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 thought you were going to release me,” he said.

  “First, let’s find out if you are lying.”

  “But—”

  I assured him that the others wouldn’t know he’d given him up, and that everything would be all right . . . if he hadn’t lied.

  “He’ll never admit it,” said the man. “Never.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Back inside, I called the man whom my friend had just identified as Nassar and took him into the Stryker.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I gave you my real name,” he said.

  “I didn’t say it was not real,” I told him. “What is it?”

  He gave a little smirk and repeated the name that matched the ID.

  “Okay,” I told him. “You want to play games? We will play a game. If I win, you will be hooked. If you win, I will release you. Deal?”

  He pretended not to understand.

  “If you answer correctly, then you will be released,” I told him. “Otherwise, you will be a prisoner. Deal?”

  “I am telling you the truth.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  I had him blindfolded, and placed a SEAL next to him. Then I brought the Iraqi who’d claimed to work with the Special Forces in.

  “Hey, I have a question I forgot to ask you,” I said to him. “Nassar Farhan—can you describe him to me?”

  “Yes.” He proceeded to give practically a centimeter-by-centimeter description of the man I’d had blindfolded.

  “What he is involved in?” I asked.

  “Kidnapping, killing . . .” He recited a litany of terrorist activities.

  “Thank you,” I said, dismissing him. The SEAL brought him back inside.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Nasser, removing the blindfold.

  “No, no,” he said. “He is the bad guy.” He proceeded to implicate the man who’d just been talking in a number of terrorist crimes.

  “Right now, I have to take both of you,” I told Nassar. “But I can make you a witness against him. What do you think, Nassar?”

  “Okay. I will do it.”

  “So your name is Nassar,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could.

  I thought I’d get an argument, but instead he started talking freely. He told us the names of several other insurgents, including one whom he answered to. He also told us about targets. He was a jackpot of a jackpot.

  The Iraqi who said he was in the Iraqi Special Forces hadn’t been lying about that. He had trained in Iran and then been returned specifically to infiltrate the special operations unit. Needless to say, he didn’t rejoin his unit. I believe a total of six people were arrested because of that one night.

  I have no idea what happened to them after they were arrested. Once turned over to the Iraqi government, they might be put on trial, or they might even be released. I’d never know.

  A DIRECT CONNECTION to Iran was not uncommon among the Shia insurgents and militia. While it was never emphasized in the media, Iran was actively training men and giving support and supplies to various Shia groups. Moqtada al-Sadr, the head of the so-called Mahdi Army, was only the most famous.

  Al-Sadr had a complex and contentious history in Iraq, vehemently opposing Americans on the one hand and trying to become a power in the government on the other. To give you just a taste of his story: He incited protests in Najaf—a city holy to the Shia—in April 2007, pushed followers to kill Americans, then declared a truce later that summer. The following year, his followers waged open war against the British in Basra, another Shiite stronghold. By 2011, Sadr had made peace with the Shia-dominated government—not a bad idea, as by then he controlled a large bloc of votes in parliament.

  It wasn’t hard to get the feeling that people’s lives were being sacrificed for whatever political agenda Sadr and others were pressing for. For some leaders, religion was just something to be used to advance their own agendas. That doesn’t mean that all people who were religious were naive or cynical, or that someone might not be truly religious and ambitious, but it was hard not to question motivations or feel that the whole process was at its core corrupt.

  AT ONE POINT in 2007, we went south to Basra with one of the Iraqi ICTF units. It was a mission I remember not so much because of what we did in Basra but for how we got there—via a C-130 aircraft flown by Iraqi pilots.

  In fact, we were the first troops they ever transported, a fact they were extremely proud of: so proud, in fact, that they waded through the crowded plane to tell us.

  I was sitting on the rear ramp near the Quiet Man. If you’ve ever seen the interior of a C-130, the ubiquitous cargo aircraft used by militaries all over the world, you know I wasn’t sitting back there by choice—there were so many Iraqis with us that that was the only spot I could find. When I heard what the pilots were saying, I nearly bolted from the plane.

  At least that’s the way the Quiet Man tells the story.

  Truthfully, I was nervous to begin with, and didn’t care to hear any pilot saying anything about being brand-new on the job. But the flight went off without a hitch.

  It’s not true that my eyes were closed the entire time—I know I had them open for at least a few seconds during the flight.

  The British met us at the airport, and for some reason they turned our arrival into a celebration. The ICTF soldiers were treated to a catered dinner, the sort of buffet you would see at a wedding feast. When it was over, we went out and made a routine arrest at a mosque; the Brits’ preparation must have been more elaborate than the actual operation.

  The Iraqi troops did a number of operations in Basra, especially in the Hayyaniya district. Any action that was deemed “culturally sensitive”—like raiding a mosque—now required the presence of Iraqi units and generally had them in the lead, at least in theory.

  That didn’t mean they went smoothly, or with no resistance. I was with an ICTF unit one night when a suspect decided he was going to try using me as a punching bag. I didn’t take too kindly to that; I coldcocked him, punching him so hard he fell unconscious. I was worried for a few moments until I saw that he was breathing.

  The British were good to work with, especially when they fed us, but they did have some odd ways. They followed regulations a lot more carefully than most Americans, even if those rules didn’t make much sense. I still remember standing with them in a chow line when an alert siren rang outside. The SEALs and I looked at each other as the Brits all dove to the floor. Apparently they had standing orders to take cover whenever that alarm went off, even though it went off a lot.

  We moved ahead and got food while the others waited for the all-clear. It wasn’t a bad rule, in retrospect.

  We’d come to the city that day for a mission on the western side of town, in a packed district of low-slung yellow and tan buildings that dotted a landscape of empty lots. Those sites had been houses just a few years before; destroyed by fighting and insurgent attacks, they’d been bulldozed away to improve security as well as the view.

  The view wasn’t much. Basra is a dry, hot town near Kuwait. Much of the surrounding area is desert, and the streets were arid, the air fetid. Barriers had been built by the British on some of the roads to slow traffic down. Along others there were small bushes that were supposed to add a little green.

  Our target was an insurgent cell leader who had been directing local operations. We found him without any trouble and brought him back to the base. But when we got there, he began playing games. He stopped cooperating and made it clear that he wasn’t going to help either the Americans or the British.

  And then he started in on me.

  “You are a Muslim,” he told me, playing the religion card. “Why are you working with the infidels?”

  “Give me one reason you call yourself Muslim,” I countered. “The word means peaceful. But you are killing people. Where is peace?”

  “No. You don’t understand Islam. T
hose guys took over our country.”

  “Why would they do that?” I answered. “They don’t need it. They came to release us from Saddam.”

  “You don’t understand. No, no, no. This is a conspiracy from multiple countries to destroy our country and religion.”

  “When we fail, we blame conspiracies,” I told him. “But it is our failure.”

  He kept insisting that I didn’t understand. The world was out to get Iraq and to destroy Islam.

  We spoke for a while. It was a typically frustrating conversation. The man was not well educated and fell back on a very simple formula. He started with what he considered a basic truth: the world is conspiring against Iraq and Islam. Because of that, he said, we must destroy our enemies. That was his entire argument, and I suppose the whole scope of his worldview. He could reason from A to B, but not get to C or D, let alone examine the premise of A. And no amount of logic could convince him he was wrong.

  Even if he had been more intelligent, there was too much at stake for him to examine his beliefs, let alone change them. For imagine what would happen if he did: his inevitable conclusion would be that he was a murderer. And few people want to face that.

  The man was depressingly typical of the suspects we captured as time went on, but it is hard to stereotype them all. More educated people made more sophisticated arguments. They usually cited American mistakes.

  “The Americans killed this, the Americans killed that,” they would say when talking to me. “What is your answer?”

  “You are right,” would be my answer. “They have made mistakes. It’s war. There are always mistakes. But what are we doing to help our country? How are we fixing ourselves so that we don’t need dictators or help from the outside?”

  People who were educated and yet still joined the insurgency were the most frustrating to me. They had real potential to help Iraq—they were exactly the people that a struggling country needs—but they were destroying it instead. I told more than one, “Why are you not fighting with your pen instead of an AK? With your education and science—you can make a tremendous community and country.”

  These discussions and arguments had no effect on them, much less on the entire situation in Iraq. They were between two men, or at most three or four. Even if I had changed their views—and I don’t believe that I ever did—there were still thousands and thousands of others who remained unconvinced.

  MENTIONING THE BRITISH reminds me of a story that illustrates how far my command of English had come. American English, I should say.

  Or maybe SEAL English.

  The British commander of Nasiriya—I believe he was a colonel—asked to see me while we were in the area. When we met, he prompted me to tell him what was going on with the local population. He wanted to know what sort of things I had heard from talking to suspects and people on the street (hatred for anyone who wasn’t part of their group), whether it differed from elsewhere in Iraq (not really), and in general what I thought the mood of the people was (ugly).

  I talked to him the way I talked with the SEALs. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but apparently I must have mixed in a lot of four-letter words as I spoke.

  “Thank you for your briefing,” said the colonel when I was done. “But I do believe that if you could not say the word ‘fuck,’ your speeches would be only half as long.”

  I laughed. He was probably right.

  “The SEALs taught you very well,” he added.

  NASIRIYA HAD BEEN the scene of some nasty fighting during the very early days of the war. It was also the area where Jessica Lynch was taken prisoner and later rescued by U.S. personnel. Since that time, it had been comparatively quiet—not a safe haven by any means, but nowhere near as bad as Baghdad or Mosul or many other cities where sizable populations of Sunni as well as Shia made for a volatile mix and plenty of targets.

  The Iraqi ICTF unit we were working with was assigned to pull security for a unit of U.S. Army Rangers who’d been given a tip about a house that was being used to store IEDs. The Rangers planned to go into the house, wake up its owner, and search it. The house was surrounded by a wall; to set up their assault, they had to climb over it. I went over to them as they discussed what they were doing and suggested that they might want me along, since they had no translator.

  “Oh, no, we’re good,” said one of the Rangers. “We’re ready to rock.”

  “Then take me with you.”

  “We don’t need you. Thanks.”

  “If you climbed a wall in my yard in the middle of the night and I saw you, I would shoot,” I told them. “So I think maybe—”

  “No, no. We’re good, we’re good,” he insisted.

  So I stood back and watched. The first soldier went over—and was shot by the owner of the house, who thought he was being robbed.

  As soon as he was shot, I started to the wall. I saw someone taking aim and firing from the third floor of the house. I pulled my rifle up—because we were working with the Iraqi forces, I had permission to carry a gun—and laid into the building, firing to chase him back. Then I lowered my aim to the second floor, hoping to keep him from getting downstairs. I changed magazines like a madman, running through practically every bullet I’d brought with me—enough so that the video image we saw later from a UAV overhead painted my gun bright white.

  The Ranger was rescued, and since he wasn’t hurt too badly, I suppose the story does have something of a happy or at least not terribly sad ending. But the intelligence that had taken them to the house turned out to be bad: the Iraqi was a traffic officer; he’d fired because he thought he was being attacked by insurgents.

  The bad information had probably been passed along by someone hoping to cause him grief, which obviously they succeeded in doing. The whole mess was straightened out without further loss of life, fortunately.

  Even among ourselves, you could never be too careful about information or a source—sometimes the people you least suspected were guilty.

  We had a translator who wanted to do a good job in the worst way, or so he claimed. He started copying everything I did, from the way I talked to the way I walked, from how I dressed to how I cursed.

  We were brothers, don’t you know?

  In his mind, maybe. He was what the kids these days call a “try hard”—he tried hard, but too hard, to make an impression. He started developing sources on his own time, trying to find insurgents in Baghdad. Then he brought the “intel” he developed to the SEAL commanders, suggesting that they authorize missions.

  The problem was, his information was generally about Sunni insurgents, and we were assigned to hunt Shia.

  Around that same time we got information about a cell in east Baghdad that worked out of a house. The mission was planned, and we took a source with us to the house. There were several people in the house when we got there. They seemed bewildered, but offered no resistance, insisting there had been a mistake.

  Admittedly, this was what nearly everyone said when we arrived. A mujahideen cell leader would not, as a general rule, admit who he was when first confronted. So initially the SEALs weren’t surprised or convinced. They called the source in and asked him to confirm that they had captured the right plotters.

  He poked his head in the room, then poked it out.

  “Those are the men,” he said.

  The glimpse around the room couldn’t have lasted more than two seconds, if that. His response seemed much too quick to me, so I went up and found my boss. The SEAL team chief also felt something wasn’t right—the men had protested too logically, and the source seemed too dismissive of the SEALs’ concerns.

  “I have an idea,” I told him. “Wait until I try it, then we’ll know.”

  The chief—he’s still on active duty so we’ll call him Bear—gave me a strange look, but he trusted me and didn’t object when I went inside. A few minutes later, I came out dressed in one of the men’s clothes. They were traditional Iraqi clothes—loose-fitting pants, baggy shirt—very different th
an the fatigues I’d been in.

  Bear was amused, but hid his smile as he walked me over to the informer. With every step, our act intensified—I was his prisoner, and he was determined to take me in and hand me over to the authorities.

  “We found another,” said Bear, pushing me in front of the informer. “Is he one of them?”

  “Yes, yes, he’s bad, he’s bad, he’s bad,” said the informer, shaking his head and scowling in my direction before quickly turning away.

  Bear ended up having everyone released. Needless to say, we never worked with that informer again.

  11

  Friends, Neighbors, and Snipers

  MATCHING WITS WITH bad guys on missions was always interesting. Equally challenging, but very different, were missions where I accompanied SEAL sniper teams as they did overwatches in various areas.

  I started doing sniper missions very early on—I’d accompanied a team in Mosul for the elections—and eventually came to specialize in them. They were not only challenging but long, generally running up to twenty-four hours. Most terps tried to avoid them, but that was exactly why I liked them.

  On an overwatch mission, a team of SEAL snipers would set up a position where they could watch a specific area. Usually this meant going on the roof of a house, which in Iraq were mostly flat and nearly always used as a patio would be used in America. From the roof, the snipers would watch an area while a unit patrolled, searched, or went into a house to make an arrest. Or they might keep an eye on a place where there had been trouble—say an area where IEDs were being planted, or a government building that was believed to be targeted by bombers.

  While the number of people assigned to the mission varied, usually there would be one or two snipers in the house, along with two or three men providing security. More SEALs might be used initially when the house was selected, just to make sure there was no trouble, and at various points, different Iraqi units and their members joined us. For the most part, though, overwatches were conducted by a small subset of the entire platoon. That meant there was less firepower immediately available if something went wrong—or if things went right and the snipers themselves were targeted.