then switched on her computer monitor and began sifting through the morning’s secret cables from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The agency’s senior targeters were caught up in an urgent search for one Baitullah Mehsud, and that group included Hanson, who was developing a reputation for her ability to track down the country’s most dangerous foes. Terrorist figures of greater importance than Mehsud had been on Hanson’s list in the past, and some of them were no longer among the living.
Coworkers sang out greetings as they wandered by, and Hanson acknowledged them with a smile. It was early, but the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was humming with a kind of low-grade tumult that never completely subsided. The place was divorced from normal time distinctions of day and night, early and late, weekday and holiday. The cavernous main room was perpetually awash in a fluorescent brightness that compensated for the lack of windows. (Any portal to the outside world is viewed as a security risk, new hires are told.) The center’s warrens of cubicles and flat-panel TV monitors took up much of the ground floor of the agency’s sleek new headquarters building, a facility that was built, for security’s sake, into a hillside. Workers in the Counterterrorism Center arrived on the fourth floor through a gleaming glass atrium festooned with scale-model spy planes and statues, then descended four levels below to the bunker where the agency’s most sensitive operations are managed.
Hanson stood out in this subterranean world, and not just because of her footwear. Barely thirty, she had a kind of understated midwestern girl-next-door beauty that men adored and women admired. Coworkers loved her for her outsize sense of humor, which ranged from slyly sarcastic to scatological to downright silly. She could quote endlessly from comedies like
Hanson’s playful demeanor belied the utter seriousness with which she approached the core business of the Counterterrorism Center. For more than two years, she had worked as a targeter, a job that entailed tracking terrorists on the CIA’s wanted list, by whatever means available, from a tiny cubicle a few miles outside Washington. She had her own list of targets and access to raw data from every surveillance tool in the agency’s sizable kit. Like an artist assembling a giant mosaic, she could summon bits of information from wiretaps, cell phone intercepts, surveillance videos, informant reports, and even news accounts, blending them with a mix of imagination and conjecture to develop a profile that the agency’s spies, drone operators, and undercover case officers could use to physically spot the target. More recently Hanson had become a group leader for other targeters, overseeing multiple efforts to track down terrorist leaders. Often she spent hours monitoring the hour-by-hour surveillance of a terrorist target, and she personally made the call to the CIA director to request the go-ahead to launch one of the agency’s Hellfire missiles. Hanson had helped track down some of al-Qaeda’s most senior leaders, including Osama al-Kini, the man killed by a CIA missile on New Year’s Day. And her intricate knowledge of Pakistani terrorist networks made her an indispensable source of expertise when agency officers were on the trail of lesser terrorists, some of them al-Qaeda’s closest allies. These included the cagey Pashtun warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, the longtime ally of Osama bin Laden’s whose fighters were attacking U.S. troops around the eastern Afghan city of Khost; and, more recently, leaders of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan alliance headed by Baitullah Mehsud.
“Her career trajectory was straight up, like a rocket,” said a CIA colleague who worked closely with her in the Counterterrorism Center. “She was helping put bad people out of business, permanently. It was getting to the point that it was getting harder to hide in the tribal areas.”
Some coworkers compared Hanson with Jennifer Matthews, another female officer and onetime targeter who had shot up through the ranks. The two had worked together briefly and were friendly, but their paths had been markedly different. Matthews had joined a vastly different CIA in the late 1980s, a place where women still were relatively rare, the Cold War still raged, and most of the glamour jobs were held by male case officers who had secret meetings with informants in seedy bars in Vienna or Budapest. By contrast, Hanson was part of a class of new officers hired after September 11. Some referred to themselves as the Windows generation: young, highly educated, and confident in the power of their technology. Case officers and informants would always be needed, but in the post–September 11 era, they were no longer kings.
“It’s now about connecting dots,” said another of Hanson’s coworkers. “It’s about multitasking, going through reams of data from different sources. It’s putting two and two together to stop a plot or to find a leader who is trying not to be found.”
It was also about personal toughness. Friends recalled being startled one day when Hanson, then twenty- nine, got into a heated argument with an army colonel over a potential target. When the military officer tried to dismiss the young targeter, Hanson moved within inches of his face. “The target is correct, sir,” she said. “Either you take it out, or we will.”
As spring turned to summer, Elizabeth Hanson was preparing for a transfer to Kabul, Afghanistan, her first overseas posting with the CIA. But before her departure she would set her sights on the elusive and newly dangerous Baitullah Mehsud.
On the morning of June 22 the Obama administration’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, traveled to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, for urgent meetings with the country’s civilian and military leaders. In press releases the meetings were described as routine consultations on Washington’s Afghanistan strategy. In reality the top items on the agenda were Mehsud and his “devices.”
Pakistani officials adamantly insisted that the country’s nuclear stockpile was secure, but they could not rule out the possibility of a Taliban dirty bomb. If anything, the government of President Asif Ali Zardari was even more worried than the Americans about Mehsud’s intentions. If a dirty bomb was to explode in one of the world’s major cities in the coming weeks, officials reasoned, it was more likely to happen in Karachi or Peshawar than in New York or London.
The only bright spot for Islamabad was the Obama administration’s newfound interest in Baitullah Mehsud. The Taliban leader was officially blamed for the assassination of the country’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, on December 27, 2007, and in the months since then he had declared war on Pakistan’s government. Mehsud had targeted Pakistani police and military barracks with suicide bombings, and he had famously cut off the heads of captured army recruits. Pakistan’s generals were preparing to expand their military offensive against Taliban strongholds, and they were engaging in fierce clashes in villages along the border. Yet the CIA and its robot planes—so controversial in Pakistan—had done little to help. U.S. officials had long viewed the Mehsud clan as a local problem for the Pakistanis and were reluctant to agitate yet another militant faction that might cross into Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops.
The dirty bomb threat changed everything. Now the Obama administration was privately talking about targeting Mehsud, and Pakistani officials, for once, were wholeheartedly embracing the idea of a U.S. missile strike on their soil.
“Go after him,” one Pakistani security official pleaded to one of the U.S. officials in Jones’s delegation.
In Langley, meanwhile, the search by Elizabeth Hanson and her fellow targeters was beginning to bear fruit, as daily cables from Kabul and Islamabad brought fresh reports on the movements of Taliban commanders close to Mehsud. Some in the CIA had developed a theory about the origins of the Taliban’s mysterious devices: They were part of an al-Qaeda project that had been disrupted by the relentless Predator strikes on the terrorist leaders. An al-Qaeda bomb maker named Khalid Habib had been aspiring to build a dirty bomb before his plans were cut short in October 2008, when a missile slammed into his car in northwestern Pakistan. Habib’s closest ally and the presumed heir to his bomb-making projects was Osama al-Kini, the al-Qaeda commander who died in the Predator strike on New Year’s Day. Had al-Qaeda bequeathed its dirty bomb factory to Baitullah Mehsud?
The CIA had long worried about collusion between al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s loose confederation of militant groups, and now Hanson and her team were seeing increasing examples of it. In their natural state, many of the local extremist groups were rivals who fell regularly into spasms of bloody intertribal feuding. But lately, squeezed by encroaching Pakistani troops from the south and the constant threat of death from CIA missiles, the militants were consulting and cooperating in ways that could make them far more dangerous.
Hanson was skimming classified cables for the names of Mehsud lieutenants in late June, when Pakistani informants reported that a kind of pan-jihadist strategy session had taken place near Baitullah Mehsud’s ancestral home of Makeen, in South Waziristan. The eleven-member guest list included a top al-Qaeda emissary, Abu Yahya
