Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  Over the next two weeks, American counterterrorism teams would arrive to assist the Jordanians in reconstructing what became known to history as the Millennium Plot, following a trail of clues spread across at least six countries. Organized by an al-Qaeda associate in eastern Afghanistan, the Jordanian portion of the plan called for a wave of bombings and small-arms attacks targeting not only Amman’s Radisson, but also an Israeli border crossing and a pair of Christian shrines popular with Western tourists. A separate plot to attack the Los Angeles International Airport was foiled when U.S. customs agents arrested the would-be bomber as he attempted to cross the U.S.-Canadian border in a car packed with explosives.

  Seized documents and an expanded surveillance web identified still more alleged participants, raising the number of suspects to twenty-eight. Out of all the names on the list, one in particular evoked surprise: a Jordanian from Zarqa whose given name was listed as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh.

  Zarqawi was back.

  When he left Jordan just two months earlier, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had made it as far as western Pakistan and then appeared to have gotten stuck. The informant who briefly trailed him sent back word that he was attending daily prayers at an Arabic-speaking mosque in Peshawar and staying clean. Now, just weeks later, he had resurfaced with a bit part as a consultant to one of the biggest terrorist plots against Jordan in years.

  Zarqawi appears to have played only a minor advisory role, but wiretaps that linked him to the plot were sufficient to earn him new criminal charges and a guilty verdict in absentia. He would also be featured in a report that landed on Robert Richer’s desk at the CIA’s Amman station.

  “It was the first time,” the American intelligence officer recalled later, “that we had heard Zarqawi’s name.”

  In dismantling the plot, the Jordanians had saved lives while averting an economic and political disaster. The jihadists had deliberately targeted symbols of Jordan’s vital tourist industry, at a moment when the country and its unexpected young monarch were still finding their footing after King Hussein’s death. Nine months into his reign, Abdullah II was struggling to implement economic and political reforms in the face of heavy resistance from Jordan’s old guard, including the army generals, security chiefs, and tribal leaders who had held positions of privilege under his father. A successful attack could have altered the face of Jordan, crippling its economy and weakening the new king’s grip on the country.

  For the Mukhabarat, there was little euphoria over the plot’s disruption. The Islamists had signaled their determination to attack Jordan, and they had come close to succeeding. And even though some of the participants were now in jail, the key planners were in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they were free to try again.

  Among this group was Zarqawi, whose intentions were now clear. In September, Zarqawi had sat in the office of the Mukhabarat’s Captain Abu Haytham, begging for a chance to put Jordan behind him and start a new life. Less than three months later, the spy service was bitterly ruing the decision to allow him to leave.

  “Despite everything that happened,” Abu Haytham would lament, “he had not forgotten about Jordan.”

  Indeed, Zarqawi’s interest in his home country would never slacken, even as his focus shifted to bigger targets. “The way to Palestine is through Amman,” Zarqawi often told friends.

  The Mukhabarat would soon learn of other plots to attack Jordan. The next one to invoke Zarqawi’s name would be organized and planned by him alone.

  —

  Zarqawi’s sojourn in Pakistan had not gone as he planned.

  He arrived in Peshawar in September with the intention of traveling onward to the northern Caucasus, where a new war pitting Chechen separatists and Islamists against the Russian Federation was just getting under way. If he could link up with Chechnya’s volunteer Islamic International Brigade, Zarqawi would at last have a chance to fight Russians, something he had never managed to do during the Afghan civil war. But it was not to be. Pakistan’s government, which helped bankroll the Afghan rebels in the 1980s, was far less tolerant of itinerant Arab jihadists in 1999, and Zarqawi struggled to obtain connections and travel documents. As he waited, most of the Islamist army in Chechnya was destroyed when Russian planes dropped massive fuel-air bombs into mountain passes on the Chechen-Dagestan border.

  Then, six months into his trip, Pakistani officials notified him that his visa had expired and he would have to leave the country. Zarqawi was suddenly confronted with a choice of either returning to Jordan—with the near certainty of arrest and imprisonment for his role in the Millennium Plot—or heading across the mountains into Afghanistan, a destination that offered far less appeal than it did when he last visited. Not only had the country been devastated by six years of civil war, but the conflict’s newest phase also lacked the moral clarity that had attracted Zarqawi and tens of thousands of Arab volunteers in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, instead of a struggle between Islamists and communists, the Afghan contest pitted a confusing array of Muslim warlords and Taliban generals against one another in ever-shifting alliances.

  Still, Zarqawi chose Afghanistan. With a pair of friends, he made his way to Kandahar, eventually arriving at the headquarters of the one former Afghan Arab who might have been expected to welcome him: Osama bin Laden. But instead of getting a warm greeting from his old mujahideen comrade, Zarqawi was rudely snubbed. The al-Qaeda founder refused even to see Zarqawi, instead sending one of his aides to check out the Jordanians. Bin Laden’s caution with visitors of any stripe was likely well founded: the deadly attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa the previous year had landed Bin Laden on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Bin Laden had good reason in particular to be wary of visitors who associated themselves with Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Zarqawi’s former cellmate and mentor. Maqdisi had infuriated the rulers of Bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia with his essays calling for the violent overthrow of apostate Arab regimes. Bin Laden had his own problems with Saudi leaders, and publicly associating with Maqdisi would only make things worse.

  Zarqawi was left to languish in a guesthouse for two weeks before Bin Laden finally dispatched a senior deputy, a former Egyptian army officer named Sayf al-Adel, to meet with him. Al-Adel, writing about the events years later, acknowledged that he also was leery of Zarqawi, a man who already had a reputation for being stubborn and combative.

  “In a nutshell, Abu Musab was a hardliner when it came to his disagreements with other fraternal brothers,” al-Adel would write. “Therefore, I had reservations.”

  After exchanging traditional greetings and hugs, al-Adel took a moment to size up the Jordanian. It was not an encouraging first impression.

  “Abu Musab was a sturdy man who was not really very good at words,” al-Adel recalled. “He expressed himself spontaneously and briefly. He would not compromise any of his beliefs.”

  Zarqawi’s one big idea, it seemed, was “the re-establishment of Islam in society,” and he had rigid views on what such a society should look like. But he had no handle on how to begin working toward that goal, al-Adel said. Moreover, in quizzing Zarqawi about events in his old neighborhood, the al-Qaeda deputy found the Jordanian curiously uninformed.

  “He had adequate information about Jordan, but his information about Palestine was poor,” al-Adel said. “We listened to him, but we did not argue, since we wanted to win him to our side.”

  Despite Zarqawi’s many shortcomings, al-Adel gradually came to feel sympathy for his visitor, who, in his lumbering, inarticulate way, reminded al-Adel of a younger version of himself. Anyone as stubbornly opinionated as Zarqawi could never be part of al-Qaeda, and al-Adel never suggested that he should join. But the al-Qaeda deputy had an idea about a different way Zarqawi could be helpful to the organization. He raised it with Bin Laden the next morning.

  By late 1999, al-Qaeda had built a powerful support network in Afghanistan, in North Africa, and across the countries of the Persian Gulf. But it lacked a comparable presence in the countries of the
Levant. Al-Qaeda’s great goal was the eventual destruction of Israel; yet it never managed to put its cadres in place in Jordan or the Palestinian territories to prepare the ground for such a blow, starting with the necessary step of overturning Jordan’s pro-Western government. Perhaps Zarqawi, with his Jordanian roots and deep ties to Palestinian Islamists from his prison days, could help fill a critical gap.

  “How could we abandon such an opportunity to be in Palestine and Jordan?” al-Adel asked. “How could we waste a chance to work with Abu Musab and similar men in other countries?”

  Zarqawi’s trustworthiness remained in question, so al-Adel proposed an experiment: Let the Jordanian run his own training camp, specifically catering to Islamist volunteers from Jordan and the other countries of the Levant as well as Iraq and Turkey. Al-Qaeda could provide start-up money, and then watch from a distance to see what Zarqawi could accomplish. The “distance” in this case would be a separation of some 350 miles: the camp for Levantine fighters would be “somewhat remote from us,” al-Adel acknowledged, located near the Iranian border in Herat, a city on the opposite end of Afghanistan from al-Qaeda’s base. Zarqawi would not be obliged to swear allegiance to Bin Laden, or to sign on to every point of al-Qaeda’s ideology. But there would be plenty of cash from wealthy Gulf patrons, as well as what al-Adel described as full “coordination and cooperation to achieve our joint objectives.”

  Zarqawi considered the proposal for two days and decided to accept.

  His first training base was initially made up only of a handful of close friends from Jordan, along with their families. But Zarqawi sent invitations to some of his old mujahideen comrades and prison contacts, and soon others were making the trek to western Afghanistan. When al-Adel stopped by weeks later to check on Zarqawi’s progress, he counted eighteen men, women, and children. In another two months, the camp’s population had swollen to forty-two people, including Syrians and Europeans. One of the Syrians, Abu al-Ghadiya, a trained dentist and comrade from Zarqawi’s mujahideen days who spoke four languages, served as a kind of travel agent and logistics chief, in a preview of the role he would assume years later, when he ran the Zarqawi network’s supply pipeline through Syria and into Iraq. For the moment, though, the most reliable route for recruits headed for Afghanistan passed through Iran. Although Zarqawi disliked Shiite Muslims and viewed Iran’s leaders as heretics, he managed to link up with several helpful Iranians who ran safe houses and smuggled men and supplies to the Afghan border.

  The camp’s leader, meanwhile, had turned into an enthusiastic commanding officer. He had taken a second wife, Asra, the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of his Palestinian campmates, discomfiting some of his al-Qaeda sponsors, who viewed the marrying of children as unseemly. He spent his free time reading books, learning basic computer skills, and polishing his speaking ability, trading his habitual Zarqa slang for the classic Arabic of the Koran. He supervised his recruits’ instruction in everything from firearms to Islamic history and religion.

  “They were establishing a mini Islamic society,” a proud al-Adel declared.

  But it was not to last. Back in Kandahar, Bin Laden had given the final approval for the September 11, 2001, attacks that would draw the United States into war against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. According to al-Adel, Zarqawi was kept in the dark about al-Qaeda’s plans until after the strikes against New York and Washington were carried out. But Zarqawi’s Herat base would be targeted by the Americans along with Bin Laden’s in the weeks of fighting that followed.

  Zarqawi’s disciples and their families eventually organized a convoy of vehicles and traveled across Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda in the defense of Kandahar. The U.S.-backed Northern Alliance, supported by American commandos and air strikes, had already captured Kabul, the capital, and were preparing to march on the Taliban government’s final stronghold. But soon after the Herat group’s arrival in Kandahar, a U.S. bomber struck a house where senior al-Qaeda leaders were meeting, wounding several of them and burying others, including Zarqawi, under debris. The Jordanian was pulled from the rubble with serious wounds, including several broken ribs. He was still undergoing treatment when Bin Laden fled, deserting the Taliban and stealing away to his private sanctuary in the eastern mountains, the fortress known as Tora Bora.

  Zarqawi collected his followers and a few al-Qaeda stragglers and made a dash in the opposite direction, toward Iran, where he sought safety in the border towns through which his recruitment network once ran. There the refugees huddled in small groups, as al-Adel recounted later, to consider their dwindling options. In eastern Afghanistan, Bin Laden’s mountain redoubt had fallen under heavy U.S. bombardment. In Iran, government officials who had initially granted entry to the al-Qaeda refugees had shifted course, arresting dozens of the newcomers, including most of the Herat contingent. Where on earth could al-Qaeda’s men find a haven that offered both physical safety and a chance for the organization’s surviving members to rest and regroup?

  In Iraq’s northeastern mountains, there was one such place. Just a few miles from the Iranian border, a handful of Kurdish villages and towns had attained a precarious autonomy outside the writ of the Iraqi dictatorship. These Kurdish provinces were protected under the U.S. no-fly zone established at the end of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, and within their boundaries a number of wildly disparate political factions had taken root. One of the Kurdish groups was a Taliban-like movement that included scores of Afghan war veterans and called itself Ansar al-Islam, or “Helpers of Islam.” Its leaders were Sunni Muslim extremists who quickly imposed harsh Sharia law in the villages they controlled. They banned music in all forms, forced women to cover their faces in public, and outlawed schools for girls. They also developed a fondness for experimenting with poisons, building a crude lab in which they exposed stray dogs to cyanide and homemade ricin.

  Beyond these charms, northern Iraq offered other advantages for a Jordanian on the run. Zarqawi could blend more easily with the local population than he did in Afghanistan, where he spoke none of the local languages. And the region’s extreme isolation offered a chance to recuperate without interference.

  After reaching the Ansar al-Islam base, Zarqawi moved into primitive quarters in the tiny village of Sargat, a cluster of stone hovels on a dead-end road leading up into the hills. With a handful of his Herat followers and a few thousand dollars of leftover al-Qaeda money, he set about re-creating the training camp he had established in Afghanistan. There would be important differences, starting with the absence, this time, of any significant al-Qaeda influence now that Bin Laden was in hiding more than two thousand miles away. He would have new allies and supporters, including sympathetic Islamists in Baghdad, who sheltered him when he traveled there in secret to obtain medical treatment for his broken ribs. In addition, Zarqawi was beginning to think more broadly about the targets of his jihad. Until 2001, Zarqawi’s two great hatreds were Israel and the government of his own country, Jordan. Now the pain from his cracked ribs provided a constant reminder of his wish to inflict harm on the United States. He said as much to al-Adel one day shortly before leaving Iran to join Ansar al-Islam’s forces. It was the last time the two men would meet.

  “When he came to say goodbye before he left Iran,” al-Adel recalled, “he underlined the importance of taking revenge on the Americans for the crimes they committed during the bombardment of Afghanistan, which he witnessed with his own eyes.”

  Zarqawi’s rough character had been thrice remolded: by war, by prison and by the responsibilities of command at the helm of his own Afghan training camp. He had come to regard himself both as a leader and as a man with a destiny. And now, in al-Adel’s view, his energy and thinking had been altered again, honed this time by “hatred and enmity against the Americans.”

  In the West, newspapers were beginning to speculate about whether America’s government, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, was preparing for a possible second war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussei
n. Zarqawi, for one, believed the stories. In conversations with disheartened Islamists in the bleak months of 2002, he talked of the epic conflict still to come, and how he had been steered by destiny to precisely the right place for engaging the great enemy of Allah, according to Fu’ad Husayn, a Jordanian journalist who met Zarqawi in prison and later penned a biography about the terrorist leader’s early years. At that moment, Bin Laden was on the run in Pakistan, and the Taliban’s rear guard was being chased by U.S. commandos across the eastern mountains of Afghanistan. Yet the real showdown still lay ahead, Zarqawi predicted, in a country that had had no history of serious religious militancy in at least a hundred years.

  “Iraq,” Zarqawi told friends, “will be the forthcoming battle against the Americans.”

  5

  “I did it for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi”

  Laurence Foley was never a flashy man, but there were certain things about the Boston native that stood out, even in a city as cosmopolitan as Jordan’s capital. He was big by Amman standards, with an ample midsection that had grown to accommodate the many diplomatic dinners and lunches required of a midlevel official at the U.S. Embassy. He wore a fringe of snowy hair that stood out like bleached cotton against his freckles and ruddy Irishman’s complexion. He liked to take long strolls with his golden retriever, Bogart, in neighborhoods where the sight of a human walking any kind of pet still attracted stares. More striking, to friends, was his refusal to succumb to fretting over security, as so many Westerners did in the anxious months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “Jordan is a safe place,” the sixty-two-year-old assured family members who saw the reports about rising threat levels for Americans and became worried for him.