THE MISSIONS WITH the SEALs would soon blur together, but I remember my first one vividly. I went in with them to the room they used to gear up, watching them don their combat gear and ready their weapons. Night vision, machine guns—everything was different, everything was bigger, everything was better, than I had seen with the military police.
Holy crap, I thought. These guys are serious. What have I gotten myself into?
I wasn’t allowed in on the brief, but when we were ready to leave, one of the SEALs gave me the name of the jackpot—our target—and told me that we were going to apprehend him.
Then he tried to give me some body armor.
“No, thank you,” I told him. “I don’t want to die in your clothes.”
“No, no, it’s for your protection,” said the SEAL, who later became a good friend.
“If I am going to die, I want to die in my clothes. And I am not going to die.”
We went back and forth for a bit. Finally, Neal came over and told me in no uncertain terms that I was gearing up. The platoon chief told me I had no option—they were keeping me safe, and they were making all the judgments. So I put on a vest and a helmet.
The SEALs didn’t know what to expect from me. It wasn’t solely a matter of trust. I’m sure the MPs had vouched for me, and the SEALs had certainly done their own checking. But you never know how someone is going to act under stress until they are actually under stress. Combat stress and its consequences are unpredictable.
I’d already seen that and knew that interpreters in Iraq were a mixed lot. Looking back, I can say pretty definitively that everyone the SEALs had already worked with preferred to stay way back and out of danger, something that wasn’t always possible.
Neal and the others didn’t yet have a good feel for how I would react. Even so, I have to say they were way overprotective. Not only did they have me bundled up in armor, they had one of their members stay with me at all times, governing my every move: stay down, go here, down, up, get down. I don’t think a baby could have been better protected.
It made me a little crazy.
Just before we were going to leave, I asked the SEAL who’d been assigned as my escort—minder would be a better word—if I could bring a gun along for protection.
The SEAL—I’ll call him Wolf—told me in no uncertain terms that I could not.
“You’re an Iraqi,” said Wolf. “You’re not getting a gun.”
“I need protection.”
“We’ll protect you.”
There were probably some four-letter words thrown in as well to emphasize the point.
So I didn’t bring a gun. But I wasn’t about to go on an operation unarmed. I went back to my trailer and got the longest knife I had, a twelve-inch combat knife that some of the SEALs said later looked like a machete or a small sword. They’d told me I couldn’t bring a gun; they said nothing about a knife.
We drove in the direction of the target house, stopping far enough away that the Hummers wouldn’t tip off any lookouts or the people in the house. The military vehicles were very loud, especially at night when nothing else was going on, and any lookout with half a brain would know we were coming from a few blocks away. Out of the trucks, we formed up in a loose line and began walking in the direction of the target. The streets were dark and deserted. At this point, my job was to keep up and keep quiet.
I stayed next to Wolf as we walked to a spot a short distance from the jackpot’s house. Suddenly, he motioned for me to crouch.
Unsure what was going on, I obeyed.
Light flashed.
Ba-boom!
The explosion shook the ground. My first reaction, my instinct, was to get the hell out of there. I was scared beyond belief. I probably would have run off if it hadn’t been for the SEAL next to me.
“This is how we open doors,” Wolf said, calmly rising and nudging me to my feet. “Come on.”
We got up and ran to the house. The assaulters had blown open the door and secured the building by the time we got there. I went in and found the SEALs standing with a man who was looking pretty bewildered.
I’m not sure that my expression wasn’t exactly the same.
My babysitter and the other SEALs looked at me expectantly.
“What is your name?” I asked the man, who’d been sleeping when the door blew open.
I forget the answer now, but whatever it was, it matched the name of the man we were looking for. I turned and nodded at Neal. He’d already heard the name and motioned to the others. They took the suspect away.
In the meantime, a search of the house turned up some bomb-making equipment. The gear was taken away with him, to be handed over to the authorities.
And that was the night. Except for panicking and nearly running away, it had been a breeze.
I SHOULD POINT OUT that using explosives on doors was unusual. The SEALs had various ways of getting into the houses—among them was a nifty pneumatic tool that opened them as easily as popping the lid on a can of tuna—but often they simply turned the knob. You’d be surprised how many doors weren’t locked. Those that were generally gave way with a firm nudge. On many other missions, they’d simply knock.
That’s not to say that missions against high-level and risky targets didn’t involve force, or that SEALs never used the devices you see in movies like flash-bang grenades to surprise armed defenders. It depended on what the situation called for. But much of the showy drama captured in movies or other works of fiction was the exception. The only thing that was constant was the knowledge that a gun or an explosive might be behind the door, or in the next room. Danger was always present; it just wasn’t flashy about it.
The majority of the missions I did with the SEALs, not only with this unit but over the course of several teams and nearly a half-dozen years, were similar and simple in outline:
We were given the name of a suspect to apprehend, along with the details on where he lived and some way of identifying him. We would go to the house or the apartment—it was almost always a residential building of some type—usually arriving very late at night when everyone was asleep. We’d go in, find him, take him back to the base, and turn him over to whatever agency was looking for him.
The trick for me was figuring whether we got the right person or not. Only occasionally—maybe two or three times in total, as I look back—did we get photographs before the start of the mission. So making a positive identification was often tricky—not only did we have to worry about whether the person was telling the truth, but there was often a question about whether the intel we had was correct or not.
I say we because as time went on the SEALs relied on me more and more to do that part of the job. And as time went on, I learned different ways of finding out the true identity of the person we were questioning.
Naturally, things like bomb-making gear in the attic or heavy machine guns under the bed were pretty much a tipoff; even if the guy wasn’t the suspect, he would be taken in. But in a lot of cases, that sort of obvious evidence was missing.
Less people than you would think resisted, and even less resisted effectively. Maybe you might get resistance two times out of ten, or four out of ten later in the war—but in most cases suspects quickly realized they were surrounded by well-armed men and that physically resisting was pointless. Firefights were the exception rather than the rule.
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 secon
dary 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 SEA
Ls 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.
Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Page 10