The Triple Agent

Bin Laden set up housekeeping within the compound in 2005, joined by three of his five wives and at least two of his eighteen children. The house had no telephone or Internet, but it had a shaded garden for morning strolls and a balcony with its own seven-foot-tall privacy barrier so the terrorist mastermind could sun himself in seclusion. His third-floor bedroom window afforded a view of cabbage fields, grazing cattle, and craggy hills, while the satellite TV served up a daily diet of Arab-language soap operas and news shows. In March 2011, in his sixth year inside the compound, he quietly marked his fifty-fourth birthday, a middle-aged man with graying locks and a thickening waist, his once-towering global ambitions now confined to a space smaller than a soccer field.

Unknown to him, even this small sanctuary was soon to disappear.

Thousands of miles away in another green suburb, tiny scraps of data, collected and studied by scores of different people over nearly a decade, had been assembled like a giant puzzle to reveal a possible answer to one of the most vexing mysteries of the age. For the first time since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA believed it knew where to find bin Laden.

The trail of evidence stretched across three continents. It started in Pakistan, where security forces captured a pair of midlevel al-Qaeda operatives with knowledge of the terrorist group’s inner workings. It wound through a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe, where the interrogation of one of the men yielded a partial name. It picked up intensity in Langley, Virginia, where Jennifer Matthews and her colleagues in the CIA’s bin Laden unit poured over the new data searching for patterns and connections. In 2007, it reached the office of then-CIA director Michael V. Hayden, who was briefed by his senior counterterrorism advisers one morning about a potentially momentous discovery: They had learned the name of the trusted al-Qaeda courier who served as bin Laden’s personal connection to the outside world. All that remained was to find the man who would lead them to bin Laden’s door.

“We think we’ve found a path forward,” one of Hayden’s briefers said.

The task of locating bin Laden’s courier could take months or even years, Hayden knew, but he considered the discovery important enough to warrant a full airing during one of his regular meetings with President George W. Bush and his national security advisers. True, there had been other promising leads—some of them more akin to Elvis Presley sightings than intelligence tips, Hayden thought. This one seemed more promising than most, but it was not, he cautioned, a breakthrough.

“There is rarely a ‘eureka’ moment,” Hayden has said. “It’s one grain of sand at a time.”

Indeed, the progress in finding the courier remained agonizingly slow. The man had first come to the CIA’s attention soon after the September 11 attacks, when investigators learned of bin Laden’s preference for using personal couriers to send messages, rather than relying on e-mail or phone calls that could be electronically tracked. Captured Afghan fighters spoke of a particularly favored courier, a young Pashtun businessman who was known within al-Qaeda circles by his jihadist name, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But it took the CIA several years and a series of lucky breaks—including the arrests of the two al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan in 2004 and 2005—before the agency discovered his real name: Sheikh Abu Ahmed. Still, CIA officials had no idea where to find him.

In 2007, with Hayden at the helm, the CIA embarked on a massive search for the mysterious courier. The National Security Agency, with its computer networks and global eavesdropping capabilities, swept phone and Internet lines for the name. At the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Elizabeth Hanson’s team of targeters assembled a profile of the man and scrubbed interrogation transcripts for clues that might lead to a family member, business connection, or hometown. The search was still active in the closing weeks of 2009 when Matthews and Hanson, by then at Khost, turned their attention to another possible path to bin Laden’s inner circle, the Jordanian agent Humam al-Balawi.