The Triple Agent

Humam al-Balawi was not making it easy. Jordanian intelligence captain Ali bin Zeid, unsure how Balawi would react, had broached the idea of a meeting somewhat tentatively at first. Your reports have been most interesting, bin Zeid wrote in a late-November missive. Now we’d like to take things up a notch.

Balawi seemed instantly agreeable to the idea of seeing bin Zeid again. But he put up so many conditions and qualifiers that bin Zeid was left wondering whether the meeting would ever come about.

Yes, but I don’t want to meet with anyone except you, he wrote at one point.

Yes, but it’s too dangerous to cross the border, he said in a separate note. And, finally: Yes, we should meet. But I think you should come to me.

Over several days of exchanged messages, Balawi became increasingly insistent. The ideal meeting place, he declared, was Miranshah, North Waziristan’s sprawling market town just across the mountains from Afghanistan. Balawi knew the town and would find a secure place where both he and his Jordanian countryman would be safe. There were cafés and bazaars, shops and mosques, all of them crowded with people. The two Jordanians could meet discreetly without attracting attention, and then Balawi could be on his way again.

Bin Zeid gently pushed back. North Waziristan was too risky, he said. Khost, on the other hand, was a fortified military camp guarded by Special Forces commandos and attack helicopters. Both men would be safer there.

“I’m the one who’s taking all the risks over here,” Balawi protested. He was sure that Afghan spies at the American base would betray him, and then he’d be finished, killed in the most gruesome of ways. Balawi had seen what the Taliban did to suspected informants. He repeated his plea.

Come to Miranshah, he wrote.

Bin Zeid shared the e-mails with his CIA partner, Darren LaBonte, who was starting to feel queasy. LaBonte was getting hammered with requests for updates from his bosses in Amman and Langley, and his answers so far had not been popular. The two partners talked for hours about Balawi and his e-mails and what it all meant. This was shaping up as the biggest case either man had ever been associated with; yet more than anyone around them, they harbored doubts. The video evidence had been staggeringly impressive, but also perplexing. How was it that Balawi, this frightened mouse of a doctor who weeks earlier had begged to come home, had come up with something so spectacular? Was Balawi a con artist? Was he trying to scam the CIA for more money, as so many bogus informants had done in the past? Perhaps Balawi was everything he seemed, but as the two men hashed it over, they were less than convinced. It was too much, too soon.

Later LaBonte tried to summarize his concerns in an internal memo. The bottom line, he wrote, was that the CIA didn’t yet know enough about the Jordanian agent to trust him entirely. He seemed real enough, but that wasn’t a sound basis for divining the man’s intentions.

“We need to go slow on this case,” he wrote.

The top CIA officer in Amman was a veteran operative who had served in Pakistan and understood the fickle art of running covert agents better than most. The station chief, whose name is classified, accepted LaBonte’s recounting of the key facts of the Balawi case, but he reached an entirely different conclusion: A meeting with Balawi was urgently needed precisely because the CIA knew so little about the informant and his motivations. Yes, there were risks, the station manager said. But if ever there was a moment for risk taking, it was this one.

Let’s move forward, he said.

Ali bin Zeid spent the first days of December preparing for what he believed would be a short trip. Winters in eastern Afghanistan are notoriously cold, so bin Zeid called his older brother, Hassan, and asked to borrow his heavy jacket, the one with the thick insulation and the North Face logo. He did some last-minute shopping and buffed up the black Desert Eagle .44 Magnum he liked to take on his business trips.

Then, just days before his planned departure, bin Zeid was summoned unexpectedly to a meeting on the Mukhabarat’s executive floor. He entered a conference room to find his immediate supervisor and several other senior officials waiting for him, all dark suits and ties, their faces as dour as buzzards’.

We’re sending someone else to Afghanistan to meet with Balawi, one of the officers said. The mission is simply too risky for someone from the royal family.

Bin Zeid exploded. “But it’s my case,” he protested.