by Robin Moore
“Everyone,” as one soldier put it, “wants to be there when the last round is fired. No one wants to just be there to police up the brass.”
Though the path was often frustrating and divergent, Hal Engstrom and his fellow soldiers made it to Iraq and now faced the biggest enemy of all: The Butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein. It was the job of MAJ Murphy’s intel team, along with their Special Operations and interagency colleagues, to find the missing pieces and assemble the trail that would lead to Saddam.
Mongo Link
The Iraqi social structure and intricate code of loyalty and silence frustrated American intelligence analysts in the same way that Saddam’s ability to remain just out of reach frustrated U.S. military commanders. Captain Jim Walker, Murphy’s predecessor, had done an excellent job of gathering information. Murphy took over a database with over 1,100 names of individuals, but there seemed no way to make sense of it all. With his infantry background, Murphy brought a fresh perspective. He knew there had to be a way to paint the picture of the enemy that commanders could use to make decisions when the enemy was not easily identifiable. This was an enemy who didn’t wear uniforms or stand out in a crowd. He could be the common laborer on the corner during the day and a mortar man by night. Murphy and his team had to find a way to interpret and present the information and continue to conduct operations at the same time. Murphy intuitively knew that he needed to change the paradigm and turn the Iraqi cultural obstacles into weapons for his own arsenal.
First Murphy and his team had to know their enemy. Although Iraq’s culture was not their enemy, Saddam and his followers were using it as a weapon of sorts, and Murphy had to understand how to neutralize it, and turn it to an advantage. Even the most cursory review made Murphy quickly realize that all the studying he’d done prior to arriving in Iraq was insufficient. Real world studying of Arab culture, the family ties, and the tribes and the loyalties embedded within them impressed upon him how important the human factor was going to be. Murphy began reading extensively about Iraq’s culture and customs. The more he read the more he understood how difficult and complex their task would be.
His inspiration came from reading the account of an Iraqi father commanded by his tribe to execute his son. The son had informed on two Iraqis, later ambushed in an American raid. The tribal ultimatum to the father was simple: kill the son or they would kill the man and his entire family. The father chose to kill his son.
With that, Murphy realized the strength of tribal traditions. If someone in your network came to your home for sanctuary or aid, you were bound by centuries-old tradition to take them in. That alone made the number of Saddam’s potential hiding places staggering. If he was going to find Saddam, he had to break the inner circle of families protecting him. To break the circle, he had to understand its constituency. The majority of the reports Task Force RAIDER received reinforced the belief that Saddam was in their area of operations. This made sense. Tikrit is where his family and tribal ties were anchored; they would be the likely ones supporting him with places to stay, vehicles, money, and food. History tends to repeat itself; Tikrit was where he hid and healed after the failed coup attempt, before fleeing to Syria.
Murphy brought his idea to Hickey and the vision was born. Murphy and his team would find the path; Hickey would follow it. Together they’d get their man.
This team approach brought them immediate and continued success. In June, Task Force RAIDER conducted raids day and night, gathering vast amounts of information, weaponry, munitions, and money. One raid produced eight million U.S. dollars. Another netted Abid Hamid al-Tikriti, number four on the Most Wanted list. Hamid al-Tikriti was one of Saddam’s closest aides, a man who controlled access to Saddam and was frequently seen at his side. U.S. intelligence confirmed that he handed down many of the regime’s repressive orders. The raids in June and July produced information that became a template for Murphy’s grouping security guards into cells that had various responsibilities in the resistance.
In early July, Murphy started what was to become an immensely complicated intelligence project by putting down four names and a few notes on paper and passing it to Gray, Santana, Engstrom, and the rest of the intelligence section. On his way out to a commander’s conference, Murphy told Santana and Gray to take his notes and link the thoughts together. He gave a simple directive: “Make sense of it.”
At first they thought their new boss was nuts. When Murphy returned to discover they hadn’t progressed much beyond what he had left them with, he sat down with Santana and CPT Tom Hoeritz, the night shift Officer-in-Charge (OIC), and worked through some of the names and how they were linked. Murphy left them to work through the night shift on the new project. He told them he wanted not only the connections but the relationships. Murphy wanted to know who exactly the “enablers” were. Enablers were deemed to be those trusted members of the former regime who were making things happen, many of whom were not viewed as significant enough by conventional military intelligence to make the Most Wanted list. As the analysts’ theory went, these men relied on others below them, the arbaeen (or “forty”); a second- or third-tier group. They were Saddam’s “errand boys,” who did his bidding, cooked for him, amused him, and provided the “yes-man” feedback he craved. MAJ Murphy reasoned that these men were drawn from a close group of five or six trusted families, who, when the Coalition stormed into Baghdad, became a secret web of keepers that sheltered and moved Saddam just ahead of Coalition forces. To Murphy’s surprise, Santana met him the next morning with a page full of information. Within a week that one sheet of paper grew exponentially into files of narratives linking the families.
From the initial list of four names, the team began constructing a picture of the enemy in their area of operations. Over the course of five months the intelligence section mapped a network of Saddam’s family, bodyguards, associates, and his most trusted companions. By focusing on the key families, Murphy’s team understood how a child is named and the significance of the name. It all manifested itself in a better understanding of the enemy they faced and how that enemy might organize. The link diagram continued to grow, developing along the family and tribal lines, fused with all the reporting of anti-Coalition activity. It developed a picture of the enemy and led to actionable intelligence, and eventually to raids. With each raid and each capture of a person from the link diagram, they learned more. After the Brigade had detained most of these individuals over months, the information was greatly refined, allowing them to focus on individuals who required further targeting and capture. These individuals ran operations for Saddam, reported to him, and would, the team reasoned, eventually lead to his capture.
What emerged was an intricate diagram of tribes, families, associates, and contacts unlike anything being drawn or tracked by any other organization. The relationships evolved as the analytic rigor increased, and they began understanding their knowledge base of the enemy and how he lived, thought, and operated. Murphy’s team shared what they developed. First they brought in other intelligence officers in the Raider Brigade and their subordinate battalions. Murphy and his subordinate battalion intelligence officers cross-talked and shared information about the enemy and how he was conducting operations within the brigade’s Area of Operations (AOR). This cross-talk grew to reach across brigade and division boundaries to higher headquarters, and eventually to Special Operations forces and participating agencies. They may have had different focuses, but all perspectives led back to Saddam.
Captain Desmond Bailey, the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop Commander, had a mission to screen and to make reconnaissance patrols through the area on the east side of the Tigris River. He could always be counted on to return with good nuggets of information about the various families around Tikrit proper. One of the battalion’s intelligence officers, Captain Tim Morrow, did a particularly fine job. He ferreted out pieces of information on the activities of the families in his area. When the group met, not all of them viewed the information the
same way, but the environment Hickey inspired in his command made them not afraid to say so. Some of the most lively “discussions” occurred between Murphy and Morrow, but their debates got them to the details behind the information and the different perspectives led to a shared understanding that fit the pieces precisely.
As that understanding grew, the gaps requiring critical information became more evident and other agencies operating within the area began helping to fill them in. The intelligence effort grew from a simple outside-the-box initiative by an unlikely combination of soldiers and Special Operations operatives, into a combined operation including the assets of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the CIA, Special Forces, the 4th Infantry Division, and a Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF)—Task Force 121. With this information sharing, the predictions made by the template were increasingly more accurate.
From July into December, there were twelve raids conducted to capture Saddam throughout Task Force RAIDER’s area of operations. Some raid reports indicated they’d missed their man by only a few hours. More than six hundred operations were directed against targets depicted on the link diagram. In November, Task Force RAIDER captured several key Iraqis, including two members of one family in a single eighteen-hour period. The strategy continued to lead the Task Force to the most trusted individuals in Saddam’s inner circle.
What started as a simple task to make sense of four names on a sheet of paper turned into a full team effort to reveal an extremely detailed Link Analysis Diagram of the people connected to Saddam. The template of growing information became known as “Mongo Link.” “Mongo” was short for Mongaso, a common term in the military for large complexities, resembling the work of cartoonist Rube Goldberg. Gray coined the nickname to capture the sheer size and complexity to which the diagram had evolved. And, as one soldier put it, “calling it ‘the big-ass chart’ just didn’t brief well.” As the chart gained definition, it listed targets that ranged from “trigger pullers on the ground” to the highest levels of Saddam’s most trusted, including those on the card deck of Most-Wanted Iraqis.
Information from many different sources was processed through different intelligence analysts, but ultimately, it all fed into the Mongo Link. One piece of information linked to another, which would link to something that happened on a different day, and so on. The brigade, higher headquarters, special operations forces, the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and others in the area developed their estimates in tandem and leveraged off each other’s sources to gain a better, more robust understanding of the enemy. But it all started with the Mongo Link.
The analysts would find Saddam. Hickey and his task force would fix him in place. Task Force 121 would finish him, once and for all, dead or alive.
As relatively low-tech “door kicking,” arresting, and interrogation of Saddam’s former bodyguards, relatives of people close to him, errand boys, and assorted flunkies went on, the detail and number of the links grew downward, and increasingly inward to Saddam, who sat in the center of the target. While many U.S. forces and virtually every aspect of the media were preoccupied with finding the “high-value targets” from the Most-Wanted Iraqis, the trail that led to Saddam was built through lower-level operatives. Eventually the Mongo Link contained the names and descriptions of more than 250 top- and mid-level activists connected in a web of family and functional ties. Murphy’s team color-coded each family, with greens, yellows, blues, purples, and whites denoting the various classified statuses and linkages. Those who were killed or captured got a mark in red.
In the first Gulf War, Saddam claimed to fight “the mother of all battles.” In this second round, Hickey planned to knock Saddam out using MAJ Murphy’s “mother of all family trees.”
The influx of information that shaped this tree became incessant, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Processing it was a daunting, tedious, and often extremely frustrating task. Some days produced huge leaps forward, while others left the team feeling like they’d never move another step. But each raid, each report, each piece of information, each detainee, even the attacks against Coalition forces added a little piece to the puzzle. Murphy understood that fighting this type of war was different from fighting a high-intensity, force-on-force war. It required looking at things from a different perspective and looking at the enemy in a different way. It required countless hours of trying to figure out who was who, and how they fit together. They focused on everything from the DIA blacklist (a Defense Intelligence Agency list of enemy persons of interest) to the local trigger pullers in the cities where the units of the 1st brigade operated.
Before long, it was apparent that Murphy’s first four individuals were playing a bigger role in the resistance than anyone had thought. In July the brigade began piercing the inner circle with the arrest of Adnan Abdullah Abid Musslit, a key Hussein bodyguard seized during a series of raids late in the month. The operations also uncovered photographs of Saddam posing with various people, many of whom had been overlooked.
Once the Mongo Link took shape, the analysis began to almost feed itself, pointing toward new, better locations to raid and showing linkages more clearly. Even what appeared to be the most mundane and trivial bit of information could reveal itself to be vital. Murphy continually stressed that the link diagram was a living document. By September the work led them to a raid in ad Dawr, south of Tikrit, a place they would return to later with better results.
Saddam Supper Club
September also saw a rise in attacks by insurgents against the brigade and division. Nonetheless, Hickey, supported by intelligence from Murphy’s team, quelled the offensive in their area through a series of aggressive raids and night attacks, targeting both “shooters” and the lower and mid-level organizers that directed them. Through it all they continued to gather more intelligence and it all linked back to the original five key extended families from abu Ajeel, al Alam, al Owja and ad Dwar and a few other small villages within a twelve-mile radius of the volatile city of Tikrit. Murphy, Joe, and select others were frequent dinner guests of the special operators and they exchanged ideas, sometimes just watching football and “shooting the bull.” The conventional soldiers were impressed by how warmly these elite shadow warriors took them in and treated them as equals. The gatherings became as much social as they were business.
What also emerged as increasingly important, was a group of individuals on the Link Diagram that Hickey referred to tongue-in-cheek one day as “the 42-inch waistband club.” They were a group of middle-aged, balding financiers and operators with physical builds like bowling pins. They were a direct contrast to the lean twenty-year-old kids who were actually conducting the attacks against Coalition forces. “The 42-inch waistband club” occupied key power positions on the diagram and looked to be a critical link to Saddam.
The process was set. All it needed was a catalyst to bring it all together. Hickey, through the efforts of MAJ Murphy’s team, believed he knew what, or rather who, that was. They needed the Fat Man.
The Fat Man
The running joke about “the 42-inch waistband club” increasingly proved to be the case. Large around the middle, these men never seemed to be the ones who actually got their hands dirty, much like Sidney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon.
The missing link, the catalyst, was a member of one of five families close to Saddam, a key figure in the insurgency, and one of the individuals who long occupied a space high up on Task Force RAIDER’s “wish list.” Although they had known all along that he was an important figure in the resistance, just how important he was became evident as more and more low-level operatives on the list were scooped up. They knew he would possess critical information that might lead to Saddam, so they began tracking him and his family in early July. Murphy, Hickey, and the brigade knew they wanted him even though they didn’t ultimately know what he was up to. In late November, after capturing the two brothers from the Fat Man’s family, his importan
ce grew; the more they learned, the more they understood how large a role he played.
Although his and his family’s names remain a closely guarded secret, the Fat Man apparently first attracted MAJ Murphy’s attention as just one of four names on a list drawn up in early July, after troops from the 1st Brigade raided his property in Abou Ajil. Though they missed arresting him by moments, the photographs, documents, and other items they captured connected him to several key allies of the Hussein family. They first believed he was simply a bodyguard for Saddam Hussein, and learned later that he was a senior figure in the Special Security Service (SSS), a force run by Hussein’s son, Qusay, and the man ultimately charged with protecting the President himself.
Although more raids snared more operatives, the man who would prove to be the key to finally finding Saddam remained at large. Over three nights during the first week of December, U.S. troops conducted a series of raids in Tikrit, Samarra, and Bayji that netted other suspects and produced more leads. A raid on December 5, in the nearby city of Samarra, yielded $1.9 million in U.S. currency, but not the man himself. They missed him again on December 7 in Bayji. It seemed the Iraqi operative was as elusive as Saddam himself.
After 249 days of searching, 41 of the 55 Most-Wanted Iraqis were dead or in custody, but there was still no Ace of Spades.