She arrived in Kabul in August to a pungent stew of odors, dust, and broiling heat, her mother’s admonitions still ringing in her ears. The elder Hanson, also named Elizabeth, had been unhappy when her daughter joined the CIA, and she had been horrified by her decision to move to such a dangerous place as Afghanistan. She tried for weeks to talk her out of it and continued to fret long after it was clear that the decision was final.
“Don’t you think you should at least try to learn karate before you go over there?” the mother asked one day before the departure.
“Mom,” she replied, “if the time comes when you find that you need karate, the game is already over.”
That was typical Elizabeth—Bitsy or Monkie to her family—frustratingly stubborn, but with a wry twist that made it impossible for anyone to stay angry with her. Mrs. Hanson would have no choice but to let her daughter go, but she would insist on a call home nearly every day, and she would keep a handset strapped to her body at all hours, in case there was bad news.
The truth was, Hanson’s mother had seen this day coming for a long time. Once, as a little girl of about four years, Bitsy had plopped into her chair at the family dinner table and announced, in very mature English, that she “wanted to try everything in life, and learn everything there is to learn.” With that, she picked up a crystal goblet of ice water and bit into it so sharply that it shattered.
“The glass broke in her mouth,” her mother remembered. “But it didn’t faze her.”
Years later she joined the CIA for the same reason, prizing romance and adventure above the easy money she could have earned with her private school education and economics degree. She was a girl’s girl who adored children and appreciated nice clothes and a good manicure, yet she would leap at any chance to get her hands dirty, whether from rock climbing and bungee jumping, or from shooting grenade launchers and slogging through the mud at the CIA’s training academy. She was a self-professed nerd who read physics textbooks in her spare time, yet was so naturally funny that her friends encouraged her, quite seriously, to become a stand-up comic. The career might have pleased her mother more but for the fact that her taste in humor was, as Mrs. Hanson explained, “not very ladylike.”
Volunteering for duty in Afghanistan was in keeping with Hanson’s adventurous side, and she was thrilled at the chance to go, her friends say. There were serious risks in living even in the relatively safe Afghan capital, a place where suicide bombers occasionally rammed into military convoys and where gunmen sometimes shot their way into five-star hotels. Hanson would work and live in the CIA station inside the ultrasecure U.S. Embassy, but her job sometimes required meetings with informants outside the steel-plated gates. Hanson was again a targeter, but now she would be leading a focused effort to find and kill the top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders who were driving the Afghan insurgency and plotting terrorist attacks against the West—including bin Laden and Zawahiri.
Her mother never pressed Hanson for details of her work, but she knew the essentials, and she never fully understood how her daughter was able to adjust mentally to work that involved the killing of other human beings, even terrorists. Sometimes she asked her daughter about it.
Elizabeth Hanson leaned to the left politically, and “she hated war,” her mother said. And yet she seemed to have no doubts about where she belonged.
“Whether you approved of the war or not made no difference,” the elder Hanson said, recalling her daughter’s words. “You don’t run away from a fight, and you always have to take care of the people who are over there, fighting your war.”
In her daughter’s words, she said, it would usually boil down to this: “It’s just what you have to do.”
Hanson quickly settled into the daily rhythm of her new job. Her living quarters consisted of a tiny dorm room with a shared bath, and there was precious little to do in the way of socializing, so she worked. Fourteen-hour days, seven-day workweeks. Dinner and lunch at her desk. Gym breaks in the afternoon. She would put in a full day before Langley was awake, and another full day while the Counterterrorism Center’s senior officers were at their desks, asking questions and demanding updates.
Hanson’s targets were closer now, just a half hour’s chopper ride to the east, hiding in the steep valleys of Kunar and Khost and in the Pakistani tribal lands beyond. Baitullah Mehsud was gone, but his Taliban minions were still there. So were the Haqqanis and the Shadow Army paramilitary troops loyal to al-Qaeda. Somewhere among the mountain villages, Sheikh Saeed al-Masri was plotting his next move, perhaps in consultation with Ayman al- Zawahiri or even Osama bin Laden himself.
If they could be found, Elizabeth Hanson would find them.
9.
CHIEF
At 4:58 A.M., two hours before sunrise, Jennifer Matthews was roused from sleep by a loud bang. It sounded close—it was hard to tell in the dark, and she was new to such things—and it was strong enough to rattle the picture frames in her tiny hooch. Instinctively she rolled out of bed, grabbed her flak jacket and helmet, and walked out the door toward the shelter.
Outside, other figures stumbled along the same path, and some exchanged a grim greeting. The dark sky was still chalky with stars, with no trace of the new moon that would mark the end of the month-long Ramadan fast later that evening. Somewhere in town, a muezzin was sounding the predawn call to prayer, his lilting baritone rising and fading against the squawks and beeps of the base’s emergency loudspeakers.
Matthews felt the heaviness of the air, still warm even at that hour. The airfield lights glowed yellow through a dusty fog, casting a feeble light over the parched terrain beyond the fence. Farther up the valley, clusters of tiny lights from the army’s Salerno base shimmered like distant constellations.
It was a thrilling sight and oddly serene. The Haqqani fighters who lobbed occasional mortar rounds at the base rarely hit anything, so the perfunctory huddle in the concrete shelter was mostly an annoyance and a chance to catch up on gossip. But Matthews, barely twenty-four hours into her new job as Khost base chief, found even the little things fascinating. It was perhaps a strange admission, coming from a woman who a week earlier had been a suburban mom working in a sleek office building in northern Virginia, but she loved being in Afghanistan.
“It is exhilarating,” she told one close agency friend back home. Her Afghan assignment was going to take up a year of her life, and she would be absent from her three children for most of that time. She would miss twelve months’ worth of ball games and bedtime kisses, stomachaches and school projects, recitals and family dinners. And she would miss Christmas. But Matthews had volunteered for the posting, and she was now determined to extract every possible advantage from the experience. And to the extent she could, she would enjoy every bit of it, even the middle-of-the-night visits to the bomb shelter.
This one was mercifully short, as there were no other explosions. A chopper crew circling the base with a searchlight found the strewn body parts and quickly pieced together the story. A lone man had crept up the main approach to the base in the moonless blackness and attempted to bury an IED, or improvised explosive device, near a dip in the road where the morning convoys would pass in a few hours. But the bomb had exploded prematurely, leaving pieces of the man scattered across the highway. An almost identical incident had occurred near the same spot a few months earlier, only it ended with two would-be bombers lying dead, one of them a schoolteacher.
In an odd way, such attacks validated Matthews’s belief in the low risk of living in such a dangerous place. She would be safe at Khost, she told worried relatives and friends, because she would stay inside the wire. Local jihadist groups would fling themselves against the walls at regular intervals, but they never quite amounted to a serious threat.
“She told me, ‘I would never allow myself to be put in danger, because of my kids,’ ” said a CIA colleague who met with Matthews a few weeks before she went overseas. “I think she honestly believed it.”
Matthews had already concluded that life in a war zone wasn’t so bad. Her first glimpse of her temporary Afghan home was from the heaving side of a Black Hawk helicopter making the thirty-minute run from Kabul. The city and CIA base were perched on a high plateau surrounded by dun-colored hills, and the terrain reminded her of parts of the American Southwest. “I kept expecting to see the Marlboro Man show up,” she quipped to one of her e-mail pals back in Virginia.
The land had a kind of austere beauty best appreciated from the air. To the north, and visible from the base
