teenager and blowing up a bazaar. Mehsud lacked the resources to acquire a nuclear weapon, and no one would be stupid enough to give him one.
Still, the CIA would quietly dial up the volume on its surveillance of the hilly border region that was home to the Mehsud clan. The heightened listening continued fruitlessly for days, until one evening the agency’s trawlers snagged something big: a secret meeting among members of Baitullah Mehsud’s Taliban shura, or council. The advisers were overheard discussing an interesting ethical dilemma that had been recently thrust upon the group.
Now the attention of the Obama administration’s entire security infrastructure was fixed on a small patch of real estate in northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban had remorselessly slaughtered thousands of people, including many women and children, yet these devices had given them pause. The terrorist movement appeared to be taking the unusual step of acquiring religious cover for whatever it was about to do.
In Washington not a word about the new threat would be uttered publicly. But across the Obama administration, government agencies girded themselves to deal with a new crisis. The Energy Department, with its radiation-sniffing planes; the Pentagon; the Homeland Security chiefs responsible for ports and border security—all were put on heightened alert. At Langley, Panetta harangued his counterterrorism teams daily for specifics, his dark eyes flashing from behind his wire-rims. “What the hell are we talking about here?” he demanded. “Did they take something from one of those damned nuclear depots?”
Of all the devastating scenarios Panetta had ever allowed himself to imagine, the worst by far was a nuclear explosion in a U.S. city. There were only a handful of places in the world where agency officials feared that a terrorist might buy or steal a bomb or its key components, and nuclear-armed Pakistan topped the list. Yet it was all but inconceivable that a small-time rogue like Baitullah Mehsud could have gotten his hands on a functioning atomic bomb.
Panetta and his top aides eventually settled on a more plausible explanation: The Pakistani terrorist had acquired a
Faced with a potentially grave threat, the five-month-old Obama administration prepared to take action, starting with the dispatching of a high-level delegation to Pakistan to secure that country’s help in locating Baitullah Mehsud and his mysterious devices. “The entire U.S. policy-making community was very alarmed,” said an administration official who participated in meetings convened to discuss the White House’s response. “It was an all-hands-on-deck mentality.”
It had already been a rough spring for Panetta, who, at seventy, sometimes found himself looking back wistfully at the comfortable semiretirement he had been enjoying before being summoned by Obama to head the CIA. The former California congressman had been suggested for the intelligence job by his longtime friend Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, but his nomination quickly stirred up controversy. Panetta’s prior brushes with the spy world had been limited mainly to the White House briefings he attended as staff director for the Clinton administration, and even Democrat stalwarts in the Senate publicly questioned if he had the necessary experience to lead the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. Obama, seeing the pounding his candidate was taking on Capitol Hill, wondered aloud to Emanuel whether the nomination was worth the political price he was paying.
“Are you sure this was the right choice?” he asked.
Emanuel was convinced. Panetta was a shrewd manager who knew Washington and possessed formidable political skills. Though tough and profane, Panetta had an easy laugh and the natural charm of a small-town mayor—a combination that made him nearly impossible not to like. Panetta would protect the administration’s interests while also finding ways to fight and win the agency’s battles with other intelligence agencies, White House bean counters, the Pentagon, and Congress. “This will turn out,” Emanuel assured the president.
Yet Panetta’s troubles persisted. He angered Republicans and many CIA managers with his comments condemning waterboarding. Then, just two months after his arrival at Langley, he infuriated Democrats when he opposed the administration’s decision to release Bush-era legal memos that justified the use of waterboarding. Panetta’s stance on the so-called torture memos won him new friends inside the CIA, but it also put him at odds with powerful members of the administration he was now serving.
A bright spot for Panetta was the CIA’s continuing successes against al-Qaeda, as the new administration embraced and even expanded the agency’s campaign of missile strikes against terrorist bases in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. In his daily intelligence briefings, Panetta could see the impact the strikes were having. For the first time in years, al-Qaeda’s leaders faced a mortal threat within their own sanctuary, the prospect of instant annihilation from robot planes that hovered continuously overhead, their mechanical humming filling the evening silence and making men fearful in their own beds.
But for Panetta even these successes came at a price. The son of Italian immigrants, Panetta was a lifelong Catholic who regularly attended mass, and the responsibility for deciding life and death for other individuals—even suspected terrorists living thousands of miles away—weighed heavily on him. His predecessor, Mike Hayden, had warned that the job would require “decisions that will absolutely surprise you.” It was true: Once a week, on average, Panetta was approving what amounted to a death sentence for a group of strangers on the other side of the globe. The CIA’s new weapons systems were impressively precise, with capabilities that exceeded the accounts most people would read in newspapers. The agency’s Predators could put a missile through the window of a moving car or nail a target the size of a dinner plate in a narrow alley at night without harming buildings on either side. The aircraft’s operators could—and, on at least one occasion, did—change a missile’s trajectory in midflight to avoid an unintended target that suddenly wandered into its path. According to the agency’s closely held body count, its missile strikes had inadvertently killed nine people by the time Panetta took office, or an average of one unintended death for every forty al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters targeted.
Still, friends kidded Panetta about becoming a CIA hit man so late in his life. “Does your bishop know what you’re doing?” one close friend quipped when Panetta talked about his work. But the CIA director wasn’t amused.
“I don’t take it lightly,” Panetta protested.
Yet week after week, when Panetta was confronted with the choice, his personal qualms would fall away against what he perceived as the far greater evil. Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies were contemplating acts of mass murder, unburdened by remorse. In all the world, only the CIA had both the means and the will to reach into the terrorists’ mountain sanctuary to stop them.
Now, in his third month as CIA director, Panetta was facing the same life-or-death calculation for a Pakistani man who the CIA believed was preparing to detonate a dirty bomb. Until that spring the United States had never regarded Baitullah Mehsud as a significant threat to Americans, and the CIA was just beginning to redirect its vast surveillance network toward the task of searching for him. Inevitably, the agency would find Mehsud. When it happened, Panetta would know what to do.
One of the most talented of Langley’s new crop of terrorist hunters arrived at work, as always, in flip-flops. Elizabeth Hanson liked wearing beach shoes, even in the dead of winter. The snap of her sandals as she padded around the CIA’s corridors was as familiar to her colleagues as her blond mane, with the couple of rebellious curls that resisted her efforts to flat iron them into submission. She kept a pair of dressier shoes under her desk for the days when she was unexpectedly summoned to the executive floor to talk about al-Qaeda, and she could quickly turn on the glamour when the situation demanded it. But on normal working days Hanson believed in making herself comfortable: jeans, flip-flops, and sometimes even pigtails. After all, she routinely worked long hours, and when things were busy at the office, she often stayed up through the night, watching the live video feed from the CIA’s Predator aircraft as they stalked one of her targets. And June was already shaping up to be a remarkably busy month.
She plopped down at her small cubicle desk, pushing aside papers to make room for her caramel macchiato,
