The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  Only once, in the summer of 2003, did I ever go inside the camp. I decided immediately not to go back. That decision was soon codified by a mandate from Langley, as stories of detainee abuse at the camp began spreading back to the States. By August of that year, the CIA had become so concerned about goings-on at the camp that it barred its employees from visiting the camp at all. Still, the activities there reverberated on the other side of the airport.

  When SOF finished with individuals at the camp, they often moved them over to Cropper for longer-term detention. There I had access to them, and in my little plywood office, I saw men sitting across from me who were almost unrecognizable from their intake mug shots, taken days earlier. I was always told that the bruising and swelling that covered so much of their bodies came from their “resisting arrest.”

  I was certainly not immune to the urge to force someone to talk. When you’re in that moment, looking for a guy building improvised explosive devices specifically to slaughter your friends, you’re not full of empathy. I’m confident that most of the members of the task force I worked with weren’t running on blood lust but on adrenaline. For the most part, the violence at the camp wasn’t born from a desire to hurt people but rather was perpetrated in service of a larger mission to stop people from hurting our troops, our allies, and innocent Iraqis. It has been said that the best defense is a good offense, and at the camp, those operators were extraordinarily aggressive in the hopes of saving lives. Bad people provoke bad things out of even good people.

  Beyond the stomach-churning sight of a battered victim sitting in my shack at Cropper, however, I couldn’t conceal my frustration over the squandered opportunities their mistreatment represented. Those prisoners were physically and psychologically broken, rendering even the most knowledgeable of them unreliable sources of information. Either they would say anything to not be sent back to the camp, or the fear, anger, and battery had robbed them of the kind of nuanced cues in speech and body language that Ron and I might have seized upon to tease out additional information. My concerns about the camp grew as fuzzy, coerced intelligence led to more SOF missions to useless locations and a rise in innocent Iraqis being apprehended. Strictly from a tactical perspective, if we really hoped to get anywhere in the hunt for key individuals in Iraq, beating information out of people wasn’t just against the rules; it was a waste of our time.

  Even that same army field manual from which the military extrapolated some of its enhanced techniques agreed, explaining that “experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation.” Reading that, I felt validated: even as a relatively new questioner, I might still be doing things the smart way, at least according to that manual. “The direct approach is often called no approach at all,” it read, “but it is the most effective of all the approaches.”

  Over the course of the summer of 2003, it was tough to detail exactly how much progress was being made in either my assigned duties in Iraq or the ones I felt should have taken precedence. Hussein’s former government leadership was on the run, and with them went any hope of scouring information about hypothetical secretive plans prior to 9/11. But the high-level detainees I’d already spoken with had dismissed that theory, and the run-of-the-mill insurgent characters I found at Cropper couldn’t possibly have that kind of official inside information. Meanwhile, Zarqawi and his close followers had also scattered since the post-invasion missile strikes on his Khurmal compound. Ron and I recognized a marked increase in the number of foreign fighters spilling into Iraq, but even if that was Zarqawi’s network reconstituting itself, it didn’t seem to have enough solid infrastructure for those foot soldiers I debriefed to map it out.

  Suddenly our attention was drawn elsewhere. Out of the blue, in June of 2003, a political firestorm was whipped up back at Langley over rumblings from the Pentagon that a trove of Iraqi government documents had been uncovered and that they cast explosive new light on Hussein’s efforts to obtain WMD and to take part in terrorism plots against the United States. Any attention I’d hoped to pay to Zarqawi that week instantly took a backseat as the White House was poised to crow about a paper trail that justified the war. Executives in the Agency eager to play political games and appease the administration would be happy to let them.

  The implications in the documents made global news when, a few months later, London’s Sunday Telegraph ran a front-page exclusive describing supposed documentary evidence that Mohammed Atta, the al Qaida mastermind of 9/11, had received terror training in Baghdad. It announced: “Details of Atta’s visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.”

  What we came to know as the Habbush letter did indeed contain explosive accusations. The paper was dated July 1, 2001. It said that Atta “displayed extraordinary effort” in his training and had demonstrated his ability to lead a team “responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy.” To the Bush administration, it represented ironclad evidence of a direct operational link between Iraq, al Qaida, and the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, if authentic, the Habbush letter would represent a damning critique of our Iraq unit, which battled against that purported connection at every turn—and even more so for me, because the IIS and figures such as Habbush were my focus.

  If real, the letter could have a substantial impact upon the way the Agency approached its work in Baghdad. If those former government officials had a hand in training a 9/11 mastermind, we should have approached them as war criminals instead of merely high-value detainees.

  Immediately, Katherine, our unit’s no-nonsense chief, and the rest of our Langley branch were skeptical about its authenticity. The letter’s fundamental assertions about Atta didn’t match up with anything we’d heard before, for one thing. Furthermore, I knew that Iraqi intelligence officials were notoriously conservative; they rarely if ever put anything so brazen and incriminating in writing. On the other hand, if the letter was fake, it would seem to represent a shocking and extreme attempt to defend the war effort and simultaneously discredit our branch at the CIA. That didn’t make much sense, either.

  In the hope of determining whether the letter was authentic or not, Katherine divvied up the investigative duties. One member of our unit called the FBI, one reached out to the Secret Service—and I drew up a list of the highest-ranking officials detained at BIAP whom I could drag back to my plywood shack.

  The FBI was important because their units had compiled detailed records of airline travel, ATM withdrawals, cell-phone usage and hotel stays that indicated Atta was living in Florida and crisscrossing the United States in the summer of 2001, not traveling in the Middle East. One document they passed along to our unit, classified as Law Enforcement Sensitive, showed that during the last few days in June—the time frame in which the Habbush letter asserted Atta was training in Baghdad—he “conducted extensive travel,” making stops in Florida, Boston, New York, New Jersey, and Las Vegas. Almost all his movements were accounted for: on June 27, 2001, for instance, the FBI recorded Atta flying from Fort Lauderdale to Boston. The next morning, he flew first class from Boston to San Francisco, switched planes, and ultimately landed in Las Vegas that afternoon at 2:41 p.m. There he rented a Chevrolet Malibu from an Alamo rental-car office, set up an account at an Internet café called the Cyber Zone, and checked into a cheap EconoLodge motel on Las Vegas Boulevard nestled in among a line of seedy strip joints barely two blocks from the local FBI office.

  Records were similarly thorough for Atta’s movements over the following few weeks. His only international travel that summer occurred on July 7, when he boarded a flight from Boston to Zurich, then transferred on to Spain. He returned to the United States on July 19, 2001. I thought Atta seemed pretty clearly to be casing America’s air
travel system; the suggestion that he was physically in training eight thousand miles away in Iraq seemed dubious at best.

  Meanwhile, in Baghdad, every detainee I questioned suggested the allegations about Atta’s training were bogus. The former government officials being held at Cropper pointed out that, among other things, the chain of command described in the letter was fake, down to the incorrect titles. The idea that Habbush, the former head of the IIS, wouldn’t know his own official hierarchy strained credulity at best.

  Our unit also consulted with the leading government experts in forgery, the United States Secret Service (USSS).

  Along with its highest-profile duty—protecting the president—the service has other branches that do everything from detect counterfeit currency to monitor networks of electronic crime. One branch, some 120 men and women strong, collects ink. More than 8,500 samples of ink, in fact, which have been sent to the USSS from manufacturers since the 1920s.

  Each new ink formulation prompts a new delivery, with samples arriving from around the world as liquid in a bottle or perhaps a new batch of pens or refills. Each time, the team scribbles a sample of the ink onto Whatman filter paper, grade 2—hence the paper’s common nickname, scribble sheets—tucks it into a protective sleeve inside a binder, then stores it in dark cabinets to protect it against degradation from light, temperature, and humidity. The USSS proudly oversees the largest ink library in the world—and we needed their expertise.

  That team performs various tests for law enforcement investigations, gauging ink’s reaction to ultraviolet and infrared light, even picking it apart at the chemical level to study the multiple color bands that make up something as seemingly simple as black. Our unit requested something more basic: static dating to determine exactly which ink was used in that Habbush letter and when it was created. If the ink used on the memo wasn’t available in July of 2001, the note couldn’t have been written at that time.

  Within days of examining the memo, the Secret Service had concluded that the ink was inconsistent with types manufactured around the note’s purported date. The coup de grâce: they found that the piece of paper it was written on wasn’t manufactured until after the July 2001 date scribbled on it. Coupled with what the FBI knew of Atta’s travels at the time and what I was hearing in Baghdad, there was no way the letter was real.

  With all that information, Katherine made a trip to the White House. She told me later that she walked into Vice President Cheney’s office. “The letter is fake,” she insisted, laying out the details we’d uncovered. I wasn’t in the room, but she told me the vice president was gracious and thanked her.

  That a week of my time in Iraq was spent on such a backward-looking wild-goose chase was irritating. As I looked ahead, though, I thought the obvious follow-up questions were even more problematic: Who was behind the forgeries? Were they going to try to derail our work again? If so, how? Perhaps the Habbush letter was, we speculated, the product of an unhappy foreign government or even an al Qaida rival. But there was another unsettling possibility, too. None of us who sat through those murder boards could quite rule out sabotage by someone looking for a different ending.

  Ultimately our Iraq unit never could conclude where the forgery came from. Simply establishing that the letter was a forgery was the most important part. Over the coming years, the question of the forgery would become the subject of a pair of official investigations from House and Senate oversight committees, though they accomplished little more than scoring political points. “The [Bush] administration figures who ordered and authored the apparent forgery—and their involvement in leaking it through foreign intelligence channels,” John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the House judiciary committee, declared, “remain unidentified.” For its part, the administration insisted, “the idea that the White House had anything to do with a forged letter purportedly from Habbush to Saddam is absurd.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Special Friends

  As emotionally draining as that summer in Iraq was, sporadic moments of silliness offered at least some sense of optimism about the country’s future and our place in it. When I could step away from my plywood shack and SOF work, I enjoyed tagging along with Agency case officers on car rides away from BIAP. Sometimes those were sightseeing trips downtown—to the Victory Arches, for instance, the massive, crossed-swords monuments that form the entrance to Great Celebrations Square. Other times they were simple ice cream runs or trips into town for coffee, a luxury. At that point in my deployment I still couldn’t wrap my mind around living off limited food when we could have been eating at restaurants in Baghdad, having authentic falafel. I had no supervision at all once my work was done for the day; if I wanted to eat at a restaurant, I chose someplace that wasn’t full of Westerners—no need to tempt fate by dining in a target-rich environment—and went out to dinner. I think I always seemed more paranoid than most.

  Tragically, soldiers were still dying. In general, whenever we left airport grounds I was more worried about the Glock 19 handgun on my own hip than about the weapons other people might be carrying. The Agency security officers I traveled with stressed that I shouldn’t be unarmed, though after giving me a quick tutorial on handling and firing the 9mm weapon, they also determined that I should probably pull the trigger only if I was captured. There was little chance I’d actually hit the enemy with the handgun.

  Back on base, meanwhile, I had a great coincidental reminder of home: one of my cousins, Commander Greg Erickson, was at the time a navy helicopter pilot flying missions for SOF. His Helicopter Combat Support Special Squadron 5, or HCS-5, was also based at the airport, so I saw him regularly. He and his squad mates were hard to miss. As many choppers as HCS-5 had, they didn’t have much in the way of ground transportation, so Greg and his team commandeered one of the ancient orange Mercedes-Benz dump trucks abandoned on airport grounds. They scribbled a logo on the side of the rounded cab, and “the Great Pumpkin” became a staple for transporting pilots on BIAP.

  Greg’s squadron’s mission in the summer of 2003 was primarily overwatch, and primarily with SOF. After the navy special operators selected a target, Greg would take an active part in planning the missions in order to provide overhead coverage—checking traffic, checking the site before they got there, and providing close air support or medevac service if necessary. In military words, his mission was to be ISTAR: intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance.

  Greg told me about his very first mission, in which they were assigned to take down a house. They had a squirter—a guy running out the back door as the navy special operators’ trucks came to the front. Greg followed him into a field, and the navy special operators were able to capture him. That’s how close the helicopters could get to a target.

  The Defense Department’s General Order Number 1 kept things at the airport from getting too rowdy. The Pentagon mandate prohibited all military personnel from the “introduction, purchase, possession, sale, transfer, manufacture, or consumption” of alcohol, drugs, pornography, and most anything else that might offend Muslim sensibilities. The CIA, on the other hand, had quietly set up a bar within walking distance of our terminal.

  Known as the HVT Bar, or the High-Value-Target Bar, the BIAP dive was set up in a nearby abandoned building—just the latest in a long line of Agency war-zone speakeasies. In 2001, as CIA personnel helped defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, the “Talibar” appeared in the Agency’s hotel headquarters, in downtown Kabul. Back at BIAP, the bar was only open late at night and featured naked lightbulbs that swung from the ceiling and cast long shadows across the sweaty patrons and captured artillery that decorated the walls. I really wasn’t sure where the alcohol came from. The selection was sparse for the first few weeks, and I had enough arak to last me a lifetime. Over the years, a few different commemorative T-shirts were printed, displaying the sort of testosterone-fueled message likely designed by a guy. One shirt had HVT BAR: BAGHDAD printed on the sleeve and the wor
ds CHICKS DIG GUYS IN BODY ARMOR written across the chest. On the back, it read GUYS DIG CHICKS WITH GUNS. I don’t own one.

  That Fourth of July, the Agency set up a small celebration outside the bar, sharing its alcoholic bounty with a number of special operators and foreign intelligence service personnel we’d come to work with closely. After weeks of grinding away in Iraq, I was ready for a drink.

  Around 3:00 p.m. that day, my cousin and his squadron motored over in the Great Pumpkin. Smoke wafted up from a nearby fire pit. The meat—I heard it was antelope, though I was never quite sure—cooking over the pit was secured by a Navy SEAL who’d been spending his downtime on the grounds behind the airport, taking advantage of one of Hussein’s former hunting preserves. A small sound system was rigged up for music. I wiped the dust off my sunglasses and cracked open a beer. As I settled into a lawn chair next to Greg, a smile crept across my face.

  “Almost feels like home, huh?” he said, offering me a toast.

  “Almost,” I said, knocking my aluminum can against his.

  That lucky family connection always provided a little respite from the daily drudgery in Iraq. If I didn’t like the hot dogs and salad du jour at our palace, I would find Greg and we would frequent the air force mess, which always had better food.

  Conversation inevitably returned to our day-to-day lives there, and I was struck by the differences in perception and understanding that could exist among those at the heart of the occupation.

  “This isn’t the war we should be fighting,” I’d told Greg a few nights earlier. I’d invited him and other members of his squadron to our terminal to scavenge leftovers in its restaurant-style kitchen. “Al Qaida was our main threat after 9/11,” I continued, picking through a plate of hot dogs with my hands. “Iraq wasn’t even near the top of that list. And look around: you think the US government has any idea what it’s doing when it comes to nation building?”