by Eric Maddox
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Just got in,” he replied, dropping his bag and coming over to pick the leftovers off my plate. He was still grinning, an expression I remembered from our time together in Baghdad. I hadn’t gotten a good impression of Allen the arrogant. He had an attitude and wasn’t a team player.
“What brings you out here?”
“They need support for some big raid,” he replied, still chewing.
“I thought you guys were real busy down at BIAP.” I didn’t like where this was going.
He shrugged. “I speak the language,” he said. “I guess I’m in demand,” he added condescendingly.
I’d forgotten about that. Allen was fluent in Arabic. Suddenly I had competition. And he had a definite advantage. I tried to tell myself that there was nothing to worry about. He was just here for the roundup. But I still felt uneasy. The realization of just how much I wanted to stay in Tikrit, to continue the work I started, took on new significance. After only two weeks, I felt like Tikrit was the right place to be. More important, the team needed me as much as I needed them. I liked my job. And I was getting better at it every day. Allen’s arrival might put an end to that before it really even began. Where before I was paranoid my time was limited, now I could see my stay in Tikrit had an expiration date.
It was mid-August and well over a hundred degrees in the shade. The blistering heat had figured into the planning for the Haddoushi roundup. The raids had been set for the eleventh of the month at 1400, the hottest part of the day. The reason was simple: everyone would be in their homes, taking naps to escape the scorching midday sun. The streets would be empty, making it easier for us to move through the city. The targets would more likely be at the locations we’d identified. Jeff had a name for it: the witch hunting hours.
That morning, the pace of preparations increased. Another element of the task force had arrived from Baghdad to assist in the operation. The house was crowded and I could tell by the muffled music in the shooters’ headphones that they were getting themselves ready. There was always more metal rock in the hours before a hit.
I was walking back from the guesthouse, where a small gym had been set up. Exercise was my way of preparing myself and, unlike the shooters, I was nervous and excited about going on the hit. I had at least something to do with bringing this engagement about. More than anything I hoped we would be rolling up Muhammad Haddoushi before the day was over.
I heard a honk and turned to see Matt and Jack pulling up behind me.
“We’ve been talking to that guy you worked with back at BIAP,” Jack told me from the open window of the SUV.
“Yeah. Allen,” I said, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
He nodded. “He said he’d be willing to relocate up here to Tikrit.”
That was the last thing I wanted to hear. But it got worse.
“We don’t need two interrogators, Eric,” Matt added, leaning over from the passenger seat. “They won’t allow it.”
“So you want me to leave?” I sounded pathetic even to myself.
“The guy speaks Arabic,” Jack said. “We wouldn’t need a terp with him. He could do the interrogations here and we could use Adam for the raids.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. There was no reason for them to keep me, except for my vague intuition about bodyguards. And that wasn’t good enough. It was easy to see that they didn’t care one way or the other. I was interchangeable with Allen as far as they were concerned. They just wanted the job done, as simply and straightforwardly as possible. Suddenly everything slowed to a crawl. My thoughts arrived in slow motion. I envisioned the last grain of sand in the hourglass freefalling with a thud, marking the end of my time in Tikrit.
I stepped back as they drove away. I’d had a good run. I’d learned more about interrogating in the time I’d spent here than anything they’d taught me at school. But it still felt like a kick in the front of the shorts. I was just getting up to speed, feeling my way through the labyrinth of the city, following leads wherever they took me. Now I’d be going back behind the wire of the BIAP where it didn’t really matter what I did or how well I did it.
It had to have been close to 120 degrees when we finally left the compound for the Haddoushi roundup. It felt even hotter in the back of the armored Humvee where I was sitting. The scorching wind blowing in my face felt like a blast furnace and I was relieved when we reached the objective within five minutes. Grateful as I was to have the wind out of my face, I didn’t have time to think about what we might be driving into. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
The team I was with, which included a terp we had borrowed from the 4th ID, took up positions at opposite ends of a street where one of Little Saddam’s houses was located. Our job was to move along both sides and link up in the middle, emptying out all the houses along the way. Two blocks over, another team, using Adam as their terp, was deployed the same way.
The 4th ID terp was given a bullhorn to order everyone onto the street and my job was to interrogate as many as possible, to either identify the bad guys or find out where they were. As the shooters jumped out of the Humvees and took their positions, the terp starting barking commands into the bullhorn. The only problem was, the bullhorn did not work. Unsure what to do, he just kept talking into the dead mouthpiece while everyone waited for something to happen. Standing next to him, I tried to get things moving.
“Just yell,” I told him. “Get up and yell as loud as you can.” He looked confused but did what I told him. Nobody was coming out onto the street. “Louder!” I urged him.
It was then that I caught of glimpse of Matt staring at me from the front of the Humvee. If a look could have blistered paint, that would have been it. I immediately understood that I had made a serious mistake. I was attached to the finest military unit in the world and I had taken it upon myself to intervene in a contingency situation. We were in the middle of a large-scale hit with a lot of moving pieces and the distinct possibility of shots being fired. It was not my place to make a decision on the raid. I was way out of line.
Fortunately by this point people were starting to emerge onto the street, so I began interrogating them. The task force rounded up the adult males and brought them to me. We’d moved as a group to the next house and after about a half hour, we met up with the second half of our team in the middle of the block.
We had about a dozen detainees by then, handcuffed and blindfolded, gathered in a backyard. Adding the men captured by the other team, we formed a lineup. We quickly questioned them until we found one who admitted to knowing Haddoushi and his family and had him identify as many of the prisoners as possible. We had netted a couple of Little Saddam’s brothers-in-law, some cousins and a nephew. But no Muhammad Haddoushi. I wasn’t sure what the other teams would turn up at the remaining houses, but as far as I was concerned, we’d hit another dry hole.
By 1730 that afternoon the raids were over. We were back at the compound conducting an after action review (AAR). A lieutenant colonel had come from Baghdad for the raids. Even though we all had our doubts, the officer proclaimed the operation a success. The reason was simple, if not exactly on point. Haddoushi may have eluded us, but the roundup had netted four other wanted men. They weren’t the HVTs from the deck of cards, but instead were on another list of three hundred former regime members and Saddam sympathizers.
I understood the value of these targets, but still wondered how the roundup could be considered a success when the guy we were after hadn’t been nabbed. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that there was a flaw in our approach. Taking one-time government and military personnel off the streets wasn’t getting us any closer to the HVTs who were our real objectives. Those three hundred names were part of the old order in Iraq, the one we had already overthrown. There was a new network now, the one tasked with hiding Saddam and killing Americans. Maybe these guys were part of that network. Maybe not. But instead
of just arresting them and congratulating ourselves on a job well done, we needed to go deeper. We needed to focus on anyone and everyone who could tell us the names of the real bad guys. That’s why we’d gone after Haddoushi in the first place, not for what he’d done. He hadn’t even been a full-fledged member of the regime. It was the intel he could provide that made him a prime target. Because Haddoushi’s nephew had been killed with Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, we thought he might be privy to Saddam’s current whereabouts.
Not that my assumptions made any difference. I was just the interrogator. The brass were satisfied with the results, with a few exceptions.
“Listen,” the lieutenant colonel concluded, “I’m not sure what to say about the AD that happened out there today. I guess we just have to remember the simple rules: selector switch on safety and finger out of the trigger well.”
I bolted upright. An accidental discharge? Someone had unintentionally fired his weapon? That was unheard of among the task force and easily one of the most serious infractions one could commit. As the meeting broke up I hurried over to Jeff. “What happened with the AD?” I asked.
He pulled me aside. “It was Allen,” he told me. “That interrogator from Baghdad.”
I could hardly believe my ears. Allen the arrogant was now AD Allen.
“How did it happen?”
“He was talking to some ladies and shot right at their feet.”
“And that means?”
“Eric,” he replied. “If an operator has an AD, he’s out. Period. Sorry, but your pal is history.”
As it turned out, the day wasn’t a total loss. Allen’s quick trigger had inadvertently plugged the hourglass.
Chapter 7
FEAR UP HARSH
1800 12AUG2003
I had been in Tikrit for just over two weeks, working a constant schedule of interrogations. There were valuable lessons to be learned every time, as much from my failures as my successes. Except that in my situation, success was hard to define. Since I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I wouldn’t have recognized it if I had found it. So I just kept plugging away, piling up information and trying to make sense of it.
For every prisoner who gave me a piece of valuable information, there were ten who gave me nothing at all. Maybe they didn’t have anything to begin with. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to get it out of them. It was trial and error, hit and miss. But I was definitely developing my own approach.
I compared what I was getting from detainees to what was being supplied by the informants to the case officers. I was more inclined to believe what the prisoners were telling me. For one thing, I knew what their motivation was. I was providing it. I had control over their lives: their freedom and their future. That gave them a real incentive to tell me the truth.
But there was also a definite disadvantage to the intelligence we gleaned from interrogations. From the moment they were captured, there was a time limit on any information a prisoner had. Once news traveled that he was in custody, the clock was ticking. After forty-eight hours at the latest, whatever bad guys he knew about would have gone into hiding or changed up their daily routine. For that reason I had to get what I was after as soon as I could and pass it along to Jack and Matt.
As I started refining my own method of questioning, I began to realize that it was different from the standard operating procedure of many other interrogators. That became especially clear to me when I participated in questioning the four prisoners we had rolled up in the Haddoushi raid. One of them in particular caught my attention. He was a former general in the Republican Guard and was well connected to the Haddoushi clan. He was definitely someone I wanted to spend some time with. But I had a problem. After the all-day Haddoushi roundup, Adam, the terp, was burned out. He needed a break and without a terp, I was useless.
Jeff had a solution. He told me to use Allen, who was still waiting around to go back to Baghdad after the accidental discharge incident. I tried to hide my reluctance. Aside from the fact that I just didn’t like the guy, I also knew that having an interrogator as an interpreter was asking for trouble. In an interrogation only one person can be in charge. When I worked with Jeff, he operated in a supervising role and the questions he asked were always in line with the direction I chose. With another interrogator, especially someone like Allen, the chances increased that the lines of authority would blur. The prisoner could take advantage of the situation.
To head off that possibility, I took Allen aside before we got started interrogating the captured general. I tried to explain the way I would be handling the questioning, based on the techniques I had learned over the past couple of weeks.
“I like to go into lots of detail,” I explained. “It may not seem important at first. And you may not know where I’m going. But just bear with me.”
“Sure thing,” he replied with a smirk.
The session started out smoothly enough. Allen translated the questions and answers without adding or omitting anything. The prisoner was doing a good job, too—a good job lying through his teeth about any connection he might have had with Little Saddam. I was patient, without letting on that I was aware of his deception. In every interrogation, I start with the assumption that I don’t know anything about the prisoner, that I have no idea what he might or might not be willing to discuss. So I just ask him about his life, the seemingly random details of his background. In my training, this was called building a timeline. The goal was to construct a chronological account of every aspect of his past: his family, his career, his finances, even his personal preferences. You were taught to either do it starting at the beginning and moving forward or picking up from the date of his capture and moving backward.
We were taught to build these timelines in sequence, but I didn’t like to do it that way. I would jump around, from one period to the next and from one subject to the other. I’d ask him what job he had in 1986, and then skip to the weddings he’d recently attended. I want to know the type of car he drove twenty years ago and what he had fed his dog six days ago. The point was to keep him from guessing where I was heading. That was the only way to stop him from getting there ahead of me. I’d be all over the map, scattering the individual timeline questions throughout the interrogation. It got very confusing—for the prisoner, for the terp and for almost anyone else who watched it unfold.
But it wasn’t confusing for me. I had learned to take every fragment of information I received and drop it into place on the appropriate timeline. If I found some area of discrepancy, a missed stitch in a web of lies, I’d store that away, too. I never asked a detainee to clarify a potential lie. I didn’t want him to suspect that I might have caught him in a deception. Confusion was my ally. As long as the prisoner couldn’t anticipate the next question, he wouldn’t be able to conceal what he didn’t want me to know. Then, when the time is right, I’d drop the hammer.
In some areas, I’m pretty inept. I’m not good at directions and frequently get lost as a result. I don’t handle tools very well, and couldn’t change a flat tire to save my life. But as an interrogator, I have the ability to remember everything a prisoner tells me, place it where it belongs, and create a mental picture. When that picture is complete, no matter how long it may take, I can see the lies standing out in sharp contrast.
Not every interrogator has that ability. Allen, for instance, started rolling his eyes impatiently after about three hours of my seemingly random questions. “You’re mixing this guy up,” he told me when we took a break. “You could have had a timeline two hours ago, but you keep jumping around. He can’t even remember what he told you to begin with.”
I looked him in the eye. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re doing a great job translating. Just keep it up.”
“No way,” he replied. “This is a waste of time. Get yourself another terp.”
I followed his advice and suspended the interrogation until Adam was rested. If this guy didn’t like the way I handled an interrogati
on, I must be doing something right.
A few days after Allen left Tikrit, the task force reeled in a big catch. His name was Rashid Abdullah and he was one of two top inner-circle bodyguards. He was a Marafiq, which meant he commanded the most elite Hamaya, those charged with personally protecting Saddam. Along with Rashid, the raid had rolled up two of his brothers and several of his sons and nephews.
“Listen, Eric,” Jack said, as the detainees were brought in for interrogation. “These guys are responsible for the deaths of a lot of our men. They’re bad dudes. Don’t let them talk their way out of here.”
This was another area where I differed from other interrogators. I really didn’t care how bad a prisoner was, or was supposed to be. Maybe they’d killed Americans, but they were soldiers and that was their job. Just like our job was to kill them. Did that make us bad guys?
As far as I was concerned it was my responsibility to look at the war and the men who fought it on both sides as objectively as I could. I couldn’t afford to be motivated by real emotion. I knew that when a soldier died, his family and friends would mourn for him better and longer than I ever could. I needed to focus all my attention on interrogating. I couldn’t afford to take what they may or may not have done personally.
The only thing that really did light my fuse was when a prisoner lied to me. That was preventing me from doing my job. I had zero patience for that.
My assignment in this case was to question one of Rashid’s captured brothers. The guy was totally relaxed and confident from the start. He seemed to be humoring me by answering my questions and for the time being I let him. I would have plenty of opportunity to run any number of intimidating approaches, including what interrogators call a “Fear Up Harsh,” when I’d inform a prisoner how much trouble he is in, at the top of my lungs. But there was no hurry. I wanted to see where he would take me on his own.