Not Fair
A tale of the War on Terror
The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick
This is a straight story, elaborately told. Here’s the simple version, the very simple version, the version without any names. A man who is affiliated with a terror organisation is cultivated by two intelligence agencies who believe he is on their side. They schedule a meeting with him at one of their bases, flying out good people, his handlers, in order to hold it. But it becomes clear, far too late, that he is not on their side. As people cluster around the agent, he detonates himself and kills and wounds a very large number of his supposed allies and friends. The murky depths, oh, how this War on Terror plumbs them.
And now, with a few more names, the same.
Humam Khalil al-Balawi is a Jordanian doctor (and the author of inflammatory Islamist posts online which are noted) with an inclination towards violence, towards jihadism, and towards al-Qaeda. He is picked up and noticed, and that noticing gives way to cultivation. Al-Balawi is an odd character. It is not known what he is thinking. The Jordanian Mukhabarat think they have a grasp on him; that they know him to have no legitimate ties to al-Qaeda. The swollen post-September 11 CIA think they know him, too. And they have a plan. They think that they could insert him into Afghanistan or Pakistan, have him climb the leadership of the Afghan Taliban or its al-Qaeda guests and masters. There are al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in need of a doctor. Their wounds give them trouble. They were injured in assassination attempts, in decapitation strikes. A doctor getting close to them would hardly be a surprise. He might yet produce the goods.
But this was not to be, of course. What al-Balawi did instead was to play the Americans, the Jordanians and, to an extent unknown, al-Qaeda off. He convinced the Americans that they ought to debrief him, as he was laden with knowledge about the al-Qaeda and Taliban ranks in which he moved. Thus his Jordanian handler, and many CIA bigwigs arrived in Khost, in Forward Operating Base Chapman in late December 2009. They wait for al-Balawi to be driven from the Afghan—Pakistan border, to arrive at Camp Chapman, to be waved through three checkpoints, three layers of security, before he stepped out of his car, all of them gathering round, and detonating the suicide belt that he wore, that no one had detected and attempted to take from him. Ten people were killed, including al-Balawi, Arghawan, an Afghan; Sharif Ali bin Zeid (Jordanian intel, cousin of the king) and a great litany of CIA people. Chief of base, security chief, case officer, contractor, targeter. Some of those in duplicate. Six others were badly wounded.
A massacre.
This clever book traces, with somewhat implausible pace and style, the triple-cross. How al-Balawi kept the Americans and the Jordanians on the hook, both of them believing he was their man, a man with unbeatable access to the enemy.
He was a jihadist writer, an essayist under the name Abu Dujana al-Khurasani, one of the most prolific and most influential of the pro-jihadi writers in those days. A defender of the ancestor of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And many thought thought this did not matter, that al-Balawi would be honest if he said he had changed his mind. Arrested by intelligence, supposedly turned, al-Balawi was sent into Pakistan to spy for the Americans. One of those moments – afterwards – where everyone could see, but only in retrospect, that declining to search people who had been in the midst of the enemy – as a gesture of respect, indeed – might have been done in error.
Evidence for some of a bloated CIA, where its members do not often speak local languages, or live among the people they keep under surveillance – a CIA which always fails, will always be destined to fail.