In the late afternoon of December 30, 2009, CIA officers at a secret base in Khost, Afghanistan were getting ready to welcome Jordanian doctor-turned-double-agent, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, into their midst.
Balawi was the CIA’s ‘golden source’; the ‘super-spy’ who had seemingly infiltrated the upper echelons of Al Qaeda and was now expected to relay important information to eager listeners at the CIA.
All security checks at the Khost base were blatantly ignored in honor of Balawi’s requests to not be manhandled. American officers, all of whom had never seen Balawi before, had lined up to meet him as his vehicle drove into the base. Base chief Jennifer Matthews had even arranged for a birthday cake for Balawi, who had turned thirty-two on Christmas.
“Hello, my brother,” greeted Ali Bin Zeid, the Jordanian intelligence captain, as Balawi stepped out of the car. Bin Zeid, a cousin of Jordan’s King Abdullah II, was the agent who had arrested Balawi for his cyber jihadist activities, and then, later, recruited him as a spy.
In response, Balawi blew himself up, by detonating a powerful bomb attached to his vest, killing himself, Bin Zeid, seven CIA officers and the driver of the vehicle he was in.
Joby Warrick’s “The Triple Agent” is a fast-paced, gripping narrative on the chronology of events that led to that ill-fated day in Afghanistan. In a style reminiscent of spy thrillers, Pulitzer Prize winner Warrick, who covers national security for the Washington Post, deconstructs, with finesse, the principal characters whose miscalculations led to the CIA’s worst loss of life in years.
Balawi is initially portrayed as an unassuming recluse, who moonlighted as a gruesome cyber jihadist. After getting selected by Bin Zeid to become an informant, Balawi, in cahoots with Al Qaeda extremists in Pakistan, began a devious plan to deal a grievous blow to the CIA. This involved Balawi sending the CIA carefully guised messages, and enticing fake videos, one of which contained footage of Balawi talking with the then deputy, and now head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri.
“Balawi was thrilled to be part of it,” Warrick writes. “The storied American spy agency had ensnared so many jihadists with its technology, money and clever tricks. Now it appeared to have fallen to Al Qaeda’s clever ruse, one surely as clever as any dreamed up in the West. ‘All praise is due to God, the bait fell in the right spot,’ Balawi said, ‘and they went head over heels in excitement.’”
The idea that Balawi had made contact with Zawahari was lapped up by the CIA, and a meeting between the CIA and Balawi was quickly arranged. While it did seem too good to be true, and despite doubts by a few of the officers at Khost, concerns over both Balawi’s intentions and the large number of people at the meeting were never taken seriously.
As Warrick puts it, ‘the war-weary spies saw a mirage, and desperately wanted it to be real.’
Be it flip-flop wearing terrorist hunter Elizabeth Hanson, or former Army Ranger turned CIA officer Darren LaBonte, Warrick fleshes out each of the men and women who died that day, and their families, giving each of them a voice. In one of the more poignant moments of the book, after hearing about the death of security guard Jeremy Wise in the suicide bombing, his teary-eyed widow tells their six-year-old son, “Daddy’s gone.”
It is anecdotes like these that help the principal characters in the book seem more than just cardboard cut-outs. In bringing out delicate nuances of everyone from Balawi to Wise, Warrick tries to showcase the human element in this tragedy, and succeeds most of the time.
Warrick also takes the reader on a whirlwind trip around the world, from the dusty streets of Jordan where Balawi grew up, to the drone-infested highlands of Pakistan where America was waging a fierce, technologically-savvy war against Al Qaeda. In this, however, he hurries through some scenes and repeats others, sometimes leaving the reader a little dazed, if not confused.
Warrick suggests that perhaps the only good thing that came out of this tragedy was that the CIA seemed to have learnt their lesson. Extra precautions were taken in the operation that led to the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden earlier this year, which Warrick details in the epilogue. The CIA got its revenge. Warrick got a page-turner of a book.
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