The Triple Agent

“I know that this must be so hard and confusing, but please always remember this: It wasn’t always easy for your mom or dad to leave home,” Obama said. “But they went to another country to defend our country. And they gave their lives to protect yours.

“They served in secrecy, but today every American can see their legacy,” he continued. “For the record of their service is written all around us. It’s written in the extremists who no longer threaten our country—because they eliminated them. It’s written in the attacks that never occurred—because they thwarted them.”

Panetta’s words were largely aimed at the slain officers’ CIA family.

“We are on the front lines,” he began. “We will carry this fight to the enemy.”

The agency’s secret cables had brought initial reports of successes in northern Pakistan, but in recent days the storm clouds had again gathered, with warnings of new threats from al-Qaeda cells from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and signs of renewed resilience by al-Qaeda’s leaders. The agency confirmed that Hakimullah Mehsud had narrowly escaped the attempt on his life and was again furiously threatening to find ways to kill Americans. Osama bin Laden had just resurfaced with a new audiotape praising the attempted bombing of the Detroit-bound passenger jet on Christmas Day and promising that Americans would “never dream of peace.” Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, minus one of his bodyguards, was living somewhere in the Pakistani hills, listening for the buzzing of Predators and plotting his next move. The war was far from over.

“Our resolve is unbroken,” Panetta continued, “our energy undiminished.”

After the speeches a CIA officer sang a mournful ballad, and the crowd slowly filed out of the headquarters building. It was now dusk, and the first clots of thick snowflakes started to fall.

18. MEMORIAL DAY

Arlington, Virginia—May 21, 2010

Nearly five months passed without a proper burial for Elizabeth Hanson, but at last it was happening. There had been hurdles to overcome, including initial Pentagon resistance to burying non-veteran CIA officers in the nation’s most prestigious military cemetery. Leon Panetta, who was accustomed to plowing through bureaucracies when he needed to, called on his old friend Robert Gates, a former CIA director and now the Obama administration’s defense secretary. Soon it was settled: Though a civilian, Hanson would receive the Arlington burial her family wanted. The date for this, the last of the Khost interments, was set for May 21, and Panetta, as always, would be there.

But the date arrived to find the agency’s senior leadership unusually distracted. That same morning the CIA director returned home from two days of urgent meetings in Islamabad with Pakistani government officials. Panetta and National Security Adviser James L. Jones made the trip together to share information about a young Pakistani-American charged with trying to blow up New York’s Times Square with a car bomb on May 1. The suspect, an out-of-work financial analyst named Faisal Shahzad, had told police he had received training for the bombing attempt during a 2009 trip to Pakistan’s border region. Eventually a video turned up of the Bridgeport, Connecticut, suspect embracing his Pakistani sponsor, Hakimullah Mehsud.

The car bomb, fortunately, had been a flop, but U.S. intelligence officials were stunned to discover Mehsud’s fingerprints all over the plot. A year earlier, Hakimullah Mehsud had been an obscure aide to a semiliterate tribal gangster living in the remote mountains of northwestern Pakistan. Now, catapulted into Taliban leadership by the death of his cousin Baitullah in a CIA missile strike, Hakimullah Mehsud had managed to threaten American lives in the heart of its greatest city. Was this what Mehsud meant when he warned that his fighters had “penetrated the terrorist America”? How many other bombers were on their way or perhaps already here?

But Panetta had even bigger things on his mind as he climbed into his limousine for Hanson’s graveside service. All morning his aides had been calling about a possibly momentous discovery, something unexpected that had emerged from the day’s trolling for terrorist suspects. The picture from the Pakistani tribal belt was still coming into focus, but the agency’s targeters believed they had located an al-Qaeda operative they had been seeking for a long time.

It was Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, the No. 3 terrorist commander and the man who had presided over Humam al-Balawi’s suicide attack at Khost.

Panetta, still exhausted from his overnight flight, snapped to attention. He flung questions at the counterterrorism chief. What do we know? How did we find him? How certain are you?

The reply from Langley: Not certain enough. Not yet.