The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick Read Free Book Online Page A

carnage, fresh from amateur jihadi photographers in Tikrit or Ramadi, served up with a gleefully ghoulish commentary that became Abu Dujana’s trademark.
    “Welcome to the al-Hesbah café,” he wrote to open one Internet session. “Go to the menu and pick today’s dish:
    “Roasted Humvee with sauce of human remains.
    “Exploded tank by an IED [improvised explosive device] with no survivors.
    “Or a pastry made of Americans’ brains taken out with snipers’ bullets.”
    Thousands of Muslims sampled Abu Dujana’s offerings and paused to read his words. And each week the appetite for his articles grew larger still. Abu Dujana—whoever he was, wherever he was—was becoming a true celebrity.
    He had to be stopped.
    Inside the headquarters of the secretive National Security Agency in suburban Washington is a computer search engine unlike anyother in the world.Code-named Turbulence, it is a five-hundred-million-dollar-a-year network that continuously vacuums up terabytes of data from across the Internet and scours them for possible security threats. When specific targets are identified—a new Web site or an unknown militant group, for instance—it can burrow into a single computer on the other side of the world to steal files or drop off eavesdropping software. Agents on the ground can then follow up with portable surveillance gear so sensitive it can detect individual strokes on a computer keyboard from hundreds of feet away.
    The precise methods used for tracking a specific target overseas are a closely guarded secret. But what is known is that sometime in late 2008, such tools were used to hunt down a popular jihadist blogger who called himself Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Working backward through a maze of servers and trunk lines spanning continents, U.S. officials narrowed the search to Jordan, then to Amman, and finally to a single house in a working-class neighborhood called Jabal Nuzha.
    The man’s true identity came as a shock, most especially to Jordan’s Mukhabarat intelligence service: One of radical Islam’s rising stars was an obscure pediatrician living right under its noses.
    What happened next was up to the Mukhabarat. While the CIA and its foreign counterparts closely monitor jihadist Web sites and occasionally shut them down, more often they prefer to quietly study them for insights into how terrorist movements are evolving. The Mukhabarat would have to decide if the man who called Muslims to holy war as the fictitious Abu Dujana posed a flesh-and-blood threat to Jordan and beyond. Someone would have to go to school on Humam Khalil al-Balawi, and that person ultimately turned out to be a midlevel officer who understood the phenomenon of Internet jihad as well as anyone in the agency’s counterterrorism division. His name was Ali bin Zeid, buthe was known among his peers as Sharif Ali, an honorific that denoted noble birth. Bin Zeid was a direct descendant of Jordan’s first monarch, Abdullah I, and a cousin to the king.
    Just thirty-four, bin Zeid was already a ten-year veteran of the intelligence service, with a number of medals and commendations to his credit, including one from the CIA. Sensitive to perceptions that his royal blood accorded him privileges, he worked long hours and never mentioned his ties to the crown unless there was something to be gained for his entire unit. Once, during a training exercise in the desert, he pulled rank to arrange for a special lunch delivery to his campsite: Big Macs and fries for everyone in his company. But he was also serious and intense. His weapon of choice was a fat .44 Magnum pistol known as a Desert Eagle, which he hoped would even the odds in case he encountered a would-be assassin looking to make his mark by killing a son of the monarchy.
    The stocky, thick-chested bin Zeid was also more Western than most of his colleagues, having attended college in Boston and worked as an intern for Massachusetts’ junior U.S. senator, Democrat John Kerry. He