The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  But Lawrence had been fighting a completely different type of war than the Americans were. He and his tribal militias were trying to drive out the occupying Turkish army with hit-and-run attacks, not govern a country. “Lawrence was the insurgent,” Hix concluded. “His insights are useful, but we were wrong to treat them as canon law.”

  Casey’s small plane touched down on the narrow landing strip outside Tal Afar, where a car was waiting to ferry him the short distance to McMaster’s makeshift plywood headquarters. After a year in combat, McMaster’s regiment was heading home. Casey took a seat at a table piled high with muffins, coffee, and sodas while McMaster delivered what he thought was a routine briefing on his pullout plans.

  “Publish the orders,” Casey said suddenly as he rose to his feet. He pulled out a Bronze Star and pinned it to McMaster’s tan uniform. The surprise visit was an honor he bestowed on only a handful of his best field commanders. McMaster’s regiment had won praise for its successes. Like Petraeus, McMaster had had the good sense to make sure he had plenty of reporters around to document his troops’ triumphs.

  When his soldiers had arrived four months earlier they’d found an all-out sectarian war. Gangs of Sunni religious extremists kidnapped Shiites and left their headless corpses on the city’s streets. The city’s terrified police force, made up entirely of Shiites, holed up in the ruins of a sixteenth-century Ottoman castle in the city’s center, sending out small teams to conduct reprisal attacks on mostly innocent Sunnis.

  McMaster’s first priority was to stop the killing. At a time when many commanders were pulling back from cities and handing over their sectors to Iraqi forces, he established twenty-nine small outposts in an effort to separate the feuding groups. He replaced both the city’s proinsurgent Sunni mayor and its Shiite police chief with outsiders from nearby Mosul. Lastly, he closely controlled the Iraqi army and police forces in the city. With his area on the verge of civil war, McMaster believed that only an outside force could mediate between warring Sunnis and Shiites.

  Casey and Abizaid had long believed that U.S. forces in Iraqi cities fueled resentment over the occupation, and emphasized that their top priority should be to build up Iraqi forces. McMaster insisted that only American troops could stop the killing. In sharply worded assessments, he catalogued the Iraqis’ flaws. Local Sunnis were terrified of the abusive Shiite police commandos sent from Baghdad. The Iraqi troops were incapable of standing up to brutal Sunni insurgents. They couldn’t feed themselves without U.S. help or repair broken equipment. When one of their soldiers was killed by insurgents, the unit wasn’t even able to ship the body home. Instead the battalion commander ordered his men to put the decomposing corpse in a room with the air-conditioning turned on full blast. In a scene reminiscent of a Faulkner novel, the Iraqis then passed a hat hoping to collect cab fare for the 500-mile trip to the dead soldier’s family home in Basra. Eventually McMaster paid the fare.

  U.S. advisors complained that McMaster didn’t give their Iraqis a chance. “The Iraqi division commander in Tal Afar was really no longer the division commander,” Colonel Doug Shipman told an Army historian. “He was now taking very direct orders from a colonel in the American Army.” In Baghdad, the U.S. one-star in charge of the advisory program told McMaster that he didn’t understand Casey’s strategy, which emphasized training Iraqis and taking a step back so that they could handle the fight. McMaster testily dismissed the criticism. “It’s unclear to me how a higher degree of passivity would advance our mission,” he said.

  After Casey pinned on McMaster’s Bronze Star, the two walked down a narrow hallway and ducked into McMaster’s windowless office. Casey knew there was tension between McMaster and some of the officers above him. He told McMaster that he was an extremely talented officer who had a better sense for the war’s complexities than just about any other commander. But he needed to listen more and be willing to take no for an answer, especially when it came from his superiors. The two officers were polar opposites. McMaster, passionate and intense, was a risk taker who always craved a good argument. Casey tried to be a team player and searched for consensus.

  By late 2005, McMaster’s approach of moving U.S. troops into Iraqi cities and safeguarding citizens was starting to gain notice in Washington, where it had caught the eye of Phil Zelikow, a top advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. To sell the strategy as a potential model for the rest of Iraq, Zelikow decided he needed to come up with a pithy phrase that described it. He settled on “clear, hold, and build,” a play on General Creighton Abrams’s “clear and hold” strategy in Vietnam. U.S. and Iraqi troops would clear insurgents from an area. Instead of leaving, they would stay behind, as McMaster’s troops had done, establishing small outposts to protect the people. Lastly, they would rebuild the government and infrastructure.

  In late October, Secretary Rice unveiled the concept in testimony to Congress and Rumsfeld hit the roof, insisting that the term made no sense. “It is the Iraqis’ country. They’ve got 28 million people there. They are clearing; they are holding; they are building. They’re going to be the ones doing the reconstruction in that country,” he railed to reporters.

  Casey felt betrayed as well. When Rice next visited Iraq he pulled her aside. “Madam Secretary, what’s clear, hold, and build?” he asked.

  “That’s your strategy, George,” she said.

  “Well, if it’s my strategy, don’t you think it would have been appropriate for someone to ask me about it?” Casey replied.

  Later that day, he confronted Zelikow, whom he had hosted in Iraq a few months earlier. Casey didn’t explicitly object to the “clear, hold, and build” phrase, though he agreed with Rumsfeld that the priority needed to be on building up the Iraqis to take the leading role. He was most upset that Zelikow hadn’t sought him out to discuss the idea before he and Rice took it public. “This is bullshit. It is personal. You came here and I opened the books to you. I gave you free access to everything, and you don’t have the courtesy to call me and tell me what you are doing,” he said. In fact, Rumsfeld’s insistence that the Defense Department dominate the strategy debate and his refusal to listen to outside critics had made such cooperation almost impossible.

  With Iraq collapsing into civil war, President Bush cited McMaster’s approach as proof that after “much trial and error” and many bloody setbacks, the United States had finally found a winning strategy. An influential New Yorker article described McMaster and his troops as “rebels against an incoherent strategy.” By that point, McMaster’s regiment was home; U.S. troop levels in Tal Afar had been cut by more than half, and the security in the city was starting to deteriorate.

  Baghdad

  November 2005

  “I understand you are looking for a kidnapped boy,” an Iraqi colonel whispered to Brigadier General Karl Horst as they walked out of a routine meeting inside the Interior Ministry. “You need to go to this location.” He quietly pressed a piece of torn paper into the American officer’s hand. Horst, one of two assistant commanders in Baghdad, had been looking for the fifteen-year-old for several days, ever since the boy’s distraught parents told him that their son had been abducted by a Shiite militia with ties to the Interior Ministry. The scribbled note was his first lead.

  The location listed on the colonel’s note was a three-story concrete building near the Green Zone, known as the Jadiriyah bunker. When Horst arrived there, a dozen police officers in camouflage uniforms blocked the entrance. He told them to let him pass. They refused. After an extended argument and a call to the interior minister, an Iraqi general showed up and agreed to take him on a quick tour of the facility.

  For the next fifteen minutes they wandered up and down the same empty halls and stairwells. Horst was furious. “I want to see the prisoners,” he demanded.

  “We’re getting there,” the general replied.

  Down a dark hallway, he smelled a pungent odor coming from behind two locked double doors and ordered the jailers to open them. �
��The man who has the keys is gone for the day,” the general replied. Horst threatened to break open the lock with a sledgehammer, and the guards quickly produced the missing key. Inside the six-foot-by-twelve-foot room were a dozen blindfolded inmates. One of the prisoners began nodding toward a second set of locked doors at the back of the small, windowless room.

  As the door opened, Horst was hit by an overpowering smell of dirty bodies, urine, rotten food, and human feces that made him retch. One hundred fifty-six prisoners—all but three of them Sunnis—were sitting in lines with their legs crossed. The guards stepped outside, and the prisoners began lifting up their shirts to show bloody whip marks where they had been beaten. Many of them had been held in the building for months. At least sixteen inmates had died there.

  The guards identified themselves as part of an off-the-books unit within the Interior Ministry that patrolled largely Sunni neighborhoods of western Baghdad. “They’d run missions at night, gather up Sunnis, torture and kill them,” Horst recalled. Aside from a small cartoon-covered notebook with names written inside it, there were no records in the building. None of the Sunnis in the torture facility had been charged with a crime. There was also no sign of the fifteen-year-old boy. The United States evacuated two dozen emaciated prisoners to a military hospital. Horst snapped some pictures and stuffed the worst-looking torture implements—whips, handcuffs, a bloody metal pole, and a mace—into a box as evidence. During his nine months in Baghdad, Horst had come to believe that the Shiite-dominated police were waging a coordinated campaign to clear Sunnis out of the capital’s mixed neighborhoods. Now he had proof.

  Petraeus had left Iraq about two months prior to the discovery of the prison bunker to take command of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. Before he was assigned there he’d been told that the Pentagon brass were considering him for three slots: the Leavenworth position, a top slot on the Joint Chiefs staff, and an assignment as the superintendent at the U.S. Military Academy. The superintendent job was a terminal three-star position, meaning that if Petraeus was put there, he could never get promoted again. In early 2005, Army secretary Fran Harvey had casually mentioned to Colonel Mike Meese, the Sosh department head, that Petraeus might be headed to West Point. Meese, whose position in Sosh gave him more influence than the average colonel, flipped. “Sir, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” he said, arguing that it would take the talented general permanently out of the war.

  Petraeus was given the Leavenworth slot. He’d been replaced in Iraq by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, a smart and affable officer who had led the U.S. division in Baghdad in 2003. Before Petraeus departed, he’d heard rumors that Shiite militias were infiltrating the Special Police Commando force that he had spotted training on the edge of the Green Zone in late 2004 and had enthusiastically backed. The first hints of a problem came when General Thavit, the hard-nosed Sunni who had founded the group, was shunted aside by the Shiite-dominated government in the spring of 2005. Over the course of the summer the commando force grew rapidly and complaints about them multiplied. In Tal Afar, McMaster’s regiment snapped pictures of the police commandos’ abuses and sought their permanent removal from the sector. Hix and Sepp’s report to Casey in August 2005 noted that several U.S. officers had expressed concern about the Shiite force.

  Petraeus successfully pushed to have one police commando commander removed and cut off U.S. support to the Interior Ministry’s major crimes unit when its troops were caught abusing prisoners. But it was tough to get hard evidence of widely rumored atrocities because there weren’t enough advisory teams. The ten-man teams, each of which was assigned to a 500-man Iraqi unit, simply couldn’t keep eyes on the Iraqis twenty-four hours a day. “You had such limited means to put hands on [the commandos] and the need was so urgent to get them out there,” Petraeus recalled.

  Horst had been worried about the Shiite police forces since early summer, when he had first mentioned his concerns to Casey. He thought that sectarian violence and militia infiltration of the police were a bigger problem than Al Qaeda extremists coming into the country from Syria. “That’s not the read that I am getting from my guys, Karl,” Casey had told him. Like Petraeus, Casey had heard the rumors of Shiite militias taking over the police but could never nail them down. “We were always trying to figure out what the heck was really going on there,” he recalled.

  Horst believed the prison bunker proved that his earlier instincts had been right. A few hours after the last Sunnis had been taken from the facility he met with Casey and gave him the photographs from the prison bunker along with the box of torture implements. “Sir, this is a manifestation of the sectarian problem that we have been trying to describe,” he said.

  Casey took off his glasses and rested them on the top of his head as he stared at Horst’s pictures. He rubbed his eyes with both hands, something he did only when he was thinking hard or worried. He’d seen this problem coming. In an e-mail to a senior U.S. embassy official nine months earlier, he’d outlined the potential pitfalls of his strategy to shift the fight to the security forces. One of the biggest was that the government would “politicize the security ministries, the military and the police forces, heightening Sunni anxieties.” Now Casey was staring at a brown cardboard box of torture implements that suggested his greatest fear was being realized.

  The discovery couldn’t have come at a worse time. The second round of elections was set for December 30, just five weeks away. The Sunnis had boycotted the first vote in January 2005, and Casey was working to convince Sunni leaders to go to the polls in December. He reasoned that if the Sunnis took part in the balloting and won a place in the new government, the fighting might die down some.

  He promised Horst that he’d press Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to investigate what had happened at the bunker. He also wanted to assign an American team to probe whether the interior minister knew about the abuse. Horst’s body was coursing with adrenaline as he walked out of Casey’s small Green Zone office. He found Casey hard to read and wondered if he understood the severity of the problem. The secret prison proved that the U.S. strategy wasn’t working, Horst thought. The military was essentially handing power to a sectarian government and suspect militias. It was time, he believed, to try something different.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “What Would You Do,

  Lieutenant?”

  Green Zone, Baghdad

  November 2005

  Just before nine in the morning a convoy of Chevy Suburbans pulled up at the Adnan Palace, an ugly pyramid-shaped building on the western edge of the Green Zone. Casey clambered out of one vehicle along with several aides and diplomats, pushed through the towering wooden doors, and headed up the marble staircase to the second floor where Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, was waiting. A small man with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard who had spent years in exile during Saddam Hussein’s rule, Jabr now presided over a force that included some 135,000 local police and 30,000 national police commandos. He and Casey settled into a pair of cushioned armchairs. Like other government officials, Jabr normally didn’t start working until much later in the day, but Casey had wanted to see him first thing.

  “This is what we found,” Casey said, pointing at a cardboard box that his aide had brought to the meeting and placed on the low coffee table in front of them. It was the same container Karl Horst had shown Casey the day before, with the whips, shackles, and other torture devices that his men had removed from the Jadiriyah bunker. Sticking out of the top was a fearsome-looking barbed club. Jabr recoiled and then let out a resigned sigh. “Iraqis,” he muttered, as if such behavior was a national trait. Casey handed him photographs of the emaciated, broken men who had emerged from the dank prison. He wanted no misunderstanding. The secret prison was in an Interior Ministry building less than a mile from his office and guarded by men on Jabr’s payroll. The only possible conclusion, Casey said in a level but firm voice, was that Jabr himself or the people around him ha
d known about the facility and had condoned it.

  With his French-cuff shirts and passable English, Jabr was one of the smoother members of the cabinet. He knew nothing about this, he sputtered. He was far removed from such sordid matters. Many of the guards had trained under Saddam Hussein, when all prisoners were treated this way. What did Casey expect? “We will have an investigation,” he said. The meeting lasted no more than fifteen tense minutes. By the time Jabr appeared before the press later to announce the joint Iraqi-U.S. investigation of the prison, the minister had recovered his composure. Most of the prisoners had been foreign terrorists, he told disbelieving Western reporters, holding up several passports. “Nobody was beheaded or killed.” It had been worse under Saddam.

  Casey found Jabr hard to believe, too. After returning to his office, he ordered a secret investigation to assess whether the minister had known about the prison. Though it was never acknowledged publicly, U.S. and British intelligence eavesdropped on the top levels of the government, intercepting their cell phones and text messages. When the secret report came back a few weeks later, there was no definitive proof linking Jabr to the torture operation. But Casey was convinced that he at least had known about it. The bunker was run, the United States believed, by a relative of Jabr’s, known as Engineer Ahmed, who was often seen around Adnan Palace. The United States wanted to use the Jadiriyah incident to force personnel changes at the Interior Ministry, starting with Jabr. When Casey and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad presented Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari with the classified report a few weeks later, the subject only seemed to make him weary. “He just said, ‘Okay. I’ll look at this,’” Casey recalled. He and Khalilzad talked about whether they should try to force the prime minister to do something by giving him a deadline to take action or calling a press conference to further expose the abuses in the ministry. Casey decided it was the ambassador’s call. “As a military guy, I didn’t feel like I ought to dictate to the prime minister,” he explained. Eventually the subject of Jadiriyah was dropped. No one important was fired, and Jabr remained in senior government posts.