108. Hunting Al-Qaeda: From Jihadist To Spy (Ep 3)

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Welcome to the Rest of this Classified. I'm Gordon Harrera.
And I'm David McGlarski. And we're journeying deep in this third episode into the host bombing of 2009.

And we've been looking at this remarkable figure.

Bilawi, who had been a jihadist blogger, but also a quiet doctor, and whom the jordanian intelligence service thought it had broken and turned and sent into the heart of al-qaida a man who'd sent videos back showing him with al-qaeda officials and who is suggesting amazingly that he is going to be able to meet with al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a person the CIA, the US government is desperate to track down.

And I guess here, David, the real question is, does this case make sense? Yeah, it's a big question, isn't it? I mean, at this point,

because

on the one hand, you have

this, again, kind of formerly quiet, soft-spoken doctor who has been sent on this, I mean, really quite improbable and daring mission into the, you know, sort of federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan and who has

turned up with connections inside Al-Qaeda, inside the Taliban, and has video proof that he's been in the same room as a senior al-Qaeda member who has delivered intelligence on Zawahiri's medical condition that perfectly matches the CIA's understanding of his medical condition.

You have a guy in Valawi who has done and delivered accurate damage assessments from drone strikes, who has been

co-located with or nearby, you know, many of the sort of jihadist targets that the CIA is most interested in and that, you know, sort of gives him the bona fides about he's actually embedded with these groups.

And Joby Warwick, you know, in his account in this, The Triple Agent, says that

Balawi's reporting actually led to the targeting of several Taliban soldiers. So that's the pro column here.

I think at this point, though, there is real skepticism floating around the agency about Balawi.

I mean, at one point, Darren Labonte, who is the Amman case officer who's running, co-running this case with Ali Benzaid at the Jordanian GID, says this guy's too good to be true.

So there's some real skepticism here.

And I think if we tunnel back to the actual recruitment of Balawi, I mean, this is where you can raise questions about whether a guy who is psychologically tortured by Jordanian intelligence during an interrogation and who, in one light, is this blogger who's sort of living this online fantasy and is quick to, you know, distance himself from it, but in another is actually a jihadist true believer, like whether a jailhouse recruitment of a guy like that is really going to ever be effective, particularly when he's now outside of the control of the Jordanians, right?

He's not in Jordan. You can't arrest this guy anymore.
He's off on his own. I mean, he is under al-Qaeda control.
He's under al-Qaeda control. In the sense physically of being with them.

And you're just getting these occasional messages from him.

So effectively, if you're the Jordanians, you're trusting that that breaking of him was real and that he didn't, if you like, put himself back together afterwards.

But also, you know, if you're the CIA, you're doing all this one step removed, aren't you?

I mean, one of the interesting things is the CIA are starting to invest more and more in this source and his importance. They've not even met the guy.
Well, and that's the plan is let's meet this guy.

And that makes perfect sense because

you kind of think, well, at this point,

we'd want to think about this guy kind of like a walk-in.

A classic walk-in would be someone who shows up at the embassy and basically says, I want to meet someone from your intelligence service, right? I have something.

And, you know, one of the, one of the first lines, I think, of the internal CIA review on this ended up being, we needed to meet him, right? So the idea of meeting him is not a bad one.

It's a good one. You need to meet, to build rapport, to understand his motivation, to assess his access and the risks that he's taking.
Stare him in the eye.

Yeah, that's the job of a good case officer, isn't it? It's to be in the room with someone and make that judgment based on the direct interaction rather than reading a report.

And you need time because you have to, ideally, you'd want to build some ops plan for the future.

You'd want a commo plan for how you'd actually be in touch because the email is clearly, you know, clunky and has its own vulnerabilities that go with it.

And, you know, the goal here would be that Balawi would lead the CIA to big, high-value targets, HVTs, right? Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the al-Qaeda guy that he'd been in the room with. Yeah.

Ayman al-Zuwahiri, who he's supposedly treating, and maybe even Osama bin Laden. Yeah, and again, we mention this

throughout this series, but it is important to just continue to emphasize how big of a deal this case is and would be inside the CIA, because all the targeting work that went into the courier to eventually get bin Laden two years later, at this point in time in late 2009, this looks like the best possible path to get to Osama bin Laden.

But then there's a question, Gordon, where do you meet this guy? Yeah,

he's in the tribal areas. I guess the problem is he's in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan.
The safest place would be to get him out, get him to Oman or get him to the West.

But that's obviously going to raise all kinds of questions, isn't it? If he's going to leave, you know, for days and days and days, people are going to think that's suspicious. So that's out.

So I guess, you know, you're going to have to kind of compromise or or come to him or come close to him.

I mean, if you're the CIA, you can't quite, you can't just rock up into the tribal areas either. So I guess you've got to find somewhere else to meet him.
Not easy.

No, and I guess, yeah, in the Pakistani city, you don't want the Pakistani Intelligence Service, ISI, to be in on this. And so there's going to be concern about that.

So Afghanistan. Yeah, eastern Afghanistan.
It's reachable by car. from the tribal areas.
And I think this is important, this lens of like, he's a walk-in.

It's not uncommon for an agent, an asset, to suggest meeting locations. That makes sense.

You would, all other things being equal, not want a walk-in to dictate where the meeting takes place. And so you would want that.
You want to be in control. You want to be in control.

And eastern Afghanistan has a network of CIA bases in it that are along the border with Pakistan.

But only one

is on the highway that connects Maranshah, which is a town in North Waziristan in Pakistan, to the city where the base is located itself. So you have essentially a road that he could take to get in.

And so by this total accident of geography, the CIA is going to say, well, let's have the meeting take place at a base called Khost.

It is officially called Forward Operating Base Chapman and is named for a special forces officer and American who was killed in the opening months of the war in Afghanistan.

But the CIA refer to it as Coast Base. Now, it's in a city around a city.
There's about 160,000 people that live in the coast. The CIA base,

this Camp Chapman, it's perched on this kind of high plateau surrounded by hills. If you look at pictures of it, it kind of looks like the American Southwest, I think, Gordon.

It's very rugged topography. It's very austere.

You have to the north, these what are called the white mountains, which are snow-capped.

It's actually where Tora Bora is, which is the sort of base where bin Laden had mounted what might have been his last stand in 2001 before fleeing into Pakistan.

And then to the east, you have these kind of low hills that mark the border with Pakistan itself. Now,

the base, coast base, is kind of an island in this very hostile, hostile country. You have this base that's surrounded by concentric rings of Hesco barriers.

And for those who have not seen them, Hesco barriers are sort of this instantly recognizable. It's a prefab, collapsible container that you can then fill with sand and top with razor wire.

So it's a very mobile, quick way to build a defensive perimeter. The base,

like so many of these spots in Afghanistan, is covered in relics from the Soviet occupation.

Kind of reminds me of the fort at Kala Yzhangi, Gordon, from the very first episodes of The Rest is Classified, where you had just kind of Soviet-era machinery and outposts kind of littering the space.

So there's a control tower at Coast that's built by the Russians and that now serves as a lookout post. There's like a dozen or so wrecked 1980s vintage aircraft that line one side of the runway.

If you, dear listeners, are thinking that this is a very colorful scenery, you would be dead wrong. Everything is colored brown or gray.
It's all kind of dust-coated.

It's got this kind of Martian feel to it. The base at Coast is frequently subjected to usually very wildly inaccurate mortar volleys from the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters around it.

There's like local jihadi groups that'll try to plant improvised explosive devices or send suicide bombers against the walls, but they never amounted to much of a serious threat.

And the base has just gotten bigger and bigger since 2001. So you don't just have, you know, paramilitary officers or case officers.

You have targeters, you have reports officers, you have analysts who are forward deployed to these bases in Afghanistan. And here, Gordon, I think it's important to set up the base chief at COST

because This woman, her name's Jennifer Lynn Matthews. And at this point in the story, she's not been involved at all in the Balawi case.
But again, by this accident of geography,

she is going to have to orchestrate what is going to be seen from 2009, the most important meeting with a human agent that the CIA will undertake, probably

since 9-11. Yeah.
Interesting enough, she's a...

a very important character in this story. In some ways, she,

in terms of the hunt hunt for al-Qaeda, had been at the heart of it for many years, hadn't she? I mean, that's one of the important aspects of her.

Let's talk a bit about her, and we'll come to maybe a few more details about her later. Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Father was a press operator, mother a nurse, went to church, cross-country runner, ends up though at the CIA. I mean, takes a few different paths, but ends up at the CIA.

First as an analyst, isn't that? Is that right? Yeah, she joined the agency. It seems on the encouragement of a relative who had served in the intelligence community.
So she applies for a job at CIA.

She joins as an imagery analyst, right?

She's looking at satellite imagery, and she seems to have known that she was going to be a CIA lifer from the get-go. She will later become a reports officer.

This is a job at the agency where you're basically taking the raw intelligence, the operational cables from the field and turning that into a disseminated intelligence report that someone, an analyst like me, would have read and incorporated into a finished analytic production.

She goes to Switzerland when her husband gets a job there, but then she returns back to the CIA in 1996.

And here she shifts from the analytical side to the directorate of operations and joins a small group inside ALEC Station. Yeah, and it's worth saying what ALEC station is.

It's a very interesting name. And this is 1996 when almost no one has heard of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
It's just recently been formed, but this is the small group hunting it.

It's led by a really interesting guy called Mike Schoyer, who I used to know pretty well, actually. And it was called Alec Station, actually after his son, Alec.

And it was a group of people who became obsessed with hunting al-Qaeda long before 9-11 and who could kind of see how dangerous Osama bin Laden was and how deadly he could be.

I mean, they kind of foresaw it. I mean, they did have a reputation, didn't they? I think in the CIA in the late 90s.

And they were seen as people who were kind of obsessed, you know, and always kind of going on about this Osama bin Laden person and kind of banging on about why he was dangerous.

And interestingly enough, had a lot of women in the group, even though it was led by Mike Schoyer. The group consisted of a lot of women, including Jennifer Matthews.
Yeah, and

they called themselves the Bay because they sat in high partition cubicles in Alex Station that was kind of arranged in this Bay

formation. A lot of others in that period, it seems, called that group of women the coven.

So it gives you this sense of

it's an insular group. It's a highly motivated group.
It's a group that knows al-Qaeda inside and out.

And then I think it's fair to say, you know, Morell calling Shoyer a zealot, you kind of laugh at it, but you think this group of people is fanatically committed to stopping. Osama bin Laden.

And of course, 9-11 happens. And, you know, for those people, it is personally, I think, devastating because they'd been the ones trying to stop him.

And Jennifer is going to kind of keep into this group, you know, which is now part of this growing counter-terrorism centre.

And she's going to become very involved, isn't she, in that hunt after 9-11, this job of being a targeter, which it sounds like you're targeting people for drone strikes.

But actually, what it really meant was finding people, wasn't it?

It was using all the kind of different trails of data and information and, you know, intelligence CI could collect to find and locate and work out who the people were in al-Qaeda and then be able to work out where to get them.

I think she's one of the first officers to ever have that title of targeter because it was kind of a new practice in the agency in the late 90s and early 2000s inside CTC.

And Jennifer led the search for this AQ logistics. guy and eventually traces him to a safe house in Pakistan where he's he's nabbed by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence.

This logistics guru is kind of, he's one of the first Al-Qaeda operatives caught by CIA after 9-11. And within days of his capture, he identifies Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the lead architect of 9-11.

And it's a big win for Jennifer. And I mean, she's very, very hard.
charging, isn't she? I mean, that's one of the things. She's seen as very dedicated.

I think it's worth saying one of the reasons and one of the things that shapes her is the fact that in the years after 9-11, of course, there is this question about did the CIA screw up?

Was there an intelligence failure? And we'll look at that in detail at some other point.

But there are questions about whether the group hunting bin Laden had failed to share information with the FBI about two of the hijackers in advance of 9-11, which potentially could have stopped 9-11.

And there'll be investigations within the CIA about that. And Jennifer will be named in that internally, won't she? And I think this is a kind of important part of her story.

Yeah, she winds up on a list of named agency managers that the inspector general recommended be reviewed for possible disciplinary action. This didn't happen.

Then Director Porter Goss decided not to discipline anybody. But I think this combination of having been so deep in the hunt and this sort of

ultimately failed effort to stop 9-11,

And then afterward, to be

named as someone who maybe could have stopped the attack, but didn't. That's a haunting position, I think, to be in.

And I think it explains some of her drive and her ambition is she's, I think, unfairly gets the nickname of Ruth for Ruthless.

But I think if you see it in another way, this is someone actually who's, you know, spent more than a decade hunting for al-Qaeda, has seen what they can do, fears that they may be implicated and somehow failed to do something, and is absolutely just determined to stop al-Qaeda and to get to the leadership.

Yeah, and so there's definitely that motivation around hunting al-Qaeda and bin Laden and the senior leadership. But there is also, I think, the

reality that she's a CIA lifer who wanted to do this work for the rest of her days and she wants to advance in the organization. And a targeter is a desk job.
You're working typically from Langley.

She'd been working from Langley for her entire career.

Then in 2005, she takes a job as the

CIA's counterterrorism center, essentially liaison officer in London, which I, you know, makes sense because of her CT focus.

London's, I guess it's a nice place, Gordon, you know, but the reality of CIA promotions is like you, you really can't

get your

cis promotion, CIS senior intelligence service, without time overseas. And so, London is is kind of a way to start doing that for her.

Yeah, and I guess this is this is the bit where it's tricky for me because I should say I knew her. So, I knew her when she was in London.
Um, it is a bit difficult to talk about.

I think the obvious assumption would be that I knew her as a journalist, but actually, I knew her in a kind of strangely in a personal capacity outside of work initially.

And I'll just share two kind of brief stories. One is so I can do her a bit, but I didn't know what she did, had no idea.

And then I was at the US Embassy's, the American Ambassador has a big Fourth of July party, and I bump into her at the kind of Fourth of July party, and I say, oh, hi, you know, what are you doing here?

And she says, oh, I work at the embassy. And I say, oh, what do you do at the embassy?

And then she gives me a reply, which I won't repeat on the podcast, but she gives me a name, which because I did the job, I do the job I do as a national security journalist, I knew that name was a cover name.

for the CIA station in the embassy, one of the cover names they use.

And so I kind of clearly didn't have a very good poker face because I think think she could see my eyes widen when I realized at that point that she was giving me a cover name for the CIA.

So she just looked at me and she said something like, oh, you know what that means, don't you?

And then after that, whenever we kind of bumped into each other, she never uttered the word CIA and I never asked her about it. But I think we both knew, I knew, she knew, and she knew, I knew, etc.

And actually, I remember going to Afghanistan in February, I think, of 2009, so, or maybe around that time, and talking to her about it and realizing as well, she knew a lot about Afghanistan.

I mean, like, I had no idea about her background in Alex Station or any of these things, but it was clear to me just from the way she was asking me about things that she knew a lot about it.

And then, last one, a very vivid memory I have of the last time I spoke to her because it was a very kind of strange place. It was a kind of

bouncy castle, long story.

And she

told me she was leaving. She told me she was leaving London.
She said she was going. And she said, she told me she was going to Afghanistan.
And she she didn't say coast. I assumed Kabul, actually.

And it was very interesting because, you know, she said to me she was going out there. And

I was talking to her about it. And I think she knew there was an element of danger.

But I also think I sensed from her, she felt she'd had, she'd had a very comfortable life in London for four years, you know, including with her family.

And she had this, as we talked about, this overriding sense of mission. And

going to Afghanistan was something I think she felt she had to do, both career-wise, but also I think personally, having, I think she felt almost a slight guilt at having been comfortable in London while the kind of war is being fought out there in Pakistan, Afghanistan.

I think in her mind, it very much felt like it would be a year, I think that was the posting, a year to Afghanistan, and then back to Virginia and back to kind of normal life, having done the frontline position.

So I can, you know, recall that conversation where, you know, she basically said, yeah, she's leaving London and doing that short posting in a war zone, which I guess from what you're saying as well is career-wise was the thing that someone like her needed to do.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's the merging of two really important threads in her life, which is how do you get closer to the fight against al-Qaeda? And how do you do something that

will

put you on a track to moving forward inside the counterterrorism center?

And the answer is, well, you take over this job out in Coast, right at this base, which there's a slot opening up, lo and behold. And I think it's a one-year slot, which is kind of unique.

I mean, there would be slots in Baghdad or in Kabul that could be two to three years.

And that's, in some ways, I guess you could think about it as harder because those are not accompanied posts in Baghdad or Kabul. And so, you know, she's got, at this point, three kids.

And so being away for three years with like RR stints in between is pretty rough. But if you could do a one-year sprint,

that maybe holds some appeal. You're also, frankly, more on the front lines of the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban if you're out in coast.

And I think it's worth saying that typically, like if you're in Iraq in this period, the bases that exist in Iraq are really going to ladder up to the overall station in Baghdad.

This is not how it worked in Afghanistan in 2009. The way it worked was Kabul

station

was going to be, you know, sort of staffed and

run by what at the time was any division management, Near East Division Management. The Counterterrorism Center picked the leaders for the bases.

And so

the counterterrorism center kind of front office, it has a tremendous amount of influence over who who becomes the base chief in Coast.

And Matthews, I mean, despite all of her depth on the Al-Qaeda target, right, over a long period of time, is in some ways a

atypical pick to be a base chief. Because at this point, again, she's been a targeter.
an imagery analyst, a reports officer.

She's not gone through the typical ops training that you would give to a case officer or a paramilitary officer who's kind of dual-hatted as a case officer to run one of these, run one of these bases.

So there is some dissension, it seems, inside

the agency over

her as the pick

for base chief. And I think, yeah, this is one of the harder parts of the story to talk about because

you get the sense, and I think Joby Warwick does a good job in his book of kind of bringing this out. You get the sense that

there's also a thread here of like

Jennifer Matthews is a really competent intelligence officer who's who has

come up in an organization that has traditionally been dominated by men and where all of these senior case officer sort of slots, you know, are typically held by men.

And so there's an element to this where the dissension dissension among some quarters kind of bleeds toward sex

women can't do this job and why do they put this woman to this job but i agree there are legitimate questions yeah some of the other dissension though is we need people who have gone through the full gamut of ops and security training before they run run a base in eastern afghanistan yeah she will get some training obviously you know she gets a kind of three-week overseas preparation course which i guess is designed to teach survival skills, kind of what could go wrong in somewhere really dangerous.

I mean, did you have similar things when you were mine was much shorter because I didn't go to Iraq or Afghanistan.

So, you know, it wasn't a war zone, but I mean, in this case, civilian officers going to Afghanistan were required to take,

I think it was a three-week kind of overseas preparation course, basic war zone survival, security, shooting skills, defensive driving, first aid, things like that. 10 years earlier,

the same course had been 21 weeks long and

it had extensive instruction on bombs and explosives. Which is maybe a reflection of how many people you've got going through.
Totally. Yeah, exactly.

You know, now post 9-11, you've got so many people going through Iraq and Afghanistan. You can't afford to put them on like a long, long courses, you know, for 21 weeks.

It's got to be the three-week course. She does kind of talk to people about it.
She goes to people she knows, former CIA officers and people about the decision of whether or not to go to post.

And it's interesting, isn't it? Because some people tell her not to go there. Yeah, don't do it.
Don't do do it.

They say, you know, it's a paramilitary environment rather than, if you like, a regular intelligence environment. And it sounds like she has a real argument with one of these people, doesn't it?

It becomes very heated when he tries to tell her not to go, someone who clearly she kind of went to for advice. Yeah, no, exactly.

And we'll talk about it a little bit more, I think, in the next episode. But

Jennifer is famously portrayed in Zero Dark 30. And I have to say, as I think many of of the people who knew her,

I didn't know her, but I found the depiction to be horrendous. There's a kind of a

southern girl affect that the actress uses, and she comes across, I think,

in the film as not being

particularly competent. And that is very much not who

Jennifer Matthews was. No, in fact, interestingly enough, I actually didn't watch Zero Dark 30 for many years after it came out because someone someone warned me about that depiction.
I just thought,

I don't want to see it. You know, I've watched it since, and we've talked about it actually on a bonus podcast and kind of picked it apart a bit, you know, in the context of bin Laden.

But yeah, partly because I kind of thought the portrayal wasn't quite right of her. But she's made that decision.
You know, she has the arguments with people.

She clearly thought it was something she wanted to do. So by, I guess, it's late 2009, fall, autumn 2009, she is now out in host

in Afghanistan. She's not, as we've said, been involved in this case before, though.

And yet, just by chance, it is to her it will fall to host this absolutely crucial meeting with someone who people think could be the most important agent, the most important source they've had for years in the hunt for the al-Qaeda leadership.

So, maybe there, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how the build-up goes to that all-important meeting.

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Okay, welcome back. We've been looking at

Balawi, this crucial source the Jordanians and the CIA have, they think,

in the heart of al-Qaeda, and this plan. to try and arrange a face-to-face meeting between him and the CIA, David.

Well, and Ali Benzaid, the Jordanian case officer, still back in Amman, you know, is looking at this incredible reporting that's coming in from Balawi, you know, hinting that he might be able to actually get into the same room as Zawahari and, you know, lead GID and the Americans to this incredible, incredible target.

Benzaid says he wants to take things up a notch and he wants to meet with Balawi and he wants to arrange the location for that meeting.

And of course, as we've been talking, Binzaid says, let's meet in coast at the American base.

Now, Balawi, again, in these emails, agrees in concept to a meeting, but immediately begins to throw out conditions. He doesn't want to meet with anyone but Bin Zaid.

He says, it's too dangerous for me to cross the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan. He says, you should come to me, which means to Maransha in the tribal areas.

Balawi says, you know, if you come to me in Maransha, I can find a place to meet. It won't attract any attention.
Now, I do think, pause here for a second. It's worth noting.

Of course, this tragedy is going to dramatically impact the CIA. At this point, when you're looking at these messages from Balawi, this feels a lot like

He's after the Jordanian. He's after Ali Benzaid.
He wants to lure him into Pakistan. Now, Benzaid pushes back because, again, he's a good case officer.
He doesn't want

to have a meeting under Balawi's control.

Again, it's not uncommon for an asset to suggest a location for a meeting, but you don't want to do that in a place where you have no ability to control the turf, right?

Bin Zayed pushes back, but Balawi is insistent on Maransha. And Balawi says, you know, I'm the one who's taking all the risks.
He worries about Afghan spies on the U.S. base.
He says, look,

if any of them are informants and they rat on me, I will be killed.

And Binzaid and his CIA partner in this case, Darren Labonte, they're really in a very high-pressure spot because this case, I mean, as we said last time, like this case has been briefed to the president of the United States.

It's doubtless been briefed to the Jordanian king, to King Abdullah. The senior people in CIA and GID are watching this thing like a hawk.

And yet they both, both Benzaid and Labonte, I think in some moments do seem to harbor doubt about Balawi.

You know, how does this nervous, kind of soft-spoken, introverted doctor, how does he get so close to Al-Qaeda so quickly? He's trying to scam us. He's trying to get, get paid.

Again, you know, you sort of think about this like a walk-in, though, despite all of these concerns, you say there's still something to be gained by meeting with him.

And Benzaid and Labonte are, even as they're trying to negotiate with

Balawi about where the meeting is going to happen, both of these guys are preparing to go to coast.

Now, GID, and I think this is one of the other dynamics here that's kind of interesting, is the extent to which there are some people inside GID above Ali Benzaid

who

resent

him.

Yeah.

He's a member of the royal family. family.
He's the rising star.

And you can kind of picture some older guys who have maybe been around a little bit longer,

who

are looking at this case and have a kind of complicated swirl of emotion around it, who think maybe it's not that good of a case.

How can we trust a jailhouse recruit when he's not an Amman Jordan and we've sent him out into Pakistan? What's really the motivation here? Are we being played?

But also,

maybe there's this sort of personal jealousy around Ali Benzaid. You can see there's kind of this complex swirl of stuff that's probably going on inside GID as well.

And initially, Ali Benzaid's superiors say, look, you cannot go to Afghanistan and have this meeting. It's too dangerous.

We don't want, I mean, you could imagine for the kingdom, a Jordanian royal

being, you know, kidnapped by by al-Qaeda. I mean, it's an absolute disaster.

But Ali Benzayd, it seems, again, in Joby Warwick's account of this, it seems like he does play a bit of the kind of Trump, American Trump card here and says, well, if you don't let me go, I'll just go with the Americans.

Yeah, the Americans want me. The Americans want me.
And eventually it does seem like he works something out where Amon Station says we want Ali Benzay to go.

And look, frankly, it does make sense to have the case officer go. Yeah, yeah, the guy who knows him.
So he's standing on solid ground there. Now, so they're getting ready to go.

It's, you know, early December 2009. Darren Labonte has a wife and a very young daughter in Amman.

And Labonte seems to have, in part, chosen Amman because he had done several unaccompanied tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he's finally in a place where his wife and daughter can be with him.

They are planning to spend the holidays at a villa in Tuscany. And it seems like his wife had sort of pieced together enough of his concerns about this operation that she's uncomfortable with.

Yeah, that she was uncomfortable with it and had some doubts about the asset he was going to meet.

I mean, in the Warwick account of this, you know, at one point, she, when they're talking about him going, his wife, Rachel, says, you know, he could turn out to be a suicide bomber.

As we said before,

the Labantes and the Benz Aides are friends.

They're social friends. And apparently, right before

Darren Labante and Ali Benzader headed to Afghanistan, the couples gather to have kind of last farewell coffee at the Labantes apartment in Amman.

So they meet at five in the morning, just before the two guys go to the airport.

They apparently don't want to do the goodbyes at the airport, of course, because it's kind of, you know, messy and sad in public.

And hey, have coffee out on the balcony and then you know, get ready to actually head to the airport to go out to Afghanistan.

And of course, the meeting is not set yet, but they might have to wait there for a while. And this is the point where

some of those

concerns that had been zinging around largely informal channels inside both intelligence services, that CIA and GID,

start to pop out a little bit more into the open because apparently a senior Jordanian official at GID

calls someone in Amman station. and says, you know, we've got some serious concerns about this case.

And, you know, I find this kind of fascinating fascinating because it does it shows the seriousness and the depth of the jordanian thinking on a big counterintelligence case and this jordanian official says look i've got two concerns the first one um he says is historical precedent you know we know jihadists We've been working with them and against them for 40 years, going all the way back to Palestinian terrorism in Black September, right?

And we kind of know which ones can be flipped. You've got the low-level thugs that are working for money, the criminals, you know, it's pretty easy to flip those guys.

But there's ideological types that don't switch sides. You know, they're true believers.
And Balawi has all the hallmarks of a true believer. This guy is not flippable.

And he's telling us he's flipped. So that's concern one.

The second concern, and this is obviously someone inside GAD who'd been reading the traffic on the case, all the back and forth, the emails, the reports that Ben Zaid had been writing up.

You know, his second concern was he's like, okay, Balawi is insisting on a meeting in Pakistan, in Maransha, instead of in a fortified base. It sounds like an ambush.

He's trying to ambush you, us, really, is what this George is saying.

All valid concerns. Right.
All valid concerns. Now, here's the problem.
They're theoretical concerns at this point. How'd you prove it? Yeah.
How do you be sure?

How do you balance that that out against the potential benefit that you get from him? Yeah, you haven't got hard evidence he's bad.

All you've got is that suspicion or possibility versus the potential payoff of getting him right, isn't it? That's the problem. This is the

final point that the GID officer raises, and I think it's a fascinating one. He says, you know, maybe Ali Ben Zayd is not the right officer for this case.
And here's the thing.

How do you interpret that? You could interpret that as Ali Ben Zayd has fallen in love with this agent. Meaning, he's overinvested in it.
He's overinvested.

Yeah, not actually romantically in love, but he's overinvested. He's fallen in love with the case, right? And he's become blinded to some of the risk.
You could read it that way.

Or you could read that as internal politicking inside GID, resentment of Ali Ben Zayd. This young royal guy.

It's like it's this guy with royal blood who's kind of, you know, he gets to do whatever he wants.

And we old crusty guys who are smoking six packs a day of cigarettes back here at the fingernail factory like we're not going to get any of the the praise for it right so you can yeah you can see the it's hard to interpret isn't it yeah and you could interpret that either way but at this point you got to be thinking you from a Mon station perspective if you stand up and say hey one guy in the Jordanian service doesn't buy it Is that going to stop any of this from happening?

Are you going to be the one who said, let's not, you know, let's not meet with the guy who might lead us to Zawahiri and bin Laden? No.

And it's worth worth saying, isn't it, that this is, you know, this guy is the kind of golden source.

And we talked previously, didn't we, about the pressure on this case and the expectation around this case.

You know, the fact that President Obama has been briefed on this case and on the potential for a meeting, the pressure to succeed is growing and is bound to weigh heavily against.

any concerns that come up. And, you know, you're going to find a reason to discount those concerns.
You've got whole organizations and leaderships who are invested in this case and in this source.

I think the central choreography for this is being run inside CTC. There's a lot of other fingers sort of in the pie, but this is a

CT case that is being run by a very aggressive CTC front office at the time that's prosecuting what it, I think, rightly sees as the administration's number one priority, which is the war against al-Qaeda.

And then to bring it back to Jennifer Matthews and Coast, she is the one who is running the base, who has got to write the plan on how to deal with it. It's not her case.

She's kind of inherited it because she's running this base and all these layers of expectation are there, but she's got to work out how to deal with the agent on his way in.

I mean, you could tick through the complexities here, right? Or the different facets of this you need to work out. The first one is, okay, well, how how do we transport

Balawi to coast? The timing is really, really important. I mean,

they thought they'd have maybe nine hours with Balawi inside the base, realistically.

That sounds, I guess, like a lot of time, but if you're talking about a meeting with the most important source the agency is running, it's not a lot of time.

He's got to be extracted from Pakistan without al-Qaeda or the Taliban knowing where he's going.

So the idea is we'll send a trusted Afghan driver from the base who will go and pick him up at the border, right? Now the cover, what's his explanation to his hosts, right, in Pakistan?

And the idea is that as Zawahiri's doctor, Balawi can claim that he'll need to go into Maransha for medicine.

And he obviously won't get medicine in Maransha, but the CIA during the meeting will provide him with a package to take home.

It'll be like pills for Zawahiri's bad circulation and some other medicine for his diabetes. Yeah.
And how do you manage confidentiality on the base? The base is a big base.

There are local Afghan guards.

There's

obviously the U.S. military.
And he's an agent. You've got to protect his identity.
And you've got to protect, yeah, his identity.

It's obviously something in the email traffic with Benzaid that, you know, Balawi is deeply concerned about this.

And the front gate is a concern because you have these Afghan soldiers that man the outer perimeter. You know, it seems likely that the Taliban has informants among them.
Now, how do you balance

the risk, the security risk that Balawi provides

with

his confidentiality, right?

That's the tension here. Here's another big question, which is how do you run the meeting itself? It seems that Matthews decided that the group should be large,

both larger than is typical, and we'll talk about what that means, to allow for more evaluation of Balawi and to benefit from the sort of breadth of experience that the team would have on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Because, again, you're going to have a lot of questions for this guy. And the quality of the intel you collect is going to be directly connected to the quality of the questions that you ask.

A large group

is

not

what you would want from from a CI, a counterintelligence perspective.

Because again, if you think about Balawi as a walk-in, which he kind of is, you would want like one CIA officer to meet with him because you don't want him to see

12, 13, 14 people

and be able to report that back to al-Qaeda or to the Taliban. But importantly, he's not treated like a walk-in, you know, because

he's the biggest source, the most important source that CTC is running. You know, there is this line, he has to be made to feel welcomed.
And that's, I guess, the tension there, isn't it?

Is that they want to make him feel welcomed and relaxed and maybe have lots of people to assess him.

And that requires a certain structure around the meeting, which is going to define it, which is back to this idea about being, you know, kind of invested into this source, isn't it? Yeah.

I mean, there's a tension, right?

Because if you draw up an ops plan for a meeting with a source who has been working with you for several years and who is highly trusted and who has been vetted consistently over and over again and has been run through all the CI reviews and all that kind of stuff, you run the meeting a certain way.

If you don't know much about the guy and you haven't actually vetted him, nor have you met him, there would have been at the time even a set of security protocols for a high threat meeting.

And that would call for certainly a security check outside of the base and for a smaller number of people. Yeah.
And the problem is here, more and more people are going to get added to the meeting.

This is actually going to cause some

tension in the run-up, isn't it? This issue of how many people are going to be there. I mean, they're having kind of discussions about it in advance.

And I think, you know, Darren LeBonte kind of criticizes it, doesn't he? And suggests it's too many. That's according to some of the accounts.

Because they're talking about up to 13 people being outside waiting for him. The

sort of testimonies in Joby Warwick's book

suggest that there were rehearsals, you know, for the meeting. And it makes sense that you would rehearse pieces of this, because this is a tightly choreographed session with Balawi.

You might only get to see him once. but part of that was rehearsing kind of the arrival, it seems, and a large number of people who'd be standing outside this building

to greet him. Darren Labonte, I guess, at one point called it a gaggle and a clown show.

You know, he and Ali Ben Zayd have been sitting at this point in Afghanistan for two weeks, waiting on Balawi to show up during the holidays. Everyone's kind of getting antsy and agitated.

It does seem like,

as the ops plan is is being formulated, that the CI security people, the GRS people on the base,

were also frustrated with the plan. And

one of the guards, who's an ex-SEAL, apparently emailed a friend on the 21st of December and kind of hinted that he had differences with the CIA leadership over something, but he's not clear about what it is.

You know, he said, you know, sometimes it's your job to say something. Sir, I don't think you should do that.
It's not a good idea. Labonte

sends, you know, a note to CIA management in Jordan. He says, look, there's three problems with this.
Too many people involved. We're moving too quickly.

We're giving up too much control by letting Balawi dictate events. And I think this is where you think, okay, well, there are tons of warnings, right?

Well, what we're talking about here is like emails to friends. What at the time, our instant messaging program was called same time, right?

And it was like informal or like you're sending an email back and forth to somebody. It's not official cable traffic.
And if it's not official cable traffic, it's not real in a sense. Yeah.

It's also freezing cold in eastern Afghanistan in December. They're trapped on this base.
They're living essentially in like glorified trailers. And so it's an awful Merry Christmas from Afghanistan.

So there with the CIA base waiting for its agent on the other side of the border in Pakistan is Balawi under his own kind of intense pressure.

And next time, as we come back, we'll see what he's been preparing for this meeting in the final episode of this story.

And just a reminder, of course, if you don't want to wait, if you want to hear it now, you can do so by joining the Arrest is Classified Club, the Declassified Club at arrestisclassified.com.

But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.