by Nada Bakos
I picked a trailer and climbed the metal stairway to the door. I stepped inside and was greeted by several heads immediately swiveling around and popping up over their monitors to see who’d entered.
“Hi,” I said sheepishly. “I’m the CTC analyst who just arrived. Do you know which SCIF I should be in?”
“Hi,” said an upbeat young woman. She greeted me with the widest smile I had seen in a while. “You’re in the right place,” she said and held out her hand. “I’m Eve.”
“Nada,” I said. “But not that one.”
I sat down at an empty computer terminal next to Eve, toward the front of the trailer, and grabbed from my bag the assigned temporary-duty hard drive I’d been given before I deployed. I inserted it into the computer and pressed the Power button. Almost instantly, I was patched into the appropriate networks.
Eve, like everyone else in the trailer, was an operations officer, a.k.a. case officer, tasked with recruiting and developing local sources who could secretly provide the US government with valuable intelligence.
The operations side of the Agency’s work is a direct descendant of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which William “Wild Bill” Donovan established in 1942, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. True to Donovan’s nickname, an action-oriented cowboy ethos has always permeated the operations ranks. Exude confidence, the thinking goes. Always confidence. Operations officers recruit agents to spy on behalf of the United States. There are other jobs within the Directorate of Operations, but operations officers form the business end of the human intelligence collection pipeline.
In my mind, that swagger was best embodied by Marty Martin, an Agency colleague who began his career in special operations forces before climbing the ranks at the CIA as an operations officer. He ultimately oversaw the entire operations side of the hunt for high-ranking al Qaida personnel following 9/11. Marty was the one who chose the publicly released photo of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which showed the terrorist not in one of his “Arab yuppie” outfits, as Marty called them, but rather in the dirty white T-shirt that left KSM looking like he’d spent the previous two days without sleep or a shower. A muscular fiftysomething with swept-back hair, Marty always had a decisive view of his work: “My job was to kill al Qaida,” he would later say. “Get with us, or get out of the way.”
To be fair, that work requires a bit of bravado. Being on the front lines jeopardizes lives every day, be they the agents’ own, their sources’, or, on especially bad days, those of their sources’ families. I saw quickly in the Counterterrorism Center that it was better for an officer to be decisive rather than the opposite.
Beyond the aggressive mind-set, or perhaps because of it, there was another obvious difference between the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations, or DO. The operations side was the men’s world at the CIA, especially at that time, a situation that had been acknowledged by no less than Nora Slatkin, the Agency’s executive director from 1995 to 1997. “Women in the DO have often been delegated to jobs writing reports, doing research, or other support work,” she told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 1996. “Even war-seasoned [female] OSS veterans… found themselves doing largely office work when they got to the CIA, rather than recruiting spies.”
That trend was so pervasive that it led to a bruising 1986 class-action lawsuit filed by several hundred women who’d worked on the operations side. The suit alleged that women in the DO had been routinely denied promotions, overseas assignments, and supervisory positions because of what lawyers for the women described as the CIA’s “pervasive culture of sexual discrimination.” Nearly a decade later, the Agency quietly settled with the women, providing them $940,000 in back pay and granting twenty-five retroactive promotions to the victims. “We all know that James Bond is a fantasy,” Slatkin told the council, “and Bond women are a fantasy of a different sort.”
Clearly, in that era, women on the operations side faced steep hurdles in working their way up to the senior ranks. In the DI, thankfully, people were mostly judged by the substantive knowledge they brought to their work and their ability to do their jobs.
Looking back at my time in the CIA, I think the simplest difference in approaches comes from the way women tend to balance risk and reward. I know this veers toward armchair theorizing, but there’s a scientific underpinning for it. In a 1999 meta-analysis of 150 studies comparing risk-taking tendencies of males and females, entitled “Gender Differences in Risk Taking,” researchers James Byrnes, David Miller, and William Schafer concluded that “clearly… male participants are more likely to take risks than female participants.” Other studies built upon those findings, including the 2006 “Gender, Financial Risk, and Probability Weights,” by Swiss researchers Helga Fehr-Duda, Manuele de Gennaro, and Renate Schubert, which found that females weigh probabilities differently from males and that women are more pessimistic about potential significant gains. Taken together, researchers found, “women’s relative insensitivity to probabilities combined with pessimism may indeed lead to higher risk aversion.”
I don’t think it’s risk aversion; I think it’s measuring risk. Women incorporate measuring risk into their daily lives in ways that many men don’t even consider. We make sure our toddlers are drinking from BPA-free sippy cups and surreptitiously slip vegetables into family meals to guard against disease. Risk is, of course, a fundamental component of growth and innovation, something to be embraced in the appropriate contexts. Women may tend to calculate the dangers more judiciously than some men—and the failure of work environments, including high-level government bureaucracies, to recognize that does a disservice to everyone.
Ambitious women shouldn’t have to adopt stereotypically male behaviors or character traits. Yet even today, when inroads into the upper echelons of management still feel like a form of cultural success, many women take the path of least resistance—acting like a man. This demoralizes women employees and kneecaps the effectiveness of the overall organization. Because often, even if only in hindsight, it seems clear that thinking like a woman is sometimes the better option. To be clear, I think the argument that you might be better at one job or the other based on gender is false, be it man or woman. This is why diversity is so important; if everyone has the same background and thinks the same way, it’s no better than a giant self-licking ice cream cone.
The baseline for our work in the Counterterrorism Center was the first strategic warning delivered to US government policy makers about bin Ladin. It had been written in August of 1993, as thousands of Saudi guerrilla fighters had finished campaigns against the Soviets in Afghanistan and were spreading out across the Middle East. In response to that notable trend, a young analyst who was at the time in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Gina Bennett, drew up a product entitled “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous.” She called special attention to a benefactor of the movement living at the time in the capital of Sudan: “Among private donors to the new generation, Usama Bin Ladin is particularly famous for his religious zeal and financial largess,” she wrote. “Bin Ladin’s money has enabled hundreds of Arab veterans to return to safehavens and bases in Yemen and Sudan, where they are training new fighters.” Bennett later moved to the CIA to continue her work.
Bennett’s work received little attention at the time, and in the following years, other analysts in the intelligence community would quietly toil away on the same case. Barbara Sude, one of the pioneering counterterrorism analysts, has said that in the mid-1990s, “I remember one senior analyst from another account saying at some conference, ‘Terrorism people are just tracking things. That’s not real analysis.’”
The subject was so amorphous, and such a departure from the traditional topics being analyzed in Langley, that it was difficult to garner attention for it. This continued even after the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania, when George Tenet said that “we must now enter a new phase in our eff
ort against bin Ladin.… We are at war.” He concluded, “I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [intelligence] Community.”
Later, a joint congressional task force investigating intelligence lapses prior to 9/11 would find that “despite the DCI’s declaration of war in 1998, there was no massive shift in budget or reassignment of personnel to counterterrorism until after September 11, 2001.” A further cutting report by the CIA’s own inspector general recommended that Tenet and other senior officers face an “accountability board” because they “did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner” in enabling the CIA to battle al Qaida.
My earliest days in Iraq were spent poring over information brought back to base by the Pentagon’s special operations units. That included units from the army’s special operations force and the navy’s special operations force deployed to Baghdad. It was similar to the work I’d done in Langley, though from Iraq I wasn’t contributing directly to products for policy makers. Instead I had a closer look at the tactical perspective of ongoing operations, something impossible to do back at the office.
My boss at Baghdad Station, the term for the CIA’s main operating facility in a foreign location, was a man I’ll call Charley, a former operations officer. Back in 1986, in an era when the Islamist threats largely consisted of kidnappings and bombings in and around Beirut, Lebanon, he had helped create the Agency’s precursor to the Counterterrorism Center. Just shy of six feet tall, he had gray hair and the semistocky build of a man who’d spent his career in the field focused on terrorist organizations and al Qaida. I was relieved to be working under someone who understood my unit’s counterterrorism mission so well—in large part because everyone else in those BIAP trailers was focused on an entirely different sort of hunt.
The Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq had contained a few pillars. A big one was Hussein’s potential support for terrorism, which I was dutifully pursuing from my temporary workspace. But perhaps an even larger justification for the war had been the supposed need to rid Iraq of chemical and biological weapons once and for all. “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz later acknowledged, “we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.”
Logic dictated that once Hussein was overthrown, the administration actually had to locate those weapons. And already, by the time I arrived in Iraq, the search had not found anything to support Saddam’s having WMD.
I settled in at BIAP just as the Pentagon’s Seventy-Fifth Exploitation Task Force wrapped up seven frustrating weeks of work. The six hundred or so people comprising the task force—including experts in everything from biology to computer science to special operations forces combat—had visited all the nineteen top suspected WMD sites identified prior to the invasion. These locations also generally happened to be targets the coalition had bombed, however, and that looters had subsequently ransacked. If there had been anything to find prior to the invasion, it wasn’t there afterward.
I saw weapons investigators wandering the airport grounds some evenings, back from their latest wild-goose chase through some charred office building. Their shoulders were perpetually hunched. The task force leaders no longer thought they were going to “find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun,” Army colonel Robert Smith told the Washington Post at the time. “That’s what we came here for, but we’re past that.” I could tell they couldn’t wait to get back on a plane to the States.
Just as the team rotated out, another team arrived to fill its shoes. With a key pretext for the war on the precipice of complete invalidation, the Pentagon nearly tripled-down on its hunt for WMD with a new fifteen-hundred-person task force. Known as the Iraq Survey Group, or ISG, the multinational, multiagency team fell under the general command of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Unlike the previous task force, however, this new one was headed by CIA director Tenet’s handpicked special adviser, David Kay, who had served as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq after the first Gulf War. It was immediately clear to me, as his team mounted an expanding array of missions across the Iraqi countryside, that Kay had the full might and resources of the Agency behind him. It was less clear whether even that would be enough.
I wasn’t privy to the details of the WMD case, but there was an overwhelming skepticism among my coworkers that any major stockpiles of weapons existed. Sitting next to Kay at lunch one day, I asked him.
“Do you think you’ll find anything?” I said.
His outlook seemed upbeat, if somewhat restrained. “If there is anything there to find,” he said, “we’ll find it.”
To help in Kay’s efforts, it seemed like a stream of new CIA officers began arriving every day. Eventually the growth of Agency operations with the ISG would necessitate that they move from our living quarters and workspace to an airport camp of their own, full of gaudy marble guesthouses, lakeside villas, and a central palace that was allegedly a former brothel. WELCOME TO CAMP SLAYER, a sign outside their outpost would soon read. ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE. But during my first few weeks at BIAP I shared quarters with the growing team of weapons hunters at the Baghdad Station’s SCIF. If they knew who Zarqawi was, they didn’t especially care.
Charley, thankfully, did. He understood the nuances that exist, perhaps paradoxically, at the nexus of extremist groups, and he had his own skepticism about al Qaida’s supposed connection to Hussein’s regime and the ensuing invasion. I decided early on that those must have been the reasons for the fierce scowl he usually wore. Charley was clearly the sort of coworker whose good side you wanted to be on—not someone you wanted to bother unnecessarily. But fortunately, we clicked. When I arrived, he was instrumental in facilitating the handoff of information from the Iraq unit analyst who’d held the seat in Baghdad before I did. As I settled into a groove there, he offered a willing second set of eyes for the cables I wrote about extremists operating in Iraq. And after I’d been in country for a few weeks, it was Charley who first offered me an overview of the right way to interview detainees.
If I was going to properly investigate the administration’s question—What role, if any, might the Iraqi Intelligence Service have played in cooperating with terrorists such as Zarqawi?—I needed to ferret out information myself. Training in interview and interrogation techniques is par for the course among CIA operations officers, but analysts back at Langley are rarely called upon to cull fresh intelligence from sources. Questioning detainees was something I’d simply never done before.
Sitting across from me in the dusty space that was formerly Saddam’s personal airport conference room, Charley walked me through “Debriefing 101.” In practice, he said, the difference between an interview and an interrogation is largely one of art—particularly to the person wearing the handcuffs. But at its simplest, an interview is direct and efficient. Where was the detainee on this particular date? How did he know that other individual? Who is this person in the photograph? I was looking for information, Charley said, not necessarily to catch someone in a lie. That applied to “high-value detainees” as well as to the lowliest shopkeeper. Besides, if someone were innocent, this would quickly clarify that, too.
“Gain their respect and their trust,” he said. “Be patient, and try to be unimposing. Then they’ll talk.”
Interrogating, however, is something different. It’s directly confrontational, and it’s built on the certitude that a detainee is guilty of something. The end goal is to convince him that a confession is in his best interests. That wasn’t my job, Charley pointed out, but it was useful to understand the difference. And what a difference it was.
After Charley’s debriefing tutorial, I needed to calm my nerves. The next day I would be heading to the detention center. So I climbed under the mosquito netting enveloping my cot at my terminal and thumbed through the one book I’d thrown into m
y bag before leaving Washington: Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs.
I appreciate now the irony of preparing to question high-value radical detainees by reading about a religion in which Four Noble Truths revolve around understanding suffering and the path to enlightenment. But I’d packed the book simply because it was slim and full of short essays on subjects such as culture, integrity, and emptiness. I figured it might take my mind off living in a war zone with new acquaintances, trying to digest my role in all of it.
Lying on my cot that night at BIAP, I grabbed a pen and underlined this, from Batchelor’s essay on compassion: “A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.”
That seemed like a valuable ethos for an interviewer. Little did I know how many times I would need to repeat this to myself in the coming weeks.
If the detention facility on the western edge of the BIAP grounds had a proper name at the time, I never knew it. Later, news reports and investigations would refer to it as Camp Cropper, but at least in the summer of 2003, Cropper was a “camp” in the same way Alcatraz might have once been. As a colleague and I drove through the late-morning haze the next day, those endless spools of razor wire surrounding the facility were just the most obvious hint that Cropper wasn’t there to house Americans.
The camp wasn’t the largest prison, or “theater internment facility,” the US government would build in Iraq. That honor goes to the isolated Camp Bucca, in the country’s southeastern desert, which was swelling steadily by the time I arrived in Iraq and would grow to hold as many as twenty-six thousand inmates. Cropper isn’t the most notorious Iraqi detention center, either. For most Americans, Abu Ghraib likely holds that distinction, thanks to what a 2004 army internal report described as the “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” of inmates there. But in the United States’ war on terror, Camp Cropper just might have been the most important internment facility. It’s where the high-value detainees were held.