The Triple Agent

Coworkers sang out greetings as they wandered by, and Hanson acknowledged them with a smile. It was early, but the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was humming with a kind of low-grade tumult that never completely subsided. The place was divorced from normal time distinctions of day and night, early and late, weekday and holiday. The cavernous main room was perpetually awash in a fluorescent brightness that compensated for the lack of windows. (Any portal to the outside world is viewed as a security risk, new hires are told.) The center’s warrens of cubicles and flat-panel TV monitors took up much of the ground floor of the agency’s sleek new headquarters building, a facility that was built, for security’s sake, into a hillside. Workers in the Counterterrorism Center arrived on the fourth floor through a gleaming glass atrium festooned with scale-model spy planes and statues, then descended four levels below to the bunker where the agency’s most sensitive operations are managed.

Hanson stood out in this subterranean world, and not just because of her footwear. Barely thirty, she had a kind of understated midwestern girl-next-door beauty that men adored and women admired. Coworkers loved her for her outsize sense of humor, which ranged from slyly sarcastic to scatological to downright silly. She could quote endlessly from comedies like The Hangover or put her coworkers in stitches with a dead-on impression of Beavis from the cartoon series Beavis and Butt-Head. The most mundane CIA-speak would be transformed into off-color puns (“OK, who had weekend doody?” and “Have you been debriefed?”), and when she needed a favor from a boss or colleague, she would preface the request by demanding, “I want a pony.” A small circle of close friends knew her by a family nickname, Monkie, an artifact from her girlhood fascination with the famous sock puppet monkeys originally manufactured in her hometown of Rockford, Illinois.

Hanson’s playful demeanor belied the utter seriousness with which she approached the core business of the Counterterrorism Center. For more than two years, she had worked as a targeter, a job that entailed tracking terrorists on the CIA’s wanted list, by whatever means available, from a tiny cubicle a few miles outside Washington. She had her own list of targets and access to raw data from every surveillance tool in the agency’s sizable kit. Like an artist assembling a giant mosaic, she could summon bits of information from wiretaps, cell phone intercepts, surveillance videos, informant reports, and even news accounts, blending them with a mix of imagination and conjecture to develop a profile that the agency’s spies, drone operators, and undercover case officers could use to physically spot the target. More recently Hanson had become a group leader for other targeters, overseeing multiple efforts to track down terrorist leaders. Often she spent hours monitoring the hour-by-hour surveillance of a terrorist target, and she personally made the call to the CIA director to request the go-ahead to launch one of the agency’s Hellfire missiles. Hanson had helped track down some of al-Qaeda’s most senior leaders, including Osama al-Kini, the man killed by a CIA missile on New Year’s Day. And her intricate knowledge of Pakistani terrorist networks made her an indispensable source of expertise when agency officers were on the trail of lesser terrorists, some of them al-Qaeda’s closest allies. These included the cagey Pashtun warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, the longtime ally of Osama bin Laden’s whose fighters were attacking U.S. troops around the eastern Afghan city of Khost; and, more recently, leaders of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan alliance headed by Baitullah Mehsud.

“Her career trajectory was straight up, like a rocket,” said a CIA colleague who worked closely with her in the Counterterrorism Center. “She was helping put bad people out of business, permanently. It was getting to the point that it was getting harder to hide in the tribal areas.”

Some coworkers compared Hanson with Jennifer Matthews, another female officer and onetime targeter who had shot up through the ranks. The two had worked together briefly and were friendly, but their paths had been markedly different. Matthews had joined a vastly different CIA in the late 1980s, a place where women still were relatively rare, the Cold War still raged, and most of the glamour jobs were held by male case officers who had secret meetings with informants in seedy bars in Vienna or Budapest. By contrast, Hanson was part of a class of new officers hired after September 11. Some referred to themselves as the Windows generation: young, highly educated, and confident in the power of their technology. Case officers and informants would always be needed, but in the post–September 11 era, they were no longer kings.