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B
Welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
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A
And I'm David McCloskey.
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B
And this is the second in our four part series looking at the host bombing of 2009, a devastating event for the CIA in which someone who they trusted turned against them, launching a suicide bombing which proved absolutely deadly. And I guess the key question that we're going to be looking at in this episode and really through the series, David, isn't it, is can you ever trust an agent, a jihadist who you think you've turned, someone who had been ideologically committed to a cause but is now claiming to be on your side? Last time we looked really at this story of Bilawi, this man who'd been online as a blogger supporting Al Qaeda, had become a very prominent and famous blogger in the kind of ecosphere of Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters and who turned out to be a pretty mild mannered doctor living in Amman, Jordan. The CIA had passed on intelligence to Jordanian authorities. They'd picked him up, they'd interrogated him, they thought they'd broken him, they thought he'd basically confessed and they'd released him. And the question is, what now? Isn't it?
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A
Well, the GID is certainly not done with him because even though he's given them, you know, a host of information about the forum that he's posting on jihadists who are affiliated with the forum, Bilawi is not obviously in the clear, right? And Ali Bin Zayd, this case officer at GID, is still on the case. Bahlawi's phone is tapped. He's Followed reports from the interrogation are passed, it seems, to the CIA. And I think here in this period after the interrogation and the arrest, the deeper the GID looks into Balawi, the more concerning his case becomes. We talked in the last episode about how it kind of first blush, Balawi didn't seem to have any deep connections or any connections at all outside of the forum to radical Islamist groups. And at the end of that interrogation, Bilawi essentially says, hey, that online Persona is not me.
- [06:24]
B
I was playing at jihadist online.
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A
I'm live action role playing a character.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But the deeper GID looks, the more troubling this all becomes, because despite Valla's claims about opposing violence, it appears that at least twice he tried to join the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. The virulently jihadist part of it run by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who's a Jordanian terrorist who ran the Al Qaeda branch in Iraq for many years until his death as a backup plan. When that didn't work, Laliot canvassed friends and relatives to collect money for the insurgency and had raised just over $1,400. So again, not much before abandoning the effort. But here we have a couple glimpses of the Abu Dujana personality that he writes under. Stepping into the real world after Israel's invasion of Gaza in 2008, Bilawi had tried to volunteer as a Hamas medic to treat Palestinian wounded. Right. I mean, you could say, okay for fine, but again, it's a connection with Hamas that he tries to establish. While studying in Turkey, Blaoi had gone to medical school in Turkey. He had flirted with joining or interacted with a terrorist organization that had links to Al Qaeda. And here in Turkey, where Balawi met his future wife, Bethany, Balawi seems to have become much more conservative during that that courtship. Really. Bilawi had really never been religious before. He had memorized portions of the Quran. But as a child, again, he had regularly skip Friday prayers and apparently had on, on several occasions referred derisively to Jordan as, quote, that Islamic country. But Defne is, it seems, a true believer herself. She had translated these sort of hagiographies about Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The title of Osama bin Laden book was Osama bin Laden, the Che Guevara of the East. So obviously this very laudatory biography of bin Laden. The couple, Balawi and his wife, definitely they name their oldest daughter after. Her name is Layla. They name her after Layla Khaled, a Palestinian woman who hijacked a TWA airliner. In 1969 and served time in a British jail. And their younger daughter was named after a Swedish born Palestinian filmmaker who made a documentary about Layla Khaled. So you have these real world sort of facts that start to pile up after the initial round of interrogation that Ali Bin Zayd at GID is starting to log as part of Balawi's sort of case file.
- [09:10]
B
Yeah. Which all suggests that it's not simply just a Persona that he inhabits online while being the mild mannered doctor in the rest of the world. And I guess that's only emerging after his arrest and he's been released. I mean, he's back at work, but he's clearly troubled, I think it looks like, by what's happened. I mean, who wouldn't be? Having been arrested by the intelligence service and interrogated, but also perhaps by, you know, what he talked about, the humiliation and the, the impact of having confessed and having talked.
- [09:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, I guess you'd have to say after you're arrested, after you spend several days in a sensory deprivation tank and after you're treated, even though, you know, Blahey said that he wasn't beaten during his interaction with gid, I mean, you're psychologically tortured. You know, I think is fair to say he's obviously not in a good spot. His headspace is all messed up after this. Right. He's back at work. This is February of 2009. It's been a couple months since his arrest. He's back working at the refugee camp, but he's sold his car, which is kind of odd because it's how he gets to work. You know, typically he sells the car, he's losing weight, he's disappearing for hours at a time, seems very distracted. He's praying all the time, asking for God's guidance. And this was not normal prior to the arrest. You know, he's got the two little girls. When their noise becomes too much for him, he kind of runs sometimes. Joby Warwick writes in his book, you know, sometimes literally Bawi would run out of the house and go down to the neighborhood mosque and pray quietly in the prayer room.
- [10:51]
B
And we should say he is still in touch with Bin Zayd with the General Intelligence Directorate. That wasn't a just, we're going to interrogate you, you're going to confess, we're going to release you. There are now regular conversations where he's going to get picked up, you know, at prearranged spots. Zayd's going to kind of come along in his Land Rover, take him to some nice meals, it sounds like, to talk to him, but basically trying to work him as a source, as an agent.
- [11:18]
A
This begins, I think, a part of this story that I find to be sort of a fascinating decision because you could, I guess, say, look, we squeezed all of the intelligence possible out of this guy. We were interrogating him, and now we're just going to watch him to make sure that he doesn't rejoin the forum or he doesn't actually get in connection with any actual jihadists anywhere. You could just sort of watch him. If you're gid, this isn't the choice that the GID makes, right? So Ali Bin Zayd really starts to kind of court him in some ways, right? He takes him out to some of these nice meals. Once, apparently, bin Zayed met Bilawi and took him out to the. There's a. There's a Safeway grocery store in Amman. Bin Zayed took him there, did shopping, gave Balaoui several bags of groceries as gifts. And bin Zayed, I think in this couple month period after Balawi's arrest and release, he takes this kind of interesting tack in these conversations where he puffs up the GID and talks about all of these kind of impressive intelligence successes of the gid, about how the GID is, you know, entrapping wannabe jihadists on the way to Iraq. The GID had supplied the targeting information that led to Zarqawi's death in 2006. Kind of an interesting thing to be bragging about because of how lionized Zarqawi was by the Abu Dujana Persona. But there's this kind of, I think, attempt to, on the part of bin Zayd to sort of show Bilawi that he might have the opportunity to work with or for a really impressive organization. And the pitch by bin Zayn, I think, is essentially work for your country. And we might be able to put together an interesting sort of operation together. And at some point, bin Zaid floats the idea to Balawi that, you know, if. If Balawi can help GID track down other terrorists, he would be rewarded financially. There would be a payoff. Now, keep in mind, up to this point, the CIA has been receiving some of these reports, unclear exactly like how many of them. But the CIA is aware of Balawi at this point. The CIA hasn't met the guy. This is a Jordanian run operation at this point, where they're sort of sharing the product. Probably. You know, I think the financial motivation here probably bears some discussion because, you know, again, hindsight is 2020 here. But you got to wonder, I mean, this guy who's driving around and banged up Ford Escort, who's a refugee doctor, who made decisions throughout his life to not accrue material wealth, is all of a sudden put in a position where it seems like the sort of leverage or the benefit he might gain is money for working with the gid.
- [14:30]
B
It's also the Bin Zaid floating the idea that effectively help us for the sake of your country, for Jordan, for. For working with a great intelligence service and for money. I mean, you can see why that might work on a criminal, on someone who is not ideologically motivated. But I do struggle to think why they think it would work on someone who is clearly deeply emotionally in his interior life aligned with the jihadist cause. Now, you know, I get the exteriors of him is the kind of not very well off doctor, you know, who's got a family. But you also know he's got this other side to his personality, which is, after all why you're interested in him. And it does seem surprising to me that they thought it would be that easy to just leverage one side of his personality, if you like, and not the other. But I guess that's what they thought they'd done when they'd broken him to some extent. They thought they'd broken him down and kind of got him to kind of recognize one side of the personality and dispel the other side to some extent.
- [15:37]
A
So what happens is that in February, during one of these dinner chats, Balawi suggests that he might travel to the Fatah. Those are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan, this kind of strip of mountainous terrain in northwestern Pakistan that runs along the border with Afghanistan. It's the place we talked about in episode one, that the agency has been sort of pounding in its drone war against Al Qaeda. And this is where I think the potential value of Malawi starts to come into focus. Because he's got contacts in the fate through his Abu Djana Persona, and he has a credible cover story, right? He's Abu Dhujana. He's this sort of widely known jihadist online personality.
- [16:25]
B
It's not a cover story. He really is he, you know, or he is kind of Abu Dhujana, or at least one part of him has been. And he is someone who would have been well known in the jihadist world, you know, a kind of legend in his own way.
- [16:37]
A
And he's a doctor. So he has immediate value to Al Qaeda and this sort of band of associated militants and Taliban types who have congregated in the Fatah, who are always short on qualified doctors. Yeah. And Joby Warrick in his book Triple Agent, which again, I'll just recommend to listeners of this series because it goes so deep into all of the detail on this case. Joby Warrick says the agreement is essentially that Bilawi will work on spec, which means they'll give him a little bit of startup cash to get him there, get him started, but he'll get paid when he delivers. So if he delivers intelligence that allows the Jordanians or the agency to eventually take out members of Al Qaeda or these other militants, he'll get paid. And that's the arrangement that gets worked out between Bin Zayd and Bilawi. And the agreement is that Bilawi will get a few thousand dollars, again as startup cash. There won't be any spy gear or anything like that. They'll set up email accounts that they can communicate through because him having gear is going to be, if he's caught with that dead, and again, produce intel and get paid. And you can see from Bin Zade's perspective why this is appealing and makes some sense.
- [18:03]
B
Yeah, you can. Obviously, one of the problems is it's tempting to look at this story in hindsight of what he ends up doing. But at this point, you probably, if you're Bin Zade in the Jordanian, you think, well, we got. What have we got to lose?
- [18:14]
A
Yeah, he's expendable, isn't he?
- [18:16]
B
He's expendable. If he either gets, you know, rumbled as a spy, who cares? Even if he's not loyal. Well, what at this point have we lost? You know, I guess they think maybe we've got him. But I guess you don't need to be totally sure at this point.
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A
No, you don't. You know, we talked in the first episode about how the Jordanians are partners with the Americans, but they're also the sort of dependent partner. And in this case, I think this is exactly the sort of thing that the Jordanians would think about as being, and would recognize rightly as being extremely valuable to us.
- [18:53]
B
To the CIA.
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A
To the CIA.
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B
It's a good offer, isn't it? We've got a guy.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah. Now, obviously it's the kind of thing the Jordanians would want to collect on on their own because the Jordanian monarchy feels existentially threatened by groups like Al Qaeda. But as soon as you start thinking about Abu Dhujana, slash below, his connections in Pakistan and how those could potentially be turned into, you know, a secondary set of connections that get him Sort of closer and closer to targets of real intelligence value. It's going to be the case that the Jordanians are going to want to bring the CIA in because if you think about the way a case like this would would have to be run in Pakistan, all of the agent vetting would really be done via signals intelligence and imagery platforms, some of which are probably drone based, that the agency runs, not the Jordanians. It makes sense for Bin Zaid to bring this idea proposal both to his leadership and then once they approve to CIA. And so the case will be run jointly with the CIA and the logistics of Balawi's journey into Pakistan come together from there. I think this is the point in the story where you know, this case is sort of coming into the agency, right? Because again up to this point the agency has been aware of Bilawi but they're not running him in any way, shape or form at that point in time. Even though this is coming into Amman station, this case is going to immediately go into the Counter Terrorism Center. CTC case like this is going to come into ctc. It's not going to come into what at the time was the old any division, the near east division. This is going to be a terrorism case. It's cut and dry. No one's going to fight over it. But I do think that the fact that this becomes a, and will become a CTC kind of front office case is going to end up being really important for some of the kind of headquarters and field dynamics to come. So this will come into the Agency. It's a CT case really quickly. You know, Bilawi obviously needs a visa to go to Pakistan. So the CIA and GID draft a letter that invites him to this medical conference in Pakistan. There's maybe a little bit of debate about whether the Pakistanis should be informed about sending him into Pakistan. Of course we're not going to do that because there's concern that there'd be some penetration inside the Pakistani service that would turn the information over to militants and. But I would be killed. So the Pakistanis are uninformed. The comma plan is basically an email connection with Bin Zayed with some code word kind of language to allow them to talk to one another again. No, you know, Covcom or covert communications gear or anything sexy like that. And his kryptonym, which had been Panzer it seems inside the Jordanian system is changed to Wolf inside ctc. So the final step is purchasing airline tickets and Bilawi is given an open ended sort of, you know, return flight Those tickets are hand delivered by Bin Zayed along with the startup cash. And in mid March of 2009, Balawi announces to most of his family that he's decided to apply to study medicine in the us but he needs to go to Istanbul first for this qualifying examination. It does seem that his wife knew where he was actually headed. And he heads off as a, you know, joint CIA GID asset who's going to be run against Al Qaeda. And he heads to Peshawar, Pakistan with his ultimate destination being the Al Qaeda infested tribal areas of northwest Pakistan.
- [22:42]
B
So they're with Balawi on his way to the heartland of Al Qaeda on behalf of the Jordanians, think them and the CIA. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll see how he fares with Al Qaeda.
- [23:01]
A
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- [24:46]
B
Well, welcome back. We left with Huma Al Bilawi on his way to Pakistan on this mission to infiltrate, to get as close as he can to Al Qaeda on behalf of the Jordanians and behind them, the CIA. And at first he's going to go quiet, isn't he? Which maybe is not surprising when you've turned up in the Tribal areas, the wildlands of Pakistan, which were pretty much out of government control at this point. There's no word from him, which inevitably is going to make people, I think, in Jordan and at, you know, Langley, CIA headquarters, think, well, they probably caught him straight away and he's dead.
- [25:23]
A
So Bilawi, he's a physician. He's had essentially no training whatsoever in much of any trade craft, and he doesn't speak any Pashto.
- [25:34]
B
So.
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A
So this guy has got, you know, it's a bit of an uphill battle, I think, for him to sort of set up shop there. And, you know, Bin Zayd worries, I think, rightly, that Lowy has maybe just been killed by the Taliban outright. But then a few weeks later, Bin Zayed gets an email. The text that arrives is in code, but there's a few short phrases that they had agreed upon as a way of sort of verifying that it's actually Bilawi. And it translates as essentially, hey, it's Bilawi. I'm here. And Bilawi has been living in the South Waziristan market town of Wana, living off of the cash that Bin Zayd had given him. And Balawi has a list of jihadists he had met online as Abu Dujana, which, again, this is a glimpse of the value that he could provide to Bin Zayed and the gid, because he's got this roster of people. It's kind of like if all of your social media friends and not just people who were following you, but people you've interacted with, you've had conversations, you moderated conversations on these messaging boards, all these people are elsewhere. And you show up and you say, well, I'm that guy. It's an immediate way to get in.
- [26:49]
B
Because we know that MI6 and the CIA were trying to run sources up into the tribal areas and into Al Qaeda. And often they were trying to do that, and it was hard. The first thing people would be is like, well, who are you? But he can say, I'm Abu Dhujana.
- [27:04]
A
And he actually is. That's the thing. It's not made up. So he's got this list of people he can reach out to. And the. The ops plan that he's worked up with Bin Zayed is basically that he'll approach Taliban contacts. He'll use the kind of Abu Dhujana Persona as the in. But then, of course, the question is, well, why are you here and what value do you provide? Right? And the answer is going to be, well, I want to set up medical clinics where I can treat the sick and wounded of the Taliban. And this is extremely valuable to the Taliban and also great cover for wandering around the tribal areas. And the connectivity between Balaoi and Bin Zayd continues through April and May. Balaoi kind of is making these cryptic references to lower level Taliban contacts that he's making. And then in mid May, Balawi informs Bin Zayed that he had accepted an invitation to move in with members of the Pakistani Taliban, the largest insurgent group based in that province of South Waziristan. The Taliban apparently want his doctor skills in a training camp, which, again, this is all sort of going to plan. Balaoi says, you know, I'm probably going to be watched closely. And we should say the way that Balaoi is communicating is he. He's essentially going to Internet cafes. So if he's at a training camp run by the Taliban, he's going to be under a lot more scrutiny. And it makes sense that the communication tempo will drop significantly. Right. And you know, Bilawi basically says, you might not hear from me for a while. So May passes and then June again. This is 2009. Still no word from Bilawi. And what's happening and what been able to sort of reconstruct about Bilawi in that period is that he's been invited to meet with a warlord named Baitullah Massoud, who's one of the most powerful warlords in the tribal areas and one of these guys inside the Pakistani Taliban who's got these Al Qaeda sort of connections. Now, Beytullah is basically a gangster, but he, like so many of these militants, is extremely attracted to Bilawi because Bahlawi is a physician and Baitala Massoud is a diabetic who's not well, who's got leg problems, and he wants a doctor around. So Balawi gets embedded into this kind of social system around Beitullah Massoud, where he's actually dining with Massoud. But this is the point where I think Balawi basically comes clean and says, I have contacts with Jordanian intelligence because they trust me, but I'm actually like you. I got arrested, interrogated and tortured by them. They think that they've turned me so that I'll work against you, but I'm actually not right. So there's, there's a set of conversations he has where he introduces this connection that he's got to Ali Bin Zayd and Giddy.
- [30:15]
B
And of course, we don't know, you know, for obvious reasons exactly the circumstances or what led him to do that. I mean, whether he intended to do it all along. I think it's plausible, isn't it, that all along he thought my loyalties are with these Jihadist groups, not with Gid. Or whether it was when he was out there, he suddenly changed his mind. I mean, we don't know. I suppose it's the truth. But it's interesting to even speculate as to whether he ever really intended on. On being loyal to Gid and to the Jordanians.
- [30:46]
A
It's interesting, you know, b' Lauey's character and personality because in Joby Warwick's book on this, he kind of paints this picture of Bilaoi as almost this blank slate that others are able to kind of write their, you know, their own script over. So he's with Bin Zaid and Gid and he's this reformed former jihadist sympathizer who's now trying to make good and work for the Jordanian monarchy. But then as soon as he's with the Al Qaeda folks and Massoud, well, that identity is sort of wiped and he's Abu Dhujana again. But he's in the real world, you know, he's kind of this blank slate in some ways, who seems, it does seem like there was this core of sort of radical ideology that had defined him for much of his life and that he was deeply interested in. There's this push and pull, which is why I think it's so hard to get at exactly what he's thinking at this point in time.
- [31:52]
B
And it's interesting, isn't it, because he is coming clean. He is telling them that he's got this link to Jordanian intelligence. Some of you know, Betella Massoud, this big Pakistani Taliban leaders entourage clearly don't trust him though. And they behead people they beheaded. I think the Polish geologist and you know, they, they kill spies out there, don't they? And I mean, if they have any suspicion that his loyalties are still with the Jordanians, they're going to kill him. You could imagine for him, the stresses at this point are pretty intense. And you've got drones flying overhead, you've got all these predators which are flying over these kind of federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan and striking targets, I think quite near him at various points. I mean, you can see why he's not sleeping well.
- [32:33]
A
There's kind of this low buzzing noise that the predators make. The Taliban refer to them as bees because they make that kind of low whine, buzzing sound. And apparently the sound is so constant that Bilawi has trouble sleeping and Indeed, that June, there is a real uptick in the number of predator strikes in Waziristan. And there are a couple in the village where Bilawi and Masood had been, had been living. And so you kind of, you get this feel in this period that he's probably thinking, I might get ritualistically executed by my hosts or I might be killed in an American drone strike. This is a pretty rough wake up call from his life in Jordan, right, Because he's, he's living with this guy who's personally conducted beheadings, who's got a $5 million bounty on his, on his head. And you kind of get this feel of like the, the sort of court of Beethullah Massoud is like Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, where you've got all these like unsavory, freakish characters around. And I think we've been talking about the trust in Balawi as trust from the standpoint of the Jordanian GID and the CIA. But here, Beitullah Massoud and the Pakistani Taliban guys, they're asking the same questions. Can we really trust this guy?
- [33:57]
B
Yeah. Can you trust a guy who, you know, has been in contact with Jordanian intelligence? Now this is the bit that is really fascinating, isn't it, is that they are actually going to come up with their own plan to test him, to test whether he really is who he says he is and whether he really does have a link which can stretch through Jordanian Intelligence all the way to the CIA. And I mean, it is a kind of wild plan, isn't it? Because the idea is that he's going to use his contacts to give the details of where Betullah Massoud might be in order for the CIA to order a missile attack on Massoud. But of course, the target wouldn't be real and he wouldn't be there. I mean, it's a kind of wild, interesting plan to put him to the test, which shows they only half trusted him, if that.
- [34:49]
A
Here's my caveat on this story. I don't think that it ever happened. So it's again, Joby Warwick references the story in his book and says basically, Beitullah Massoud's idea to test this linkage between Balawi and Gid and eventually CIA was to send word that Beytullah himself would be traveling in a certain district at a certain time in a certain car. All the details about the car and the route would match the description given to the CIA by Bilawi. There would be a drone strike called in and The Taliban lore is that this actually happens and that a driver, this sort of hapless driver, who I guess later Beethola says consented to be sacrificed in this.
- [35:34]
B
Yeah, which seems pretty.
- [35:35]
A
Would be killed instead of Massoud, but it would allow the, the Taliban would allow Massoud to test, you know, Balawi's connections. Right. If he's actually able to, to talk to Western intelligence or to Jordanian intelligence. And Joby Warwick is clear about this in his book. This was never reported in the press at the time. And, and it has never been confirmed by the CIA. And I've got to tell you, I think it's made up, made up by.
- [36:01]
B
The Pakistani Taliban to show how smart they are, basically.
- [36:04]
A
To show how smart they are and to explain how they vetted Balawi in the sexiest possible way. Point being, at some point that summer, Bilawi convinces his hosts they still have some suspicions, but that he's working for them. Now, on the 5th of August, Beytallah is killed in a drone strike while he sleeps on the roof of his father in law's compound. This is not done on the basis of Bilawi's intel, but importantly, his sort of benefactor, Bilawi's benefactor is dead on 5 August. Right now, simultaneously, CIA Director Leon Panetta, who is Obama's CIA director and who is a very earthy sort of walnut farmer from Northern California, he's an experienced Washington hand. Experienced Washington hand. He'd been Bill Clinton's chief staff, I believe, and was a real bureaucratic knife fighter. Now Panetta goes, that summer 2009, he goes to President Obama and basically he wants more resources for the drone program and he wants to ramp up even more this sort of air war against Al Qaeda. Now let's go back to what's going on in Jordan because Balawi has had this extremely tense summer where he is living under the buzz of drones, sensing that the other, you know, denizens of Jabba's palace out there are sharpening their knives for him. But he's been quiet all summer. Right. Ali bin Zayd has, has no email from him. There's nothing from other sources because remember, the CIA isn't on the case. So at this point, there's a whole host of other SIGINT gathering capabilities and imagery where you'd, you'd be thinking, well, is there anything to prove that this guy is actually still alive? And there's, there's nothing until August. But then in late August of 2009, Belawi resurfaces and he sends an email to Ali bin Zayd saying he has a gift for him. And this gift is a few seconds of very low quality video that shows a small gathering of men in traditional Pashtun dress. They're talking in this kind of dimly lit room. Balaoui's in the foreground of the video. Seated beside him is this sort of guy with a thick dark beard. He's in probably his early 40s. This guy is doing most of the talking. And the analysts in the Counterterrorism center recognize this guy with the dark beard, but no one has seen him in eight years. And his name is Atiya Abdelrahman. And he is one of the closest associates of Osama bin Laden, who is known to be alive.
- [39:00]
B
That is a big deal because this is a guy who I think had escaped with bin Laden, you know, in this famous escape after 9 11, and is known to be close to bin Laden. The leadership are kind of, you know, strategic thinker. So that video must just have, you know, set Langley on fire in terms of how significant it is, because it's suggesting you've got all the Jordanians have got an agent who is right by one of Al Qaeda's top people.
- [39:28]
A
Yeah. And, you know, the CIA runs checks on the video, of course, to determine if it's real. And yes, it's real. The video is briefed. At the time, there were, I think they were meeting three times weekly. There were these afternoon CT meetings, counterterrorism meetings on the seventh floor in the director's conference room. And I remember anytime you'd be up there, even just tangentially going to some other office, there were always these, you know, gaggles of people outside of the director's conference room up on the seventh floor waiting for that afternoon CT meeting. And this is the point in our story where, you know, we sort of come back to this idea of don't fall in love with your agent. Because here we have a guy who in a very short period of time seems to have developed real deal access inside the upper echelons of Al Qaeda. And that is meeting an insatiable hunger on the part of the Obama White House and the seventh floor, the executive floor at the CIA for something, some lead to help get inside the senior leadership of Al Qaeda. And from a Jordanian standpoint, it's kind of the same dynamic where obviously this is important intelligence in its own right. But Ali bin Zayed writes to Bilawi in one of his emails from Amman. He says, you have lifted our heads. You have lifted our heads in front of the Americans. And I think it shows some of the dynamics at play here from Ali Bin Zayd's perspective, which is this is the kind of case, if you're a 34 year old GID case officer that could make your career. This is the kind of thing, if it works, yeah. The service will be talking about this for decades, for years.
- [41:25]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:26]
A
And you'll be the one who had the idea and who ran this guy and worked with the Americans to get it done and oh, by the way, demonstrated the services extreme value to the CIA.
- [41:38]
B
I mean, the video is such an interesting move to supply that video. I mean, it does raise some questions for me about how he could have convinced people that he filmed it covertly or overtly and then been able to, you know, why would you be filming at something with Al Qaeda leaders? I mean, I guess the video is grainy and it looks like, you know, but it's still, I don't know, maybe I'm all hindsight, but I still feel to me that the ability to produce because it's the video which is so powerful, but also that's the key bit of evidence which would make me go, hang on, I don't know. But you know, he's going to start producing more intelligence, isn't he? The flow is going to begin. The video establishes the credibility. Then he starts sending back more and more information about what's going on around him. A kind of steady flow.
- [42:22]
A
In most like really big cases, there would be a push and a pull between the case officers, the people who are trying to run the asset, and the counterintelligence people. There would be like CI rigorous that would be applied to a case where you'd have someone in the case officers typically hate this even though they recognize the value of the discipline in general. They hate the CI people because the CI people come in and crap on cases.
- [42:48]
B
Yeah, counterintelligence people going, are you sure? Are you not being played? That's their job.
- [42:52]
A
Here's 10 reasons why this might be total bunk. Why he might be manipulating us, why he might be making stuff up, why he might be a double. All this kind of stuff at this period.
- [43:04]
I think it's safe to say that most big CT cases were not undergoing CI reviews.
- [43:11]
B
And it is interesting, it's worth saying this. That kind of CI counterintelligence review is the kind of thing you do in a Cold War case. It's the kind of thing we talked about with Oleg Gordievsky or something like that. Is he being dangled in front of us, when in fact he's still working for the kgb. It's that kind of questioning you go through and which they'd learned in the Cold War to do with cases against the Soviet Union or its allies. But now, I guess in the CT counterterrorism world, it's different. I mean, it always felt like when you talk to people from this world, it was faster, slightly dirtier, slightly looser. The checking was less. You didn't think that these groups like Al Qaeda could do something like, you know, dangle and run double agents. And so that just feels like the kind of discipline of counterintelligence hadn't yet been transferred into the counterterrorism world because it just. It's too fast as well. You're kind of churning through agents and intelligence at a much different rate than the kind of slow production of cases and careful kind of Cold War espionage.
- [44:11]
A
Yeah. I think the CTC management perspective was these are the kind of cases where if we slow them down and undergo, you know, a full CI review, there won't be any cases, there won't be any intel, and people are going to die. Right. Because we won't stop plots like that was. I think that was the logic. But we should say even though there wasn't like a formal CI review done on the case, there was asset validation. That was the check. Yeah. And, you know, some of that is Bilawi, because he's in this medical role when there are drone strikes, he's oftentimes called to treat victims. And so he gives very accurate damage assessments back to Bin Zaid of what he saw when these drone strikes happen. And the CIA can verify those damage assessments with their own drone imagery. Right. Because after the strike would happen, there'd be more predators that are. That are watching. And so his reporting is spot on. He is also, as he's communicating to Bin Zaid, you know, he's doing this from Internet cafes and things like that. The Agency can see that he's co located or close to targets of interest. And that, I think, in the minds of the agency, the Jordanians suggests that, okay, he's, you know, he's actually with the people he says he's with. It's not like there's no validation done. Apparently also Balawi's reports help the Agency do some targeting. And Joby Warwick, in his book cite sources claiming that maybe five Taliban soldiers were killed as a result of Malawi's accounts back. So it's not that there's.
- [45:51]
B
There is validation. There's validation, yeah. Going on so you can see why that is going to impress the Jordanians and I guess the Americans as well, who are getting deeper and deeper involved in this case or getting more and more interested in it. Although kind of still one step remote at this point.
- [46:08]
A
Through that summer of 2009, it's, it's Ali Bin Zayd coordinating with Balawi, but as we said, there's an Amman station case officer who is involved as well. Again, it's a joint case and this guy's name is Darren Labonte. I think it's worth kind of briefly setting him up because he's going to be another key personality in the Bilawi case. Darren Labonte is a former Army Ranger and CIA paramilitary officer who has already done multiple times tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is remarkably impressive and I've spoken to a number of people who knew him very well inside and he was an absolutely exceptional case officer. Extremely patriotic. He had been in the army before 2001. After 9 11, he rejoins the Army. Then he becomes a SWAT team officer in Chicago. He joins the U.S. marshals Service and he applies simultaneously to join the FBI and the CIA, ends up at the FBI for a bit, but then in 2006 joins the CIA and I think Labonte is teamed up with Ben Zaid to run this case. You know, I'll just say again, I mean, this is the sort of human face of an incredible tragedy. We'll say more about him I think later, but just kind of set up where this case is right now. You've got Labonte paired with Bin Zayt and Amon talking to Balawi, who is in Pakistan. And in November, which is again roughly a year after Balawi's initial arrest and recruitment, Balaoi is going to send another really interesting message into this team.
- [47:50]
B
The video obviously kind of, you know, really woke people up to his potential port. This one is almost, you know, more amazing because Balawi, the doctor is going to say he's got a patient and his new patient is Ayman al Zawahiri. That is the number two in Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's deputy. I mean, that is staggering because I mean, we should just briefly say, you know, he is a very important figure in jihadist circles. I mean, many people would say Zawafiri was actually the brains behind Al Qaeda. You know, he's very experienced.
- [48:24]
A
It turned out to not be true though.
- [48:26]
B
That was the assumption though, wasn't it? That kind of bin Laden was the front man, the rich Saudi. But actually Zawahiri was the kind of Egyptian brains. The doctor who was older and had been kind of schooled in jihadism right through the 80s and had been as elusive as bin Laden, so, you know, was very much at the top of the list. And here you've got Balawi claiming that he's in contact with him, that he's treating him.
- [48:50]
A
No, this, it's hard to overstate how big of a deal that that is inside, inside the CIA. And importantly, in that email where Balawi says, I'll be treating this guy, you know, he's going to be my patient, Balawi supplies a summary of Zawahiri's physical condition and his various maladies that perfectly matches records the CIA had obtained years earlier from the Egyptians. So again, in, in this vetting process. Yeah, you think, okay, that's interesting. And this, this, this feels like it's real because how would, how would this guy know this unless you know?
- [49:31]
B
Yeah, on one level it checks out.
- [49:33]
A
On one level it checks out. And Bilawi says there's gonna be a follow up appointment in a few weeks. And, and this is where the case. I think it takes a really fascinating turn because I think it's fair to say that once, once Balawi reports in that he is treating Zawahiri, I think you could make the argument that this case becomes the most important.
- [50:00]
Case inside the Central Intelligence Agency. It's, it's, obviously it's run as a restricted handling or RH case out of CTC, but this is the most important thing that the CIA has going in the fall of 2009 once we get the Zawahiri information. If you're Leon Panetta, this is exactly the kind of interesting, juicy morsel that you'd want to bring to Obama. And Panetta says, look, if CIA can meet Bilawi, we might be able to, you know, of course vet him, but also train him for a role and give him appropriate tech so that he can communicate with us and so that we can get geo coordinates for where Zawahiri is. And the reason I mention this case being brief to Obama is because usually again, outside of maybe a covert action setting, when you're just talking about the gathering of foreign intelligence, it's pretty abnormal to brief the President before an asset meeting.
- [51:11]
B
You tell him what you get out of the asset meeting.
- [51:13]
A
It's not necessarily the wrong move, but again, what it does is it creates expectation, incredible expectations for what it'll produce. And I think as we'll see as we keep going, those expectations are going to filter down through the bureaucracy in a way that is going to impede the decision making.
- [51:34]
B
And so this is really remarkable. I mean, it's worth saying the last time they'd had any kind of lead on Zawahiri was 2006, when the CIA had bombed an Al Qaeda gathering that he was supposed to attend. But apparently, you know, he hadn't been there. He'd sent his aides instead. You know, there'd been not really any kind of verified sightings of him for years. Now it looks like the CIA, their Jordanian ally, have a lead who could potentially lead them to Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's number two himself. I mean, maybe even, who knows, to bin Laden. It's a tantalizing opportunity, isn't it? But as we'll see, it's going to lead to disaster.
- [52:14]
A
But of course, Gordon, for those who don't want to wait, go and join the declassified club@the restisclassified.com where you can get early access to all of our series, our bonus club episodes. And we would strongly encourage everyone to get tickets for our first ever Rest Is Classified live show, which is going to take place on 31 January at the South bank center in London. All of the information on on tickets you can get in the episode description box. We'll see you next time.
- [52:50]
B
See you next time.
- [52:58]
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