The Triple Agent

The agency imposed a news blackout in an effort to keep details of the attack out of the public spotlight until the senior managers were clear on exactly what had happened and had started the process of notifying the families of the dead and wounded. Within hours, Internet news sites were buzzing about a major explosion at a secret CIA base, but the official response from Langley was silence. At headquarters and in the agency’s Amman station, teams were appointed to the grim task of locating wives and parents so they could be told in person.

The CIA had no one reasonably close to Tuscany on December 30, so it fell to the Amman station to deliver the news by phone to Racheal LaBonte. The station chief knew that the LaBonte family was in Italy, expecting Darren to show up at any time. In reality, his wife already sensed that something had gone badly wrong in Afghanistan.

Late in the afternoon she began receiving urgent text messages from Ali bin Zeid’s wife, Fida. The Jordanian woman had been watching news reports about an attack of some kind in Afghanistan, and she was worried. Bin Zeid had not phoned when he was supposed to, and now she was having trouble getting through to him. Had Racheal heard from Darren?

Racheal LaBonte figured it was just a problem with phone lines, but to ease both their minds, she punched in the number of the CIA duty officer back in Amman. The voice on the other end sounded a little nervous but was reassuring. There was no news from Khost, good or bad, Racheal was told.

A few hours later, as she put the couple’s daughter, Raina, to bed, the fear started to prick her like a thousand little knives. There was a knock on the door. It was the landlord, saying that someone from the U.S. government was trying to reach the family. A phone rang. It was the station chief from Amman.

“Are you sitting down? Is your father-in-law with you?” he was asking.

“Say what you’re going to say. I want to hear in person,” Racheal demanded.

“I don’t know how to tell you this. Darren was killed in a suicide bombing,” he began.

Racheal fell to her knees, the phone still pressed against her ear. Darren’s parents were hovering over her, asking questions. What happened?

“Darren didn’t do anything wrong,” the station chief was saying. “He was a hero.” Then: “Racheal, are you still there?”

Racheal was lost in a fog so deep it felt as though the events were happening to someone else. “You’ll have to tell Dave,” she said softly, and handed off the phone. She was dimly aware of her father-in-law, David LaBonte, shouting into the phone in a voice tinged with exasperation and pain.

“What do you mean?” he was shouting. “What are you saying?”

She looked up to see her mother-in-law, Camille, frightened and confused, fearing the worst but not yet knowing. Racheal took her hand to tell her gently that her son would not be coming home.

At the same hour small teams of CIA officers were boarding planes and cars heading to small towns in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Two of Elizabeth Hanson’s close friends trekked through a snowstorm to knock on the door of her mother’s house in suburban Chicago. Others sat with Janet Brown, whose husband, Harold, had been only a few weeks from completing his Khost assignment and was due to travel home soon; and with Molly Roberson, who was seven months pregnant with a baby girl that she and Scott Roberson had decided to call Piper. A fourth team tracked down Jennifer Matthews’s husband and children at a ski resort. Gary Anderson sat with his in-laws, Bill and Lois Matthews, in a hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to learn the details of how his wife had died.

Xe Services LLC, the company better known as Blackwater, sent its representatives to Virginia Beach, and DuPont, Washington, to meet with the wives of security guards Dane Paresi and Jeremy Wise. Dana Wise’s visitors showed up at her house as she was putting her son, Ethan, into the family truck for a quick errand. She sent the six-year-old to his room while she sat with the men in her living room. Before they left, she steeled herself for the task of breaking the news to her son.

Ethan was her child from an earlier marriage, but Jeremy had adopted him and loved him as his own. Once, when he was returning home from a long Iraq deployment, he decided to surprise Ethan by showing up at his school. It had been the happiest day in the young boy’s life.

Now there would be no more homecomings. With tears welling in her own eyes, Dana Wise scooped up her son and held him as the two sat on his bed surrounded by his toys and stuffed animals. Finally she worked up her nerve.

“Daddy’s gone,” she said softly.