by Joby Warrick
Now back in his hometown, Zarqawi had become his self-chosen nickname—“the Stranger.” Even a trip to the local market was a reminder of the gulf between moderate, easygoing Jordan and the strict Islamic discipline Zarqawi had witnessed in Afghanistan. He complained to friends about immodestly dressed Jordanian women and the mixing of unmarried couples at cafés and cinemas. He griped about the liquor stores and pornography vendors, which, years earlier, he himself had patronized. Even his own family disappointed him: his mother and sisters refused to wear the burka-style veil commonly worn by Afghan women, and his brothers allowed their families to watch un-Islamic movies and comedies on their TVs. The news shows that Zarqawi occasionally watched were even more upsetting, bringing reports of progress by both the Palestinians and the Jordanian monarchy in negotiating treaties with Israel. The very idea of peace with the Jewish state was anathema to many Islamists. Some formerly steadfast supporters of King Hussein never forgave the monarch for this act.
Zarqawi would take a stab at a normal life, spending his days renting out Hollywood movies and Islamist propaganda tapes at the video store. But, inevitably, he was drawn toward the one thing that had given him a purpose. He read books about early Islamic heroes, and became particularly fascinated with Nur ad-Din Zengi, a warrior-prince who ruled from Damascus in the twelfth century. Nur ad-Din had famously destroyed a European Crusader army and sought to unify a patchwork of Muslim kingdoms under a single sultanate extending from southern Turkey to the Nile River. After his soldiers killed the French-born prince of Antioch, Nur ad-Din arranged for the sovereign’s head to be placed in a silver box and sent to the caliph in Baghdad as a gift.
Years later, Zarqawi came to view himself as a modern incarnation of Nur ad-Din and would seek to emulate his military strategy. But for now, Zarqawi was prepared to start small. He tracked down an old acquaintance from Afghanistan, the preacher and scholar named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, showing up at his house in Amman to say he wanted to “work on behalf of religion in Jordan,” as Maqdisi later recalled. The two began a years-long partnership that began with Koranic study groups for other Afghan veterans and progressed to the organizing of small cells for more ambitious endeavors.
“We printed out some of my books and disseminated them among the people,” Maqdisi would write later about his early days with Zarqawi. “Young men rallied around our call and circulated our books and messages.”
Similar groups, also led by disaffected ex-mujahideen fighters, were forming simultaneously across Jordan, and some had carried out minor attacks against liquor stores and other symbols of Western vice. Soon Zarqawi, too, was pushing to do something more dramatic than photocopying religious tracts. He suggested ways to disrupt upcoming parliamentary elections in Jordan, talking excitedly about possible targets until others in the group became nervous.
“He wanted everything to be done quickly,” remembered Muhammad Abu al-Muntasir, a Jordanian Islamist who attended some of the meetings in 1993. “He wanted to achieve all of his ambitions in a matter of months, if not hours.” Because of hastiness, Zarqawi made decisions “unilaterally at the wrong time and place,” he said.
“More tragically,” al-Muntasir added, “the majority of brothers used to agree with him.”
By early 1994, the group had a name: Bay’at al-Imam, or literally, the Oath of Allegiance to the Prayer Leader. They also had a small stock of weapons from an unlikely source. Maqdisi, who had lived in Kuwait at the time of the 1990 invasion by Saddam Hussein’s army, had acquired a few mines, grenades, and artillery rockets left behind after the Iraqis’ retreat in 1991, and hid them in his household furniture when he moved to Jordan after the war. The spark that finally propelled the group into action came on February 25, 1994, when a Jewish extremist opened fire on praying Muslims in a religious shrine in the West Bank town of Hebron, killing twenty-nine men and boys and wounding scores of others. Incensed by the murders, the group decided, with Maqdisi’s reluctant support, to use their weapons in a coordinated attack on an Israeli outpost along the border. The plan called for striking the guard station with back-to-back suicide bombs followed by small-arms fire.
The plotters never had a chance. The Mukhabarat, with its vast network of informants, inevitably learned of the plan and moved quickly to squash it. Abu Haytham’s team launched their raids, ending with the dramatic arrest of Zarqawi in his bed on March 29. He and twelve other members of the cell eventually signed confessions admitting to possessing illegal weapons and plotting an act of terrorism.
Maqdisi tried to turn the group’s trial into a showcase for his radical views, at one point shouting at the military judge, “You are guilty!” The defendants yelled and banged the bars of the prisoners’ box as they were being sentenced, while Maqdisi called out a warning:
“Your penalties only strengthen our faith in our religion!”
Perhaps it was so. But with Maqdisi and Zarqawi both drawing prison terms of fifteen years, the greater likelihood was that the men and their movement had been silenced for good. And if Jordan’s prisons couldn’t control them, the Mukhabarat had a variety of alternate methods that could deliver the same result, as Abu Haytham was fond of reminding Western visitors.
“The agency is not averse to using pressure,” he would say, “if it’s the only way to stop a bad thing from happening.”
—
The truth was, the leaders of the Mukhabarat weren’t entirely sure what to do with Zarqawi when he emerged unexpectedly from prison in the spring of 1999. The spy agency was still pondering the question six months later, right up to the morning he turned up at the airport with his mother and a pair of coach-class tickets for Pakistan.
As Zarqawi stewed in a holding cell during his three days of confinement, the Mukhabarat’s men made a careful inventory of his belongings, looking for clues about his destination and how long he intended to stay. They found a handwritten letter in one of the bags, and pored over every line for possible coded messages, eventually concluding that it was a harmless greeting from one of Zarqawi’s friends to a mutual acquaintance in Pakistan.
Abu Haytham tried quizzing Zarqawi directly, asking the same questions different ways. The detainee freely admitted that he hoped eventually to settle in Pakistan, once his honey business was doing well enough to support his family.
“I can’t live here in this country,” he told the captain. “I want to start a new life.”
Zarqawi’s discomfort was hardly surprising. For one thing, he missed prison. Harsh though it was, al-Jafr had given Zarqawi an identity and a community. Life on the outside just left him feeling anxious and disoriented, he told family members.
But it was the Mukhabarat that accounted for most of his stress. Deeply unhappy with the Islamists’ early release, the service’s counterterrorism chiefs endeavored to keep Zarqawi and his brethren in a state of perpetual agitation.
Abu Haytham and his colleagues were masters of the art. Indeed, getting into the heads of suspected terrorists and troublemakers was one of the many things Jordan’s intelligence agency did exceptionally well. The service had always been relatively small, and it traditionally depended on the United States and other allies for surveillance technology and operating cash. But few in the world could rival its capabilities in developing informants, running spy operations, or penetrating hostile networks. In earlier times, its interrogation methods included physical cruelties so extreme that some Jordanians referred to the Mukhabarat’s imposing prison as “the fingernail factory.” But in later years, the service’s directors adopted subtler techniques that achieved the same result.
To keep Zarqawi off balance, the Mukhabarat employed a strategy of regular harassing visits its men called “annoyances.” A pair of officers would turn up at the Khalayleh house at odd hours, even late at night, and ask Zarqawi to take a ride with them. Invariably, they would end up at headquarters for “chats” that often went on for hours. A key part of the ritual would be a recitation of things the agency’s in
formants had overheard Zarqawi say or do, just to remind their guest of how closely he was being watched.
Though Zarqawi clearly resented the visits, he had no choice but to submit. During one routine “annoyance” in late summer, the sight of the spy agency’s black car sent him into a rage, as one of the officers later recalled.
“Oh, look who’s here again—it’s the Mukhabarat,” Zarqawi boomed, with sarcasm that could be heard down the block. His mother, her plump face crimson against her dark head scarf, met the visitors at the door with a string of epithets, denouncing the intelligence service, the government, and even her troublemaker son. “I curse the day he was born!” she said.
At headquarters, officers took turns with Zarqawi in a kind of tag team of interrogators and techniques. Abu Haytham sometimes alternated with his boss, Ali Bourzak, the head of the counterterrorism section and one of the most feared men in the Mukhabarat. Bourzak’s harsh manner and thin fringe of red hair earned him the nickname Red Devil among the spy agency’s frequent visitors. Zarqawi loathed him. Years later, long after leaving Jordan for good, he twice sent operatives to Amman with explicit instructions to assassinate the Red Devil. Both attempts failed.
A third officer who took a particular interest in the case was a young counterterrorism specialist nearly the same age as Zarqawi. Abu Mutaz was part of a new generation of Mukhabarat officers: college-educated and traveled, with special training in intelligence analysis at institutions in Britain and the United States. But he was also a son of one of Jordan’s desert tribes, steeped in the same culture as many of the jihadists and criminals he worked with. His close-cropped hair, jagged teeth, and leather coats gave him a streetwise look, but his warm brown eyes and easy laugh made him instantly likable, even among the Islamists.
When Zarqawi arrived, Abu Mutaz would grab a notebook and pack of Parliament cigarettes and make his way to the sparsely furnished office where informal interrogations took place. Zarqawi would sit opposite him across a small table, without handcuffs or restraints, maintaining his usual look of icy indifference. Abu Mutaz thought he seemed a bit shabby, with his loose Afghan clothes and patchy beard that he never groomed. His fingernails were unfailingly untrimmed and dirty, giving him the look of a rough field hand.
Abu Mutaz would offer sugary herbal tea and sweets, which were usually accepted, but not coffee or cigarettes. Zarqawi disliked coffee and, as a strict Islamist, he viewed smoking as a Western vice. Abu Mutaz would light up anyway.
“So, Ahmad,” Abu Mutaz would begin, using Zarqawi’s given name, “talk to me about your plans.”
Abu Mutaz became adept at pushing Zarqawi’s emotional buttons as a way of drawing him out. He found that he usually could provoke a reaction by bringing up religion or family, particularly Zarqawi’s tribal roots. Tribal identity is a matter of profound importance among Jordan’s East Bank communities, and Zarqawi’s Bani Hassan lineage tied him to one of the biggest and most important tribes in the region, dating back to the time of Muhammad and beyond. A person’s tribal affiliation defined his standing in society and incorporated elements of patriotism, filial duty, and family pride. Abu Mutaz would drop into the conversation that he had spoken to tribal elders about Zarqawi, and they were concerned about him. The defiance would briefly disappear from Zarqawi’s expression, but he said nothing.
“The thing that you were doing,” Abu Mutaz would say, “is something that could destroy your tribe. It could destroy the country.”
When the subject turned to religion, Zarqawi became animated. He seemed to enjoy showing off his knowledge of the Koran and the Hadith, the collection of apocryphal sayings of Muhammad and his companions, extensively mined by jihadists to justify their beliefs. Abu Mutaz, accustomed to parrying with Islamists, quizzed him on his views about violence. Didn’t Islam prohibit the taking of innocent life?
Apostates are not innocent, Zarqawi would argue. “It is not just halal”—permitted—Zarqawi said flatly. “We are commanded to kill the kafir.”
Eventually, Zarqawi would weary of the conversation and shut down. “You didn’t like me when I was a delinquent,” he mumbled to Abu Mutaz one day. “Now I’m religious and you still don’t like me.”
As disturbing as his words were, Zarqawi was only mouthing standard jihadist rhetoric. Senior Mukhabarat officials regarded his partner, Maqdisi, as a truly dangerous thinker and proselytizer, and they would find reasons to keep him behind bars for most of the next fifteen years. Zarqawi clearly wasn’t in Maqdisi’s league, but what, exactly, was he? The agency’s experts were perplexed.
Though Zarqawi talked like a religious radical, the agency’s intensive surveillance showed that his behavior was filled with contradictions and carried echoes of his prereligious past. He would disappear for hours to the home of a Zarqa woman who was not his wife, and then he would head directly to an Islamist gathering or to the local mosque for evening prayers. Abu Mutaz observed that Zarqawi would habitually lie about the most insignificant things, and he would stick to the false story even after being confronted with contrary evidence. His behavior was so baffling that Mukhabarat officials hired private psychiatrists to review his files and make an assessment. Though inconclusive, their review suggested that Zarqawi could suffer from a kind of multiple-personality disorder, one in which the subject’s deep insecurities and shattering guilt battled with an outsized ego convinced of its own greatness.
“He had a hero complex and a guilt complex,” Abu Mutaz said. “He wanted to be a hero and saw himself as a hero, even when he was a thug. But it was the guilt that made him so extreme.”
Some of his Islamist friends also noticed his increasingly strange demeanor. One recalled that Zarqawi would sometimes sit for hours in a favorite falafel shop in Zarqa in his Afghan garb without speaking to anyone. “He struck me as being like a Sufi, or a mystic,” the friend said. “He would sit there, looking calm, pious. Slightly sad.” At other times, he seemed nearly manic, prattling on about his ambitions to revive his old Islamist cell, either in Jordan or abroad.
“He visited me at home and asked me to open a new chapter with him, work together, and perhaps travel to Afghanistan,” recalled al-Muntasir, the Amman Islamist who had been arrested and imprisoned with Zarqawi in 1994. “I welcomed him as a guest, but I refused to work with him again in any way in view of his narcissism, not to mention other traits.”
But such talk did not constitute a crime. Abu Haytham acknowledged as much to Zarqawi on the last of his three days in Mukhabarat custody after the scene at the airport. The captain was questioning Zarqawi, for what would turn out to be the last time, when his subject began to complain bitterly about his limbolike existence at the agency’s headquarters.
“Take me to court if you have something on me!” Zarqawi pleaded.
“If I had something on you, I would take you to court!” Abu Haytham acknowledged.
It was a rare moment of mutual candor. The captain explained again the necessity of keeping men such as Zarqawi on a tight leash. “It’s nothing personal,” he said.
“You have to understand how we look at you,” he said. “You’re an extremist.”
“You have to understand how I look at you,” Zarqawi retorted. “You are all infidels.”
The next day, Zarqawi and his mother returned to the airport for a Pakistan-bound flight. There would be no interference this time, but the Mukhabarat would still be watching.
4
“The time for training is over”
On November 30, 1999, Jordanian investigators were running a wiretap on a twice-jailed Islamist militant when an ominous phrase turned up in one of the daily transcripts. The suspicious call came from a phone in Afghanistan, and the speaker appeared to be giving a kind of coded instruction.
“The time for training is over,” the Afghan caller had said, speaking in Levantine-accented Arabic.
Though the words were maddeningly vague, Mukhabarat leaders decided to move quickly to head off whatever it was the Islamis
ts were planning. It was soon clear that they had stumbled upon something huge. Within a few days, the Jordanians had arrested sixteen people, including the recipient of the call, Khadar Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian and veteran of the Afghan war with ties to several extremist groups. They seized bomb-making manuals and hundreds of pounds of chemicals hidden in a secret underground passage. They picked up key details from one of the suspects, including the intended date of the attack—New Year’s Eve, 1999—and what the detainee said was the operation’s slogan: “The season is coming; bodies will pile up in sacks.”
A few days later, the agency’s deputy director invited the CIA’s Amman station chief, Robert Richer, to dinner. Sa’ad Kheir seemed unusually anxious and waited until he had consumed several drinks before blurting out the news.
“Rob, I have to tell you something, but you can’t tell my boss,” the Mukhabarat’s number two commander said. “We just picked up some people who are planning major attacks against a number of targets in Jordan.”
Kheir described how the Jordanians had stumbled on the plot and what was known so far about the intended targets. Topping the list was the Radisson Hotel, the Amman landmark that on any New Year’s Eve was certain to be packed with Americans and other Westerners as well as hundreds of Jordanians. He said top Mukhabarat officials had decided against sharing details with U.S. counterparts until they were certain they had all the plotters in custody.
Richer cut him off.
“Sa’ad, I have to use this information,” he told the Jordanian deputy. “I’ve got to see your boss and get this released.”
Richer, a former marine on his second tour as the CIA’s spy chief in Jordan, well knew the Mukhabarat’s complex internal politics. But this time American lives were potentially at stake. The next morning he walked into the office of Samih Battikhi, now the Mukhabarat’s director, to say that the CIA had learned independently of a plot to strike Jordan on the eve of the millennium. Battikhi, surprised, had little choice but to tell the Americans everything he knew.