Joby Warrick - The Triple Agent

For his part, Balawi wasn’t interested in the CIA base. As he well knew, going to Khost would be akin to breaking into a prison. There would no chance for an ambush or kidnapping, and no al-Qaeda fighters waiting for the command to attack. Even if he could somehow smuggle a gun onto the base, he would almost certainly be disarmed or killed before he could squeeze off a single round.

Not possible , he wrote back.

Balawi’s invitation to visit a known CIA base did present one intriguing option, one that conceivably could allow him to strike a blow against Jordanian intelligence and possibly the Americans as well. Balawi knew it, and his al-Qaeda hosts were almost certainly thinking about it as well. Unlike the other plans they had discussed, this would be a solo mission and a guaranteed one-way trip. It would also be the longest of long shots. For Balawi to have any chance of succeeding as a suicide bomber, he would have to somehow make it past layer after layer of security, starting with multiple rings of Afghan and American guards, followed by pat-downs, bomb-sniffing dogs, and metal detectors. The best he could realistically hope for would be to take out a few of the low-paid Pashtun wretches who stood sentry outside the base to feed their families.

Balawi’s feelings about a possible suicide mission can be deduced from the urgency of his efforts to avoid Khost. Through early December, and continuing for weeks after bin Zeid arrived at the American base, he pelted the Mukhabarat officer with requests to come to him. When it was at last clear that Miranshah was out of the question, he proposed still another option, a meeting outdoors at Ghulam Khan, the checkpoint on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on the highway that runs from Miranshah to Khost.

The haggling was still under way on December 17, when the CIA unleashed one of its most powerful missile barrages in months in Datta Khel district, not far from the village where the special suicide vest was being made. At least ten missiles hit a compound where several al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives had gathered, killing sixteen of them. It was a costly strike. Among the dead was Abdullah Said al-Libi, the al-Qaeda operations chief with whom Balawi had briefly lived.

The pressure for some kind of response was now becoming exquisite. The old warriors cursed the Americans, cast nervous glances at the drones overhead, and eyed the Jordanian doctor expectantly. An opportunity beckoned—the flimsiest of threads, perhaps, but at least it was something. When, exactly, would Balawi’s words taste his blood?

His options dwindling as December neared its end, Balawi’s mind raged with the desperation of a condemned man. One evening he sat down to try to write, as though he could somehow exorcise his doubts by putting them on paper. As he started, he was struck by the irony of what he was attempting to do.

“I have often wished to know what is going on in the head of a martyr before the martyrdom-seeking operation,” he wrote. “It is now my turn today to fulfill the wishes of others.”

He began to list his private fears, pausing to admit deep misgivings about the value of suicide attacks. The problem, he acknowledged, is that one could “only do it once in your life,” and there was a real chance that he would fail and squander his life for nothing. Why not instead fight on the front lines? he asked himself. Or why not use his brain to come up with something better, a “bigger operation that hurts the enemies of God”?

Balawi tried to convince himself that “intent” was the only thing that mattered: God would honor his sacrifice, even if he were shot and killed before he could press the detonator switch. The harder question was whether he could go through with it. How would he feel in those final seconds, with only a slight twitch separating him from permanent annihilation?

“Do you not fear to be cowardly at the last moment,” he asked himself, “and be unable to press the button?”

On December 28, Humam al-Balawi returned to the public call office to compose a brief note to his countryman Ali bin Zeid. You win , he wrote.

I’ll meet your driver in Miranshah this afternoon as requested , Balawi continued. See you tomorrow in Khost .

Afterward Balawi and two al-Qaeda associates drove to a field to record some video footage of the Jordanian firing a few rounds from an AK-47, the gun jerking upward as bullets kicked up dust spouts in the distance. He put his crutch aside for the photos, so he wouldn’t appear injured, but as he walked, he limped badly from his leg injury.

Later that morning Balawi went to his room and tried on the suicide vest. He tightened the straps, and the weight of thirty pounds of explosive and metal cut into his thin shoulders. He put on his kameez shirt and gray patou, the shawl-like blanket that doubles as a cloak and mobile prayer mat, and walked back outside where his friend with the video camera was waiting beside a white hatchback. Balawi looked tired, he had aged visibly in nine months, and his face below his right eye still bore scars from the motorcycle crash.

Balawi sat in the driver’s seat as the camera rolled. He had decided that his martyr’s message should be in English, to ensure the widest audience if the video made its way to the Internet, and he chose lines intended to project a kind of cinematic, bad-guy toughness, as though he were a Hollywood mobster delivering an ultimatum.

“We will get you, CIA team. Insha’ Allah —God willing—we will bring you down,” he said. “Don’t think that just by pressing a button and killing mujahideen, you are safe. Insha’ Allah , we’ll come to you in an unexpected way.”

Balawi raised his left hand to reveal what appeared to be a wrist-watch beneath his kameez sleeve. “Look, this is for you: It’s not a watch, it’s a detonator,” he said. But the tough-guy routine was falling short. Balawi seemed agitated and bitter, and he turned his head from the camera whenever he finished a thought. His eyes were red as he spit out his last words.

“This is my goal: to kill you, and to kill your Jordanian partner, and Insha’ Allah , I will go to al-Firdaws —paradise,” he said. “And you will be sent to hell.”

With the final phrase his voice cracked, as though he were straining to fight back tears. Balawi looked away, and the image went dark.

Khost, Afghanistan—December 30, 2009

Dane Paresi rose early on December 30 and was instantly mindful of two things. One was the cold—twenty-three degrees at daybreak outside the Blackwater employees’ quarters, and not so balmy inside either. Another was food. Paresi’s Special Forces call sign was Jackal, a tribute to his legendary appetite and reputation for mooching from his comrades’ plates. He had developed a special fondness for the Khost mess hall, which he judged to be superior to most of the dozens of others he had sampled in Afghanistan. By this hour, just after 6:00 A.M., the pancakes would be flying off the griddle, and the aroma of greasy bacon and black coffee would be strong enough to grab an ex–Green Beret by the collar from half a block away.

There was a weightier matter as well, one that tugged at his thoughts as he dressed in the frigid room: The CIA’s prized informant was at last on his way to Khost. Paresi had dealt with scores of informants over his career, but never had he seen a case that could simultaneously kick up so much excitement and rancor. Plans for the agent’s debriefing had preoccupied the base’s senior staff for weeks, and tempers had boiled over. For his part, Paresi was highly skeptical of the security plan the officers had rehearsed, and he had said so, sharing his concerns with both his supervisor back in Virginia and the CIA’s security chief at Khost, Scott Roberson. Roberson had independently reached the same conclusion about what he believed was the fundamental problem: too many people, standing too close to an agent who had been living undercover and, by definition, could not be trusted.