The Triple Agent

Within days of his capture, Zubaida handed his American interrogators an intelligence breakthrough, revealing the identity of the principal architect of the September 11 attacks: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Later, when Zubaida stopped cooperating with his interrogators, the Bush administration authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, to force him to talk. Among the witnesses to these sessions was Matthews, who was flown to Thailand to help guide the teams of CIA interrogators in questioning the new captive. Years later the case became the center of a roiling controversy. Human rights groups, congressional committees, and even former Bush administration officials questioned every facet of the CIA’s handling of Zubaida, who came to symbolize the debate over the agency’s use of secret prisons outside normal legal constraints, as well as interrogation practices that the International Committee of the Red Cross condemned as torture. Later evidence suggested that Zubaida was never truly an al-Qaeda leader, but rather a logistics man with limited knowledge of the terrorist group’s strategy and plans. Still, Matthews would be admired within the counterterrorism division as the officer primarily responsible for the takedown of the agency’s first high-value terrorist captive and the man who led the CIA to the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

By the middle of the decade Matthews was in management, directing the Counterterrorism Center’s teams of reports officers. She also forged alliances with a cadre of other tough women who were ascending into the division’s leadership ranks a few career jumps ahead of her. One of her new mentors was a notoriously sharp-tempered redhead who had played a key role in many of the agency’s most aggressive—and controversial—operations, from “enhanced interrogation” to a classified program known as rendition, in which suspected terrorists were abducted overseas by CIA operatives and flown to a third country to be interrogated and, in some cases, tortured. The two women shared an infatuation with tough guy actor Tommy Lee Jones, and they were fond of quoting a particularly apt line from his 2007 film No Country for Old Men: “You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waiting on you.”

As she moved up the hierarchy, Matthews was sometimes accused of being abrasive, stubborn, and impatient. Nothing riled her more than the suggestion that she as a woman was not adequate to a task—any task. In Langley several male colleagues began to refer to her by an unflattering nickname, Ruth, short for ruthless.

There, and later at Khost, she would feel obliged to prove herself time and again, fighting a never-ending battle for respect in a world that had long been dominated by men.

“You’re telling boys how to do their business,” said a CIA Afghan hand who counseled Matthews before she left for Khost. “Typically the answer is, ‘Missy, you don’t know what it’s like.’ ”

It was true that the Khost Matthews knew was nothing like the Khost of a few years before. Long before the base was safe enough for the likes of analysts and targeters, Khost belonged to America’s original black ops force, the paramilitary officers of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Recruited mostly from the ranks of Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other elite military units, the CIA’s SAD officers had been the country’s premier force since the 1950s for clandestine missions outside the writ of conventional troops, such as sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and targeted killings. Teams of SAD officers and Special Forces commandos spearheaded the assault against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001 that drove the Taliban government out of power. About a dozen of them set up camp in the eastern city of Khost that winter to begin cleaning up lingering pockets of Taliban resistance, and SAD officers had stayed there ever since.

In those final days of 2001, when Matthews and her team in Langley watched in anguish as Osama bin Laden slipped away into Pakistan, the Khost SAD team formed at an air base in the Pakistani city of Jacobabad and choppered across the mountains to take control of the airfield. They very nearly met with disaster in their first minutes on the ground.

They arrived in Khost at 2:00 A.M. on a bitterly cold morning, carrying light weapons and gear, along with a small trunkful of cash and a pledge of assistance from a local commander who opposed the Taliban. The local commander was waiting for them, as promised. But so were dozens of fighters from rival clans. Turbaned gunmen glowered at one another in a tense standoff with the Americans in the middle.

In the darkness, the U.S. team could see that several Afghans on different sides had pulled out grenades. They were prepared to fight to the death, as the CIA officers later learned, to decide who would get to play host and receive the bulk of American money and modern weapons.