by Oliver North
"Abul who?" I asked, somewhat irritated that my solitary time was being interrupted.
"I don't know," Griff replied. "Here," he said, handing me the phone, "talk to New York."
Abul Abbas
The foreign desk had the story right. The name was Abul Abbas, and he'd been captured Tuesday night by Task Force 20 operators during a raid on the outskirts of Baghdad. Abbas, a Palestinian terrorist, had masterminded the October 1985 hijacking of the Italian Achille Lauro cruise ship while I was on Ronald Reagan's National Security Council staff. He had been wanted by the U.S. government for nearly twenty years.
The terrorist faction led by Abbas had been a conduit for the money Saddam provided to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. President George W. Bush named him in a speech in 2002 as part of his argument for removing Saddam Hussein from power. "Iraq has . . . provided safe haven to Abul Abbas," he said, then added, "And we know that Iraq is continuing to finance terror and gives assistance to groups that use terrorism to undermine Middle East peace."
It took longer than anyone wanted, but capturing Abbas confirmed what Ronald Reagan had said back in 1985: "You can run, but you can't hide."
Griff and I finally arrived in Tikrit with a column of armor from the 4th ID
Shortly before noon, while I was interviewing Dunford, Driscoll, and Mundy for our documentary archive, I received another call on my satellite phone from the FOX foreign desk.
"How far is Camp Pennsylvania from where you are?" asked the duty officer in New York.
"About five hundred miles," I replied. "It's in Kuwait. I'm just south of Tikrit. Why?" I asked with a twinge of uncertainty.
"Well, that's where the 4th ID is forming up," he answered. "Someone at the Pentagon has asked for you to be embedded with them as they move into Iraq."
"Yeah, well, tell 'em I smell real bad and maybe they'll take someone else," I said, hoping that maybe Greg Kelly or Rick Leventhal might have been cleaned up by now.
"Can't," he replied. "They asked for you by name. Besides, the other teams are on the way home."
"Well, that's a stunner," was all I could say, knowing that this wasn't going to go down well with Griff, who had a new baby at home who hadn't seen her dad in a couple of months. "How long?" I asked, hoping for an answer of days rather than weeks.
"Couple of weeks," he said and then hastily added, "There is some thought that they might find Saddam."
"OK," I said, "a couple of weeks, but if I'm not home for my daughter's wedding in June you might as well leave me here because I'll be safer in Baghdad than in my own kitchen."
That night, Griff and I joined the U.S. Army's 4th ID, five hundred miles south, in Kuwait. On Easter Sunday we finally got to Tikrit.
9
LIBERATION LOSES ITS LUSTER
With LTC Pepper Jackson in Bayji, Iraq
TIKRIT, IRAQ
EASTER MONDAY, 21 April 2003
We "celebrated" the resurrection on the road in a Humvee. Just before dark on Easter Sunday we arrived at the outskirts of Tikrit with LTC Larry "Pepper" Jackson's 3rd Bn of the 66th Armored Regiment, part of the 4th ID out of Fort Hood, Texas. When his armored column halted for the night, Griff and I rode forward with SFC Terrigino, the senior NCO in the battalion's reconnaissance platoon, as they scouted the route into Saddam's hometown. The only evidence that this had once been the dictator's stronghold were the burned-out hulks of Iraqi tanks, trucks, and armored vehicles on the shoulders of the road.
One of Saddam's many palaces in Tikrit became the 4th ID headquarters
Early on Monday we accompanied LTC Jackson into the city and went directly to the deposed despot's opulent palace perched on a bluff overlooking the Tigris River. This was the third of Saddam's many palaces I'd been in at that point, but it was the only one not damaged by coalition bombs. MG Ray Odierno, the 4th ID commanding general, had decided to use it as his headquarters.
Like all of Saddam's residences, this one overlooked some of the most beautiful scenery in all of Iraq. It was encircled by irrigated orchards of fig and eucalyptus trees. An enormous swimming pool graced the south side of the ornate, three-story building. Carefully manicured gardens were terraced into the hillside to the east and south. On the west side, there was a six-car garage, complete with an armored Mercedes limousine.
Yet just out of sight in the surrounding neighborhood, there were thousands of homes without electricity, running water, or sewage systems. Saddam had to have been totally oblivious to the suffering of his people as he turned the country's oil profits into his own personal fortune—or he just didn't care.
Not surprisingly, all of the Iraqi dictator's staff had fled as the Marines of Task Force Tripoli closed in on Tikrit a week earlier. In the days after 4th ID replaced the Marines, Army patrols had managed to capture and detain several of the Iraqi dictator's relatives and high-ranking Baath Party officials before they could flee to Syria. Before I departed the castle, COL Don Campbell, the commander of the 1st Bn Combat Team, told FOX News: "Our missions are to find Saddam, his two sons, and his henchmen and establish a civil government here in this province . . . and we're going to do just that."
As it turned out, the first parts of the mission would be easier to accomplish than the last.
BAYJI, IRAQ
FRIDAY, 25 APRIL
We moved with Pepper Jackson's 3rd Bn, 66th Armor, to Bayji, out in the desert northwest of Tikrit. Though U.S. Special Operators had infiltrated the city during the early phase of the campaign, Jackson's troops were the first to take up positions in the area. His soldiers found the local oil refinery, pipelines, and pumping facilities intact and immediately secured them. But in the desert just outside the city, they also found one of the largest ordnance storage facilities in Iraq. They quickly determined that it was completely unsecured.
Saddam had constructed the ammunition depot and nearby railroad switching yards during the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war because the site was beyond the range of Iran's missiles and air force. The Iraqi army unit responsible for securing the place had simply walked away from their guard posts when Baghdad fell on 9 April. With no one there to stop them, local Iraqis removed nearly twenty kilometers of chain-link perimeter fence and began systematically looting the hundreds of bunkers and warehouses.
Saddam stored 300 million tons of ordnance at the Bayji munitions depot
The depot was far too large to be secured by a single battalion, so Jackson ordered his companies to outpost the facility and set ambushes on the avenues of approach to the ammo dump. His instructions were, "Do what you have to do to keep anyone from getting into this place, because God help us if the fedayeen get their hands on this stuff." Every night for the rest of the time we were with that unit, at least one of Jackson's units would catch Iraqis or fedayeen trying to steal truckloads of ordnance.
The morning after one such "event" I filed this report:
When we arrive, the platoon commander who triggered the ambush is reviewing with his soldiers what happened. The bodies of fourteen men, nearly all dressed in black, are lying on or near a rutted dirt road that enters the ammo dump from the east. According to the battalion S-2, who has collected identity documents from the bodies, only two of the dead are Iraqi. Of the remaining twelve, four are Jordanian, three are Syrian, two are Egyptian, one is a Saudi, and the other two are Lebanese.
The foreigners and their two Iraqi guides, all armed with AK-47s, had disembarked from two pickup trucks about two hundred meters from the nearest ammunition bunkers and walked straight up the road into the killing zone of the night-vision-equipped platoon-sized ambush. The carnage was completely one-sided. There were no American casualties.
U.S. Army engineers and ordnance specialists inspected the depot over the course of several days, with us in tow. What they found were more than five hundred ordnance bunkers and revetments and ninety-five steel
structures filled to the top with every conceivable type of ammunition and explosive from around the globe.
Much of the ordnance was in very good shape. Some of it—including Jordanian artillery rounds, Italian land mines, and Saudi small-arms ammunition—was nearly new. In one shed, several hundred green wooden boxes were labeled "Ministry of Procurement, Amman, Jordan," and had shipping tags with delivery dates in January 2003. Several steel buildings contained hundreds of cases of man-portable, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles: SA-7s, SA-14s, and SA-16s.
The unguarded anti-aircraft missiles and the tens of thousands of land mines and RPGs created the greatest anxiety among the specialists trying to inventory the site. These weapons can bring down a military helicopter or commercial jet. The mines and RPGs can take out a Bradley fighting vehicle and even an M-1 tank. Many of the surface-to-air missile and RPG cases had been broken open and emptied.
I asked one of the experts what they planned to do with all the ordnance. "I don't know," he responded. "We haven't got enough TNT, Det-Cord, and blasting caps to blow all this. Worse yet, there are probably seventy-five to one hundred sites just like this one elsewhere around the country."
When I left Iraq on the 26th of April, people were still cheering for American troops
SATURDAY, 26 APRIL 2003
On the 25th, twenty-six-year-old Army 1LT Osbaldo Orozco became the first Fort Hood soldier to die in Iraq when his Humvee flipped over while on a combat patrol. That same day, Tarik Aziz—Saddam's former deputy prime minister and the only Christian in the Baath Party inner circle—was captured. As in so many other cases, he was found after a tip from an Iraqi civilian.
Early on the morning of 26 April, the FOX News foreign desk called on my satellite phone and told us that we could head home. Though it had only been two weeks since the fall of Baghdad, it was already becoming clear that the nature of the campaign in Iraq was changing. Conducting "pacification" and civil affairs operations were becoming increasingly dangerous as foreign Jihadists continued to flood into the country.
Before heading to Kuwait for a flight home, we stopped in Tikrit to interview MG Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th ID. His parting words aptly summarized the situation for U.S. troops two weeks after the fall of Baghdad:
"In many respects this is tougher than beating Saddam's army. We really don't know who the enemy is. He dresses like, looks like, and lives among the civilian population. We are going to need their help if we're going to defeat them—and that means we have to convince the Iraqi people that we're on their side as liberators, not as conquerors. That could prove to be a very tough task."
—MG Ray Odierno
Events over the next several months would prove General Odierno to be right on the mark. About the only point he might have added was how hard it would become to keep America's people and political leaders behind the troops.
South of Baghdad, a soldier searches an Iraqi civilian at a security checkpoint
MISSTEPS AND THE RISE OF THE INSURGENCY
As Griff and I journeyed home, the USS Abraham Lincoln was headed there too. After ten months of combat operations, including Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, the aircraft carrier and its crew of 5,500 had traveled over 100,000 miles in support of the War on Terror.
Recognizing the skill and dedication required for such a commitment, President Bush decided to say "well done"—not only to the sailors on the Lincoln but to all of his troops. A former pilot, the President flew aboard in the cockpit of a Navy S-3B Viking, taking the controls for part of the trip. By landing on a moving carrier—an extraordinarily difficult feat—he paid the crew on board the Lincoln the ultimate compliment: he put his life in their hands.
President Bush with the flight deck crew on the USS Abraham Lincoln
Then, the commander-in-chief made a dramatic speech commending both the crew and all the troops who had helped end Saddam Hussein's rein of terror.
"The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done and then we will leave and we will leave behind a free Iraq."
—President Bush
Unfortunately, the media fixated not on the words of the president's speech but on a banner behind him that read "Mission Accomplished." It had been hung by the crew of "Honest Abe" who were glad to be coming home. The media seized on the image of the president in a flight suit standing before the banner and pilloried him. It was a major public relations gaffe that gave adversaries of the administration new ammunition, and it could have been prevented by the president's staff. But this misstep was followed by a far more grievous error.
Five days after what the potentates of the press derisively called his "Mission Accomplished Speech," President Bush appointed L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer as administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA had been created shortly after the capture of Baghdad to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq and provide leadership for reconstituting a new civil government.
L. Paul Bremer arrives in Iraq
Though accepting the assignment in Baghdad placed him at considerable risk, Bremer's appointment was controversial from the start. The person he replaced as CPA administrator, Jay Garner, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, had been criticized in the U.S. media for moving too slowly on reconstruction and "de-Baathification"—getting rid of former regime loyalists. But even before Jerry Bremer arrived, he was denounced by the press for being "too political" and "too close to the Bush administration."
In fact, Jerry Bremer came to the CPA with better credentials for combating terrorism than almost anyone President Bush could have chosen. In 1986, when I left my post on the National Security Council staff as the U.S. government's coordinator for counter-terrorism, Jerry Bremer was my replacement. He had a redefined mission and title: Ambassador-at-large for Counterterrorism. He had also served as chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism. After the 9-11 attack he cochaired a task force that drew up plans for creating the new Department of Homeland Security.
Bremer's instructions from the White House and the Pentagon included requirements for the CPA to "actively oppose Saddam Hussein's old enforcers . . . and eliminate the remnants of Saddam's regime." This guidance hobbled reconstruction by preventing the interim government from using talented administrators and technocrats who had joined the Baath Party simply to keep their civil service jobs under Saddam.
But the greatest damage to the prospect for peace in Iraq was the failure to immediately recall the remnants of the Iraqi military. Bremer's directive of 23 May 2003 effectively dissolved the entire Iraqi military system. The order told nearly 500,000 trained and armed young men that they were not part of the "New Iraq." Without options for legitimate employment, thousands of them became the "hired guns" for sectarian militias and Al Qaeda.
Bremer's rebuttal, in a FOX News interview, that "there was no Iraqi army to disband. The Iraqi army basically self-demobilized" was true, as far as it went. But it ignored what he might have done about it, as well as the lessons of history.
BAGHDAD, 18 April 2003 — Lt. Gen. William Wallace tells his soldiers to stay vigilant as Operation Iraqi Freedom transitions into a peacekeeping and humanitarian stage. "Don't let your guard down," Wallace said. "Show the people of this country the proper respect, but be careful. There's still a bunch of knuckleheads running around." He went on to praise the troops for giving "back to the Iraqi people the society and culture that is rightfully theirs."
In May of 1945 when Germany surrendered, GEN Dwight Eisenhower issued orders to arrest all Nazi Party members. He instructed all German military personnel to return to their barracks with their weapons. In the zones occupied by U.S., British, and French forces, military police collected the Mausers and panzerfausts and issued shovels and wheelbarrows. The defeated army was put to work cleaning up the destruction
. They were fed, clothed, and paid a modest sum by the U.S. Army, and they started rebuilding their country. George Patton, the military governor of Bavaria, went so far as to grant amnesty to low-level Nazi functionaries just to get public works—water, sewage, electricity, and the civil police—functioning again.
The same could have been tried in Iraq. In May of 2003, the Coalition effectively controlled all information being disseminated to the Iraqi people—print, broadcast, and many of the leading clerics. It would have been simple for the CPA to put out the word that every Iraqi soldier who returned to his barracks with his weapon would receive one hundred dollars at the end of thirty days.
It was never tried. Instead of becoming a work force rebuilding Iraq, many from the defeated Iraqi army became bomb builders, terrorists, and new recruits for Shiite and Sunni warlords. It was an unmitigated disaster.
By July of 2003, armed bands were operating throughout the countryside and in nearly all of Iraq's major cities. In Baghdad, Washington, and European capitals, critics of the Bush administration cited the "rise of an insurgency." The words "quagmire' and "Vietnam" appeared with increasing regularity in the press.