I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

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  Copyright © 2008 by Michael Hastings

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

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  used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007049806

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6116-3

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6116-1

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To

  ASP

  forever

  Violence and progress coexist in Iraq.

  —General George W. Casey, former U.S. commander of Multi-National Forces Iraq

  Me and you and you and me No matter how they toss the dice, it had to be.

  —“Happy Together,” 1967

  In such dangerous things as War, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst.

  —Carl von Clausewitz,On War

  Author’s Note

  This book is my own personal interpretation of events. Some names have been changed for security reasons, others for reasons of privacy. A full list of altered names is included at the end of the book, along with an explanation of my sources.

  —MH

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  January 17, 2007

  CHAPTER1August 14, 2005

  CHAPTER2August–October 2005

  CHAPTER3June–August 2005

  CHAPTER4June–August 2005

  CHAPTER5August–September 2005

  CHAPTER6October 15–19, 2005

  CHAPTER7October 17–December 27, 2005

  CHAPTER8December 28–30, 2005

  CHAPTER9January–February 2006

  CHAPTER10January 18, 2006

  CHAPTER11March 2006

  CHAPTER12March–July 2006

  CHAPTER13August 2006

  CHAPTER14August–September 2006

  CHAPTER15September 2006

  CHAPTER16November 2006–January 1, 2007

  CHAPTER17January 7–9, 2007

  CHAPTER18January 11–16, 2007

  CHAPTER19January 17, 2007

  CHAPTER20January 18–19, 2007

  CHAPTER21January 20, 2007

  CHAPTER22January 20–21, 2007

  CHAPTER23January 21, 2007

  CHAPTER24January 21, 2007

  CHAPTER25January 22, 2007

  January 17, 2007

  Note on Names, Security Procedures, Sources

  Acknowledgments

  I Lost My Love in Baghdad

  January 17, 2007

  Andi wakes up Wednesday morning in Baghdad. She takes an hour to get ready. She showers, brushes her teeth, and thinks about placing a Crest whitening strip on her smile. She eats only a Zone bar, high nutrition, and drinks a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice from her small refrigerator. Her room is in the Ramal Hotel off Karrada Street on the fourth floor. It is a two-star establishment pretending to be four-star. Lots of gold and dark reds. There is only a single bed in her double room; she asked for the second bed to be taken out to make space for her yoga mat. The drapes on her window overlooking the compound are always closed. She puts on her jeans, a long-sleeved white button-down shirt, and a navy blue blazer. She checks her email on a laptop with a wireless connection, sends a message to her friend in New York, giving advice on relationship troubles. She grabs her black bag and folder with pen and paper. She closes and locks the door.

  Andi walks down the four floors, says good morning to the owner of the hotel, who stands behind the front desk in a suit. She waves at the boy who cleans her room and brings her room service, light meals of hummus and tea. She steps around the metal detector at the hotel entrance, checks to make sure she has her mobile phone, then steps out into the isolated world of her compound. It is a self-contained fortress: two barely functioning hotels facing each other across a narrow, closed-off street, an entire city block taken over by the organizations that live and work inside the compound.

  There is sun today, a clear sky, but at this hour it is still chilly. Her office is inside the compound, protected from the main avenue by checkpoints and tall concrete walls. It takes her only a minute to walk there. She passes about a dozen vehicles, some armored white SUVs, others armored sedans, parked underneath an awning. She arrives at her desk about 9A.M. She has a trip planned for this morning, her first in her new job at the National Democratic Institute. Compound life can be stifling, and she is looking forward to getting out into the city. She sits down and calls her interpreter, who tells her the meeting is still on. The interpreter will meet her at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters in Yarmouk, a neighborhood on the other side of the city. She calls the head of security, telling him she’ll be ready to go soon. The security team is waiting outside, four European private security guards and three Iraqi drivers.

  Across the Tigris River, other men are preparing for her arrival. A few of them were up earlier, most likely for prayer. They have names, though most don’t use them. They are cousins and brothers. They drink chai and start to move to their cars. They stash weapons—AK-47s, grenades, and a heavy machine gun—in the trunk of an orange and white Opel. They load up two more cars.

  The leader’s cell phone rings. The ring tone is an Islamic prayer he downloaded from the Internet. The rest of the men are used to it, they know it is his phone. He gets confirmation.

  She is coming. She is blond, American. They even have a name.

  Andi sends a few more emails from her desk, typing quickly. She takes off her blazer and leaves it on the back of a swivel chair. A coworker wishes her good luck. She turns, smiles, says thanks. She doesn’t turn off her laptop and the screen saver kicks in a few minutes after she goes outside. Her private security guard opens the door of the BMW sedan. The sedan has B-6-level armor, which is supposed to stop bullets. She gets in the car, and they leave the compound, traveling quickly through the morning traffic. There is a tail car and a lead car, nothing unusual. The traffic circles are snarled. Iraqi police fire shots in the air instead of using their horns.

  It takes her convoy twenty minutes to get to the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party. It is now 10:30A.M.

  Another phone call to the leader from his contact. The same ring tone. She has arrived. The orange and white Opel heads toward Yarmouk.

  The meeting is off to a slow start; her interpreter is running a little late. Andi jokes and talks about the weather, about a story in theNew York Times , about how she isn’t able to get out of her compound much. One of the men she is there to meet refuses to shake her hand because she is a woman. Two security guards are with her in the room. The others wait with the cars in the parking lot. Glasses of chai are served. The interpreter, a young Iraqi woman, finally arrives and apologizes for being late. She was held up at a checkpoint, she says, a bomb scare, the typical morning.

  They get on with the meeting. The purpose is to discuss how the Iraqi Islamic Party can effectively get their message out to the media. They are an important political party in the new government; the head of the party is one of the country’s three vice presidents. It’s also a chance for Andi to meet the politicians she’ll be working with over the coming month, part of a training program the National Democratic Institute has set up to assist the Iraqi government in building a functioning democracy.

  It is now 11:30A.M.

  The street outside the headquart
ers begins to empty. Traffic disappears; shop owners decide it is time to take a break. The street kids are nowhere to be seen.

  The men are now in position. A machine gun is set up on top of a building. The rest of the men, nearly thirty of them, all carrying weapons, hide in alleys and shops along the street.

  12P.M. The meeting ends, goodbyes are said, cards exchanged.

  Andi walks out to the parking lot. The three cars have their engines running. Her security guard opens the door to the sedan, the second car, and she gets in.

  12:07P.M. The first car drives out of the Islamic Party’s compound and heads down the street. The driver and guard don’t notice anything wrong. The route looks clear. There is no traffic, no one in the streets.

  Thirty seconds later, her car follows.

  Andi is sitting in the backseat.

  CHAPTER1

  August 14, 2005

  BAGHDAD

  “Mike, get down, mate.”

  I am lying in the backseat of a blue BMW. My view is the car’s ashtray on the back of the center console. My legs are wedged between the seats, my torso twisted at an awkward angle. I am wearing blue jeans and a button-down long-sleeved shirt, a vest of body armor firmly Velcroed to protect my vital organs. I’ve been in Baghdad less than one hour and am now a passenger traveling down the road from the airport to the Green Zone.

  “Mike, just try to keep your head below the windows, mate.”

  My security manager is Jack Tapes, an ex–Royal Marine, who flew in with me that morning from Amman, Jordan. Neither of us slept much the night before. We had first-class tickets, so we waited, chain-smoking, in the Royal Jordanian first-class lounge at the Queen Alia International Airport. The flight, one of the two scheduled daily commercial flights from Amman to Baghdad, was delayed for about an hour. The pilots were South African, working on contract because of their experience flying in and out of war zones. The plane was filled with contractors and mercenaries and overweight Iraqi businessmen and officials. The stewardesses, also South African, were very pretty; a slight blond girl with wild green eyes served me shrimp on a small slice of brown bread and a bottle of seltzer water. I suspected they chose the prettiest girls on purpose, to give the passengers a sense of calm, the flight a feeling of normalcy it shouldn’t have had. The stewardess stood in the aisle to talk about seat belts, emergency exits, overhead compartments, electronic devices off, and flotation devices under the seats, a highly improbable safety feature considering we were flying over four hundred miles of desert. The “corkscrew landing”—the phrase used to describe the now legendary descent for civilians coming into Baghdad—was uneventful. The plane angled down, a sharp diagonal cut across the sky, the wings dipping in ways the wings of passenger planes aren’t supposed to dip. I looked out the window at the sunlight bouncing off miniature homes and cars, a series of tiny sparkles, wondering if they were flashes of gunfire. The fear was more existential than physical. We were floating, circling, a big fat target over the dull brown landscape below. I remembered the warning on the State Department’s website: “Civilian aircraft flying into the Baghdad Airport are regularly targeted for rocket and small arms fire.” The travel advisory strongly recommended Americans not to visit Iraq. When the plane touched down, the stewardess’s voice came over the intercom to give us the local time, one hour ahead of Amman, and then said, “Thank you for flying Royal Jordanian. We hope you have pleasant stay.”

  The day before, Tapes had briefed me on the pickup from the airport—what was supposed to happen, what car we would get into, what to do if we got hit, if there was “contact,” as Tapes put it. We would be traveling in a Mercedes sedan. “B-6 armor,” he explained, “the highest level available, made to stop 7.62mm rounds.” In addition to me and Tapes, there would be a driver and an Iraqi guard in the Merc. Three other Iraqi guards with AK-47s would be in the tail or “follow car,” a gray Chevrolet. Tapes diagrammed the whole thing out in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Amman. “We’ll drive through any contact,” he said. First priority: keep going. “The Iraqi guards are okay,” he told me, “but they’re really ‘shit shields’”—bodies to be shot before I got shot. Our biggest threat would be from American military convoys. “When they go out, they stop traffic for miles,” Tapes said. “You get stuck behind one of those, and if a car bomb is aiming for them, you can get caught up in it. It’s what happened to that Marla girl”—Marla Ruzicka, the twenty-eight-year-old American aid worker who was killed in April by a car bomb on Airport Road.

  The plan seemed straightforward enough, and Tapes seemed reasonable enough at the time. He’d been working in Iraq for two years. He’d been involved in gunrunning in Fallujah and Baghdad, transporting and selling arms to other security companies. He liked to say that the best time to be in a war is right at the beginning, when you can do whatever you want, before people get their shit together and start making rules. Drive any which way, shoot any which way. The golden age to work in Iraq, he told me, had passed. “It’s just no fun anymore,” he said.

  We stepped off the plane onto the tarmac. Private security guards from Latin America in floppy recon hats stood guard with M-16s. Military cargo planes landed on the U.S. side of the facility. Sad-looking planes with greenIRAQI AIRWAYS decals sat on the runway. Slightly bombed-out hangars lined the landing area. The heat was intense, 45 degrees Celsius, 113 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the CNN weather report I’d watched the night before, Baghdad was the hottest place listed on the map.

  A rickety fume-spewing bus, standing room only, brought us to the terminal at the Baghdad International Airport. I kept my bags close to me. The other passengers filed in, no smiles, the scent of body odor in the air reminding me that I had now entered the birthplace of civilization. The Fertile Crescent. Mesopotamia. Iraq.

  We passed through customs and picked our luggage up off the baggage carousel. I’d brought two extra duffel bags filled with supplies for the bureau—one packed with Western food, Skippy peanut butter, Cap’n Crunch, and strawberry Pop-Tarts, the other with new DVDs and PlayStation 2 games. Our Iraqi security team waited in the arrivals section. They helped with my bags, and we walked at a brisk pace out to the parking garage. Tapes said we would wait a few minutes for all the VIP convoys—groups of SUVs with tinted windows and tail gunners—to leave first, on the theory that they were the “bullet magnets.”

  But something else wasn’t right. Tapes was getting nervous, jumpy.

  “Where the fuck are the guns?” he asked.

  He was speaking to Massen, our Jordanian driver. Massen lived in Amman and was at the moment under some suspicion. A few days earlier, he’d claimed his SUV was stolen, along with eight hundred dollars, while he was trying to make the drive from Amman to Baghdad on what was called the Mad Max Highway, a straight five-hundred-mile dash across the desert that was now considered too dangerous for Westerners to take. According to Massen, gunmen stopped him and stole the car and he had to walk through the desert after spending a night out in the cold. He was demanding thatNewsweek , or Tapes, reimburse him for the lost car and the airline ticket he’d had to buy to get back into Iraq. There was a question as to whether he had actually been ambushed, or if he and his friends in Amman had just decided to steal the car. Massen was going to be my driver.

  “What the fuck do you mean, you didn’t bring any guns?”

  Standing in the parking garage, I noticed for the first time that none of my guards were carrying weapons. I also noticed that contrary to what I was promised—the heavily armored black Mercedes—I was going to be traveling in a smaller blue BMW.

  “We didn’t have the key to the gun locker,” Massen explained.

  “How didn’t you have the key to the gun locker?”

  “TheL.A. Times took the key to the gun locker.”

  TheLos Angeles Times and theWall Street Journal shared the house in the Green Zone withNewsweek, a way to ease the pain of paying upward of $16,000 a month for rent.

  “You’re fuc
king kidding me, mate.”

  Massen shrugged. “I have a 9mm pistol,” he said.

  “One fucking pistol on Airport fucking Road? Christ. And where’s the fucking Mercedes?”

  “We didn’t want to take the Mercedes today.”

  “You didn’t what?”

  Tapes’s thick British accent grew thicker the more he swore. He took the 9mm pistol from Massen.

  “And if we get fucking hit today, Massen, if we get fucking hit today, what do you thinkNewsweek in New York is going to say? They’re going to say why the fuck did we spend 130 grand on an armored fucking Mercedes when you shits decided to drive in a fucking Beamer? They’re going to say why the fuck wasn’t Mike in the fucking Mercedes?”

  Luggage loaded in the trunk, I got in the backseat of the BMW. Tapes sat next to me. He was highly agitated. “Once we leave the airport,” he said, “you lie down.”

  Twisted down on the backseat, I can feel sunlight on the top of my head, on my hair, and I wonder if that means I am exposed and should try to wriggle down lower. It is very sunny, very hot, the air conditioner in the car doesn’t work, and we can’t roll the windows down because if a bullet gets into an armored car, it bounces around until it hits something, or more likely someone. I’m smiling. There is no fear; there is adrenaline. I know things aren’t going according to plan. I know that there are no guns and I am in the wrong car and there was a serious breakdown in communication somewhere along the way. I think to myself: I guess this is to be expected in a conflict environment when you are dealing with former gunrunners and possibly criminal Iraqi men. I’m not going to say anything. I just got here, I’m new, I guess this is how it works.