The Triple Agent

“It’s really bad,” one of them said. “Seven officers are dead.”

The men had just broken the news to the most senior officer in the building.

Details were still coming in, and already a feeling akin to shell shock was spreading through the executive floor. Hayden, unsure of what else to do, wandered over to his old office and found Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, on the phone with his boss in California, relaying the latest updates.

The first reports had arrived at Panetta’s Monterey, California, home just before 5:00 A.M., with a rap on the director’s bedroom door by a member of his security detail. One of his aides urgently needed to speak with him on the secure line, Panetta was told.

“I’ve got terrible news,” the woman began. “We’ve lost seven of our officers in Khost.”

“What the hell happened?” Panetta shouted, instantly awake. He heard the words Jordanian informant and suicide bomber and the outlines of the disaster crystallized in his mind. The double agent. The long-awaited meeting. The chance to get Ayman al-Zawahiri. It had all been a trick.

Panetta pressed for details, but there were few at that hour. He hung up the phone and sat, hoping that it was somehow a bad dream.

As the chief of staff for the Clinton White House he had stood by the president in 1993, when news broke of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, an attack by American right-wing extremists that killed 168 people. But never had men and women fallen under his direct command.

This is truly war, he thought.

With Bash on the line he began to make phone calls, thinking that the bad news should come first from him. He called Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary. He tapped in the number for Vice President Joe Biden.

Then he called the president.

Barack Obama was on Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but after a moment the CIA director was patched through. We lost seven officers in Khost, Panetta began.

“This guy that we thought was going to take us to Zawahiri turned out to be a double agent and blew himself up,” he told the president.

The two talked for a few minutes while Panetta summarized the scant facts he had. Obama listened quietly at first, then stopped Panetta repeatedly to press for details. I want to understand what happened, he said.

The two talked about what would come next. Family notifications. Services. The White House should be part of it, Obama said, thinking out loud. The families should know that we’re with them.

Please keep me posted, Leon, the president said, finally. If there’s anything at all that I can do …

Back at Langley, Bash had invited Hayden to stay, so he did. Some of the names of the victims were starting to trickle in, and one of them pierced Hayden to his core.

Elizabeth Hanson.

He could still picture her young face from the times she had presented updates on al-Qaeda at senior staff meetings. He remembered her voice from late-night calls from the Counterterrorism Center, when the agency was hot on the trail of some senior commander in Pakistan. She was smart, confident, attractive, a walking recruitment poster for the agency. She exuded the kind of enthusiasm and competence that had made Hayden proud when he served as director.

Hayden sat for a long time in the director’s office with Bash and Sulick, talking about the events, the people, wondering what had gone wrong. Finally he said good-bye to the others and let himself out. He walked past the guard station and through the marble entranceway, with its famous engraving of the CIA seal on the floor. He passed the CIA’s fallen officer memorial, where dozens of granite stars honor slain intelligence operatives, including many whose names will forever remain secret.

Outside, it was overcast and freezing. Hayden hurried to his vehicle and sat for several minutes in the parking lot. He thought about Hanson and the others and the many families who at this hour did not yet know what lay ahead for them.

Alone in his car in the bitter cold, Michael Hayden wept.

Even before the extent of the losses was known, top CIA officials inaugurated a plan that would guide the agency’s response over the coming days. The first immediate step was to seal off Khost entirely, locking down the base itself and cutting communications to the outside world. A few cell phone calls made it to the United States before the access was shut. One of them was from a Special Forces officer who had witnessed the bombing’s aftermath and called a CIA friend with the news.

“Your base just got blown up,” he said.