The Triple Agent

Hanson was skimming classified cables for the names of Mehsud lieutenants in late June, when Pakistani informants reported that a kind of pan-jihadist strategy session had taken place near Baitullah Mehsud’s ancestral home of Makeen, in South Waziristan. The eleven-member guest list included a top al-Qaeda emissary, Abu Yahya al-Libi, as well as Sirajuddin Haqqani, the charismatic young commander who presided over the powerful Haqqani network, and Baitullah Mehsud himself. The reputed purpose of the gathering was to persuade the Taliban leader to negotiate a truce with Pakistan; Haqqani and al-Qaeda leaders were watching the army’s advance through South Waziristan and worried that their territory might be next.

Hanson jotted some notes and leaned back to think.

Mehsud, al-Qaeda, and the Haqqanis, sipping tea and planning strategy. The groups had maintained informal contacts for years. But this was something more.

James L. Jones was wrapping up his meetings in Islamabad on June 23, when the CIA caught a break in its search for Baitullah Mehsud and the weapon he was feared to be hiding: A midlevel commander in Mehsud’s organization was spotted in Taliban country. A plan was quickly hatched to strike Baitullah Mehsud when he attended the man’s funeral. True, the commander, a trusted aide named Khwaz Wali Mehsud, happened to be very much alive as the plan took shape. But he would not be for long.

Before sunrise on June 23 a lone Predator drone circled high over tiny Lataka, a mountain hamlet in Taliban country, forty miles northeast of the provincial capital of Wana. Two missiles sliced through the humid predawn air, racing ahead of their own sound waves, sensors locked onto a mud-brick building on the village outskirts. Anyone watching from the street would have seen only a small impact flash and then an eruption of rock, dust, and smoke as the house burst apart from the inside. Neighbors clambering over broken walls and singed furniture and bed mats found the mangled bodies of five Taliban fighters and their leader, Khwaz Wali Mehsud.

It was a significant hit, but it was only the prelude to what CIA officials hoped would be a much bigger score.

The Mehsuds, like other Pashtun tribesmen who live along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, attach great significance to funerals, which often surpass weddings as social occasions. The passing of a prominent member requires a show of respect from his relatives, and often large crowds of mourners gather around the body to wail and chant prayers. Village elders and other prominent citizens then fall in line to escort the shrouded corpse to the gravesite.

As the smoke cleared in tiny Lataka, spy agencies watched and listened when Mehsud notables began pouring into the village to recover the bodies and organize a hasty burial. Among the names gleaned from phone intercepts was Qari Hussain Mehsud, Baitullah Mehsud’s top deputy and heir apparent. Qari Hussain was among the most ideological of the Mehsud clan, a man with deep hatred for Pakistan’s secular government and a vision for a broader alliance between the Pakistan Taliban and other jihadist movements. He had founded suicide bomber camps for young boys and was behind several deadly attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The second big name on the guest list was a surprise: Mullah Sangeen Zadran, a military commander in the Haqqani network. Sangeen was a top deputy to Sirajuddin Haqqani, Jalaluddin’s son, and a man with a bounty on his head. The Pentagon had targeted him twice during raids inside Afghanistan, but he had slipped away both times. Now his presence at a Mehsud clan funeral reinforced U.S. fears of a deepening alliance between the Mehsuds and the Haqqanis that would surely benefit al-Qaeda as well.

Among Pashtuns, burials frequently occur within hours of a person’s death, so on this day the CIA immediately dispatched its drones to Makeen, the town nearest to Lataka and the presumed setting for Khwaz Wali Mehsud’s funeral. Agency officials in Khost and Langley watched on flat-screen TVs as cars arrived and mourners gathered, the men in long tunics and the women in burkas and veils. They watched as the shrouded body was carried through the streets and as prayers were chanted at the graveside. They listened as the officiating mullah urged the crowd to disperse quickly because the low-pitched humming of the machays or bees—the Pashto name for the pilotless planes—was drawing nearer.

Muhammad Saeed Khan, a thirty-five-year-old Pashtun tribesman, was leaving the gathering when the first two missiles hit almost simultaneously.

“It created a havoc—there was smoke and dust everywhere,” Khan told a Pakistani journalist afterward from his hospital bed. “Injured people were crying and asking for help. They fired the third missile after a minute, and I fell on the ground.”