The Triple Agent

“You won, by the Lord of the Ka’aba, O Abu-Leila, God willing,” he said. “You were truthful, and you proved it.”

Al-Masri’s reaction was restrained in comparison to the Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud’s. Balawi’s former host had gone to the trouble of videotaping the Jordanian before his death, and so he had evidence of his ties to the suicide mission. But in the days after the attack, rival Taliban groups began to assert their own claims. One faction boasted that a disgruntled Afghan soldier was behind the bombing.

Hakimullah was so incensed that he began sending e-mails to Western journalists, using his real name.

“We claim the responsibility for the attack on the CIA in Afghanistan,” Hakimullah Mehsud wrote in the e-mails. The bombing was “revenge for the killing of Baitullah Mehsud and the killing of al-Qaeda’s Abdullah,” an apparent reference to Abdullah Said al-Libi.

The thirty-year-old Taliban leader also began to hint of a bold new phase for the Mehsud clan. The suicide bombing had been his group’s biggest operation outside its home base, and it gave a boost to Hakimullah Mehsud’s personal clout. He had been a local jihadist with parochial aspirations, but no longer. Like his slain cousin, he began to boast of plans to attack the West, starting with “America, the criminal state,” which he blamed for the death of Baitullah Mehsud.

“Our fidaeen have penetrated the terrorist America,” Hakimullah Mehsud brashly reported in a videotaped warning. “We will inflict extremely painful blows on the fanatic America.”

Balawi had predicted as much in the hours before his death. His sacrifice, he said in one of his final video recordings, was to be the “first of the revenge operations against the Americans and their drone teams, outside the Pakistani borders.”

In other words, Khost was only the beginning.

At 8:30 A.M. on January 4 the CIA’s senior managers gathered in the director’s office for the most solemn Monday staff meeting in nearly a decade. It began with a moment of silence, at Leon Panetta’s request. The agency’s top counterterrorism officials bowed their heads, some praying while others wept.

The normally loquacious Panetta was subdued, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. Soon after the meeting he would depart Langley for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet the military plane carrying the bodies home. He would stand on the tarmac in the bitter cold to watch the flag-draped coffins as they were carried, one by one, from the aircraft. He would huddle with the families in an empty hangar for a brief memorial, the first of many such services scheduled over the coming days.

Panetta had not known exactly when the meeting with Balawi would take place, but he had known how the operation was to unfold, and he had eagerly awaited the results. Now he bore the burden of knowing the names and faces of each of the dead and wounded. He realized he had met several of them in his travels to CIA bases, visits that nearly always included an informal town hall session where ordinary case officers and analysts could ask questions of the CIA director. He had felt proud to lead such smart, capable men and women. Now, in his private conversations with close friends, he agonized that Balawi’s treachery had not been spotted earlier. Panetta reread the files about the informant and studied the photos of the red Subaru with its blown-out windows and hundreds of shrapnel holes. He tried to project an aura of calm, but he was deeply frustrated. How could they have let a terrorist slip in like that? he asked repeatedly. “Leon felt accountable,” said an administration friend who met with him during the initial days after the attack. “We all did—everyone who knew about the meeting that day.”

But when Panetta at last stood up in front of the CIA’s division managers at their morning meeting, his voice was firm. After the moment of silence, he told the group to prepare to be exceptionally busy. There would be a full investigation in time, he said, but for the moment the CIA was to focus its energies on the tribal belt of northwestern Pakistan. The loss of seven officers in a day was historic—the worst in twenty-five years—but the agency could not allow the enemy to see even the slightest pause. In fact exactly the opposite would happen, he said.

“When you are at war there are risks that you take, but we are a family—we have to be family,” he said. “We now have to pull together to not only deal with the pain of this loss but also to pull together to make sure that we fulfill the mission.”

Panetta continued to speak as the agency’s veterans sat quietly.

“We hit them hard this past year, and they’re going to try to hit us back,” he said. “But we have to stay on the offensive.”

Indeed, a new offensive had already begun.