This time some Iraqi Republican Guards fought back fiercely from dug-in positions and with tanks. But they were outmaneuvered, flanked, and eventually trapped between the two large forces and pounded. After taking heavy casualties, they turned and ran—troops, tanks, and vehicles—in a massive retreat northwest up the six-lane Iraq-Kuwait Highway (Highway 80). Coalition air forces pounded retreating Guard units with rockets, machine guns, and bombs, turning the road into what became known as the Highway of Death. Meanwhile, Coalition forces pursued Iraqi soldiers to within 150 miles of Baghdad, before they withdrew to Iraq’s eastern border.
One hundred hours after the Coalition ground assault started, it had achieved its goals. And on February 28, President Bush declared a cease-fire.
An estimated 20,000 to 26,000 Iraqi soldiers and military personnel died in the conflict, while the Coalition suffered 348 casualties. One hundred and forty-eight of them were Americans.
The humiliating defeat suffered by Saddam Hussein’s army inspired uprisings among Shiite Muslims and demoralized soldiers in the southern city of Basra and among Kurdish nationalists in northern Iraq. Saddam loyalists responded to both attacks without mercy.
It was during this time, in the second week of March 1991, that US intelligence officers were looking for volunteers to infiltrate into Iraq and report on the internal violence. Like always, I raised my hand, and due to my background and language skills, I was selected by the two S2 military intel guys who were directing the mission.
Our five-man team included a big African American E5 in Special Forces named Leonard, who claimed he spoke Arabic, which turned out to be a big exaggeration, a tall Lebanese American SF medic named Yusef, and two young Kuwaiti military intel guys, Abdullah and Majeed.
The S2 officers who briefed us included this warning: “This isn’t going to be an easy job. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourselves. Constantly monitor your own behavior. Take mental notes of everything you see, but don’t write anything down.”
“Can we carry weapons?” Leonard asked.
“That’s up to you. If you do bring a weapon, make sure it’s a Russian- or Chinese-made pistol and keep it hidden, and keep in mind that you’re doing so at your own risk. You’re on your own. If you’re caught, don’t expect us to help you.”
The mission brought back memories of going into Tehran a decade earlier. Except Iraq wasn’t familiar to me. All we knew was that if we were found out to be Americans, we were certainly going to suffer.
In consultation with the J2 guys, we came up with a cover. We were going to be Iraqis who had been working for an oil company in Kuwait and were returning to Iraq to find our boss and see what we could do to help our families.
When it was time to select a name for my fake Iraqi ID card, I chose that of one of my heroes, former heavyweight boxing champ Muhammad Ali. One of the Kuwaitis bought us clothes in a local market, short-sleeved cotton shirts, loose pants, and inexpensive leather shoes. I grew my beard out and wrapped my head in a turban.
The five of us crossed into Iraq from Kuwait in a beat-up Toyota 4Runner. Yusef drove at moderate speed so as not to attract attention. Traffic on Highway 80 was extremely light, and we immediately saw why it had been dubbed the Highway of Death. Lining both sides of the road at macabre angles was a shocking array of destroyed civilian and military vehicles—particularly Soviet-built T-72 tanks and BMP-1s and Chinese Type 63 armored personnel carriers. Sections of the highway had been torn up by US bombs. Others had been completely obliterated, leaving huge craters and forcing us to leave the road and drive around them.
Upon reaching the outskirts of Basra, we stopped at a local coffee shop to take the pulse of the dozen or so men gathered there, smoking, sipping coffee, and exchanging gossip. They were suspicious and asked who we were, and where we were from. Yusef did most of the talking, because I had a slight Persian accent.
Our cover story seemed to put them at ease.
The men told us that people in the city were in desperate need of food and water. The uprising started, they said, when a tank returning from Kuwait had fired at a large portrait of Saddam Hussein hanging in the town square. Other soldiers fired their guns in the air and cheered.
The rebelling soldiers inspired masses of Shiite civilians to take to the streets shouting antigovernment slogans, looting Sunni-owned stores, and staging protests outside government buildings, especially offices of the security forces. Gun battles eventually broke out, and besieged security forces called for reinforcements. The response by army units loyal to Saddam Hussein was swift and brutal. Thousands of civilians were killed, and hundreds of Shiite leaders and clerics thrown in jail.
The men at the coffee shop warned us that the situation in the city was still extremely tense. And as we approached downtown Basra, we heard sporadic gunfire. The center of the city was clogged with groups of men standing around and being watched by grim-looking soldiers in military gear with tanks and armored vehicles. It felt as though violence between them could ignite again any second.
We saw signs of recent fighting everywhere, on pockmarked buildings, burned-out cars and trucks, and shattered storefronts. We moved cautiously, took copious mental notes of street names and numbers of civilians and soldiers, and moved on.
That night we stayed with a family friend of the Kuwaiti officer Abdullah. They were nice people, but very frightened. They told us they couldn’t say anything before for fear of being arrested, but now complained openly about Saddam Hussein and how he was destroying the country. They struck me as the type of normal, decent family you’d find in any country—a high school teacher father, housewife mother, and kids going to school. Their distress moved me. They said they had no beef with Kuwait, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, and just wanted to live in peace.
I barely slept that night and was startled awake every twenty minutes or so by an explosion or a peal of automatic arms fire. At 0430 hours the next morning we were back on Highway 80 headed north to Baghdad. Again we saw a staggering number of destroyed and abandoned military vehicles along the road as we passed.
Traffic was light, and we proceeded without being stopped until we reached an Iraqi military checkpoint about 100 miles outside of Baghdad. There, soldiers in full battle gear waved at us to stop. Behind them stood trucks with mounted machine guns and gunners. The soldiers didn’t look happy.
As Yusef slowed our 4Runner to a stop, we debated whether we should offer them money or not.
“Don’t do it,” one of the Kuwaitis warned in Arabic. “They’ll want everything we have. They’ll take our vehicle.”
“I don’t agree,” the other Kuwaiti said, while Leonard seemed to be praying quietly from the backseat.
A very tired and grim-looking young soldier approached the driver’s side window and pointed an AK at Yusef’s chest.
“Papers,” he grunted.
We handed him our fake documents and he scanned them quickly as more soldiers gathered around and started peering in the windows, not really at us, but at what we had. We had hidden our pistols under the seats.
“Where are you going?” the young soldier asked.
“Baghdad,” answered Yusef.
“Why?”
“We work for an oil company in Kuwait. Everything is shut down there. It’s very bad. We’re going into Baghdad to talk to our boss and ask him what he wants us to do.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“Ahmed.”
“Ahmed what?”
“Ahmed Hassani.”
Both were common Iraqi names. The young soldier handed back our ID papers and said, “It’s very bad here, too. We’re all starving. You have any food?”
We had brought dates and hard cookies with us from Kuwait, which we shared with the half-dozen soldiers. More hurried over when they saw we had food.
A couple of cars had stopped behind us and were waiting. As the soldiers devoured the dates and cookies, smiles returned to some of their faces.
“Thank you, bro
thers,” the young soldier said.
This moved Yusef to reach into his pocket and hand him two US twenty-dollar bills. I tensed for a second, but the soldier immediately expressed his appreciation.
“May God bless, you, my brother,” he said.
“Use the money to buy some food and drink for you and your friends,” Yusef said.
The soldiers waved us through, and we relaxed.
“This is fucked,” Leonard groaned from the back, expressing what all of us were feeling.
We continued into Baghdad, past torn and defaced pictures of Saddam Hussein and walls splashed with angry graffiti in Arabic, which read, FUCK YOU SADDAM AND FUCK YOUR MOTHER! SADDAM IS THE DEVIL. SADDAM, WE HATE YOU!
Interestingly, none of the graffiti was directed at the US or the Coalition. My heart beating hard and fast, we drove past the huge unfinished Umm al-Qura (Mother of all Cities) mosque, which Saddam later used to commemorate his “victory” in the Gulf War.
Baghdad had once been a thriving city, but now the streets were filled with people begging for food and money—women, children without shoes, and grown men in tears. We handed out the spare dollars and dinars we had and moved on, trying to avoid the military roadblocks we saw every fifty yards.
As we had in Basra, we saw lots of destruction. But this time it wasn’t at the hands of rebels and rioters, but the result of Coalition air strikes. Many government buildings had been destroyed, and we saw workers clearing rubble from some of the streets. No one was attending to the piles of garbage we saw on practically every street corner.
Weeks after the end of the war, Baghdad was still without running water and electricity. We slept that night at the house of Yusef’s cousin, who was a Christian and lived in one of the suburbs. The next two days, we drove around the city collecting intel and talking to people in tea shops. Then we turned around and headed back to Kuwait.
8
FBI SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT
I returned to Fort Campbell from Kuwait in April 1991, where all of us in 5th Group were ordered to put on our dress uniforms and march with the legendary “Screaming Eagles” 101st Airborne. Then we lined up to receive battle patches as part of a big celebration for the success of Desert Storm.
Again, as with Grenada, I felt embarrassed, because much of what I had contributed came after the Iraqi surrender. To my mind, what we had achieved in Iraq was worthwhile, but nothing to beat our chests about. We had organized an international coalition to thwart the ambitions of a madman and drive him out of Kuwait. But he was still in power, and his country remained in shambles.
While military officers and civilian dignitaries stood behind a podium talking about our great victory, I had a nagging feeling that we hadn’t heard the last from Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs, or other disgruntled groups in the Persian Gulf.
One night several weeks later, I was in a neighborhood bar unwinding with my SF buddy Steve, when I noticed this pretty blond woman stealing looks in my direction. Doubting that she could be interested in me because I wasn’t tall, nor did I fit the usual American standard of masculine good looks, I pointed her out to Steve.
Steve sized up the situation and said, “Yeah, she’s definitely giving you the eye. You should go for it.”
“Really? You think so?”
“Hell, yeah, Changiz, you ol’ horndog.”
“All right. Wish me luck.”
I walked over and asked her to dance. To my surprise she accepted, and before I knew it we were in each other’s arms dancing to “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones.
It seemed fitting.
Her name was Bonnie. She was divorced with two kids and worked in a mattress store near the base. We hit it off immediately and started dating. After several weeks, she introduced me to her family.
For the past ten years, I had thought of myself as a rough soldier who loved the company of women but had no time or inclination to settle down. Now suddenly my head was filled with domestic matters—moving in with Bonnie and her children and making a nest together. We were even talking about getting married.
Just as things started getting serious, my company commander called me into his office and asked me to volunteer to accept a transfer to New York City on special assignment to the FBI. The commander was vague about the nature of the work I would be doing, except that the FBI was in critical need of Farsi and Arabic speakers and it would be top secret.
As I always did when asked to volunteer, I agreed, even though this time I had strong misgivings. I didn’t want to leave Bonnie and her children, and she wasn’t happy, either. I explained to her that by becoming a member of SF I had dedicated myself to defending the principles of freedom that form the bedrock of our country and way of life. And since I was being called on a special mission, I had to go.
Bonnie didn’t agree. On an overcast morning in early June, I kissed her and her kids good-bye and boarded a commercial flight for JFK Airport. I had been told to wear my uniform so that the FBI agent meeting me in New York could identify me easily. Entering the arrival area I saw a pretty young blonde holding up a sign with my name on it.
She introduced herself as FBI Special Agent Leslie Sanders (not her real name), and drove me directly to One Federal Plaza in downtown New York City—a tall, black, glass-covered skyscraper that housed FBI headquarters. I accompanied Leslie up to the twenty-second floor, where FBI staff took my photo and handed me an ID card. Leslie informed me that I was being assigned to the IT-2 FBI Special Antiterrorism Unit.
Next followed a briefing by the leader of the unit, John—an FBI special agent in his early fifties who had previously served in the military. The first part of my job, he explained, was to listen to surveillance tapes that dated back as far as ten years and hadn’t been transcribed because of a lack of people who understood Farsi and Arabic. Also, I was to visit mosques in Brooklyn and Queens and listen to the anti-American propaganda that was being spewed by some mullahs.
Other members of our top secret unit were restricted to only listening to the tapes. They included several retired US Marines, a couple of guys from the Army, a tall Iranian American contractor who had served as a translator for Delta during Operation Eagle Claw and had been aboard the USAF EC-130 when it was hit by a RH-53 helicopter in the Iranian desert staging area—which led to the mission being canceled.
Seated two cubicles away from me in the language unit was a very attractive young Iranian woman. Several days into my assignment, I introduced myself.
Hearing my name, she did a double-take and asked, “What’s your last name again?”
“Lahidji,” I answered.
She covered her mouth in surprise and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but we’re related.”
“Really? How?”
Her name was Azita and she explained that her aunt was married to my father’s oldest brother, who had been a colonel in the Shah’s army. He had died about ten years earlier of brain cancer. Now she lived in a nice condo overlooking the New York harbor.
My living quarters were more spartan—a room in the BAQ (basic allowance quarters) at Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn. But I wasn’t complaining, because my room was free and I was receiving TDY to cover my meals, travel, and other living expenses, so I didn’t have to spend a penny. So half of my E7 salary went to my mother in California, and I stashed the rest in my savings account.
I adjusted to my new routine quickly. Mornings, I’d get up at 0430, do some PT, shower and dress, then hoof it over to 77th Street subway station, where I’d catch the R train to City Hall. During the two-block walk to One Federal Plaza, I would stop at one of the sidewalk vendors to buy a cup of coffee and two bagels with cream cheese.
Work would start at 0700 and sometimes I’d continue late into the night. Some evenings after translating surveillance tapes all day, I’d attend evening prayer at mosques the FBI wanted me to infiltrate in Brooklyn and Queens. In the Shiite mosques I had gone to occasionally in Iran, I was taught to pray with my
arms at my sides. Now I had to adjust to praying like a Sunni with my arms stretched in front.
It was while attending Al Farooq Mosque located in a converted factory on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn that I first heard Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh. The ground floor of the six-story building housed the Al-Kifah Refugee Center. A decade earlier it had been used to recruit Arab immigrants to become mujahedeen and fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
There I listened to fiery sermons by Rahman and others and heard them talk about how Zionists had duped the American people, and blood and martyrdom were the only ways to build an Arab society. Sometimes I’d play dumb and ask the guys around me what the speakers were saying.
When I reported on these sermons to the FBI, I was surprised to learn that they were well aware of the Blind Sheikh’s influence and radical Islamism. I learned that he had been born in Egypt and had lost his eyesight due to a childhood illness. He was jailed for three years in Egypt during the late 1970s because of his radical activities. After his release, he was expelled from his native country and traveled to Afghanistan to join the mujahedeen. While in Afghanistan, he developed a strong bond with Osama bin Laden, who had assumed control of the international jihadist arm of Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), charged with raising funds and recruiting foreign mujahedeen for the war against the Soviets. As the Soviet-Afghan War wound down, MAK morphed into Al Qaeda. That the Blind Sheikh was allowed to preach anti-US and anti-Zionist hate from a mosque in Brooklyn in 1991 surprised me.
My FBI supervisors asked me to try to identify the faces and record the names of Sheikh Rahman’s followers. “If you can get a phone number,” one of the agents said, “that would be gold.” This was before cell phones, so I did the best I could.
Full Battle Rattle Page 11