Joby Warrick - The Triple Agent

Normally, such disagreements would have been considered part of the natural order. In nearly twenty-seven years of army service, including nearly six years of Special Forces work in Afghanistan, Paresi had seen endless skirmishing over tactics. Soldiers clashed and sometimes got mad, but in the end the officers decided, and everyone did his job. Today was looking like another of those days, yet it wasn’t. Paresi couldn’t yet put a finger on what was different.

Paresi dressed quickly and dug around his hooch for his heavy coat and weapon. Space-wise, the room was just a notch above an army tent, but there were plywood walls for privacy and just enough room for his cot, clothes, and gear, along with the books and journals he brought along to pass the idle hours. The hallway outside his room led to a small lounge with a leather sofa where the contract workers could play cards, read, or just sit with their laptops to skim the headlines and check e-mail. The place smelled vaguely of dogs, a legacy of the many strays that wandered through the base and were sometimes adopted as pets. The newest of the Blackwater arrivals, a Navy SEAL named Jeremy Wise, had taken up with a white, lop-eared mongrel he named Charlie that slept in the guards’ quarters and liked chewing on the men’s beards when they sat on the sofa. Paresi hardly minded. He loved dogs and missed his, a black-and-white Boston terrier so earnestly loopy Paresi had given it the nickname Retard. Dogs reminded him of home, where he planned to be in February, putting Afghanistan and military work behind him for good.

Dane Paresi had spent his entire adult life saluting. He had wanted to be a soldier since childhood, when he played army in the woods around the Willamette veterans’ cemetery near his home in Portland, Oregon. He joined the army on the day after high school graduation, and he later became a paratrooper and served in the First Iraq War. He left the army briefly but was inevitably drawn back again, this time determined to join the army’s elite Special Forces. He sweated off thirty pounds in the grueling tryouts and training courses, but in 1995, at age thirty-two, he earned his Green Beret.

Not long afterward, while window-shopping at a strip mall near the base in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he noticed a pretty brunette eating ice cream inside a Bath & Body Works store and wandered in to try to talk to her. The young woman initially recoiled from the bone-thin man in a Batman T-shirt, white socks, and ugly, oversize glasses—“birth control glasses,” she later called them. Her friends nearly phoned security, but within a few minutes the two were laughing and making plans to meet for coffee. The future Mindy Lou Paresi wrote her name and phone number in lipstick on a paper napkin. Eight months later they were married.

Life for the newlyweds was an unending series of separations during Dane Paresi’s overseas deployments; he served in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Philippines, among other hot spots. He happened to be home at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but both husband and wife instinctively knew that things were about to get worse.

“Got to go to work, babe,” he said.

Paresi shipped out to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. He returned home for a few weeks at a time to reconnect with Mindy Lou and the couple’s two daughters, Alexandra and Santina. He said little at home about his time overseas, except to complain about the sandstorms and lousy weather and, in private moments, about what he saw as the futility of the U.S. efforts to graft a Western-style democracy onto a corrupt, clannish society where two-thirds of adults cannot read. Mindy Lou learned about his Bronze Star commendation when her husband handed her the official letter from the Pentagon and said, “Read this.” It was the army’s official account of how Paresi had helped spring a trap on an al-Qaeda convoy that included one of the terrorist group’s senior commanders. Sixteen insurgents were killed and another was wounded in the 2002 operation.

Among his peers, Paresi was known for his unflappable calm and his Zen-like insistence on looking after small details. He stormed Taliban hideouts in the dead of night, and went on deep-cover assignments in Afghan garb, infiltrating villages infested with insurgents, sometimes with only one other American beside him.

“These were missions where you knew that no one was coming back for you,” said one comrade who fought beside Paresi. “You had to know that the other person was capable and would get you back, dead or alive. That was him. He never got excited, and you knew he always had your back.”

Afterward, back at camp, Paresi would find a quiet place to unwind, usually with a book and his pipe and a bottle of water. He never drank alcohol or talked loudly. When he was worried or troubled about something, he paced or found some way to busy himself.

He had just turned forty-five in the fall of 2008 and was in prime condition physically when the Defense Department informed him he was no longer needed. After twenty-six years of service he had been on track for making the rank of sergeant major, but instead of a promotion he received his separation papers. The army, flush with middle-aged master sergeants, gave him thirty days to clear out.

Paresi had dreamed of retiring in the mountains of western Oregon, fishing and growing old with Mindy Lou. But an army pension at his rank could not begin to pay the bills, so he started the search for his first civilian job. Weeks passed, then months. With money running low and few good prospects, he decided to sign up with the security contractor Blackwater for a one-year stint. The job was equally split between instructor assignments at home and security duties overseas, mostly in Afghanistan, where Blackwater had been hired to protect CIA installations and officers. The daily rate for overseas work was seven hundred dollars, enough to enable the Paresis to pay some bills and save for retirement. By late February, less than four months from his arrival in Khost, he would again be on his way home, this time finished with Afghanistan for good.

The housing assignment was certainly better than the dozen or more firebases where he had previously bunked, awful places where Americans and Afghans slept with their guns, lined up like Crayolas inside smelly group tents, and slipped out at dawn to relieve themselves by squatting in the open over crude pits. But now he was no longer a Green Beret, or even a soldier, but a highly paid security guard whose employer had been tarnished by multiple scandals in the press, including allegations that its employees killed innocent Iraqi civilians. Practically, though, Paresi’s real bosses were CIA officers, most of them younger than he and none of them as experienced in surviving the dangers of Afghanistan. When their decisions exasperated him, he spoke up, but Paresi also understood his place. He had a family to feed and would do his job, even if he didn’t like it.

The breakfast trays had been put away, and there was time to kill before the informant arrived, so Paresi wandered down to the motor pool, as he had been doing off and on for several days. He had been an army mechanic once, and he had learned a few tricks in previous Afghanistan tours about hardening a vehicle against a roadside bomb. He had given up hours of free time there, without pay, just keeping his mind busy. And he would do so again this morning, working alone in the cold on old jalopies the CIA’s Afghan agents used for meetings in the countryside.

Paresi’s journals, his usual outlet for his thoughts, had not been touched for days, because he couldn’t sit still long enough to write. When he called home, his voice sounded different, as though he were distracted or preoccupied. Mindy Lou Paresi knew the tone and became instantly concerned.