The Triple Agent

The pressure for some kind of response was now becoming exquisite. The old warriors cursed the Americans, cast nervous glances at the drones overhead, and eyed the Jordanian doctor expectantly. An opportunity beckoned—the flimsiest of threads, perhaps, but at least it was something. When, exactly, would Balawi’s words taste his blood?

His options dwindling as December neared its end, Balawi’s mind raged with the desperation of a condemned man. One evening he sat down to try to write, as though he could somehow exorcise his doubts by putting them on paper. As he started, he was struck by the irony of what he was attempting to do.

“I have often wished to know what is going on in the head of a martyr before the martyrdom-seeking operation,” he wrote. “It is now my turn today to fulfill the wishes of others.”

He began to list his private fears, pausing to admit deep misgivings about the value of suicide attacks. The problem, he acknowledged, is that one could “only do it once in your life,” and there was a real chance that he would fail and squander his life for nothing. Why not instead fight on the front lines? he asked himself. Or why not use his brain to come up with something better, a “bigger operation that hurts the enemies of God”?

Balawi tried to convince himself that “intent” was the only thing that mattered: God would honor his sacrifice, even if he were shot and killed before he could press the detonator switch. The harder question was whether he could go through with it. How would he feel in those final seconds, with only a slight twitch separating him from permanent annihilation?

“Do you not fear to be cowardly at the last moment,” he asked himself, “and be unable to press the button?”

On December 28, Humam al-Balawi returned to the public call office to compose a brief note to his countryman Ali bin Zeid. You win, he wrote.

I’ll meet your driver in Miranshah this afternoon as requested, Balawi continued. See you tomorrow in Khost.

Afterward Balawi and two al-Qaeda associates drove to a field to record some video footage of the Jordanian firing a few rounds from an AK-47, the gun jerking upward as bullets kicked up dust spouts in the distance. He put his crutch aside for the photos, so he wouldn’t appear injured, but as he walked, he limped badly from his leg injury.

Later that morning Balawi went to his room and tried on the suicide vest. He tightened the straps, and the weight of thirty pounds of explosive and metal cut into his thin shoulders. He put on his kameez shirt and gray patou, the shawl-like blanket that doubles as a cloak and mobile prayer mat, and walked back outside where his friend with the video camera was waiting beside a white hatchback. Balawi looked tired, he had aged visibly in nine months, and his face below his right eye still bore scars from the motorcycle crash.

Balawi sat in the driver’s seat as the camera rolled. He had decided that his martyr’s message should be in English, to ensure the widest audience if the video made its way to the Internet, and he chose lines intended to project a kind of cinematic, bad-guy toughness, as though he were a Hollywood mobster delivering an ultimatum.

“We will get you, CIA team. Insha’ Allah—God willing—we will bring you down,” he said. “Don’t think that just by pressing a button and killing mujahideen, you are safe. Insha’ Allah, we’ll come to you in an unexpected way.”

Balawi raised his left hand to reveal what appeared to be a wrist-watch beneath his kameez sleeve. “Look, this is for you: It’s not a watch, it’s a detonator,” he said. But the tough-guy routine was falling short. Balawi seemed agitated and bitter, and he turned his head from the camera whenever he finished a thought. His eyes were red as he spit out his last words.

“This is my goal: to kill you, and to kill your Jordanian partner, and Insha’ Allah, I will go to al-Firdaws—paradise,” he said. “And you will be sent to hell.”

With the final phrase his voice cracked, as though he were straining to fight back tears. Balawi looked away, and the image went dark.

14. NO GOD BUT GOD

Khost, Afghanistan—December 30, 2009