The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  There was a grain of truth to that. As much as I was frustrated by our team fielding backward-looking questions about the evolution of various terror cells and their geographic and ideological connections throughout the Middle East in the days leading up to the attacks of September 11, 2001, I was becoming fixated on the puzzle of what Zarqawi and those foreign fighters were up to. Was he maintaining residency in Iraq or moving in and out? If the latter, how was he going to accomplish fighting the coalition forces?

  As I gazed out the window at the green of the campus courtyard in the morning sunshine on my first day back, I tapped a finger against the cup of Starbucks coffee in my hand. Puzzle was a word I’d been rolling around in my head over the previous few days, ever since Cindy Storer, one of the original al Qaida analysts, had described her research to me. “It’s not connecting dots; it’s more like a jigsaw puzzle,” she’d said. “Except there is no picture and there are no edge pieces. And not all the pieces fit the puzzle.” I took another sip of my coffee and thought about how much we didn’t know.

  Days later, the first big piece of the puzzle that was Zarqawi fell into place.

  As Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority took control of postwar Iraq, I watched a second organization play a pivotal role in the attempted stabilization of the country: the United Nations.

  Though the Bush administration had publicly feuded with the UN when it became clear that many members of the Security Council would not back American ambitions for military action in Iraq, once the war was over support from the international community in rebuilding the country was crucial. The UN mission in Iraq was headed by a fifty-five-year-old white-haired Brazilian envoy named Sergio Vieira de Mello, who had spent thirty-four years as a UN diplomat in war-torn countries, including Sudan, Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. Named the UN’s high commissioner for human rights in 2002, Vieira de Mello achieved something even more impressive soon afterward: he charmed President Bush.

  During an Oval Office meeting with President Bush a few weeks prior to the invasion, I later heard, Vieira de Mello and the president had discussed the harsh treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Bush asserted that it could never be allowed to become a “country club,” according to Jonathan Prentice, Vieira de Mello’s special assistant, and that terrorists must be dealt with harshly. “I know,” Vieira de Mello replied. “In East Timor I gave U.N. peacekeepers shoot-to-kill authority to go after the militia.”

  That President Bush and the UN’s high commissioner for human rights would have a meeting of the minds over shoot-to-kill authority was unexpected, perhaps—but it was a key strategic gambit, Prentice later told colleagues. Bush immediately respected Vieira de Mello’s authority and subsequently became enthusiastic about the UN’s collaboration in rebuilding Iraq. “After cursing the U.N. or calling it irrelevant or comparing it to the League of Nations,” Vieira de Mello told the Wall Street Journal at the time, “the United States very quickly came back, as it were, even though they will never admit it, in search for international legitimacy.” He added, “My guess is that the U.S. and the U.K. and those that have joined will realize… that this is too big, that building a democratic Iraq is not simple.… As a result they have every interest in encouraging others who are seen to be more impartial, independent, more palatable to join in and help create these new institutions.”

  That strategy, it soon became clear to me, was not lost on those determined to undermine the rebuilding efforts, either.

  Vieira de Mello arrived in Baghdad not long after I did. I respected the fact that the UN had set up its offices at the Canal Hotel, in a relatively unfortified area three miles east of the Green Zone, across the Tigris River. Human rights work required interaction with the population, and Vieira de Mello embraced the mandate that then UN secretary general Kofi Annan had given him: the envoy to Iraq would “serve as a bridge to the Coalition,” Annan had said, “but he will also have to distance himself from the Coalition.” Vieira de Mello clearly was proud that his three-story headquarters, trimmed along the roof in the organization’s signature azure blue and flying a massive UN flag out front, was approachable by everyday people.

  At the hotel, the envoy’s third-floor office looked out onto a gravel service road running along the western side of the building and, directly across from it, a hospital. At the end of the service road was a busy catering school. The US military had originally blocked off that gravel service road with armored vehicles to protect the hotel, but UN officials balked at the practice, not wanting to alienate people who might be trying to get to the hospital or the school. On one visit to the compound, I saw that the security around the Canal Hotel had been reduced to a group of unarmed Iraqi diplomatic police. Locals regularly met with UN humanitarian workers in the hotel cafeteria for tea and coffee—the UN certainly seemed to me more popular among Iraqis than the US forces were.

  Sadly, that made the UN a key pressure point—and soon a terrible instance of a growing trend. Vieira de Mello knew a lot about helping rebuild societies after conflict and after dictators had been overthrown. He also pleaded with the CPA to slow down de-Baathification and make provisions for the needs of Iraqi Army veterans.

  In May, the month I arrived in Baghdad—mere weeks after President Bush’s dramatic “Mission Accomplished” speech—there were 117 attacks against coalition forces. That number rose to 307 in June and 451 in July. The bulk of them seemed indiscriminate or merely opportunistic.

  Just before I left the country in August, a truck bomb detonated outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing seventeen people, including two children, and wounding more than sixty. It was the deadliest attack in Iraq since President Bush had declared an end to combat operations, one I could instantly tell was far more elaborate than a simple roadside bomb erupting next to an armored personnel carrier. With it, the number of attacks against coalition forces that month crept toward 320, and I pushed myself to try to pick up on trends or operational tactics hidden within the rising tide of violence. One became clear to me after some thought.

  Not long after the bombing at the Jordanian embassy, Turkey pledged to join the coalition, sending ten thousand troops to aid in stabilization and rebuilding efforts. Days later, a car bomb detonated outside the Turkish embassy in Baghdad—the first time a Turkish installation had been targeted by fundamentalists. Following that, Luay Muhammad Hajj Bakr al-Saqa, who by this time had become Zarqawi’s trusted lieutenant, struck directly inside Turkey by plotting and financing truck bombings in Istanbul. Over the course of five days, fifty-seven people were killed and seven hundred wounded as the bombs exploded outside a pair of synagogues, the British consulate, and a British bank.

  Those moves struck me as a clear attempt to disrupt any fledgling rebuilding the coalition had done up to that point. Taken together, they also made perfect sense as a necessary opening salvo for a group like Zarqawi’s. As upheaval and chaos played out, an ominous internal threat assessment was distributed to UN employees. It read, “To date there have been no direct assaults on U.N. staff or facilities, but it is the consensus of the U.N.-Iraq Security Team that it is only a matter of time.”

  At approximately 4:30 p.m. Baghdad time on August 19, 2003, an orange truck with a brown cab carrying more than a ton of artillery shells, mortars, and other explosives turned down the service road beside the Canal Hotel. Rather than slow down along the small street, however, witnesses reported seeing the truck speed up, spraying the hotel’s windows with gravel as it went. There was a screech of tires, the crunching sound of a metal impact—and then the sight of “one million flashbulbs going off all at once,” a survivor said, as the truck exploded directly beneath Vieira de Mello’s office.

  Twenty-three people were killed in the blast, fifteen of them UN officials. Roughly 150 were injured. Vieira de Mello lay tangled in the rubble of his collapsed office for hours as rescue workers attempted to save him. By 7:30 p.m., he was drifting in and out of consciousness; by 8
:00 p.m., he was dead. Within weeks, the UN pulled the majority of its remaining staffers out of Iraq. In that instance, at least, the plan to isolate the United States from some of its international collaborators worked almost instantly.

  Having just returned from Baghdad, I scrambled to collect all the data I could from the attack. I knew the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq was only increasing, but if this represented Zarqawi’s grand introduction to the international conflict, I needed solid information to work with. If the bread crumbs from the UN bombing led back to a different insurgent organization, the investigative work would be off my desk, shifting over to that organization’s corresponding Agency unit. In my gut, though I sensed Zarqawi was behind Vieira de Mello’s death, I just didn’t have any idea how to prove it.

  Sadly, however, the carnage of August wasn’t yet done. Days later, all the data I gathered from the UN bombing began to pay off.

  On August 29, 2003, an attack outside the Shia Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf killed ninety-five people, including Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. Questions immediately swirled about who might be responsible.

  It took a few hours to get any clarity at all about what had unfolded, but as soon as he could, my colleague and replacement in Baghdad, Neville, sent me instant messages containing the latest information he was seeing on technical collection—a database showing the latest signals intelligence the Agency collects from various sources. I really wanted his feedback: if I had a knack for spotting trends through a cloud of data, Neville had an uncanny ability to remember seemingly every detail from prior events. He was like a walking Google interface; together we could think through the various aspects of the attacks and try to figure out what they meant. Had it not been for him, I would not have known where to start looking.

  Granted, it’s frowned upon to have an instant-message conversation about intel collected before a cable is formally submitted. That chatter is known as back-channeling, and it can absolutely get you sent home. Then again, Agency personnel aren’t known to be legendary rule followers. Bureaucracy is frustrating everywhere, but even more so when you feel like it might be keeping you from tracking a killer. My calculus in that moment following the Najaf bombing suggested that circumventing the rules—gently—wasn’t likely to cause any additional harm. In a best-case scenario, we might really be on to something. I needed to know what Neville had found out.

  I carefully probed him through IM; any sort of grand war plan from Zarqawi was still sketchy at best—but there was a clear connection between the style and sophistication of the attacks and at least some of the people associated with them. After analyzing raw data, we had been able to make a connection with the same person claiming to be at the UN bombing scene.

  By 2:00 p.m. on the day of the mosque bombing, I was in Katherine’s office suggesting that we include this information in an upcoming President’s Daily Brief. “I’m certain this is Zarqawi’s network,” I told her. She instructed me to write up a draft of my analysis; then she and I met with Cornelius, our group chief, for his thoughts. I knew my analysis was in for some intense scrutiny, as it should be.

  PDBs have been described by historians as the most exclusive newspapers in the world—ten-to-fifteen-page collections of articles written by CIA analysts and hand-delivered six days a week to the homes and offices of fewer than two dozen of the highest-ranking government officials in the United States. PDBs are so secret that they generally have to be read in the company of the delivering Agency officer, then given back, to be stored at Agency headquarters. Much of the written material in a PDB doesn’t qualify as breaking news, if only because each article has to be scrutinized and rescrutinized by people in the Agency hierarchy, then ultimately chosen for inclusion by the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence. What PDBs may sometimes lack in immediacy, however, they make up for in depth. They’re intended to be unimpeachable assessments of some of the most nuanced and complicated global events. Coordinating all those approvals is never a quick process—and for my first article, on a topic as sensitive as Zarqawi, I knew I’d have to defend my analysis.

  At the same time, if I was right, and a line could be drawn between the UN murders and the mosque bombing, I knew that time was of the essence. For the following four hours, Cornelius picked apart the conclusions in my drafts and sent me back to my cubicle to write new ones. I was able to come up with responses and assessments for every question he asked, however—and just as important, I managed to bite my tongue over the condescension I sensed in his tone. Best of all, once I sent my article out for coordination among other Agency analysts, many of the e-mails I received were supportive and complimentary, offering useful suggestions and raising additional insightful questions. Finally, after one last draft, the CIA “editors” above me finished fine-tuning the PDB in the middle of the night and said I could head home.

  I don’t remember the exact time I arrived at our house, but I do know I couldn’t sleep. My mind raced not only because of the sheer scale of what I had accomplished that day but also because of Zarqawi’s surging and disruptive influence in Iraq. In just the past ten days, he had been responsible for killing nearly 125 people. His tangential, trumped-up role prior to the invasion had been relevant for political reasons—but Zarqawi was now involved in murdering people on the ground. He was becoming the very threat the administration had suggested he’d been all along. That night, I truly began to appreciate what Zarqawi meant for the coalition’s task ahead.

  I lay in bed and thought back through the binders of background notes, the intelligence briefs, the PDBs written by other analysts—everything I’d read about Zarqawi—from an entirely new perspective. His history mattered to me only because it suggested what he might do next.

  Soon the first beams of sunrise came streaking through the bedroom window. I climbed out of bed and headed back to the office.

  A few days later, a bomb made from a familiar combination of explosives and leftover ammunition from Hussein’s regime was detonated in central Baghdad, just a few blocks from the area where I used to occasionally grab ice cream. One person was killed. While the attack bore some similarities to the UN bombing, the target was different. This one exploded outside an Iraqi police academy.

  Why a training center? I asked myself as I stared at the cable on my desk describing the grisly scene.

  That was no accident, however: over the ensuing few weeks, Zarqawi’s associates attacked a police station for the first time—in Sadr City, in the northeast corner of Baghdad, killing ten Iraqi officers. In late October, in a daylong series of assaults, five suicide bombers blew up vehicles at four Baghdad police stations and at the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross, killing forty-three people, all Iraqis. Days later, a dozen more Iraqi officers and nineteen Italian police officers were killed during an attack at the Italian carabinieri training center in Nassiriyah, in the southeast part of the country.

  He’s terrorizing the Iraqis, I thought, picking up my pen. He wants to isolate the United States from local support.

  In the following months, attacks on Iraqi police forces became tragically commonplace. Seventeen killed at a police station in Khalidiyah, in central Iraq; three Iraqis killed and twenty-nine wounded outside a police station in nearby Baquba; dozens killed—most of them Iraqis—outside the coalition headquarters in Baghdad; then another nine Iraqis perishing, many of them civilians, in an attack on a police station in Mosul.

  My heart sank each time we got word of a new bombing. The country’s existing security forces had been utterly disbanded after the invasion in an act of hubris; now new recruits were willing to fill the gaps and take on the most dangerous jobs in Iraq for roughly $140 a month. They were risking everything to feed their families. That realization was never more sobering for me than it was during a two-day stretch in early February of 2004.

  First, on February 10, a bomb in the bed of a red Toyota pickup obliterated a waiting area outside the police station in Alexandria, in central Iraq
. Fifty-six people were killed—most of them Iraqis applying for jobs with the police force.

  The next day, a suicide bomber blew himself up at an Iraqi Army recruiting station in Baghdad, killing forty-seven people—most of them new recruits. Police officials, we were told, had asked the recruits not to gather in such large groups, as it could attract unwanted attention. However, the applicants, many of whom had driven hundreds of miles to be there, feared the ranks would be filled by others if they didn’t force their way to the front of the line. They were clustered by the check-in tables when the bomb went off. Following that attack, the Bush administration was forced to divert nearly $2 billion in reconstruction funds away from infrastructure projects just to shore up devastated Iraqi security forces.

  And then things somehow got worse, because a third prong of Zarqawi’s strategy soon became clear: he was attempting to control his territory through fear. And to do that, he had to utterly shock and completely horrify us.

  Many of the first responders, frontline operators, and analysts who study terror saw the depths of human depravity in unflinching detail on September 11, 2001. In a moment I won’t forget—on May 11, 2004—I experienced another up-close version of terrorism. That day, my deep thoughts about our latest cable were broken by a knock behind me on the cubicle wall. “You need to see something,” my colleague Seth said.