/ Language: English / Genre:nonf_publicism The Triple Agent Joby Warrick A stunning narrative account of the mysterious Jordanian who penetrated both the inner circle of al-Qaeda and the highest reaches of the CIA, with a devastating impact on the war on terror. In December 2009, a group of the CIA’s top terrorist hunters gathered at a secret base in Khost, Afghanistan, to greet a rising superspy: Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian double-agent who infiltrated the upper ranks of al-Qaeda. For months, he had sent shocking revelations from inside the terrorist network and now promised to help the CIA assassinate Osama bin Laden’s top deputy. Instead, as he stepped from his car, he detonated a thirty-pound bomb strapped to his chest, instantly killing seven CIA operatives, the agency’s worst loss of life in decades. In The Triple Agent, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Joby Warrick takes us deep inside the CIA’s secret war against al-Qaeda, a war that pits robotic planes and laser-guided missiles against a cunning enemy intent on unleashing carnage in American cities. Flitting precariously between the two sides was Balawi, a young man with extraordinary gifts who managed to win the confidence of hardened terrorists as well as veteran spymasters. With his breathtaking accounts from inside al-Qaeda’s lair, Balawi appeared poised to become America’s greatest double-agent in half a century-but he was not at all what he seemed. Combining the powerful momentum of Black Hawk Down with the institutional insight of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, Warrick takes the readers on a harrowing journey from the slums of Amman to the inner chambers of the White House in an untold true story of miscalculation, deception, and revenge.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Quotations in this book that are designated by quotation marks are the recollections of individuals who heard the words as they were spoken. Italics are used in cases in which a source could not recall the precise language or when a source relayed conversation or thoughts that were shared with him by a participant in the events described.

LIST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

The White House

President Barack Obama

James L. Jones, national security adviser

John Brennan, chief counterterrorism adviser to the president

Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Michael V. Hayden, CIA director, May 2006 to February 2009

Leon Panetta, CIA director, February 2009 to June 2011

Stephen Kappes, CIA deputy director

Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence

Amman, Jordan

Darren LaBonte, CIA case officer, Amman station, CIA station chief, Amman station (identity classified; name withheld)

Ali bin Zeid, captain, Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID), aka the Mukhabarat

Ali Burjak, aka Red Ali, Mukhabarat counterterrorism chief, bin Zeid’s boss

Humam Khalil al-Balawi, physician and blogger

Khalil al-Balawi, Humam’s father

Defne Bayrak, Humam’s wife

In Afghanistan

Jennifer Matthews, CIA base chief, Forward Operating Base Chapman (“Khost”)

Harold Brown Jr., CIA case officer, Khost

Scott Roberson, CIA security chief, Khost

Dane Paresi, security contractor, Xe Services LLC, aka Blackwater, Khost

Jeremy Wise, security contractor, Xe Services LLC, aka Blackwater, Khost

Arghawan, Afghan detail security chief, Khost (last name withheld), CIA deputy chief of station, Kabul station (identity classified; name withheld)

Elizabeth Hanson, targeter, Kabul station

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan

Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda founder and leader

Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s No. 2 commander, deputy to Osama bin Laden

Osama al-Kini (given name Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam), senior al-Qaeda commander for Pakistan

Abdullah Said al-Libi, an al-Qaeda operations chief, leader of al-Qaeda’s “Shadow Army” in Pakistan

Sheikh Saeed al-Masri (given name Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid), al-Qaeda’s No. 3 commander

Baitullah Mehsud, leader of Pakistani Taliban alliance, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)

Hakimullah Mehsud, deputy TTP leader, cousin to Baitullah Mehsud

Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, al-Qaeda senior leader and Islamic scholar

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (given name Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh), Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, killed in U.S. missile strike in 2006

Abu Zubaida (given name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein), first “high-value” terrorist operative captured by the CIA after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the first to be subjected to waterboarding

MAPS

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’s 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.

By 3:30 P.M. the entire team was ready and waiting outside the interrogation building. Another thirty minutes dragged by without news from the Jordanian, and then an hour, and now the sun was slumping toward the tops of the mountain peaks west of Khost. The temperature dropped, and the nervous adrenaline congealed into plain nervousness.

Had something happened? Had Balawi changed his mind? There were no answers and nothing to do but wait.

The group of men and women beneath the metal awning had grown to fourteen, an oddly large gathering for an informant meeting. Normally, the imperative to shield a spy’s identity dictates that no more than two or three officers are ever allowed to see him. But as was quickly becoming clear, there was nothing normal about the Balawi case. There was a sense of destiny, of history being made, one CIA participant in the events later recalled. “Everyone,” the officer said, “wanted to be involved in this one.”

Gradually the officers segregated themselves into small groups. The security detail, two CIA employees, and a pair of guards working for the private contractor Xe Services LLC, commonly known as Blackwater, stood near the gate, talking in low voices, M4s slung over their backs. Three of the men were military veterans, and all four had become chummy. Pipe-smoking Dane Paresi, a former Green Beret and one of the oldest in the group at forty-six, had joined Blackwater after a career that included stints in multiple hellholes, most recently Afghanistan, where his conduct under fire had earned him the Bronze Star. Iraq veteran Jeremy Wise, thirty-five, an ex-Navy SEAL with an infectious grin, had signed up with the security contractor to pay the bills after leaving active service and was struggling to figure out what to do with his life. Security team leader Harold E. Brown Jr., thirty-seven, was a former army intelligence officer and devoted family man who taught Roman Catholic catechism classes and led Cub Scouts back in Virginia. Scott Roberson, thirty-eight, had been a narcotics detective in Atlanta in a previous life, and he was looking forward to becoming a father in less than a month.

Nearer to the building, two men in civilian jeans and khakis chatted with the ease of longtime friends. Both were guests at Khost, having flown to Afghanistan from Jordan to be present at Balawi’s debriefing. The big man with ink black hair was Jordanian intelligence captain Ali bin Zeid, a cousin of King Abdullah II of Jordan and the only one in the group who had ever met Balawi. Darren LaBonte, an athletic ex–Army Ranger who sported a goatee and a baseball hat, was a CIA officer assigned to the agency’s Amman station. The two were close friends who often worked cases together and sometimes vacationed together along with their wives. Both had been anxious about the meeting with Balawi, and they had spent part of the previous day blowing off steam by snapping pictures and puttering around on a three-wheeler they had found.

A larger group clustered around Matthews. One of them, a striking blonde with cobalt blue eyes, had been summoned from the CIA’s Kabul station for the meeting because of her exceptional skills. Elizabeth Hanson was one of the agency’s most celebrated targeters, an expert at finding terrorist commanders in their hiding places and tracking them until one of the CIA’s hit teams could move into place. She was thirty but looked even younger, bundled up inside a jacket and oversize flannel shirt against the December chill.

The wind was picking up, and the late-afternoon shadows stretched like vines across the asphalt. A frustrated boredom set in, and officers fidgeted with their cell phones.

Paresi set down his weapon and tapped out an e-mail to his wife. Mindy Lou Paresi was airborne at that moment, flying back to Seattle from Ohio with the couple’s youngest daughter after holiday visits with family. As he often did, Paresi would leave a message that his wife would see when she landed, just letting her know that he was OK.

“E-mail me when you get to the house,” he wrote. “I love you both very much.”

Jeremy Wise stepped away from the others to make his phone call. The Arkansas native was feeling strangely anxious, so much so that he wondered if he was coming down with something. He dialed his home number, and when the answering machine picked up, the disappointment clearly registered in his voice. “I’m not doing very well,” he said, speaking slowly. He hesitated. “Tell Ethan I love him.”

Bin Zeid was the only one with a direct line to Balawi, and his phone had been distressingly silent. The big man now sat quietly, clutching his mobile between thick fingers. It was bin Zeid who had gone over the arrangements with the agent—Balawi had been his recruit after all—and now the possibility of failure loomed over him like a leaden cloud. On top of it all, both he and his CIA partner, LaBonte, had personal reasons for wanting out of Afghanistan in a hurry. LaBonte’s entire family, including his wife and their baby daughter, was waiting for him in an Italian villa they had rented for the holidays, and the delays had already eaten up most of his vacation. Bin Zeid, who was newly married, had made plans to spend New Year’s Eve with his wife back in Amman.

When his phone finally chirped, it was a text message from dark-haired Fida, asking her husband if he was positive he would be home the following evening. Bin Zeid tapped out a terse reply. “Not yet,” he wrote.

Just after 4:40 P.M. bin Zeid’s phone finally rang. The number in the caller ID belonged to Arghawan, the Afghan driver who had been dispatched to the border crossing for the pickup. But the voice was Balawi’s.

The agent apologized. He had injured his leg in an accident and had been delayed, he said. Balawi had been anxious about his first meeting with Americans, and he asked again about the procedures at the gate. I don’t want to be manhandled, he kept repeating.

You’ll treat me like a friend, right? he asked.

By now a column of dust from Afghawan’s red Outback was already visible from the guard tower. The driver was moving fast to thwart any sniper who might happen to have a scope trained on the road in time to see an unescorted civilian vehicle heading for the American base. In keeping with the CIA’s instructions and, coincidentally, with Balawi’s wishes, there would be no fumbling or checking IDs at the gate. On cue, the Afghan army guards at the front gate rolled back the barriers just enough to let Arghawan roar past. The Afghan driver then veered sharply to the left and followed a ribbon of asphalt along the edge of the airfield to a small second gate, where he was again waved through.

Now Matthews could see the station wagon entering the compound where she and the others were waiting. Matthews had asked bin Zeid and LaBonte to greet Balawi while she and the other officers kept a respectful distance, spread out in a crude reception line beneath the awning. She began making her way to a spot at the front of the line, straightening her clothes as she walked.

Security chief Scott Roberson and the two Blackwater guards unslung their rifles and made their way across the gravel lot, but the arriving Outback cut them off. The car rolled to a halt with the driver’s door positioned directly in front of the spot where Matthews was standing. Arghawan was alone in the front seat, his face nearly obscured by the thick film of dust that coated the windows. The figure sitting directly behind him in the backseat was hunched forward slightly, and Matthews strained to make out the face. The engine was cut, and in an instant Roberson was opening the rear door next to Balawi.

The man inside hesitated, as though studying the guards’ weapons. Then, very slowly, he slid across the seat away from the Americans and climbed out on the opposite side of the car.

Now he was standing, a short, wiry man, perhaps thirty, with dark eyes and a few matted curls visible under his turban. He was wearing a beige, loose-fitting kameez shirt of the type worn by Pashtun tribesmen and a woolen vest that made him look slightly stout around the middle. A long gray shawl draped his shoulders and covered the lower part of his face and beard. The man reached back into the car to grab a metal crutch, and as he did, the shawl fell away to reveal a wispy beard and an expression as blank as a marble slab.

As the others watched in confused silence, the man started to walk around the front of the car with an awkward, stooped gait, as though struggling under a heavy load. He was mumbling to himself.

Bin Zeid waved to Balawi but, getting no response, called out to him.

“Salaam, akhoya. Hello, my brother,” bin Zeid said. “Everything’s OK!”

But it wasn’t. Blackwater guards Paresi and Wise had instinctively raised their guns when Balawi balked at exiting on their side of the car. Paresi, the ex–Green Beret, watched with growing alarm as Balawi hobbled around the vehicle, one hand grasping the crutch and the other hidden ominously under his shawl. Paresi tensed, finger on the trigger, eyes fixed on the shawl with instincts honed in dozens of firefights and close scrapes. One shot would drop the man. But if he was wrong—if there was no bomb—it would be the worst mistake of his life. He circled around the car keeping the ambling figure in his gun’s sight. Steady. Wait. But where’s that hand?

Now he and Wise were shouting almost in unison, guns at the ready.

“Hands up! Get your hand out of your clothing!”

Balawi’s mumbling grew louder. He was chanting something in Arabic.

“La ilaha illa Allah!” he was saying.

There is no god but God.

Bin Zeid heard the words and knew, better than anyone, exactly what they meant.

1.

OBSESSION

McLean, Virginia—One year earlier

For nearly three years the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and his top generals had been Michael V. Hayden’s daily obsession, a throbbing migraine that intruded on his consciousness at odd hours of the night. But as he turned the page on his final month as CIA director, it was a different Osama that was costing him sleep. Before New Year’s Day was over, Hayden would have to decide whether the man would live or die.

The man was called Osama al-Kini, and he had been the subject of an increasingly frantic search. The boyish onetime soccer player from Kenya had moved up in al-Qaeda’s ranks, starting as a truck driver and bomb maker and rising to become a top operations planner with a flair for the spectacular. He was preparing a list of targets for a wave of strikes across Western Europe when the CIA caught a lucky break. In late December, the agency had spotted one of al-Kini’s top deputies in a town in northwestern Pakistan, and now it was following him, with eyes on the ground and robot planes circling silently above. Cameras whirring, it trailed him as he wandered through the bazaars, sat for tea, or climbed the hilly street to the abandoned girls’ school where he sometimes stayed the night. Agents watched for hours, and then days, waiting to see who would come to meet him. As the graveyard shift at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters rang in the first minutes of 2009, the watchers sensed that they were finally getting close.

New Year’s Day found Hayden attempting to enjoy a rare day off. He tried to relax with family and even took in a couple of football games, but the phone summoned him back to the hunt. From his basement office, with its twenty-four-hour security detail and secure line to headquarters, he mulled the latest updates from Pakistan. Keep watching, he ordered. Then, when late evening arrived without further news, Hayden decided to turn in for the night. He switched on his TV and sat on the bed. It was the Orange Bowl game from Miami, and Virginia Tech was pounding Cincinnati. He stretched out and tried to concentrate on the game.

At sixty-three, Hayden was no one’s vision of a killer. The retired four-star general had been a career intelligence man in the air force who moved up to become head of the National Security Agency, overseeing the country’s vast overseas eavesdropping network. In 2006 he was President George W. Bush’s pick for the CIA’s third director in two years, inheriting a demoralized spy agency in need of a wise uncle to pay bail and clean up the damage. Hayden’s charge, simply put, was to restore stability and even a kind of bureaucratic blandness to the CIA after multiple scandals over the alleged kidnapping and torture of suspected terrorists. One of his stated ambitions going in: to get the CIA out of the headlines. “The agency needs to be out of the news, as source or subject,” he told the Washington Post in an interview.

Hayden was born to Irish Catholic parents in Pittsburgh and maintained lifelong ties to that working-class city, returning home on fall weekends to root for the Steelers or for the football squad at his alma mater, Duquesne University. He liked talking in sports analogies, and, as CIA director he enjoyed mingling with young analysts in the agency cafeteria, his bald pate and easy smile making him a reassuring, rather than an intimidating, presence for junior staffers. The mechanics of finding and eliminating specific terrorist threats seemed to fall more naturally to Hayden’s chief deputy, Stephen R. Kappes, a legendary case officer who had made his mark matching wits against the Soviet KGB in Moscow.

But now, in his third year as director, Hayden was in charge of the most relentlessly lethal campaign in the spy agency’s history. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA had devoted itself to hunting down bin Laden and his followers with the aim of capturing, imprisoning, and interrogating them. Now the agency had a different goal: killing the terrorists and their allies wherever they could be found. The agency had slowly built up a fleet of pilotless aircraft, called Predators, capable of firing missiles by remote control. In mid-2008, as the Bush administration entered its final months, the CIA unleashed the planes, commonly referred to as drones, in an all-out war against al-Qaeda. CIA missiles blasted terrorist safe houses and training camps week after week, and the finger on the trigger was Hayden’s.

The transformation had been years in the making. In the middle years of the decade, as the Bush administration poured troops and resources into Iraq, al-Qaeda had staged a comeback in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan. The demoralized bands of Arab fighters who had streamed out of Afghanistan in late 2001 regrouped under their old generals, bin Laden and his operations chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a new generation of aggressive commanders replaced those who had been killed or captured. From new sanctuaries in the rugged no-man’s-land between the two countries, they quietly began reopening training camps, raising money, and plotting new attacks against the United States and Western Europe. The agency’s wire intercepts crackled with vague but ominous talk about surveillance missions and dry runs targeting airliners, shopping centers, tourist resorts, and hotels—threats most Americans would never hear about.

By 2007 al-Qaeda’s ability to wreak havoc nearly rivaled the group’s pre-2002 peak. In some ways, the threat was even worse: Al-Qaeda had effectively merged with some of Pakistan’s extremist groups, while spawning new chapters in North Africa, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Qaeda’s propagandists harnessed the Internet’s formidable powers to spread al-Qaeda’s hateful gospel to millions of Muslims through Web sites and chat rooms. New streams of cash and recruits spilled into northwestern Pakistan and to regional affiliates from Yemen to Southeast Asia. Many of the newcomers signing up for jihad carried Western passports and could slip undetected into American and European capitals. Some had blond hair and light skin.

What Hayden saw as he surveyed the world in early 2008 truly frightened him. So early that year, during his weekly intelligence briefings at the White House, he began to make the case to President George W. Bush.

“This is now a bona fide threat to the homeland,” Hayden told the president during one Oval Office visit. Another September 11–style terrorist strike was inevitable, he said, and it would come from the tribal region of Pakistan.

To prevent such an attack, the United States must take the fight to the enemy, Hayden argued. That meant attacking al-Qaeda on its home turf inside Pakistan, disrupting its communications, killing its generals and field commanders, and depriving it of sanctuary. Only the CIA had the legal authority to reach targets deep inside Pakistan, and the agency already possessed the perfect weapon, the Predator. It was time to take the fetters off the CIA’s fleet of unmanned hunter-killer planes, he said.

Bush and his advisers listened sympathetically. The problem, everyone knew, was Pakistan. Islamabad was a crucial ally, and it officially opposed foreign missile strikes on its soil, no matter the target. Pakistani officials argued that American air strikes only worsened the terror problem by radicalizing ordinary Pakistanis and driving more of them to join with the extremists—a concern shared by some U.S. terrorism experts as well. In private discussions, Pakistani intelligence officials chided the Americans for what they perceived as two dangerous obsessions: an overdependence on expensive technology, and an absurd fixation on the person of Osama bin Laden.

“Al-Qaeda is not very strong, but you’ve made it into a ten-foot-tall giant,” one senior Pakistani government official recalled telling a visiting Bush administration delegation. “How can a handful of core al-Qaeda leaders seriously threaten the greatest empire in the world?”

Eventually, Pakistani leaders agreed to allow a limited number of Predator strikes, and for months Washington and Islamabad engaged in an awkward dance over when an attack was permissible. If the CIA discovered a potential target, the agency could pull the trigger only after both governments agreed. In practice, it rarely happened. “If you had to ask for permission, you got one of three answers: either ‘No,’ or ‘We’re thinking about it,’ or ‘Oops, where did the target go?’ ” said a former U.S. national security official who was involved at the time. A whole year passed without a single significant success against al-Qaeda on its home turf. “We’re at zero for ’07,” Hayden complained to the White House.

After months of debate Bush decided in July 2008 to give the CIA what it wanted. News reports later characterized the policy change as an informal agreement by Pakistan to allow more U.S. air strikes in remote tribal regions that were largely outside of Islamabad’s control. In reality, the shift was much simpler: The CIA stopped asking for permission. The new policy, communicated to Pakistani officials in a meeting that month, required only “simultaneous notification” when the strikes occurred.

Over the next six months Predators hit targets in Pakistan thirty times, more than triple the combined number of strikes in the previous four years.

U.S. elections in November 2008 signaled the coming end of Republican control of the White House and likely Hayden’s tenure at CIA. But in the final weeks, as the clock ran down on the Bush presidency, the number of Predator strikes soared, prompting speculation within the agency that Hayden was hoping to flush Osama bin Laden himself out of hiding as the Bush administration’s final payback for September 11. It was amid the scramble for big targets in the final days of 2008 that a familiar name popped up in one of the agency’s phone intercepts.

The name belonged to an East African man named Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, a midlevel al-Qaeda operative linked to several terrorist bombings. But Swedan was most interesting because of whom he worked for, the former soccer player known as Osama al-Kini, now the senior al-Qaeda commander in Pakistan. The two men had been on a bloody two-year rampage, killing hundreds of people in a series of increasingly spectacular attacks in Pakistani cities. On January 1, 2009, they were preparing to take their brand of mass murder on the road.

All by himself, Swedan would have made a worthy target. At the time he stumbled into the CIA’s surveillance net, he was on the most wanted lists for both the CIA and FBI and had been indicted in New York for assisting the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. His apparent hideout in late 2008—an abandoned girls’ school on the outskirts of a village called Karikot—had also drawn keen interest. The CIA’s informants identified the building as a training academy for al-Qaeda’s bomb makers.

Hayden mulled his options and decided to wait. As important as he was, Swedan was only a deputy, and he wasn’t going anywhere. On the morning of January 1 he was under constant surveillance, not only by CIA operatives on the ground but also by a pair of Predators flying above the village. Sooner or later Swedan would have to communicate with his boss, and then Hayden would have a much bigger prize.

The CIA had been waiting for such an opportunity for more than a decade. Like his deputy, Osama al-Kini was also linked to the 1998 African bombings and had a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. Slim and athletic with tightly curled locks, al-Kini had been part of Osama bin Laden’s entourage since the early days and had been promoted to operations planner. By 2007 he was al-Qaeda’s top regional commander for all of Pakistan, and he was good at his job. His cell assisted the Pakistani Taliban in the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and carried out bombings and suicide attacks against police stations, army camps, a civilian court, and a naval academy. Then, in September 2008, he achieved something far more ambitious, a massive truck bombing at Islamabad’s luxurious Marriott Hotel. The blast killed more than fifty workers and guests, wounded two hundred others, and made headlines around the world.

Al-Kini was now muscling his way into al-Qaeda’s senior ranks while putting his personal stamp on the organization. Aggressive and charismatic, he was popular with the group’s younger fighters, and he was beginning to pose a challenge to al-Qaeda’s more experienced leaders, particularly a commander named Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, a cruel-tempered Egyptian who controlled the group’s purse strings and claimed the top leadership spot after Zawahiri. Most ominously, al-Kini was preparing to go international, dispatching some of his top trainees to Western Europe. CIA officials concluded that the Kenyan was attempting to lay the groundwork for a network of terrorist cells across Europe that could begin casing major hotels and other landmarks for future attacks.

It was this threat that weighed most heavily on Mike Hayden on January 1 as he waited for news from northwestern Pakistan. The CIA director had not yet fallen asleep when the phone rang at 10:30 P.M. with fresh word from the hunt. Hayden rolled out of bed and trudged to his basement office to get on a secure phone line.

It was already daylight in Pakistan, and one of the CIA’s Predators had been hovering nearby as Swedan left the girls’ school for an early appointment. As the CIA watched, Swedan met with a man he appeared to know, and the two traveled back to the girls’ school together. The second man’s face was obscured, but everything about him matched the description of the terrorist commander the CIA had been looking for. The duty officer at the Counterterrorism Center had made a judgment call and phoned Hayden for his consent. Permission to strike?

Hayden had a standard set of questions for situations such as this, and he proceeded to go through them.

How long have you watched this location?

What is the history of this location, and how many times have you looked at it?

Have you seen women and children in this compound, ever?

From its vantage point a half mile above the village, the lead Predator, which had followed the two men, had already locked its video tracking system on the girls’ school while awaiting further instructions. The odd-looking aircraft with its narrow fuselage and bowling alley–length wingspan cut lazy circles in the sky above the town, moving at speeds barely above those of freeway traffic. With a full tank and the usual complement of missiles, it could have continued to hover for fourteen hours without a pause. Instead, with a subtle shift in the engine’s pitch, the aircraft widened its arc to line up its body with the building below. In Langley, the live video feed flickered on a pair of flat-screen TVs in the operations center, while the aircraft’s two-man crew, in a separate building, made small adjustments to the aircraft’s movements with joysticks and the click of a computer mouse.

Hayden thought for a moment. Swedan was inside the building; that was certain. The man with Swedan was doubtlessly an accomplice and very possibly al-Kini himself. The building was a known training facility for al-Qaeda that probably contained explosives and was far enough from the village to ensure that no one else would be harmed. Three for the price of one, Hayden thought.

One or two of the Predator’s Hellfire missiles would probably do the job, but Hayden wanted to be doubly sure.

Use the GBU, he ordered. At the command, the Predator’s flight crew bypassed the aircraft’s fourteen-pound Hellfire missiles and switched on a far larger weapon hidden inside the bomb cavity, a five-hundred-pound laser-guided GBU-12 Paveway. The weapons officer checked the guidance system, made one last tweak, and pressed a button. He counted backward as the missile hurtled toward the village at a speed slightly faster than sound. Three, two, one, the operator called. And then: “Impact.”

The building in the black-and-white screen erupted in a massive fireball.

The drone lingered for hours, to record the recovery of two mangled corpses. A local Taliban official confirmed the deaths of the two men he called foreign fighters and “close friends.”

By then, the drone operators had ended their shift and climbed into their cars for the journey home, a commute made refreshingly easy by Washington standards because of the holiday.

Hayden sat on his bed to watch the last few minutes of the football game and then fell into a deep sleep. The next morning an intercepted phone call in Pakistan confirmed the death of Osama al-Kini, the last high-ranking al-Qaeda leader to be killed by orders of the Bush administration.

The whereabouts of the other Osama remained unknown.

Weeks later, Mike Hayden was officially out of a job. Newly elected President Barack Obama had opted for a fresh start by naming an old Washington hand, Leon Panetta, to run the CIA. Panetta had no significant intelligence experience but was a proven manager, having been chief of staff in the Clinton White House. One of his first decisions was to retain Hayden’s popular deputy, Steve Kappes, as the agency’s deputy director and to keep the agency’s entire counterterrorism team intact.

Hayden’s initial meeting with his successor was cordial, if occasionally awkward. Panetta had gotten off to a poor start inside the CIA by publicly criticizing the agency’s harsh treatment of al-Qaeda captives, some of whom had been locked in secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding, an interrogation tactic that mimics the sensation of drowning. Panetta testified in his confirmation hearing that he believed such techniques constituted torture, a criminal offense.

Hayden made a curt reference to the controversy. “You should never use ‘torture’ and ‘CIA’ in the same paragraph,” he advised dryly. But the retired general was mostly interested in talking about something else. Using notes he had written on an index card, he cautioned Panetta against being lulled into underestimating al-Qaeda. Although the terrorist group was being hammered in northwestern Pakistan by Predator strikes—a practice Obama had already heartily embraced—it remained capable of hitting Americans in ways that were both unexpected and potentially devastating. Just three months earlier, a Taliban-allied terrorist group from Pakistan had launched commando-style attacks on Mumbai, raking hotels, rail stations, and other buildings with automatic weapons and grenades, and killing more than 170 people.

Hayden now looked directly at Panetta. This was the important part.

“I don’t know if you understand this yet, but you are America’s combatant commander in the war against terrorism,” he said. More than the Pentagon, the FBI, or anyone else, Hayden continued, the CIA was responsible for hunting down terrorists in foreign countries and stopping them before they could strike. Other CIA directors had carried out similar missions in bygone years, but now the job was different: For the first time in the agency’s history, “stopping” the bad guys meant killing them.

“You will be making decisions,” Hayden said, “that will absolutely surprise you.”

Panetta listened politely, but Hayden’s final point struck him as a bit dramatic. At military posts, a change of command was often greeted with ceremonial flourish: boot clicks and salutes and theatrical rhetoric. It would be weeks before Panetta fully understood what Hayden meant.

On his way out, Hayden stopped by the White House for a final meeting with the newly elected president. In an Oval Office briefing with Barack Obama, the general mentioned a pair of targets the agency had been monitoring in northwestern Pakistan. Hayden had authorized a strike, and the agency’s team was waiting for the right moment, he told the president.

Later that morning, after the meeting had moved into the White House’s Situation Room, Hayden was asked about the Pakistani operation. What about those two targets?

Hayden made a quick call on his secure phone.

“Check,” he said, “and check.”

Hayden left the meeting a few minutes later amid appreciative smiles and handshakes.

They certainly seem supportive, he thought, appraising the young president and his security team with guarded approval.

He had officially passed the baton. Now it was their turn.

2.

HAUNTED

London—January 19, 2009

A winter squall was whipping through central London’s Grosvenor Square, scattering newspapers and tourists and pelting Franklin Roosevelt’s caped statue with sheets of rain. Jennifer Lynne Matthews peered from her office window into the thick weather, barely able to see.

It was another soggy Monday in London and the start of the final stretch of a nearly four-year stint as the CIA’s chief liaison on counterterrorism to Britain. Soon she would be on her way either back to Virginia or to an entirely different location—perhaps even Afghanistan—and the uncertainty was making her anxious. The morning’s cable traffic had brought unsettling news. The FBI was chasing a possible threat by Somali terrorists to blow up the inaugural parade for the newly elected president, Barack Obama, due to begin in less than twenty-four hours. In Afghanistan, insurgents had attempted an unusually sophisticated double suicide bombing just outside the CIA’s secret base near the city of Khost. First, a minivan was blown up at the front gate, killing and wounding mothers and young children who had been waiting in line to see the base doctor. As guards and troops rushed to help the wounded, a truck, sagging under the weight of a massive bomb, came barreling down the main highway. A few well-aimed gunshots by an Afghan soldier had killed the truck’s driver and averted a bigger disaster.

She studied the item, habitually fingering the thick shock of brown hair that spilled across her forehead. Was this the kind of place she wanted to be? Matthews was forty-four now but looked younger, her body lean from years of running and her angular features showing no trace of wrinkles. She was nowhere near retirement, but after two decades of CIA work, her career choices were becoming increasingly momentous. If nothing else, another overseas posting would mean a better pension when the time finally came.

Still. Afghanistan.

Matthews sat back in her chair and stared into the gloom outside her window. Office workers were slogging through the square with their umbrellas, and some of them would be heading to pubs later that day for celebrations marking the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. Glad though she was to see certain members of Bush’s security team leave town, Matthews would not be celebrating. She reserved great disdain for Bush’s former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, one of a half dozen men she blamed for letting Osama bin Laden slip away when the CIA had had the terrorist in its crosshairs. But the prospect of an Obama presidency had been more unsettling to some of her former comrades in the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. Candidate Obama had condemned the agency’s past use of waterboarding and had even called it torture, suggesting that investigations, public hearings, and even criminal charges were on the agenda.

Matthews knew about waterboarding. She had spent weeks by the side of Abu Zubaida, the man who became renowned as the first high-value al-Qaeda prisoner to be subjected to the procedure, in a controversial, secret prison overseas. As one of the CIA’s leading al-Qaeda experts she had fed questions to the interrogators as they did their work. She had been pregnant at the time and became so sick afterward that her doctors worried about the health of her unborn baby.

But underlying her anxiety about the torture case was an even deeper secret, one that had gnawed at her for four years and followed her to London when she accepted the CIA’s liaison post in 2005. Thousands of miles from CIA headquarters, in the heart of one of the world’s great cities, she had plunged into her new role with an intensity that left her physically and emotionally spent, yet it was clear when a lawyer friend from the CIA General Counsel’s Office stopped by for a visit that the old pain still raged.

“I can’t get this thing out of my head,” she told him, fighting back tears. Matthews had gone over the details many times, with this friend and others. The lawyer offered reassurance but quickly concluded that it was hopeless. “She was haunted,” he later said.

The reasons for Matthews’s anguish were well known within the CIA, where roughly two dozen other officers carried the same burden. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks the CIA’s internal watchdog, the Office of the Inspector General, had launched a wide-ranging investigation into how the intelligence agency had failed to uncover the al-Qaeda plot to hijack four airliners and crash them into buildings. Other U.S. departments shared in what was arguably a government-wide failure, but the agency’s probe homed in on CIA missteps that had allowed two of the nineteen hijackers to enter the United States undetected.

Leading the probe was career CIA analyst John L. Helgerson, a quietly amiable former college professor who surprised his peers by becoming one of the most aggressive and fiercely independent inspectors general in the agency’s history. Helgerson concluded that the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had failed to respond to a series of cabled warnings in 2000 about two al-Qaeda operatives who later became part of the September 11 plot. The first warning came in January of that year, when the two operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were observed attending a meeting of suspected terrorists in Malaysia. Soon afterward the CIA learned that one of the men had obtained a U.S. visa, and the other had apparently already entered the United States. The cables were seen by as many as sixty CIA employees, yet the two operatives’ names were never passed along to the FBI, which might have assigned agents to track them down, or shared with the State Department, which could have flagged their names on its watch list. In theory, the arrest of either man could have led investigators to the other hijackers and the eventual unraveling of the 9/11 plot.

Helgerson’s report named individual managers who it said bore the greatest responsibility for failing to ensure that vital information was passed to the FBI. The report, never released in full, also recommended that some of the managers be reviewed for possible disciplinary action.

Jennifer Matthews was on that list.

The report ignited a furor at CIA headquarters as top agency officials pushed back sharply against Helgerson’s call for individual accountability. It was unfair, Helgerson’s critics argued, to tarnish a few managers for what had been a collective failure. The agency’s director at the time, Porter Goss, decided the matter by formally rejecting disciplinary reviews. He then ordered that Helgerson’s list of names remain classified.

From the reprieved officers came a collective sigh of relief. But Matthews would not be consoled. It galled her that she, one of a handful of dedicated al-Qaeda experts in the CIA before 2001, had been accused of failing to take al-Qaeda seriously. Matthews believed the opposite was true: She had been among the few who had recognized the threat posed by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Like others in the agency’s al-Qaeda unit, she faulted the country’s political leaders for missing numerous chances to kill or capture the Saudi terrorist.

It was abhorrent to Matthews that her name would be forever linked to one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history. The jagged sliver continued to bore into her psyche years later in London, long after public interest in the agency’s pre–September 11 failures had dried up.

As Matthews sat in her sparsely furnished office overlooking Grosvenor Square, she could see how it would all unfold. A leak that revealed her name as one of the culpable. A media flurry. A ruined career. And, most painful to contemplate, public disgrace.

“The worst part was that her children would know,” said the CIA lawyer who visited with her. “She would be indelibly tarnished, forever linked to the failures of September 11.”

London had served as a welcome respite for Matthews and her family, at a time when she really needed it. She had relished her long weekends and holidays traveling with the family around Europe. She savored repeat performances of her favorite musical, Les Miserables, on the London stage, and she bought cases of French wine to add to a growing collection back home. At work, Matthews was caught up in the investigations of several international terrorism plots, including the 2006 al-Qaeda plan to blow up commercial airliners using liquid explosives. British colleagues came to respect her knowledge of the subject matter and quickly adjusted to her take-no-prisoners style. “I could always tell which of my office mates had met with Jennifer on any day,” one British intelligence officer would later recall. “It was always the busiest person in the room.”

But now it was over, and Matthews was torn over what to do next. Most of the typical slots for someone with her background involved a desk somewhere back in Langley, an unappealing prospect for multiple reasons. Career-wise she was near the top of the government’s civilian pay scale, yet she lacked the experience in key areas necessary to make the jump into upper management, the so-called senior executive service, where minimum salaries start at $111,000 a year.

During trips to Washington she rode the elevator to the CIA’s seventh-floor administrative wing to seek advice. The guidance was consistent: There were gaps in Matthews’s résumé that had to be filled before she could advance. Matthews was already an experienced manager who had led ably in London and Langley. But in two decades of counterterrorism work, she had never served in Kabul or Baghdad, front-line posts that were central to the CIA’s core mission. If Matthews really wanted to move up, she had to go to war.

But not all war zone jobs were the same, she discovered. A stint in Baghdad’s Green Zone would mean three years of hard work away from family. But within the constellation of CIA facilities were a few dismal outposts where conditions were so harsh or so dangerous that a one-year assignment was considered equivalent to three years anywhere else.

A base chief’s slot was due to open up in the early fall in just such a place, Matthews was told. It was in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan not far from Tora Bora, in what historically had been considered one of the roughest locales in that most violent of countries. It also was next door to a pair of Pakistani provinces that were the heartland of the Taliban and the location of the last confirmed sighting of Osama bin Laden.

Matthews knew the place. It was called Khost.

Other officers already were vying for the position, but Matthews quickly claimed the inside track. Several of the CIA’s most senior officers supported her for the job, telling Matthews that her one-year stint would be as beneficial to the agency as it would be to her own career.

Some of her closest friends and mentors were divided on whether she was suited for such a position. Some worried that it was too much, too soon. Matthews had no experience in dealing with the security demands of living and traveling in a war zone. She also had little background in the science of running covert agents, a separate tradition within the spy agency with its own highly specialized training and skills. Much of the Pakistani work at Khost involved working with networks of undercover operatives.

Then there was the personality factor. CIA peers who worked with Matthews regularly knew her to be passionate and direct, but also impatient and stubborn.

“She didn’t take questions well, and she had no patience for people who didn’t know as much about a subject as she did,” recalled a former covert officer who met with her regularly at Langley. “She had this way of sighing audibly, as if to say, ‘I know this; why don’t you?’ ”

Yet it was hard to argue that she lacked experience. Matthews had helped run operations against al-Qaeda from Washington and London for nearly fifteen years, and her role in the CIA’s takedown of Abu Zubaida had been roundly praised. Matthews’s team had led the agency’s two-year search for al-Qaeda’s former logistics man, tracking him at last to a safe house in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad, where he was surrounded and captured by dozens of Pakistani commandos and CIA paramilitary officers.

Moreover, Matthews’s superiors saw in her exactly the qualities the agency needed in its escalating war against al-Qaeda: leadership skills, mental toughness, enthusiasm, ambition, and an unquestioned mastery of the subject matter. One of her bosses had a pet name for her: STRAC. It was an old Navy acronym that stood for “Standing Tall, Ready Around the Clock.” The CIA had big plans for Matthews, it was clear, and the point of sending her to Afghanistan was to help her gain the experience she needed. With the agency stretched thin by years of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, it was getting harder to find willing volunteers whose job skills lined up perfectly with the opening. But in Matthews’s case, the candidate in question seemed to have the important ones, said a retired senior officer who weighed in on her professional appraisal.

“She was so smart and so careful,” the officer said. “The best people are simply the best people. An excellent case officer can also be an excellent analyst, and vice versa.”

Matthews, by all accounts, spent even less time worrying about her fitness for the job. Khost offered everything she was looking for: both a way to move up and a path to personal redemption. The mere fact that some were questioning her ability made her even more determined, friends said.

Matthews did finally seek the advice of one dissenter, a retired CIA officer whom she respected, someone who knew the bureaucracy well and was unfailingly blunt in his opinions. The two spent an afternoon together on his porch overlooking the Virginia foothills. Then they got on his computer to look at satellite images on Google Earth. In the photographs, the CIA base at Khost is clearly identifiable because it sits on an airfield with a packed-dirt runway, expanded by the Soviets in the 1980s to support bombing sorties against Afghan rebels dug in to the mountains. Just east of the base was the border crossing at Ghulam Khan, gateway to Pakistani strongholds controlled by notorious warlords and militants such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, Baitullah Mehsud, and perhaps bin Laden himself.

The retired officer attempted to distill his advice in a way that he hoped would penetrate Matthews’s reflexive defenses. For the CIA’s sake and for yours, he told her, Khost is the last place you should want to go.

“I understand the drive you’re feeling to go there,” the officer told her, according to his account of the conversation. “But you’re not thinking clearly. This is a paramilitary environment, and you have no experience with that.”

He ticked off a list of other concerns. Khost ran covert agents, something that Matthews knew little about. The drone strikes she helped orchestrate could kill innocent civilians and possibly expose her to legal jeopardy. Even her gender would work against her, he said, as Afghan tribesmen would be loath to negotiate as equals with a woman, particularly one wearing fatigue pants and a T-shirt.

Matthews’s eyes flashed at the suggestion that she as a woman would be at a disadvantage. The conversation became heated, and the more the two argued, the more adamant Matthews became.

“She already knew she was going to Afghanistan,” Matthews’s adviser later said. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was hearing something else. She thought I was saying she couldn’t handle it.”

Unable to dissuade Matthews, the retired officer instead wished her good luck. It was the last time they would meet.

3.

THE DOCTOR

Amman, Jordan—January 19, 2009

The raiding party gathered in the street just before 11:00 P.M. and waited, as always, for the bedroom lights and TV sets to flicker out. Darkness would mean fewer witnesses, and a sleeping household would allow the agents of Jordan’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence service to work quickly, with a minimum of noise and fuss. There would be no knock at the door and no spoken commands. Just a crash of metal against wood and a single coordinated movement that would sweep the hapless suspect from his bedclothes to the back of a waiting car.

The target on this raw January night was a four-story house on Urwa Bin Al-Ward Street, a narrow alley in a Palestinian immigrant neighborhood of neatly scrubbed stone houses the color of beach sand. Just before midnight, two black sedans moved from their parking spot on cue and pulled into the alley with headlights off, while a third parked diagonally across the street to block traffic. Police and Mukhabarat agents in dark clothing dispersed to take positions around the front and rear of the house, and a small breach team gathered by the front door to await the signal. One of them, a stout intelligence captain wearing a black commando sweater, clutched a warrant with orders for the arrest of a young physician named Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi. The man they were seeking was thirty-one years old and had never been accused of anything more serious than a traffic violation. Yet in forty-eight hours Balawi had emerged as one of the most dangerous men in all Jordan.

Just as the raid was set to begin, a scuffle broke out between some of the Mukhabarat’s officers and a group of young men walking home from a party. The men gathered around the strange car straddling the alley and began hectoring the driver for blocking the street. Another plainclothes officer arrived, and soon there were shouts and shoving.

I’m calling the police, one of the men was yelling.

Inside the house, the commotion roused the suspect’s father, Khalil al-Balawi. The sixty-six-year-old retired schoolteacher had dozed off while reading on the living room sofa and awoke to angry voices just outside his front window. The bearded pensioner peered through the curtain and, seeing nothing, tied his robe and hobbled to the front door. He had opened it only a crack when the door burst inward, flinging him back. Three figures in leather coats brushed past him without a word, while a fourth moved toward the old man as though to block him.

Balawi, still foggy, guessed that the intruders were trying to escape the fight under way in the street. But now three of the men were bounding up the stairs, toward the apartments where Balawi’s adult children lived with their families. He started to protest but felt a viselike grip on his shoulder. It was a large man in a black sweater.

“Mukhabarat,” the man said quietly, using the Arabic term for the spy service known officially as the General Intelligence Department, or GID. He handed Balawi a creased document. “We’re here for Humam.”

Balawi felt his knees buckle. Was he dreaming? From upstairs came desperate sounds: A child’s piercing scream. Bangs and thumps. His daughter-in-law’s voice shouting, then pleading, then wailing. Finally a single thought crystallized in his brain: This is a mistake. It was the wrong house, the wrong Humam. His son was a healer, not a criminal.

“Whatever you’re looking for—it doesn’t exist!” he stammered to the captain. “We don’t have weapons or drugs. We don’t keep anything against the law!”

The officer’s hazel eyes met the old man’s with a look that seemed to convey sympathy, but he said nothing. Khalil al-Balawi’s mind raced. Was it possible that Humam had a secret life? Was he stealing from the clinic? No, not possible, he thought. Humam is a homebody. He has no use for money. He doesn’t go to the nightclubs in the Western hotels downtown. He barely leaves the house.

More shouts and thumps. Then two of the officers thundered down the steps with what Khalil al-Balawi recognized as his son’s belongings. One carried a desktop computer, and the other was struggling with a box crammed with books, papers, and a rack of computer disks. The first man set down the computer and presented the elderly Balawi with a handwritten list under a heading that read, “Prohibited items.” It was an inventory of the electronics and paper records seized as evidence.

“Sign here to say we didn’t break anything,” the man ordered.

Khalil al-Balawi was wide awake now, and his skin flushed beneath his red beard. “Where are you taking him? What’s this about?” he demanded.

“You can ask about him tomorrow,” the officer replied, “at the Mukhabarat.”

The old man stared at the pen that had been thrust into his hand, then looked up to see his son being led down the stairs by one of the officers. Humam Khalil al-Balawi was wearing a knee-length kurta shirt, pajama pants, and he was walking slowly, eyes fixed on the steps. At five feet seven he was slightly taller than his father, but narrow at the waist and shoulders, and he had the delicate skin of a man who keeps company with books and computers. His brown curls and wispy beard were matted from sleep, so that he looked more like a scrawny teenager than an accomplished physician with a practice and two kids of his own.

At the bottom of the staircase the procession stopped. To his father, the younger Balawi seemed oddly, inexplicably detached, as though he were sleepwalking. Then he caught his son’s eyes. They were inordinately large and as soft and brown as a doe’s. They were also incapable of hiding emotion, quick to betray fear or anger or whatever passion Humam happened to be feeling. But on this day they were ablaze with something the older man could not immediately grasp. It wasn’t fear, or nervousness, or even anger, exactly, but something more akin to contempt, like a champion boxer who had just taken a sucker punch.

“It was defiance I saw,” the elder Balawi said afterward. “I knew the look. It was very Humam.”

Neither man spoke. There was a brief jostling at the door, and then the old man watched the officers shove his son into the back of one of the cars. In an instant, Dr. Humam al-Balawi, the gifted scholar and pediatrician who had dreamed of practicing in the United States, disappeared behind tinted glass, along with his reputation and all traces of his former life. From now on, no matter what else happened, he would live his life as a man who had been marked by the Mukhabarat.

The only unknown was where precisely his path would end. Humam could choose defiance and see his career destroyed, the family name tarnished, and his children reduced to poverty. Or he could cooperate and endure the ignominy of becoming an informant for the government. Some Jordanians who chose the latter course had gone slowly insane, isolated from friends and mistrusted by coworkers. Others had fled the country, and still others had simply disappeared behind the walls of the Mukhabarat’s fortresslike headquarters, never to be heard from again.

Khalil al-Balawi shivered as he stood in the doorway in his thin robe, watching the slow-motion demolition of his son’s life and his own hopes for a quietly comfortable old age. He strained his eyes, hoping for a last glimpse, but the windows of the dark sedan revealed nothing. The lead car with Humam inside made a tight U-turn in the alley, rounded the corner, and was gone.

“Your handcuffs will be as silver bracelets. The hangman’s noose will be a medal of honor.”

The Arabic characters skittered across the computer screen as Humam al-Balawi typed, pressing the keys softly to avoid waking his wife and two girls asleep in the room next door. It was June 2007, nineteen months before his arrest, and he was doing the thing he loved most. In a few hours it would be daylight and he would be on his way to the children’s clinic to prescribe antibiotics and treat tummy aches and fevers. But at this moment, in the quiet of the family kitchen, he was Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, cyberwarrior for Islam and scourge of the Americans and their Arab lackeys around the world.

“Brothers, download these videos until your Internet cable gets overheated because of how hot the clips are,” Balawi wrote, pausing to insert coding that would allow readers to view a collage of Iraqi insurgent attacks on U.S. troops whose Humvees erupted in clouds of flame, smoke, and shrapnel. “Watch how the Americans get killed as if they were in PlayStation video games.”

Balawi read the sentences back to himself and, satisfied, clicked a button to transmit. In seconds, his column would appear as the billboard item on the Web site al-Hesbah, one of the leading outlets for radical Islamic views and teachings in the Arabic-speaking world.

“Abu Dujana” was a mere invention, a fake identity created by Balawi initially so he could express himself in chat rooms without fear of getting arrested. But over time the character had evolved a personality of its own. Where the young physician was respectful and reserved, Abu Dujana was aggressive, blunt, and bitingly sarcastic, an evil twin with a devilish sense of humor. He was also an instant hit. New postings by Abu Dujana al-Khorasani were among the most widely read items on al-Hesbah and received the most comments. Soon he was asked to serve as moderator of the Web site’s discussion groups, a position that put him in charge of the daily online conversation and gave him a showcase for his own columns.

Abu Dujana had been thrust into a small elite of jihadist writers and pundits with large online audiences and global reach. Yet no one knew who he really was. The speculation among his most ardent online followers was that he was a Saudi and very likely a senior official within al-Qaeda. But in fact even the al-Hesbah managers who gave Abu Dujana the moderator’s job did not know his true name or nationality. Nor did the Mukhabarat or the CIA, which employs teams of specialists to monitor jihadist Web sites full-time and write reports deciphering and analyzing their content. Balawi’s father and brothers joked about his love affair with his computer, but even they knew nothing about the secret life he created on the flickering blue screen.

The transformation would occur at home, usually at night or on weekends, when he was free from his duties at the clinic. Balawi would hunch over his small desktop computer for hour after hour until his eyes reddened and his wife, Defne, began to worry. Already Balawi had a reputation for being a recluse, rarely going out or socializing with friends or even attending Friday prayers at the local mosque. Balawi would deflect Defne’s questions by insisting that he had to study, but when she came into the room, the books would be tossed to the side and her husband would be where he always was, perched on his favorite chair with eyes locked on the computer screen. The more Abu Dujana grew, the smaller Balawi and his old life became.

“He was preoccupied,” Defne said later. “He was living in fantasy in another world.”

Balawi had written online columns under several other fake names before Abu Dujana al-Khorasani made his first appearance in 2007, just as Balawi was hitting his stride as an essayist. The pseudonym itself was a mash-up of historical names instantly recognizable to devout Muslims; Al-Khorasani means “from Khorasan,” the ancient name for the vast swath of Muslim lands stretching from the old Persian empire to the Hindu Kush mountains, encompassing much of modern-day Afghanistan. Abu Dujana was a seventh-century Arab warrior who was a favorite of the Prophet Muhammad’s. A skilled swordsman who relished the mayhem of hand-to-hand combat, he was also arrogant and showy. Before battle he would don a red headband and taunt his enemies by strutting mockingly in front of their lines.

Abu Dujana the pundit was a showman as well, prone to verbal bluster and fireworks. His first articles quickly cemented his reputation as one of the most engaging and colorful writers in the online community of radical Islam. He raged against all the usual targets—Israel, the West, and U.S.-friendly Arab governments—but his writings also reflected an understanding of Western culture and a knack for appealing to younger Muslims who grew up with instant messaging and social networks. In one passage he would excoriate ordinary Muslims as being unthinking clones, “like Dolly, the cloned sheep,” and in another he would write wistfully about a future in which even the Barbie doll “will wear the veil and recite the Koran when you touch it.”

He would also entice his audience with images of battlefield carnage, fresh from amateur jihadi photographers in Tikrit or Ramadi, served up with a gleefully ghoulish commentary that became Abu Dujana’s trademark.

“Welcome to the al-Hesbah café,” he wrote to open one Internet session. “Go to the menu and pick today’s dish:

“Roasted Humvee with sauce of human remains.

“Exploded tank by an IED [improvised explosive device] with no survivors.

“Or a pastry made of Americans’ brains taken out with snipers’ bullets.”

Thousands of Muslims sampled Abu Dujana’s offerings and paused to read his words. And each week the appetite for his articles grew larger still. Abu Dujana—whoever he was, wherever he was—was becoming a true celebrity.

He had to be stopped.

Inside the headquarters of the secretive National Security Agency in suburban Washington is a computer search engine unlike any other in the world. Code-named Turbulence, it is a five-hundred-million-dollar-a-year network that continuously vacuums up terabytes of data from across the Internet and scours them for possible security threats. When specific targets are identified—a new Web site or an unknown militant group, for instance—it can burrow into a single computer on the other side of the world to steal files or drop off eavesdropping software. Agents on the ground can then follow up with portable surveillance gear so sensitive it can detect individual strokes on a computer keyboard from hundreds of feet away.

The precise methods used for tracking a specific target overseas are a closely guarded secret. But what is known is that sometime in late 2008, such tools were used to hunt down a popular jihadist blogger who called himself Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Working backward through a maze of servers and trunk lines spanning continents, U.S. officials narrowed the search to Jordan, then to Amman, and finally to a single house in a working-class neighborhood called Jabal Nuzha.

The man’s true identity came as a shock, most especially to Jordan’s Mukhabarat intelligence service: One of radical Islam’s rising stars was an obscure pediatrician living right under its noses.

What happened next was up to the Mukhabarat. While the CIA and its foreign counterparts closely monitor jihadist Web sites and occasionally shut them down, more often they prefer to quietly study them for insights into how terrorist movements are evolving. The Mukhabarat would have to decide if the man who called Muslims to holy war as the fictitious Abu Dujana posed a flesh-and-blood threat to Jordan and beyond. Someone would have to go to school on Humam Khalil al-Balawi, and that person ultimately turned out to be a midlevel officer who understood the phenomenon of Internet jihad as well as anyone in the agency’s counterterrorism division. His name was Ali bin Zeid, but he was known among his peers as Sharif Ali, an honorific that denoted noble birth. Bin Zeid was a direct descendant of Jordan’s first monarch, Abdullah I, and a cousin to the king.

Just thirty-four, bin Zeid was already a ten-year veteran of the intelligence service, with a number of medals and commendations to his credit, including one from the CIA. Sensitive to perceptions that his royal blood accorded him privileges, he worked long hours and never mentioned his ties to the crown unless there was something to be gained for his entire unit. Once, during a training exercise in the desert, he pulled rank to arrange for a special lunch delivery to his campsite: Big Macs and fries for everyone in his company. But he was also serious and intense. His weapon of choice was a fat .44 Magnum pistol known as a Desert Eagle, which he hoped would even the odds in case he encountered a would-be assassin looking to make his mark by killing a son of the monarchy.

The stocky, thick-chested bin Zeid was also more Western than most of his colleagues, having attended college in Boston and worked as an intern for Massachusetts’ junior U.S. senator, Democrat John Kerry. He spoke immaculate East Coast–accented English, and he was tight with his American counterparts in the CIA’s station in Amman, particularly a former Army Ranger named Darren LaBonte. The two men were frequently partners when the two agencies worked together on terrorism cases, and they had traveled the world together, from Eastern Europe to the Far East. Both newlyweds with young wives, they sometimes spent lazy weekends in a foursome on the Red Sea near Aqaba in bin Zeid’s boat.

Bin Zeid and LaBonte would brainstorm about difficult cases, and few were more perplexing than that of the mysterious doctor the Jordanian was assigned to watch. The Mukhabarat had gathered reams of material on Balawi and had trailed him for weeks on his excruciatingly dull ten-mile trek from central Amman to the United Nations’ Center for Motherhood and Children, where he worked in the Marka refugee camp. Bin Zeid read the files and daily reports and pondered them, set them aside, then read them again.

Who was this guy? bin Zeid wondered aloud to his colleagues.

Nothing about Balawi fitted the usual pattern for terrorist or supporter of outlaw groups. There had been no brushes with the law, no record of violence, no known association with radical groups or even with Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, the creaky eighty-year-old social movement that by now was noted mostly for its fund-raising dinners for Iraqi orphans and widows.

Instead the files depicted a young man of extraordinary ability and achievement. Balawi came from a stable college-educated family with no hint of scandal. He was faithful to his wife and doted on his two young girls. He had a do-gooder streak a mile wide, yet he showed no outward signs of religious fanaticism.

His school records were singularly impressive. A graduate of Amman High School with top honors and a 97 percent grade point average. Winner of a college scholarship from the Jordanian government. Fluent in English.

After high school, he had been a shoo-in for the University of Jordan’s biosciences program, but he chose instead to go abroad to study medicine. He won admission to the University of Istanbul and, though he initially spoke not a word of Turkish, earned both a bachelor’s degree and doctorate of medicine in six years. Balawi had returned to Jordan with a Turkish wife, a college-educated journalist, and settled in an apartment in his father’s house. A wide array of career choices beckoned him, but he eventually decided to turn down a hospital assignment for one of the least glamorous medical positions in the city: tending to mothers and young children at the sprawling Marka camp, home to tens of thousands of ethnic Palestinians who had moved there as refugees after the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. The camp’s denizens quickly took a liking to the soft-eyed doctor, who was gentle with children yet also oddly serious for such a young man.

“He wasn’t flirty like some of the others,” said one single mother from the camp who saw Balawi frequently. “He seemed very shy, and he didn’t joke a lot.”

The portrait that emerged of Balawi was that of a social introvert who lived modestly and rarely went anywhere other than work. He drove a banged-up Ford Escort that doubled on most days as a free taxi service for any neighbors or patients who happened to need a lift. The Mukhabarat’s spies found nothing that suggested he was quietly meeting with Hamas or other radical groups or even knew who they were.

Still, there was the matter of Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Balawi’s secret online hobby had become a big deal, even bigger, no doubt, than Balawi had ever dreamed. More disturbingly, his writings seemed to suggest a hidden connection with al-Qaeda. Abu Dujana had always lionized the terrorist group and its founder, Osama bin Laden, but lately he seemed to be speaking for them. Anytime al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came out with a new statement or video message, Abu Dujana was there with fresh analysis, annotating and interpreting Zawahiri’s stilted Arabic. His essays defending al-Qaeda’s tactics so closely reflected Zawahiri’s own views that they might have been written by Zawahiri himself. Whether al-Qaeda intended it or not, Abu Dujana had become a mouthpiece and booster for the terrorist group. And Muslims around the world were paying attention.

Worse, Abu Dujana’s views were skewing increasingly radical. He had launched a personal crusade to rehabilitate Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the thuggish leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who made videos of himself cutting off the heads of American hostages. Jordanians had poured into the streets to denounce Zarqawi in 2005 after he launched a series of coordinated attacks on hotels in Amman, killing sixty people, many of them women and children who had been attending a wedding reception. But Abu Dujana called him a “tiger” who embodied a robust, energetic faith that true Muslims should aspire to. Most recently, amid torrents of bile over Israel’s military assault on Gaza on December 27, 2008, he began hinting about moving into an operational phase. “When will my words taste my blood?” he wrote.

Humam al-Balawi, the doctor, ambled along as before. But Abu Dujana was hurtling down a dangerous path, inciting others to violence and threatening to join them. By mid-January 2009, Ali bin Zeid and his bosses had made up their minds: Abu Dujana had to go. Whether Balawi survived or perished along with his jihadist avatar was up to him.

In the dark, the headquarters of the Mukhabarat looms over western Amman like a medieval fortress, with high walls of limestone blocks that have leached over the years to produce an oozy reddish stain. The oldest part of the complex was once one of the most feared prisons in the Middle East, a labyrinth of stone-walled cells reserved for suspected terrorists and other enemies of the state. The few who ventured inside told stories of dark passageways, of whips made of knotted electric cords, of shrieks and screams coming from the interrogation room late at night. Among some in Jordan, the building had earned a grim nickname, the Fingernail Factory.

Times were different now, at least on the surface. Jordan’s media-savvy, pro-Western monarch, King Abdullah II, disliked seeing reports from human rights groups of torture by the country’s intelligence service. He dismantled the old prison and, in 2005, fired the Mukhabarat’s ruthlessly efficient director, Saad Kheir, a man with genteel English manners and the icy regard of a rattlesnake.

But despite the happy talk about detainee rights and due process, the spy agency could ill afford to be seen as soft. Jordan, with a population of just over six million, was a moderate Arab state allied with the United States and officially at peace with Israel, policies that automatically made it a target for most of the region’s Islamic terrorist groups as well as Iran, which funded many of them. The country has long been a way station for Iraqi criminal gangs, Iranian provocateurs, Hamas, and Hezbollah. It has endured savage attacks from al-Qaeda, including Zarqawi’s 2005 killing spree in which suicide bombers blew themselves up in three Amman hotels. Zarqawi, who had spent five years as the Mukhabarat’s prisoner in the 1990s, had tried repeatedly to exact revenge by destroying the agency itself. In 2004 the Mukhabarat narrowly averted an attack on its headquarters after Zarqawi loaded a couple of trucks with enough explosives and poison gas to wipe out tens of thousands of people. In the end, it was a Mukhabarat informant—a Zarqawi foot soldier in Jordanian custody—who gave up the location of Zarqawi’s safe house near Baqubah, Iraq. On June 7, 2006, a pair of U.S. fighter jets dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the building, killing Zarqawi along with his wife and child and four others.

What Humam al-Balawi knew of the Mukhabarat and its reputation is unclear. But somewhere between his house and the intelligence headquarters, Abu Dujana and all his bluster had faded from sight. Balawi was handcuffed and sandwiched between Mukhabarat agents, who had squeezed into seats on either side of him. One of them reached over and shoved a cloth hood over his face, pulling the drawstring tight.

The foul-smelling covering not only blinded him but also made it hard to breathe. Metal cuffs bit into his wrists and forced him to lean forward in his seat.

Your handcuffs will be as silver bracelets.

The convoy wound through nearly deserted streets, past the mosque Balawi had attended since boyhood, past the empty bazaar, and past the elementary school with its concrete playground. It eased onto the modern highway that leads to central Amman, whizzing by shopping malls and gleaming hotels with bars lit in neon at this hour and past the expensive fitness clubs where men and women were said to work out together, paying money to sweat in air-conditioned rooms in their booty shorts, sports bras, and muscle shirts.

The procession turned north to enter a new section of town known as Wadi as-Seer, a district of broad avenues and heavy limestone buildings with military guards but no signs to identify the occupants. Balawi felt the car stop, twice, at security checkpoints, and then the vehicle was inside a gate. It rolled through a series of connected courtyards until it halted outside a large stone building that serves as headquarters for the Mukhabarat’s “Knights of Truth,” the elite counterterrorism division. Unseen by the hooded Balawi were the imposing portraits of the last two Jordanian kings and the black flag of the intelligence service, bearing its motto in Arabic script: “Justice has come.”

4.

HUMILIATION

Amman, Jordan—January 20, 2009

Who is Abu Dujana al-Khorasani?

Balawi was groggily aware of the question and was forming his words when he felt the sharp sting of a slap across his cheek. He was fully awake now, and the hood was finally gone. He was in a small cell with solid white walls, sitting on a wooden stool, the room’s only furnishing other than a battered desk, a fluorescent light, and a metal pin to which his legs were shackled. Two men were standing on either side of him, and one of them drew an arm back as though to hit him again.

Who is Abu Dujana?

You already know that it’s me, Balawi said, wearily.

It was barely midmorning, and already Balawi had endured four rounds of interrogation. The aim was to quickly exhaust him, and it was working. An hour in the interrogation room, then two hours in his cell, then back under the lights with fresh interrogators. Between sessions he would try to sleep, but the moment his eyes closed the guards were at him again, shouting curses and banging doors. Then he was back in the interrogation room again, questions flying at him like swarms of blackflies.

Who controls the al-Hesbah Web site? Who are the other writers? Where do they live? Who is your contact?

When this inquiry yielded nothing, the Mukhabarat’s men probed Balawi’s personal life, his family history, his brothers, his Turkish in-laws, his school years abroad. Questions were reasked, twisted slightly, and asked again. Sometimes they carried implicit warnings, reminders of the Mukhabarat’s ability to touch Balawi where he lived.

Where did you get your medical license? Are you sure it’s valid?

Your father is not Jordanian, is he? Are his papers up-to-date?

What about your Turkish wife? Your children are Turks, too, aren’t they?

The threats were real, as Balawi well knew. His father was one of more than a million Palestinians to whom Jordan has played reluctant host since the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948 sent them in search of refuge. For a noncitizen, crossing any of dozens of invisible lines could mean forfeiting the right to a Jordanian passport or residency papers. Work permits, including professional licenses, can be voided over mere suspicions. The message was clear: Cooperate or lose everything.

By now Balawi could distinguish among his interrogators. The division chief, dubbed the Red Devil by other detainees, was Ali Burjak, the part-Turkish senior officer who was one of the most feared men in Jordan. Heavy and short, with reddish, close-cropped hair, he had famously broken some of the country’s most hardened criminals and terrorists, and he also had tangled with journalists, opposition figures, and others who had fallen afoul of the state. He took special delight, it was widely said, in humiliating his captives, sometimes by forcing them to confess gratuitously to incest or other sexual crimes.

Working with Burjak was a small team of counterterrorism specialists from the Knights of Truth. They were considered the elite of the Mukhabarat, in part because they worked most closely with foreign intelligence agencies and also because they did everything: conducting surveillance; intercepting phone signals; making arrests; interrogating captives. The group took orders from Burjak and his deputy, a man called Habis. The other officer who stood out was the stout, hazel-eyed captain who had been present during the arrest. Though quieter and less abrasive than some of the others, he was treated by his peers with a deference that seemed disproportionate to his captain’s bars. The men called him Sharif Ali.

When the Mukhabarat’s men ran out of questions, Balawi was led back to his cell, which was newly built and clean but tiny, measuring nine by six feet, and furnished with a cot and blanket, a two-way mirror, and a metal commode and sink. The hood was again pulled over his face, and the cell’s thick metal door was slammed shut, leaving Balawi alone in complete darkness. He felt his way to the cot, sat, and waited.

Minutes passed, then an hour. Or was it two? From his darkened cocoon, there was no way to tell.

The hooding was standard treatment, a way of softening up Balawi for an extended cycle of interrogation and isolation that was just getting under way. Nearly all detainees are blindfolded, sometimes for days at a time. Unable to see, and hearing only muffled sounds through the cell’s steel door, they quickly become disoriented and lose all sense of time. In medical studies, volunteers subjected to similar forms of sensory deprivation begin hallucinating in as little as fifteen minutes. Longer periods induce extreme anxiety, helplessness, and depression. In one study, British scientists discovered that people held under such conditions for forty-eight hours could be made to experience any symptom by mere suggestion. A comfortably dry room could suddenly become freezing cold, or filled with water, or alive with snakes.

Balawi tried reciting prayers to keep his mind focused. But as he later admitted, he was pricked with fear about what was coming and when it would arrive. He would be beaten, no doubt, and probably worse. Was he tough enough to take it? Would he crack and give up the names of contacts? What if they threatened to hurt his wife or the girls? What if they went after his father? Balawi waited, straining for any meaningful sound—footsteps, jangling keys, the tap of a truncheon against cinder block as the guards paced the long corridor.

At some point Balawi remembered his dream. A few weeks earlier he had had a vision of seeing Zarqawi. Balawi had idealized his fellow Jordanian and had wept like a child when the terrorist was killed in the U.S. missile strike in 2006. But in the dream Zarqawi was alive again and, to Balawi’s surprise, visiting his father’s house.

“Aren’t you dead?” Balawi asked him. Zarqawi’s face fairly glowed in the moonlight, and he was busy preparing for something. Balawi guessed it was a bombing.

“I was killed, but I am as you see me, alive,” Zarqawi said.

Unsure of what to say to the man whose videotapes he had endlessly watched on the Internet, Balawi fumbled for the right words. Would Zarqawi accept his help? What if Balawi gave him his car? What if they could become martyrs together?

Zarqawi said nothing, and the dream abruptly ended. Balawi awoke unsettled and days later was so haunted by the strange encounter that he told several friends about it. What could it mean?

Everyone agreed that the dream was an omen. One friend told Balawi that the vision was a warning, a signal that he was about to be arrested. But another said Zarqawi was conveying a blessing. Balawi, he said, had been called by God for special service, an act of jihad for which he had been specially chosen.

“You will mobilize in Allah’s path,” the friend said.

Twenty-four hours after his arrest, Balawi was showing the strain of a second day without sleep. His voice rasped with exasperation, but there was no fight in his eyes. Across the table from him, the Mukhabarat’s men were just getting started.

Who is Abu Shadiyah? Who is Yaman Mukhaddab?

The questioners this time were Ali bin Zeid and a younger officer, and the subject had turned to the identities of other bloggers and commentators who shared the same Web space as Abu Dujana. Balawi could plausibly claim ignorance. Like him, the writers used fake names, and almost no one knew who they really were or where they lived. As far as Balawi knew, the other bloggers might be U.S. intelligence agents. Some of them almost certainly were.

Then a new question: Tell us about your plans for a martyrdom operation.

The younger of the interrogators pulled a page from Balawi’s file and began to read aloud. Balawi recognized his own words, from an essay he had written after watching a news broadcast about the recent Israeli air strikes in Gaza. News footage showed Israeli women and girls on a rooftop watching as U.S.-made F-16 attack planes pounded targets in Gaza City. The women were taking turns with a pair of binoculars, chatting and laughing as though they were witnessing a polo match. Laughing! As he watched, Balawi felt revulsion sweep over him until it slowly turned inward, filling him with a mixture of rage and loathing, much of it aimed at his cowardly self.

That had been two weeks before. Now Balawi was silent. Spent.

“When will my words drink from my blood?” continued the interrogator, reading from the printed sheet. “I feel my words have expired, and to those who preach jihad, I advise you not to fall into my dilemma and the nightmare I have that I may die one day in my bed.”

Ali bin Zeid regarded the detainee for a long moment. Tough talk. But this man is no Zarqawi.

Bin Zeid had worked with real terrorists, hard-core jihadis so fanatical that they welcomed death and refused to break no matter what the Mukhabarat threw at them. Balawi had run out of steam on the first day. His words were full of bluster, but the man with the drooping eyelids in front of him was soft and weak.

He was also jarringly familiar, like someone bin Zeid might have known in school. They were roughly the same age. Both were college educated and had lived abroad. They both descended from tribes with ancestral roots in the Arabian Peninsula and claims of ties to the Prophet Muhammad. Their families were well traveled and understood the world outside Jordan. Balawi was married with young girls; bin Zeid was a newlywed hoping to have children soon.

Bin Zeid could even appreciate, in an abstract way, the deep resentments that animated Balawi’s online persona. Despite his government’s official policy of peaceful coexistence with Israel, bin Zeid had often experienced a twinge of bitterness on mornings when he sat on his back porch, high on a ridge overlooking the Dead Sea, and gazed at the fertile plains to the north and west, lands that had once belonged to Arabs. Nearly all Jordanians had been angered when Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza in late December, killing more than five hundred Hamas militants and civilians in what Arabs viewed as a wildly disproportionate response to Palestinian rocket attacks.

But somewhere Balawi had fallen off a cliff, bin Zeid and his colleagues reasoned. Against all logic and his own self-interest, he had embraced a virulent philosophy that threatened to destroy everything that Jordan had achieved in a half century of faltering progress toward modernity. He had risked his reputation and his own family in the service of fanatics living in caves two thousand miles away.

How such a thing could happen to such a clever, world-wise young man as Balawi was unfathomable. But this much was clear: Abu Dujana would cease to exist, and Balawi’s life would radically change. From now on the doctor and the Mukhabarat would be permanently tethered. Balawi’s ability to work, travel, own a house, or clothe his children would depend on the spy agency’s generosity and Balawi’s good behavior. And if the Mukhabarat needed something—no matter how big or small—Balawi would have no choice but to comply.

The man in the prisoner’s chair had not yet fully grasped this new reality, but he would. From the looks of him, it would not take much longer.

On the third day of Humam al-Balawi’s incarceration, his father and oldest brother, Muhammad, hired a taxi and made the trip across town to Wadi as-Seer and the Mukhabarat headquarters. A Jordanian soldier armed with an M4 assault rifle motioned the car to stop a few dozen yards from the main security gate, forcing the old man to walk the rest of the way while his eldest son waited behind. The weather had been cold and gray all week, and a northeast wind tugged at Khalil al-Balawi’s white kaffiyeh as he crossed the parking lot and headed toward the small building where visitors were screened for weapons and bombs.

At the guard station, Khalil al-Balawi gave his name and asked to speak to a Mukhabarat officer, a Colonel Fawas, who was expecting him.

“I am here to pick up my son,” he said.

He was handed a number on a scrap of paper and shown to a waiting area, a small room with white marble floors and a few leather chairs. A large portrait of King Abdullah II, in military parade dress and festooned with sashes and medals, looked down disapprovingly.

All my life I have managed to avoid this place, he thought, until today.

By now the family had deduced the reason for Humam’s arrest. The government’s agents had seized computer equipment, and Defne had told them about her husband’s fascination with Internet chat rooms. Khalil al-Balawi, a teacher of Arabic literature and religion before his retirement, knew little of such things. But he had learned from a Mukhabarat official that his son was cooperating and would be ready for release on Thursday, ahead of the Muslim weekend.

The old man had been so anxious he had hardly slept. As he waited, his mind raced, and he thought of Humam as a young boy: whip smart, stubborn, insatiably curious, and—out of all of his ten children—the one most like himself.

Papa, why did God create people?

Why, Humam, the purpose of man is to worship his Creator.

{Silence.}

Papa, why did God create ants?

An hour ticked past, and then two. Other numbers were called, and now the waiting room was nearly empty. Worried that something bad had happened, Khalil al-Balawi shuffled back to the guard station and—an old man in failing health to a goodhearted servant of His Majesty—pleaded politely for information. A phone call was made, and the explanation obtained.

“I’m sorry, Ya ammo Balawi, but your son is no longer here,” the head officer said.

“Where is he?”

“He is at home, of course,” came the reply. “He was dropped off an hour ago.”

Khalil al-Balawi was soon tearing across Amman as fast as the afternoon traffic would permit, while he and Muhammad ran through a list of possible explanations for the abrupt change. Was Humam injured? Perhaps scarred? Since when did the Mukhabarat offer detainees a courtesy ride home?

As central Amman gave way to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, the old man gave in to brooding. The Balawis were cursed. It was happening again.

Life had begun badly for Khalil al-Balawi, who was born into turbulence in 1943 in a village near Beersheba, in what is now southern Israel. By his fifth birthday his family had witnessed massacres, reprisal killings, and finally the all-out warfare that split Palestine into two states and sent tens of thousands of Arabs, the Balawis included, into exile. The small lot where he played as a boy was now a cotton field owned by a Jewish consortium, off-limits to the Balawis forever.

His laborer father had eventually settled in Jordan, and the family, particularly Khalil, a gifted student whose high academic marks and college degree were the pride of the Balawi clan, had prospered. But with few jobs available in Jordan, Khalil had moved with his new bride to Kuwait, where he had accepted a teacher’s post. He was promoted to department head and was content to live out his days in safe, sensible Kuwait, with its moderate policies and flush, oil-fed economy. Then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard rolled into Kuwait City in August 1990 to kick off six months of military occupation, looting, and war. After the defeat of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition in 1991, the Kuwaitis immediately expelled more than three hundred thousand Jordanians living in the country, because of their government’s support for Iraq during the conflict. Khalil al-Balawi managed to save a few family treasures, but between the occupation and expulsion he lost everything else he owned.

In Jordan once again, he had scraped to put his children through college and was looking forward to a quieter time, surrounded by contented, prosperous children and grandkids. Now a half century of upheaval and misfortune could not match the pain he felt deep in his chest.

The car pulled up to the curb on Urwa bin al-Ward Street, and Khalil al-Balawi climbed out quickly and entered the house ahead of his eldest son. There in the living room, on the black sofa framed by the old man’s books, was Humam.

“Salaam alekum, Humam,” the father said. “Peace be with you.”

Humam said nothing. He could not bring himself to look into his father’s eyes.

The two sat in silence. Finally Humam spoke, his head still bowed.

“I have cleared the family’s name, Father,” he said.

“Humam, you did not have to do anything,” the old man said. “Our family name is clean.”

Days passed before Humam uttered another word to his family. His father believed his son would eventually open up about what had happened, so he did not pry. Five days went by, then a week. Finally, on a day when the two were again alone in the living room, Khalil al-Balawi could no longer contain himself.

“Did they beat you?” he asked softly.

Humam lifted his head, finally, to meet his father’s gaze. His cheeks were flushed, and when he finally spoke, his words, in Arabic