I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  Scott and I were up at 5:30A.M. on Saturday, after only a few hours of sleep. We figured if the execution was going to happen, VIPs in the prime minister’s office would be involved, and they lived in the Green Zone. There were also rumors that the execution might take place somewhere inside the zone. Scott suggested I drive around to see if anything was going on. X volunteered to drive, I rode shotgun.

  We drove down to the Convention Center. Nothing. We drove past the parade ground at the Crossed Swords monument. It was deserted. We swung by the courthouse but didn’t see a thing.

  Since we were out, I suggested we might as well get some coffee at the Green Bean in the U.S. embassy. As we approached the embassy, I saw a long line of SUVs parked on the street outside of LZ Washington. At least thirty Iraqi guards stood by the cars, smoking. This was something.

  X parked in the lot across from the LZ Washington. He went to the embassy to pick up coffee. I walked across the street to see what I could find out.

  I offered a guard a cigarette. He took one.

  “Saddam,” I said, and pointed to the line of cars.

  He smiled, and nodded. I chatted with a few more guards.

  I returned to the car and got my coffee, then I called Scott and told him that we’d found the security detail to the prime minister’s advisors and other court officials waiting at the helicopter pad. The guards were waiting for their bosses, those who’d gone to the execution, to return. Scott told me to stay put.

  X and I waited in the car, warming up with caffeine. I heard helicopters, and then the guards started to move around, firing up the engines on the SUVs. As I walked back across the street, two helicopters landed inside LZ Washington.

  The gates to the helicopter pad opened and about ten Iraqi men in suits came through. The guards rushed to meet them, and they all started shouting and jumping with excitement. One man was holding a camera phone up in the air, and the men flocked around him. Saddam was dead, Saddam was dead, Saddam was gone. They were hearing the news for the first time. Another man was holding a Sony HDTV camcorder. He was being congratulated by his friends. An Iraqi man pointed to the guy holding the camcorder: “He was the one who filmed the execution.”

  His name was Ali al-Massedy; he was the official videographer for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He had shot the official film of the dictator’s death. I tried to get as many details as I could—what did he look like, what were Saddam’s last words, what happened when he died? I scribbled notes. I was the only journalist there. I talked to him for five minutes before he got in an SUV and rushed off.

  My adrenaline was high as I rushed back to the bureau.

  I wrote the story in thirty minutes—I had just enough detail—and it went up on the website at around midnight New York time.

  The story headline:“I SAW FEAR, HE WAS AFRAID.”

  It was an exclusive interview, and one of the first published accounts of Saddam’s death. The story got a link on the Drudge Report. I was asked to do phone interviews with MSNBC, calling in on the satellite phone throughout the day.

  But the scoop was fleeting. By noon, a small portion of the video Ali had shot was released to the press. It showed Saddam walking to the gallows, then the video froze right before he dropped to his death. There was no sound on the video. Iraqi officials who’d witnessed the execution said it was a dignified event. Mowfak Rubaie, Prime Minister al-Maliki’s security advisor, told the BBC he was “very proud” of the hanging, that Saddam was given “respect” and it met “international standards.”

  By that afternoon, though, another video version of the event leaked out through an Arab TV channel. It was taken from a camera phone. (I suspected it was probably from the other guy the guards swarmed at the landing pad, but I didn’t know who he was.)

  The camera phone version was much more disturbing. It did not look like a respectable execution. There was sound, and you could hear the people assembled taunting Saddam. You got a good look at his executioners: two men in leather jackets wearing black ski masks. They looked like thugs. They looked like a death squad. After Saddam fell through the gallows, the unknown man holding the camera phone rushed in to get a closer look, while others in the chamber started to dance around the dictator’s body.

  The video didn’t play well with the international media. The U.S. military tried to distance itself from the event, embarrassed by the lynch-moblike display. The U.S. had captured Saddam, paid for and orchestrated his trial, kept him safe in jail, and now their triumph had ended in humiliation. The military did not respond to questions about the execution that day. Finally, at a press conference a few days later, the U.S. military spokesperson said the Americans played “no role” in the execution. That was a lie. The U.S. had brought Saddam to Camp Justice (a joint U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad where the gallows were located), handed him over to Iraqi custody, and flown twenty Iraqi officials to witness the execution. When the execution was completed, the U.S. flew the top officials back to the Green Zone, along with Saddam’s body. Technically, the Americans turned custody of Saddam over at 5:30A.M. ; the execution took place at 6:05. And what had happened in those thirty-five minutes? What happened after Saddam was turned over completely to the new Iraqi government? It was time for insults and old-fashioned revenge. One executioner taunted Saddam: “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada.” Another told him to go to hell. At least two witnesses filmed it with their camera phones. I saw it as a window into the new Shiite government—given the responsibility of executing Saddam, a longtime enemy, they fucked it up. They made a spectacle of themselves. They somehow made Saddam appear dignified, while they looked like a bunch of criminals in black ski masks and leather jackets. This was the new face of Iraq. This was “an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy,” as Bush would say in a statement on the day of the execution. The democratic course of the new Iraqi government: executioners in hoods and officials with camera phones and bloodlust. It reinforced the worst fears of many Iraqis, especially in the Sunni community, that while one evil found his fate another was eclipsing the future.

  The reporting pace didn’t slow up. The next week Scott and I worked on a story called “How the U.S. Is Losing the PR War.” We pegged the story to an exclusive draft memo we’d obtained, written by the director of strategic communications for the U.S. mission in Iraq, that outlined a media strategy for the military and the embassy: “Without popular support from US population, there is the risk that troops will be pulled back…Thus there is a vital need to save popular support via message.” “Insurgents, sectarian elements, and others are taking control of the message at the public level.”

  The heart of the military’s public relations campaign was located in a parking garage behind the Iraqi parliament. At the end of 2005, the parking garage had been converted into the headquarters for the Combined Press Information Center, or CPIC, pronounced “See-Pic.” The building was called, rather misleadingly, Ocean Cliffs. Inside Ocean Cliffs, CPIC held weekly press conferences, or “operational updates,” in a carpeted room with TV monitors and a large screen for slide shows. The format for the press conferences had just changed. For four years, the U.S. military spokesman had stood behind an official-looking wooden podium. Now, as part of the military’s new strategy to influence the press, the spokesman, Major General William Caldwell, would sit at the head of a “media roundtable.” More friendly, more approachable.

  I’d go to the press conferences each week if I was free. It was always good to get the military’s official line. The spokesman would dutifully explain how the U.S. was making progress and how the Iraqis were taking the lead. We’d get new slogans—2006 was “The Year of the Police” 2007 was “The Year of Transition and Adaptation.” We’d hear talking points like: “the majority of Iraq’s violence is in only four provinces,” meaning Iraq’s other fourteen provinces were not so violent. Sounds impressive, until one considers that the majority of Iraq’s population lives in those four provinces.

  There
were times when only a handful of journalists would show up, outnumbered in the briefing room by public affairs officers and the civilian media advisors. At one press conference in the spring of 2006, as the country descended into civil war, only two journalists attended.

  A constant stream of press releases was also meant to spread the message. I’d get at least ten a day from CPIC, sometimes as many as twenty. Only a fraction were informative—mainly those that listed attacks against Americans. The subject line on the email would read something like “MND-B Soldier targeted during combat operations,” and the body of the email would contain about three paragraphs. The first would explain the kind of attack and give the general location (west of Baghdad, north of Baghdad, etc.); the second paragraph would inform you of the point of the mission, and justify it (“Units operating in this area of Iraq continue to conduct targeted raid and clearing operations…Destroying these cells reduces overall sectarian violence and helps set the conditions for the improvement of essential services, economic growth and aids in the transition of Iraqi-led security operations”); then the third paragraph would read: “The Soldier’s name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin and release by the Department of Defense.” Almost every day I would receive emails from the Department of Defense, reading “DoD Identifies Army Casualties” (or marine casualties); and there would be a few lines with the soldier’s name, his rank, his unit, where he was based, and a phone number at the bottom listing a number to call for more information.

  The press releases were written with a stilted, half-literate mix of military lingo and public relations spin. “Foreign fighter facilitators nabbed.” “Two AQI with SVESTS Killed.” “Soldiers keep route clearance vehicle going.” Operation Geronimo Strike III. Operation Bastogne. Operation Arrowhead Ripper. Hundreds of the releases focused on weapons caches: “Desert Rogues find two weapons caches.” The caches were a way for the military to keep score, along with the body count—look how many mortars and AK-47s we found today!—but in a country teeming with firearms and explosives, the notion that the finds could possibly make a dent in the overall level of violence seemed absurd.

  The public affairs officers would spend hours writing the press releases, hours reviewing them, hours finding pictures to go along with them. As the months went on and the situation did not improve, the press releases seemed to become more cheerful, more detached from reality, dispatches from a la-la land of their own.

  My favorite: “Polar Bears storm Quarghuli Village by air, land and water.” This release described a unit nicknamed the Polar Bears whose mission was to clear insurgents from the town of Quarghuli, using boats. The press release included the following line and quote from a soldier involved in the operation: “The Polar Bears chose to launch Operation Polar Valor on Dec. 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. ‘We try to pick days that the enemy knows are holidays to the Americans,’ Griggs said. ‘It is during those times that the enemy is less likely to think we are going to do anything.’”

  I read it and thought: Pearl Harbor is not a holiday, and I seriously doubt that any insurgent in Iraq would have it marked on their calendar.

  Strange doublespeak would creep in. When the U.S. military announced a new strategy of building walls around neighborhoods in Baghdad—to keep the bad guys in, or the bad guys out—the release I received read: “Paratroopers create gated community in Adhamiya.” It began: CAMP TAJI, Iraq—“According to an old proverb, good fences make good neighbors. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne are putting that idea to the test in Baghdad’s Adhamiya district by building a three mile protective wall on the dividing line between a Sunni enclave and the surrounding Shiite neighborhood.” “Gated community”—a term that originated to describe wealthy suburban residential complexes in the United States.

  “Why can’t we get our message out there?” a U.S. government media consultant once asked me. “How can we compete with car bombs? It’s not fair.”

  The answer: Stop the car bombs.

  “Why won’t you report the good news?” U.S. military officers and right-wing critics would constantly ask us.

  The answer: Actually, we don’t even come close to reporting all the bad news. There’s too much of it.

  Our enemies, on the other hand, had the PR war down; the insurgents weren’t having a problem getting their message out there. There was a popular new satellite TV station, Iraqi run, called Al-Zawra. It was a snuff channel. Snuff films, 24/7.

  Those being snuffed out were Americans. The Humvee drives along—boom—an IED hits. The crosshairs focus on a soldier—bang. Two Humvees pass over the bomb, the third doesn’t. A body flies in the air.

  All day long, seven days a week, Americans getting blown up. The channel was run by a former member of the Iraqi government, a politician named Mishaan al-Jabouri, who had come in with the American invasion in 2003. His channel now “fomented sectarian violence,” as the military would say. (On Al-Zawra the Shiites were called dogs, and worse, Persians, and it went without saying that all Shiites were part of a plot hatched in Iran to take over the country.) The channel had a soundtrack of patriotic Iraqi songs from Saddam’s era.

  It was hypnotic and eerie and popular among Iraqis. Our staff liked the channel. Our Iraqi stringer in Najaf said even Shiites in the south thought the channel was great—despite its being anti-Shiite—because everyone loved to watch Americans get blown up.

  Al-Zawra was allegedly being broadcast from a mobile TV van somewhere inside Iraq, and was being hosted by an Egyptian satellite TV company called Nile Sat.

  The Americans weren’t doing much about it—free speech and all, a U.S. military spokesperson told me. Free speech?

  The U.S. and Iraqi governments talked of negotiations, talked of progress, talked of ending the violence—but the talk was not real. Just turn on the TV. Have a look at Al-Zawra. This was progress. Satellite dishes were banned during Saddam’s time, but as soon as he fell, they sprouted up across the capital and the country, as popular as cell phones and air conditioners. Al-Zawra was a hit in cafés, in homes, on the street.

  You can actually see the body. You can see his legs fly up, damn, must be ten feet high.

  I watched Al-Zawra with my interpreter. We kept the channel on in the bureau office for a few days, until we couldn’t watch it anymore. There was a video of a man being tortured, interrogated, bloodied—an Iraqi man, a Shiite, confessing to some kind of conspiracy to blow up other Shiites. Insurgents filmed their attacks, and sent them to the network. Death by IED. Death by VBIED. Death by SBVIED. By ambush. By pressure-activated mines. By remote-control-activated mines. By trip wires. By EFPs. The videos could also be found on the Internet; they could be purchased on DVDs at the local market; this was on TV. And no one seemed to give a shit. It wasn’t that big of a deal.

  On Saturday, January 6, we close the public relations story. I’m now free to go see Andi at the NDI compound. Scott is leaving Iraq the following week. After twenty-two months, he’s handing over his responsibilities to the new bureau chief, Babak Dehghanpisheh. With both Babak and Scott at the bureau for now, it’s not a problem for me to take the weekend off.

  The Iraqi guards wait out in the bureau parking lot at the side of the house. They each have an AK-47 and two clips of ammunition. Two have pistols. The engines are humming on the three cars we are going to take. The tail car and the lead car are both nondescript Chevrolet sedans. I’ll be riding in the client vehicle, the Mercedes armored car.

  X wants me to practice the drills before we leave. It’s only my third trip out into the Red Zone with him and he wants us to run through a mock incident.

  Okay, Mike, if the car is disabled, here’s what you’re going to do.

  I act it out, with my body armor on. The other car pulls up at an angle, creating a V-shape. I open the armored door, using it as cover. I keep my head down. Uday puts his hand on my shoulder and pushes me into the car that isn’t broken. Ammad gives covering fire over the hood. Head down, pretending t
he bullets are flying, I transfer safely into the follow car, the whole time thinking, Jesus, if this was real, we’re totally fucked.

  Going to see Andi was a risk that had to be weighed carefully. It wasn’t just my life I was risking—that would be fine—it was X’s life (but X loved this kind of shit) and it was the lives of the guards, too, who’d be killed if anything happened. Three drivers and four guards in total: seven lives for me to visit her. Babak and Scott signed off on it, though. It was a relatively safe area, they figured—relative to the fact that nowhere was really safe—and you had to stay sane here, and staying sane meant seeing your significant other if you had one. I wanted to see her badly, but I knew if anything did happen there would be questions. Still, I wanted to see her, and she wanted to see me, and it would probably be fine. Most of the time it’s fine, right?

  Until it’s not.

  The lead car leaves the driveway. A minute later my car follows, then the third car. I sit in the backseat. We reach the checkpoint to leave the Green Zone and I take off the ID that I carry around my neck and put it in my pocket. No more need for these IDs, not once you leave the Green Zone, not once you leave the pocket of rules and regulations and law and order.

  X has his sunglasses on. The car is silent. I button my jacket, exhale,

  and slouch down in the backseat, my face partially protected from view by a flimsy dark sunscreen pulled down over the window.

  I look at the sniper screens on the side of the two-lane road, sheet metal built up along the guard rails to prevent potshots from insurgents. A convoy of Iraqi police flies by, firing in the air. I remember what Ahmer told me, that despite the resentment toward Americans, most Iraqis would rather see an American convoy than an Iraqi convoy. After Abu Ghraib and everything else, an Iraqi would much prefer to be detained by the Americans than by the Iraqi security forces. The Americans most likely wouldn’t execute you; the Americans didn’t really torture, or at least they probably wouldn’t torture you like an Iraqi would; the Americans would probably let you go, eventually; the Iraqi security forces on the other hand—shit, you were likely to be done for, disappeared.