The Triple Agent (30 page)

The criticisms hit at legitimate problems within the CIA. But they did not fully capture what had gone wrong at Khost in the hours before New Year’s Eve.

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.

Near the Pakistani town of Miranshah, two of the agency’s drones had been monitoring the same mud-brick building for hours, watching for any sign of movement. The man inside was believed to be Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, but the truth was, the agency was less than sure. Earlier in the spring the CIA’s targeters had come close, but the sheikh slipped away before the Predators were in place. This time a tip led the agency to a cluster of buildings a few miles northwest of Miranshah. The structures were watched for days as counterterrorism officers narrowed down where precisely al-Masri was staying and who else shared the space with him.

The CIA did know that there were noncombatants in the compound, because at least two women and several children had been seen entering. The risks were grave this time, but the potential prize was huge: al-Qaeda’s No. 3 commander, on this day of all days.

If it was really him.

The service ended with no further word from Pakistan. Panetta paid his respects to Hanson’s family, and the CIA director’s black car pulled out of the cemetery and headed north, away from Washington and toward Baltimore. Panetta had an appointment at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic eavesdropping service, and the hunt for al-Masri would follow him there.

Panetta had scarcely arrived at the NSA building when he was summoned to one of the agency’s secure phones. The CIA’s counterterrorism chief had fresh news, not all of it good.

“We think we’ve got this guy, but there may be some collateral damage,” the chief was saying, referring to the women and children believed to be in the building the agency’s drones were watching.

Panetta’s heart sank. Nothing was coming easy with this one. He called Emanuel’s office again. The White House was nervous too.

“It’s your decision,” Panetta was told.

The CIA director sat quietly for a moment, the day’s events replaying in his brain. He picked up the phone again and called his counterterrorism director.

“Look, I need to know how certain you feel about the target,” he began. “This is really important.”

“Eighty percent,” the counterterrorism chief was saying. “Maybe ninety percent, in terms of knowing we have the right target.”

The numbers weren’t the ones Panetta was hoping for. But this might well be the best chance the agency would ever get.

“I don’t see how I can’t do it,” he finally said. “Go ahead.”

Panetta hung up the phone and tried to focus on his meeting. Later in the afternoon he received reports about the missiles’ deadly flight and the utter destruction of the targeted building. He learned of the recovery of bodies, and he was given the news—painful to contemplate for him—that two women and a child were among the dead. As for the fate of al-Masri himself, there was only silence out of Pakistan. Nothing more was learned during the rest of the day, or the following morning, or the day after that.

Then, on Memorial Day, the agency’s surveillance network picked up the first snippet of conversation hinting of a momentous change in al-Qaeda’s highest ranks. The terrorist group had lost one of its leaders, and the formal announcement would be posted soon on one of the usual jihadist Web sites. Al-Masri, the operational commander, had been targeted by a CIA missile at a safe house near Miranshah on May 21 and was now dead.

Panetta immediately picked up the phone and called his friend Emanuel at the White House.

“Rahm,” he said, “we just took out Number Three.”

The whereabouts of No. 1, bin Laden, and No. 2, Zawahiri, remained unknown.

O
n May 1, 2011, the same fierce desire to avenge September 11 that led to a terrible miscalculation at Khost produced a long-sought victory. Less than one year after al-Masri was confirmed dead, the hunt for bin Laden also ended.

Bin Laden, the CIA discovered, had been hiding not in the dusty borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in a green valley town in Pakistan called Abbottabad, noted for its pleasant weather, shopping malls, and top-rated golf course. There, a half day’s drive from the Afghan border, his followers had constructed a palatial compound for the al-Qaeda chief, far from the buzzing CIA drones and shielded from neighbors by twelve-foot walls topped with razor wire.

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.

A few weeks after Elizabeth Hanson was laid to rest, the CIA finally hit pay dirt. In early summer 2010, the NSA was conducting routine phone surveillance of a suspected Pakistani terrorist when a man named Sheikh Abu Ahmed came on the line. Within days, the CIA had tracked Abu Ahmed to the Pakistani city of Peshawar and identified his car and license plate. Then, in August, agency operatives followed the man to his principal residence, a suspiciously large, highly secure compound in Abbottabad with high walls capped with razor wire. Many of the dwelling’s features stood out as strange, including its lack of a phone or Internet connection, and the owner’s penchant for burning his trash rather than hauling it to the street. The three-story main building appeared to be shared by at least
three families, including a tall, bearded man who, intriguingly, had never been seen outside the walls.