by Joby Warrick
The plan was deemed workable, but the Bush White House split sharply over whether to order the raid. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld favored the strike, but other senior aides, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, advised against it. The administration was already deep into the planning for an invasion of Iraq, opponents said, and any strike on Iraqi soil carried the risk of an escalation that could start the war prematurely. Other critics of the plan simply worried that McChrystal’s proposal was too sprawling. “It’s big enough to be an invasion,” one of the brigadier’s superiors complained. “You were in special operations. Can’t they do anything small anymore?”
Bush decided to nix the plan, for now.
“It was like getting punched in the gut,” Faddis said later. “We were all putting ourselves at risk. When the mission was sidelined, you knew right then and there what it meant. We weren’t going to pull the trigger now. And when the time came when we did pull the trigger, the important targets will no longer be here.”
Faddis tried again, suggesting a less ambitious campaign that would rely on local Kurds to do most of the fighting. With a little air support, a few 150-millimeter mortars, and some logistical help from the CIA team, the local guys could destroy the base on their own, he argued.
“For the love of God, just give us two B-52s, or just the mortars, and we’ll get it done,” Faddis pleaded. “Give it to us tomorrow, and we’ll get it done the day after. Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam don’t have a clue we are here. Total stealth.”
The response from Langley was the same.
“I hear you, Sam,” came the reluctant reply, according to Faddis. “All I can tell you is, that’s the way it is. The last time I checked, the president outranked you.”
Faddis and his team remained in northern Iraq with orders to continue their surveillance. Zarqawi, meanwhile, was free to build his network without fear of attack or interference. CIA officials at the time understood that the Jordanian was becoming increasingly dangerous. As Tenet, director of the spy agency, later noted, Zarqawi was clearly on the move in those prewar days, training his recruits at the Ansar al-Islam camp while dispatching envoys to Middle Eastern and European capitals, seeking money, volunteers, and allies. “He was able to forge ties between Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Libyans and other Arab extremists located through Europe,” Tenet would write of Zarqawi in his memoirs. “Over several months of tireless links we identified Zarqawi-connected terrorist cells in more than 30 countries.”
Apprised of this, the Bush administration held one final debate on the possibility of a strike against Zarqawi and the Ansar al-Islam camp. It happened in early January 2003, just two months before the start of the Iraq war, and weeks before then Secretary of State Colin Powell was to give his now famous speech to the UN Security Council, outlining the rationale for invasion. By then, White House officials were reluctant to take any action that might detract from the all-important battle for public opinion, according to an account of the meeting in Days of Fire, the journalist Peter Baker’s acclaimed history of the Bush White House. A strike on the militant base now would undermine one of the pillars of Powell’s upcoming speech: the existence of terrorist networks on Iraqi soil.
“That would wipe out my briefing,” Powell said, according to Baker’s account. Besides, he added, “We’re going to get [Ansar al-Islam] in a few weeks anyway.”
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The administration was still debating a possible strike on Zarqawi’s camp, when, on January 23, 2003, a delegation of U.S. generals arrived in Amman for a visit cloaked in unusual secrecy. Reporters were kept far away when General Tommy Franks, commander of the Pentagon’s U.S. Central Command, landed at the airport, and the palace imposed a blackout on details of his meetings with Jordanian officials, including whether King Abdullah II had participated. Later, anonymous military sources revealed the purpose of the visit in carefully worded leaks to the Western press: with a war against Iraq just weeks away, the United States was preparing to offer Jordan its advanced Patriot missile-defense system, in hopes of securing the Hashemite kingdom’s support when the shooting began.
“We are considering it,” one of the members of the U.S. team told a Jordanian journalist during the visit. In fact, the missile batteries would be shipped to Jordan within days, along with six new F-16 fighter-bombers, bolstering Jordan’s defenses in preparation for a possible war next door.
But the U.S. assistance came at a price. For months, the Bush White House had been pressuring Jordan to get behind its plan to topple Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The squeeze had begun in the late summer, when the king met with Bush and his top deputies during an August 2, 2002, visit to the White House. The usually charming Texan was cool and stiff, as Abdullah recalled later. Aides warned the monarch that the president was upset over comments he had made to a British newspaper, accusing the Bush team of being “fixated on Iraq” and determined to start a war that would “really open a Pandora’s box in the Middle East.”
Bush, crunching on ice cubes as the two men sat in the Oval Office, said he hadn’t yet decided whether to invade Iraq. “When I do, you will know,” he said. He called Iraqi president Saddam Hussein a “thug” who had to be challenged. “I don’t want people to think, 20 years from now, that I chickened out on confronting him,” he said.
Later that day, Bush brought up Iraq again, this time framing the standoff with Saddam as a moral, even religious obligation.
“You and I have two great fathers, and we both believe in God,” Bush said, as Abdullah later recalled. “We have an opportunity to do the right thing.”
Abdullah was stunned. He despised Saddam, and he knew America’s vast military could quickly destroy the Iraqi dictator’s army. He had offered, without public acknowledgment, support for the U.S.-led assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and even volunteered Jordan’s help in tracking down Osama bin Laden. Yet he was convinced that war against the Iraqi tyrant would be a colossal mistake. An attack by U.S. troops on an Arab leader—even one as unpopular as Saddam—would inflame the region, putting Jordan at risk. But it was clear that Bush had made up his mind. Back in Amman, the monarch told his aides to get ready. “This war is going to happen,” he said.
Through the late summer and fall, the war drums grew increasingly urgent, and so did the appeals to Jordan to back the administration’s war plan. A steady stream of American politicians and generals visited Amman, pressing the king to allow U.S. forces to stage along the country’s border, or to fly sorties through Jordanian airspace. Vice President Dick Cheney phoned Abdullah personally to ask for permission to use Jordan as a springboard for the assault on Baghdad. Against the intense wrangling over war preparations, the shock over the Foley assassination quickly faded.
Abdullah ultimately claimed a middle ground. His father, Hussein, had famously opposed the first Gulf War, a stance that set back the country’s relations with both Washington and key Arab allies. Abdullah likewise would maintain a posture of opposition to a conflict that Jordanians overwhelmingly rejected as unjust, and he refused to allow significant numbers of U.S. troops into the country. But he did agree to offer the Americans behind-the-scenes support, mostly in the critical arena of covert operations involving small groups of U.S. commandos.
The decision to accept the Patriot missile batteries was a last-minute concession. Publicly, the monarchy could claim that the missile-defense system would shield Jordanians from any errant Iraqi SCUDs that might threaten Jordanian territory. In reality, the Americans wanted an additional safeguard against a possible Iraqi attack on Israel in retaliation for the invasion. It was yet another sign that war was coming.
“I tried to walk the tightrope of opposing the war and staying out of it,” Abdullah acknowledged afterward. “But I was certain of one thing: the longer the war lasts, the more terrible the consequences would be.”
7
“Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world”
The world’s introd
uction to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came on February 5, 2003, in the sixty-first minute of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council making the case for war against Iraq. It began with a declarative sentence that, like many others in the seventy-five-minute presentation, was technically true but widely off the mark.
“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s circular table.
Nada Bakos, watching on a TV monitor at work, heard the line and cringed. Yes, Zarqawi lived in the remote mountains of northeastern Iraq—in an area off limits to Iraq’s military. To suggest that Saddam Hussein was providing sanctuary to him was contrary to everything that Bakos, the Zarqawi expert, knew to be true. It was like claiming that America’s twenty-second president, Grover Cleveland, had “harbored” Geronimo, the famed Apache chieftain of the frontier West who attacked settlers and Blue Coats from his base along the U.S.-Mexican border.
She continued watching, transfixed.
“Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible,” Powell continued. “Last year an al-Qaeda associate bragged that the situation in Iraq was, quote, ‘good,’ that Baghdad could be transited quickly.”
True enough. But were the terrorists gaining passage through official Iraqi complicity, or because of weaknesses in the country’s notoriously corrupt and inefficient border security?
To those who knew the subject matter best, the speech was an extraordinary performance, an artful rendering of a selective set of facts that favored invasion. Powell later described the presentation as one of the biggest blunders of his career, a mistake he would attribute to sloppy intelligence and wishful thinking at senior levels of the Bush administration. In reality, every word of the Zarqawi portion of the speech had been written by senior officials of the CIA after weeks of rancorous debate with White House officials over what should and should not be left out. To his credit, Powell rejected out of hand an earlier script written by White House aides, one that included much stronger claims about terrorist links gleaned from untested informants and unconfirmed rumors picked up by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
Still, there were lines in the speech that baffled Bakos and her CIA colleagues. Powell acknowledged at the beginning that Zarqawi and his Ansar al-Islam allies operated in an area outside Saddam Hussein’s control. But he then asserted that “Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization,” suggesting that Iraq effectively controlled the group. Nothing in the CIA’s vetted reports confirmed that such a relationship existed.
Powell paused at one point to mention the assassination of Laurence Foley, the diplomat killed in Amman three months before, a “despicable act” that he credited to Zarqawi. After the slaying, he said, the State Department had contacted Iraqi intelligence through a third country—it was Jordan, officials later confirmed—demanding that the terrorist leader be turned over for trial.
“Iraqi officials protest that they are not aware of the whereabouts of Zarqawi or of any of his associates,” Powell said. “Again, these protests are not credible. We know of Zarqawi’s activities in Baghdad.”
The assertions were coming faster than Bakos could mentally counter them. It was becoming painful. This was not how intelligence analysis was supposed to work. When Cheney had made similar claims on Sunday talk shows, Bakos often found herself yelling at the television screen, as though she were contesting a referee’s blown call in a football game. Now Powell, like Cheney, was “asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but,” she later said.
Ultimately, the speech would tarnish Powell’s reputation and further undermine the credibility of the Bush administration with key allies, particularly after claims that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false.
The other painful side effect would not be fully appreciated until much later. With one speech, the White House had transformed Zarqawi from an unknown jihadist to an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement. The image of the mysterious Zarqawi glowering at world leaders from the UN Security Council’s screen sent hordes of reporters scurrying to their computers to figure out who he was. Newspaper reporters and TV crews flocked to Jordan to write profiles and interview people who claimed to know him. Zarqa, the gritty industrial town of the terrorist’s youth, now had a new favorite son.
Watching the transformation with special bitterness were the Jordanians who had tried for so long to keep Zarqawi on a leash. Samih Battikhi, then chief of the Mukhabarat, erupted in a rage when he saw Zarqawi’s photo behind Powell at the UN Security Council.
“This is bullshit!” Battikhi shouted.
Abu Mutaz, the young counterterrorism officer who had once sought to influence Zarqawi’s behavior, was sitting with a colleague in a Dead Sea hotel bar when Powell appeared on the TV screen talking about his former case.
“We were sick about it,” Abu Mutaz said, recalling his reaction that day. “I kept asking, ‘How could they do this? How can they think this way?’ Eventually, I decided it must be politics. Just politics.”
Even some of Zarqawi’s old friends and allies in Amman were amazed by the turn of events. On Web sites that promote jihadist causes, Islamists swapped stories and gossip about Zarqawi’s exploits, and bloggers wrote paeans to his courage and manhood, recalled Hasan Abu Hanieh, who knew Zarqawi in the 1990s.
“With that speech, Colin Powell gave him popularity and notoriety,” said Abu Hanieh, the Islamist-turned-author from Amman. “Before anyone knew who he was, here was the secretary of state of the world’s most powerful government saying Zarqawi was important. Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world, from Iraq and Syria to the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula. People were joining al-Qaeda because of him.”
It was one of the great ironies of the age, Abu Hanieh said. In deciding to use the unsung Zarqawi as an excuse for launching a new front in the war against terrorism, the White House had managed to launch the career of one of the century’s great terrorists.
“And Zarqawi responded,” Hanieh added, “by turning all their warnings about terrorism into reality.”
—
Sam Faddis was in another part of Iraq in March 2003, when, more than a week after the start of the U.S. invasion, the Bush administration finally authorized an attack on Ansar al-Islam’s camp. Dozens of Tomahawk missiles slammed into the compound at Sargat, leveling the buildings and destroying the equipment the Islamists used to mix their poisons. U.S. commandos, backed by hundreds of Kurdish militiamen, chased the remaining Islamists into hills, where some managed to scurry to safety across the Iranian border. From the dead and captured, the soldiers recovered passports and identity cards from more than a dozen countries, from Algeria to Yemen. But there was no sign of Zarqawi. Other CIA operatives later confirmed that the Jordanian had by then already moved to Baghdad to await the arrival of the U.S. troops.
Among the first Americans to enter the shattered Ansar camp was a CIA operative who had been among the eight members of Faddis’s surveillance team. In his description to Faddis, the man described a ruined base and his sinking feeling that an opportunity had slipped away.
“Everybody who mattered left before we got there,” the CIA officer told Faddis. “All that was left were the foot soldiers. The cannon fodder.
“It was better than nothing,” he said. “But we missed our shot.”
BOOK II
IRAQ
8
“No longer a victory”
The Iraqi officer was crying, again. He sat at the far side of the table, head cradled in shackled hands, sobbing with such abandon that he could be heard outside the small trailer that served as an interrogation cell. He cried until it was impossible to make out his words, if indeed there had been any.
; Nada Bakos paused to see if the man could compose himself. The room was stifling and smelled of stale clothes and sweat, and a solitary air conditioner struggled vainly against the 110-degree Iraqi heat. Bakos was exhausted, mentally and physically, yet she resolved to keep her own emotions in check.
She tried the question again, calmly.
“Were you aware that Zarqawi was in the country?”
More sobs. Hasan al-Izbah, until recently a senior manager in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, was a broken man, and it was unclear whether fear or humiliation had brought him to his current state. He would not look at the Iraqi translator, who politely repeated Bakos’s questions, or the American MP who watched from the doorway. He could not bring himself to look anywhere near Bakos, as though being in the presence of an American CIA interrogator—and a female officer, at that—was a fate too embarrassing to contemplate.
Bakos tried a different angle.
“What kind of contact was there between Zarqawi and the Mukhabarat?”
Silence. This wasn’t working.
Everything within Bakos’s line of vision was steeped in dreariness: drab trailer walls, the salvaged furniture, the mottled greens and browns of the soldiers’ desert-camo uniforms, the graying stubble of the prisoner’s quivering chin. It was weeks after the fall of Baghdad and less than a month after her first face-to-face encounter with U.S-occupied Iraq. Now she spent her days in a bombed-cratered air base north of Baghdad, using whatever combination of charm, guile, and menace she could muster to glean secrets from men who until recently had been running spy operations for Iraq’s intelligence service.
It was frustrating work, and not only because of the unrelenting grimness of the task, or because Bakos—who had never served in the military or in law enforcement—felt underqualified. What grated her most were the scripted questions from Washington and Langley, pushing her ever harder to find something that Bakos knew did not exist.