conversations with close friends, he agonized that Balawi’s treachery had not been spotted earlier. Panetta reread the files about the informant and studied the photos of the red Subaru with its blown-out windows and hundreds of shrapnel holes. He tried to project an aura of calm, but he was deeply frustrated. How could they have let a terrorist slip in like that? he asked repeatedly. “Leon felt accountable,” said an administration friend who met with him during the initial days after the attack. “We all did—everyone who knew about the meeting that day.”
But when Panetta at last stood up in front of the CIA’s division managers at their morning meeting, his voice was firm. After the moment of silence, he told the group to prepare to be exceptionally busy. There would be a full investigation in time, he said, but for the moment the CIA was to focus its energies on the tribal belt of northwestern Pakistan. The loss of seven officers in a day was historic—the worst in twenty-five years—but the agency could not allow the enemy to see even the slightest pause. In fact exactly the opposite would happen, he said.
“When you are at war there are risks that you take, but we are a family—we have to be family,” he said. “We now have to pull together to not only deal with the pain of this loss but also to pull together to make sure that we fulfill the mission.”
Panetta continued to speak as the agency’s veterans sat quietly.
“We hit them hard this past year, and they’re going to try to hit us back,” he said. “But we have to stay on the offensive.”
Indeed, a new offensive had already begun.
On New Year’s Eve, hours after the suicide bombing, a lone CIA Predator carried out the first retaliatory strike, hitting a Taliban safe house near the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. Among the four killed was a senior Taliban commander named Haji Omar Khan, a close ally of the Mehsud family and a veteran of the civil war against the Soviets.
Less than twenty-four hours later a second strike targeted three Taliban militants in a car a few miles from Mir Ali. Two more Taliban fighters were killed nearby in a third attack on January 3.
And the CIA was just warming up.
On January 6, two days after Panetta’s speech to his senior staff, robot planes converged over a training camp in Datta Khel, not far from the house where Humam al-Balawi’s suicide vest had been made. The first wave of missiles hit a mud-brick fortress that served as camp headquarters. Then, when insurgents swarmed over the wrecked buildings to look for bodies, a second salvo was launched. When the dust cleared, at least eleven people lay dead, including two Arab men whom Pakistani authorities identified as al-Qaeda operatives.
Another attack—the fifth in nine days—killed five people in a Taliban safe house on January 8. The next day a strike on a training camp in a village near Miranshah killed four more. Among the dead was a Jordanian al-Qaeda operative who had been serving as a bodyguard for Sheikh Saeed al-Masri. If al-Masri was present, he managed to slip away.
And so it continued. By January 19, less than three weeks after the suicide bombing, the CIA had launched eleven separate missile strikes over a small swath of North and South Waziristan, killing at least sixty-two people. It was drone warfare at its most furious: Never, since the first Predators were launched over Pakistan in 2004, had the pace been so intense.
The barrage was sanctioned all the way to the White House. As top administration officials later described the events, all the Taliban targets had been on the agency’s watch list before the suicide attack at Khost. But by the start of the new year, the CIA’s fleet of robot planes had grown; new orbits, approved by President Obama in the fall, were now being flown. More important, the agency had won approval to temporarily suspend one of the unwritten rules of its drone campaign. Before the Khost bombing, the CIA had largely avoided carrying out clusters of attacks that might provoke a popular backlash in Pakistan. Now the agency’s leaders, and the nation’s president, were in no mood to exercise such restraint.
“In the aftermath of Khost, political sensitivities were no longer a reason not to do something,” said one Obama administration security official who participated in discussions about the U.S. response to the bombing. “The shackles were unleashed.”
The strike that provoked the most excitement at Langley occurred on January 14 in a sparsely populated region called Shaktoi, near the border between the two Waziristans. A CIA aircraft had been flying a slow orbit above a former madrassa, a religious school, that now served as a Taliban base. Informants reported the presence in the camp of a tall, scruffy-bearded commander of obviously high rank. A phone intercept confirmed that it was Hakimullah Mehsud.
Just before dawn, two large explosions leveled the school building and an adjoining house. Among the ten bodies were several Uzbek fighters who were known members of the Taliban leader’s personal security team.
Pakistani media rushed to publish the news online: Hakimullah Mehsud, the man who had helped prepare Balawi for his suicide mission, had been inside the compound when the missiles struck and was believed to be buried in the rubble. One English-language news site posted a large headline on its main Web page. “Hakimullah feared dead,” the headline read.
Panetta remained tethered for days to his secure phone, giving orders and receiving reports from the Predator teams. But publicly his role was to lead the agency through a long period of grieving. He and his deputy, Steve Kappes, together attended more than twenty funerals and memorial services, beginning with the gathering at Dover and ending many weeks later with the final burials at Arlington National Cemetery. He traveled to Jordan to reassure top officials of the Mukhabarat, and he met with Darren LaBonte’s coworkers in the agency’s Amman station, pledging that he would personally see to it that his widow and child were cared for.
It was at Dover that the human dimensions of the disaster became fully clear. Panetta had flown to the Delaware base with General James E. “Hoss” Cartwright, the Marine Corps general and Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, to receive the bodies, and he expected to speak with family members of the dead in private bereavement rooms. But the sheer number of parents, children, and spouses forced the group to move into a large multipurpose room in the base chapel. When Panetta arrived, the room was crowded with mourners. Adults stood in clusters along the walls, while children played or sat in their parents’ laps.
“It was shocking to see so many people,” one of Panetta’s aides said afterward.
Panetta made his way through the crowd, shaking hands and giving hugs. Then he spoke briefly to the group.
“You should know two things,” he said. “We will honor your loved ones in an appropriate, dignified way, starting here at Dover. And we will keep up the fight, because that is what they would have wanted us to do.”
In Jordan, meanwhile, other CIA and State Department dignitaries gathered in Amman for a royal funeral for Ali bin Zeid, a ceremony that began with the red-carpeted arrival of the Mukhabarat captain’s body accompanied by an honor guard of twenty-four elite soldiers in traditional red and white kaffiyeh head scarves. A bag-pipe corps led an official funeral procession that included bin Zeid’s cousin King Abdullah II, along with Queen Rania and their oldest son, Crown Prince Hussein.
American families gathered to mourn in a series of private services that stretched from coastal Oregon, to Rockford, Illinois, to suburban Boston. Fellow SEALs gathered in a navy chapel in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to salute their fallen comrade, Jeremy Wise; while Harold Brown Jr.’s two oldest children, Paul, twelve, and Magdalena, eleven, played a duet on saxophone and clarinet to honor their father in services in a Catholic church in his boyhood home of Bolton, Massachusetts. Narcotics detectives and motorcycle cops wept over Scott Roberson’s coffin in Akron, Ohio, while in an Annapolis, Maryland, cathedral, one of Darren LaBonte’s CIA comrades recalled the bravery of the former Army Ranger known as Spartan. The officer compared his former comrade with Leonidas, the ancient warrior-king of Sparta, who, when ordered to surrender his weapons by a vastly superior Persian force, replied,
Mindy Lou Paresi, honoring her husband’s wishes, made arrangements for Dane Paresi’s burial in the same Willamette veterans’ cemetery in Portland where he had played army as a boy. The body, dressed in the Green Beret uniform and paratrooper’s boots Mindy Lou had carried with her to Dover Air Force Base, made its final cross-country trip in a metal casket. A closed-coffin reception was planned for a close circle of friends and family
