The Triple Agent

Just over a year later LaBonte put the body armor and night-vision goggles away and said good-bye to Afghanistan, perhaps forever. His new posting, the CIA’s largest counterterrorism hub in the Middle East, was hardly sleepy, but the Jordanian capital was stable enough to accommodate officers’ families. For the first time in years, LaBonte could look forward to evenings at home with his wife, and Racheal could be spared the constant worrying that her husband had been wounded in an ambush or blown up by a roadside bomb.

But Amman was no rest stop. By March 2009, three months after the move, the contours of LaBonte’s new role were finally clear. As he had hoped, he now hunted even bigger quarry, international terrorists, rather than the Taliban hirelings he had often chased in the Afghan hills. Soon he was busier than ever, routinely working late into the evening and traveling abroad for secret meetings with a whirligig of turncoats, hustlers, and informants.

He and bin Zeid had become a remarkable team. Bin Zeid brought a deep knowledge of Arab culture and years of experience investigating jihadist networks throughout the Middle East. LaBonte was a combat veteran expert at all the practical skills essential to covert work, from stakeouts to kicking in doors.

LaBonte’s call sign among his Ranger comrades had been Spartan. It was a name that particularly suited LaBonte, a man who was forever being compared to action heroes. Relatives playfully called him Captain America because of his earnest patriotism and the way he unabashedly spoke about wanting to protect his country. His agency friends joked about his “spidey sense,” his uncanny knack for sniffing out danger like Spider-Man.

He even looked the part. Six feet tall and broad-shouldered, LaBonte was two hundred pounds of rugged good looks and muscle, a born athlete who was said to bench-press four hundred pounds and run a marathon after barely bothering to train for it. He radiated a kind of unforced confidence that made him a natural leader, first as a standout baseball player and later as a martial arts champion, an Army Ranger, and an FBI cadet. He liked being in charge because he liked playing the role of older brother or protector.

“He was the sheepdog who protects the sheep,” said one close friend from his army days. “It’s how he saw himself.”

Finding the job that suited his protective instincts was a years-long struggle. LaBonte’s strong pitching arm earned him an invitation to play minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians, but he turned down the offer, explaining to family members that a professional sports career would distract him from more important goals he had set for his life. He found himself increasingly drawn to the military but rejected a chance to go to officers’ school. Instead he decided to test his mettle against the punishing physical standards of one of the army’s Special Forces units, the elite Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment. He quickly earned his Ranger’s tab and later a prestigious position as a member of the regimental color guard.

The army also introduced him to a pretty dance student named Racheal. In March 1999, LaBonte found himself in need of a date for the year’s big formal event, the Ranger Ball. At the last minute—just hours before the first dance—a mutual friend persuaded Racheal to help one of his army buddies out of a jam.

“Is he cute?” Racheal asked.

“He looks a little like Daniel Day-Lewis,” said the friend, referring to the actor best known at the time for portraying Hawkeye in the film The Last of the Mohicans, “but without the long hair.”

As Racheal said later, the tall young Ranger who arrived at her door that evening in his dress uniform was more than just handsome.

“I knew in the first minute that this was someone important in my life,” she said of her future husband. “From that point on, life would be different.”

The two married the following year, and by 2001 Darren LaBonte was out of the army and serving as a SWAT team officer for the Libertyville Police Department in Chicago’s northern suburbs. He was working the graveyard shift, chasing rowdy teenagers and feeling restless, when the day came that was to change his life forever.

He had just gotten home from work on the morning of September 11 when the TV news anchor broke in with reports that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. LaBonte watched for a moment mesmerized, then phoned his mother, who lived in another suburb a few minutes away.

“You need to turn on the news,” he said.

Like many Americans that morning, Camille LaBonte assumed at first that the crash was accidental. But her son was convinced that something more sinister had occurred.

“That wasn’t dumb. That was intentional,” he said.