The Triple Agent (19 page)

A second message arrived on the day his daughter, Raina, was born. LaBonte had flown all night from Afghanistan to make it home for the delivery, and he arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport to discover that his wife, Racheal, was already in labor. He jumped into his father’s waiting car, and the pair cut and swerved through sixty-five miles of traffic to the Annapolis, Maryland, hospital where the doctors were trying their best to slow the clock. The car roared up to the hospital door, and LaBonte leaped out and blew past orderlies and wheelchairs in a sprint to the maternity ward. The nurses draped a gown over the sweaty, unwashed father-to-be and led him into the delivery room just in time to see his first child brought into the world.

Just over a year later LaBonte put the body armor and night-vision goggles away and said good-bye to Afghanistan, perhaps forever. His new posting, the CIA’s largest counterterrorism hub in the Middle East, was hardly sleepy, but the Jordanian capital was stable enough to accommodate officers’ families. For the first time in years, LaBonte could look forward to evenings at home with his wife, and Racheal could be spared the constant worrying that her husband had been wounded in an ambush or blown up by a roadside bomb.

But Amman was no rest stop. By March 2009, three months after the move, the contours of LaBonte’s new role were finally clear. As he had hoped, he now hunted even bigger quarry, international terrorists, rather than the Taliban hirelings he had often chased in the Afghan hills. Soon he was busier than ever, routinely working late into the evening and traveling abroad for secret meetings with a whirligig of turncoats, hustlers, and informants.

He and bin Zeid had become a remarkable team. Bin Zeid brought a deep knowledge of Arab culture and years of experience investigating jihadist networks throughout the Middle East. LaBonte was a combat veteran expert at all the practical skills essential to covert work, from stakeouts to kicking in doors.

LaBonte’s call sign among his Ranger comrades had been Spartan. It was a name that particularly suited LaBonte, a man who was forever being compared to action heroes. Relatives playfully called him Captain America because of his earnest patriotism and the way he unabashedly spoke about wanting to protect his country. His agency friends joked about his “spidey sense,” his uncanny knack for sniffing out danger like Spider-Man.

He even looked the part. Six feet tall and broad-shouldered, LaBonte was two hundred pounds of rugged good looks and muscle, a born athlete who was said to bench-press four hundred pounds and run a marathon after barely bothering to train for it. He radiated a kind of unforced confidence that made him a natural leader, first as a standout baseball player and later as a martial arts champion, an Army Ranger, and an FBI cadet. He liked being in charge because he liked playing the role of older brother or protector.

“He was the sheepdog who protects the sheep,” said one close friend from his army days. “It’s how he saw himself.”

Finding the job that suited his protective instincts was a years-long struggle. LaBonte’s strong pitching arm earned him an invitation to play minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians, but he turned down the offer, explaining to family members that a professional sports career would distract him from more important goals he had set for his life. He found himself increasingly drawn
to the military but rejected a chance to go to officers’ school. Instead he decided to test his mettle against the punishing physical standards of one of the army’s Special Forces units, the elite Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment. He quickly earned his Ranger’s tab and later a prestigious position as a member of the regimental color guard.

The army also introduced him to a pretty dance student named Racheal. In March 1999, LaBonte found himself in need of a date for the year’s big formal event, the Ranger Ball. At the last minute—just hours before the first dance—a mutual friend persuaded Racheal to help one of his army buddies out of a jam.

“Is he cute?” Racheal asked.

“He looks a little like Daniel Day-Lewis,” said the friend, referring to the actor best known at the time for portraying Hawkeye in the film
The Last of the Mohicans
, “but without the long hair.”

As Racheal said later, the tall young Ranger who arrived at her door that evening in his dress uniform was more than just handsome.

“I knew in the first minute that this was someone important in my life,” she said of her future husband. “From that point on, life would be different.”

The two married the following year, and by 2001 Darren LaBonte was out of the army and serving as a SWAT team officer for the Libertyville Police Department in Chicago’s northern suburbs. He was working the graveyard shift, chasing rowdy teenagers and feeling restless, when the day came that was to change his life forever.

He had just gotten home from work on the morning of September 11 when the TV news anchor broke in with reports that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. LaBonte watched for a moment mesmerized, then phoned his mother, who lived in another suburb a few minutes away.

“You need to turn on the news,” he said.

Like many Americans that morning, Camille LaBonte assumed at first that the crash was accidental. But her son was convinced that something more sinister had occurred.

“That wasn’t dumb. That was intentional,” he said.

He drove to his parents’ house and arrived in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. He and his mother then watched in disbelief as one tower collapsed, and then the other. When Camille turned to her son, he was crying.

Within weeks, LaBonte was privately taking Arabic lessons while sorting through his options for landing a meaningful role in the fight against terrorism that was just getting under way. He considered, and then rejected, the idea of reenlisting in the army; it was unlikely that he would end up in the job or unit that he wanted, he reasoned. Instead he decided to sign up with the U.S. Marshals Service, a law enforcement arm of the Justice Department that tracks down fugitives and protects federal courts. His Ranger experience landed him a coveted spot on the marshals’ special operations team, yet it quickly became clear to LaBonte that the job was not the one he was looking for. Instead of searching for suspected terrorists, he was spending his days tracking down drug dealers.

LaBonte then applied simultaneously for positions at the FBI and CIA. The FBI called back first, so he enrolled in the bureau’s academy in Quantico, Virginia. He won commendations as a cadet for leadership and shooting skills, and after graduation he landed a prime spot in the bureau’s New York office, working for an organized crime unit investigating the city’s Mafia families. Still, he burned for something more.

At last, in 2006, the CIA came through with the offer he had been waiting for. The intelligence agency saw in LaBonte a combination of skills that were most in demand five years into the global war against al-Qaeda: the tactical abilities of a Special Forces soldier, combined with the resourcefulness of a classic CIA case officer. LaBonte was among a handful of CIA recruits who would be trained for both jobs. He catapulted to the front of the waiting list for the agency’s training school, the former Defense Department reservation in southern Virginia known as the “Farm.” Months later he was on his way to Iraq and then to Afghanistan.

This job felt right, at last. His comrades and commanders were
impressed by the enthusiasm of the young ex-Ranger who was always the first to volunteer for difficult assignments and the last to complain about the hardships the group endured. Though less experienced than some of the older combat veterans, he distinguished himself for his clearheadedness and sharp instincts during firefights. One officer who fought next to him in Afghanistan was struck by LaBonte’s “total confidence in who and what he was.

“He was living his calling, without pretense or guile, brag or boast,” the former comrade said. “Darren believed his predestined role was to serve as a professional warrior, a protector for those less able to protect themselves.”

Such qualities were on display one summer night when LaBonte led a two-man surveillance mission in Kunar Province. The men were walking alongside a river when a sudden noise alerted them to an approaching Taliban patrol. The Americans froze and hugged the riverbank as the insurgents filed into view, then paused in a clearing a few yards from their hiding place. A dozen fighters arrived, then two dozen, and still more. At last the group swelled to more than one hundred Taliban fighters, all armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and obviously staging for some kind of attack. They lingered for several minutes, so close that the two Americans could hear their conversations. If any one of them had wandered a few feet toward the river, the pair would almost certainly have been discovered.

The other man was new to the CIA base and had never been in such a scrape. LaBonte kept a hand on his shoulder and whispered words of encouragement.

“Don’t worry, everything is going to be OK,” he said.

Eventually the insurgents moved on, and the two men scurried back to their base—but only after relaying the Taliban group’s coordinates to the nearest NATO dispatcher.

As the months passed, though, LaBonte slowly lost some of his early optimism about the tide of battle against al-Qaeda. By the time he arrived in Jordan, he was convinced that bin Laden and his followers were winning the ideological struggle, appealing to ever
larger numbers of young Muslims who could serve as fodder in the next wave of suicidal strikes against the West. He brooded about the attacks that were surely coming and worried about how to safeguard those he cared about most.

That list was topped by his wife and baby daughter, now with him in a Middle Eastern country in which American officials had been targeted for assassination. It also included bin Zeid, who he feared, was being swept along by the collective enthusiasm for Balawi, a double agent whose achievements already bordered on the implausible.

“This guy is too good to be true,” LaBonte flatly told an ex-military friend in late autumn.

Among most of the intelligence community, though, Balawi fever was real and about to get much worse.

DANGLE

H
umam al-Balawi’s breakthrough as a spy was one hundred megabytes of flash and sizzle, titillating and wholly unexpected. But his next big score would blow everyone away.

It arrived, again by e-mail to his handler, bin Zeid, this time in the form of a simple typed message. Balawi, the doctor, had a new patient. His name was Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The Jordanian had made direct contact with the deputy commander of al-Qaeda, second only to Osama bin Laden himself.

As Balawi described the events, he had been as surprised as anyone. One day he was told that Zawahiri was experiencing problems, and then suddenly the bearded, bespectacled terrorist leader was standing in front of him, asking him for medical treatment. Zawahiri, himself a doctor, was suffering from a range of complications related to diabetes, and he needed advice and, he hoped, some medicine. It was not so easy for Zawahiri, a wanted man with a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head, to write his own prescriptions.

Balawi happily consented, and within minutes he was alone with Zawahiri, checking the vital signs of the man who had helped dream up the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In his e-mail, Balawi supplied a summary of Zawahiri’s physical
condition as well as his medical history, providing details that perfectly matched records the CIA had obtained years earlier from intelligence officials in Egypt, Zawahiri’s home country. Most important, Balawi revealed that he had scheduled a follow-up visit with his patient. He would be seeing Zawahiri again in a few weeks.

From Kabul to Amman to Langley, marble buildings seemed to shift on their foundations. The last time the CIA had caught a whiff of Zawahiri was in 2006, when the agency bombed a house in southwestern Pakistan on the basis of faulty intelligence that suggested he was eating dinner there; there had been no verified sighting of Zawahiri by a Westerner or government informant since 2002.

Now, everyone with a top secret clearance wanted to know about the “golden source” who had been in the terrorist’s presence.

Even the White House would have to know.

Leon Panetta met with members of the Obama administration’s national security team to apprise them of the stunning developments. The CIA director himself served as chief briefer, and among those seated around the table were the national security adviser, James L. Jones; Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence; and Rahm Emanuel, Panetta’s old friend and White House chief of staff. Afterward Panetta would repeat the briefing in a private audience with the president of the United States.

“There are indications that he [Balawi] might have access to Zawahiri,” Panetta announced, his tone deliberately low-key. The next step, he said, was to meet with the informant and train him for an important new role.