The Triple Agent (16 page)

“It is exhilarating,” she told one close agency friend back home. Her Afghan assignment was going to take up a year of her life, and she would be absent from her three children for most of that time. She would miss twelve months’ worth of ball games and bedtime kisses, stomachaches and school projects, recitals and family dinners. And she would miss Christmas. But Matthews had volunteered for the posting, and she was now determined to extract every possible advantage from the experience. And to the extent she could, she would enjoy every bit of it, even the middle-of-the-night visits to the bomb shelter.

This one was mercifully short, as there were no other explosions. A chopper crew circling the base with a searchlight found the strewn body parts and quickly pieced together the story. A lone man had crept up the main approach to the base in the moonless blackness and
attempted to bury an IED, or improvised explosive device, near a dip in the road where the morning convoys would pass in a few hours. But the bomb had exploded prematurely, leaving pieces of the man scattered across the highway. An almost identical incident had occurred near the same spot a few months earlier, only it ended with two would-be bombers lying dead, one of them a schoolteacher.

In an odd way, such attacks validated Matthews’s belief in the low risk of living in such a dangerous place.
She would be safe at Khost, she told worried relatives and friends, because she would stay inside the wire. Local jihadist groups would fling themselves against the walls at regular intervals, but they never quite amounted to a serious threat.

“She told me, ‘I would never allow myself to be put in danger, because of my kids,’ ” said a CIA colleague who met with Matthews
a few weeks before she went overseas. “I think she honestly believed it.”

Matthews had already concluded that life in a war zone wasn’t so bad. Her first glimpse of her temporary Afghan home was from the heaving side of a Black Hawk helicopter making the thirty-minute run from Kabul. The city and CIA base were perched on a high plateau surrounded by dun-colored hills, and the terrain reminded her of parts of the American Southwest. “I kept expecting to see the Marlboro Man show up,” she quipped to one of her e-mail pals back in Virginia.

The land had a kind of austere beauty best appreciated from the air. To the north, and visible from the base on a clear day, were the snowcapped White Mountains—home to the infamous al-Qaeda fortress Tora Bora, from which Osama bin Laden had escaped in 2001. The invisible line separating Afghanistan from Pakistan ran along another line of low hills just twenty miles to the east. The territory in between appeared almost lush, by Afghan standards, with irrigated fields and a scattering of trees, in contrast with the relentless brown of much of the country during the hot months.

Khost, home to 160,000 mostly ethnic Pashtuns, had survived a four-year military siege by Soviet forces during the 1980s, yet was remarkably intact. Instead of ravaged, the city appeared merely poor, a maze of dirty, mud-brick houses and shops with only a single noteworthy public structure, an elegant turquoise-domed mosque built by the patriarch of the Haqqani clan, Jalaluddin Haqqani. Bordering the city to the east was the concrete sprawl of Khost Airfield and the base itself, an American island isolated from the host country by concentric rings of HESCO barriers—the ubiquitous sandbags on steroids present at all U.S. military installations in Afghanistan—and concertina wire. A few crumbling relics from the Soviet occupation still stood; they included a squat two-story control tower built by the Russians that now served as a lookout post and the dozen or so wrecked 1980s-vintage aircraft that lined one side of the runway. Most of the newer buildings were prefabricated military structures, such as cargo containers converted into
improvised barracks. All things natural and man-made—buildings, streets, houses, vehicles, uniforms—were muted shades of beige and brown, dulled further by an omnipresent coating of dust.

Life inside the wire came with not only a presumption of safety but better than average amenities. The mess hall served up surprisingly good food, including lobster or crab legs on Fridays. The main rec room’s satellite receiver beamed in live baseball and football and the newest Hollywood releases. A separate CIA lounge drew crowds of off-duty officers with its private stock of wine and ice-cold beer. The base gym gleamed with the latest fitness equipment, from elliptical machines to racks of Olympic barbell plates.

Matthews was a runner, and she quickly took up the habit of lacing up her sneakers just after dawn for a lap around the airfield with an eclectic group of CIA and military officers that called itself the Khost Running Club. After her workout she returned to her trailerlike quarters and one of the greatest perquisites accorded to her, the ranking officer on base: a private bathroom. Matthews had bargained hard for the extra privacy, perhaps the most coveted luxury of all.

The commute from her room to her CIA office was only a few steps, instead of the two hours of interstate and Beltway traffic she faced back home. But the new role that awaited her there would be her toughest adjustment by far. The subject matter, al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgency, she knew well. She had also managed people before. But now she commanded American and Afghan men and women in a place where the bombs and bullets were real. For the first time in her career, the hard choices she faced on the job carried profound consequences for the people working for her.

Matthews answered to her bosses in Langley, just as before, but now she sparred with a new set of partners who thought differently and had priorities separate from those of the CIA. They were the soldiers: Pentagon and NATO brass in Kabul, field commanders in and around Khost, and, most immediately, the Special Forces teams that operated out of the base. The commandos were military rock stars, supremely confident in their skills and used to being treated
as elites. They formed natural alliances with their Special Forces brethren within the CIA’s ranks, including several of the paramilitary officers from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, as well as the base’s security detail, which included retired Green Berets and Navy SEALs now working for Blackwater. Some were disdainful of the CIA generally, mocking the newcomers as “children” or eggheaded “Clowns in Action.” It wasn’t just that the CIA lacked military skills; many of them also had little grasp of the local language and culture and rarely left the base to venture outside, military officers said.

The dislike was mutual. In private, the case officers and analysts complained about the gun toters as “knuckle-draggers” and “hot-house flowers” with egos to match their inflated biceps. Both views were stereotypes, but Matthews was hypersensitive to male skepticism about her ability to do a job. She had battled against it for her entire career.

The CIA still was very much a man’s world when Jennifer Matthews signed up on January 3, 1989. Three other women joined the agency the same day, and the foursome quickly concluded that they needed to stick together—“
the only women in a sea of men,” one member of the quartet later recalled.

By chance, they shared a similar look: four white women in their mid-twenties, of roughly the same height and build, with brown hair and size 4 clothes. When they traveled together as a pack, as they often did, they turned heads in Langley’s buttoned-down corridors. The four lunched together in the cafeteria, took group vacations, and even planned one another’s weddings. Matthews felt obliged to serve as leader because she was the oldest by a few weeks. She also was the most ambitious. When the new recruits were asked during orientation about their future plans, Matthews answered without hesitation: “I’m going to be the DCI”—director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

That kind of unabashed ambition, and a belief that she could conquer anything through willpower and hard work, was a lifelong trademark. As a young girl, the middle of three children born to a press operator and a nurse in a working-class suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she bored into her books while her girlfriends chased boys and partied. She grew up with a strong feminist streak and a belief in a divine will that ultimately shapes all human destiny. Her social world as a child and teenager revolved around a small Christian fundamentalist congregation that embraced both patriotism and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Her theology evolved as she grew older, but she considered herself an evangelical Christian for the rest of her life.

After high school she attended a small Baptist university in western Ohio called Cedarville, a school that advertises its commitment to teaching a creationist approach to science. There she studied broadcasting and met a fellow cross-country runner whom she later married, a religiously devout chemistry student named Gary Anderson. Both later attended nearby Miami University of Ohio, where Matthews earned a master’s degree in political science. She worked briefly as a paralegal before deciding, with encouragement from a relative who served in the intelligence community, to try for a job at the CIA.

Very few women had been permitted to join the elite fraternity of case officers in those days, so Matthews and her three new CIA friends took positions that traditionally were open to women. Matthews became an imagery analyst and spent many hours poring over satellite photos of suspected chemical weapons factories in Libya. A natural writer, she later became a reports officer, a job that entailed translating raw intelligence from the field into concise prose.

Even there, Matthews was driven by a perceived need to outshine the men around her just to be accepted, remembered a female colleague who was part of her close circle of friends.

“We worked long, hard hours. We went the extra mile. And we routinely outran our male counterparts,” said the friend, who, like
Matthews, eventually became an undercover operative with a protected identity.

Matthews briefly followed her husband to Geneva, where he worked for a Swiss company. But afterward the couple settled into a suburban Washington lifestyle that was organized largely to support her career. Because they worked in different cities—Matthews in the Washington suburbs, her husband in Richmond—they bought a house roughly in the middle, near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and logged more than a hundred miles a day in their commutes. But Matthews kept her maiden name, and when children arrived, the couple employed nannies so she could quickly return to the office. Friends say she adored her three children, but her brain was wired for work. Staying at home would have been as alien to her as growing fins and living in the ocean.

“She was very much a feminist in that way, yet she also was extremely traditional in her views about marriage and family,” said the agency friend. “There was a dichotomy about her that allowed her to separate different parts of her life. It’s part of what made her a good analyst.”

Matthews rejoined the agency after returning from Switzerland in 1996, but with entirely new aspirations. She shifted from the agency’s analytical division to the Directorate of Operations, the side of the CIA that runs clandestine missions overseas. The new job would require weeks of physically rigorous training at the CIA boot camp known as the Farm. Eventually she would also have to give up her right to her own name, becoming an officer “under cover.” Like Valerie Plame, her soon-to-be-famous colleague in the operations division, her very identity was a government secret.

Matthews truly hit her stride at the CIA when she joined a small unit within the directorate’s counterterrorism division known internally as Alec Station. It consisted of a mix of officers from different backgrounds, all devoted to the study of a little-known Islamic terrorist group that called itself the Base, or al-Qaeda. When she first joined in 1996, the unit was regarded as a CIA backwater. Terrorist groups were a second-rate threat, and al-Qaeda was a bit player compared
with the better-funded Hezbollah and Hamas. But things began to change in 1998 after al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 220 people. The attacks catapulted bin Laden to a spot on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Suddenly Alec Station and its analysts were in demand.

As a group
the officers became so al-Qaeda obsessed that they jokingly referred to themselves as the Manson Family. The hard part was convincing official Washington that Osama bin Laden was a threat to the U.S. homeland. Led by Matthews’s boss, a blunt-spoken analyst named Michael Scheuer, they eventually won the backing of senior CIA leaders, including Director George Tenet, and Cofer Black, who headed the Counterterrorism Center. The officers in the late 1990s drew up contingency plans for killing bin Laden and driving his terrorist allies out of Afghanistan, using friendly Afghan fighters and the agency’s newly acquired unmanned aerial vehicle, the Predator. But the Clinton administration passed on a chance to assassinate bin Laden in 1999, and the newly elected Bush administration deflected Tenet’s urgent requests for action and ultimately postponed any significant policy discussions about al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001. Seven days later al-Qaeda–trained hijackers crashed commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The morning of the attack was a normal workday at Langley, and many CIA employees were just arriving at the office as the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower at 8:46
A.M
. When the second tower was struck seventeen minutes later, there was an audible gasp of recognition:
This is the work of al-Qaeda
.

Cofer Black, the CIA’s counterterrorism director, assuming that CIA headquarters was likely on the terrorists’ attack list, ordered most of the staff out of the building. He and the Alec Station analysts stayed behind and got to work. Some did not see their families again for days.

“
We’re at war now, a different kind of war than we’ve ever fought before,” Black told the counterterrorism team as he prepared to
issue marching orders. “We’re all going to have to do our part. And not all of us are going to make it back.”

Matthews’s close friends say her experiences during those weeks forever changed her. Before September 11 she had worked long hours with her Alec Station colleagues, trying to uncover the al-Qaeda plot they believed was in the works, but after the terrorist attacks she slept in a chair in her office and didn’t go home for days. Pregnant with her third child at the time, she became physically exhausted and eventually suffered a miscarriage, a misfortune that she suspected was due to the stress of her job. Yet she continued to work, telling friends repeatedly that she believed that a new attack was imminent, and only the CIA had the resources to stop it. Where al-Qaeda was concerned, Matthews had “drunk the Kool-Aid,” a CIA friend said.