The Triple Agent

Matthews had quickly come to appreciate the extraordinary assets that the base brought to the hunt. Foremost among them were the Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, a new force of CIA-funded Afghan commandos trained by the SAD. There were three thousand of these soldiers in the eastern half of Afghanistan, a mix of Pakistani- and Afghan-born ethnic Pashtuns who could slip across the border in local costume to kill or capture suspected terrorists or collect information. The intelligence they gathered was shared with the base’s contingent of American case officers and funneled, along with the usual phone and Internet chatter, into the CIA’s giant databases, to be teased and sifted by targeters—Elizabeth Hanson and others like her. Active leads about specific terrorists could be quickly transformed into hard geographic coordinates for the CIA’s growing fleet of Predators.

After eight years of practice, the cogs and wheels turned smoothly most of the time. And lately the men and women in charge of the CIA’s complex machine had seen new evidence of progress. After more than a year of relentless missile strikes, al-Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan appeared to be in complete disarray, an assessment based on intercepted conversations between the group’s demoralized operatives. Bin Laden had gone so deeply into hiding that he was effectively absent. Though Zawahiri still guided strategy, command of day-to-day operations had fallen to a handful of lieutenants, chiefly the man known as Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, the Egyptian who had filled the void after the death of Osama al-Kini. But CIA intercepts showed that al-Masri was a highly unpopular leader, tyrannical, manipulative, and controlling. Al-Qaeda fighters whose conversations were monitored complained bitterly about the group’s presumed acting leader.

And the best news of all had come not from Pakistan but from Amman. The Jordanian intelligence service had recruited a star informant who had been dropped into the tribal region with CIA help. The new agent, a Jordanian, had disappeared for several months but had just resurfaced with breathtaking new information. In the course of a few months he had somehow managed to penetrate first the Pakistani Taliban and then, by all accounts, al-Qaeda itself. At senior staff meetings back in Langley, top CIA managers were now speaking in hushed tones about a “golden source.”

A golden source, operating just across the hills in Pakistan, perhaps fifty miles from the small office where Jennifer Matthews now sat. She skimmed the daily cables and waited with increasing anticipation to see what would happen next.

10. THE DOUBLE AGENT

Langley, Virginia—September–October 2009

See attached.

Humam al-Balawi’s first big score as a spy, the one that would surely cement his reputation as the decade’s greatest, arrived at CIA headquarters on a late August morning as a jumble of computer code attached to an e-mail. The agency’s data forensics specialists had been warned, and they set upon it like an army of sushi chefs. They sliced and filleted, separating larger chunks of data into bits and bytes and then reassembling them again.

Several days of scrutiny later the agency’s initial impression stood: The file was authentic. And it was nothing short of miraculous.

Nearly a month after Mehsud’s death, Balawi had seemed to vanish from the earth. There had been no e-mail, phone call, or even intercepted Taliban transmission to explain what had happened to him. Then he suddenly resurfaced in late summer in a short message to bin Zeid. He was back, and he had a gift, he wrote, one that bin Zeid would find to be worth the wait.

The gift was a small image file, a few seconds of low-quality video taken by a handheld camera, the type that can be purchased at any electronics store for a few hundred dollars. The video depicted a small gathering of men in traditional Pashtun dress talking in a dimly lit room. In the foreground was a young man, seen mostly in silhouette, until a sideways turn clearly revealed him to be Balawi. Seated near him was a slim, dark-bearded man in his early forties who was doing most of the talking. His face was instantly recognizable to the agency’s counterterrorism experts, even though no American officer had seen the man in eight years. His name was Atiyah Adb al-Rahman, and he was one of the closest associates of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden known to be alive.