Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (11 page)

Passive resistance was a different story. Many jackpots simply denied they were the person we were looking for. It was easy to do: the intelligence we started with was often less than perfect. If the names had been processed by a non-Arabic speaker, or even one who spoke Arabic with a different accent than what the locals used, it could take quite a bit to decipher the actual identities—the name “Tariq,” for example, might be written as “Tah,” because that’s what the English speaker heard.

I quickly learned not to ask for a name I wasn’t 100 percent sure of; I let the person I was questioning tell me who they were. It was always better to look for secondary intelligence—papers in the house, for example—before talking to anyone, so I’d at least know the proper names of the people who lived there.

Suspects who claimed to be someone other than whom we were looking for often had phony identity papers “proving” they were that person. Part of my job was separating the bullshit from the truth and the truth from the bullshit. I had to learn how to get people to talk to me without lying.

There’s been a lot of controversy in the United States about torture. Not that I ever asked for permission, but I wasn’t allowed to torture people to get information. What I could do was trick them, sometimes with threats that I knew I couldn’t carry out, sometimes with misdirection and lies.

I learned to use clues from around the house, from other people, and from the suspects themselves to confirm their identities. I got better at it as I went. It helped greatly that I was Iraqi. I could tell where people came from, what their general religious beliefs were, and usually a little bit about their station in life. That helped a lot when I was trying to get a sense of how truthful they were—someone with an Egyptian accent who claimed to be from Kurdistan had better have a good explanation if they wanted me to believe them.

Fear was a good weapon, and there were plenty of things I could do to ratchet up someone’s fear without touching them. First of all, when people appear suddenly in your house in the middle of the night, you’re not going to be entirely comfortable. When those people are wearing combat gear and yelling commands, your stress level elevates. So most subjects started off intimidated, and it was just a matter of pushing a few buttons to get them fearful enough to cooperate.

“If you don’t tell me who you are,” I might say, “I’m going to have to take your entire family with me.”

That may not sound like much of a threat in the United States, but in Iraq, it represented an enormous loss of honor, since the male head of the household ordinarily dealt with all formal matters. Taking the family to headquarters—not even to jail, just to an American base—was a slap at the man of the house’s status.

The goal wasn’t to get him to lie about who he was—if it had been, we could have simply arrested him and I wouldn’t have had to bother asking any questions at all. What I discovered was that stress made truth and lies more obvious. Denials became much more sincere and easier to read. Even a man who lied and said he
was
the jackpot to get his family off the hook (rare, but it happened) would give himself away with his eyes or some mannerism.

The truth is, I would never have taken the man’s family, and I’m sure the SEALs wouldn’t have permitted it if I had suggested doing so. But most people didn’t realize that.

Iraq was not the United States, where the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” is ingrained in the culture. On the contrary, the long years of the dictatorship had pretty much led us to believe
everyone
was guilty of something. But with the Americans I had to work from the premise that the people I was talking to were innocent, and only if I was sure that they were the jackpot did I identify them.

The SEALs emphasized this all the time, but it was just common sense. Even if the man was just interviewed and then released—a very common occurrence—taking the wrong person meant more than a little inconvenience for them. Hassle a man enough, and even someone who supported the new government and liked Americans would eventually turn and side with the mujahideen.

WORKING WITH THE SEALs
, I became a connoisseur of truth and a sorter of names. But at least at the beginning, I was a man without a name myself.

Because of the nature of the work, the SEALs didn’t want to use my real name while out on a mission. It would be too easy for someone to overhear it and then report it to the insurgents. At first I used variations that were easy for them to pronounce. Then finally one of the SEALs gave me the “code name” Johnny Walker.

Somehow it stuck. I’m not exactly sure how or why it was first chosen; there seem to have been a number of Walkers, Johnny or otherwise, before me. It did have a couple of advantages: it was easy to remember and easy to say over the radio.

“Get Johnny Walker up here.”

“Where’s Johnny Walker?”

“We need Johnny to talk to the jackpot.”

Johnny Walker.
Sounded good to me.

Sometime later, I found out that the name echoed the one belonging to a fine Scotch, Johnnie Walker. It’s possible that the SEALs were thinking of that originally, though at that point I don’t remember having made my own acquaintance with that particular whisky. Once I did, I decided the name was a natural.

I’d drunk Scotch a few times before I started worked with the Americans, but not a lot. Even bad Scotch was very expensive in Iraq and I had no taste for it—or money to buy it. Once I started working with the SEALs, I had enough money to buy the good stuff. And I suppose it was inevitable that I would become acquainted with my “relative.”

I should make clear that, while Iraq is a Muslim country and the sale of alcohol was illegal under Saddam, in fact it was always available. Stores, clubs, and restaurants throughout the country sold it before the American invasion. It actually became harder to get after Saddam was deposed, as shops selling alcohol became targets for Islamic fundamentalists of all persuasions. They bombed many liquor stores and others closed out of fear.

There were many things to learn about working with the SEALs and Americans in general. The hardest things to understand were not operational procedures—my job was never very complicated, really—but things that had to do with culture that Americans took for granted. My knowledge of American entertainment, whether it was music or film, was limited. What I did know, many of the SEALs didn’t share—few were very big country music fans, at least of the classic country music I’d heard growing up. And I knew almost nothing about television. But it was all fascinating, things to learn. I became a kind of cultural sponge, soaking up whatever tidbits I could.

The same with the equipment they used. The SEALs and American soldiers in general had some interesting gear. Put on night vision gear and the entire world turns green, just as if you are in a Hollywood movie.

And since you are in a Hollywood movie, nothing is scary. Because it is fiction, not fact.

I told myself that a lot, especially in those early days. Sometimes it worked.

One unit took me to a range to familiarize me with their weapons. It was “show and shoot” for the Iraqi terp.

I was not then and am not now a gun expert. Weapons are tools to me, nothing more. But I did see that the M4 was a very nice rifle—light and easy to handle, especially compared to the AK-47s I had grown up around. When later I worked with the Iraqi troops as a liaison, I made sure to be assigned one.

The truly impressive weapons were the .50-caliber machine guns and the grenade launchers. The grenade launcher—
crazy!
I stood on the side as they demonstrated it, and tried not to cringe.

U.S. regulations prevented the SEALs from giving me a gun. But I had my own personal 7 mm pistol; I believe it came from Romania or somewhere behind the old Iron Curtain. I also had an AK-47, as did most Iraqi males.

These were my personal weapons and I wasn’t supposed to take them on raids. I’m sure if I’d showed up with them during the first few weeks, the SEALs would have grabbed them out of my hands and probably beaten me with them.

Trust, they say, has to be earned. It’s especially tough in a war zone, and ridiculously hard when the person who has to be trusted looks and sounds like the enemy.

But I soon had plenty of chances to prove who I was and what I believed.

5

Trust and Treachery

I
KNEW THE MISSION
would be unusual because it was taking place during the day, something rare for the SEALs. But when I saw the guys dressed in civilian clothes, I realized it was going to be far different and probably more dangerous than anything we’d done before.

As usual, I didn’t get the full brief, just enough so I could do my job. What they did tell me was dramatic enough. The SEALs had been given intelligence that a suspect would be in a certain store at ten o’clock that day. They were going to just walk in and grab him.

The suspect was a high-ranking member of the local al-Qaeda organization. They gave me a surprisingly detailed description; ordinarily the descriptions were pretty bare, and this was another indication that the mission was unusual. I forget the suspect’s name now—with maybe one or two exceptions, the names never stuck with me. They were an identity that I had to check, important for the moment, completely forgotten afterward. As for what he was accused of: aside from his being an important figure in the insurgency, I doubt I knew the actual details of his résumé at the time. In retrospect, I’m sure it was better that way; it’s hard to be dispassionate about a man when you know exactly how many people he has killed.

We boarded two SUVs and headed toward the block where the shop was. I was sitting in the front passenger seat, watching to see what was going on. Besides my normal clothes, I’d put on a scarf; when we stopped I slipped it around the lower part of my face, masking myself in case there were lookouts. By now I’d grown my beard out, and if anything I probably looked like a terrorist myself.

The SEALs assigned to snatch the jackpot got out of the trucks and walked across the street. As they went in, I realized they were making a mistake—they’d accidentally gone in the wrong store.

It wasn’t hard to do. All the buildings on that stretch of the block looked the same. If you weren’t from Mosul and you didn’t read much Arabic, it was easy to get confused.

“Hey, tell him he is wrong,” I said to the driver beside me. “They went into the wrong shop.”

Just then, I saw the jackpot come out of the
right
building and walk by us.

Shit.

We locked eyes for a moment as he picked up his pace. Even if I hadn’t studied his description, I’d have known who he was from that glare.

“That’s the jackpot,” I said, jumping from the truck. “Hey,” I shouted at him, pulling up my gun. I waved it in his direction. “Stop! Stop!”

He spun around and, seeing the gun, froze. The SEALs, finally realizing what was going on, ran over. Before he could do anything else, he was surrounded.

The SEALs weren’t happy about the gun, though ultimately I didn’t get in any trouble for it. They were surprised I’d jumped out of the vehicle and stopped the man—grateful, but surprised.

Terps didn’t do that.

And yet I felt that was what I had to do. It was natural; to not do it would have been wrong. I was part of the team, and part of the mission to accomplish a goal, which we all shared.

Looking back, I know it was dangerous, even foolish. Not only could the jackpot have had a gun, but he could easily have had friends nearby who might have opened fire on me. And by taking an active role in stopping him, I’d made it clear to everyone on the street that I wasn’t only working
for
the Americans, I was working
with
them—and was therefore a highly prized target for insurgents of every stripe.

None of that occurred to me at the time.

I questioned the jackpot back at our camp. He was surprisingly free with information, mentioning a house that was being used as a possible bomb stash. Still dressed in civilian clothes, we went back out and found the place filled with bombs, missiles, artillery shells, and even sticks of TNT. It was a veritable mother lode of destruction, enough to kill thousands of people for months. We packed as much as we could into our two SUVs, blew the rest in place, then headed to the base.

To get to the air base, we had to pass over a bridge. As we approached, we saw that an Iraqi checkpoint had been set up in the middle of the roadway. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been a problem—Americans in Humvees pretty much zipped through checkpoints.

But in this case, the SEALs were in civilian clothes and civilian vehicles. They had to stop or be fired at.

At the same time, no one trusted any checkpoint in the city, even the legitimate ones. The Iraqi army was littered with insurgents and informants. Even if they weren’t traitors, the soldiers could hardly be trusted; too many were prone to panic and fire without warning.

Add in the fact that the men in the SUVs had explosives and didn’t want to show their IDs—that wouldn’t go over at an
American
checkpoint, let alone an Iraqi one.

I glanced at the dark-skinned SEAL who was driving. He could pass for an Iraqi, as long as he didn’t open his mouth.

“I have an idea,” I told him. “Let me talk.” I told the others to stay in the shadows or cover their faces—they were all too white-skinned to pass as anything other than Westerners.

“Hey,” I said, leaning across as we stopped. I waved my ID. “You see an American patrol?”

“Eh?” asked the guard, coming over.

“American patrol? You see them?”

“Yes, yes.” The guard said he had, and we started talking. It turned out he knew one of my cousins. We spent a few long minutes catching up with nonsensical chitchat. I’m not sure what the SEALs thought of the conversation; it was fortunate that it was in Arabic.

“Very good, very good,” I told the man finally. “We need to catch up to that patrol.”

“Good night then,” said the guard, forgetting completely that he hadn’t checked the others’ nonexistent IDs or looked in the trucks.

Working with the SEALs had turned me into a bit of a con man as well as an interpreter and foot soldier.

LITTLE BY LITTLE,
I built up my reputation with the SEALs. The outlines of my work were always the same: Once the site was secured, the SEALs would locate the suspect. I would ask him what his name was, confirm his identity, and off we would go, back to the base.

It was the particulars that varied, small things changing in countless ways: how I talked, what we said, the questions, the answers. The look in the suspect’s eyes. Sometimes there was a great deal of hate, even from a man who wasn’t a suspect, a person we simply left. I had to wall the look and the emotion away and go about my business.

I’d usually talk with the suspects on the way back to camp. Sometimes I got some information the SEALs could use, an address maybe, or the name of someone that might be involved. Depending on the circumstances, I might question him for a while when we arrived, gathering more intelligence or maybe confirming what he had told me before.

Of more use were the documents and other intel the SEALs would gather at the house. We’d go through it, myself and the other interpreters, looking for local information that would help the SEALs to set up another operation.

But it was often the small, nearly indefinable things that I did that impressed the SEALs the most. I knew Mosul; they didn’t. You can only get so much information from street maps and satellite photos. No intelligence briefing can explain the rhythm of a neighborhood, why the lack of people on one street is significant and not a problem on another. No computer I’ve ever come across can straighten out the confusion that occurs when a Westerner tries to pronounce an Arabic name. The SEALs were impressed that I could tell them that there was danger up a certain street but not down another. My mind was simply processing information as it always had. The nine-year-old boy who’d ventured out of his neighborhood to show how tough he was could have told the SEALs exactly the same thing. The slingshot expert, as foolish as he might have been, would have avoided exactly the same alley.

Not that my skills weren’t advancing. My English, in particular, improved tremendously. With experience, I was able to anticipate what the SEALs wanted me to do when we were on a mission. I knew where I was supposed to be before the NCO gave the order. Explosions no longer turned my stomach.

Fear remained. No one ever loses that completely, even if they become inured to the circumstances that provoke it.

I think my real value to the SEALs had less to do with my technical skills than the way I handled myself. And that came from them. The SEALs were always very businesslike and aggressive; I tried to be the same. They were great role models. While I had no illusions that I was a SEAL, I wanted to be accepted by them. And they brought out the side of me that was both aggressive and professional.

The SEALs believe that, when doing an assault, they must act with violence of action. They attempt to move as aggressively as possible, overwhelming their opponent to minimize casualties—collateral as well as their own. I interpreted the philosophy to mean this: get the job done, get it done fast, get it done right, don’t fool around. Show that you are powerful, and you are less likely to have problems.

It was something I understood in my bones. If you need to arrest someone, do it quickly and don’t give him a chance to escape or even struggle. Otherwise there can easily be complications.

The SEALs had a concept of brotherhood that went beyond anything I’d seen outside of an actual family, certainly beyond the camaraderie of a typical Iraqi military unit and even the American MPs I’d worked with. It’s difficult to describe the bond between them, even with metaphors. I imagine most civilians might make a parallel to a sports team; in some ways, I guess, the connection between the SEALs reminded me of the basketball teams I’d been part of. But that’s a pale comparison to the bonds they shared.

Part of it came from their shared and parallel experiences, and not just in war. Combat is such an emphatic experience that even strangers form tight bonds, but even the “new guy” SEALs I worked with were tight before they even saw their first mission. From their famously rigorous BUD/S classes to the months of training, they had common experiences to draw on. Each man knew that the man beside him had gone through that trial and come out; there was confidence in that, something that can’t be underrated. Beyond that, each man had accepted as his own the unit philosophy that they all depended on each other and that the team as a whole was stronger than its individual parts. It was clear that they would do anything for each other, even and especially risk death.

Not only did I admire that philosophy and camaraderie, I wanted to be part of it. If I couldn’t be a SEAL, I could be the best terp they ever had. Ultimately, I could be their Iraqi brother.

BUT AS 2004
went on, Americans had less and less reason to trust Iraqis, especially in Mosul. Mujahideen were coming into the city, chased from other places or recruited by the small but growing insurgency network established by al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, the growing prominence of Kurds in the city antagonized people, adding to the friction and possibly helping to prime some against the new government.

Because of my work, I was in effect living on the U.S. base, spending the bulk of my time among Americans, not Iraqis. Going home only occasionally, I missed a lot of these changes. Perhaps I would have missed them if I was on the streets as well. Many things are clear only in retrospect. When you are in the middle of the woods at night you have a hard time knowing whether you are walking deeper in or heading out.

For me personally, things were better than they had been in years. I was able to support my family comfortably. I could buy small presents for the kids and Soheila. I moved them back to the area in Mosul where my family had lived before the war, not far from the house that we had to sell to help my sister. We took a house on a main road near the business area of the city. It was large enough for us to be comfortable.

Most Iraqi lives were not getting better. Former soldiers, now released from the army, found no jobs. The Americans were an easy target for hate. People who had no education were especially vulnerable to the whispers of the mujahideen. Some of what they said about the government was true enough—corruption was back, if not as bad as it had been under Saddam. Reality crushed many dreams, even simple ones of not going hungry two days in a row. And if you had no dreams to fall back on, what did you have?

AFTER ROUGHLY SIX
months, Team 7’s time in Iraq came to a close. They were replaced by Team 2. After only two or three weeks, they were assigned to go to Baghdad on an entirely different mission—PSD, or protective service detail, which basically meant that they were protecting important people. There was no need for me, so I wasn’t invited. They started packing up to leave.

Though we’d only been together for three or four missions, the idea of their leaving still filled me with sadness. I thought that I’d never see them or any SEAL again. I knew they liked me and thought I did a good job, but I also knew that in war you have little control over the future, especially your own.

Knowing I was going to be out of work, I started thinking of what I might do next. There were still American units in Mosul, and I considered going over to the MPs and asking for my old job back. But before I had a chance to do that, a civilian came over to the compound and asked if he could arrange to borrow a car. I started talking to him, and as it turned out, the firm he worked for needed a translator, so I went to work with them.

It was a big change after going on direct actions with the SEALs. The civilians had some various ventures, mostly in the Kurdish area to the north. Their business consisted primarily of trying to help the new government, arranging for different types of support. (I was asked not to give specifics, most of which I don’t know anyway.) Translating for them was always interesting, but the tempo was very different than working with the SEALs.

Still, I made some good friends and had some interesting times. One of the men, whom I’ll call Pistol, was a smart, friendly business type who was always cracking me up with jokes. You could easily forget the potential for danger when you were with him.