My Share of the Task (37 page)

I probably wrote five such messages during my years commanding TF 714, but I made many of the same points in the O&I VTC almost daily. A leader must constantly restate any message he feels is important, and do so in the clearest possible terms. It serves to inform new members and remind veterans.

TF 16 increasingly pushed to be ever more effective, and that spring, even as Al Qaeda in Iraq wreaked havoc, we had been pummeling the organization. I stressed the importance of pace, or “OPTEMPO” as we called it, as key to maintaining pressure. Where we'd executed eighteen raids per month in August of 2004, by that month in 2006 we were up to three hundred. I also felt that we were closing in on Zarqawi himself. Many in the task force shared the feeling. We looked for every way possible to provoke him or someone near him to make a mistake and appear on the grid.

That May, one way we thought we could flush him out was to manufacture discord between him and Abu Ayyub al-Masri. Egyptians like al-Masri were to a degree the dominant aristocracy within Al Qaeda, and Zarqawi had displayed a fixation with his status in the movement. So we aimed to diminish Zarqawi's stature while
raising al-Masri's profile. We petitioned to reduce the reward offered for information on Zarqawi—which had been at twenty-five million dollars since 2004—down to five million, while simultaneously raising the money attached to al-Masri to the same amount. From my assessment of Zarqawi, any diminution of his status would sorely upset him.

At about the same time, we obtained a video taken by Zarqawi's propaganda team of him shooting a U.S. M-249 squad automatic weapon, or SAW, in a bermed desert area somewhere inside Iraq. The footage was meant to be grist for a propaganda film showing a macho-looking insurgent leader demonstrating his warrior skills. We intercepted that footage, as well as the full, unedited version, which revealed the supposedly pious Zarqawi ignoring a call to prayer from a muezzin off camera and lacking even rudimentary proficiency on the weapon. As Zarqawi and his team swaggered back to their trucks after firing, one of his aides achieved buffoon status when he took the SAW from Zarqawi by grabbing the barrel, still hot from being fired. The hot metal seared his hand, and he dropped the weapon. It was amusing to watch and also an opportunity to undercut the terrorist leader's mystique. So we arranged for it to be released by MNF-I on May 4, nine days after AQI's edited version hit the Internet. We felt we were closing in—and it was worth making every effort to provoke his vanity, threaten his standing, and hopefully cause him to make a fatal slip.

By Wednesday, May 17, after two more weeks of interrogations, Mubassir's flippant attitude had increasingly given way to weariness. His family was now completely on its own, without his brother to watch over them. The screening facility team sensed they could make his desperation more acute. Again working together, the analysts and interrogators had put together a time line of Mubassir's travels to Jordan. Amy and Jack saw that Mubassir had been there prior to bombings in Amman the previous November. He had admitted a connection with al-Masri, who, along with Zarqawi, was closely linked with the Atrous family, which had yielded the female suicide bomber for the attack. Knowing this, they saw a chance to play on his self-preservation instinct and goad him into revealing something they thought he was holding back.

Now, several weeks after Mubassir's capture in Yusufiyah, Amy, the young female interrogator, and her partner, Jack, sat down again across the table from Mubassir. They told him they knew of his trips to Jordan and his connections to al-Masri and top status in AQI. They presented these as dangerous secrets they had uncovered.

“We're trying to hold on to you, but if the word gets out that you are tied to this, it could be really bad,” the interrogators said. Mubassir sensed how significant the hotel bombings were.

“I can't give you anything,” Mubassir said. “I don't have anything.”

Jack, pretending to get mad, got up and walked toward the door. He passed a knowing glance to Amy over his shoulder. She understood. He stopped in the doorway. “I'm going to get a guard, we're done with you,” he said to the detainee, and slammed the door.

Amy turned back around in her seat and looked at Mubassir squarely. Across the small molded-plastic table from her small five-foot-four frame, Mubassir's bulk hid much of the white plastic chair. “You need to talk to us,” she said. “You need to tell us what's going on. We're going to be able to tie you to those bombings, and at that point, it's going to be out of our hands.”

“I don't have anything,” he said.

Behind her the guards knocked on the wood door. The weeks of rapport now tugged at him. His only meaningful interactions since capture had been with Jack and Paul and Amy, sitting in front of him. They were now his best and only advocates in this bizarre world he increasingly wanted to escape, and the surest way to make it be over for him. The knocks on the door threatened to upend all of that. The knocks meant a new prison, new interrogators, new uncertainty.

“Wait,” Mubassir said, “I have something to tell you.”

| CHAPTER 13 |

Hibhib

May–June 2006

A
t around 10:00
A.M.
on May 18, 2006, an interrogation report was on the desk of J.C. when he entered the operations center. T.S. and T.C. had convinced Mubassir to talk the day before, and the result was stunning. Midmorning was normally dead time at the Baghdad compound, the squadron's central headquarters. J.C. had gone to bed only a few hours earlier, when the raids had finished and the assaulters called in “objective secure.” Those operators were now asleep in the bunk beds berthed throughout the house, one of a row of identical villas Saddam had built for favored supporters. The villa sat inside the Green Zone and backed to the Tigris River. It had at one time been nice, with stucco patios and verandas. After five years of heavy use by the seventy-man squadrons that rotated through for ninety days of breakneck operations, the amenities were neglected and in disrepair. Most of the pools out back were covered in a film of algae. The interior was austere and practical. Plywood shelving had been built into the walls. A TV went rarely watched, and a gym was heavily used. Former living and dining rooms had been converted to operations centers with monitors and workstations. The rooms and hallways were crowded and had a hodgepodge look, but it was anything but casual. In these slow hours of the morning, and into early afternoon, a few operators scrutinized intelligence and quietly coordinated necessary support. But by late afternoon it would become tense with focused activity in anticipation of the night's raids.

J.C. had sat there many mornings before, studying Mubassir's interesting but still inconclusive interrogation. Up until then, each had normally been a couple of pages in length. Today's report, from Mubassir's fifty-first interrogation, was eight pages of commentary from a man who seemed to be unburdening himself. The day before, after Mubassir had told Amy to wait as she rose to answer the guards knocking on the door, she and Jack had deftly pulled out of him all the details they knew J.C. and his team would need. It was all now in the report, which J.C. quickly skimmed: Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, Mubassir said, was Sheikh Abd al-Rahman. He lived in Baghdad with his family. He had a wife and three kids. Two daughters and a boy. The boy was the youngest. Abd al-Rahman never drove himself. He had a chauffeur.

And, Mubassir claimed, Abd al-Rahman met with Zarqawi regularly, every seven to ten days.

Reading Mubassir's full portrait of Abd al-Rahman, it was almost too good—perhaps bluffs from a desperate detainee. But the address Mubassir had provided for Abd al-Rahman in Baghdad was a way to start to verify. At this point the squadrons and troops—two and three levels below the TF 714 headquarters—had control over the task force's ISR flight paths. Not needing to go through the higher headquarters, J.C. turned to a team member.

“Hey, fly over to that address. Tell me when you're there.”

As the aircraft flew toward the house in Khadra, Baghdad, J.C. continued reading the report. When the UAV arrived overhead, the house was quiet. By Baghdad standards, the neighborhood was upper-middle class, and oddly, given Abd al-Rahman's supposed connections, the house was in a Shia area. This might be a waste of time, J.C. thought. But after a few minutes, the image on his screen stirred. A silver sedan pulled up in front of the house. The driver got out, disappeared under the roof of the house, and came back out with another man. Both got in the car and drove off.

“Stay with that car,” J.C. said.

As the cameras followed the car weaving through the residential streets, J.C. read the report over again. As he turned to the section about Abd al-Rahman's family, the sedan returned to the house. The passenger went back into the house, while the driver stayed in the car idling out front. Five figures reemerged from the house a few minutes later—two adults and three smaller figures. To lay eyes, it would have been hard to tell that the second figure was a woman. But her distinctive movements and size were visible to the Green intel team with years of watching aerial surveillance. Three young children trailed them, one small enough to be picked up by the man. The man, woman, and children got into the car.

The sedan drove to a nearby market, busy now as midday approached. The man on the passenger side stepped out of the car. The driver popped out as well. While the scene was mute on the screen, J.C. and his team could read their exchange as the passenger told the driver to get back in the car. The passenger turned toward the bazaar, stopped at a few stalls, and eventually returned to the sedan, which wound its way to another house. What now appeared to be a family got out of the car and walked into the house, the driver shutting their doors behind them. J.C. watched and knew he had to cancel the planned surveillance for that day. As if on script, these six people on the screen matched the description and movements described in the detainee report in his hands. Suspicious, J.C. pulled up the database that plotted all the known areas of interest. The second house the sedan ended at was tagged as one of the five known locations used by the Abu Ayyub al-Masri's courier network. It made sense—al-Masri functioned as a sort of real estate agent for the network.

J.C. called his boss, M.S., who was at Balad, and described what he was seeing and how it matched the detainee report. J.C. was skeptical as to whether Mubassir's report was trustworthy—and had good reason to be. M.S.'s experience had told her to put great stock in the intuition of colleagues, so she arranged for her, J.C., and the interrogators to discuss this at more length in a series of VTCs. The interrogators—Amy, Jack, and Paul—laid out why they thought this report from Mubassir was worth betting on. As they did, J.C. was convinced. It was now up to him and M.S. to convince the task force leadership.

“All right,” said M.S., “let me get the boss, and let's do a VTC.” They would propose to the task force leadership that J.C. and his team watch Abd al-Rahman—or the person they thought was Abd al-Rahman—constantly. Approval would not be automatic. Diverting limited ISR assets to concentrate on any target was a decision with significant operational implications for our ability to maintain pressure on Zarqawi's entire network.

M.S. and Scott Miller, the commander of Green in charge of TF 16, videoconferenced in J.C. and Joe, the commander of the squadron about to rotate out, both of whom were in Baghdad.

“Here're the facts,” J.C. began, being sure not to mix what he thought with what he knew: Although the man, woman, children, and driver matched what Mubassir was saying, it wasn't a sure thing that the guy being driven around was Abd al-Rahman or that, if he was, he met weekly with Zarqawi. But, he said, if this panned out, it would be the closest we had been to Zarqawi yet. The two colonels and the major listened patiently to this sergeant first class, who had been eating, living, sleeping, breathing Zarqawi and the Al Qaeda in Iraq network for the past two years. He was credible for his reservoirs of knowledge and for his straightforward reputation.

To monitor Abd al-Rahman, they would need to watch him constantly, twenty-four hours a day, in a busy city. J.C. asked to control at least three ISR assets at all times. He wanted two to stay with Abd al-Rahman and a third to follow anyone with whom he met. This would require using up the bulk of the task force's valuable ISR, pulling orbits away from the other TF 16 teams spread throughout Iraq to be solely under J.C.'s control.

“All right, we'll do it, J.,” said Scott.

From that moment on, J.C. almost never stopped monitoring the screen. He slept minimally. Guys brought him food. He occasionally stole away for a VTC to keep the rest of the teams and us up at Balad informed, knowing that updates bought him time.

*   *   *

O
n Saturday, May 20, as J.C. and his team spent a second day watching Abd al-Rahman in Baghdad, the Iraqi parliament gathered for a vote in an
auditorium inside the Green Zone. With typical drama, including a
group of Sunnis storming out, the parliamentarians approved the first permanent government since Saddam. After three years in which the Iraqis had a governing council, a transitional government, and then an interim one, they now had a constitutional administration. At its head was a Shiite member of parliament,
Nouri al-Maliki, a balding man with glasses and a gourd-shaped head. He was influential within his Dawah Party but lesser known by most spectators. Fifty-five years old on that day, he had lived much of his life outside Iraq—he had fled to Iran via Syria and then, once able, moved back to Syria where he spent his adult life until 2003. It was hard to know what to make of al-Maliki. Would he be a Shiite hard-liner? Or would he prove the much-hoped-for conciliator? Would Iran and Syria have undue sway now? Would he be a democrat or an authoritarian in utero?

In addition to selecting al-Maliki as the prime minister, Parliament also approved thirty-six of his cabinet posts, all except for three: the national security adviser and the ministers of
both interior and defense. These most contentious positions were all connected to the security forces, which over the past year had been infiltrated by Shiite extremists. Wearing their light gray and deep blue uniforms and carrying the badge of the ministry of the interior, they had targeted Sunnis—young men, mostly—
abducting and killing them. Sunnis worried Maliki's temporary appointments would stay long enough that he could make them permanent.

The urgent question, further delayed by these empty posts, was this: Would, or could, al-Maliki create a unified Iraqi government not defined by sectarian infiltration and divisions? If he did, would it slow the apparent slide to open civil war? That looked doubtful. Many of the politicians meeting in the auditorium that day supported—and were supported by—the Sunni and Shia groups who were meanwhile producing
a thousand corpses each month in the streets outside the Green Zone.

In April and May, I visited the task force screening facility more frequently, walking across the gravel path to sit in on the evening session of their twice-daily update. More informally, Scott Miller would stop in to my office for quick updates, or I would sit down next to him on the small bench in the back of his TF 16 JOC. One night, as we sat before the moving mosaic of current operations screens, Scott turned to me.

“Sir, we're really starting to get something out of Mubassir,” he said. “He's starting to cooperate. We've never had someone who we can ask about what we're seeing.”

As J.C. and his team monitored Abd al-Rahman's movements, they showed pictures—of buildings or people Abd al-Rahman visited—to Mubassir, who explained whom or what we were looking at. Most recently, Mubassir had identified a second house, belonging to Abd al-Rahman's brother-in-law, where Abd al-Rahman had recently moved his family. The task force gradually built up fourteen sites throughout Baghdad that were part of Abd al-Rahman's routine movement.

I had heard people get excited about detainees before, but I listened to what he was saying. Across the gravel, where Mubassir was detained, the interrogators continued to build rapport. One day they set him up in one of the interrogation booths so he could watch a movie. At his request, his interrogators brought in their own chairs and took turns watching it with him. They had managed to find a copy of the film he had asked for, which he said was his favorite:
The Exorcist
.

*   *   *

J.
C.'s focus remained controversial within the command. The squadron was doing its best with limited ISR, and during the weeks we watched Abd al-Rahman, it hit one or two targets a night throughout the country. But this was way
below the operational tempo I had been pushing—and that I felt was necessary to keep Al Qaeda in Iraq disjointed and wheezing. The assault troop based out of that compound in Baghdad was essentially sitting on hold, as the squadron's intelligence staff and 70 percent of its ISR assets were focused full time on Abd al-Rahman.

The wait was grating. Every day that we watched Abd al-Rahman, other targets went undisturbed. I was worried that if he was a wash—and we had seen other seductive leads go cold—we would have allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq weeks to heal and strengthen. The days that Abd al-Rahman relaxed at home and out of sight were excruciating.

Meanwhile, outside the field of view of the ISR feed, Baghdad was on fire. In the weeks after the Samarra bombing at the end of February, the violence was carried out in impulsive spasms. Now, by the end of May, three months after the bombing, the sectarian killing programs were accelerating. Armed militias of Sunni and Shia led systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad. By the end of May 2006, more than
eighty thousand Iraqis had been uprooted, seeking shelter elsewhere in the country. Meanwhile, Baghdad's central morgue had taken in 1,398 bodies during the prior four weeks, the most since the invasion. And yet this was only a portion of the real death toll in the capital city, as the morgue didn't perform autopsies on
victims of the city's bombs.

During these tense weeks, I went down to Baghdad to meet with J.C. and his team as I had on each of his previous rotations. I wanted to show them my support and interest. Given the stakes, I also wanted to know more about their thinking. I met J.C. at the squadron's Green Zone villa during daylight, when most of the assault teams were still asleep from the previous night's operations. J.C. left the monitors under the watch of his team and joined Mike Flynn, Joe, the commander of J.C.'s squadron (headquartered at Baghdad), and me on the couch in the next room. We cradled Styrofoam cups of coffee as J.C. ran through what he had been watching.

Every morning, normally at around 9:00
A.M
., the silver sedan showed up outside Abd al-Rahman's house. Abd al-Rahman came outside to the street, said good-bye to his wife and family, and got in. The driver always opened and closed the front passenger door for him. They drove around the city, stopping for meetings, until dinnertime, when Abd al-Rahman returned home. He repeated the routine each day, varying only the locations throughout the city. They mapped and logged each location in a database—from the gas station at which they filled the tank to where Abd al-Rahman bought bread to his regular, sketchy meeting places.