Free The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick Page B

sometimes with his brother, Hassan, who was attending school across town at Boston University. When time was short, he would drive to Cape Cod to wander the beaches or sit in the cheap seats at Fenway Park to ponder the mysteries of American baseball and the allure of the frankfurter. During longer breaks he would drive alone to snow-covered Montreal or discover a secluded lake hidden among the hills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
    His need to roam was one of many traits that set him apart and made him something of an oddity at the Jordanian intelligence service. CIA acquaintances joked that the hardworking, plain-living bin Zeid was the “most unroyal of the royals.” But some Jordanian colleagues had trouble seeing past his ties to the monarchy and decidedly Western lifestyle. His superiors worried that family connections would eventually catapult bin Zeid to the top, pushing veterans aside and giving the royal family an even tighter grip on the spy agency. Fellow officers admired his energy but also were acutely aware of the gulf between their lives and his. It wasn’t just money and privilege, though everyone knew about bin Zeid’s Bostoneducation and the small Bertram fishing yacht he and his brothers kept anchored in Aqaba Harbor. It was also bin Zeid’s apparent detachment from the conventions that governed the life choices of most Jordanian men his age. Though a Muslim, he had married a woman from Jordan’s tiny Christian minority, a dark-haired beauty named Fida Dawani. In a culture that considers dogs unclean, bin Zeid was openly affectionate toward Jackie, a German shepherd he had acquired as a puppy, and her shaggy offspring, Huskie. The two rode around Amman in bin Zeid’s truck as though they were a couple of cattle dogs on a Wyoming ranch.
    Bin Zeid could shrug off the comments about his pets, but he detested it when people treated him differently because of his royal blood. Although colleagues persisted in calling him Sharif Ali, he introduced himself as Captain at work and as just Ali to neighborhood shopkeepers. The local repairman who serviced bin Zeid’s desktop computer took a liking to the affable young man who would linger in his shop to dissect the day’s news, sometimes bringing in a pizza to share with the technicians. Years passed before he learned that low-key, jeans-wearing Ali was both a Mukhabarat officer and a cousin to the king.
    At work, however, bin Zeid was all business. As a boy he had written in an essay that he planned to devote his life to serving his country, offering that it was “very important for an individual to be willing to die for his country.” He went to work at the Mukhabarat soon after graduating from college and poured himself into the job. He was pulled into some of the agency’s biggest terrorism cases, including the investigations into the Zarqawi-led suicide bombings in Amman in 2005. And increasingly, he became an indispensable conduit between the intelligence service and the CIA. The two agencies had worked closely since the 1960s, and by 2001 much of the Mukhabarat’s budget was underwritten by its cash-flush American partner. From Langley’s perspective, it was a smart investment: The Jordanian agency was a reliable partner, and its operatives were deemed among the best in the world.
    Bin Zeid occupied a unique place within this special relationship.He understood Americans and their language better than anyone in the Mukhabarat, and the U.S. agency routinely asked for him whenever the two countries worked together on joint investigations. When the two agencies clashed over tactics, it fell to bin Zeid to serve as mediator and bridge.
    The Balawi case was a perfect example. Two weeks after his arrest, Humam al-Balawi remained a cipher to the Mukhabarat. Yes, he had given up names of jihadist writers, but his confessions were looking less impressive on closer examination. The writers were either minor players or prominent figures whose identities