The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  “Hang on,” I said, lifting my right foot off the gas and signaling, as if being polite and using traffic signals would be a clear sign we weren’t a threat.

  I cranked the steering wheel hard to the left to plow through the soft dirt.

  We reached the inside shoulder of the westbound lanes and kicked a rooster tail of dirt across the road. I scanned the mirrors and spun my head around looking for angry soldiers. Happily, I didn’t see any. Ron laughed at my cautious turn and last-minute decision.

  Soon we were back at the statue of the Winged Man, and then we stopped at an entry checkpoint to BIAP. I waved my ID badge and stuck my head as far out the truck’s window as possible, hoping to appear nonthreatening to the apprehensive young soldier at the gate. I have no doubt I just appeared crazy, but he let us through.

  “Well, hey,” Ron said once we finally spoke again. “We didn’t get shot today!”

  “It’s still early,” I said.

  Once we found the WMD team that day, they hadn’t been able to help much, either. My self-doubt began creeping back in.

  When I volunteered for temporary assignment in Iraq, I had such grand hopes for what I might accomplish. At the time, the Agency official assessment, contained in its Iraqi Support for Terrorism report, said, “Our knowledge of Iraq’s ties to terrorism is evolving,” and “This paper’s conclusions—especially regarding the difficult and elusive question of the exact nature of Iraq’s relations with al Qaida—are based on currently available information that is at times contradictory and derived from sources with varying degrees of reliability.” Naive and idealistic as it might have been, I wanted to crack the case and get to the bottom of those things. As my deployment began wrapping up in early August, I hadn’t. Meanwhile, back in Langley, CIA higher-ups who faced continued historical questions from the White House might have been even more eager than I was to get clarity once and for all.

  I decided to take one last run at a detainee I’ll refer to here as Pettigrew. He was part of one of the Iraqi Intelligence Service directorates and was privy to the analysis of foreign military capabilities, particularly those of potential aggressors with political motivations. In April of 2003, the CIA had lured Pettigrew to a meeting by suggesting they wanted to recruit him as a double agent; in fact, they’d just wanted to arrest him. Subsequently, I’d come to know Pettigrew’s wide-set eyes and bushy mustache well during my time in the high-value wing of the BIAP detention center. Evil Hagrid would have likely known if Hussein’s government had been actively courting terrorist assistance, but Pettigrew would have been watching from a different angle. He would have known if jihadists such as Zarqawi had been trying to sneak into Iraq undetected.

  The problem was that in the nearly dozen times I’d spoken to Pettigrew, nothing I asked ever seemed to penetrate his indignant sophistication. He never offered me anything useful. Mostly, the round man in his early forties just sat there with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the floor. Before my time in Iraq ended, I wanted answers that I thought he could provide.

  Early the next morning, Percy and I walked to my shack. I fished a stack of paperwork from my backpack and set it on the table. A guard soon brought Pettigrew.

  “Can you undo his shackles?” I said, and the guard agreed.

  The former intelligence officer took his seat. He was clearly dispirited.

  “Did you know that Zarqawi was in the country?” I said. Percy translated the questions.

  “This again?” Pettigrew said softly in Arabic. “I told you I don’t know where he is.” He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. Pettigrew’s body language made the translation unnecessary.

  “How closely did the Mukhabarat watch him?” I asked.

  “We didn’t know anything about him,” Pettigrew told me.

  “I didn’t believe you the last time you told me that, either.”

  It only made sense to me that Zarqawi was too much of a wild card for the IIS not to have kept tabs on. Even if there was no relationship between the sides prior to 9/11, it was possible that Hussein’s regime might have forged one with Zarqawi and his newfound Ansar allies afterward, especially if Zarqawi’s network could be a useful ally against US forces during the invasion. That sort of collaboration felt like a stretch, but faced with an impending invasion and inevitable defeat, who knows what lengths Hussein might have gone to?

  “We would have made a deal on oil,” Pettigrew had told me. “The FBI could have searched for weapons wherever they pleased—we had no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam didn’t want war,” he’d said.

  On February 19, Lebanese-American businessman Imad Hage had faxed his Defense Department contacts a list of five concessions Hussein offered through the intelligence service. The United States would be given “first priority” to Iraqi oil, according to the document; the Iraqi government would also offer its “full support” for the US negotiation of an Arab-Israeli peace process, assist the Bush administration in its counterterrorism efforts, help promote America’s strategic interests in the Middle East, and allow “direct U.S. involvement on the ground in disarming Iraq.”

  The memo sparked a flurry of activity within the Pentagon, and subsequently at the CIA, to determine the offer’s veracity. But after years of obfuscation and half-truths from Hussein, as well as uncertainty about the trustworthiness of the intelligence officers transmitting the information, the offer was deemed incredible. The United States soon invaded.

  That all felt like ancient history now, Pettigrew told me. He was emotionally drained, he said. He just wanted to go home.

  “Zarqawi,” I repeated. “What did you know?”

  Pettigrew slouched in his chair. He mumbled a few names—the Jordanian’s possible Ansar contacts—and details about Zarqawi’s initial path into Iraq. They weren’t much, but they matched details I’d heard from Agency officers outside Khurmal and reports we’d gotten from a liaison intelligence service.

  “Finally, the truth,” I replied.

  Pettigrew lifted his head and stared at me. Instantly he knew I knew more than I was letting on. That got his full attention.

  “Is Zarqawi still here now?” I said. “Don’t tell me you don’t know—I’ll think you’ve been lying about everything. You want to spend the rest of your life in here?” Up until this point I had fooled myself into pretending I was arguing with a belligerent acquaintance; in this moment, however, I felt utterly sick of the situation we were both part of.

  After four months in detention, Pettigrew’s facade cracked. It started with a sniffle. Soon the tears were streaming down his face.

  Frankly, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Another thing I’d learned during debriefs is that many detainees presumed a woman would fall back on some innate motherly instinct and take pity on them. More than one manipulative sob session had been abruptly cut short when I’d remarked, “Let me know when you’re done so we can continue.”

  At that moment, however, Pettigrew was not trying to be manipulative. He clutched his hands to his face and bawled, repeating the same phrase over and over. I glanced at Percy.

  “He’s saying he misses his son,” Percy finally said. “Saddam had many enemies. He’s afraid for his family’s safety.”

  I tried to think quickly: Pettigrew was going to be of no help to me like this. I did feel empathy, though less so for him than for his children, who must have missed their father. So I improvised. “Look” I said, loudly enough to be heard over the sobbing. “Answer the question, and I’ll let you make a phone call.”

  That impromptu strategy certainly hadn’t been covered in the training I’d received. Years later, Cropper would institute a policy that allowed family visits once every two weeks and even permitted five minutes of physical contact for hugs. But during my time in Iraq, when many families didn’t know where their relatives were being held, phone calls were the detainees’ only form of connection with loved ones. For many, given a choice, staying indoors to make a call was worth far more than their
few minutes of daily sunshine in the yard. Pettigrew immediately began to compose himself.

  “Okay,” I said. “When we meet tomorrow, I will arrange a call.”

  I spent that evening arranging the phone call. Only a few hours after striking the deal with Pettigrew did I think about the Pandora’s box I might have opened. What if he’d established a code word ahead of time to pinpoint his location for supporters or identify a spot for an attack? My mind reeled with crazy possibilities.

  True to my word, however, I summoned Pettigrew from his cell the next day. With an MP following close behind, Percy and I led the former intelligence officer outside the hangar onto the sidewalk. At just shy of noon on the sun-scarred landscape, everything seemed to glow white. The guard left Pettigrew with us and found a shady spot where he could perch in the distance.

  “You have fifteen minutes,” I said through the translator, handing Pettigrew a satellite phone. He raced to type in his home number.

  I turned to Percy. “Make sure you hear every word,” I said.

  Moments later, I could hear a voice on the other end of the line pick up. It was a woman’s; I presumed it was his wife. Pettigrew smiled.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he told her. “Are you okay? How are my children?”

  Soon I overheard another voice on the line. It was clearly a child’s, and if the sound of his wife had softened Pettigrew’s rough-hewn demeanor, the sound of his son melted it completely. Soon both were crying. “I’ll be home very soon,” Pettigrew said. “I love you.”

  I stared down at the sidewalk. In that moment I felt like a dirtbag, as if I’d somehow been responsible for breaking up this man’s family. I had to walk away from the scene, just far enough away to no longer hear his sobs. “If he misses his family that much,” I mumbled under my breath, “why won’t he just tell me what he knows? That’s the only shot he has.”

  When the fifteen minutes were up, Pettigrew handed the phone back without protest. The guard led him back to his cell. As I watched him go, the term “a broken man” was seared into my mind.

  Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi president, was found guilty of crimes against humanity for the 1982 killing of 148 Shias in the small city of Dujail, approximately forty miles north of Baghdad. Hussein was hanged for the crimes. I assume Pettigrew is still in custody to this day.

  Toward the tail end of that summer in 2003, I wasn’t the only one fixating on Zarqawi’s simmering plans in Iraq. As the Jordanian rebuilt his network, al Qaida central decided it was time to send something more significant than fighters along those rat lines. Bin Ladin sent some of his top brain trust, including Sayf al-Adl, Zarqawi’s main contact with the group, and a man I was about to learn far more about: Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi.

  As his nom de guerre indicates, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi is a local, born in Mosul, Iraq, in 1961. A skilled military tactician, the burly man speaks a half dozen languages and had risen to the rank of major in Hussein’s Iraqi Army before defecting to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. That battle may have been where he first met Sayf al-Adl, al Qaida’s future military leader, but their initial introduction isn’t nearly as important as what they would do together later. After being recruited to serve as an instructor at al Qaida training camps throughout Afghanistan, al-Iraqi had acted in the late 1990s as the organization’s international operations chief. Then, like Adl, he’d been named a member of bin Ladin’s ten-man personal shura council—an advisory group modeled after Islamic legislative bodies in the Middle East.

  Given his heritage, it was not surprising al-Iraqi had interest in steering a strategy in Iraq; his influence had only risen among extremists. Sending 20 percent of al Qaida’s most senior advisory board members on official business was no small feat, but the show of intellectual force was clearly important for bin Ladin. During his time in Afghanistan, Zarqawi and his lieutenants had canvassed the region, making loose connections with rebel groups in Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and elsewhere. Zarqawi’s exact plans in Iraq were still fuzzy at the time, but his potential influence had become unmistakable. Together, bin Ladin hoped, Adl and al-Iraqi could counsel the feisty Jordanian on the best approach to the battles ahead.

  It turned out, however, that Zarqawi hadn’t been the only one busy over the previous few months—and that meeting ended up a bit smaller than bin Ladin had hoped.

  As US forces toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, Adl and a few other prominent members of al Qaida had fled across the country’s western border into Iran. There they were quickly detained by Iranian authorities and placed under “house arrest.” What that term actually meant, however, was never clear to me—presumably, I always believed, because it was a house arrest of mutual convenience.

  Al Qaida figures such as Adl found Iran a much safer landing spot than the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where the CIA was aggressively pursuing the Taliban and other militants. Al Qaida personnel in Iran were able to visit swimming pools and shopping complexes, and some were even permitted to travel relatively freely around the country.

  At the same time, the Revolutionary Guard in Iran had found al Qaida useful to have nearby. Tehran, the country’s capital, had been thrust into a harrowing position in American foreign policy when President Bush delivered his second State of the Union address, in January of 2002. In what is now widely remembered as the “Axis of Evil” speech, Bush had linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea as states that “pose a grave and growing danger” and “threaten the peace of the world.” Bush pledged decisive action. “If we stopped now, leaving terror camps intact and terror states unchecked, our sense of security would be false and temporary,” he’d said. “It is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.”

  The implication was clear to everyone at the CIA and to those listening in Tehran. In the face of an American adversary keen to fight, it didn’t matter that Iran’s hard-line Shia government had deep ideological differences with the radical Sunnis of al Qaida. Keeping those refugees close made sense, the Iranian government knew, because the terrorist leaders could prove to be useful bargaining chips.

  Then three explosions rocked the Middle East. Adl had made the most of his time under house arrest, plotting with other al Qaida leaders there in detention—and coordinating with foot soldiers abroad—to strike on the other side of the Persian Gulf. At around 11:15 p.m. on Monday, May 12, 2003, right as I was headed to the region, al Qaida members acting on Adl’s orders drove a car full of explosives up to the front of each of three housing compounds in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. The ensuing bomb blasts sheared off huge sections of the apartment buildings, killing three dozen people, including ten Americans, and wounding more than two hundred.

  Moreover, Iran tightened the reins on al Qaida leaders inside its borders—including Adl, right as he was heading off to meet Zarqawi and al-Iraqi. Adl never left the country, vanishing inside Iran until fairly recently. Now experts think he may be in Pakistan.

  Al-Iraqi, on the other hand, made it safely to meet with Zarqawi. Exactly what the two discussed at that meeting was never entirely clear. It’s possible that bin Ladin hoped al-Iraqi would take over Zarqawi’s fledgling operation in full. That possibility was borne out in news reports, when al-Iraqi later told some of his Taliban contacts that Zarqawi bristled at the prospect of intervention. “I’m already here!” the Jordanian reportedly told al-Iraqi. “Why is the sheik sending someone else?” Had Adl been at his side, al-Iraqi may well have had too much clout for Zarqawi to oppose.

  It was just as plausible, however, that al-Iraqi’s trip was a fact-finding mission for al Qaida central. Given that he now found himself a coordinator among the region’s disparate terror groups, Zarqawi’s own stature had been amplified in the jihadist movement. Those groups all surely benefited from even a casual connection to al Qaida as well. But what al Qaida got in return was far less clear.

  Like Adl before him, al-Iraqi see
ms to have found a connection with Zarqawi. The al Qaida lieutenant ultimately made a number of trips to northern Iraq throughout late 2003, alternately trying to persuade Zarqawi to officially join the organization and lecturing him for his perceived missteps in his approach to jihad. At the same time, al-Iraqi defended the brash Jordanian to bin Ladin and others in the al Qaida leadership. The connection Zarqawi and al-Iraqi forged during that initial meeting, and the ones that followed, proved pivotal to the future of al Qaida—and ultimately to the downfall of bin Ladin.

  CHAPTER 10

  It’s All Sunshine and Rainbows Until…

  It was a late afternoon in mid-August of 2003 when I stepped off an airplane at Dulles International Airport. After staying awake long enough to find my bag at baggage claim, I hailed a taxi and collapsed in the backseat until it pulled up to Roger’s house. “Welcome home,” he said as he hugged me. “You ready to see the new house?”

  I was. I was also ready for a real shower, clothes that aren’t made of 100 percent nylon, and a real bed. I slept most of that first day back.

  At Langley the next day, the scene was surprisingly foreign. A number of the original analysts in the Iraq unit had already begun peeling off into other roles at the Agency—some in well-deserved promotions to advisory positions and others just getting as far away from burnout and the chaos of our unit as possible. I, too, was feeling the toll our work had taken, though at the time it never occurred to me to look for another position.

  For the most part, my work as an analyst back at headquarters looked much the same as it did before I went to Iraq. Our shift work had ended and we resumed a “normal” schedule of working from 7:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. or later. Having made it through my trial by fire, however, I could see that there were a few key differences in my job. One of my new informal roles was to transfer our team’s collective knowledge to the new branch members trickling in, helping to train them in the process. By then the data was significantly more in-depth than the stack of binders I’d been handed when I started. Also, I was no longer one of the most junior members of my team, so I wasn’t inundated when I drank from the intel fire hose in the middle of the night. At home I joked with Roger that I’d found a more philosophical take on my work. “I basically get paid to think big thoughts, gather around whiteboards, and pontificate on my way to get coffee.”