The Triple Agent

The man was celebrated for his ingeniously simple designs that were both reliable and cheap, two key selling points for a terrorist organization that waged suicide bombings on an industrial scale. He started with a sturdy cotton vest, often surplus military gear from the local bazaar, and attached thick straps so it could be secured snugly against the torso. He added fabric pouches and stuffed them with packets of white acetone peroxide powder, an explosive popular in Pakistan’s tribal region because it can be cooked up at home using common ingredients. Next came the shrapnel layer, which consisted of hundreds of nails or other bits of metal glued to sheets of thick, adhesive-backed paper or cloth. Finally, he inserted blasting caps in the powder and attached them to wires that ran to a small nine-volt battery and a cheap detonator switch. The latter item he sewed into a separate pouch that closed with a zipper. That, he explained, was to prevent excitable young martyrs-to-be from blowing themselves up too quickly. An extra second or two of fumbling with the zipper would remind the bomber to move in closer to his target to ensure the maximum possible carnage.

The vest’s tight constraints and the positioning of the explosive pouches would channel the energy of the blast outward, toward whoever stood directly in front of him. Some of that energy wave would inevitably roll upward, ripping the bomber’s body apart at its weakest point, between the neck bones and lower jaw. It accounts for the curious phenomenon in which suicide bombers’ heads are severed clean at the moment of detonation and are later found in a state of perfect preservation several yards away from the torso’s shredded remains. When waves of suicide bombers attacked Israeli commuter buses and cafés during the Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, police discovered that they could often distinguish the dead bomber from his victims by finding the corpse that was minus its head.

On this day a group of young Pakistani recruits, some of them tapped as future suicide bombers, gathered to admire the vest maker as he worked. One of them took photos with his cell phone as the man reached into his explosives chest and pulled out a surprise: not the usual bags of powder, but doughy sticks of a far more powerful military explosive called C4. He kneaded the sticks to flatten them and began to pack them into a row of thirteen fabric pouches he had sewn into the outside of the vest. Next he dipped a paintbrush into a bucket of industrial adhesive and slathered the white goo over a large square of sturdy cotton. The man then patiently studded the sheet with metal bits, piece by piece and row by row, alternating marble-size steel ball bearings with nails and scrap and, finally, some shiny twisted pieces that would have been recognizable to any American who happened to be in the room: children’s jacks.

Among the spectators, there had been lively discussions about the man who would likely wear the special vest. Most speculation centered on the young foreigner whom the recruits called Abu Leila, using the Arab practice of referring to adult men by the name of their oldest child and the word Abu, or “father of.” But Leila’s father wasn’t nearly so certain. When he left for Pakistan, Humam al-Balawi imagined himself a mujahideen, a holy warrior, fighting and maybe even dying in a righteous struggle against the enemies of God. What he hadn’t pictured for himself was a suicide vest. The one in the tailor’s shop in Datta Khel was still coming together, row after metal-studded row, but there was still time. In the coming days Balawi tried his best to make sure that the vest ended up belonging to someone else. Anyone but him.

Nothing had turned out as Balawi expected.

The death of Baitullah Mehsud had seemed like the end of the line and maybe the end of his life. The diminutive Mehsud had been Balawi’s host and principal defender when other Taliban leaders and even his own aides eyed the physician warily. Now that he was gone, the suspicions returned. Perhaps it had been the Jordanian who had directed the missiles against Taliban commanders, including Baitullah Mehsud himself.

Fortunately for Balawi, there were plenty of other possible suspects. Fifteen months of relentless Predator strikes had given rise to outlandish theories about how the CIA’s missiles found their targets with such precision. Much of the speculation centered on an “invisible ink” sprayed on automobiles with syringes or on mysterious microchips, called ghamay or “ring stones” by some Pakistanis, that served as homing beacons for missiles and could supposedly be hidden inside cigarettes or even disguised as ordinary stones. Many a tribesman had been executed by the Taliban on suspicion of planting the devices around the homes of prominent fighters.