The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  In 1991, Zarqawi and a handful of other mujahideen fighters skirmished with Afghan government troops in towns throughout the country’s eastern provinces. The battles weren’t complex or significant, but they did allow Zarqawi to return home a combat veteran in 1993.

  Once he and Maqdisi reached Zarqa, Zarqawi was eager to proselytize. He had apparently taken to wandering the dirty streets, reprimanding women for clothing he didn’t find suitably conservative. “It was not easy with him [once he returned],” Zarqawi’s brother-in-law Salih al-Hami later told a German reporter. “When you spend so much time with jihad, it’s like oxygen. It gets hard to do without it.” In Zarqa, Zarqawi helped Maqdisi round up a handful of veteran Arab-Afghan fighters and form a militant group that came to be known as Bayat al-Imam (loyalty to the Imam). They began smuggling weapons into the country and plotting to overthrow the Jordanian government.

  But theirs was a poorly crafted operation. I was later told that their first mission called for a group member to blow up a local theater that showed pornographic films—sinful material, in their interpretation of Islam. The jihadist became so enthralled by the movie that he lost track of time, forgetting about his bomb, and blew his own legs off.

  Then, in 1994, Jordanian intelligence—which had been monitoring fighters returning from the Afghan war and had kept a casual eye on Zarqawi since his days as a street thug—caught Zarqawi stashing weapons in his basement in advance of potential attacks inside the country. When he was arrested, Zarqawi claimed he’d stumbled upon the weapons while walking down the street. “He never struck me as intelligent,” the extremist’s lawyer, Mohammed al-Dweik, later recalled.

  Both Zarqawi and Maqdisi were sentenced to fifteen years in prison for plotting against the government. They were ultimately locked up together at al-Jafr prison, one of Jordan’s harshest maximum-security penitentiaries, located on the edge of the country’s southeastern desert some fifty miles from the Saudi Arabian border. But again, Zarqawi flourished in confinement. His tenure was split between the communal cell in the prison’s high-security wing, which he shared with a dozen other inmates, and the scorching solitary confinement cells he was thrown into whenever he talked back to the wrong guards. During my early days in CTC, I read reports of his physical transformation behind bars: when he wasn’t trying to memorize the Koran, Zarqawi was known to kill time by bench-pressing buckets of rocks. Never exactly one for small talk or lofty ideas, Zarqawi became the perfect henchman-accomplice for Maqdisi, the stoic philosopher.

  In his role as the muscle at Jafr, Zarqawi embraced his former gang mentality. He doled out prison chores to other inmates—this one does laundry; that one reads the Koran aloud. Zarqawi sent a fellow inmate a threatening note after he caught him reading Crime and Punishment, by Christian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whom he considered a heretic. “He spelled Dostoyevsky ‘Doseefski,’” the inmate, Khalid Abu Duma, later recalled. “The note was full of bad Arabic, like a child wrote it.” Zarqawi even reportedly covered the ward’s TV sets with black cloth so the other inmates couldn’t be tempted by shapely women on the screens. They were only allowed to listen to TV.

  Zarqawi basically became a mob boss at Jafr—and I’ve long thought that “boss” was the important part. In that prison, he truly learned to lead and to protect the men who fell in line behind him. He acted as an intermediary between the guards and the inmates, who have since insisted that Zarqawi was repeatedly tortured by prison officials. In turn, Zarqawi once personally bathed an inmate who was dumped back in their collective pen after a torture session.

  The men in the cell at Jafr grew to love Zarqawi as much as they feared him. “He was tough, difficult to deal with,” Sami al Majaali, former head of the prison authority in Jordan, later acknowledged to author Loretta Napoleoni. “We were always careful in approaching him, especially because he was a real leader, a ‘prince,’ as the inmates called him. All the dealings with any of those convicts had to go through him. If he cooperated, the others would follow suit.” Zarqawi’s popularity began to rise while in Jafr with Maqdisi, whose influence among the inmates remained strong as a spiritual leader.

  With the help of other inmates’ wives and mothers, Maqdisi had managed to smuggle his own religious writings out of prison and arranged for them to be uploaded onto Salafi websites. Scarred by torture, driven by extremism, and emboldened by a zealous following, Zarqawi was born again. No longer did he scribble his name at the bottom of the flowery letters he sent his mother; instead he used a nickname he picked up as a fighter in the Afghan civil war, “al-Gharib”—the stranger.

  Then, in May of 1999, five years after Zarqawi was sent to prison, Jordan’s King Hussein died. As a gesture of governmental reconciliation, the newly enthroned King Abdullah II granted a royal pardon for political prisoners, a blessing not only for Zarqawi but also for another organization that had noted his rising influence: al Qaida.

  Years later, a book by Jordanian journalist Fuad Hussein, Zarqawi: jeel al-Qaeda al-thani (Zarqawi: the second generation of Al Qaida), would shed further light on Zarqawi’s backstory for our team—evidence that high-value government intelligence gathering can sometimes be done in the most pedestrian of ways. The author interviewed Sayf al-Adl, a former Egyptian army colonel and top military coordinator for al Qaida, via a series of handwritten letters that were folded to the size of cigarettes and smuggled back and forth, a level of access even the Agency never had. Adl told Fuad Hussein that at the time of Zarqawi’s pardon, Usama bin Ladin—who was based at the time in Kandahar, in eastern Afghanistan—had been hunting for updates on former Arab-Afghan fighters. They had spread out across the Middle East once the Soviets retreated, he knew. Often aimless and adrift, they would make obvious recruits for a growing terrorist organization with global ambitions.

  Among extremist networks, Zarqawi’s reputation preceded him. “We were therefore very pleased early in 1999 when we heard that [Zarqawi] had been released,” Adl later recalled. Just a few months after that, as we in the Iraq unit later discovered, Zarqawi was sitting in a safe house in Kandahar, awaiting a meeting with bin Ladin.

  But that meeting never happened. Many in al Qaida didn’t want anything to do with Zarqawi.

  Moreover, bin Ladin was suspicious that Jordanian intelligence might have infiltrated Zarqawi’s prison network and that Zarqawi could inadvertently lead them directly to him. Finally, the more scholarly among al Qaida’s higher-ups found Zarqawi to be something of a filterless punk, an impression that was underscored by the Jordanian’s unapologetic stance concerning Shia Muslims: they were kuffars who deserved to be executed—a group that would have included bin Ladin’s Shia mother.

  I’m sure the disdain was mutual. It was clear that Zarqawi found al Qaida’s approach to jihad far too moderate. He even disagreed with its targets. Bin Ladin’s holy war focused on the “far enemy,” including the United States and its Western allies. Zarqawi was content to try toppling what he and Maqdisi thought of as the “near enemy”—Middle Eastern governments such as Jordan’s. Partly because of that, Zarqawi was distrustful of bin Ladin’s longtime familial connections to Saudi Arabia’s royal House of Saud. Finally, Zarqawi’s ego had been inflated by his time in prison. He fancied himself a genuine leader, and he wasn’t interested in paying bayat, or swearing allegiance, to anyone—a condition of formal cooperation with bin Ladin.

  Still, some in al Qaida, including Adl, believed there was a place for Zarqawi in the larger movement. After letting Zarqawi languish for two weeks in that Kandahar safe house, bin Ladin permitted Adl to pay him a visit. There, Adl later recalled, he found a man “with poor rhetorical skills, who expressed what was on his mind bluntly.”

  “But,” he added, “his ambition was great, his objectives clear.”

  Bin Ladin was deeply unenthusiastic about allying with Zarqawi, but the upstart was connected. If his name alone—much less his background in Zarqa—could bring recruits to his jihad, that was worth something. With Adl’s enc
ouragement, the al Qaida leader acquiesced.

  Bin Ladin authorized $5,000 in seed money for Zarqawi and granted him the use of a training base outside Herat—on the far western edge of Afghanistan, near the border with Iran. Whether because of distrust or simple dislike, bin Ladin was keeping Zarqawi as far away as possible. Al Qaida’s leader didn’t demand bayat, just that Zarqawi assist in “coordination and cooperation in the service of our common goals,” Adl recalled. Inside the CIA, analysts would later describe Zarqawi’s role at the time as a “senior associate and collaborator” with al Qaida, but nothing more. As a result of Adl’s encouragement, bin Ladin left it to him to keep Zarqawi in line.

  Not long after, the former street thug moved into his small camp in western Afghanistan with a dozen or so followers. It’s not hard to imagine the sick, triumphal pride he must have felt as he first strung up a flag above the base emblazoned with his new group’s name, al-Tawhid wal-Jihad—unity and holy war.

  That camp is where Zarqawi awoke on September 11, 2001. Completely unbeknownst to him, bin Ladin and his al Qaida foot soldiers were about to unleash the worst international terrorist attack in history. It would be more than a year later when President Bush and then secretary of state Colin Powell tied Zarqawi to those attacks. That moment must have surprised Zarqawi as much as anyone.

  CHAPTER 4

  No Room for Ambiguity

  Soon after the October 2002 speech in Cincinnati in which President Bush implicated Zarqawi in the 9/11 plot, the pace in our office reached a fevered pitch. My dinners were often reduced to leftover bags of tortilla chips from some happy hour we’d planned for the branch, rescheduled, then simply forgotten about. Many days, that was the only food around, as lunch just sort of blended into dinner, which sometimes blended into a second dinner. Even when I arrived on the team, a few months earlier, some members were already leaving, either to return to their original assignments or because the pace was a frantic mess. There simply wasn’t time to coddle anyone.

  I was determined to excel at my work in the Iraq unit. Much of the Agency’s analytical ranks are populated with PhDs and Ivy League degrees, as you would find at think tanks and research facilities. My previous role had given me insight into ways I could benefit the team in spite of my less traditional qualifications, but there are very few people who start in HR at the CIA and later find themselves on one of the fast-paced analytical teams in the building. In the Iraq unit, my fear of failure drove me to almost obsessive ends; I was always scared I might screw something up.

  That was particularly true because no politician cared what I, Nada, thought about a given issue. Politicians cared deeply, however, about how the CIA assessed critical situations—and I never forgot that in those unbylined products, my word stood as the official Agency position. Doing something wrong wouldn’t ever just be my screwup; it would tarnish the Agency brand to provide expert, objective analysis. Protecting that brand was crucial to me.

  I’ve never forgotten the blunt truth I first heard from Martin Petersen, a forty-year veteran of the Directorate of Intelligence: analysts are forced to write everything down. There is no room in the DI for ambiguity or, later, coy selective memory. “One can fight over what was said in a briefing, but the written word is in black and white,” Petersen said. “It is the paper product that gets held up at a congressional hearing or eviscerated on an editorial page.”

  As one of the newest members of the Iraq unit, I still had much to learn about the issues—starting with where and how Zarqawi came to be in Iraq at all.

  I knew that in the weeks after 9/11, the United States set its sights on toppling al Qaida and, in turn, the Taliban in Afghanistan. To help accomplish that, US Special Operations Forces had been inserted by helicopter near Herat—the general location of Zarqawi’s private terrorist training camp. There, those US soldiers had met up with Northern Alliance leader Ismail Khan and some five thousand of his militiamen. Soon those allied forces poured into the city, and by the following day they had sent al Qaida and some of the Taliban fleeing west into the mountains along the border with Iran.

  Zarqawi and his men had interest in taking part in the fighting—at the time we heard reports that he may have been wounded in his chest or leg in a November 2001 airstrike—but he escaped with a few broken ribs.

  By December of 2001, Zarqawi was in Iran, setting up a network of safe houses. One was in Tehran; another was in Zahedan, just inside the Afghan border; and another was in Isfahan Province, in the south of the country. That last location was on Bahar Street, block number 27, in Kuhak, right along the border with Pakistan. It was registered to one “Ahmad Abdul Salam.” But by then, we learned, Zarqawi had nearly as many pieces of contact information as he did aliases: 0041-793686306 was his Swisscom satellite phone number at the time, and 0098-9135153994 was the number for one of his Iranian cell phones. He could sometimes be reached at alzabh@yahoo.com.

  From there, using a list of his various passports, we systematically mapped Zarqawi’s travels to Syria, then to a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, then back to Jordan in an effort to recruit militants. Whatever loose cooperation Zarqawi had had with al Qaida appeared to be severed after the retreat from Herat, though we couldn’t be certain of that at the time.

  We later figured out that in the spring of 2002, Zarqawi went west, across “the wall,” the jihadist nickname for the Iran-Iraq border, and after he had received medical treatment for broken ribs in Baghdad from sympathetic Islamists (according to some disputed reports), he settled in the northern mountain town of Khurmal, in Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan. Without much of a team to speak of, Zarqawi was traveling light, presumably subsisting on whatever generosity and meager financial donations he could pick up along the way. Still, those things were enough to allow him to plan and finance a low-budget mission that proved to be one of the first successful attacks of his life—one that further intensified the administration’s focus upon him: he paid two men to gun down an unlikely victim, Laurence Foley, a representative for USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), in Amman, Jordan.

  Early on October 28, 2002, sixty-year-old Laurence Foley—a veteran of government development posts in Bolivia, Peru, and Zimbabwe—left his two-story limestone villa in Abdoun, an upscale neighborhood in central Amman periodically compared to Beverly Hills. The former resident of Oakland, California, had come to the country with his wife, Virginia, two years earlier, acting as the chief administrative officer for America’s assistance programs in Jordan. He had eschewed life in a diplomatic compound; although a government security detail conducted periodic drive-bys of the home, there was no twenty-four-hour guard in place. Just the ever-present pink bougainvillea spreading across the tops of the walls surrounding the home and a burgundy Mercedes-Benz with diplomatic plates sitting in the Foleys’ driveway.

  Around 7:15 a.m. that October day, as Foley walked to his car, Libyan national Salem bin Suweid darted out from behind the sedan holding a 7mm pistol equipped with a silencer. Foley was shot eight times in the head, chest, and abdomen. Suweid fled in a getaway rental car driven by Jordanian Yasser Freihat; soon afterward, Virginia found her dead husband crumpled on the driveway.

  Suweid and Freihat were quickly arrested by Jordanian authorities and ultimately hanged for the murder in the same prison where Zarqawi had earlier done time. Before his execution, Suweid told Jordanian police that Zarqawi had personally handed him the gun, ammunition, and silencer used in Foley’s killing and that Zarqawi had transferred tens of thousands of dollars to him to finance other terrorist plots in Jordan. Zarqawi was found guilty of participation in the plot by Jordan’s State Security Court and sentenced to death in absentia. Back in Washington, the administration believed even more fully that Zarqawi was a rising menace who should be taken out of the picture.

  A few months after that attack, following discussions with the vice president and other administration officials at Langley, a senior colleague in our branch agreed
to draft the portion of Secretary Powell’s February 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations that was to center on Zarqawi. Those remarks went through a number of edits by higher-ups in our unit, CIA management, and then a predictable back-and-forth with the White House. Finally the remarks were approved by all, and everyone in our unit clutched a copy of the speech in our hands as we crowded into an office to watch it on TV. “Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi,” Secretary Powell said, “an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants.”

  That was the first time most Americans had heard Zarqawi’s name. In the Iraq unit, it was the first time we’d heard that line.

  At once, we all looked down at our copies of the speech. The sound of papers rustling filled the silence—everyone was scouring their documents to see what page Powell was on. In fact he wasn’t giving the remarks we’d carefully edited at all. Powell underscored his assessment with a PowerPoint slide showing a chart purportedly linking Iraq to al Qaida, with Zarqawi’s photo prominently displayed in the top-line kingpin spot.

  “What the hell is that?!” someone blurted out.

  Days later, President Bush made a similar proclamation in his weekly radio address: “Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Even with the limited information we had at the time, those assertions were impossible for me to digest. The Kurds in northern Iraq among whom Zarqawi had been living had long been marginalized enemies of Hussein’s regime. In 1988, the dictator had gone so far as to drop bombs full of sarin and mustard gas on the Kurdish city Halabja, killing some five thousand civilians. That area would have been the last place for an ally of Hussein’s to set up shop, and those extremists would have been the last people to whom Iraq’s regime would offer chemical weapons training. It was clear, to me, that Zarqawi chose Khurmal for a very different reason: it was where Ansar al-Islam (supporters of Islam), or AI, had set up shop.