Book Review: The Tiple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA (by Joby Warwick)

Anyone who has seen Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliant – one of my all-time favourites – film Zero Dark Thirty will remember the scene in which some CIA operatives travel to a base in Afghanistan to meet with an agent purportedly working for the Jordanians inside Al Qaeda, who may have a way to pinpoint for assassination of a high-ranking Al Qaeda’s commander.

Instead, Jordanian doctor named Humam Khalil al-Bilawi, who had been picked up by Jordanian intelligence due to his pro-Al Qaeda/jihadist internet postings under an assumed identity and supposedly turned, detonated a suicide vest he was wearing soon after stepping from the car at the Afghanistan base, killing eight CIA operatives, ex-military guards working as security contractors and a Jordanian native, Humam’s handler, and an Afghani driver.

It was a devastating blow, particularly as the CIA and Jordanian intelligence believed they were en route to striking a blow of their own against the hard-to-find Al Qaeda senior leadership. The Triple Agent tells the story from all sides, beginning with al-Bilawi’s arrest, through to the fateful moment he steps onto the base at Khost, there to become a martyr for his cause.

Author Joby Warwick won a Pulitzer Prize for this work, and it’s not hard to see why. I flew through it! From the first page of the prologue to the final word of the epilogue, the book is expertly written and gripping, examining every facet of the plot, and shedding light on events that most of the world would not have known about, and profiling people who both deserve to be remembered and immortalised, and some who don’t. It reminded me stylistically of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, written in that same urgent tone.

Such a complex plot with interwoven loyalties, goals and ideals, and there were honestly times where I had to stop and remember that this wasn’t a movie, but a real event. No matter how much like a Hollywood blockbuster – it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch – it all really happened, and good people died as a result. The most emotional parts of the book are the final chapters, after the bomb has gone off, when friends, family and colleague after left to work out what had happened and, in most cases, to pick up the pieces of broken lives.

As depressing as the subject matter is, if you have any interest on the shadowy world of double and triple agents, and the way the CIA has conducted it’s facet of the war in Afghanistan, this is a brilliant book, well worth your time.