The Triple Agent

Al-Rahman, a Libyan and an Islamic scholar, had been a top aide to bin Laden since the 1980s, and the two had escaped together into Pakistan after the Tora Bora debacle in late 2001. Afterward he was believed to have fled to Iran, but he emerged again in 2006 as one of al-Qaeda’s top strategic thinkers and spiritual advisers. It was al-Rahman who had tried unsuccessfully to rein in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, when his sadistic attacks against Shia Muslims began to shift the tide of Iraqi public opinion against al-Qaeda. There had been no confirmed sightings of al-Rahman in years; yet here he was, holding forth on video, with a CIA informant seated at his feet.

The images left jaws agape and unleashed a torrent of questions. Yet this much was undeniably true: The Jordanian physician Humam al-Balawi had been in the same room with one of al-Qaeda’s top commanders. He had managed to capture the encounter on videotape. And he had delivered the evidence to the very doorstep of the CIA.

In the eight years since the start of the war against al-Qaeda, no one had ever gotten so close.

Three times a week Leon Panetta opened his seventh-floor office for a gathering of the CIA’s top counterterrorism officials. His deputy, Steve Kappes, attended, along with the directors of the agency’s National Clandestine Service and Counterterrorism Center and a phalanx of aides and briefers. Squeezed around Panetta’s mahogany table, beneath the tattered American flag that had once flown above the World Trade Center, they sipped coffee from china cups and discussed the latest events in Pakistan. One afternoon in early September, the group gathered to pore over an extraordinary transmission from an obscure agent known as Wolf.

There were still photos and a blow-by-blow description of a video—at the time, still undergoing evaluation by technical teams—that showed a presumed CIA informant conversing with one of al-Qaeda’s senior advisers. The agency’s senior managers were bursting with questions. Where did the agent come from? How did he get such amazing access? No one was yet sure what to make of it, except that it was extraordinarily good news.

Two snippets of information about Balawi were particularly intriguing to Panetta. One was the fact that the informant had managed to get his nose under al-Qaeda’s tent with such speed. The time frames for running agents in this region are always very long, the CIA director thought. This one is going from asset to target incredibly fast.

The other surprise was how little the agency seemed to know about the operative in the video.

“Nobody from the CIA has really had any person-to-person contact with him,” Panetta marveled.

There were plausible explanations for all of it. The informant was one of the Mukhabarat’s recruits, and he was already in Pakistan before any American officers could take a look at him. As for his access, it was simple: Balawi was a doctor. Al-Qaeda desperately needed doctors.

Balawi was talented, no doubt. Exactly how good was something the agency needed to find out, and with all possible speed.

“You have lifted our heads,” Ali bin Zeid wrote to Balawi one morning in one of his regular missives from Amman. “You have lifted our heads in front of the Americans.”

Bin Zeid was receiving verbal high-fives from his Jordanian colleagues over the stunning performance of his star recruit, and he wanted to pass the compliments along. Balawi had surprised everyone, bin Zeid most of all. How had he managed it? What else could he provide?

The encouragement seemed to work. In the weeks after Balawi resurfaced, as the dry northerly winds of autumn swept away the last traces of summer’s heat, his e-mails crackled with interesting tidbits. He described jihadist fighters he met, passed along rumors, and sketched out the complex web of relations among local militant groups.

More intriguingly, he began to serve up graphically detailed descriptions of the damage wrought by CIA missile strikes, down to conditions of the corpses and body parts pulled from the shattered cars and flattened houses. He wrote about the frustration and rage among Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, all of whom now lived in dread of the buzzing machays.

Balawi could rarely be precise about locations—he was still a stranger to the area and spoke little Pashto—but his reports helped the agency’s Predator teams narrow their search for targets. Some agency officials concluded that as many as five Taliban soldiers were killed as a result of Balawi’s detailed accounts. After a missile strike, the informant would e-mail bin Zeid with his on-the-scene accounts of death and mayhem, along with words of encouragement. You’re on the right track now, he would say.