The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  “Okay,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  A video had been posted to a forum we’d been monitoring on a radical Islamist website. “It might be Zarqawi,” Seth said. We walked into an office where there were three other analysts and a DVD player and sat down. I will never forget the moment Seth hit Play.

  The image was grainy and digitally compressed, but the video began with a short scene of a bearded man sitting in a white plastic chair in front of a yellow wall. He wore an orange jumpsuit similar to those worn by detainees I’d seen in Iraq. His hands rested in his lap; it was unclear if they were shackled. “My name is Nick Berg,” he said. “My father’s name is Michael; my mother’s name is Suzanne. I have a brother and a sister, David and Sara. I live in West Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.”

  I’d later learn that Berg was a twenty-six-year-old telecommunications engineer who’d twice gone to Iraq in search of work rebuilding radio towers. His parents had last heard from him a few weeks prior to the video being posted.

  Twenty seconds in, the video jumps to Berg, bound at the ankles and with his wrists clearly tied behind his back, sitting on the floor on a brown mat. Behind him, five hooded men in black clothing and olive-colored ammunition vests stand awkwardly against the yellow wall. The man in the center identifies himself as Zarqawi. It was one of the first times I’d heard his voice.

  “For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we asked the US administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib, and they refused,” he says in a lengthy statement, read off what appears to be a stack of loose-leaf paper in his hands. “So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will receive nothing from us but coffin after coffin slaughtered in this way.”

  I felt my body go numb as Zarqawi pulled a disgustingly small knife from a holster on his chest. Berg stared blankly at the camera; I sincerely hoped he’d been drugged. There was no doubt what was about to happen and no way to prepare myself to watch it.

  It was possible that there would be clues in the video—a reference to an event, a location, or other hostages. Perhaps a voice pattern that matched that of other suspects we were monitoring; even something as simple as the intensity of sunlight in a room could prove valuable for forensic analysis. Furthermore, since writing my first PDB connecting Zarqawi to the violence in Iraq, I’d become something of our unit’s de facto lead analyst on the Jordanian. If anyone needed to witness what came next, I did.

  In the years that followed, as social media evolved and terror groups became ever more adept at harnessing the Internet to spread their hatred, I saw entire departments in the intelligence community created to parse through similarly awful footage in even more minute ways. The intel community had units specifically dedicated to reviewing jihadist footage; some of the footage included pornography with child victims.

  Later the Agency would bring in a cadre of mental health professionals to counsel analysts and help them process the emotions associated with watching things like the tape of Nick Berg’s assassination. Such a support infrastructure didn’t exist on that Tuesday morning in May of 2004, however.

  On the video, Zarqawi lunges at Berg, grabs a fistful of the American’s red hair, and throws him onto his side. The other four men fall on Berg, pinning him down. Berg writhes on the ground as Zarqawi begins sawing through his neck. There were screams that haunted my dreams for days. It took an unholy amount of time for Zarqawi to lift the severed head and the camera to jerk back to the pool of blood on the ground.

  In that moment, I was practically blinded by horror, the desire for vengeance, and utter despair. This, for me, was the feeling of true terror. I’d never witnessed anything like it before; I closed my eyes and tried not to vomit.

  When I got home from work that night, Roger had dinner waiting.

  “How was your day?” he said.

  I just shook my head. I sat down in the living room and scratched Gus, our new Saint Bernard. I had no idea what to say. There was nothing I wanted to say. Virtually no one in my life, including Roger and my family, knew that watching videos like that was part of my workday—just that I was becoming increasingly angry and distant at home. And obsessed with my work.

  Zarqawi’s war plan had another prong, which was soon exposed in rare and explicit detail: joining forces with al Qaida.

  In February 2004, Zarqawi sent a message from Iraq to al Qaida; he was clearly weighing the benefits of his group merging with the al Qaida network against the costs of sacrificing his autonomy in Iraq and having guidelines added to his approach to jihad. Those business negotiations seemed far from complete at the time, but the merger seemed logical, and when it happened, I knew the United States would find itself battling a much deeper and well-organized pipeline of fighters rushing into Iraq. I sat down with Cornelius’s deputy, Lucius, and other department heads to discuss how we might frame this information for a PDB.

  “I think we need to explain why this change will be significant, both strategically and tactically, when these groups unite,” I said.

  “No; that’s too speculative,” Lucius said. “You can’t know that for sure. Be safe and stick to the facts: how they know each other, what they are doing now.”

  I grudgingly accepted the direction from above, and a few hours later Cornelius approved the PDB I wrote about the correspondence between Zarqawi and al Qaida central.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the discussion. The next morning, the Agency’s top briefers called us into an office to discuss the product. “We couldn’t use this,” they said. “We can see they are in discussions, but so what? We have questions about where this information is supposed to lead in the future. Our principals are going to ask us the same thing.”

  In that moment, I clearly didn’t hide my amusement very well. As my newly minted branch chief began arguing his case with the briefers, I evidently displayed a look of clear exasperation—which was, I admit, unprofessional. One of the briefers, in fact, took it upon himself to mention it to the chief of the counterterrorism analysts—who then questioned me after the meeting. I think she was able to see why I was frustrated but wanted assurance I wasn’t being disrespectful.

  So I sat down and rewrote the PDB in accordance with the briefers’ suggestions, as I believed it should have been done all along. I was quite proud of this second draft; the next morning, I even received an e-mail from President Bush’s briefer commending me on the work: “The president wanted me to send his personal thank you,” she e-mailed. The team that publishes the PDB even selected it as an exemplar brief that should be sent to each of the analysts as a model of excellence—one of the few times an analyst’s name is ever attached to a specific product, a real badge of honor in the DI.

  That final pat on the back, however, was overruled by Cornelius and Lucius, and using the PDB as an exemplar was shut down completely. “This one was a team effort here,” he told the PDB editors. “It would be wrong to attach anyone’s name to it.”

  Hearing Cornelius’s decision from the PDB editors rather than Cornelius himself pissed me off. For me, an acknowledgment that I was contributing and working hard meant something. There’s a real feeling of accomplishment that comes from having any lawmaker—much less the president—truly grasp the depth and nuance of the information analysts are trying to convey. For the branch, after years of having our analysis questioned, we finally had a piece that truly spoke to our assessment without layers of editing. After months of being questioned and looked down upon by management, I hoped the rest of the DI would feel a similar sort of victory: we’d finally gotten an important point across.

  In late 2003 my phone rang at home just after 3:00 a.m. I rolled toward the nightstand and fumbled in the darkness for the handset. The caller ID read UNKNOWN NUMBER, which I knew meant the office.

  “Hello?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
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  “I’m really sorry for calling at this hour,” said Cornelius. He was great at being nice when he wanted something from me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “What happened?”

  Over the previous six months, these calls had become far more common. They were never good news. Back at the office, my growing role on the team required me to be in such close contact with other intelligence agencies that the CIA’s tech support personnel had installed a classified phone system at my desk. There’d been some discussion about whether one should be put in my house as well, but that proved to be a nonstarter for a standard analyst. But it also meant that our late-night calls were usually pretty cryptic.

  Maybe it was the hour of Cornelius’s call, or perhaps just the relentless slog of misery I’d pored over in the previous months, but the group chief clearly sensed my defeated tone. I knew what came next.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going to need you to come to the office in case we need to write something.”

  By then I was often writing two briefings a week for President Bush about Zarqawi’s terror connections and his potential plans. On some slower Agency accounts, analysts wrote two President’s Daily Briefs a year. Yet even as my fortunes at the office steadily improved, my frustration with the work hardened. No matter how much ink was spilled over Zarqawi’s motivations and aspirations, no bombs were dropped. No tactics shifted. Zarqawi kept on murdering people, I kept documenting it for the administration, and they kept seeking the answer to an entirely different question—where is the evidence of a connection between Hussein and al Qaida?

  I do understand that part of this comes with the territory. Analysts don’t make policy; that’s a hallowed tenet in the intelligence community. We’re programmed to scrutinize national interests, not domestic political motives.

  I saw a dire and imminent threat ignored in the context of what was then happening in Iraq. I clearly had an interest in being more forward-looking with my PDBs, and I constantly felt like our work in the counterterrorism center was being treated as a separate entity from any sort of larger foreign policy strategy. Watching the rise of a threat like Zarqawi made clear to me that battling extremism is far more complicated than simply rounding up the right bad guys. Defeating Zarqawi’s threat and influence required a cohesive strategy that incorporated the military as well as State Department diplomacy. The administration seemed to me so blindsided by almost everything unfolding in Iraq that they were constantly reacting to new developments instead of proactively implementing a strategy for stabilization.

  Granted, if the line between highlighting opportunities for action and suggesting policy sounds like a fine one, well, it is. Fulton Armstrong, who spent his career in the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence before moving on to the National Intelligence Council in 2000, once described this type of analysis, known as opportunity analysis, as swimming without getting wet.

  There, in the middle of the night, I sighed and walked out of the bedroom. Up to that point I had spent hours answering the continual historical questions about Iraq’s possible support of terrorism, while the real intelligence story was the growing connection between Zarqawi and Usama bin Ladin. Zarqawi was not only becoming more menacing for the United States; he was also inspiring disparate networks that had not necessarily trained directly with al Qaida. In exasperation, my colleagues and I kept wondering why we weren’t paying more attention to the imminent, growing threat than to the effort to piece together a case for the invasion. I was starting to become a very angry person watching people die in Iraq and seemingly doing very little to stop it.

  So I quit.

  CHAPTER 11

  We Asked Him Nicely

  Cornelius stammered when he read my resignation e-mail and said he would secure me a promotion, which would come with a salary bump if I stayed. I don’t think I believed him—and in my mind-set at the time, I knew a few more dollars would make no difference anyway. I had never left a job, or any other type of relationship, so abruptly. But the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center was certainly not going to collapse without me, and I had had enough.

  There was no time for anyone in the Iraq unit to fret about my departure—there was too much work to be done. I knew that coming back as a contractor was frowned upon but still considered an acceptable practice by most of my colleagues because of the pay raise. I felt angst over giving up the central mission and walking back in the door as a contractor, feeling marginalized and not part of the team.

  Days after I had quit, Scott, the group chief from CTC, invited me back into his office to discuss, in broad strokes, the ways the Agency was expanding to become a bigger part of the Global War on Terror and the new roles that were being created.

  He mentioned the basic outlines for a new sort of staffer the Agency needed for its reimagined role in the hunt for al Qaida: a targeter. CTC was expanding again, he told me, and the Agency had a new approach in mind to counter terrorism. Finally the idea that we’d get them before they could hurt anyone else was gaining momentum.

  The drone program employed by both Presidents Bush and Obama to kill high-value terrorist targets was the most visible and contentious but not the only tool used to extend the reach of the US government. Since its inception, the Agency has had a paramilitary wing that today is part of its Special Activities Division (SAD), for example. SAD personnel were inserted into Tibet in 1950 after the Chinese invaded to lead resistance fighters against the People’s Liberation Army of China; during the Vietnam War, they ran the Agency’s covert Air America program.

  In the late 1970s, however, use of the Agency’s paramilitary options began to wane under scrutiny from Congress following revelations in the New York Times that the CIA had, among other things, plotted the assassinations of Cuban president Fidel Castro as well as the leaders of Congo, the Dominican Republic, and other nations. Following 9/11, however, when the government searched for options to combat the new and nebulous threat represented by al Qaida, whatever resistance there was to giving CIA operations a wide berth crumbled. The Agency’s special operators were the very first ones into Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, cooperating with the Pentagon to help decimate al Qaida and overthrow the Taliban. Their role only rose in scope and prominence during my time at the Agency.

  Furthermore, the special operations missions in Iraq had showed how well interagency coordination could work for surgical strikes on terrorists.

  “We can make kinetic operations happen and go get these guys,” Scott told me, “but we need to locate them. You know Zarqawi’s current network better than anyone else here.”

  And I desperately wanted to find him. The US invasion and its bungled postwar strategies had given Zarqawi the platform to grow into the very terrorist threat the administration had said he was all along. Switching over to the operations side of the Agency to run a team that could dismantle Zarqawi’s organization piece by piece, I decided, was the way I could help change the world.

  “You don’t even have to change offices,” Scott pointed out. “We’ll just set you up on the other side of the room where you were.”

  “What is this job even called?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure about that yet,” Scott said. “For now, it’s just specialized skill officer.” Within days, I was back on the third floor of the New Headquarters Building.

  Because the Agency requires employees to sign stacks of secrecy and nondisclosure agreements, being processed out, as we call it, can take a week or more to work its way through the system. There were a few back-end administrative wrinkles to be sorted out when I was recruited, but since I hadn’t signed any official paperwork signifying that my run at the Agency had come to an end, I could get a new ID card and reenter the building.

  A funny e-mail name greeted me on my first morning. Each officer in the DO is given a bogus autogenerated name for his or her Lotus Notes account to protect the identity of those who are undercover. You don’t get to choose it, and, no, I found out, the
y won’t change it once it’s in the system.

  “That’s mine? Seriously?” I asked the tech guy setting up my account. “Is that a stripper name or a shampoo brand?”

  We often used those names in real life, too. A colleague would approach my desk and address me by my cover name. I would immediately chuckle, but eventually it became commonplace. We frequently didn’t know the real names of people working in the DO.

  For the first time in my career, I needed cover.

  Agency employees at the time were, or had been at some point, undercover—their real names and jobs obscured beneath layers of props and lies. Analysts generally don’t need it, but on the operations side there are multiple levels of cover assigned to officers depending upon their daily responsibilities. Run-of-the-mill case officers abroad might receive “official” cover—mostly just a false identity and a made-up job.

  Even deeper is “nonofficial” cover, when the US government might even disavow any knowledge of an officer’s existence.

  Happily, I fell on the other end of the spectrum. Being based in Langley, I mostly just required a light, or “notional” cover—a fake job to talk about while overseas and a new identity. That identity I was allowed to choose—as long as it was utterly mundane. I was told, “Basically, make it so that once you start talking about yourself, no one wants to hear any more.”

  To sound authentic, and to be sure I wouldn’t forget it, I spun aspects of my own past into an elaborate new story. I took my grandmother’s maiden name. I concocted a story about working in the HR department of some faceless fictional corporation. I’d had enough experience in that field that I could credibly tell stories of performance assessments and budget allocations that would make people’s eyes glaze over. If anyone asked, I said I was married. I even printed out a photo of a not-too-handsome guy I saw on the Internet to carry around in my wallet. My husband, I said, was a middle manager at an architectural firm—which I didn’t know much about in real life, but I’d gone on a few online dates with architects. We had no kids yet, I said, but we were thinking about it. For now, the story went, we were content remodeling our new home. I was, of course, very happy with my life.