Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs

by Walker, Johnny

  I visited Tal Afar with the SEALs three times between 2005 and 2007. Each time, we came as part of an effort to apprehend local mujahideen leaders. The castle grounds were used as a camp and lookout area—they had plenty of space and great vantage, which made the place perfect. As soon as we arrived, I took a walk to one of the towers and admired the view.

  With things quiet, I took out my phone to call my wife.

  We’d just started talking when I suddenly heard the distinctive sound of AK-47 rounds slashing through the air and hitting the wall nearby.

  Tshkew, thskew, thskew.

  Soheila asked what was going on.

  “A wedding,” I told her. “You know the people—they are celebrating. Firing into the air. They are happy.”

  Happy to kill me, I thought, but I didn’t add that.

  Hanging up with Soheila, I searched the area below for the gunmen. I finally spotted some men with rifles and called over one of our snipers. In short order, the insurgents were killed or chased off. But the fact that they were bold enough to fire on the main American camp in the middle of the city in broad daylight says something about them—and the Iraqi army unit that was allegedly providing security.

  The next day, we were assigned to help an Iraqi unit clearing mujahideen from an area in the city. Their plan was to go door to door, searching and inspecting every house in a neighborhood where mujahideen were known to be operating.

  We met with the commander of the Iraqi unit and discussed what they needed. The SEALs had conducted dozens of these missions themselves, and had no trouble giving the Iraqi army advice. The Iraqi commander seemed to accept it. The only caveat was that he wanted to conduct the searches and most of the sweeps himself. That wasn’t a problem, and the SEALs quickly supplied a strategy.

  The general idea was that the Americans would move first into a central house, where they could watch the area. Once they were ready, the Iraqis would begin their sweep, moving methodically through the neighborhood, securing and searching one or two houses at a time. Meanwhile, the SEALs would protect the Iraqis and act as lookouts.

  There were a few wrinkles: the Iraqis and SEALs didn’t have radios that could work together, and the Iraqi unit lacked maps or, from what I could see, any ability to make them.

  I drew up a map and gave the commander my cell phone number, settling on that as a means of communication. The SEALs tried mingling with the Iraqi unit, eating dinner with them and socializing as a way of building confidence between the two units. It was a tactic I’d seen them try before with American units; it was a little thing, but in battle the outcome often depends on many little things working together.

  Dawn broke. Our team went to a small house nearby and began the overwatch.

  Once the house was secured and the family that lived there taken care of, I went outside and took a walk around, assuming the SEALs didn’t need me to be with the family. I liked to amble around and scout the area. I had a long beard and dressed like an average Iraqi; I blended in well.

  The Iraqi force was just getting into position nearby. The first house they were going to hit was next door, and by coincidence, I happened to see one of the soldiers running along the fence, his helmet loose and bouncing on his head. Whether he tripped or was just discombobulated, he hit the fence as he ran. His helmet slid so that it blocked part of his vision. It was like watching a comedy routine, except it wasn’t very funny.

  What happened next was even less humorous. I stood watching him in disbelief as he straightened, spotted me, then raised his gun in my direction. Before I could do or say anything, he had fired three rounds.

  All missed, somehow.

  I ran back inside the house, surprised to be alive. He’d fired at point-blank range, no more than a few meters away.

  “What’s going on?” asked one of the SEALs.

  “One of the Iraqis almost killed me.”

  “What?”

  “One of our Iraqis,” I said, explaining what had happened. The team’s ranking petty officer came over and heard the story. In the meantime, the area outside was checked; the Iraqi had moved on with the rest of his unit, which was now moving to a search a new house.

  “What do you want to do?” the petty officer asked me.

  “I have no more trust,” I told him. “He saw me—he had to know who I was. We ate with them last night.”

  “And he still fired at you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have no more trust.”

  “Then we’re done with the mission.”

  We went to the Iraqi commander. He didn’t seem to understand how seriously we took the incident. Maybe he just didn’t put that much value on human life, or at least mine. But he was finally convinced to call the soldier over to talk.

  “Hey, buddy,” I told the man. “Do you know you almost killed me?”

  “Oh, sorry about that,” he said, shrugging. His tone was just a hair less polite than what you might say to someone who bumped into you outside a movie.

  Our NCOs closed the operation down.

  THAT WAS OUR last experience with that unit, but it was far from our last “interesting” experience with the Iraqi army or other forces, whether in Tal Afar or anywhere else. As the war went on, we dealt with them more and more. The quality varied greatly.

  Iraqi units came in several varieties, but they could be divided into two groups, those under the Ministry of Defense—essentially the army—and those that worked for the Interior Ministry—essentially the police. The main army forces we worked with were known as ICTF or sometimes just ICF, which stood for “Iraqi Counter Terrorism Force.” The primary Interior Ministry force was the “ERU” or Emergency Response Unit. These units were supposed to be special operations teams modeled after Western units. It would be a stretch to say they were the Iraqi equivalent of the SEALs or even a good SWAT team back in the States, but they were better trained and equipped than units in the regular Iraqi army and police force. All were trained by Americans to some degree; in fact, we did a lot of the training ourselves, mostly by taking them into the field.

  Working with the Iraqi forces was a by-product of the counterinsurgency plan implemented by General David Petraeus, which was executed in coordination with the surge. The first phases of the plan called for tactics very dear to the SEALs—violence of action against the terrorists. The many missions against suspected terrorists, the arrests, the gunfights—all were aimed at doing serious damage to the insurgency. As the attrition mounted, Iraq’s institutions were supposed to have space to revive themselves. American forces would eventually be phased out, replaced by Iraqis.

  The middle space, where Iraqis were trained up to take over, was the most difficult one. It wasn’t just that the soldiers needed to be taught how to do tasks like searching a building or securing a marketplace; the Americans had to trust them. As my encounter in Tal Afar showed, that wasn’t always easy or possible.

  As the war went on, I generally found the ICTF more dependable. Their intel tended to be a little more reliable, though nowhere near the level that the SEALs had received and used earlier in the war. More importantly, they were more professional when going after their targets. To them, it didn’t matter whether the person they were seeking was Sunni or Shia. The ICTF’s composition was mixed; it was a majority Sunni, but there were also a good number of Shia and Kurds in the ranks. I think the fact that they had all worked together may have helped make them more neutral; if they were going after a bad guy, they didn’t care what his religious beliefs or alliances were.

  The ERU units were usually a stark contrast. There was definitely a link between the Interior Ministry and the Shia militias—I visited the ministry building in Baghdad one day and saw a militia flag prominently displayed on one of the floors. The ERU members were predominantly Shia, and rarely if ever went after Shiite targets. That didn’t mean that they might not do good work otherwise, but it did make them very hard to trust unilaterally.

  The quality of the units throughout
the country also depended a great deal on how much experience each individual member had, how long they’d worked together, and of course how good the officer corps was. I remember working with an ICTF officer who was so naive he tried to set up an observation post in the middle of farmland, where he would not only be easily spotted but quickly surrounded. I aborted that mission myself, simply by standing outside the small building he’d picked: I was seen and we had to leave. I’m not sure what might have happened otherwise.

  It was during this time that I formed one of my closest friendships with a SEAL, a chief still on active duty whom I’ll call the Quiet Man. The name is an allusion to the John Wayne movie—a favorite of mine—but more importantly, it described the chief’s manner. He was a calm person, with a quiet manner even when the shit hit the fan.

  The Quiet Man was the sort of fellow you can picture walking upright through a fire with long, measured steps, his feet untouched and his stride unhurried. He was extremely fair skinned, so he couldn’t pass as an Iraqi, yet he often found himself running around in Baghdad on various errands dressed much like a civilian, driving in a pickup truck with no external security. Worried that he would get into trouble—he would have been a valuable target—I used to argue with him to take me along. He just waved me off. The most he’d let me do was fix his scarf so his white face wouldn’t be so obvious.

  Obviously, he knew what he was doing, because he was never attacked. But I worried about him like I worried about my wife and kids.

  I’d first met the Quiet Man back in 2004, when he was coordinating interpreters for the task group I was assigned to. He’d impressed me then, not only for his combat skills but for his ability to deal with the various personalities and egos. At one point, he had ten interpreters answering to him; there was a lot of what he calls “man drama” between them—present company excepted, of course. Petty squabbles and jealousies always seemed to calm when he came into the room, and he had a way of making all the silliness disappear when he reminded you of the mission and why you were there.

  Now the Quiet Man was back for his third tour in Iraq. He’d seen the arc of the entire war, as the pendulum swung from American control to Iraqi. The Quiet Man was an excellent choice to work with the Iraqi units, whether they were ICTF or ERU; he was wary, very familiar with Iraqis, and unflappable. We soon became good friends.

  One of the biggest problems for the Quiet Man and the rest of the SEALs was navigating the different politics of the Iraqi groups. That was a problem for me, as well, though I at least had the advantage of knowing who was who and being able to sort the different prejudices. Dealing with the ERU could be particularly treacherous, not because they were out to kill Americans, but because they tended to view any Sunni as a permissible target. Subsequently, their intelligence was often bad.

  I remember one night we went to three houses in a row without finding anything the ERU intelligence promised; worse, their men practically destroyed the houses while searching for a nonexistent weapons cache. Needless to say, that didn’t win any points with either the occupants or their neighbors, who undoubtedly got a full report the next day—and for weeks to come.

  We’d apologize—profusely—to the people when the intel turned bad, and pay them for damages, but there was little else to be done. It got so bad that for a while I think sources at the Defense and Interior Ministries had to be targeting each other back and forth in their own little power game. We’d go to a house and find that the owner’s son was in the army, or a policeman. Under other circumstances it might have been hilarious, but here it could have easily been a matter of life or death.

  There were other problems. One night we went on a raid with the ICTF. It was a good arrest; we ended up with a jackpot who was implicated in earlier attacks. But one thing seemed odd—we couldn’t find his cell phone after he surrendered.

  That was highly unusual; just about everyone had a cell phone in Iraq. We were discussing this back at the camp when someone—I assume one of the sources—announced that he had his phone number and called it.

  A phone rang in a nearby room where the ICTF soldiers had gathered.

  “Oh, I forgot I found it,” said the man, turning it over.

  Looting gradually diminished as the war went on, not so much because the Iraqi soldiers became more honest, but because the SEALs started checking their rooms more carefully and running inspections.

  With the Iraqis taking the lead, my services were even more in demand. There was a stretch through 2006 and 2007, and even into 2008, when I and some of the other interpreters would run three or more missions a night, working with different teams. We’d get back from an operation and jump into another vehicle with the next group; come back and do it again.

  Truthfully, I loved the excitement and the adrenaline; even better, I felt that I was getting a lot done and making a difference.

  But in retrospect, it was taking a physical toll. I was smoking a lot and collapsing into sleep whenever my work was done.

  It wasn’t just me. A truck flipped over early in 2008, killing a number of Iraqi soldiers who’d been working with us. That was followed by another accident with a Humvee. In both cases, fatigue was cited as a possible—though not the main—reason for the accident. The powers that be decided the mission pace had gotten too heavy and started ordering breaks and a lighter tempo. I don’t think anyone complained.

  IN 2007, WE WERE to get a man known to us as Nassar Farhan. Farhan was considered a very high ranking Shia cell leader. I’ve long since forgotten the names of most of the men we were assigned to arrest, but somehow his has stayed with me. It’s not because he was more evil than any of the other men we encountered—not one of them was a great humanitarian, and most were mass murderers by any sane standard. But we were looking for him for so long that it was almost like an obsession. Intel would come in and lead nowhere. He was always “on the radar”—an Americanism it took me a while to understand—but we never found him in the flesh. How many leads we chased down, how many rumors were heard and checked—the total must be in the hundreds.

  One day an American army unit contacted the SEALs and told us they thought they had apprehended an individual on our list of suspects we were assigned to apprehend. They’d stopped a car in Baghdad with six men who’d raised their suspicions—why I’m not sure, though the number alone was probably a factor. One of them, they seemed to think, was Nassar Farhan.

  My boss at the time was a chief petty officer I’ll call the Bishop. He was friendly, quiet, and extremely low key—if you saw him on the street in the States, you would never expect that he was a SEAL. Mess with him and you’d find out real quick that you’d made a serious mistake. His hands were fast, whether there was a weapon in them or not. His only real drawback in Iraq was his light features, which made it impossible for him to pass as anything other than a Westerner.

  The Bishop had me and some of the men in the platoon board a Stryker and drive over for a look. The ride took quite a while, and with every passing moment, I felt the tension build. Were we really going to find Nassar Farhan? We’d been chasing him for so long, it didn’t seem possible.

  And it wasn’t. None of the suspects looked anything like the description we’d been given for Nassar Farhan. And none of the names on the IDs were Nassar’s.

  Nonetheless, I started interviewing them one by one. The IDs they’d presented all looked fake, but each man stuck to the stories they’d given the army unit. I was carrying an old photo of Nassar taken many years before—it was so old that he had a tie on. Maybe one of the men looked like an aged version of him, but it was anything but a close match.

  The Bishop was inclined to release the men. While they were certainly suspicious, there was no evidence against them, and the names they had given weren’t known to be the names of any insurgents.

  While he was discussing the situation with the soldiers, I noticed that one of the Iraqis seemed to be a little nervous. Was he scared that something would happen to him? Or
was he afraid that some secret he was trying to hide would come out?

  I persuaded the Bishop to let me talk to the man before any decision was made on whether the group should be released. Then I marched into the room where they were being held and pointed sharply at the nervous Iraqi.

  “You, come with me,” I said sharply. I led him out to the Stryker.

  Inside the back of the truck, I asked him what kind of work he had done before the war.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he told me he was a member of the Iraqi Special Forces.

  I didn’t believe him until he mentioned the name of a sergeant major whom I knew. Either he was with the Special Forces or he had very good information on them.

  “So what are you doing with the bad guys in there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that they are bad.”

  “Do you know what they do? They kill women and children.”

  We talked for a while, without getting anywhere, until finally he asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “You know what I want,” I said. “Information on these men. Don’t ask me stupid questions. Tell me what I need to know so I can release you.”

  He hemmed and hawed a little bit, but I could tell he wanted to talk.

  “I can let you go,” I told him. “But only if you give me information.”

  “Okay,” said the other man finally. “One person inside—he is a cell leader.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Nassar Farhan.”

  He described the man I’d noticed, but I wasn’t convinced, even though no one had mentioned Nassar to the Iraqis. I acted as if I didn’t know who Nassar was. I asked a few more questions, then told my new “friend” that I would take him back inside.