The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  By the time I arrived, Cropper’s ranks included Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, the head of Iraq’s biological weapons development program, whom everyone in the Agency referred to as Anthrax Annie. Humam Abd al-Khaliq Abd al-Ghafur, the former head of Iraq’s nuclear program, was also in a cell in Cropper. Former Iraqi foreign minister and deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, who oversaw the killing of forty-two Iraqi merchants the government accused of price fixing, was there as well.

  Not long after I arrived, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as Chemical Ali because of the horrific gas attacks he orchestrated against the Kurds in 1988, was apprehended and sent to Cropper—and if and when the coalition tracked down Hussein himself, I knew he’d go there, too. Basically anyone who appeared on one of the Bush administration’s deck of fifty-five terrorist Personality Identification Playing Cards got sent to Camp Cropper.

  I was hoping to interview the comical Baghdad Bob—the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who denied the presence of US troops on television even as tanks were rolling in the background behind him. He was detained but then immediately released because he was low on the hierarchy of power. Given that he stated on television, “They are trying to say that the Iraqi is easy to capture, in order to deceive the world that it is a picnic.… One day, they [will] start facing bitter facts,” I thought he might be an interesting guy to talk to.

  Outside the camp’s perimeter row of twelve-foot-high steel-reinforced concrete T-walls, designed for blast protection, I was met by a sergeant in no mood for small talk. His M4 carbine was slung over his shoulder, and I could see an MP tag on his shoulder as he leaned over and peered into the car window. The patch under his tag, depicting a crossed pair of spears, signified the 320th Military Police Company, based in Saint Petersburg, Florida. I’d heard about those MPs trailing the war effort back in March, setting up prisons to hold the Iraqis captured during the coalition’s initial advance. But I mentioned to him that I thought those reservists were supposed to have been sent home when President Bush had declared combat operations over.

  “Orders changed,” he said, barely concealing his frustration.

  It turned out that the detainees weren’t the only ones who didn’t care for the prisons. At the time, the US Army had half a million soldiers on active duty, the sergeant said, but only a few thousand of those were military police. Only a subset of those MPs had undergone the special training necessary to become prison guards—which is a niche assignment, perhaps, but not a job you can simply throw at an everyday soldier and expect to have it go well. In no other place in the army would a private be in charge of nearly one hundred people, particularly people who might be hostile toward him. The MPs in Iraq who had the composure, judgment, and training to manage a prison proved far too valuable to rotate home—especially as the Pentagon’s detention plan began to unravel.

  That airport facility, I’d been told, had originally been designed as a central processing place for the Defense Department’s network of Iraqi prisons. Insurgents in and around Baghdad would be brought to BIAP, cataloged, then distributed among various internment facilities around the country—many of which, like Abu Ghraib, had originally been built by the Iraqis. But this plan presumed that existing prison facilities would be in working order, and yet as Iraqi military forces retreated, they pillaged and neglected many of them. Suddenly the internment options were far more limited. By the time I first visited Cropper, which was built to house around two hundred people, it held somewhere between five hundred and one thousand.

  The sergeant pointed us toward a makeshift parking area up ahead. I drove through the gate and stopped by a large blown-out airplane hangar. The giant corrugated metal sheets on its roof flapped whenever there was a sharp gust of wind. My colleague, who’d been to the camp before, hopped out and headed for the door. I hurried to keep up.

  Walking through the searing sunshine, down a fenced corridor toward the special housing unit, I saw groups of male detainees, in whatever clothes they’d been wearing the moment they were arrested, milling about inside a giant pen. To battle the heat, many had taken off their shirts and wrapped them over their heads. At the edges of the courtyard was more elaborate fencing, delimiting the female-only section of the jail as well as the juveniles’ section. The whole setup looked more to me like livestock pens than a detention center for humans.

  The original Pentagon plan had anticipated that these men would have all cycled through Cropper and gone on to other facilities within three days. In reality, most of them would be detained there for more than three hundred days. The men glared at me as we walked—and to be sure, some of the animosity was mutual. A percentage of the detainees, I had been told, had been an active part of the brief conflict. Others had been arrested while plotting attacks against US personnel and infrastructure in Iraq. A reminder of what some of these detainees were capable of was delivered a few weeks earlier, when an army convoy had taken a wrong turn on the road to Baghdad. Insurgents attacked the caravan, killing eleven soldiers and kidnapping seven others, including Private First Class Jessica Lynch, then nineteen years old. When the West Virginia native was rescued eleven days later, special operations forces found her right arm shattered, her spine fractured, her left leg splintered, and indications of sexual assault. They thanked God she couldn’t remember that.

  Inside the facility, we stopped briefly among the rows of yellow metal walls that made up Cropper’s solitary confinement wing. Former Iraqi government officials and other high-value detainees were brought here. If they were cooperative, some of them were allowed more than one hour of sunlight per day.

  From there the tour continued on to the detainment area for the general population. We stopped into the makeshift intake office, where three MPs stood next to a few computers and several clipboards full of the names and numbers of the detainees. I ran my finger down the list, reading through the notes about why each detainee was arrested—the start of a task that soon became part of my daily routine. Up ahead, an MP led us into that same blown-out airplane hangar we’d parked next to. There I could interview detainees.

  I made a sweeping circle of the place with my eyes. The flapping metal roof offered a modicum of shade over the dirt-and-gravel floor, but that was it. A row of adjoining plywood rooms, each maybe a dozen feet square, stood off to the right. The MP gestured us over to one of them.

  There were no ceilings on the rooms and little in the way of privacy. But they each had a small table, a few plastic chairs, and a door.

  “Your office,” the MP said.

  CHAPTER 6

  Long Guns to Be Placed Here

  It was an early afternoon at the end of May when MPs led a man I’ll call Mahmoud to my plywood shack. He was the sixth detainee I’d questioned at Cropper that day, and I had been told that he had only been in Iraq for a few weeks before he’d been arrested by US forces. Like the other people I’d questioned, Mahmoud was clearly no Iraqi freedom fighter or devout Hussein loyalist. Yet he was being described by the military as an enemy combatant.

  Mahmoud sat down in the salvaged plastic chair with a thud and threw his restrained hands up on the tabletop in front of him. His right leg twitched in his dirty clothes. He scanned the tiny room.

  To my left sat a man named Percy. Nearly forty years old, he was born in the Middle East, then immigrated to the United States as a teenager. He’d earned scholarships to college, then caught on at the Agency as an invaluable interpreter. His knowledge of local customs and nuances was almost impossible to replicate, even by the best-trained American-born Arabic speaker. Percy’s beliefs were not vague, ingrained platitudes about American superiority; his passion for the US intelligence mission came from a deep appreciation for the opportunities he had in his adopted homeland. I trusted him fully and was glad to have him sitting there silently by my side in the shack, staring right back at Mahmoud.

  The detainee craned his neck and glanced behind him. Leaning against the back wall was an analyst in his mid
-thirties named Ron. He wore a white button-down shirt and khakis, and he worked for the Pentagon’s intelligence wing, the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  That Ron was even in the room was something of a coup and a testament to the idea that the CIA and the Pentagon could set aside their rancorous history of petty squabbling in service of the larger mission. I hadn’t exactly been searching for help when I’d met him a few days earlier, but there were few of us in Iraq at the time who were focusing on Hussein’s potential connection to extremism. I could tell Ron was savvy about his work, and we both agreed that two heads were better than one. Besides, I sensed from our first conversation that Ron was a kindred spirit because of the way he viewed the whole misbegotten enterprise in Iraq. To that end, I could vent with him when the days got particularly long.

  The work was a free-for-all: you could either sit idly by in the trailer SCIF or do something, and Ron and I both chose to do something, and that meant looking for our own leads. So there was Ron with his arms folded, leaning against the back of the shack as I began with Mahmoud.

  “Do you know Zarqawi?” I said calmly.

  Percy turned to the detainee and repeated the question.

  “I don’t—” Mahmoud said; then Percy cut him off.

  “She asked you the question,” Percy said flatly. “Direct your answers to her.”

  Mahmoud was taken aback, then turned to me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Through his indignation, I sensed that Mahmoud might be telling the truth. And after a long day of asking the same scripted questions from headquarters, probing for the same weak links between Hussein’s regime and possible al Qaida fighters, even I was a little bored of talking about the Iraqi Intelligence Service. I felt like that path was a dead end. So I changed the subject.

  “You got here through Syria, right?” I said. “Did Darwish facilitate your travel or Saqa?”

  Mahmoud’s eyes darted around the room. He seemed surprised by the question.

  The truth was, I didn’t know the answer myself; they seemed to be the logical choice to help foreigners who enter Iraq by way of Syria and soon get labeled as “enemy combatants.” Maybe he had something to do with Zarqawi’s network. Maybe he didn’t.

  “Zarqawi and Darwish,” I repeated. “What can you tell me?”

  Mahmoud again took stock of his situation. “I don’t know who that is,” he finally said. “I came here to visit my family.”

  That instantly felt to me like a lie, but there was no way for me to prove it; I had zero information or background on this guy. So I asked him a few more questions, then sent him off with the MPs, back to the general population.

  “Zarqawi, huh?” Ron said to me as we watched Mahmoud walk back through the hangar doors.

  “Thought I might as well ask,” I said.

  Before the coalition’s March invasion, Zarqawi had said goodbye to Sayf al-Adl, his main al Qaida contact in Iran, to set up a camp with Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq. Some of his followers from Herat, Afghanistan, moved with him, and eventually other foreign fighters would join his ranks. Ron and I only understood this in the broadest strokes when we sat down with Mahmoud.

  From researching the Iraqi Intelligence Service, I knew that in the years preceding 9/11, Hussein had taken a decidedly conservative turn. While he’d always been a dictator, he’d begun his presidency in 1979 advocating a surprising amount of separation between church and state. Following a Shia uprising, he had declared that his Sunni party must “oppose the institutionalization of religion in the state and society.… Let us return to the roots of our religion, glorifying them—but not introduce it into politics.”

  By 1988, however, Hussein sought to rebuild support following his disastrous war with Iran, which killed more than a million people. In a naked appeal to the country’s hard-line, conservative Muslims, Hussein opened an Islamic university in Baghdad. He introduced compulsory religious education into Iraqi schools. He shuttered nightclubs with seedy reputations, and he even made an unsuccessful appeal to Saudi Arabia to unfreeze funds held in Saudi banks so Baghdad could import ten million copies of the Koran. The more support those moves gained, the more pious the dictator tried to appear. Meanwhile, his geopolitical blunders only amplified the impact of religion on the Iraqi people.

  By 1994, as Iraq faced chronic shortages of food and medicine, thanks to international economic embargoes, desperate men and women turned toward a higher power than even Hussein: Allah. More men began praying five times a day. More women veiled themselves. “We are really against this,” Ihssan Hassan, a University of Baghdad sociology professor and adviser to Hussein, told the Los Angeles Times. “It is a backward thing. If we could ban it, we would. We can’t.”

  But Hussein steered into that curve. Among other things, he banned alcohol from restaurants, a move publicly criticized by no less than his son Udai, who saw it as a marked turn toward Islamic fundamentalism. Hussein added the words Allahu akbar—God is great—to the Iraqi flag, in script modeled on his own handwriting. By 2001, my research showed, construction crews had finished the first of three gigantic Baghdad-area mosques that the dictator commissioned. Named the Mother of All Battles, with minarets shaped like Scud missiles, the mosque housed a six-hundred-page Koran encased in glass. The text was written with fifty pints of Hussein’s blood, which he’d donated over the course of two years.

  Perhaps, I thought as Ron and I stood there in the doorway of the plywood shack, Hussein’s gestures to hard-line Islamists really had resonated with the Sunni fighters now entering the country. Maybe it was that simple.

  But my gut wasn’t buying it. And if those foreign fighters entering Iraq had no allegiance to Hussein or his supporters, they would introduce a nasty new element into the war. The coalition would suddenly be facing an enemy more networked than the fragments of Hussein’s deposed regime and more unpredictable than guerrilla warriors defending their homeland. These would be rogue opportunists, hell-bent on sheer destruction, from which their caliphate could rise from the ashes.

  Ron turned to me. “So what do we make of today?” he said.

  “No clue,” I said, watching Mahmoud disappear back into the detention center. “But now I’m really afraid of what Zarqawi might be up to.”

  Ron and I fell into an easy rhythm with those debriefs, speaking with as many as ten run-of-the-mill detainees a day. Most of those conversations failed to move the intelligence needle in any real way, but around 20 percent of them provided some useful information that expanded our knowledge base. After those conversations, as well any debriefs of high-value detainees, which were considered important no matter what they said, I headed over to a secure trailer to quickly think through what we’d heard and to send an encrypted cable back to Agency headquarters. Ron, too, was allowed into the trailer as long as he was with me.

  Typing those cables was the most tedious part of being in Iraq. They all followed a standard template: names of the people involved, date and location of the debrief, then a little background context to go along with any new information, listed in three or four neatly numbered paragraphs. It just seemed like an awful lot of words for bite-size nuggets of information. Having been on the Agency-based receiving end of cables from Iraq, I obviously understood how important that steady drip of useful details was, though I admit there were times, as workdays in Iraq stretched to sixteen and seventeen hours, when I questioned my earlier assessment of “useful.”

  There was another reason I didn’t particularly enjoy working out of those trailers, and it was one entirely foreign to my experience behind a desk in Langley: the trailers were located in the general area where mortars were landing.

  By the summer of 2003, that simple piece of weaponry was becoming a staple for anyone looking to take a potshot at coalition forces. Mortars are just metal tubes that are closed on one end, are usually planted in the ground, and have an explosive charge inside—a mobile version of the cannons first used to blast away at med
ieval castle walls. Drop in a metal mortar shell—or one of the thousands of tiny Iraqi Army rockets that went missing after the dismantling of Hussein’s government—light the figurative fuse, and you have a weapon that can fire upon American positions a few miles away. The insurgents didn’t even have to have a direct line of sight to the target.

  Anyone who’s played Angry Birds understands the trickiness of aiming a projectile along a simple parabola. Add to that the pressure of having to scramble away from the mortar before coalition forces pinpoint the origin of the shot and return fire, and it’s safe to say that accuracy isn’t the weapon’s strong suit. That was only doubly so, as the rumor went, because the person firing the mortar often wasn’t a trained former member of Saddam’s military. American troops periodically found the empty mortar tubes stuffed in hay bales. Guerrilla fighters had mitigated their own risk by paying local farmers to lob a round in the general direction of the nearest US base.

  That’s not to diminish the mortar’s potential lethality: if one hit you, you would be instantly killed or maimed. Then again, a bolt of lightning could do the same thing. Walking around BIAP, I’d occasionally hear their faint thump in the distance, often followed by someone yelling, “Incoming!” and maybe a little return gunfire. In general I thought of those mortars as full of sound and potential fury but signifying very little.