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

19:34Gordon: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.

20:13David:And I think it explains some of her drive and her ambition. 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 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.

20:36Gordon: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. um then in 2005 she takes a job as the uh cia's counterterrorism center essentially liaison officer in london which which i get you know makes sense because of her ct focus london's i guess it's a nice place gordon you know but uh but the reality of cia promotions is like you you really can't get your CIS promotion, CIS Senior Intelligence Service, without time overseas.

21:32Gordon:And so London is kind of a way to start doing that for her.

21:36David:Yeah. And I guess this is a bit where it's tricky for me because I should say I knew her. So I knew her when she was in London. 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 knew her a bit, but I didn't know what she did. I had no idea. And then I was at the US embassies. The American ambassador has a big 4th of July party. And I bump into her at the kind of 4th of July party.

22:07David:And I say, oh, 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 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 she could see my eyes widen when I realised 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, you know what that means, don't you?

22:38David: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, or maybe around that time, and talking to her about it and realizing as well she knew a lot about Afghanistan. I mean, 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 I spoke to her because it was a very kind of strange place.

23:19David: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 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 sense from her, she felt she'd had a very comfortable life in London for four years, including with her family. And she had this, as we talked about, this overriding sense of mission.

23:57David:And going to Afghanistan was something I think she felt she had to do, both career-wise, but also I think personally, 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 and Afghanistan. I think in her mind, it very much felt like it would be a year, I think that was the posting, a year in Afghanistan, and then back to Virginia and back to normal life, having done the frontline position. So I can recall that conversation where she basically said, yeah, she's leaving London and doing that short posting at 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.

24:36Yeah.

24:37Gordon: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 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 as harder because those are not accompanied posts in Baghdad or Kabul.

25:19Gordon:And so, you know, she's got at this point three kids. And so being away for three years with like R &R stints in between is pretty rough. But if you could do a one year sprint.

25:31David:Yeah.

25:32Gordon: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.

26:22Gordon:And so the counterterrorism center kind of front office, it has a tremendous amount of influence over who becomes the base chief in Kost. and matthews i mean despite all of her depth on 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 bases. So there is some dissension, it seems, inside the agency over her as the pick for base chief.

27:22Gordon:And I think this is one of the harder parts of 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 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 among some quarters kind of bleeds toward sexism.

28:05David:Women can't do this job and why do I put this woman to this job? But I agree, there are legitimate questions. Yeah.

28:11Gordon: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 a base in eastern Afghanistan.

28:23David: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...

28:37Gordon: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. Ten years earlier, the same course had been 21 weeks long and it had extensive instruction on bombs and explosives.

29:06David:Which is maybe a reflection of how many people you've got going through. Totally. Yeah, exactly. Now, post 9-11, you've got so many people going to Iraq and Afghanistan, you can't afford to put them on long, long courses 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 it. They say it's a paramilitary environment rather than, if you like, a regular intelligence environment.

29:36David: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.

29:45Gordon: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 Thirty. And I have to say, as I think many 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.

30:24David:No, in fact, interesting enough, I actually didn't watch Zero Dark Thirty for many years after it came out because someone warned me about that depiction. I just thought, I don't want to see it. But, you know, I've watched it since and we 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.

31:03David: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 buildup goes to that all-important meeting.

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34:03Available right now.

34:11David:Okay, welcome back. We've been looking at Balaoui, 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.

34:30Gordon:Well, and Ali Benzaid, the Jordanian case officer, still back in Amman, is looking at this incredible reporting that's coming in from Balaoui, hinting that he might be able to actually get into the same room as Zawahiri and lead GID and the Americans to this incredible, incredible target. Benzade says he wants to take things up a notch and he wants to meet with Balaoui and he wants to arrange the location for that meeting. And of course, as we've been talking, Benzade says, let's meet in coast at the American base. Now, Balaoui, again, in these emails, agrees in concept to a meeting, but immediately begins to throw out conditions.

35:22Gordon: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. Balaoui 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 Balaoui, this feels a lot like he's after the Jordanian. He's after Ali Benzaid. He wants to lure him into Pakistan.

36:02Gordon:Now, Bin Zaid pushes back because, yeah, he's a good case officer. He doesn't want to have a meeting under Balaoui'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 Zaid pushes back, but Balaoui is insistent on Maransha. And Balaoui says, you know, I'm the one who's taken all the risks. He worries about Afghan spies on the U.S. base. He says, look, you know, if any of them are informants and they rat on me, I will be killed. And Bin Zaid 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.

36:51Gordon: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 Bin Zeta and Labonte, I think in some moments do seem to harbor doubt about Balaoui. 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 paid. Again, 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.

37:33Gordon:And Bin Zaid 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 Ben Zaid who resent him. Yeah. He's a member of the whole family. He's the rising star. Right. 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.

38:24Gordon: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 Benzade. You can see there's kind of this complex swirl of stuff that's probably going on inside GID as well. And initially, Ali Benzade's superiors say, look, you cannot go to Afghanistan and have this meeting. It's too dangerous. We don't want, I mean, you can imagine for the kingdom, a Jordanian royal being kidnapped by Al Qaeda. I mean, it's an absolute disaster. But Ali Benzade, it seems, and again, in Joby Warwick's account of this, it seems like he does play a bit of the kind of American trump card here and says, well, if you don't let me go, I'll just go with the Americans.

39:17Gordon: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 Benzade 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 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.

39:53Gordon: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. Yeah, that she was uncomfortable with it and had some doubts about the asset he was going to meet. In the Warwick account of this, at one point, when they're talking about him going, his wife, Rachel, says he could turn out to be a suicide bomber. As we said before, Or the Labontes and the Bin Zades are friends. They're social friends. And apparently right before Darren Labonte and Ali Bin Zade are headed to Afghanistan, the couples gather to have kind of last farewell coffee at the Labonte's apartment in Amman.

40:38Gordon: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 have coffee out on the balcony and then 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.

41:29Gordon:And, you know, I find this kind of 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, 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 and 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.

42:10Gordon:But there's ideological types that don't switch sides. You know, they're true believers. And Balaoui 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 GED who'd been reading the traffic on the case, all the back and forth, the emails, the reports that Benzade had been writing up. His second concern was he's like, okay, Balaoui 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.

42:51Gordon:Yeah, all valid concerns. Right, all valid concerns. Now, here's the problem. They're theoretical concerns at this point.

42:58David:How do you prove it? Yeah, how do you be sure? How do you balance 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 suspicional possibility versus the potential payoff of getting him right, isn't it? That's the problem.

43:15Gordon:This is the final point that the GID officer raises, and I think it's a fascinating one. He says, you know, maybe Ali Benzadeh is not the right officer for this case. And here's the thing. How do you interpret that? You could interpret that as Ali Benzadeh has fallen in love with this agent. Meaning he's overinvested in it. He's overinvested. Yeah, not actually romantically enough, 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 Benzade.

43:52David:This young royal guy.

43:53Gordon:Yeah, it's this guy with royal blood who's kind of, 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 praise for it, right?

44:07David:So you can, yeah, you can see that it's hard to interpret, isn't it?

44:10Gordon:Yeah. And you could interpret that either way. But at this point, you got to be thinking 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? Or are you going to be the one who said, let's not meet with the guy who might lead us to Zawahiri and bin Laden.

44:31David:No. And it's worth saying, isn't it, that 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. 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'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.

45:07Gordon: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 rightly sees as the administration's number one priority, which is the war against Al-Qaeda.

45:34David:and then to bring it back to Jennifer Matthews and hosts, 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.

45:54Gordon: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 do we transport Balaoui to coast. The timing is really, really important. I mean, they thought they'd have maybe nine hours with Balaoui 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?

46:37Gordon:Now the cover, what's his explanation to his hosts right in Pakistan? And the idea is that as Zawahiri's doctor, Balaoui 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 Zoharie's bad circulation and some other medicine for his diabetes. And how do you manage confidentiality on the base? The base is a big base. There are local Afghan guards. There's obviously the US military. And he's an agent. You've got to protect his identity. And you've got to protect, yeah, his identity.

47:20Gordon:It's obviously something in the email traffic with Bin Zaid that, you know, Balaoui 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 Balaoui provides with his confidentiality, right? 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 Balaoui and to benefit from a 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.

48:18Gordon: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 a CIA, 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 them. 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.

49:10David: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?

49:34Gordon: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, 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-thread meeting. And that would call for certainly a security check outside of the base and for a smaller number of people.

50:15Yeah. And the problem is here, more and more people are going to get added to

50:19David: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 a barge. And I think Darren LeBond, he 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.

50:43Gordon:And the sort of testimonies in Joby Warwick's book suggest that there were rehearsals for the meeting. And it makes sense that you would rehearse pieces of this because this is a tightly choreographed session with Balaoui. You might only get to see him once. but part of that was rehearsing kind of the arrival it seems and large number of people who'd be standing outside this building um to to greet him darren labonte i guess at one point called it a gaggle and a clown show you know he and ali bin zaid have been sitting at this point in afghanistan for two weeks waiting on balawi to show up during the holidays everyone's kind of get Nancy and agitated.

51:27Gordon:It does seem like as the ops plan is being formulated, that the CIA 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. He said, 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 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.

52:10Gordon:We're giving up too much control by letting Balaoui dictate events. And I think this is where you think, okay, well, there's 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.

52:39David:Yeah.

52:39Gordon:It's also freezing cold in Eastern Afghanistan in December. They're trapped on this base. They're living essentially in glorified trailers. And so it's an awful Merry Christmas from Afghanistan.

52:55David: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 the rest is classified.com but otherwise we'll see you next time we'll see you next time