The Triple Agent

Panetta and his top aides eventually settled on a more plausible explanation: The Pakistani terrorist had acquired a dirty bomb. Sometimes called the poor man’s nuclear weapon, a dirty bomb fuses conventional explosives with lethal quantities of radioactive waste, such as the radioactive cobalt used to remove cancerous tumors or irradiate food. Dirty bombs are far less deadly than an actual atom bomb, but they are cheap and easy to make, and they can spread radioactive contamination over wide areas. One well-made bomb detonated in lower Manhattan could kill scores of people, wreak economic havoc, and render parts of the city uninhabitable for months or even years. Was this the itami device the Taliban was planning to set loose?

Faced with a potentially grave threat, the five-month-old Obama administration prepared to take action, starting with the dispatching of a high-level delegation to Pakistan to secure that country’s help in locating Baitullah Mehsud and his mysterious devices. “The entire U.S. policy-making community was very alarmed,” said an administration official who participated in meetings convened to discuss the White House’s response. “It was an all-hands-on-deck mentality.”

It had already been a rough spring for Panetta, who, at seventy, sometimes found himself looking back wistfully at the comfortable semiretirement he had been enjoying before being summoned by Obama to head the CIA. The former California congressman had been suggested for the intelligence job by his longtime friend Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, but his nomination quickly stirred up controversy. Panetta’s prior brushes with the spy world had been limited mainly to the White House briefings he attended as staff director for the Clinton administration, and even Democrat stalwarts in the Senate publicly questioned if he had the necessary experience to lead the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. Obama, seeing the pounding his candidate was taking on Capitol Hill, wondered aloud to Emanuel whether the nomination was worth the political price he was paying.

“Are you sure this was the right choice?” he asked.

Emanuel was convinced. Panetta was a shrewd manager who knew Washington and possessed formidable political skills. Though tough and profane, Panetta had an easy laugh and the natural charm of a small-town mayor—a combination that made him nearly impossible not to like. Panetta would protect the administration’s interests while also finding ways to fight and win the agency’s battles with other intelligence agencies, White House bean counters, the Pentagon, and Congress. “This will turn out,” Emanuel assured the president.

Yet Panetta’s troubles persisted. He angered Republicans and many CIA managers with his comments condemning waterboarding. Then, just two months after his arrival at Langley, he infuriated Democrats when he opposed the administration’s decision to release Bush-era legal memos that justified the use of waterboarding. Panetta’s stance on the so-called torture memos won him new friends inside the CIA, but it also put him at odds with powerful members of the administration he was now serving.

A bright spot for Panetta was the CIA’s continuing successes against al-Qaeda, as the new administration embraced and even expanded the agency’s campaign of missile strikes against terrorist bases in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. In his daily intelligence briefings, Panetta could see the impact the strikes were having. For the first time in years, al-Qaeda’s leaders faced a mortal threat within their own sanctuary, the prospect of instant annihilation from robot planes that hovered continuously overhead, their mechanical humming filling the evening silence and making men fearful in their own beds.