Free The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick Page A

Three months later, they were making wedding plans.
    “I liked his personality, his piousness, his strict following of the religion,” she said.
    During their courtship the couple began to change. Neither had ever been considered devout in a traditional sense. Defne wore a head scarf in public, but so do a majority of Turkey’s adult women. Humam had memorized large portions of the Koran as a child but regularly skipped Friday prayers at the mosque and referred derisively to his native Jordan as “that Islamic country.” But as a couple he and Defne embraced a creed that was gaining popularity among Turkey’s college-educated elite and whose chief tenet was rage against the non-Muslim West. Rooted in the same decades-old resentments expressed by millions of other Muslims, butpeculiar to privileged young adults who came into maturity in the age of al-Qaeda, this brand of faith perceived CIA and Israeli intelligenceplots behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Its adherents saw the invasions and occupations of Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan as part of a Western crusade to destroy and corrupt Islam, loot natural resources, and slaughter thousands of innocents.
    Humam and Defne’s new passion was partly driven by personal and family history: Humam was a son of Palestinian refugees and treated refugee children; Defne had worked for conservative Turkish newspapers, translating Arabic news accounts about fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defne, who friends say was the more strident of the two, had also translated laudatory books about al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The former had been titled
Osama bin Laden, the Che Guevara of the East
.
    But in each other Humam and Defne had found a partner whose political views reinforced and amplified their own. Later, when they had children, even choosing their names became a means of asserting their beliefs.
    The couple named their older girl after Leila Khaled, a Palestinian woman who hijacked a TWA jetliner in 1969 and served time in a British jail. The younger was named after a Swedish-born Palestinian filmmaker named Lina Makboul. Her best-known work is a documentary titled
Leila Khaled: Hijacker
.
    Now bin Zeid did what he often did when he needed to think. From the high perch of his pilot’s seat in the cockpit of a Boeing 737, he checked his flaps and eased the throttle forward. The stripes of the runway began falling toward him in a quickening stream. He tugged on the yoke, and with a roar, the jet’s nose tilted skyward, clearing the trees and hills and soaring into an endless expanse of blue.
    Bin Zeid took off his headset and leaned back in his chair, staring at the computer screen. Physically he was still in Jordan, in the house he had built overlooking the Dead Sea. Bin Zeid had set up the flight simulator on his computer so that it was just like a real cockpit, with controls and pedals and even realistic engine soundsthat he downloaded to match the specific plane he was flying. He would set a course for a distant city and then, once the wheels were up, sit in silence for an hour or more as the plane moved over empty seas. His hobby mystified some of his family members, but bin Zeid claimed it was therapeutic.
    It helps me think
, he would say.
    That’s your problem
, was the usual retort.
Too much thinking
.
    But bin Zeid craved space when working through a complicated puzzle. If he had a day to himself, he would slip into the desert in his Land Rover with his two dogs or head south to the Red Sea with his wife, Fida, to anchor his boat in a desolate cove with no other humans in sight. In photos he always seemed to be in the same place: alone on a beach chair in his shorts and floppy camouflage hat, eyes fixed on some indiscernible point on the horizon.
    Bin Zeid had fallen in love with America as a land of endless horizons. During holiday weekends at Emerson College he would hit the road in his car, sometimes alone,