The Triple Agent

Humam al-Balawi scanned the line of cars and taxis, crutch in hand, looking for his ride. It was midafternoon on December 30 when he finally arrived at Ghulam Khan, the only border crossing between Pakistan’s North Waziristan Province and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Balawi was now more than twenty-four hours late for his meeting at Khost. Would anyone still be waiting for him?

The checkpoint, a cluster of mud-brick buildings on the Pakistani side, was manned by a handful of nervous guards with rifles and one antique machine gun with its barrel pointed toward Afghanistan. Passengers crossing to the Afghan side queued up here for taxis and private cars that would ferry them across the dividing line, a mile farther up the road, and to points as far west as Kabul. The line inched forward as Balawi wavered, watching the guards in their heavy coats as they peered into trunks, checked IDs, and picked through suitcases, looking for drugs or weapons.

Physically Balawi was a wreck. His injured leg still ached, and he had spent a jarring afternoon on the rutted road from Miranshah with thirty pounds of metal and explosives strapped to his chest. Now he waited in line for a border check, clutching a Jordanian passport with a Pakistani visa that had expired seven months earlier, and wearing a bomb under his shirt. The line lurched forward again.

Balawi looked up to see someone waving to him from the cluster of taxis waiting for passengers to Afghanistan. He was tall, well built, and Afghan, to judge from his clothes. When the two were close enough to speak, he greeted Balawi softly in Pashtun-accented English.

He opened the door of a white sedan, and Balawi climbed inside. The car started and edged forward into the queue of westbound vehicles. With a flash of the driver’s ID card, the vehicle was waved through. It rumbled along a steep incline for several minutes until at last it passed the boundary marker and was in Afghan territory.

The driver mumbled a few words into his cell phone, and the two men began an hour-long descent from the mountains to the semiarid valley that is home to most of Khost Province’s one million inhabitants. The road snaked precariously along steep ridges and switchbacks here, and drivers were forced to swerve or brake to avoid craters gouged by flash floods or bombs.

The Afghan officer sat alone in the front, with his passenger directly behind him. Arghawan was one of the CIA’s favorites at Khost, hardworking and as dependable as the morning sun. Just thirty, with hazel eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, he had been an early graduate of Afghanistan’s indigenous Special Forces school and had risen to head the detachment of Afghan guards employed by the CIA to help protect the base. It was a measure of the agency’s trust that he was sent alone to pick up such an important source. An American might have begun the debriefing in the car, after a quick pat-down for weapons. But an American would not have been able to slip in and out of Pakistan as easily as a Pashtun speaker from outside Khost.

Just at the point where the hilly terrain finally leveled out, the car veered off the highway into a small village. Arghawan drove slowly along an unpaved street, looking for something, then pulled up next to a red Subaru hatchback that was idling behind a mud wall with a man sitting at the wheel. The two drivers got out of their cars and exchanged words; then Arghawan returned and opened the rear door next to Balawi.

Get out. We’re switching cars, he said. It’s a precaution.

Soon the two men were under way again, moving faster now on flat roads lined on either side by irrigated fields. It was already 4:15 P.M., nearly twenty-six hours after Balawi’s scheduled appointment at Khost.

The initial delay had been the Taliban’s fault. The CIA had expected Balawi to arrive in the Pakistani town of Miranshah on Tuesday, December 29, and then hire a car to ferry him to the border crossing, where Arghawan would be waiting. But Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud seemed determined to extract every possible propaganda benefit from Balawi’s martyrdom, so the Jordanian’s departure was delayed while the terrorist group’s videographers set up one recording session after another. By the time Balawi arrived in Miranshah, it was too late to make the sprint to the border before the checkpoint closed for the night.