Anderson was even more baffled after he learned that LaBonte, one of the CIA officers killed in the attack, was sounding alarms about Balawi’s trustworthiness before the Khost meeting.
“Why couldn’t he convince Jennifer that they shouldn’t let this guy on the base without being searched?” Anderson said, adding that he hesitates to blame LaBonte, either. “This stuff should have gone back to headquarters, and someone should have made a call.”
Reconstructing the CIA bombing in Khost, Afghanistan
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Read the eulogy for Jennifer Matthews.
Thomas Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador who helped conduct the independent review of the attack, said, “We don’t know if Darren ever articulated his concerns in a cohesive way.” But Pickering also said that circumstantial evidence suggested that Matthews did not heed her security officer’s warnings not to greet Balawi with too many people — a breach of long-standing tradecraft.
Anderson tires of the postmortem attacks on his wife. He was especially incensed by former CIA operative Robert Baer’s piece in GQ magazine. Baer used a pseudonym — “Kathy” — for Matthews but asserted that she was “set up to fail” and “in over her head.”
“It was just mean,” Anderson said. “It was like, ‘Girls can’t do this stuff.’ ”
Anderson and Dave Matthews haven’t spoken since shortly after her death. “About a week before the funeral, Dave said she didn’t know what she was doing. And this was her fault. I was like, ‘Okay, we’re done,’ ” Anderson said.
Dave Matthews thinks the agency is more culpable than his niece.
“I was saying to Gary that if Jenny followed tradecraft rules, this wouldn’t have happened. And that she wasn’t trained” in how to vet informants, Matthews recalled. “Gary was too supportive. As a husband, he should have fussed with her about going. But he just dismissed me. He said my knowledge was from the Cold War. I said, ‘Jeez, Gary, look at the evidence. How many have to die for you to realize that something went tragically wrong?’ ”
The phone call ended.
Jennifer Matthews’s parents voiced some of the same concerns as her uncle.
“When we found out she was going to a danger zone, we questioned it,” said her father, Bill Matthews, 78, a retired printing press operator from Harrisburg, Pa. “I do believe she needed more training.”
As devout Christians, they believe that “there is a plan and purpose behind it all,” her father said. “She’s in heaven right now. Some day, we’ll see her.”
* * *
At his home near Fredericksburg, Anderson spends most of his time with his daughter, now 14, and two sons, 11 and 9. (He didn’t want their names published to protect their privacy.) The family is living off a stipend paid by the federal government as a result of his wife’s death. He wants a new job, something science-related, but his chief focus is on being a single father.
“I can’t be a mom, but I gotta be better dad than I was before because I have to make up for the fact Jen’s not around,” he said.
The children don’t ask a lot of questions about her death. He figures that, as they mature, they’ll insist on knowing more.
“They just miss their mom,” he said. “Sometimes, they’ll ask, ‘What food did she like?’ ” Or they’ll reminisce about how they used to put fake snakes and spiders in her bed. How she used to tease the boys about possible girlfriends.
Anderson is surrounded by his wife’s things. Some of her jewelry sits on her bureau. He misses one piece, especially. It was a platinum Celtic cross necklace that he shipped to her at Khost for Christmas.
“She wanted to delineate herself since she was going to a Muslim country,” he said.
She was wearing it the day she was killed.
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