The Triple Agent

The agency’s Khost review did confirm numerous missteps. It concluded that Jennifer Matthews and her Khost team—with the support of more senior officials at Kabul and Langley—failed to follow standard safety procedures in their meeting with Balawi, apparently out of an eagerness to secure the informant’s cooperation. Warnings that might have alerted the CIA to Balawi’s deception were never passed along, in part because the messages weren’t entirely trusted, investigators concluded. Critical insights were not shared with decision makers because they were expressed in private e-mails and text messages that never became part of the agency’s reservoir of knowledge about Humam al-Balawi. At the same time, expectations were raised in high-level meetings in Washington before key facts were known.

As a result, both Matthews and senior managers at Langley believed that Balawi was a trusted Jordanian agent, investigators found, and the cautions raised by those who knew him best—Ali bin Zeid and Darren LaBonte—were trumped by the “evidence” the officers could see with their own eyes: the words and images Balawi e-mailed from inside al-Qaeda’s tent.

“All they had seen and read, plus the urgency of getting to the top leadership of al-Qaeda, led to a situation in which the major preoccupation was the good health and safety of the man who was intent on becoming a suicide bomber,” said Ambassador Thomas Pickering, coleader of the independent review.

The agency’s investigators recommended significant reforms, several of which were quickly implemented by Panetta and his team. The agency raised its standards for training and experience for overseas managers, even though the investigators concluded that inexperience was not a decisive factor at Khost. CIA officials also tightened security procedures for their overseas bases and established a system of “red teams” to probe the agency’s defenses as an enemy would do, as well as internal reviews to guard against double agents and spies.

No single person or failure caused the disaster at Khost, the investigators found. Yet just as had happened before the September 11 terrorist attacks, managers at every level were blinded to warnings and problems that would seem screamingly obvious in hindsight.

After September 11 a bipartisan commission sought to distill in a single report why so many government departments had failed to prevent al-Qaeda’s plot to turn commercial jets into missiles against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The 9/11 Commission identified scores of tactical mistakes by the CIA, the FBI, and others, but it said the larger lapse was the agencies’ inability to conceive of the inconceivable.

“The most important failure was one of imagination,” the panel said in its 2004 report.

The suicide attack on Khost, while hardly comparable in scale, shared in at least this one root cause. Before December 30, 2009, no one at the CIA had dreamed that an informant would set up a meeting with his handlers just so he could kill them along with himself. Over the course of the CIA’s first sixty-two years, a multitude of double agents, informants, and spies had lied, defrauded, betrayed, stolen money, or skipped town. Not one had ever blown himself up.

Balawi, through the power of his manufactured evidence, put himself on a path that would inevitably end with a confrontation. Foresight might have limited the number of deaths, yet even the most powerful and prescient observer could not have constrained the two singular forces that collided in Khost in the fading light of December 30, 2009.

One was the mind of Humam al-Balawi, a man who scudded and wove between towering waves, unsure of his destination and never exactly what he seemed.

The other was the eagerness of war-weary spies who saw a mirage and desperately wanted it to be real.

Arlington’s marble headstones had lain beneath a thick blanket of snow when Leon Panetta visited in January to preside over the burials of Jennifer Matthews and Darren LaBonte. Now the cemetery was ablaze with color, from crimson tulips and pink dogwood blossoms to the emerald green of new grass, all bathed in brilliant sunshine. More than three hundred people, including a large contingent of Elizabeth Hanson’s CIA friends, trooped quietly through the rows of headstones to stand with her parents and brother at her graveside. Two of them walked with crutches because of leg wounds suffered in the bombing at Khost.

The crowd gathered beneath a giant oak tree that shaded the spot where Hanson’s ashes, in a mahogany box bearing the CIA seal, was to be buried. An honor guard folded an American flag, which was presented to Hanson’s mother. “She guarded the flag, and now the flag guards her forever,” the military chaplain said.

As the eulogies were spoken, Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, stood near the back of the crowd with an eye on his muted cell phone. The wait was nearly over. It was time for a decision, and this one would be harder than most.