The Triple Agent

Matthews truly hit her stride at the CIA when she joined a small unit within the directorate’s counterterrorism division known internally as Alec Station. It consisted of a mix of officers from different backgrounds, all devoted to the study of a little-known Islamic terrorist group that called itself the Base, or al-Qaeda. When she first joined in 1996, the unit was regarded as a CIA backwater. Terrorist groups were a second-rate threat, and al-Qaeda was a bit player compared with the better-funded Hezbollah and Hamas. But things began to change in 1998 after al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 220 people. The attacks catapulted bin Laden to a spot on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Suddenly Alec Station and its analysts were in demand.

As a group the officers became so al-Qaeda obsessed that they jokingly referred to themselves as the Manson Family. The hard part was convincing official Washington that Osama bin Laden was a threat to the U.S. homeland. Led by Matthews’s boss, a blunt-spoken analyst named Michael Scheuer, they eventually won the backing of senior CIA leaders, including Director George Tenet, and Cofer Black, who headed the Counterterrorism Center. The officers in the late 1990s drew up contingency plans for killing bin Laden and driving his terrorist allies out of Afghanistan, using friendly Afghan fighters and the agency’s newly acquired unmanned aerial vehicle, the Predator. But the Clinton administration passed on a chance to assassinate bin Laden in 1999, and the newly elected Bush administration deflected Tenet’s urgent requests for action and ultimately postponed any significant policy discussions about al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001. Seven days later al-Qaeda–trained hijackers crashed commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The morning of the attack was a normal workday at Langley, and many CIA employees were just arriving at the office as the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower at 8:46 A.M. When the second tower was struck seventeen minutes later, there was an audible gasp of recognition: This is the work of al-Qaeda.

Cofer Black, the CIA’s counterterrorism director, assuming that CIA headquarters was likely on the terrorists’ attack list, ordered most of the staff out of the building. He and the Alec Station analysts stayed behind and got to work. Some did not see their families again for days.

“We’re at war now, a different kind of war than we’ve ever fought before,” Black told the counterterrorism team as he prepared to issue marching orders. “We’re all going to have to do our part. And not all of us are going to make it back.”

Matthews’s close friends say her experiences during those weeks forever changed her. Before September 11 she had worked long hours with her Alec Station colleagues, trying to uncover the al-Qaeda plot they believed was in the works, but after the terrorist attacks she slept in a chair in her office and didn’t go home for days. Pregnant with her third child at the time, she became physically exhausted and eventually suffered a miscarriage, a misfortune that she suspected was due to the stress of her job. Yet she continued to work, telling friends repeatedly that she believed that a new attack was imminent, and only the CIA had the resources to stop it. Where al-Qaeda was concerned, Matthews had “drunk the Kool-Aid,” a CIA friend said.

Matthews was one of the first officers to be assigned the title of targeter, then a newly minted job in the agency’s counterterrorism division, and she soon acquired a high-profile case: She was to lead the agency’s search for an al-Qaeda logistics planner who went by the nom de guerre Abu Zubaida. Zubaida, a Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, ran a jihadist camp near Khost before September 11, and over the years he had facilitated the training or travel arrangements for scores of al-Qaeda militants in Afghanistan. Matthews believed that Zubaida knew details about a planned second wave of al-Qaeda attacks against the United States, and she convinced her CIA superiors to let her assemble a team of newly hired intelligence officers to coordinate a global search for him.

Matthews set up shop in a small conference room that was soon jammed with computers and bodies. Her team worked elbow to elbow for weeks until, in March 2002, they caught a break: They traced Zubaida to a safe house in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad. On March 28, Pakistani and American intelligence officers raided the house and captured the man after a firefight that left him gravely wounded. He was the first significant al-Qaeda operative to be nabbed by the CIA.