The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  The operation in Iraq took place just as the CIA’s collaboration with elite military units under the special operations vision that had been first established in 1980 was being formalized. It was only once a new enemy emerged on September 11, 2001, that the operational collaboration rose to such prominence. For military planners, its effectiveness had been proved in the weeks following 9/11, when Agency personnel working closely with special operations forces, or SOF, in Afghanistan had dealt crippling blows to the Taliban there. Following that success, the model was implemented in Iraq as well.

  The task force fell under the authority of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command. The task force didn’t actually have to coordinate with the Pentagon on specific missions, unless the target fell outside the list of most-wanted former Iraqi regime members. Otherwise, SOF had control of the “target deck”—our computerized list of people we wanted to apprehend—and the data we could use to find them.

  In almost no time, that list expanded to include names the operators gleaned from intelligence sources and brought back from missions. Other times, my interviews at Cropper turned up the name of someone I thought might have ties to Saddam’s former regime or Zarqawi’s network. Regardless of where the lead came from, as soon as a new figure was highlighted and located, the task force’s preparations would be under way for a new surgical strike.

  Early on, the cooperation between the CIA and the military was still being worked out. It was the first time I’d had a hand in the front end of the targeting process, identifying people I specifically wanted to debrief as opposed to spending my days in the plywood shack interviewing whomever someone else happened to pick up. From the comfort of my desk back at the terminal, the process was revelatory, the independence and immediacy of it almost addictive. I’d never imagined intelligence could turn into action so fast.

  Through it all, however, the Agency and the military remained two distinctly different cultures. And as the wheels of that intelligence strike machine began spinning even faster, two aspects of the process began making me decidedly frustrated.

  In war, there is an important concept known as the OODA loop. First mapped out by a former air force pilot who’d flown fighter jets during the Korean War, the loop maps out the observe-orient-decide-act planning process that occurs prior to every mission. In crafting a theory to clarify the situational decision making that unfolds in combat, John Boyd, the former pilot, must have been at least partly inspired by dogfights—rapid, close-quarters engagements among small groups of aircraft. There were at least some parallels to these missions—and parallels to the thinking that underpinned them—in the operations the task force prosecuted on the ground.

  I could appreciate that, particularly during manhunts, a quick OODA loop offered a tactical advantage. If we could compress the time the enemy had to reorient itself in response to a task force mission, we had a better chance to drive the action on the battlefield—what military strategists thought of as shaping the environment rather than adapting to it. I wasn’t excited about the task force members’ plan to achieve that, however: they suggested that even a few hours of intelligence-turnaround time back at BIAP could be shortened if I simply reviewed documents, photographs, and other intelligence being picked up with suspects on the scene, in real time. A couple of operators wanted me to join them during the raids—as a ride-along. If I could observe enemy combatants at the moment they were apprehended, they said, the task force could orient itself with the newfound information, decide on the next target, and act on that more quickly—perhaps without even returning to base first.

  So on one predawn morning I found myself strapping on a bullet-resistant vest at BIAP and climbing into the back of a Humvee for the first of a half dozen raids. Details of those missions remain classified, but in broad strokes, our target that first night was a former Iraqi Intelligence Service official who was lending his bomb-making prowess to insurgents. At the time, the technician was a priority not so much because of his past but because of the future carnage he might enable. Heavily outgunned insurgents were settling on roadside bombs as the ultimate force multiplier against the coalition, and, we believed, this former official was a key component of that. Disrupting the efforts of technicians such as him was rapidly growing in importance.

  By mid-2003, the rudimentary roadside bombs being used by insurgents consisted of charges made from mortar rounds or leftover artillery shells that were lashed together and hidden among the garbage strewn along the sides of the roadways. Sometimes ball bearings were packed in, too, to increase the shrapnel and maximize damage. The bombs all had a power source, usually a tiny battery, that provided just enough power to activate a detonator, which in turn set off the charge. The trickiest part of the devices—really, their Achilles’ heel—was the trigger, which goosed that power source to set the chain reaction in motion.

  At the time, the bulk of the triggers used by insurgents were still hardwired to the bombs. That meant that once a soldier spotted a device, the bleak so-called fight at the roadside was as straightforward as locating the wire snaking off into the distance, then shooting the person at the other end of it. But as more sophisticated bomb makers integrated into the enemy ranks, the technological prowess spiked. The devices began to include radio receivers that could be triggered wirelessly from a half mile away with garage door openers, wireless doorbells, or remote-controlled toy car controllers, making bombers vastly harder to spot and increasingly difficult to stop.

  As those horribly iconic roadside bombs went on to kill thousands of Americans throughout the war, billions of US dollars would be spent engineering vehicles to better withstand the attacks. SOF, however, had a different approach—one that aimed “left of boom” on the timeline: get the bomb makers before the devices are even built. I couldn’t argue with that logic. But I could hardly digest what it looked like in practice.

  Climbing into a pickup, I packed in among SOF with long guns, side arms strapped to their legs, and extra ammunition bulging the pockets on the outsides of their bulky vests. Folding my hands in my lap, I surveyed the men around me; they appeared almost as if we were headed to get an ice cream cone. My adrenaline nonetheless began to surge. The bomb maker, we believed, was operating out of a nearby neighborhood in a quiet section of Baghdad.

  Twenty minutes later, the pickup turned off the main road into the bomb maker’s neighborhood, and our driver shut off the vehicle’s lights. Someone in a second task force Humvee radioed that he had circled around to the opposite end of the block, walling off the roadway.

  There was a last moment of silence as we pulled to a stop; then the doors flew open. The team spread out across the street, then filed forward along the beige brick walls toward a metal doorway outside the technician’s house. I crouched low in the backseat, awaiting the all clear to follow. In the moonlight, I could make out a hand signal from the lead task force member in line; then the team burst through the doorway.

  Even from a distance, their maneuvers were stunning. The damage those units unleashed on people and property was immediate. Just as in a large OODA loop, they’d explained to me, in a small, close-quarters battle your role can be either proactive or reactive. Proactive is always better.

  Soon one of the soldiers emerged from the metal doorway and waved for me to follow. No one was inside the home when we arrived, he said, but someone had clearly been there recently. Inside we found a series of radio controllers. Nearby, a few doctored plastic toy car chassis sat on a workbench, and we found other indications that the technician had been trying to convert them into rolling, guidable bombs. We packed up his devices and equipment to bring with us back to base; if we couldn’t grab the bomb maker that night, I took some consolation in the idea that losing all his equipment would at least slow him down.

  Days later I joined another late-night raid in Baghdad. The intelligence about the occupants of the residence was more uncertain, but we were trying to move quickly, to be proactive. There we missed our suspe
cted insurgent target as well—but that didn’t mean there was nobody home. This time, once the yelling and sounds of shattering glass subsided and I was waved over to enter the house, I found two people sitting on the floor surrounded by special operators. One, we quickly learned, was a male relative of the target, whom we had no indication would be there that night. The other appeared to be his son, whom I saw cowering behind his father’s back.

  “Are they useful?” one of the operators asked. Heads turned in my direction. My heart sank.

  As many disquieting things as I’d seen during my days at Cropper, nothing unsettled me as much as the children’s wing of the prison. Most of the kids landed there simply because they happened to be with an adult when that person got arrested. Once back at BIAP, those adults were logged into Cropper, and the children were shuffled into their own large holding pen. In theory, the kids were free to leave when a guardian came to pick them up—but what if their lone guardian was locked inside Cropper? If those kids had other guardians, how were those adults supposed to locate a child who suddenly disappeared in the middle of the night?

  In the beginning of my time at the prison, when I recognized that a child had been there for a week or more, I had visited through the wire to make sure he or she was relatively okay. I couldn’t get the children out, and I couldn’t promise them anything, but maybe a friendly face would be worth something. Anything, I hoped, was better than having them spending endless hours sitting on the packed dirt, waiting. As the population of Cropper’s children’s wing began ballooning along with its adult population, I visited less and less. Not being able to reverse the course of war became my eventual unraveling.

  Soon after, I stopped joining SOF teams on missions. I had no misgivings about trying to stop people who presented a threat to coalition troops, but I was not trained to be on those missions. In other words, I was pretty sure that I would either cost an operator his life or lose my own. I thought I might have more to contribute by trying to piece together intelligence that allowed us to focus on specific targets.

  It was starting to become clear that devotion to absolute speed at these raids compressed the OODA loop, thereby de-emphasizing analysis of the intelligence and undervaluing the effectiveness of the mission—and it got innocent people, including children, thrown in prison.

  I thought about that one night after my last ride-along as I heard another Chinook disappearing into the distance. I thought about whom those operators were going after. I knew that when they returned, the helicopter would likely be carrying Cropper’s newest detainees, and I hoped that in a day or two I’d find myself in the shack with them. Percy, Ron, and I could get to work, generating new leads in the hunt for former Baath officials, Zarqawi’s network, or whatever the day’s work happened to be.

  But I knew all bets were off if they passed through another camp—a place we called purgatory—first. And that would only make everything harder.

  For years, a camp on the outpost of the southwestern edge of Baghdad International Airport didn’t officially exist. Thirteen years later, it is only begrudgingly acknowledged. But Hussein’s former interrogation chamber was always terribly real. Under the command of the task force, it wasn’t repurposed, and to many of Cropper’s detainees it was purgatory.

  With its rows of fencing and permanent guards at the gates, the camp didn’t look much different from any other camp at the airport. That it blended in made it an ideal location for the task force’s headquarters. But inside, the camp was very different.

  The main facility was designed around four interrogation chambers, where SOF sometimes attempted to gather their own intelligence from the detainees they brought back to base. The “soft room,” I’d begun hearing by the summer of 2003, which offered couches and even tea service, was held out as a reward for cooperative detainees. The rectangular “red” and “blue” rooms, each about six feet wide by fifteen feet long, were standard, stripped-down chambers where arrested Iraqis were questioned more forcefully.

  But the detainees who lied, or who the task force thought sufficiently uncooperative, got dragged to the “black room,” a garage-size cell lacquered from floor to ceiling in black paint, as one former interrogator later told Human Rights Watch. There was a table in the center, which held a boom box and a computer, and behind it a token chair or two. Everyone knew those chairs weren’t for sitting; more often, handcuffed detainees ended up suspended from the eighteen-inch-long hooks that hung from the ceiling.

  Multiple times per week, unmarked helicopters landed at the camp. Task force members dragged shackled detainees, clad in blue jumpsuits and blindfolded by goggles covered in duct tape, through the intake center to be registered. Many were then moved along to Motel 6, as the task force called it—a kennel of some eighty-five plywood holding cells that reeked of excrement. Many of those cells weren’t big enough for the prisoners to stand up in.

  When coalition forces and SOF members delivered new prisoners to the camp, they never did so alone. They were always accompanied by at least one American soldier, who was officially recorded as having made the capture. The rationale, according to an extensive investigation that later ran in the Guardian newspaper, was that the arrangement “enabled the British government to side-step a Geneva convention clause that would have obliged it to demand the return of any prisoner transferred to the US once it became apparent that they were not being treated in accordance with the convention.”

  By mid-2003, as the Agency and the military disagreed about the pace of SOF missions, those task force personnel began creating their own interrogation tactics on the fly—some an outgrowth of broad-stroke guidance in the US Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. But there was another document, a one-page set of guidelines that was considered a “logical interpretation” of some of the techniques in the field manual. This document listed approaches such as “Fear Up Harsh,” “Fear Up Mild,” and “Pride and Ego Up.” The techniques were loosely modeled on torture tactics employed by the Soviet Union and other Cold War enemies of the United States and included relatively innocuous-sounding things such as dietary manipulation, the use of muzzled dogs, sleep adjustment, and sensory deprivation.

  In practice, those techniques led to members of the task force beating prisoners with rifle butts and spitting in their faces. The urgency to organize new missions completely overrode long-standing tenets of effective interrogation, as savviness and subtlety were thrown aside in favor of blunt-force trauma. One former interrogator, later given the pseudonym Jeff Perry by Human Rights Watch, recalled an incident in which a detainee was “stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed with the hose… [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put next to an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was put back in the mud and sprayed.”

  “This happened all night,” Perry added. “Everybody [at camp] knew about it.”

  Other Defense Department personnel reported seeing blotches on detainees’ clothing and welts on their bodies. Around that time, the task force began firing paintball guns at detainees and hung a sign referring to it as the High Five Paintball Club. On that same sign, a motto read: NO BLOOD, NO FOUL. If they don’t bleed, the message was, they can’t prosecute—not that that message was always adhered to.

  When Iraqi major general Hussam Mohammed Amin, the six of clubs in the deck of Personality Identification Playing Cards, rotated through purgatory, he claims he was hooded and beaten with “some kind of special metal stick” while task force interrogators demanded the location of weapons stockpiles. The assault left him with gashes in his face that required stitches.

  Medical evaluations would corroborate that detainees at the camp had been punched and kicked and even had baseballs tied into their mouths. I saw task force teams returning to the airport with pickup trucks full of new detainees, stacked like cordwood in the truck bed. Once, I watched a group of detainees, black hoods or burlap sacks drawn tight over their heads, pulled from the back of a SOF truck. Not long befor
e, a group of US forces had been kidnapped nearby and their Humvee stolen; I later learned that vehicle was found in the possession of these detainees—the last of whom spilled from the back of the truck and hit the ground with a sickening thud. I assumed that by then he was dead; the operators led the other detainees inside and just left him in the dirt.

  To the extent that I or any other outsider could decipher it, the command structure at the camp was as horizontal as any I’ve seen in the military. Everyone at the base went by first names, pseudonyms or not, and beyond one or two rotating commanding officers there, ranks were an unnecessary distraction. “It worked better that way,” Jeff Perry later told Human Rights Watch. “You didn’t have to worry about sucking up to whoever and pleasing this person or that person.”

  The depths of the depravity at the camp have largely only been revealed by task force interrogators suffering crises of conscience. At the time, investigators weren’t allowed inside, including those sent by the International Committee of the Red Cross, who must be permitted under the Geneva Conventions to “visit with prisoners privately, examine conditions of confinement to ensure the Conventions’ standards are being met and distribute relief supplies.” Yet as Perry told Human Rights Watch, “The commander was insistent that [the Red Cross] wouldn’t come, and that they never would come because [camp] was just very secretive.” Perry added that interrogators were assured that secrecy “was very necessary for the efficacy of the operation.”