Financial Times: How triple-agent outwitted CIA’s best
By Matthew Green
Just over a year ago, a visitor to an Islamic website posted a comment next to a photograph of two Muslim women lying in pools of blood. “Anyone who sees such a painful picture and does not rush to fight should consider his manhood and masculinity dead,” the message read.
Drawing on a well of patience, subterfuge and ultimately self-sacrifice that has earned a grudging respect even from his adversaries, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor turned triple-agent, stayed true to his word.
Having convinced some of the Central Intelligence Agency’s top al-Qaeda experts that he could track down the terrorist group’s leaders, he strolled into their base in Afghanistan without being searched, waited until his victims had gathered, then detonated his explosives-laden vest.
The resulting deaths of seven CIA personnel, including a woman, represented a propaganda coup for al-Qaeda, allowing the network to claim to have outwitted its most implacable foe.
The story of how the 32-year-old Jordanian won a complex game of espionage against vastly more experienced players reveals the level of sophistication attained by al-Qaeda. “To be blunt, this was a brilliant operation,” said Fred Burton, a former US counter-terrorism agent and now vice-president of intelligence at Stratfor, the global intelligence company. “They will be able to use this for recruitment, for fundraising, to tout their success.”
Like the suicide hijackers who led the September 11 attacks, Mr al-Balawi was a highly educated, migratory radical. Born in Kuwait to a middle-class Jordanian family of Palestinian origin, he studied medicine in Istanbul, where he met his wife, Defne Bayrak. “We had a routine life there; he was not someone who would go out often,” she told Turkey’s Dogan news agency. “But I knew his inclinations.”
In his education and social standing, al-Balawi might not have been worlds apart from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian graduate of University College London who has been charged with trying to destroy an airliner over Detroit on Christmas day. Al-Balawi contributed to numerous radical websites before returning to Jordan where he ran a clinic in a Palestinian refugee camp near the town of Zarqa. In March last year, he was arrested by the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, who had been monitoring his posts.
But the agents who held Al-Balawi in custody believed they had “turned” him into an asset. In return for his freedom, he agreed to work for Jordanian intelligence and was given a mission of the utmost sensitivity.
Al-Balawi’s task was to travel to Afghanistan and join al-Qaeda, posing as an Arab volunteer. Once infiltrated into the terrorist network, he would help CIA agents in Afghanistan track down al-Qaeda’s core leaders, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command to Osama bin Laden.
Al-Balawi duly left for Afghanistan and, once he was in position, he appeared to keep his side of the bargain, passing on valuable information. He also continued to post virulently anti-American essays to jihadi websites, using the nom de guerre “Abu Dujana al-Khorasani”.
The CIA appears to have accepted that this was all part of the agent’s cover. The possibility that these internet ramblings might have reflected his real opinions seems to have been discounted.
Having burnished his credibility, al-Balawi then indicated that he had actually met Mr al-Zawahiri, the second most wanted al-Qaeda leader.
When it was agreed that al-Balawi would brief his employers at Forward Operating Base Chapman, a US military installation in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost, five of the CIA’s most experienced operatives, two of their bodyguards and the agent’s Jordanian handler, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, attended.
When he detonated his suicide bomb, he inflicted the worst blow on the CIA since eight of its agents died in the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983.
The al-Qaeda strike defied predictions that the group had been largely contained. Jim Jones, the US national security adviser, said in October that al-Qaeda counted less than 100 fighters in Afghanistan and had no bases from which to launch attacks.
This confidence was inspired in part by scores of strikes from unmanned drone aircraft that have killed at least 11 of the top 20 leaders in “core al-Qaeda”, according to the American Security Project in Washington.
But al-Qaeda’s success in wounding the CIA could reinvigorate its franchise. “Many Muslims will see al-Qaeda as a little David challenging Goliath and managing to reach his den,” said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, the London-based Arabic newspaper, who interviewed Mr bin Laden in 1996. “Al-Qaeda is still very active, still very powerful, still very efficient.”
