Joby Warrick - The Triple Agent

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.

“If we can meet with him and give him the right technology, we have a chance to go after Zawahiri,” Panetta said.

The reaction was instantaneous and dramatic. How quickly can we make this happen? NSC officials wanted to know.

“Everyone was very enthusiastic,” said one of the security officials present at the briefing, with considerable understatement, “that for the first time in a long time, we had a chance of going after Number Two.”

If Balawi had offered up bin Laden himself, it could hardly have evoked more excitement. After so many years deep in hiding, al-Qaeda’s reclusive founder was merely a figurehead. It was Zawahiri, together with his old friend Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, who now steered al-Qaeda’s ship. The two Egyptians decided strategy for the group, raised money, and planned operations. If al-Qaeda were to unleash another September 11–style attack on the United States, it would almost certainly be Zawahiri’s handiwork.

The physician, fifty-eight now and scarred, physically and mentally, from years in Egyptian prisons, was the al-Qaeda version of a mad scientist, a man who was forever scheming up sensational ways to kill large numbers of people, using chemicals or viruses or even nuclear weapons, if he could get them. He was also al-Qaeda’s great escape artist, ever managing to elude death or capture by slipping away just as the trap was being sprung. Once, before September 11, 2001, he traveled to the United States without being noticed, raising money for terrorist causes under a fake name and departing, still undetected. After the plane attacks the CIA came close to killing him on three different occasions, but each time he walked away unharmed. The older counterterrorism hands at Langley who had battled with him over the years respected his capabilities and loathed everything he stood for.

Zawahiri had been on the CIA’s watch list since the mid-1980s, long before anyone had heard of bin Laden, and over the years the agency witnessed his rise from Egyptian revolutionary to international terrorist. He was the intellectual force behind many of al-Qaeda’s grandest ambitions, including its fledgling efforts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons. It was Zawahiri who decreed that al-Qaeda must take on the “far enemy”—the United States—before it could defeat its principal target, the “near enemy,” the pro-Western Arab regimes that stood in the way of the group’s dream of uniting all Muslims under a global Islamic caliphate.

“To kill Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country in which it is possible to do it,” Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto.

As documented in the CIA’s case files, Zawahiri’s early life bore striking similarities to Balawi’s. Both were born to educated, middle-class parents from religiously tolerant communities, and both were drawn simultaneously to medical studies and radical Islamist ideology. Zawahiri, who grew up in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, was the son of a well-known professor of pharmacology, and his maternal grandfather was a president of Cairo University. As an earnest, bookish teenager Zawahiri was introduced to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author and intellectual who became one of the founders of modern Islamic extremism. Qutb’s execution by Egyptian authorities inspired the young Zawahiri to organize a group of like-minded friends into a secret society he called al-Jihad, or the Jihad Group. He continued his studies and eventually earned a medical degree, but all the while he looked ahead to a day when his al-Jihad would seek to overthrow Egypt’s secular government.

As a new doctor, Zawahiri spent time volunteering in refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There, while patching up the wounds of anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters, he first crossed paths with a charismatic young Saudi, bin Laden, who had also come to Afghanistan to support the ragtag rebels in their struggle against the Communist superpower. Not long afterward, upon returning to Egypt, Zawahiri and his small cell joined with other antigovernment factions in a series of plots to assassinate Egyptian leaders, culminating in the fatal attack on Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, as he sat in a reviewing stand to watch a military parade. Zawahiri was imprisoned for allegedly participating in the conspiracy to silence one of the Arab world’s most moderate and pro-Western leaders. He later claimed in a memoir that he was tortured by Egyptian security officials.

The experience left Zawahiri even more determined to undermine secular Arab governments and their financial underpinnings through spectacular acts of terrorism. His signature attack during his pre–al-Qaeda years was a savage 1997 assault on foreign tourists at Egypt’s famous Luxor ruins, in which gunmen systematically slaughtered sixty-two people, including Japanese tourists, a five-year-old British child, and four Egyptian tour guides.

Ordinary Egyptians, previously accustomed to thinking of al-Jihad as engaged in a grassroots struggle against corrupt and autocratic rulers, were repelled by the wanton slaughter, and support for Zawahiri and his Jihad Group evaporated. Soon afterward Zawahiri told followers that operations inside Egypt were no longer possible, and the battle was shifting to Israel and its chief ally, the United States. In 1998 the Jihad Group officially merged with bin Laden’s larger and better-financed al-Qaeda.