Hesla, a Washington contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, was among eight people, including several foreigners, who died in the assault on the five-star Serena hotel.

Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the attack, in which one bomber blew himself up at the entrance, allowing his colleagues to get past the armed guards, metal detectors and blast walls protecting the hotel. Another attacker blew himself up inside, while others shot and killed several foreigners, including Hesla, who were using the hotel gym.

U.S. State Department officials in Washington declined to comment. "In accordance with the wishes of the family, we are not releasing any information," one told United Press International.

"This is a new kind of target for the Taliban," wrote Afghan expert Barnet Rubin on his blog, the first attack deliberately targeting Western aid workers, many of whom stayed at the hotel or used the facilities there. "I imagine it will not be the last," he said.

Friends and family in the Washington area were memorializing Hesla in e-mail exchanges and on the Web Tuesday, recalling his sharp and unforgiving wit, astute intelligence and generous nature.

"Even in Washington where there are a lot of smart and very intense people, Thor stood out," his friend Nicholas Flagler told UPI, for his "intellectual focus and gusto."

"He had the biggest personality, but his heart was even bigger than that," added former colleague Tricia Enright. "Anyone who counted him as a friend was seriously fortunate."

Enright met the lifelong Democrat when they both worked on the 1992 Clinton campaign, and Hesla maintained close contact with her and other campaign alumni, even after he left party politics for event management and later development work, initially in Kosovo.

"Because he spent so much of his time out of the country," another friend, Ira Sockowitz, told UPI, he would send a round robin at year's end to all his friends -- the much-feted "Big Letter."

"They were hysterically funny," Sockowitz recalls of the letters, "full of insight and observation, and poking merciless fun both at himself and the situations he found himself in."

His humor was something that all of his friends recall. "When I think about the times in my life that I laughed so hard it hurt," said Enright, "Thor was involved in almost all of them."

"Like a lot of us who work in politics, he was a little cynical about it sometimes, but he passionately believed in trying to make the world a better place," Sockowitz said. "While we just talked about it, he actually went and lived in these places."

Hesla arrived in Kabul at the end of October last year to do public affairs work on a USAID-funded capacity-development project for the government of Afghanistan.

"I write the press release(s)," he e-mailed a friend, "But USAID takes all the credit."

Although he lived in what he described to friends as "a corporate villa in the heavily patrolled part of Kabul where the embassies are," he joined the gym and spa at the Serena and was apparently working out there when the attackers struck.

Friends say he dismissed concerns about his safety when he announced he was moving to Kabul. "He didn't see the risk as a big deal," said Sockowitz. "That was the kind of guy he was."

Nonetheless, one friend recalled that Hesla had reservations about the Kabul job. "He loved being in Kosovo," said Enright, "But this project (in Kabul) he wasn't loving."

And Hesla's own writing -- in an e-mail to a friend -- betrays some concern about the security situation.

"Think of my life as a series of moves from Green Zone to Green Zone," wrote Hesla on arrival in Afghanistan. "There is much less active penetration of greater Kabul than greater Baghdad. But the situation is deteriorating at present."

"We have armed guards at the villa," he continued. "Our offices are guarded. We are only allowed to eat at certain restaurants, and patronize certain bars, which have -- you guessed it -- armed guards."

Rubin, the Afghan expert, said on his blog that Monday's attack was an attempt by the Taliban to leverage the resentment many Afghans were feeling about the lavish, and in their eyes morally corrupt, lifestyles of many Western aid workers.

"Many Afghans think that money that is supposed to be used to help them is instead being used to pay for the good life for foreigners in the Serena hotel," he wrote, adding, "Alas, it is true."

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