knowledge of the events.
3. “When you put it all together”: Leon Panetta interview with Jim Lehrer on PBS
4. “Once those teams went into the compound”: Author interview with Panetta, May 3, 2011, and ibid.
5. “we have rid the world of the most infamous terrorist of our time”: May 2, 2011, e-mail from Leon Panetta to CIA staff, provided to author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOBY WARRICK has been a reporter for the
Humam al-Balawi was a straight-A student destined for a medical career when he posed for this photograph in his senior year of high school.
Humam al-Balawi’s father, Khalil, was a school administrator, teacher of Arabic literature, and father of ten children. When he was a boy, his family were forced to leave their home in what is now Israel after the partition of Palestine in 1948. They settled in Jordan, becoming part of a Palestinian refugee community that grew to nearly two million people.
Balawi turned down more lucrative medical opportunities to work in this United Nations medical clinic in a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Amman. While tending to refugee women and children, he developed a secret identity as a jihadist blogger, writing anti-Israel and anti-Western screeds that eventually attracted the attention of Jordan’s intelligence service.
Balawi’s Turkish wife, Defne Bayrak, was a journalist for a conservative Istanbul newspaper when the two met in an online chat room. A fluent Arabic speaker, she translated a biography of Osama bin Laden into Turkish.
Ali bin Zeid, a captain in Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, commonly known as the Mukhabarat, was a cousin to Jordan’s king. He went on off-roading excursions to relieve the pressure of counterterrorism work. Bin Zeid took charge of the Balawi case and believed he saw potential in the young doctor to become a double agent for the West.
Former Army Ranger Darren LaBonte fought the Taliban in Afghanistan as a CIA paramilitary officer before moving to Jordan to work on counterterrorism cases. He became the CIA’s American case officer for Balawi.
Osama bin Laden (left) went deep into hiding after 2002, becoming so isolated that his influence over al- Qaeda’s decisions diminished. His top deputy, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri, narrowly avoided a CIA attempt on his life in 2006, and afterward taunted President George W. Bush in a videotaped diatribe, saying, “Bush, do you know where I am?”
Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, al-Qaeda’s long-time financial chief, rose to take charge of the terrorist group’s day- to-day operations. He gradually came to see an opportunity in the young Jordanian doctor who turned up in Pakistan’s tribal belt in the spring of 2009.
Jennifer Matthews helped lead the CIA’s search for al-Qaeda terrorists in Washington and London, and by early 2009 she was in line for her first command posting in a war zone. She had been in Afghanistan only three months when CIA officials put her in charge of the agency’s first meeting with Balawi.
Elizabeth Hanson was barely thirty and already a seasoned CIA “targeter” when she was dispatched to Kabul to help the CIA track down senior al-Qaeda operatives. She helped put the agency’s unmanned Predator aircraft on the trail of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.
The CIA relied on its fleet of Predators to strike terrorists in places where U.S. troops couldn’t go. The pilotless planes can hover for hours to conduct surveillance and can fire laser-guided missiles at targets with unparalleled accuracy. The Predators have killed hundreds of suspected terrorists in Pakistan in dozens of strikes since 2008.
Michael V. Hayden, who became the Bush administration’s third CIA director in 2006, saw signs that al- Qaeda’s strength was increasing in Pakistan’s tribal belt in 2007. He pressed the Bush administration to ramp up lethal Predator strikes in an effort to prevent another September 11–style terrorist attack against the West. (
The leader of the Taliban alliance in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, became the focus of a massive U.S.-Pakistani search in 2009 after intelligence linked him to a possible dirty-bomb plot. A CIA missile struck him on August 5, 2009, on the roof of his father-in-law’s house in northwestern Pakistan.
After the killing of his cousin Baitullah, the charismatic Hakimullah Mehsud (middle) took the reins of Pakistan’s Taliban alliance and talked openly of targeting the American heartland. Initially suspicious of Balawi, he