Joby Warrick - The Triple Agent

Come to Miranshah , he wrote.

Bin Zeid shared the e-mails with his CIA partner, Darren LaBonte, who was starting to feel queasy. LaBonte was getting hammered with requests for updates from his bosses in Amman and Langley, and his answers so far had not been popular. The two partners talked for hours about Balawi and his e-mails and what it all meant. This was shaping up as the biggest case either man had ever been associated with; yet more than anyone around them, they harbored doubts. The video evidence had been staggeringly impressive, but also perplexing. How was it that Balawi, this frightened mouse of a doctor who weeks earlier had begged to come home, had come up with something so spectacular? Was Balawi a con artist? Was he trying to scam the CIA for more money, as so many bogus informants had done in the past? Perhaps Balawi was everything he seemed, but as the two men hashed it over, they were less than convinced. It was too much, too soon.

Later LaBonte tried to summarize his concerns in an internal memo. The bottom line, he wrote, was that the CIA didn’t yet know enough about the Jordanian agent to trust him entirely. He seemed real enough, but that wasn’t a sound basis for divining the man’s intentions.

“We need to go slow on this case,” he wrote.

The top CIA officer in Amman was a veteran operative who had served in Pakistan and understood the fickle art of running covert agents better than most. The station chief, whose name is classified, accepted LaBonte’s recounting of the key facts of the Balawi case, but he reached an entirely different conclusion: A meeting with Balawi was urgently needed precisely because the CIA knew so little about the informant and his motivations. Yes, there were risks, the station manager said. But if ever there was a moment for risk taking, it was this one.

Let’s move forward , he said.

Ali bin Zeid spent the first days of December preparing for what he believed would be a short trip. Winters in eastern Afghanistan are notoriously cold, so bin Zeid called his older brother, Hassan, and asked to borrow his heavy jacket, the one with the thick insulation and the North Face logo. He did some last-minute shopping and buffed up the black Desert Eagle .44 Magnum he liked to take on his business trips.

Then, just days before his planned departure, bin Zeid was summoned unexpectedly to a meeting on the Mukhabarat’s executive floor. He entered a conference room to find his immediate supervisor and several other senior officials waiting for him, all dark suits and ties, their faces as dour as buzzards’.

We’re sending someone else to Afghanistan to meet with Balawi , one of the officers said. The mission is simply too risky for someone from the royal family .

Bin Zeid exploded. “But it’s my case,” he protested.

He spent much of the day appealing the decision, from one end of the Mukhabarat’s headquarters building to the other. He argued and complained, and when neither worked, he threatened.

“I’m going to Afghanistan, even if I have to make my own arrangements to get there,” bin Zeid said. Then, eyes narrowed to slits, he dropped the ultimate threat.

“I’m going to Afghanistan,” he repeated, “even if I have to go with the Americans.”

Bin Zeid had already laid the groundwork for this threat, and sure enough, a call was made from the CIA’s Amman station to the Mukhabarat headquarters, officially requesting bin Zeid’s presence at Khost. The Jordanian captain was the only one who knew Balawi, the Americans explained, and the informant might balk if he wasn’t around.

“We need Ali,” the CIA caller said.

The Mukhabarat relented.

Bin Zeid and LaBonte were scheduled to leave for Afghanistan on December 6, but the Jordanian was fully packed a day early. There were tearful good-byes from family members, including bin Zeid’s sister-in-law, who had been plagued with feelings of dread since she first learned of the trip.

The men’s wives had been unusually anxious as well. Racheal LaBonte was beginning to fret about the Italian vacation the couple had planned for the Christmas holidays, and she now worried that Darren LaBonte wouldn’t make it back in time. More important, she had managed to piece together the outlines of the mission from snippets of conversation, enough to know that her husband had grave doubts about the informant he was flying to Afghanistan to meet.

“He could turn out to be a suicide bomber!” she finally blurted out.

Often Darren LaBonte would crack a joke to relieve the tension when his wife expressed such fears about his work. This time he did not.

“You’re right, he could be,” he said solemnly. Then, taking her hand, he tried to explain his conflicted feelings about the case. This one was worth the risk, he said, and what’s more, if it succeeded, it might finally be enough for him. He could even walk away from the terrorist-catching business forever.

“If I don’t go, and this case is everything that it’s supposed to be, it would be a big mistake,” he said. “If it’s successful, then I can stop. I can finally say that I’ve done what I came here to do.

“On the other hand, if I don’t go, and something happens …”

He paused. Racheal knew he was thinking of bin Zeid.

“Well, I could never forgive myself,” he said finally.

The two couples gathered for last farewells at the LaBontes’ apartment at 5:00 A.M., just before the two men departed for the airport, and sat for coffee on the balcony. The usual weepy scenes in the terminal attracted too much attention, and besides, this time the wives had planned something different. Both women had been unusually anxious about the trip to Afghanistan, but they decided together to go out of their way not to show it.

The women knew the men shared a fascination with ancient warrior culture, for the armies of Athens and Sparta. In ancient Greece the mothers of Spartan warriors exhorted their sons to bravery with the words that Fida Dawani and Racheal LaBonte now spoke to their departing husbands: “Return with your shields or on them.”

But as the two officers gathered their bags, Fida could not restrain herself. She pulled Darren LaBonte aside, her dark eyes imploring.

“Take care of Ali,” she said.

The Mukhabarat tried once more to block Ali bin Zeid from meeting with the informant Humam al-Balawi. It happened on December 5, as the Jordanian intelligence captain and his CIA partner, LaBonte, were making final preparations for their journey.

That evening one of the Jordanian spy agency’s senior managers phoned an old CIA friend at the Amman station to talk privately about the Balawi case.

We have serious concerns , the Jordanian said before proceeding to lay out two of them.

The first was a matter of historical precedent, he said. The Mukhabarat had been dealing with jihadists of all stripes for many years, and it knew a few things about them, including which ones could be flipped. The low-level types—the thugs and opportunists who glommed on to terrorist movements for personal advantage—could be transformed and might even become useful informants. But radicals and ideologues never truly switched sides. A true believer might lie and deceive, but deep down he could never betray his cause. And Humam al-Balawi had all the markings of a true believer.

It was a compelling argument, coming from a Mukhabarat veteran who had interrogated scores of radical Islamists. The CIA officer listened attentively.

The second concern derived from the Jordanian’s observations as the case had unfolded in recent weeks. Wasn’t it curious, he asked, that Balawi kept insisting that the meeting take place in Miranshah, rather than inside a fortified base where his security would be assured?