The Triple Agent

But the search for spies was interrupted when Baitullah Mehsud’s followers began skirmishing over who would replace the dead Taliban leader. One of the disputes turned into a gun battle that very nearly killed Hakimullah Mehsud, Baitullah’s charismatic younger cousin and the presumed front-runner in the leadership contest. The wounded Hakimullah needed a doctor, and Balawi’s skills likely saved the young man’s life and perhaps his own.

Barely thirty, Hakimullah was tall and handsome, a shaggy Che Guevara to Baitullah’s diminutive Karl Marx, but the men shared the same impetuousness, and both took a liking to the Jordanian physician. Hakimullah had been affected deeply by his cousin’s death, and the moral obligation of badal, the Pashtun tribal tradition of blood vengeance, fell on his shoulders as the new chief. Balawi possessed useful abilities, apparently including the means to plant messages inside the CIA. Could he help avenge Baitullah’s death?

For the moment, Hakimullah decided, Balawi could use military training. The Mehsud clan ran training camps for jihadist recruits, and soon the doctor was on his way to a dusty camp in a North Waziristan village called Issori, with a few dozen other young men who aspired to fight for the Taliban.

Now Balawi’s days started at 5:30 A.M. and continued through the midday with calisthenics, target practice, and obstacle courses. In the afternoons the trainees studied bomb making, including the mechanics of suicide vests and roadside bombs. The group broke for meals and for mandatory daily prayers at the mosque and gathered in the evenings for discussions of theology and tactics. The local Pashtun youths in their teens and twenties who made up the bulk of the class eagerly welcomed the older Arab doctor who was said to be the famous essayist Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. But the camp’s physically taxing regimen showed up Balawi’s shortcomings in embarrassing ways. When the course ended, he still struggled with the basics of firing the AK-47 assault rifle, consistently allowing the barrel to jerk upward with the recoil so his shots flew well high of the target.

The worst moment occurred during a practice session for one of the Taliban’s favorite tactics, a vehicle ambush involving a pair of motorcycle assassins. Balawi had never driven a motorcycle, yet he found himself roaring along a dirt road, trying to simultaneously cling to the handlebars and to a weapon. Balawi lost control of his bike in the soft dirt and slammed into the second motorcycle, knocking both vehicles to the ground. Balawi felt a painful pop in his lower right leg and then the scrape of gravel against his face and arm as he skidded across the road. He lay still for a moment, mentally assessing the damage. The fibula bone in his left leg was broken.

The injury to his reputation, no doubt, was even worse. What good was a jihadist who had no aptitude for fighting?

Unbeknownst to Balawi, he had been watched and studied for months by men who saw potential in him. Finally, in the weeks after Baitullah Mehsud’s death, al-Qaeda made its move.

Balawi was invited to meet with a midlevel commander named Abdullah Said al-Libi, an operations chief for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Soon afterward, the Libyan native made room for the physician in his compound, and Balawi moved in for a short stay. The Jordanian gradually was introduced to others within the small circle of al-Qaeda leaders in North Waziristan. Balawi drank tea with Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s religious adviser and diplomat. Finally he was introduced to the man who, for all practical purposes, was the chief tactical commander for all of al-Qaeda. In the leadership charts back in Langley, the man known as Sheikh Saeed al-Masri was ranked as the terrorist group’s No. 3. In reality, al-Masri called the shots while al-Qaeda’s top two communicated only rarely, through trusted messengers.

Al-Masri squinted at Balawi through a pair of narrow, oddly feminine glasses. The cagey old warrior was fifty-three but looked ancient, his long face weathered and deeply creased and his unkempt beard flecked with gray. On his forehead, just below his white turban, was a thumb-shaped bruise, a legacy of years of pressing his head against the floor during daily prayers.

The sheikh was not one for small talk. As a young radical growing up in Cairo, the man born as Mustafa Ahmed Abu al-Yazid had been imprisoned and tortured, along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, for conspiring to kill Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. He had joined Zawahiri’s Egyptian terrorist cell, and been present at the merger with al-Qaeda. He had survived numerous attempts on his life, including a close call in 2006, when CIA missiles struck a house in northern Pakistan where Zawahiri was believed to be a guest.