The Triple Agent

Balawi was nearly worn out by the multitude of efforts to document his final thoughts. In the last days of December he had written at least two essays and held forth in at least three lengthy video interviews and a few shorter snippets. In one video, Balawi sat outdoors, sandwiched between a pair of masked gunmen, to talk about the virtues of martyrdom. Another was set up as a standard talk show interview in which Balawi answered questions from an unseen “host.” In a third, Balawi sat, somewhat nervously, next to Hakimullah Mehsud himself, as the two men proclaimed their intention to avenge the death of the Taliban leader’s cousin Baitullah.

In the latter piece, the two men spoke in different languages—Mehsud in Pashto, Balawi in Arabic and English—and barely looked at each other as they sat cross-legged on a mat surrounded by weapons and sticks of C4 explosive. The Taliban leader spoke directly to the camera and praised Balawi as a man who “wants to go on a martyrdom-seeking mission.

“His conscience did not allow him to spy on Muslim brothers for the infidels,” Mehsud said. He acknowledged that the CIA’s attack planes had inflicted “pain and sadness” and said the Taliban had finally found a way to “infiltrate the American bases through a fidayeen in order to cause them a huge blow that they will remember for a hundred years.”

Balawi, wearing military fatigues, looked small and pale as he read from written notes. “We arranged this attack together,” he said, “to let the Americans understand that the belief in God, our faith, and the piety that we strive for cannot be exchanged for all the wealth in the world.”

The piety that we strive for. From where he sat, Balawi could see Arghawan in the rearview mirror, his eyes trained on the highway, instinctively watching, as all Afghan drivers do, for freshly turned earth that could signal a roadside bomb. The guard was earning a living for his family, but he also was a servant of the Americans. Two days earlier, Balawi had declared that such people were apostates and unfit to live—“even their cooks and drivers … even he who works in the garden or carwash.”

“Killing him is more permissible than killing the American himself,” Balawi had said in one of his video recordings. “These are the hired dogs.”

A large airfield had loomed in the distance for several miles, and now Arghawan was pointing to it. Khost.

The car had been out of cell phone range for nearly two hours, but with the city outskirts fast approaching, Balawi gestured to the driver to ask for his mobile phone. He dialed a number he had written on a scrap of paper, and in a moment a voice in familiar Arabic came on the line.

“Salam alekum,” Ali bin Zeid said. Peace be with you.

Balawi apologized for the delay and repeated his concerns about being poked and prodded by Afghan guards who might well be spies. “You’ll treat me like a friend, right?” he asked.

Bin Zeid was reassuring.

The car was roaring along now, its wheels kicking up clouds of fine dust. Then it slowed at the approach to the main gate. The car passed through a canyon of high walls that narrowed at one end, squeezing traffic into a single lane at the checkpoint. The last few yards were a gauntlet of barriers and razor wire that channeled vehicles into the kill zone of a 50-caliber machine gun. Balawi sat low in his seat, the weight of the heavy vest pressing against his gut, but as bin Zeid had promised, there was no search. Arghawan turned left into the main entrance, and the car barely slowed as it zigzagged around a final series of HESCO barriers and into the open expanse of the Khost airfield.

The car turned left again to travel along the edge of the runway, past the tanker trucks, the dun-colored armored troop carriers, and an odd-looking green helicopter that stood idle on the tarmac, its main rotor blades drooping slightly like the wings of some giant prehistoric bird at rest. To the right were more high walls and barbed wire, and beyond them, the metal roofs of buildings Balawi could not yet see.

Balawi sank back into his seat. For days he had pondered what this moment would be like. In his writings he had imagined the djinn—devils—and their whispered doubts nudging him back from the edge.

“Are you going to perform jihad and get yourself killed, and let your wife remarry and your children become orphans?

“To whom are you leaving your pretty wife? Who will be dutiful to your frail mother?

“How can you abandon your wonderful work?”