by Joby Warrick
“There was a PowerPoint briefing that was as good as any given by one of our commands,” said a military analyst who was among those who pored through the computer’s contents. “His organization, as a line-and-block chart—all of it was laid out there. Kind of a who’s-who.”
One video captured an entire war-council session, with fly-on-the-wall intimacy that was at once fascinating and chilling. Here were hardened killers sitting on a circle of blankets like schoolchildren, listening with rapt attention as one of their members sang a song and another recited poetry. Zarqawi, when it was his turn, told jokes and stories. Then he talked about his vision for Iraq and the region, and how, from rubble and ash, the jihadists would lay the foundation for something that was utterly new, yet as old as Islam.
Here Zarqawi departed from the usual jihadi rhetoric. Other radical Islamists spoke vaguely of the restoration of the caliphate from Islam’s golden age, when all Muslims lived under a single religious authority that erased the national boundaries imposed by the West. But Zarqawi wasn’t talking about the distant future. He spoke of the caliphate in the present tense, with himself as the leader of a liberation army that was already on the march.
“He was already building it,” said the military analyst who studied the laptop’s contents. “His thinking was strategic and very long-term.”
Bakos, too, was struck by Zarqawi’s performance. Back at CIA headquarters in Langley, she studied the laptop’s trove. The images deepened her conviction about the pathologies that drove the Jordanian and his core followers: the cultish behaviors and messianic thinking that distinguished them as different from Bin Laden and his aides. A formal analysis by CIA psychologists reached similar conclusions: A classic narcissist, Zarqawi truly appeared to see himself as the incarnation of one of the ancient Islamic warriors he so admired. Now his belief in his own greatness was swelling like a tumor. Long-settled doctrinal issues, such as the prohibition against killing innocents, no longer mattered, because Zarqawi’s opinions trumped centuries of Islamic scholarship.
“There are some who study the Koran and understand it,” Bakos later said of the evolving thinking on the Jordanian terrorist. “Zarqawi can recite parts of the Koran—he couldn’t read it for the longest time, because he was barely literate—and he’s just going to interpret it however he wants, even though he lacks the education and background.”
The study of Zarqawi was now Bakos’s full-time pursuit. Just a year earlier, fed up with the constant requests to chase phantom al-Qaeda connections to Saddam Hussein, she had tried to quit the CIA in an angry pique. She gave her boss notice and didn’t return to work for four days, until a senior manager phoned to try to talk her into coming back. As a sweetener, she was promised a new job as a targeting analyst, focused solely on Zarqawi. “Targeters,” as they are known in CIA-speak, are the agency’s super-sleuths, assembling the trail of evidence that would lead to the capture or killing of a single terrorist regarded by the agency as a threat to the country. Some, like Bakos, lived divided lives, shuttling between the frenetic world of the CIA’s counterterrorism office and dangerous outposts overseas. Often they stayed on the case until their quarry was removed from the CIA’s list, usually by death. Bakos, as a newly minted targeter, would be able to dip into intelligence streams from across the U.S. government’s vast networks to find the clue or security stumble that could put Zarqawi out of business for good.
Between Iraq deployments, Bakos returned to what, for her, passed as a normal life. She moved into Washington’s Cleveland Park, a charming neighborhood of late-nineteenth-century homes and stylish cafés, dropping off her bags in a house that was a few blocks from the National Zoo. The extreme secrecy of her job—her family still had only a vague idea of what she did for a living—limited her socializing mostly to work friends. Though Bakos was no crafter, she joined a “knitting and wine” club made up of other female CIA analysts, just for the companionship.
“We could talk openly, and it was just nice,” she said. “It was more about the wine drinking than the knitting.”
But the next morning, it was back to the hunt.
One July day, five months after the near miss in the desert outside Ramadi, a fresh piece of the Zarqawi puzzle turned up in the daily cables from Baghdad. The surveillance net had snagged a singular piece of correspondence: a letter to Zarqawi from al-Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Bin Laden’s deputy had authored a six-thousand-word performance appraisal that sought to express the organization’s concern about its newest subsidiary. The CIA’s acquisition of the letter was a closely guarded secret, so Bakos was only allowed to view it from inside a secure chamber that analysts call “the vault.” She read, her fascination growing with every line.
The problem, which Zawahiri outlined in restrained prose, was simply this: Zarqawi’s bloodthirstiness was beginning to damage the al-Qaeda brand among Muslims. It was fine to kill Americans and Iraqi soldiers, Zawahiri wrote, but the car bombings, the attacks on Shiite mosques, and the gory execution videos were sending the wrong messages. To ordinary Muslims, images of dead Shiite children and beheaded Bulgarian truck drivers were not inspiring, they were repulsive. “The mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve,” Zawahiri warned.
Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages. You shouldn’t be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the “sheikh of the slaughterers,” etc. They do not express the general view of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq, and of you in particular by the favor and blessing of God. And your response, while true, might be: Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers? And isn’t the destruction of the villages and the cities on the heads of their inhabitants more cruel than slaughtering? All of these questions and more might be asked, and you are justified….However, despite all of this, I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our [Muslim community]. And that however far our capabilities reach, they will never be equal to one thousandth of the capabilities of the kingdom of Satan that is waging war on us. And we can kill the captives by bullet. That would achieve that which is sought after without exposing ourselves to the questions and answering to doubts. We don’t need this.
The admonition was accompanied by praise for Zarqawi’s courage and military accomplishments, and Zawahiri closed the letter by asking for some cash (“If you’re capable of sending a payment of approximately one hundred thousand, we’ll be very grateful to you”). Still, the intent was unmistakable. Here was evidence of a serious disagreement between the main branch of al-Qaeda and its Iraqi franchise.
Zarqawi replied in a fashion, though not to al-Qaeda directly. Two weeks after Zawahiri’s reprimand, he penned an open letter to his old mentor and cellmate, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, rebuking him and all Islamists who would question his methods. Maqdisi might be a respected Islamic scholar, but he didn’t know everything, Zarqawi wrote.
“He does not and should not have a monopoly on knowledge, and not everything he says is correct, especially when it comes to Jihad and the current state of affairs,” he said.
Zarqawi declared that everything he did—from killing Shiites to sending suicide bombers to their deaths—had been sanctioned by “righteous, truthful, Mujahideen scholars.” But he couldn’t name them, he said, because some were in prison and might be harmed.
A second rebuttal came in the form of an audiotaped message posted on jihadist Web sites in September 2005. Two months after al-Qaeda’s number two leader cautioned him against killing Shiites, Zarqawi announced a new military offensive, specifically targeting the Rafidha, or “those who refuse”—a pejorative term for members of the Shiite faith.
“The
al-Qaeda Organization in the Land of Two Rivers is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha, wherever they are in Iraq,” Zarqawi said in the recorded message. He warned that other Iraqi groups would also be targeted unless they publicly renounced the Iraqi transitional government that had come to power after the January 2005 elections.
“You must choose between the good side and the bad side,” he continued. “Any tribe…whose allegiance to the crusaders and their agents is proven will be targeted by the mujahedeen in the same way the crusaders are.”
Such open defiance of al-Qaeda’s leadership was mystifying, coming from a man who had worked so hard to obtain Bin Laden’s approval. Bakos and other counterterrorism officers picked apart the letters and transcripts from inside their classified “vault,” wondering whether Zarqawi was making a conscious play for global leadership of the jihadist movement, or just being boneheaded.
“We kept reading the letters over and over, just astonished at his tone,” Bakos recalled afterward. “He was not deferential. He was emboldened, arguing with Zawahiri on what he thought was the right strategy to wage jihad in Iraq.”
Bakos tried to imagine how it looked from Zarqawi’s perspective, at the head of an army of thousands of fighters, all devoted to him and willing, even eager, to sacrifice their lives. Zarqawi had achieved something no mujahideen force had accomplished since the Afghan war: humbling a global superpower by miring it in bloody guerrilla war. He had plenty of money, weapons, and volunteer fighters. Unlike al-Qaeda’s leaders in their self-imposed exile, he was fighting Americans and their Iraqi allies on a daily basis. As measured by plummeting U.S. support for the war in opinion polls, he was succeeding. Why should he take advice from Zawahiri?
His brutal tactics were offending some Muslims, it was true, but were they hurting Zarqawi’s cause? Bakos was no longer sure. The hard-core jihadists—the ones willing to fight and die on Zarqawi’s orders—were streaming into Iraq at a rate of 100 to 150 a month to join “the sheikh of the slaughterers.” Zarqawi had embraced the emerging power of the Internet to craft a reputation as a fierce warrior who killed Allah’s enemies without mercy. The images he posted, though repulsive to most people, made him an icon and a hero to many thousands of young men who saw him as avenging the Muslim nation for centuries of perceived humiliations and defeats. Here was evidence that Zarqawi no longer believed he needed Bin Laden’s stamp of approval. Some analysts had begun to describe his organization as a local chapter or franchise, but it was clear that Zarqawi didn’t see it that way. This was no al-Qaeda offshoot. This was al-Qaeda 2.0.
“People think he’s hurting al-Qaeda’s brand,” Bakos said. “The truth is, he’s helping his own brand, because he’s winning.”
—
That same summer, as Zarqawi and al-Qaeda sparred over the permissibility of hacking the heads off of hostages, President George W. Bush convened the first White House security meeting devoted primarily to the Jordanian terrorist.
It took place on the morning of June 29, 2005, in the cramped confines of the Situation Room. Bush, now six months into his second term, settled into his leather chair at one end of a polished wooden table as the other places filled up with familiar faces: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley. The morning’s presenter was Michael V. Hayden, the four-star air force general and future CIA director, who was then the principal deputy in the office of the director of national intelligence.
Hayden opened with a quick sketch of the life of Iraq’s most infamous terrorist. He talked about Zarqawi’s upbringing in gritty Zarqa, his early delinquency, his adventures in Afghanistan, his religious conversion, and his jail time. He described the Herat camp, the flight to Iraq’s eastern mountains, the assassination of the diplomat Laurence Foley, and links to the Millennium Plot. Then he began to outline Zarqawi’s early terrorist forays in Iraq, including the mix of cunning and “dumb luck,” as Hayden put it, that enabled him to land well-aimed blows against Iraq’s leading moderate Shiite cleric and the head of the United Nations mission in Baghdad.
Bush looked up.
“He killed Sergio?” the president asked, referring to the diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in Zarqawi’s spectacular bombing of the UN building during the war’s first summer. Bush had met the dapper Brazilian and liked him. “I didn’t know that.”
For the operations briefing, Bush turned to Rumsfeld, who in turn introduced a newcomer to the group. Stanley McChrystal, the Joint Special Operations Command chief and the officer in charge of the hunt for Zarqawi, happened to be on a visit to the United States and was tapped to update the president in person.
“Stan’s going to tell you what we are doing to get Zarqawi,” Rumsfeld told Bush.
McChrystal, now a major general, ran through a slide presentation as Bush asked occasional questions, according to the officer’s written account of the meeting. When he finished, Bush studied the general for a long moment.
“Are you going to get him?” the president asked.
McChrystal summoned up all the conviction he could muster.
“We will, Mr. President,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Later in the meeting, Bush turned to McChrystal again. “Do you want to kill him or capture him?” Bush asked.
“I’d like to capture him, Mr. President.”
“Why don’t we just kill ’im?” Bush asked, to nervous laughter around the room.
“Well, Mr. President, to be honest, I want to talk to him. He knows things we want to know.”
Bush appeared satisfied. He smiled.
“Good point,” he said.
In fact, McChrystal was confident, though there was no hard proof that he was any closer to capturing Zarqawi. McChrystal’s Task Force 6-26 had zeroed in on several of the terrorist’s lieutenants, killing some and interrogating others inside Balad Air Base, which served as the unit’s headquarters. With each capture, the Americans’ intelligence network grew stronger. And still it wasn’t enough.
Better intelligence raised McChrystal’s estimation of his adversary’s ability. Educated or not, Zarqawi had repeatedly shown himself to be an able field commander, capable of transforming waves of untrained recruits into soldiers and suicide bombers who struck with purpose and discipline. From captured operatives, a portrait emerged of a leader with quiet, understated charisma and personal fearlessness. “This guy is the real deal,” one of McChrystal’s deputies said during a strategy session.
It was hard to disagree. Zarqawi possessed a “jihadist mystique—a potent mix of violence and real charisma, perfumed by thick propaganda efforts,” McChrystal would later write. And now it was “wafting outside of Iraq’s border.”
Records seized by McChrystal’s men also shed light on a remarkably sophisticated system for recruiting, transporting, training, and deploying suicide bombers from across the Middle East and beyond. Often the initial contact was one of Zarqawi’s propaganda videos, available to anyone with a computer and Internet connection, and handily supplying an e-mail address for communication. After the opening e-mail exchange, an army of handlers stood ready to guide the potential recruit through screening and indoctrination and then along a chain of safe houses and, finally, a perilous journey by foot across the Syria-Iraq border. Once inside Iraq, the volunteer would be relieved of any cash he had brought along, and then shunted to a kind of holding cell for further indoctrination in near-complete isolation.
“By design, often the first time a suicide bomber saw Iraqis in the flesh was in the moments just before he killed them,” McChrystal said.
Recruits such as these rarely, if ever, saw Zarqawi, whose intense personal security tightened further as U.S. troops and CIA operatives stepped up their search. As McChrystal’s men discovered in interrogations, Zarqawi kept his whereabouts secret to all but a small handful of top aides. He never used a cell phone, and he remained constantly on the move. He had acquire
d a third wife—an Iraqi, believed to be in her midteens—and his entourage now included two children from his second marriage. But Zarqawi hid them so well that the American search teams never saw a trace of them.
The hunters were improving, too, however. By mid-2005, McChrystal’s Zarqawi team had expanded to include some of the best counterterrorism operatives and experts from across the U.S. government, from veteran special-forces soldiers to CIA analysts to techno-wizards from the NSA. To ensure that they meshed as a unit, he placed them together around plywood tables in a large “Situational Awareness Room,” or SAR, surrounded by banks of video monitors carrying live feeds from a fleet of drones in constant orbit overhead.
McChrystal set out to neutralize what he perceived as Zarqawi’s greatest single advantage: an ability to control the tempo of the fight. Zarqawi’s nimble command structure allowed him to strike quickly and shift course to adjust to his enemy’s movements. To defeat Zarqawi, the Americans would have to be even quicker.
“If we could apply relentless body blows against AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq]—a network that preferred spasms of violence followed by periods of calm in which it could marshal resources—then we could stunt its growth and maturation,” he said afterward, summarizing what became his strategy for the group the Americans now called by its new name. “Under enough pressure, AQI’s members would be consumed with trying to stay alive and thus have no ability to recruit, raise funds, or strategize.”
To keep the blows coming, the Americans needed to “operate at a rate that would exhaust our enemy but that we could maintain,” he said. For Task Force 6-26, that meant keeping up with McChrystal’s brutal personal regimen of sixteen-hour days with few diversions other than eating and fitness training. The general routinely worked through the night, catching a few hours’ sleep beginning around dawn, followed by a daily run in Balad’s 120-degree midday heat.