“This very day, one year ago. Twenty-two years old, but he could hardly read or write. If he went a few streets from our house, he was lost. A child. They filled his head with angels and virgins.”

Rashid’s potential was obvious. For nearly a decade, the CIA had sought reliable sources inside al-Qaeda, men who might narrow the search for Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Eventually, of course, the agency and NSA would track bin Laden to a compound less than fifty miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. SEAL Team Six would do the rest. But in 2009, bin Laden was still a ghost. The agency had no hard information on him. Rashid could fill the gap.

Assuming he was genuine, of course. Brad Stanley, the station chief at Amman, feared that Rashid might be a con man, or — worse — a double agent sent by al-Qaeda. But his story held up under scrutiny from Amman station and the muk. The Jordanians reported that Rashid belonged to a moderate mosque and wasn’t on their watch lists. Amman school records showed that his brother had dropped out in sixth grade. Army files confirmed a suicide bombing in Baghdad by a Jordanian, first name Farhad, last name unknown, on June 16, 2008.

With those preliminaries out of the way, Stanley decided that Rashid was worthy of surveillance. He put a four-man team on Rashid, led by Todd Laitz, his best watcher, maybe the best in the Middle East. For two weeks, Laitz and his men tracked Rashid. He jogged every morning at a gym in downtown Amman. He stayed late at the hospital most nights. He visited his mosque only for the Friday midday prayer, which was more or less obligatory. Laitz summed him up to Stanley in four politically incorrect words: “Even whiter than you.”