The Triple Agent

“It’s now about connecting dots,” said another of Hanson’s coworkers. “It’s about multitasking, going through reams of data from different sources. It’s putting two and two together to stop a plot or to find a leader who is trying not to be found.”

It was also about personal toughness. Friends recalled being startled one day when Hanson, then twenty-nine, got into a heated argument with an army colonel over a potential target. When the military officer tried to dismiss the young targeter, Hanson moved within inches of his face. “The target is correct, sir,” she said. “Either you take it out, or we will.”

As spring turned to summer, Elizabeth Hanson was preparing for a transfer to Kabul, Afghanistan, her first overseas posting with the CIA. But before her departure she would set her sights on the elusive and newly dangerous Baitullah Mehsud.

On the morning of June 22 the Obama administration’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, traveled to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, for urgent meetings with the country’s civilian and military leaders. In press releases the meetings were described as routine consultations on Washington’s Afghanistan strategy. In reality the top items on the agenda were Mehsud and his “devices.”

Pakistani officials adamantly insisted that the country’s nuclear stockpile was secure, but they could not rule out the possibility of a Taliban dirty bomb. If anything, the government of President Asif Ali Zardari was even more worried than the Americans about Mehsud’s intentions. If a dirty bomb was to explode in one of the world’s major cities in the coming weeks, officials reasoned, it was more likely to happen in Karachi or Peshawar than in New York or London.

The only bright spot for Islamabad was the Obama administration’s newfound interest in Baitullah Mehsud. The Taliban leader was officially blamed for the assassination of the country’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, on December 27, 2007, and in the months since then he had declared war on Pakistan’s government. Mehsud had targeted Pakistani police and military barracks with suicide bombings, and he had famously cut off the heads of captured army recruits. Pakistan’s generals were preparing to expand their military offensive against Taliban strongholds, and they were engaging in fierce clashes in villages along the border. Yet the CIA and its robot planes—so controversial in Pakistan—had done little to help. U.S. officials had long viewed the Mehsud clan as a local problem for the Pakistanis and were reluctant to agitate yet another militant faction that might cross into Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops.

The dirty bomb threat changed everything. Now the Obama administration was privately talking about targeting Mehsud, and Pakistani officials, for once, were wholeheartedly embracing the idea of a U.S. missile strike on their soil.

“Go after him,” one Pakistani security official pleaded to one of the U.S. officials in Jones’s delegation.

In Langley, meanwhile, the search by Elizabeth Hanson and her fellow targeters was beginning to bear fruit, as daily cables from Kabul and Islamabad brought fresh reports on the movements of Taliban commanders close to Mehsud. Some in the CIA had developed a theory about the origins of the Taliban’s mysterious devices: They were part of an al-Qaeda project that had been disrupted by the relentless Predator strikes on the terrorist leaders. An al-Qaeda bomb maker named Khalid Habib had been aspiring to build a dirty bomb before his plans were cut short in October 2008, when a missile slammed into his car in northwestern Pakistan. Habib’s closest ally and the presumed heir to his bomb-making projects was Osama al-Kini, the al-Qaeda commander who died in the Predator strike on New Year’s Day. Had al-Qaeda bequeathed its dirty bomb factory to Baitullah Mehsud?

The CIA had long worried about collusion between al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s loose confederation of militant groups, and now Hanson and her team were seeing increasing examples of it. In their natural state, many of the local extremist groups were rivals who fell regularly into spasms of bloody intertribal feuding. But lately, squeezed by encroaching Pakistani troops from the south and the constant threat of death from CIA missiles, the militants were consulting and cooperating in ways that could make them far more dangerous.