Free The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick

and made the room stuffy. Bin Zeid turned away from the screen and again picked up Balawi’s paper file. He began to read.
    Humam al-Balawi had talked, eventually.
    On his third day in the Mukhabarat’s vise, and in a handful of secret meetings afterward, the physician gave up names of figures inside al-Hesbah and other jihadist Web sites. He told what he knew about networks of jihadist bloggers and their funding. Hespoke so openly that the chains and cuffs came off, and the sessions became freewheeling conversations. Afterward he would sit quietly, face flushed, head cradled in his hands, awash in unspoken emotion.
    Balawi swore to his interrogators that in his heart of hearts, he opposed terrorism in all its forms. It was a claim that seemed wildly at odds with his posts lauding such notorious butchers as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
    “It is true that I like to express my feelings in my writing,” he said at one point. “But I’m against violence, including military action. Our religion forbids terrorism.” Balawi surveyed the skeptical faces around him.
It’s not who I am
, he protested. The blogs, the fake persona, the cries for blood—none of it was real.
    It’s just a hobby
, he said.
    After his release the Mukhabarat’s men fanned out to try to corroborate his information. They also deepened their scrutiny of Balawi himself, tapping his phones, trailing his movements, and reaching outside Jordan for evidence of ties to terrorist groups. The agency placed Captain Ali bin Zeid in charge of Balawi’s file and passed the essentials to the CIA, which shared space with the Jordanians in a joint counterterrorism center in a building on the outskirts of Amman. The American intelligence agency would want to check the names Balawi provided against its own database.
    The more they probed, the murkier and more dangerous Balawi’s secret life appeared. Despite his claims about opposing violence, he had sought at least twice to join the Zarqawi-led Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the officers discovered. Why he had ultimately failed to do so was unclear. Perhaps his courage had flagged, or he had felt guilty about orphaning his children; possibly he had been forced to admit to himself that he was a poor candidate for guerrilla warfare, lacking in both physical strength and military training. As a backup plan, he canvassed friends and relatives to collect money for the insurgency and raised just over fourteen hundred dollars before abandoning the effort. After Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2008, he had tried to volunteer as a Hamas medic to treat Palestinian wounded.
    Balawi had also had a flirtation, and possibly more, with aknown terrorist organization in Turkey, it was learned. While living in Istanbul as a student, he had attended meetings of the Islami Büyükdoğu Akincilar-Cephesi, or Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front, a group that claims kinship with al-Qaeda and advocates the overthrow of secular governments in the Middle East, from Ankara to Amman to Cairo. Turkish police have credited the IBDA-C with several spectacular terrorist attacks, including bombings of two synagogues in Istanbul in 2003 that killed twenty-four people.
    Balawi’s interest in the group was something he apparently shared with the woman he eventually married, Turkish sources revealed. Humam and Defne Bayrak were first introduced in 2001 in an Internet chat room for young Muslims. After the two began dating, they connected with other couples at social events that were essentially recruitment sessions for the Raiders’ Front: small-group lectures, fund-raisers to support Palestinian militants.
    Defne, tall and lithe with a doll’s porcelain complexion, had admired Humam’s intelligence but really fell for his conservative politics, according to her own account. She had been living at her parents’ house in Istanbul, working as a journalist and brushing up on her Arabic-language studies, when the Jordanian medical student burst into her life.