The Faithful Spy

by Alex Berenson

  The procedure took only a few seconds. He put his index finger on a digital reader and looked into a small digital camera. A few seconds later the agent’s computer beeped and she waved him on.

  “Welcome to the United States.”

  “Good to be here,” Khadri said.

  ON HIS FLIGHT to LAX the next morning, Khadri silently raged at himself. He should have been familiar with the new fingerprinting rules, which had been publicly announced. He couldn’t make mistakes like that. In their paranoia, Americans seemed to think that al Qaeda was an all-powerful killing machine. But Khadri knew the group’s weaknesses all too well.

  True, al Qaeda was in no danger of going broke. Sheikh bin Laden had squirreled away tens of millions of dollars around the world during the 1990s, and new cash still flowed in quietly. But money alone was not enough. Al Qaeda’s biggest problem was finding good operatives. Plenty of men wanted to die for the cause. But only a handful had gotten inside the United States before America clamped down on immigration from Muslim countries. Even fewer could be trusted for difficult missions. One bad decision, a moment of panic, could destroy a plan years in the making.

  A flight attendant rolled her cart up. “Coffee? Tea?”

  “Coffee. Two sugars and milk.” Naturally, Khadri did not drink or use drugs, but—like many devout Muslims—he had a sweet tooth and a serious coffee habit.

  He sipped his coffee and wondered how history would judge him. He fully expected that one day the world would know his name, his real name. Biographers and historians would examine his life. But if they were looking for a traumatic event, something they could “blame” for clues to his “crimes,” they would be disappointed, he thought.

  He had grown up in Birmingham, England, the oldest child and the only boy among six children. His father, Jalil, was an engineer who had emigrated from Pakistan, a sour man with a quick temper. His mother, Zaineb, had trained briefly to become a nurse’s aide but never worked. Jalil and Zaineb were deeply religious, and strict. Khadri had felt the lash of his father’s belt more than once as a child, and he had learned quickly not to disagree. He was a mostly solitary child; his father didn’t allow him to spend time outside school with unbelievers, and Jalil’s definition of “unbeliever” included most Muslims. So Khadri had escaped into his math and science textbooks, and the Koran. At the school library, where his father couldn’t see, he turned to philosophy, trying to understand power, looking for clues in Nietzsche and Machiavelli and Hobbes. Infidels all, but they showed him how strong men forced their will on the weak. One day he would prove his strength to the world, and his father.

  As the years passed, his hatred of Britain and the West grew fiercer. Unlike some al Qaeda soldiers, he could not point to a specific incident that had turned him against the kafirs and onto the path of righteousness. Sure, like everyone in England with tea-colored skin, he’d been called a raghead by yobs on the street. But he’d never been seriously threatened, or even spat on. No, he had simply grown sick of the moral corruption around him, drug taking and homosexuality and pleasure seeking at all costs. And the kafirs did not merely insist on polluting themselves. They wanted to force their ways on the rest of the world, while piously pretending to spread freedom.

  Yet Khadri’s religious fervor had limits. Yes, he believed in Allah, believed that Mohammed was the last and truest prophet. He prayed five times a day. He never polluted his body with alcohol or drugs. He hoped to see paradise when he died. But when his companions sang tales of black-eyed virgins who would pleasure them for eternity, Khadri turned away to hide his embarrassment. Paradise wasn’t an amusement park, and only fools were eager for their own deaths. Khadri did not try to build his faith by promising himself rapture. Jihad was an obligation, not a game. Paradise might await in the next world, but Islam needed to triumph here and now. As always, Mohammed had set a fine example, Khadri thought. He had been a commander, not just a prophet. His armies had swept Arabia, and though he was a wise and just ruler, in battle his ferocity knew no bounds. He had aimed for conquest, and had viewed martyrdom as a tool to that end, not an end in itself.

  Khadri made good use of the fanatics. Any man willing to die could be a dangerous warrior. But he did not fully trust them. They were irrational, and rational men like him were needed to win this war. America, Britain, and the rest of the West might be rotten, but they were still fierce enemies, none fiercer than the United States. Thousands of American agents dreamed of sending him and his men to Guantánamo or the execution chamber. They had tools and weapons that he could hardly imagine. So he needed to be perfect. Because he and al Qaeda spoke for a billion Muslims. For every Iraqi killed by an American soldier, every Palestinian torn apart by an Israeli missile. We speak for Islam, he thought. And on September 11 we spoke loud and clear. The attack that day had been genius. Using the enemy’s own weapons to destroy its biggest buildings. He did not mind that the targets were civilian office towers, the missiles passenger planes. Only by bringing the war to American soil could al Qaeda succeed. One day armies of Muslim soldiers would fight the crusuaders everywhere, as they already did in Iraq. Meanwhile, al Qaeda would fight with the weapons at hand, and if they happened to be jets like this one, so much the better.

  Khadri had only one regret about September 11. He had wanted to target the Capitol and the White House, not the Pentagon, but the sheikh had insisted on attacking the American military directly. Unfortunately, the Pentagon was too big to be seriously damaged, even by an airplane. Destroying the Capitol would have killed hundreds of congressmen and senators. The American government would have fallen into chaos.

  Nonetheless, the attacks had been a strategic triumph. In their wake America had sent its Christian crusaders into two Muslim countries. The whole world could see the battle between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the place of peace and the place of war. But September 11 was slipping from the world’s memory. Al Qaeda needed to remind the kafirs of its power. Khadri wanted to hit this fat rich country in the face a dozen times, until blood flowed out of her eyes and nose and mouth. Then he would hit her a hundred times more, until she pulled back her armies and begged for peace. He would show the Americans just as much mercy as they had offered the Japanese they vaporized in Hiroshima, the Vietnamese they burned up in the jungles. No more. No less.

  We must win, Khadri thought. And we will. For Allah is with us. He drank the last of his coffee. He felt refreshed, invigorated. The thought of attacking America always excited him.

  EXLEY SAT AT her desk, sifting through Wells’s file, looking for something new and knowing it wasn’t there. She rolled her head, trying to relax the tension that had been building in her since Heather Murray called the day before. The call had sent a jolt through the CIA or, more accurately, through the handful of officials to whom the name John Wells meant something. Vinny Duto, the chief of the Directorate of Operations, had immediately dispatched a couple of internal security officers to interview Heather and Kenny, but they hadn’t gotten much from either one.

  Exley looked again at the polygraph test and psychiatric interview Wells had taken when he’d joined a decade before. He had smoked pot but nothing harder, he’d said. He drank occasionally. He had never had a sexually transmitted disease. He had never had sex with a man, though he had been involved in a ménage à trois in college. Despite prodding from the examiner, Wells had declined to be more specific. Good choice, Exley thought. Stuff like that got all over Langley in a hurry, confidentiality agreement or no.

  More from the poly: Aside from the marijuana and two speeding tickets, Wells had never broken the law. He felt that dissent was an essential American right. He would quit before carrying out an order he believed immoral. He had never seen a psychiatrist. He rarely had nightmares. He believed in God but would not call himself Christian. While playing football at Dartmouth he had broken the leg of the Yale quarterback. He had not felt remorse. The hit was clean and violence was part of the game. About the only time Wells had
responded unusually was when he’d been asked whether he loved his wife. Yes, of course, he’d said, but the poly hadn’t agreed.

  The agency shrink had hit the obvious points in his evaluation. Wells had a high tolerance for risk. He was self-reflective but not overly emotional. He was very self-confident. He had no pedophilic or psychopathic tendencies, but he appeared capable of extreme violence. In sum, he was an excellent candidate for the Special Operations Group, the agency’s paramilitary arm, its most covert operatives.

  None of this was news to Exley. She looked at Wells’s picture and remembered when she’d first seen him. She had come back to Langley after a frustrating posting in Islamabad. She hadn’t recruited anyone important; despite her best efforts, the Pakistani intelligence officers had refused to take her seriously. If she’d whored herself to the generals who’d groped her at embassy parties she might have gotten somewhere, but she’d refused.

  After three long years, Exley had decided to come home, get married, have kids. She’d requested and received a transfer to Staff Ops. She always judged herself too harshly. She’d been disappointed with her time in Islamabad, but her bosses said she was a rising star; she’d recruited more agents in Pakistan than anyone since.

  Which showed how badly the CIA had ossified since the end of the Cold War, Exley thought. Despite its swashbuckling mystique, the agency had become merely another Washington bureaucracy. Like all bureaucrats, its senior officers found the real action at headquarters, not in the boring grunt work of actual spying. They happily brought Exley home, where she read cables from field officers who somehow missed the fact that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons under their noses.

  THEN SHAFER CONVINCED the Directorate of Operations that the agency needed someone to recruit inside the Taliban. He picked Wells, and Exley understood why the moment she saw him on a trip to the Farm, the agency’s training grounds at Camp Peary in tidewater Virginia. Wells looked swarthy and vaguely Arab. He was tall and strong, maybe six foot two and two hundred and ten pounds, but he didn’t hold himself like a soldier. Instead he had a sleepy-eyed confidence that seemed unshakable. In fact—and even now, a decade later, the memory brought a flush to her cheeks—her first impression when she met him was that he carried himself like a man who was a very good fuck. And knew it. Highly inappropriate, she knew. Totally inappropriate, especially for a professional and a happily married woman. But there it was.

  More to the point, Wells spoke Arabic, was learning Pashtun, and had studied the Koran. He eagerly agreed to a recon trip to Kabul and Kandahar. Exley would be his handler, although in truth she had little to do but hope Wells’s performance matched his pedigree.

  Wells disappeared to Afghanistan for six months, a month longer than he was supposed to, and returned to Langley without a single agent. Recruiting was impossible, he said. The Taliban wouldn’t accept outsiders. Exley was disappointed, but not surprised. Then Wells talked about bin Laden. The agency was monitoring him as a terrorism financier; Wells insisted he was more. Bin Laden was building training camps in Afghanistan and planned a jihad against the United States and Saudi Arabia, Wells said. But he was short on specifics. He hadn’t seen the camps. His information was hearsay. Exley remembered the moment vividly.

  “Everybody hates us,” she’d said. “What makes this guy different?”

  “I saw him once in Kabul,” Wells said. “There’s something in his eyes. We need to take him seriously.”

  “Something in his eyes?” Shafer didn’t hide his sarcasm. “You didn’t even get inside the camps, son. For all you know they’re roasting marshmallows and singing ‘Kumbaya’ in there.”

  Wells grunted as if he’d been hit. He’s never failed like this before, Exley thought. Her sympathy was limited. No one was right all the time, and the sooner Wells learned that lesson the better. Welcome to the real world. Wells stood and leaned over the conference table where she sat beside Shafer.

  “I’ll go back. I’ll get in.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Authorize it, sign the waivers. I’ll get in.”

  “Okay,” Shafer said. He had wanted Wells to say that all along, Exley realized later.

  WELLS DID GET in. He never said how and Exley never asked, since the answer no doubt included violations of agency regs and U.S. law. Langley didn’t know what to do with Wells; most field agents looked for informants at dinner parties. Wells was simply trying to prove himself to al Qaeda, while sending back what he could about the group’s structure and plans.

  In 1998, after months of silence, Wells reported that al Qaeda planned to attack U.S. interests—most likely an embassy—in East Africa. But he didn’t have specifics, and the agency could not correlate his warning. Without much interest, the CIA dutifully told the State Department about the report, and State dutifully filed it away. Two weeks later, suicide bombers blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than two hundred people died. The agency started taking bin Laden, and Wells, more seriously.

  Just before the millennium Wells helped disrupt a planned bombing of two hotels in Cairo on New Year’s Eve. The plot was in its final stages; the agency believed it would have succeeded if not for Wells. In his final contact with Exley, Wells said he was going to Chechnya. He had volunteered for the mission to reestablish his bona fides; after the Egyptian plot failed, a Qaeda lieutenant had wondered openly whether he was responsible. I have to prove myself to them every day, he had said; they don’t fully trust me, and I’m not sure they ever will. Exley could not even imagine the pressures he faced.

  Then silence. Wells’s connection to the agency was strictly one-way; Exley had no way to reach him. Still, after the millennial plot, Langley viewed him as an ace in the hole, the last fail-safe if everything else went wrong. Except on September 11 the ace turned into a joker. Or so Wells’s former fans believed, especially when he vanished after his cryptic note in the fall of 2001. Exley had the distinct impression that Vinny Duto wished that Wells were dead. Dead, he was a hero, an agent who’d made the ultimate sacrifice. Alive, he was a failure at best, a traitor at worst. Of course Duto was too smart to set Wells up as a scapegoat for his failure to prevent 9/11. But Duto would be out for blood if Wells ever turned up.

  Now, looking again at Wells’s file, Exley wondered if Duto might be right. She could not understand why Wells had come back to the United States without telling the agency. Without telling her. She thumbed through the poly.

  Q: Were you sorry you had broken his leg?

  A: It was a clean hit. Violence is part of the game.

  Q: So you weren’t sorry?

  A: Not at all.

  What if Wells had been doubled? What if he had decided that violence against the United States was part of the game? Exley shook her head. If Wells had wanted to stay hidden, he wouldn’t have contacted his ex-wife. Still, Exley wished he would report in. Soon. Before something blew up.

  JOSH GOLDSMITH DIDN’T want to be nervous, but he couldn’t help himself. This morning was Thursday. His bar mitzvah was in two days, and even before that he’d have to speak on Friday night. For what felt like the thousandth time he looked at the photocopied section of the Torah he was supposed to read, making sure he had it memorized.

  A knock on his door startled him. “Ready for school, sweetie?”

  He shook his head, annoyed. “I’m studying, Mom.”

  “You’ll miss breakfast.”

  “I just need a couple minutes.” His voice broke. God, he was pathetic. Would he ever get through puberty like a normal kid?

  “At least put your socks on—”

  “Okay, okay.” Like most Reform Jews, the Goldsmiths were not particularly religious. But Josh was a studious child, and he had worked hard for the ritual ceremony of his bar mitzvah. Still, he was nervous, both for the ceremony on Saturday morning and the party afterward. Most of the kids at school had turned down their invitations. Josh tried not to feel too bad about it. His real friends would be there anyway.
He looked at the poster of Shawn Green—a Jewish first baseman, once of his beloved Dodgers, now traded to Arizona—taped above his bed.

  “Think Blue,” Josh whispered to himself, the Dodgers’ motto, the giant letters visible in the hillside beyond the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. “Think Blue, Blue, Blue.” Think Blue. He reached up a fist and tapped Shawn Green. He knew his reading perfectly. He’d be fine.

  THE STEEL DRUMS shone dully under the van’s overhead light. Holding a handkerchief over his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow too much dust, Khadri stepped into the van’s cargo compartment. He lifted the rusted top of the drum by the van’s back doors and ran his fingers through the small off-white pellets that filled about three-quarters of the drum. The van held a dozen similar drums, about twenty-seven hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate in all. Khadri had already checked out the first bomb, which was even larger and hidden in a panel truck in a shed in Tulare, fifty miles north.

  Khadri smiled to himself. No one would ever mistake Aziz or Fakhr for brilliant, but building a good ANFO bomb didn’t require brilliance, just patience and steady hands. His men had both. As they had been taught in the camps, Aziz and Fakhr had wired the barrels with dynamite charges that would set off the initial explosion and arranged the nitrate barrels in a shaped charge to maximize the force of the blast. Khadri checked the wires again. Everything was in order. They just needed to pour in fuel oil, stir, and blow.

  ANFO was a bomber’s dream, Khadri thought. Governments could crack down on antiaircraft missiles and machine guns. But as long as farmers needed fertilizer and truckers had to drive, the ingredients for an ammonium nitrate–fuel oil bomb would be available everywhere. Even better, ANFO wasn’t volatile. After it was mixed, it could be driven hundreds of miles without much risk of accidental detonation. Which was convenient when your targets were inside a major city—say, Los Angeles. And ANFO was shockingly effective. A truckful of the stuff would take out an office building, as Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols had proved in Oklahoma City. During the 1970s, the U.S. military had even used it to simulate nuclear explosions.