'The Triple Agent': CIA's darkest hour

THE TRIPLE AGENT: The Al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA, by Joby Warrick. Doubleday, 245 pp., $26.95.

In the afternoon of Dec. 30, 2009, a meek Jordanian doctor who had gained access to the top commanders of al-Qaida was driven onto a secret CIA base at Khost in eastern Afghanistan for his first formal debriefing. More than a dozen CIA officers and other Americans stood in a receiving line to welcome the so-called "golden source." Camp cooks had even baked him a celebratory cake.

Until then, no American had ever met the star informant, and only a handful even knew his name: Humam al-Balawi.

But he was deemed so pivotal to America's war on al-Qaida that back in Washington, President Obama had been notified and was awaiting news of the meeting.

Balawi instead detonated a powerful bomb sewn into his vest, killing himself, seven CIA officers, a Jordanian intelligence officer who was a member of the royal family and a CIA-trained Afghan driver. The CIA had not lost that many operatives in a single day since the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983.

Who was the seemingly mild-mannered doctor, and why was he escorted onto a fortified CIA base without being searched? Why were so many CIA officers waiting for him? Why did events go so tragically wrong?

Joby Warrick largely answers those questions in "The Triple Agent," a disturbing narrative of the events leading to that awful day. If newspapers are the first draft of history, Warrick has written a compelling and complete second draft in surprisingly short order. This is as gripping a true-life spy saga as I've read in years.

Still, the book comes off at times as a hurried snapshot more than a nuanced portrait. There is too little context or history and several minor errors; sometimes breathless prose and repetitive passages don't help.

Inevitably, the main characters are troubled. The CIA base chief, Jessica Matthews, had spent only three months in Afghanistan. She was a hard-charging al-Qaida expert back home, and played a role in the waterboarding of a terror suspect. But she had never served in a war zone, run a surveillance operation or handled an informant. And she was desperate to erase a stain on her record: An internal report had named her as one of the CIA managers who bore responsibility for bungling intelligence before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Balawi, the Jordanian physician, secretly penned anti-American screeds on jihadist websites under a nom de guerre. Arrested by Jordanian intelligence in early 2009, he abruptly switched sides. He offered to go to the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan to help the CIA penetrate al-Qaida. He would become a double agent.

Balawi soon sent his Jordanian handler a short but remarkable video file. It showed him meeting an Islamic scholar who was known to be one of Osama bin Laden's closest associates. Weeks later, the doctor sent word that he had a new medical patient: Ayman al Zawahiri, then bin Laden's top deputy and today his successor as chief of al-Qaida.

At the CIA, the grainy video was "one hundred megabytes of flash and sizzle," Warrick writes.

It was, sadly, too good to be true. Balawi had no training as a spy and had not been vetted as an informant. The two intelligence officers who knew him best -- his Jordanian handler and the CIA case officer -- both expressed doubts. They were right: Balawi had become a triple agent.

He recorded several jihadist videos in the days before he blew himself up, and he delivered his final message in English to ensure the widest audience. "We will get you, CIA team," he vowed. "This is my goal: to kill you. . . . And you will be sent to hell."

After the bombing, an internal CIA investigation concluded that no single U.S. intelligence officer was to blame. But just as in the Sept. 11 attacks, "managers at every level were blinded to warnings and problems that would seem screamingly obvious in hindsight," Warrick writes. The problem was "the eagerness of war weary spies who saw a mirage and desperately wanted it to be real."

The terrorist leader who had organized Balawi's suicide mission was more precise. In an Internet posting, Sheikh Saeed al Masri called al-Qaida's penetration of a guarded CIA base a model of "patience, good planning and management." Unfortunately, Warrick makes clear, that was exactly where the CIA failed when they waited in line to greet Balawi.

EXCERPT: 'The Triple Agent' by Joby Warrick

Prologue

Khost, Afghanistan -- December 30, 2009

For ten days the CIA team waited for the mysterious Jordanian to show up. From gloomy mid-December through the miserable holidays the officers shivered under blankets, retold stale jokes, drank gallons of bad coffee, and sipped booze from Styrofoam cups. They counted distant mortar strikes, studied bomb damage reports, and listened for the thrum of Black Hawk helicopters ferrying wounded. And they waited.

Christmas morning arrived on a raw wind, and still they sat. They picked at gingerbread crumbs in the packages sent from home and stared at the ceramic Nativity figurines one of the officers had set up in lieu of a tree. Then it was December 30, the last dregs of the old year and the tenth day of the vigil, and finally came word that the Jordanian agent was on the move. He was heading west by car through the mountains of Pakistan's jagged northwestern fringe, wearing tribal dress and dark sunglasses and skirting Taliban patrols along the treacherous highway leading to the Afghan frontier.

Until now no American officer had ever seen the man, this spectral informant called "Wolf," whose real name was said to be known to fewer than a dozen people; this wily double agent who had penetrated al-Qaeda, sending back coded messages that lit up CIA headquarters like ball lightning. But at about 3:00 p.m. Afghanistan time, Humam Khalil al-Balawi would step out of the murk and onto the fortified concrete of the secret CIA base known as Khost.

The news of his pending arrival sent analysts scurrying to finalize preparations. Newly arrived base chief Jennifer Matthews, barely three months into her first Afghan posting, had fretted over the details for days, and now she dispatched her aides to check video equipment, fire off cables, and rehearse details of a debriefing that would stretch into the night.

She watched them work, nervous but confident, her short brown hair pulled to the side in a businesslike part. At forty-five, Matthews was a veteran of the agency's counterterrorism wars, and she understood al-Qaeda and its cast of fanatical death worshippers better than perhaps anyone in the CIA -- better, in fact, than she knew the PTA at her kids' school back home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Hard-nosed and serious, Matthews was one of the agency's rising stars, beloved by upper management. She had leaped at the chance to go to Khost in spite of the quizzical looks from close friends who thought she was crazy to leave her family and comfortable suburban life for such a risky assignment. True, she would have much to learn; she had never served in a war zone, or run a surveillance operation, or managed a routine informant case, let alone one as complex as the Jordanian agent. But Matthews was smart and resourceful, and she would have plenty of help from top CIA managers, who were following developments closely from the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters. Their advice so far: Treat Balawi like a distinguished guest.

Matthews signed off on a security plan for the visit, though not without carping from some of the Special Forces veterans in her security detail. Her primary concern was not so much for the agent's physical safety -- the men with the guns would see to that -- but rather for preserving his secret identity. The CIA could not afford to allow him to be seen by any of the scores of Afghans working at the base, except for the trusted driver who was now on his way to pick him up. Even the guards at the front gate would be ordered to turn away to avoid the risk that one of them might glimpse Balawi's face.

Matthews picked a secure spot for the meeting, a gray concrete building in a part of the base that served as the CIA's inner sanctum, separated by high walls and guarded by private security contractors armed with assault rifles. The building was designed for informant meetings and was lined on one side by a large awning to further shield operatives from view as they came and left. Here, surrounded by CIA officers and free from any possibility of detection by al-Qaeda spies, the Jordanian would be searched for weapons and wires and studied for any hint of possible deception. Then he would fill in the details of his wildly improbable narrative, a story so fantastic that few would have believed it had the agent not backed it up with eye-popping proof: Humam al-Balawi had been in the presence of al-Qaeda's elusive No. 2 leader, the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the twisted brains behind dozens of terrorist plots, including the attacks of September 11, 2001. And now Balawi was going to lead the CIA right to Zawahiri's door.

When the debriefing was over, a medical officer would check Balawi's vitals, and a technical team would outfit him for the dangerous mission to come. Then everyone could relax, have a bite to eat, perhaps even a drink.

And there would be a surprise, a birthday cake.

The Jordanian had just turned thirty-two on Christmas Day, a trivia plum that Matthews had been pleased to discover. In fact his special birth date had very nearly caused him to be named Isa -- Jesus, in Arabic -- before his parents changed their minds and decided instead on Humam, meaning "brave one." And now this same Humam was speeding toward Khost with what could well be the agency's greatest Christmas present in many a season, an intelligence windfall so spectacular that the president of the United States had been briefed in advance.

As she waited for the Jordanian, Matthews' head swirled with questions. Who was this man? How did anyone get close to Zawahiri, one of the most reclusive and carefully protected humans on the planet? So much about the Balawi case was confusing. But Matthews had her orders, and she would not fail or flinch.

Balawi would be given a fitting reception. There were no birthday candles at the CIA's forward base in violent eastern Afghanistan. But the Jordanian would have his cake.

That is, if he ever showed up.