father finally asked.

Humam shrugged. “It needs a lot of maintenance,” he said. “I’m tired of keeping it up.”

To judge from his appearance, Humam was more than just tired. He said little these days, spending his time at home on his computer—the Mukhabarat had kindly returned it—or lost in his thoughts. He would disappear for hours at a time, saying vaguely that he was visiting the mosque or meeting with friends.

At the clinic, his patients had noticed his newly baggy clothes and sallow skin and worried about him. One who confronted him was Hannan Omar, forty-two, a mother with four children who sold snacks from a cart in the clinic lobby. When Omar’s blood pressure had suddenly dropped a few months earlier, Balawi had hounded her for weeks to make sure she was taking her medicine.

“You’ve lost weight!” she said scoldingly to Balawi after he arrived for work one morning. “Are you sick?”

The doctor smiled weakly and said diabetes was making him thin. It was the last time she would see him; later she learned that Balawi had handed the clinic manager his letter of resignation.

Balawi was gradually checking out of his old life. In some ways, the old Balawi was already gone.

Defne Bayrak tried to understand what was happening to her husband but was getting only small glimpses. After his three days in the Mukhabarat’s prison he was almost unrecognizable: jittery, sullen, distracted. Never one to pray openly, he now prayed all the time, asking for God’s guidance with the smallest decisions. He sat in the apartment with an open Koran for hours at a time, and when the girls’ noisy playing got to him, he would run—sometimes literally—down the block to the neighborhood mosque and the serenity of its prayer room.