Joby Warrick - The Triple Agent

Who was this guy? bin Zeid wondered aloud to his colleagues.

Nothing about Balawi fitted the usual pattern for terrorist or supporter of outlaw groups. There had been no brushes with the law, no record of violence, no known association with radical groups or even with Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, the creaky eighty-year-old social movement that by now was noted mostly for its fund-raising dinners for Iraqi orphans and widows.

Instead the files depicted a young man of extraordinary ability and achievement. Balawi came from a stable college-educated family with no hint of scandal. He was faithful to his wife and doted on his two young girls. He had a do-gooder streak a mile wide, yet he showed no outward signs of religious fanaticism.

His school records were singularly impressive. A graduate of Amman High School with top honors and a 97 percent grade point average. Winner of a college scholarship from the Jordanian government. Fluent in English.

After high school, he had been a shoo-in for the University of Jordan’s biosciences program, but he chose instead to go abroad to study medicine. He won admission to the University of Istanbul and, though he initially spoke not a word of Turkish, earned both a bachelor’s degree and doctorate of medicine in six years. Balawi had returned to Jordan with a Turkish wife, a college-educated journalist, and settled in an apartment in his father’s house. A wide array of career choices beckoned him, but he eventually decided to turn down a hospital assignment for one of the least glamorous medical positions in the city: tending to mothers and young children at the sprawling Marka camp, home to tens of thousands of ethnic Palestinians who had moved there as refugees after the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. The camp’s denizens quickly took a liking to the soft-eyed doctor, who was gentle with children yet also oddly serious for such a young man.

“He wasn’t flirty like some of the others,” said one single mother from the camp who saw Balawi frequently. “He seemed very shy, and he didn’t joke a lot.”

The portrait that emerged of Balawi was that of a social introvert who lived modestly and rarely went anywhere other than work. He drove a banged-up Ford Escort that doubled on most days as a free taxi service for any neighbors or patients who happened to need a lift. The Mukhabarat’s spies found nothing that suggested he was quietly meeting with Hamas or other radical groups or even knew who they were.

Still, there was the matter of Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Balawi’s secret online hobby had become a big deal, even bigger, no doubt, than Balawi had ever dreamed. More disturbingly, his writings seemed to suggest a hidden connection with al-Qaeda. Abu Dujana had always lionized the terrorist group and its founder, Osama bin Laden, but lately he seemed to be speaking for them. Anytime al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came out with a new statement or video message, Abu Dujana was there with fresh analysis, annotating and interpreting Zawahiri’s stilted Arabic. His essays defending al-Qaeda’s tactics so closely reflected Zawahiri’s own views that they might have been written by Zawahiri himself. Whether al-Qaeda intended it or not, Abu Dujana had become a mouthpiece and booster for the terrorist group. And Muslims around the world were paying attention.

Worse, Abu Dujana’s views were skewing increasingly radical. He had launched a personal crusade to rehabilitate Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the thuggish leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who made videos of himself cutting off the heads of American hostages. Jordanians had poured into the streets to denounce Zarqawi in 2005 after he launched a series of coordinated attacks on hotels in Amman, killing sixty people, many of them women and children who had been attending a wedding reception. But Abu Dujana called him a “tiger” who embodied a robust, energetic faith that true Muslims should aspire to. Most recently, amid torrents of bile over Israel’s military assault on Gaza on December 27, 2008, he began hinting about moving into an operational phase. “When will my words taste my blood?” he wrote.

Humam al-Balawi, the doctor, ambled along as before. But Abu Dujana was hurtling down a dangerous path, inciting others to violence and threatening to join them. By mid-January 2009, Ali bin Zeid and his bosses had made up their minds: Abu Dujana had to go. Whether Balawi survived or perished along with his jihadist avatar was up to him.

In the dark, the headquarters of the Mukhabarat looms over western Amman like a medieval fortress, with high walls of limestone blocks that have leached over the years to produce an oozy reddish stain. The oldest part of the complex was once one of the most feared prisons in the Middle East, a labyrinth of stone-walled cells reserved for suspected terrorists and other enemies of the state. The few who ventured inside told stories of dark passageways, of whips made of knotted electric cords, of shrieks and screams coming from the interrogation room late at night. Among some in Jordan, the building had earned a grim nickname, the Fingernail Factory.

Times were different now, at least on the surface. Jordan’s media-savvy, pro-Western monarch, King Abdullah II, disliked seeing reports from human rights groups of torture by the country’s intelligence service. He dismantled the old prison and, in 2005, fired the Mukhabarat’s ruthlessly efficient director, Saad Kheir, a man with genteel English manners and the icy regard of a rattlesnake.

But despite the happy talk about detainee rights and due process, the spy agency could ill afford to be seen as soft. Jordan, with a population of just over six million, was a moderate Arab state allied with the United States and officially at peace with Israel, policies that automatically made it a target for most of the region’s Islamic terrorist groups as well as Iran, which funded many of them. The country has long been a way station for Iraqi criminal gangs, Iranian provocateurs, Hamas, and Hezbollah. It has endured savage attacks from al-Qaeda, including Zarqawi’s 2005 killing spree in which suicide bombers blew themselves up in three Amman hotels. Zarqawi, who had spent five years as the Mukhabarat’s prisoner in the 1990s, had tried repeatedly to exact revenge by destroying the agency itself. In 2004 the Mukhabarat narrowly averted an attack on its headquarters after Zarqawi loaded a couple of trucks with enough explosives and poison gas to wipe out tens of thousands of people. In the end, it was a Mukhabarat informant—a Zarqawi foot soldier in Jordanian custody—who gave up the location of Zarqawi’s safe house near Baqubah, Iraq. On June 7, 2006, a pair of U.S. fighter jets dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the building, killing Zarqawi along with his wife and child and four others.

What Humam al-Balawi knew of the Mukhabarat and its reputation is unclear. But somewhere between his house and the intelligence headquarters, Abu Dujana and all his bluster had faded from sight. Balawi was handcuffed and sandwiched between Mukhabarat agents, who had squeezed into seats on either side of him. One of them reached over and shoved a cloth hood over his face, pulling the drawstring tight.

The foul-smelling covering not only blinded him but also made it hard to breathe. Metal cuffs bit into his wrists and forced him to lean forward in his seat.

Your handcuffs will be as silver bracelets .

The convoy wound through nearly deserted streets, past the mosque Balawi had attended since boyhood, past the empty bazaar, and past the elementary school with its concrete playground. It eased onto the modern highway that leads to central Amman, whizzing by shopping malls and gleaming hotels with bars lit in neon at this hour and past the expensive fitness clubs where men and women were said to work out together, paying money to sweat in air-conditioned rooms in their booty shorts, sports bras, and muscle shirts.