The Triple Agent

Pakistani news reports initially listed both Qari Hussain Mehsud and Sangeen Zadran, the Haqqani commander, as having been killed in the strike, and agency officials strained to hear if Baitullah Mehsud had been killed as well.

It took another two days before the truth was known. Both Qari Hussain Mehsud and Sangeen Zadran survived the attack, as they gleefully informed local broadcasters in interviews.

Baitullah Mehsud, if he attended the funeral at all, had slipped away before the missiles flew.

7. THE JIHADIST

Amman, Jordan—July 2009

Humam al-Balawi arrived alone in northwestern Pakistan on March 19 with his two battered suitcases, and the vastness of the country swallowed him up. The CIA’s paid informants watched him pass through customs at Peshawar and spotted him again at the crowded bus terminal where he boarded a coach for the frontier city of Bannu. But then he vanished, disappearing into the blackness of one of the harshest and most isolated places on earth.

In Amman, Ali bin Zeid checked his in-box day after day for news. The Jordanian intelligence officer had set up a special e-mail account to be used only by his new informant, whom bin Zeid had code-named Panzer after the legendary German battle tank. Balawi had been cautioned to limit his e-mails in case he was being watched, but days had passed with no contact at all. Was the informant sick? Had he gotten lost? A possible explanation, bin Zeid knew, was that he had been killed. Any traveler from pro-Western Jordan would be viewed by the Taliban as a likely spy. Balawi’s Arabic and English skills would do little to help him out of a jam in Pashto-speaking Taliban country. Balawi had known it, too.

I’m afraid I will die in Pakistan, Balawi had blurted out at one of their last meetings before leaving Amman. I will be killed, and there will be no one to look after my family.

Bin Zeid had been reassuring, but now he was consumed with worry and guilt. He began to prepare for the possibility that the Balawi experiment would utterly fail. It had happened before.

Then, one morning in late March, bin Zeid was sitting at his computer, sorting through the day’s e-mail, when he spotted an unusual item forwarded from one of his little-used accounts. The subject line was a series of code words, but there was no mistaking the sender.

The text was also in code, a few short phrases the two men had agreed upon as a way of verifying identity at the first contact. The translation was roughly this: It’s Balawi. I’m here.

In a series of notes that followed, Balawi reported that he was getting along tolerably well in his first assignment as a spy. He was living in the South Waziristan market town of Wana, using the cash the Mukhabarat had given him as start-up money. Like most of the larger towns, Wana had a public call house with computer terminals, which Balawi would use to communicate with Amman. He had a list of contacts, including Pakistani jihadists he had met online when he wrote under the name Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. The plan was for Balawi to approach the Taliban’s emissaries in Wana to ask for their help in setting up itinerant medical clinics in tribal villages. Balawi would pose as a devout physician looking to perform jihad by treating the Taliban’s sick and wounded. If it worked, Balawi would have the perfect cover to roam freely through Taliban country, gathering information for reports that he would send to bin Zeid from his home base in Wana.

Bin Zeid sent his new recruit encouraging replies. You’re doing important work, he wrote. He tried to appeal to the physician’s patriotism, thanking him for his sacrifices on behalf of his country and king. “You have made us proud,” bin Zeid said.

Balawi also tapped out a note to his wife. Before his departure he had confided to Defne that he was traveling not to Turkey, as he had told his family, but to Pakistan. I want to study medicine there, he told her. The story made little sense, but Defne knew not to question it. Now Balawi’s wife and girls were living with her parents in Turkey, where she had gone that spring at the behest of her father-in-law to search for her husband. After a few weeks she had finally told the elder Balawi the truth: Humam was in Pakistan. The Mukhabarat had sent him there.

The old man was incredulous. “How could Humam be in Pakistan?” he asked. “He can’t find his way around a traffic circle.” Later he began pressing Defne to return to her in-laws’ apartment in Jordan, the proper place for a married woman whose husband was away. But Humam would have none of it.

Stay in Turkey and I will come to you there, he wrote. He promised to send money for an apartment and furniture and offered suggestions on finding a good place. Eventually they would live there together, he said.