The Triple Agent

The final step was airline tickets. An open-ended return flight was purchased and hand-delivered by bin Zeid, along with a fat envelope stuffed with dollars.

Months later some U.S. intelligence officials still marveled over how quickly the plan came together and also over the eagerness with which agency veterans bought into the notion that the untrained Balawi could survive in a lawless FATA, let alone penetrate a dangerous terrorist network. Such a thing had never happened, not like this. By luck of timing, Balawi had turned up on the Mukhabarat’s doorstep with his unique set of assets—a physician with impeccable jihadist credentials, seemingly willing to put his life on the line—at the precise moment the CIA and a new U.S. administration were scrambling to find new methods and agents for a ramped-up global hunt for Osama bin Laden.

“Balawi dangled that he could go,” said one recently retired agency official privy to internal conversations about the Jordanian. “And he happened to match with a beautiful priority.”

Sleep eluded Humam Khalil al-Balawi. The day had been insanely hot, and the temperature was still in the nineties well after sundown. Worse, as he lay still in the dark, the humming of drones grew even louder, like a mosquito he could never swat away.

Balawi’s home through midsummer was in one of the Mehsud clan’s walled compounds in Makeen, a small town of loosely clustered mud-brick houses and shops surrounded by scrubby hills. At bedtime he had taken his mat into the outer courtyard and unrolled it near one of the guard posts to try to sleep. In the dim light he could make out a familiar form, a paralyzed man whom the fighters called Ahmad. The Pashtun man had lost his legs to disease, but Ahmad insisted on taking his turn at guard duty and refused to be relieved when his shift ended. He sat in his wheelchair with his rifle in his lap until sunrise. Humam could hear the man praying softly and occasionally sobbing. It was an impressive display of devotion that was, in true Taliban fashion, carried to a pointless extreme.

The same was true for Baitullah Mehsud himself. There were little things, like his behavior during group dinners. Baitullah would make a dramatic display of personally dishing out the choicest cuts of meat to his dinner guests until there was nothing left for himself but bones and fat. The performance made Balawi so uncomfortable that he made excuses to avoid eating with his host.

Baitullah Mehsud also appeared to have bought into the myth of his own invincibility. Two years after becoming chief of the Pakistan Taliban, he had grown fond of media attention, and he enjoyed staging news conferences, allowing the cameras full view of the head that was said to be worth more than five million dollars in bounty payments. Between staged events he would engage in long interviews over an open phone line, talking and laughing with journalists, seemingly oblivious of the possibility that his phone signal might be a beacon guiding a CIA missile to his compound. His swagger extended to absurd boasts about how his small band of illiterate, ill-equipped mountain fighters were poised to defeat not only Islamabad but also the great powers of the West.

“We pray to God to give us the ability to destroy the White House, New York and London,” he told a television interviewer. “And we have trust in God. Very soon, we will be witnessing jihad’s miracles.”

Baitullah’s insistence on his own supremacy in all things—military strategy as well as more mundane matters such as the divvying up of profits from contraband smuggling—sometimes sparked violent clashes with other Mehsuds. The diminutive commander also seemed to delight in agitating the Haqqanis and other militant groups by picking gratuitous fights with the Pakistani army and intelligence service, practically daring Islamabad to come after him, as eventually it did. Once, after surrounding and capturing an entire garrison of 250 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary troops, Baitullah proceeded to cut off the heads of three of his prisoners as the opening gambit in a negotiated prisoner swap.

It was a far cry from the idealized holy war that Balawi had championed in his blog. Baitullah Mehsud was neither a revolutionary nor a prophet. He was a thug with a massively inflated ego, a murderer who enjoyed killing other Muslims. He presided over a town that was dirty, backward, and mean, where girls barely older than Balawi’s daughter Leila were condemned to lives of little or no formal education and no appreciable rights, in a region where a newborn is three times more likely to die in his first year of life than a child born in Balawi’s native Jordan.

For the moment, though, Baitullah Mehsud was the best friend Balawi had. The two men could barely communicate except in fragments of Arabic or Pashto. But Baitullah had become convinced of the Jordanian’s sincerity. He had devised a singularly cruel test to prove it.