the idea of reenlisting in the army; it was unlikely that he would end up in the job or unit that he wanted, he reasoned. Instead he decided to sign up with the U.S. Marshals Service, a law enforcement arm of the Justice Department that tracks down fugitives and protects federal courts. His Ranger experience landed him a coveted spot on the marshals’ special operations team, yet it quickly became clear to LaBonte that the job was not the one he was looking for. Instead of searching for suspected terrorists, he was spending his days tracking down drug dealers.
LaBonte then applied simultaneously for positions at the FBI and CIA. The FBI called back first, so he enrolled in the bureau’s academy in Quantico, Virginia. He won commendations as a cadet for leadership and shooting skills, and after graduation he landed a prime spot in the bureau’s New York office, working for an organized crime unit investigating the city’s Mafia families. Still, he burned for something more.
At last, in 2006, the CIA came through with the offer he had been waiting for. The intelligence agency saw in LaBonte a combination of skills that were most in demand five years into the global war against al-Qaeda: the tactical abilities of a Special Forces soldier, combined with the resourcefulness of a classic CIA case officer. LaBonte was among a handful of CIA recruits who would be trained for both jobs. He catapulted to the front of the waiting list for the agency’s training school, the former Defense Department reservation in southern Virginia known as the “Farm.” Months later he was on his way to Iraq and then to Afghanistan.
This job felt right, at last. His comrades and commanders were impressed by the enthusiasm of the young ex-Ranger who was always the first to volunteer for difficult assignments and the last to complain about the hardships the group endured. Though less experienced than some of the older combat veterans, he distinguished himself for his clearheadedness and sharp instincts during firefights. One officer who fought next to him in Afghanistan was struck by LaBonte’s “total confidence in who and what he was.
“He was living his calling, without pretense or guile, brag or boast,” the former comrade said. “Darren believed his predestined role was to serve as a professional warrior, a protector for those less able to protect themselves.”
Such qualities were on display one summer night when LaBonte led a two-man surveillance mission in Kunar Province. The men were walking alongside a river when a sudden noise alerted them to an approaching Taliban patrol. The Americans froze and hugged the riverbank as the insurgents filed into view, then paused in a clearing a few yards from their hiding place. A dozen fighters arrived, then two dozen, and still more. At last the group swelled to more than one hundred Taliban fighters, all armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and obviously staging for some kind of attack. They lingered for several minutes, so close that the two Americans could hear their conversations. If any one of them had wandered a few feet toward the river, the pair would almost certainly have been discovered.
The other man was new to the CIA base and had never been in such a scrape. LaBonte kept a hand on his shoulder and whispered words of encouragement.
“Don’t worry, everything is going to be OK,” he said.
Eventually the insurgents moved on, and the two men scurried back to their base—but only after relaying the Taliban group’s coordinates to the nearest NATO dispatcher.
As the months passed, though, LaBonte slowly lost some of his early optimism about the tide of battle against al-Qaeda. By the time he arrived in Jordan, he was convinced that bin Laden and his followers were winning the ideological struggle, appealing to ever larger numbers of young Muslims who could serve as fodder in the next wave of suicidal strikes against the West. He brooded about the attacks that were surely coming and worried about how to safeguard those he cared about most.
That list was topped by his wife and baby daughter, now with him in a Middle Eastern country in which American officials had been targeted for assassination. It also included bin Zeid, who he feared, was being swept along by the collective enthusiasm for Balawi, a double agent whose achievements already bordered on the implausible.
“This guy is too good to be true,” LaBonte flatly told an ex-military friend in late autumn.
Among most of the intelligence community, though, Balawi fever was real and about to get much worse.
11.
DANGLE
Humam al-Balawi’s breakthrough as a spy was one hundred megabytes of flash and sizzle, titillating and wholly unexpected. But his next big score would blow everyone away.
It arrived, again by e-mail to his handler, bin Zeid, this time in the form of a simple typed message. Balawi, the doctor, had a new patient. His name was Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Jordanian had made direct contact with the deputy commander of al-Qaeda, second only to Osama bin Laden himself.
As Balawi described the events, he had been as surprised as anyone. One day he was told that Zawahiri was experiencing problems, and then suddenly the bearded, bespectacled terrorist leader was standing in front of him, asking him for medical treatment. Zawahiri, himself a doctor, was suffering from a range of complications related to diabetes, and he needed advice and, he hoped, some medicine. It was not so easy for Zawahiri, a wanted man with a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head, to write his own prescriptions.
Balawi happily consented, and within minutes he was alone with Zawahiri, checking the vital signs of the man who had helped dream up the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In his e-mail, Balawi supplied a summary of Zawahiri’s physical condition as well as his medical history, providing details that perfectly matched records the CIA had obtained years earlier from intelligence officials in Egypt, Zawahiri’s home country. Most important, Balawi revealed that he had scheduled a follow-up visit with his patient. He would be seeing Zawahiri again in a few weeks.
From Kabul to Amman to Langley, marble buildings seemed to shift on their foundations. The last time the CIA had caught a whiff of Zawahiri was in 2006, when the agency bombed a house in southwestern Pakistan on the basis of faulty intelligence that suggested he was eating dinner there; there had been no verified sighting of Zawahiri by a Westerner or government informant since 2002.
Now, everyone with a top secret clearance wanted to know about the “golden source” who had been in the terrorist’s presence.
Even the White House would have to know.
Leon Panetta met with members of the Obama administration’s national security team to apprise them of the stunning developments. The CIA director himself served as chief briefer, and among those seated around the table were the national security adviser, James L. Jones; Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence; and Rahm Emanuel, Panetta’s old friend and White House chief of staff. Afterward Panetta would repeat the briefing in a private audience with the president of the United States.
“There are indications that he [Balawi] might have access to Zawahiri,” Panetta announced, his tone deliberately low-key. The next step, he said, was to meet with the informant and train him for an important new role.
“If we can meet with him and give him the right technology, we have a chance to go after Zawahiri,” Panetta said.
The reaction was instantaneous and dramatic. How quickly can we make this happen? NSC officials wanted to know.
“Everyone was very enthusiastic,” said one of the security officials present at the briefing, with considerable understatement, “that for the first time in a long time, we had a chance of going after Number Two.”
If Balawi had offered up bin Laden himself, it could hardly have evoked more excitement. After so many years deep in hiding, al-Qaeda’s reclusive founder was merely a figurehead. It was Zawahiri, together with his old friend Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, who now steered al-Qaeda’s ship. The two Egyptians decided strategy for the group, raised money, and planned operations. If al-Qaeda were to unleash another September 11–style attack on the United States, it would almost certainly be Zawahiri’s handiwork.
The physician, fifty-eight now and scarred, physically and mentally, from years in Egyptian prisons, was the
