The Triple Agent

Hanson’s targets were closer now, just a half hour’s chopper ride to the east, hiding in the steep valleys of Kunar and Khost and in the Pakistani tribal lands beyond. Baitullah Mehsud was gone, but his Taliban minions were still there. So were the Haqqanis and the Shadow Army paramilitary troops loyal to al-Qaeda. Somewhere among the mountain villages, Sheikh Saeed al-Masri was plotting his next move, perhaps in consultation with Ayman al-Zawahiri or even Osama bin Laden himself.

If they could be found, Elizabeth Hanson would find them.

9. CHIEF

Khost, Afghanistan—September 19, 2009

At 4:58 A.M., two hours before sunrise, Jennifer Matthews was roused from sleep by a loud bang. It sounded close—it was hard to tell in the dark, and she was new to such things—and it was strong enough to rattle the picture frames in her tiny hooch. Instinctively she rolled out of bed, grabbed her flak jacket and helmet, and walked out the door toward the shelter. Rocket attack.

Outside, other figures stumbled along the same path, and some exchanged a grim greeting. The dark sky was still chalky with stars, with no trace of the new moon that would mark the end of the month-long Ramadan fast later that evening. Somewhere in town, a muezzin was sounding the predawn call to prayer, his lilting baritone rising and fading against the squawks and beeps of the base’s emergency loudspeakers.

Matthews felt the heaviness of the air, still warm even at that hour. The airfield lights glowed yellow through a dusty fog, casting a feeble light over the parched terrain beyond the fence. Farther up the valley, clusters of tiny lights from the army’s Salerno base shimmered like distant constellations.

It was a thrilling sight and oddly serene. The Haqqani fighters who lobbed occasional mortar rounds at the base rarely hit anything, so the perfunctory huddle in the concrete shelter was mostly an annoyance and a chance to catch up on gossip. But Matthews, barely twenty-four hours into her new job as Khost base chief, found even the little things fascinating. It was perhaps a strange admission, coming from a woman who a week earlier had been a suburban mom working in a sleek office building in northern Virginia, but she loved being in Afghanistan.

“It is exhilarating,” she told one close agency friend back home. Her Afghan assignment was going to take up a year of her life, and she would be absent from her three children for most of that time. She would miss twelve months’ worth of ball games and bedtime kisses, stomachaches and school projects, recitals and family dinners. And she would miss Christmas. But Matthews had volunteered for the posting, and she was now determined to extract every possible advantage from the experience. And to the extent she could, she would enjoy every bit of it, even the middle-of-the-night visits to the bomb shelter.

This one was mercifully short, as there were no other explosions. A chopper crew circling the base with a searchlight found the strewn body parts and quickly pieced together the story. A lone man had crept up the main approach to the base in the moonless blackness and attempted to bury an IED, or improvised explosive device, near a dip in the road where the morning convoys would pass in a few hours. But the bomb had exploded prematurely, leaving pieces of the man scattered across the highway. An almost identical incident had occurred near the same spot a few months earlier, only it ended with two would-be bombers lying dead, one of them a schoolteacher.

In an odd way, such attacks validated Matthews’s belief in the low risk of living in such a dangerous place. She would be safe at Khost, she told worried relatives and friends, because she would stay inside the wire. Local jihadist groups would fling themselves against the walls at regular intervals, but they never quite amounted to a serious threat.

“She told me, ‘I would never allow myself to be put in danger, because of my kids,’ ” said a CIA colleague who met with Matthews a few weeks before she went overseas. “I think she honestly believed it.”

Matthews had already concluded that life in a war zone wasn’t so bad. Her first glimpse of her temporary Afghan home was from the heaving side of a Black Hawk helicopter making the thirty-minute run from Kabul. The city and CIA base were perched on a high plateau surrounded by dun-colored hills, and the terrain reminded her of parts of the American Southwest. “I kept expecting to see the Marlboro Man show up,” she quipped to one of her e-mail pals back in Virginia.