Joby Warrick - The Triple Agent

The procession turned north to enter a new section of town known as Wadi as-Seer, a district of broad avenues and heavy limestone buildings with military guards but no signs to identify the occupants. Balawi felt the car stop, twice, at security checkpoints, and then the vehicle was inside a gate. It rolled through a series of connected courtyards until it halted outside a large stone building that serves as headquarters for the Mukhabarat’s “Knights of Truth,” the elite counterterrorism division. Unseen by the hooded Balawi were the imposing portraits of the last two Jordanian kings and the black flag of the intelligence service, bearing its motto in Arabic script: “Justice has come.”

Amman, Jordan—January 20, 2009

Who is Abu Dujana al-Khorasani?

Balawi was groggily aware of the question and was forming his words when he felt the sharp sting of a slap across his cheek. He was fully awake now, and the hood was finally gone. He was in a small cell with solid white walls, sitting on a wooden stool, the room’s only furnishing other than a battered desk, a fluorescent light, and a metal pin to which his legs were shackled. Two men were standing on either side of him, and one of them drew an arm back as though to hit him again.

Who is Abu Dujana?

You already know that it’s me , Balawi said, wearily.

It was barely midmorning, and already Balawi had endured four rounds of interrogation. The aim was to quickly exhaust him, and it was working. An hour in the interrogation room, then two hours in his cell, then back under the lights with fresh interrogators. Between sessions he would try to sleep, but the moment his eyes closed the guards were at him again, shouting curses and banging doors. Then he was back in the interrogation room again, questions flying at him like swarms of blackflies.

Who controls the al-Hesbah Web site? Who are the other writers? Where do they live? Who is your contact?

When this inquiry yielded nothing, the Mukhabarat’s men probed Balawi’s personal life, his family history, his brothers, his Turkish in-laws, his school years abroad. Questions were reasked, twisted slightly, and asked again. Sometimes they carried implicit warnings, reminders of the Mukhabarat’s ability to touch Balawi where he lived.

Where did you get your medical license? Are you sure it’s valid?

Your father is not Jordanian, is he? Are his papers up-to-date?

What about your Turkish wife? Your children are Turks, too, aren’t they?

The threats were real, as Balawi well knew. His father was one of more than a million Palestinians to whom Jordan has played reluctant host since the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948 sent them in search of refuge. For a noncitizen, crossing any of dozens of invisible lines could mean forfeiting the right to a Jordanian passport or residency papers. Work permits, including professional licenses, can be voided over mere suspicions. The message was clear: Cooperate or lose everything.

By now Balawi could distinguish among his interrogators. The division chief, dubbed the Red Devil by other detainees, was Ali Burjak, the part-Turkish senior officer who was one of the most feared men in Jordan. Heavy and short, with reddish, close-cropped hair, he had famously broken some of the country’s most hardened criminals and terrorists, and he also had tangled with journalists, opposition figures, and others who had fallen afoul of the state. He took special delight, it was widely said, in humiliating his captives, sometimes by forcing them to confess gratuitously to incest or other sexual crimes.

Working with Burjak was a small team of counterterrorism specialists from the Knights of Truth. They were considered the elite of the Mukhabarat, in part because they worked most closely with foreign intelligence agencies and also because they did everything: conducting surveillance; intercepting phone signals; making arrests; interrogating captives. The group took orders from Burjak and his deputy, a man called Habis. The other officer who stood out was the stout, hazel-eyed captain who had been present during the arrest. Though quieter and less abrasive than some of the others, he was treated by his peers with a deference that seemed disproportionate to his captain’s bars. The men called him Sharif Ali.

When the Mukhabarat’s men ran out of questions, Balawi was led back to his cell, which was newly built and clean but tiny, measuring nine by six feet, and furnished with a cot and blanket, a two-way mirror, and a metal commode and sink. The hood was again pulled over his face, and the cell’s thick metal door was slammed shut, leaving Balawi alone in complete darkness. He felt his way to the cot, sat, and waited.

Minutes passed, then an hour. Or was it two? From his darkened cocoon, there was no way to tell.

The hooding was standard treatment, a way of softening up Balawi for an extended cycle of interrogation and isolation that was just getting under way. Nearly all detainees are blindfolded, sometimes for days at a time. Unable to see, and hearing only muffled sounds through the cell’s steel door, they quickly become disoriented and lose all sense of time. In medical studies, volunteers subjected to similar forms of sensory deprivation begin hallucinating in as little as fifteen minutes. Longer periods induce extreme anxiety, helplessness, and depression. In one study, British scientists discovered that people held under such conditions for forty-eight hours could be made to experience any symptom by mere suggestion. A comfortably dry room could suddenly become freezing cold, or filled with water, or alive with snakes.

Balawi tried reciting prayers to keep his mind focused. But as he later admitted, he was pricked with fear about what was coming and when it would arrive. He would be beaten, no doubt, and probably worse. Was he tough enough to take it? Would he crack and give up the names of contacts? What if they threatened to hurt his wife or the girls? What if they went after his father? Balawi waited, straining for any meaningful sound—footsteps, jangling keys, the tap of a truncheon against cinder block as the guards paced the long corridor.

At some point Balawi remembered his dream. A few weeks earlier he had had a vision of seeing Zarqawi. Balawi had idealized his fellow Jordanian and had wept like a child when the terrorist was killed in the U.S. missile strike in 2006. But in the dream Zarqawi was alive again and, to Balawi’s surprise, visiting his father’s house.

“Aren’t you dead?” Balawi asked him. Zarqawi’s face fairly glowed in the moonlight, and he was busy preparing for something. Balawi guessed it was a bombing.

“I was killed, but I am as you see me, alive,” Zarqawi said.

Unsure of what to say to the man whose videotapes he had endlessly watched on the Internet, Balawi fumbled for the right words. Would Zarqawi accept his help? What if Balawi gave him his car? What if they could become martyrs together?

Zarqawi said nothing, and the dream abruptly ended. Balawi awoke unsettled and days later was so haunted by the strange encounter that he told several friends about it. What could it mean?

Everyone agreed that the dream was an omen. One friend told Balawi that the vision was a warning, a signal that he was about to be arrested. But another said Zarqawi was conveying a blessing. Balawi, he said, had been called by God for special service, an act of jihad for which he had been specially chosen.

“You will mobilize in Allah’s path,” the friend said.

Twenty-four hours after his arrest, Balawi was showing the strain of a second day without sleep. His voice rasped with exasperation, but there was no fight in his eyes. Across the table from him, the Mukhabarat’s men were just getting started.