Mission: Black List #1

by Eric Maddox

It wasn’t that we were in competition. I wasn’t trying to catch up with him. I just looked up to him. We’d come from the same place and shared the same values. There was a bond between us that couldn’t be broken even when, in April 2003, Casey died of unknown causes in his sleep. A few months later I’d find myself in Iraq, carrying the memory of my friend with me. I got to where I’d talk to him out loud about the challenges I was facing and the disappointments I was dealing with. Eventually I was even able to picture him sitting at a bar, maybe in heaven. He’d be having a beer with my grandfathers, both of whom had served with distinction in World War II. More than anything, I wanted to earn a place at that bar.

  My family was similar to those of most of my friends growing up in a small town in Oklahoma, except for the slight detail that my brother and I were adopted. I was only a few days old when they brought me home from the hospital, and in the years that followed, my parents never made a secret of the fact that I was adopted.

  What they couldn’t provide was any information about my birth parents. Those records had all been sealed as part of the adoption procedures. But that didn’t stop me from being curious and eventually that curiosity got the better of me. We would regularly drive to Enid, Oklahoma, on family visits to see my grandparents and because I knew that was my birthplace, I would stare out the car window at the people passing on the street. Any one of them could have been my mom or dad. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my parents, or think of them as my own. More than anything, it was that the information about who I was and where I came from was being denied me. That just made me more determined to figure it out.

  Maybe it was an early indication of my aptitude for interrogation. If there was something I wasn’t supposed to know, I couldn’t rest until I knew it. I can’t remember ever laughing harder than when the cop on The Simpsons asked his son, “What is your infatuation with the secret closet of mystery?”

  Maybe it was just the natural curiosity of any adopted kid.

  Either way, during the Labor Day break before my junior year of college, I went back to Enid on my own to see if I could crack the secret.

  I was determined to find my birth mother and had brought enough money to stay in a hotel for three days. I figured the best place to start was the public library. I searched newspapers dated on and around my birth date, but to no avail. After a couple of hours of frustration, the kindly librarian took pity on me and steered me to the records section, where I sifted through all sorts of references—everything from phone books to yearbooks. Finally, in the court records of adoption cases, I found what I was looking for. The judge accidentally let my mother’s name—Webster—slip.

  We returned to the yearbooks, looking for all female Websters until finally I came across a picture of a teenage girl who had a familiar look: Debbie Webster. When the librarian saw it, her eyes welled up. “Oh my God. That has to be her.”

  I looked up the name in some old phonebooks and discovered that a Debbie Webster had lived in Enid at the home of Thelma Webster until 1972, the year I was born. A cross-check of a current directory showed that the address was still listed.

  Now I had some soul searching to do. What was the point of this exercise? Was it to meet the mother who gave me up for adoption or was it just to prove I could find her? Either way, I had to play this out.

  The Webster residence was a small, white house with a screened-in front porch. An elderly lady sat smoking a cigarette out front. She eyed me with suspicion. I was a college kid and looked the part, with brown Cole Haan loafers, white tube socks, and a Tommy Hilfiger shorts-and-shirt combination. If I saw that kid today, I’d throw an egg at him.

  “Can I help you?” the lady on the porch asked me. I should have been more prepared. I hadn’t actually expected to find her, and up close I couldn’t see a resemblance. “Yes, hello…I’m, uh, looking for someone. Are you Thelma Webster?”

  “Who wants to know?” she asked, still suspicious.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m from Enid. I was born here and I was adopted and I think that you have a daughter, Debbie. If she had a child and gave it up for adoption, I think I’m that person.”

  She took another long pull off her cigarette and let the question hang in the air with the smoke for what felt like a lifetime. What was I doing here, I asked myself again. Was this a mistake? How long was that ash on her cigarette going to get before it fell off?

  After a long silence she responded. “No, no, you look too old.”

  “May 10, 1972, does that ring a bell?” I persisted.

  Finally she smiled and said, “Maybe you ought to come inside.”

  I blinked but stood motionless. Now I knew. I actually could have just left and been perfectly happy. They said I couldn’t find her, but I did. Hell, I did it in less than eight hours.

  Inside Thelma Webster told me that her daughter lived in Austin and volunteered to call her for me. I wasn’t at all ready to get on the phone but couldn’t find the words to stop her from making the call.

  Thankfully, Debbie wasn’t home. I asked Thelma if she had any pictures and she showed me several. I noted our striking resemblance in silence then asked if I could have one of the photos of my mother taken when she was in high school. She gave it to me and I thanked her. Then I left.

  I never attempted to contact either my mother or grandmother again. Finding them was enough. I keep the picture in my office and consider it to be one of my most treasured possessions.

  I had joined the Army to be a paratrooper. My goal was to be a “ground-pounder,” a grunt. I joined the Army to serve my country, and I wanted to make the most of my enlistment. Out on the front line was where wars were fought and won.

  In 1995 I made it into Ranger School and it proved to be every bit as tough and demanding as I had heard. But I made it through and went on to become a squad leader for the 82nd Airborne Division. I had achieved the goals I set for myself when I first enlisted. It was time to start thinking about new objectives.

  An interesting opportunity presented itself when I was sent to Latin America for training exercises. I started learning street Spanish from the locals. I had never considered myself especially good at learning languages, but I enjoyed the process. It prompted me to check out the Army’s foreign-language program. I took the test and scored high enough to get my choice of any of the dozens of languages being taught at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. I picked Mandarin Chinese. At that point I was offered two options. The first was to be a voice interceptor. That basically consisted of sitting in a windowless room with a pair of headphones listening to foreign radio transmissions. The second was to be a Mandarin Chinese interrogator. Since we weren’t at war with China, the likelihood of actually interrogating anyone was pretty slim. But it was certainly preferable to sitting behind a desk monitoring broadcasts eight hours a day. So I signed on. I figured it might prove useful when I left the military and moved into the private sector. A working knowledge of Chinese could be a very marketable skill.

  It was also one of the hardest languages in the world to master. Over the next eighteen months I struggled to read, write, and speak it; and, when I graduated in 1999, it was by the skin of my teeth.

  There wasn’t a lot of forethought that went into my decision. It wasn’t as if I ever wanted to be an interrogator or even thought I had the skills to be one. But once I made the choice, I was determined to do the best I could. From that point on, I thought of myself as an interrogator and wanted to do interrogations, even though I had no idea how to go about it and wasn’t likely to get the chance.

  Instead I was eventually sent to Beijing, where I was attached to the U.S. Embassy as a linguist and translator. Mostly my job consisted of translating newspaper articles and escorting American VIPs around town, sometimes even bargaining for them with the local shopkeepers.

  By late summer of 2000, I was back in the States, where I returned to Fort Huachuca for a course that would qualify me to become an E-6 staff sergeant. Wh
en I was there I met a woman in Tucson and we got married later that fall. We would go on to have two sons, but our marriage didn’t last. In our first few years together, I deployed six times, and nearly every tour was for six months. Our very young marriage couldn’t take it.

  There are many effects of war, not just casualties on the battlefield. Sometimes even two good people cannot make a marriage work. Whatever the reason, it was a difficult and painful decision. Thankfully both of us were committed to the kids as our number one priority.

  By the time our second son was on the way, the Army had loaned me out to a military intelligence agency. It was there that I first met Lee. We were sent on various deployments where our specific training and language skills could prove useful. I found myself increasingly desperate to take these trips.

  Then came 9/11. Suddenly I knew what I was supposed to be doing: hunting down these sons-of-bitches to the farthest corners of the earth. I started making numerous requests for assignments, anywhere and everywhere. Lee, who spoke Farsi, was naturally more in demand as an interrogator and would eventually serve in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. I had to be satisfied with a string of backwater deployments, far away from the action. But when the war started and the request came down for experienced interrogators with infantry training to go to Iraq, I saw my chance. I had no hesitation in pointing out to my superiors that I had volunteered for whatever they had thrown at me. Now there was a real war going on, with a real need for interrogators for the first time in decades. I may not have had the opportunity to ever interrogate a prisoner before, but it was not for a lack of volunteering.

  They saw my point. It had been a long time coming, but I was finally going to do my job.

  Chapter 4

  DOGS OF WAR

  1100 30JUL2003

  I woke up at 1100 feeling totally refreshed and revived. I’d only had about three hours sleep. There’s something about getting shot at by a fifty-caliber machine gun that gives you a whole new appreciation of life.

  Everyone else was still in the rack, so I took the opportunity to look around. Over the next few days, I’d get a complete picture of the mansion’s layout. Upstairs was a large open area with rows of bunk beds. This was the shooter’s quarters. Each one got both a bottom and top bunk. The bottom was to sleep on; the top was to store their weapons and equipment. There were a few couches and a TV where they played video games in their downtime. A corridor led to the operations room I’d seen on my first night, equipped with maps and computers for receiving and evaluating intelligence.

  From the second floor there was a view of the mansion grounds. From the back you could see the Tigris River, down the slope of a dead lawn past the thick brush of the bank. The wide flow of the river created a natural barrier to the post.

  Off to one side of the mansion was a guesthouse and behind that a large pool used by the task force. Its chlorinated blue water contrasted starkly with the dry desert in every direction.

  Downstairs, past the piles of weapons and ammo in the living room, a spacious kitchen opened onto the dining room. This was the main meeting area, where everyone gathered around the big table to talk and eat. Another hallway led to two more bedrooms and a laundry area with a washer and dryer.

  I was loading the few pieces of clothing I’d brought when I heard a voice behind me. “What are you doing up so early?”

  I turned to face one of the guys I’d seen in the operations room last night, short and compact, with a Midwestern accent. I couldn’t remember his name.

  “Rich,” he reminded me, sticking out his hand. “I’m the analyst around here.”

  It didn’t take long to find out that, in the hierarchy of the house, Rich was pretty low in the pecking order. For one thing, he slept downstairs. The upstairs bunks were reserved exclusively for the shooters. Along with Chris, a case officer who ran informants, and Larry, a computer guy who passed information back to the United States, Rich was part of the intelligence team and we all slept downstairs. It was our job to gather the reliable data for the raids. As more and more dry holes started turning up—raids in which the primary target was not captured—these were the guys who would take the heat.

  As we talked in the laundry room, I was able to glean more basic information. Added to what I had already gotten from Jared the terp, a clearer picture of the situation in Tikrit was emerging.

  The mission of the task force, Rich told me, had been to hunt down High Value Targets. As Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit had been hit hard and repeatedly. It was assumed that most of the HVTs in the area had already been rounded up or had scattered. “Right now,” Rich told me, “we’ll go after anyone we can find. Insurgents, Baath Party members, Saddam sympathizers.” He shrugged. “As long as we’re here, we’ve got to do something.”

  I thought about that for a minute, remembering Jared’s theory that Saddam’s bodyguards were worth taking a look at. I still had the list he’d given me in my back pocket. “So…are you getting close to anybody?”

  “Not really. But lately we’ve been trying to track down a dude named Haddoushi.”

  “Muhammad Haddoushi?” I asked. The name rang a bell; this was the bodyguard Jared thought might still be in contact with Saddam.

  I was hoping it would sound like I knew more than I did. “That’s the one,” he continued. “His nephew was killed when they got Uday and Qusay a few days ago. Those family links are important.”

  That also fit in with what the terp had told me about the relatives and tribes loyal to Saddam forming an interlocking network. “How do you get information about these people?” was my next question.

  “We have sources, but they’re not very reliable. Most of them were handed over to us from the guys here before us.”

  Voices from down the hall cut our conversation short. I followed Rich back into the dining room area, where the task force was coming in one by one for an early afternoon breakfast. I would soon learn to adjust to a schedule that started late in the day and ended early in the morning. I would also get to know who was who and what role each one played.

  A half dozen highly trained soldiers were at the core of the task force. These were the men who carried out the raids. Even when they weren’t on a mission they functioned as a tightly knit team. They slept in the same quarters, ate their meals together, and played video games with almost the same intensity as they did their job. They never made a big deal about their status as the military’s most elite unit. That fact was already well established. And being part of that unit meant that you handled your superior status with quiet dignity and humility. But there was an unmistakable distinction between them and the rest of the world. I knew from that first morning what side of that line I was on.

  Along with me on that side were Rich the analyst, Chris the case officer, and the rest of the intelligence team. This included three bodyguards who accompanied Chris when he contacted the sources providing him with their increasingly unreliable tips. Rounding out the residents were a bomb technician, a radio and communications guy, and an air tactician, whose job was to coordinate air support for the raids. Counting Jack and Matt, the first and second in command, the mansion was home to about sixteen men, give or take the occasional analyst or brass from Baghdad.

  The entire team had arrived in Tikrit only three weeks before me and they were still trying to get a feel for the environment. They were on the same steep learning curve I was on just three weeks ahead of me. I listened carefully as the shooters at the dining table talked matter-of-factly about last night’s raid while they ate their breakfast.

  My own breakfast was an MRE—meal ready to eat. I had noticed the well-stocked refrigerator and pantry in the kitchen but I didn’t know whom all that food belonged to, much less if I could help myself.

  “Hey, man,” said the guy with the handlebar mustache, who I would later find out was the air tactician. “We got a whole supermarket in there. You don’t have to eat that shit.”

  The fact was, I liked MREs, prov
iding I could pick just the best parts out of two or three of them at the same time. Right then, what had my attention was the shooters’ conversation. Jeff, the Texan I’d met the night before, had come downstairs and was talking to Carl, who’d accompanied me on the raid.

  “So,” he asked casually, as if I wasn’t even in the room. “How did Eric do last night?”

  Carl nodded his approval. “Went right at the guy. Didn’t even flinch when we got lit up, either.”

  If Jeff was the least bit impressed, he didn’t show it. Instead he turned to me and said, “I don’t know when you’re going back, but I’d still like you to interrogate that bodyguard.”

  “I’m here as long as you need me. Anything I should know about the guy?”

  “Fourth ID picked him up. Drunk off his ass. Supposed to be a big shot, but nobody knows for sure. Maybe you can find out.”

  “Okay.” Despite the good report Carl had given me, I felt bad about last night. The task force had done their job. My job had been to find Nezham. I didn’t know what the expectations were, but for me the bottom line was I hadn’t found the guy they were looking for. Maybe I’d have better luck next time, though who knew if there was going to be a next time.

  After breakfast I rode with Jeff out to the 4th ID prison where the detainee was being held. With Jared due to ship out, there was a new terp for the session, a haggard-looking Iraqi-American named Adam. He seemed harmless enough.

  As the three of us drove through the sprawling 4th ID base, Jeff gave me a brief tour. Formerly Saddam’s palace complex in Tikrit, it was as big as a good-size college campus. There were up to fifty mansions, each the size of the task force quarters, and three massive castles interspersed around manmade lakes. There had once been a luxurious garden, but that had long since died from lack of attention.

  “The Fourth ID controls this base camp,” he told me. “We just live here. Fourth ID is responsible for most of the Sunni Triangle. They make the rules and they own the battle space. We go after the HVTs. It is as simple as that. We get whatever we want and need to find them. If a detainee or source knows something about an HVT, we get them. Other than that, Fourth ID is in charge.”