The Triple Agent

On the other end of the line, his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, and a senior counterterrorism adviser passed along updates. It was a tricky shot, from twenty-three thousand feet away, but the agency would use a smaller, less destructive missile, Panetta was told. The targeting would be extraordinarily precise. And the damage would be minimal.

Panetta gave his consent.

It was now 1:00 A.M. in the Pakistani village. Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban and chief protector of the Jordanian physician Humam al-Balawi, now lay on his back, resting as the IV machine dripped fluid into his veins. At his feet, a pair of young hands, belonging not to a doctor, as the CIA supposed, but to his new wife, were massaging his swollen legs. Barely aware of the buzzing of a distant drone, oblivious of the faint hissing of the missile as it cleaved the night air, he took a deep breath and looked up at the stars.

The rocket struck Mehsud where he lay, penetrating just below the chest and cutting him in two. A small charge of high explosives detonated, hurling his wife backward and gouging a small crater in the bricks and plaster at the spot where she had knelt. The small blast reverberated against the nearby hills, and then silence.

Overhead, the drones continued to hover for several minutes, camera still whirring. A report was hastily prepared and relayed to Panetta at the White House.

Two confirmed dead, no other deaths or serious injuries. Building still stands.

8. PRESSURE

Langley, Virginia—August 2009

On August 11, nearly a week after the CIA’s missile strike, a Taliban spokesman phoned Pakistani journalists to denounce “ridiculous” rumors about the death of Baitullah Mehsud. The Taliban leader was “alive, safe and sound,” he said, adding that the world would soon see proof.

By that date Leon Panetta had already seen all the proof he could stomach. The missile impact that killed Mehsud had been captured on video and replayed, in its grisly entirety, on the giant monitor in Panetta’s own office at Langley. As if that were not enough, a second video surfaced, showing the Taliban commander’s body as his comrades prepared to bury him. The CIA’s counterterrorism team looked into the face of the man whose death they had ordered, pale and serene now in his crude wooden coffin, his head resting on a pillow strewn with marigolds. The hand of an unseen mourner stroked the corpse’s face, brushing against the dozen or more fresh scars that pocked the skin around his eyes and forehead.

Panetta had little time to dwell on the images. That week his staff was caught up in the drafting of a proposal that he would deliver in person to the White House in the coming days. The CIA had unfinished business in Pakistan’s tribal belt, and Panetta would make a personal appeal to the president for help. Of the many secret plans he would approve as CIA director, none was more likely to change the course of the country’s war against al-Qaeda than this one.

The successful targeting of Mehsud had only served to underscore the urgent nature of the work that still lay ahead. For one thing, Mehsud’s “devices” remained unaccounted for. All summer, as the CIA searched for the Taliban leader, thousands of Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships swept the Taliban’s valley strongholds, picking off the forts and hideouts one by one. By the time the campaign ended, the Pakistanis were sitting on a mountain of small arms and enough explosives to supply a madrassa full of suicide bombers. But they found no trace of a dirty bomb. The radiation detectors never sounded at all. The CIA’s counterterrorism chiefs puzzled for weeks over the meaning of the missing devices. Many Taliban survivors had fled into neighboring North Waziristan to take shelter with that province’s dominant militant group, the Haqqani network. Had they taken their bombs with them? Had it all been some kind of trick? On this, the classified reports were silent. There was no further talk of devices in the agency’s intercepts, and back in Washington, Obama administration officials made no mention of the dirty bomb scare. Publicly, it was as though the threat had never existed.