by Nada Bakos
On one occasion it was getting late in the day, and I’d just wrapped up a debrief that warranted a cable. There in the trailer, near the airport’s western perimeter, a half dozen of us were all realizing we’d be working through dinner. Suddenly there was an explosion outside.
This was no muffled pop on the horizon, however. This one hit with a bang, then echoed. I remember the feeling most of all: the nearby blast rattled the trailer and caught everyone off guard. That had never happened before. Instantly everyone was silent.
“So, uh, that one was close,” someone finally said with a forced chuckle. Tepid laughter filled the room.
Just then, a second rocket slammed into the ground outside. This one sizzled on the way in, then rocked the trailer with its blast waves. Around me, binders were knocked off the shelves. “Holy shit!” someone blurted out.
I’d experienced a few earthquakes in my life, but those were nothing like a mortar round detonating mere feet away. In that moment, I’d have believed some giant had grabbed the trailer by the corners and started shaking it. Even more to the point, a second rocket landing in the same general spot as the first indicated that the shooters were actually dialing in their range.
Most of us stood frozen in anticipation of what might happen next. The Agency’s Baghdad chief at the time, who just happened to be with us in the trailer, continued his conversation with another Agency officer. I wrapped my arms around a few of the binders I’d caught as they fell off the shelves and sat down in my chair near the door. Really, there was nothing else I could think to do. Inside the trailer seemed like the safest place to be, but it was hardly fortified against a rocket attack. If a mortar shell landed on us, I assumed I’d have typed my last cable.
And that, more than anything, is what my mind settled on in that eerie silence, as I waited out one of the closest things to combat I would ever experience: the sheer nonsensical luck of war. I was sitting there helplessly, clutching those binders, anticipating the worst, and the end was about to come—or it wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be much I could do about it either way.
Not that everyone was so stoic about the situation. Soon after I sat down, the door to our trailer was flung open by one of the Agency’s communications workers. “They’re shooting at us!” he announced. Josh, pudgy and bespectacled, was practically vibrating with energy. “It came from over there!”
All eyes turned to the silhouette in the doorway, draped in a Kevlar vest, wearing a helmet, and holding his M4 carbine. Officially a communications officer, Josh was an IT wiz and exactly the sort of guy you’d want to help build a war-zone communications infrastructure from baling wire and three pieces of duct tape. And exactly the opposite of anyone you’d want to do any actual fighting.
But just like that, Josh was back out the door, running in a dozen different directions all at once. I could swear I heard him yell, “I’ll save you!” but I might be misremembering that. Either way, I leaned back in my chair to peek out the doorway and watch his Gomer Pyle helmet zigzagging across the gravel parking lot.
The station chief walked past my chair to the door. “Are you trying to make yourself a target?” he yelled at the intrepid communications officer. “Get back to your trailer! Now!”
“Okay!” Josh said, then rattled and clanked his way back to his trailer. Additional mortars fell over the next half hour, but thankfully the explosions got fainter and farther away and eventually petered out altogether. At some point I finished my cable. We ended up no worse for wear after that assault, even if no one said much for the rest of the afternoon. Josh had even managed to get a little jog in.
“How would these guys even know Zarqawi?” I asked out loud to no one in particular. Back in the air-conditioned trailer on yet another sweltering morning, I aimlessly flipped through a sheaf of my past cables, hoping inspiration might strike. “Do they even think he’s a real person? Would that even matter?”
Ron looked up from his own notes. “Abdul knows something,” he said. “You can just tell. It’s all over his face.”
I was sure Ron was right. The array of ideologues we debriefed in that camp fell into a few categories. Many of them opposed the US occupation but lacked any real religious underpinning or radical drive behind their anger. Some of them had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and gotten scooped up in a group arrest. But the nearly forty-year-old detainee whom I’ll call Abdul fell into the truly hardened category.
Years earlier, he’d done time in Hussein’s prison system for plotting attacks against Iraqi security forces and had been grabbed by US Special Operations Forces soon after the invasion because he was suspected of turning those plots against coalition peacekeepers. Abdul sincerely believed that Americans were kuffars, or infidels denying Allah’s holy truth, who deserved the full fury of righteous extermination in His name.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Abdul wasn’t cooperative during our interviews. I hadn’t been naive enough to believe that my friendly demeanor would cause detainees to instantly open up, but in general I felt like I was getting pretty good at those conversations. I’d even found a sneaky cultural benefit in being a woman. To those Islamic extremists, being questioned by a woman was simultaneously shocking and shameful. The jihadists couldn’t believe that a woman—someone inferior to them, in their eyes—would dare question them. Or even be chosen to question them. That gave me an advantage: anything that rattled a detainee out of delivering rote answers offered us a better path to the truth.
Even as my confidence grew, however, trying to get information from Abdul had become a source of frustration—particularly at a time when conditions in Iraq were taking a noticeable turn.
Throughout the late spring and early summer of 2003, the coalition had seen a slow but steady increase in violence across the country; Abdul had been arrested when the US military started trying to stem that tide. The uptick in violence could have been merely opportunistic, but maybe there was something else to it. At around that same time, the Pentagon finally bombed Zarqawi’s Khurmal site. The strike killed a smattering of foot soldiers, but thanks to all the publicity the camp had generated prior to the war, Zarqawi and a number of his followers had long since gone. Were they still in Iraq at all? Might Abdul, a hardened extremist who bore no allegiance to his earlier torturers in the Hussein regime, have been one of them? He was our best chance to understand the growing number of attacks against coalition targets, yet he was giving us nothing.
“I’m really starting to hate that guy,” I said to Ron.
A head popped up behind me.
“Trouble?” said a floppy-haired case officer who stood up from his desk at the other end of the trailer. I’ll call him Brandon. “What’s the problem?” he asked.
I looked over, half in surprise. Though I’d been in the trailer with Brandon a number of times, we’d never said more than a passing hello to one another.
“We’re not getting anywhere with a detainee,” I said cautiously.
If there was a cookie-cutter young case officer, Brandon was it. Six feet tall, with blond hair and blue eyes, he probably went to Yale and had a master’s degree in foreign something-or-other from a school like Columbia, which he’d probably earned within the previous five years. He had probably been told he was “a real go-getter.” Most of all, Brandon had the confidence of a man who didn’t know how much he didn’t know.
“I’d be glad to take a run at him for you,” he said.
I immediately suspected Brandon had offered to help because case officers are graded internally by how many foreign sources they can recruit and the sheer volume of intelligence reports they produce. If he was having a slow day, swooping in to capitalize on someone else’s potential source of intelligence could put an easy feather in his cap. As much as I was skeptical of Brandon’s motives, however, Baghdad at the time seemed like no place for an analyst like me to be territorial—and this was no time to risk missing out on valuable intelligence because I wanted some sort of brownie point
s for cracking a detainee myself. I was under no delusion that a few weeks of questioning prisoners had somehow made me an expert at it. If Brandon could actually get something from Abdul, he was welcome to brag—I was more focused on the fact that Abdul surely knew something, and I desperately wanted to know what it was. Besides, I sensed that if Brandon was so eager, this might end up being fun.
“Okay, sure,” I told him. “Thanks.”
Ron, Brandon, and I hopped into a pickup and drove over to Cropper. Along the way, I mentioned, “You know, we’ve talked to this guy three times already.”
“Right,” Brandon said. “But as an analyst, you can’t really solicit information from these people if you haven’t had the training, you know? There’s just a…” He flapped his hand back and forth to signify a meeting of the minds. I think.
“Right, okay,” I said, offering a little nod.
“I mean, that’s not your fault,” he added. “We couldn’t do what we do without you guys doing what you do, and vice versa. That’s just how it works, you know? But I’ve got a few ideas.”
Ron and I looked at each other. He smirked. This was going to be fun.
Percy met us at the hangar. The four of us split up among a pair of adjoining plywood shacks—Ron and I standing on the dirt floor in one, positioned to overhear everything that transpired; Brandon and Percy in the room next door. Without any ceilings, eavesdropping would be easy.
Above us, tin siding rattled when the hot breeze blew through the disintegrating hangar. The whole place had begun smelling like dirty laundry. Ron pointed to the metal folding chairs in the shack, which seemed practically luxurious, and we made a mental note to swap them for the junky plastic ones in ours the next morning. Moments later, we heard Brandon tell a nearby guard to bring in the detainee.
Soon there was the familiar sound of the plywood door being opened, then slamming shut on its own. We could hear Abdul taking his seat a foot or two from us, on the other side of the plywood. Ron had a pen and a pad of paper at the ready. I glanced at my watch; it was just after 10:00 a.m.
“I’m Brandon,” our colleague said in halting Arabic. “I know you’ve been speaking with other people, but I’ve got a few more questions.”
There was no response from Abdul. I could imagine the glare he must be giving Brandon by then; I’d seen it many times myself.
“Oh, so I guess you like it in here,” Brandon said, switching to a blunter tactic. “I could arrange for you to stay a lot longer.”
“So what?” Abdul muttered in Arabic. I’m sure he rolled his eyes.
“You know, you could make this easy on yourself,” Brandon shot back. The young case officer was becoming agitated. “Just tell me what I need to know, and I’ll be on my way.”
On Brandon pressed. Twenty-five minutes drained off the clock, then forty-five. Abdul simply toyed with him—a matador parrying a charging bull—and more than once Ron and I had to put our hands to our mouths to keep from laughing. Finally, even the jihadist got bored with the gamesmanship.
“You see this?” Abdul suddenly said in perfectly passable English. We could hear him slap his right arm down on the little metal table. He’d done it in front of us, too, early on. With Ron and me, Abdul had begun slowly rolling up his shirtsleeve with his left hand. Each new fold had exposed another winding, blotchy scar. Some were from burns, I’d guessed, and others must have been from garish slashes with an assortment of blades. Some wounds had clearly been closed with staples.
“Saddam’s men did this to me,” Abdul said, switching back to Arabic. Now his temperature was rising as well. “Who are you? What can you do to me that would even matter?”
With that, Percy told us, Brandon took the bait. He leaped to his feet. The sound of a chair being slammed back from the table echoed through the hangar, and suddenly the young case officer was yelling. “You want to know who I am?”
This was young Brandon’s “I want the truth!” moment. He actually pounded on the table, which made Ron and me jump and bang into the plywood wall.
“I can make you hate life!” he screamed.
Abdul laughed at him. Ron’s shoulders shook as he tried to muffle his laugh. I couldn’t control my laughter. Tears started rolling down my face from holding it in—and with that, the interrogation was clearly over. I knocked on Brandon’s door, and in my most authoritative-sounding voice said, “Officer, you’re needed out here for a moment.”
Abdul was soon led back to his pen, where he remained in detention for the rest of my time there.
Driving back to the terminal that afternoon, once the laughter had subsided, I furrowed my brow. Debriefing Abdul had been like talking to a brick wall for all of us. Brandon threatening him with a longer prison stay? Of course that wouldn’t rattle a guy like Abdul, but I didn’t have any great ideas, either. This man was a potential murderer, and I had important questions—about Zarqawi’s plans, about the mobilization of dangerous elements in the country—I believed he could answer. But there was no way for American debriefers to force Abdul to tell us anything. There were limits to our interactions, and he knew it.
“What if someone just kicked his ass one time?” I finally wondered. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t be expecting that.”
I soon came to understand that I wasn’t the only person struggling with that question.
As the world would later learn in graphic detail, by the summer of 2003 the methods CIA interrogators used to keep terrorism suspects off-balance varied widely. What the Agency authorized as “enhanced” techniques could be physically abusive, and many have described some methods as outright torture. The pushing of those limits in black-site prisons around the world was something I heard vague stories about as it was happening. There were, however, none of those black sites in Iraq for me to visit so I could personally verify the whispers about Agency techniques—and it wasn’t until a congressional investigation took place a decade later that many of us working for the CIA at the time truly understood the tactics being unleashed.
In addition, I know from some experience that morality and righteousness can become surprisingly fluid things in a war zone. As I reflect on questioning detainees in Baghdad, and what I might have been hypothetically willing to authorize in order to learn what an enemy combatant knew, the lines aren’t clean, and they can’t be distilled onto a bumper sticker. I know that the individual interrogation techniques I heard about at the time were of less interest to me than whether or not they generated actionable intelligence.
There in Iraq, the Agency questioners I interacted with were either debriefers, as I was, or polygrapher-interrogators. I have always been skeptical of the polygraph’s validity, but it was a useful tool for keeping detainees off guard, especially if they were hiding something. Often, being confronted by “truthiness” from a machine was more valuable than whatever appeared on the readout. The traditional process of gathering intelligence from prisoners rarely if ever came with a dramatic breakthrough or a Hollywood-style revelation. It was far more often a methodical slog, in which a larger picture came into focus only a piece at a time. And we went to some unusual ends to gather those pieces—most memorably, in my experience, with a walking, talking mountain named Evil Hagrid. He’d been a key player within the former Iraqi Intelligence Service.
Colloquially known as the Mukhabarat, the IIS under Hussein comprised twenty-four different directorates, each designated with an M, so the offices were known as M1, M2, M3, and so forth. Another nine smaller regional offices helped fulfill the government’s demands for foreign intelligence collection, domestic counterintelligence, and clandestine operations. Those were the usual duties of an intelligence service. As a high-ranking intelligence officer, however, Evil Hagrid had a specific role that made him stand out: his department performed Iraqi government–sanctioned assassinations inside and outside the country.
After dozens of conversations with detainees, I was refocusing on the lingering question at hand from the administration: Was there an
y evidence that Hussein had united with al Qaida or Zarqawi? In the summer of 2003, I accepted the fact that my job in Iraq was to run down any threads that might have tied them together—and I knew that any cooperation Hussein’s government extended to those extremists might have gone through Evil Hagrid’s office. That made the former intel officer valuable enough to be one of the first regime officials arrested by US forces after the invasion and an important enough source of intelligence for my colleagues and me to try something extraordinary.
I’d heard that Evil Hagrid had been uncooperative with the Agency questioners who came before me in Baghdad, both the interrogators and the preceding analyst. I’d never spoken to him myself, but it seemed clear enough that the regular routine wasn’t working. So a specially trained CIA polygrapher-interrogator and I began thinking outside the box. Or, rather, outside the prison.
Our plan was for Percy and the interrogator to grab Evil Hagrid from his cell, then create some confusion in the prisoner’s mind as to why he needed to be immediately removed from Cropper. Ideally, that would be “for his safety.” One option was to tell him they’d uncovered an urgent plot among other detainees to murder former Iraqi officials in prison and that moving him was the only way to protect him—but I left the details to them. At the very least, we hoped, the unexpected change of venue would rattle Evil Hagrid a little before our interview—and if he seemed grateful for what he thought was our saving his life, all the better.
The next day at Cropper, Percy, the interrogator, and I—along with a CIA case officer who’d asked to tag along—were told by MPs that the only available space in which to speak with Evil Hagrid was an old bomb shelter located across a gravel lot from the detention center. That was actually perfect, because it avoided any messy storytelling on our part as to why we wanted to waltz one of the MPs’ highest-value detainees straight out of prison.
Inside the pyramid-shaped shelter, we found a series of dark stone passageways that wove around a single central room and led off to a series of side exits. That was great, too, we decided, because it meant that the case officer and I could listen from the shadows as Percy and the interrogator talked with Evil Hagrid. Slowly, the interrogator would turn the psychological screws, and because I knew the general roles and responsibilities inside the IIS, I could later call foul on any claims Evil Hagrid made about not being privy to various bits of information.