The Triple Agent

Dane Paresi rose early on December 30 and was instantly mindful of two things. One was the cold—twenty-three degrees at daybreak outside the Blackwater employees’ quarters, and not so balmy inside either. Another was food. Paresi’s Special Forces call sign was Jackal, a tribute to his legendary appetite and reputation for mooching from his comrades’ plates. He had developed a special fondness for the Khost mess hall, which he judged to be superior to most of the dozens of others he had sampled in Afghanistan. By this hour, just after 6:00 A.M., the pancakes would be flying off the griddle, and the aroma of greasy bacon and black coffee would be strong enough to grab an ex–Green Beret by the collar from half a block away.

There was a weightier matter as well, one that tugged at his thoughts as he dressed in the frigid room: The CIA’s prized informant was at last on his way to Khost. Paresi had dealt with scores of informants over his career, but never had he seen a case that could simultaneously kick up so much excitement and rancor. Plans for the agent’s debriefing had preoccupied the base’s senior staff for weeks, and tempers had boiled over. For his part, Paresi was highly skeptical of the security plan the officers had rehearsed, and he had said so, sharing his concerns with both his supervisor back in Virginia and the CIA’s security chief at Khost, Scott Roberson. Roberson had independently reached the same conclusion about what he believed was the fundamental problem: too many people, standing too close to an agent who had been living undercover and, by definition, could not be trusted.

Normally, such disagreements would have been considered part of the natural order. In nearly twenty-seven years of army service, including nearly six years of Special Forces work in Afghanistan, Paresi had seen endless skirmishing over tactics. Soldiers clashed and sometimes got mad, but in the end the officers decided, and everyone did his job. Today was looking like another of those days, yet it wasn’t. Paresi couldn’t yet put a finger on what was different.

Paresi dressed quickly and dug around his hooch for his heavy coat and weapon. Space-wise, the room was just a notch above an army tent, but there were plywood walls for privacy and just enough room for his cot, clothes, and gear, along with the books and journals he brought along to pass the idle hours. The hallway outside his room led to a small lounge with a leather sofa where the contract workers could play cards, read, or just sit with their laptops to skim the headlines and check e-mail. The place smelled vaguely of dogs, a legacy of the many strays that wandered through the base and were sometimes adopted as pets. The newest of the Blackwater arrivals, a Navy SEAL named Jeremy Wise, had taken up with a white, lop-eared mongrel he named Charlie that slept in the guards’ quarters and liked chewing on the men’s beards when they sat on the sofa. Paresi hardly minded. He loved dogs and missed his, a black-and-white Boston terrier so earnestly loopy Paresi had given it the nickname Retard. Dogs reminded him of home, where he planned to be in February, putting Afghanistan and military work behind him for good.

Dane Paresi had spent his entire adult life saluting. He had wanted to be a soldier since childhood, when he played army in the woods around the Willamette veterans’ cemetery near his home in Portland, Oregon. He joined the army on the day after high school graduation, and he later became a paratrooper and served in the First Iraq War. He left the army briefly but was inevitably drawn back again, this time determined to join the army’s elite Special Forces. He sweated off thirty pounds in the grueling tryouts and training courses, but in 1995, at age thirty-two, he earned his Green Beret.

Not long afterward, while window-shopping at a strip mall near the base in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he noticed a pretty brunette eating ice cream inside a Bath & Body Works store and wandered in to try to talk to her. The young woman initially recoiled from the bone-thin man in a Batman T-shirt, white socks, and ugly, oversize glasses—“birth control glasses,” she later called them. Her friends nearly phoned security, but within a few minutes the two were laughing and making plans to meet for coffee. The future Mindy Lou Paresi wrote her name and phone number in lipstick on a paper napkin. Eight months later they were married.

Life for the newlyweds was an unending series of separations during Dane Paresi’s overseas deployments; he served in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Philippines, among other hot spots. He happened to be home at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but both husband and wife instinctively knew that things were about to get worse.

“Got to go to work, babe,” he said.