The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  There was a surprisingly small number of us on the Zarqawi targeting team initially at Langley. They were mostly older analysts who’d been in CTC for a while, along with a smattering of career operations officers and one or two new hires. Directly above me in the team’s hierarchy was a woman named Anne. She was one of the first targeting officers in CTC, and she was more experienced than the rest of us on the new team. Anne’s knowledge of Zarqawi’s group was rudimentary, but she didn’t pretend otherwise. And she was excited to have me join the team: months earlier, she had been appreciative and complimentary of my PDB connecting the UN bombing to the attack in Najaf and Zarqawi.

  The basic job, Anne explained to me, was to supply targeting information to the station—intense intelligence curation, similar to what I’d done during my months in Iraq. I realized quickly that we needed to use the cable traffic to date to set a baseline of information for the field so we had a record of current intelligence. We started developing the initial targeting packages, which offered detailed information about locations of high-value targets, giving US teams a far better shot at snatching those whose removal would have the most adverse impact on the group. There was no formal training for the work I was about to embark upon, but there was a methodology that I could understand, one that was gradually taking shape in my mind. Targeters were glad to share this methodology with one another over entirely informal conversations at lunch or on coffee runs.

  I arranged as many of those meetings as I could, reaching out to other men and women who’d made the transition to this new role before I did. This group included Barbara Sude, a petite woman with a sly wit who was likely one of the preeminent al Qaida experts in the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, if not the entire US government.

  One of the original counterterrorism analysts looking at al Qaida, Barbara had a reserved academic air that did nothing to disguise her driving passion for the work. One of the first times we spoke, I’d seen that she kept cartoons tacked up over her desk, clipped from newspapers she’d read during her frequent trips overseas. I’d liked her immediately.

  The other woman I reached out to was a forty-year-old mother of three, Jennifer Matthews, who had graduated from a small Christian college in Ohio nearly twenty years earlier with degrees in broadcast journalism and political science. She was clever and tenacious, and in the spring of 2002, Jennifer helped locate al Qaida middleman Abu Zubaydah. She’d personally flown to a black-site prison to witness Zubaydah’s interrogations and waterboardings that summer.

  The two women offered invaluable guidance for my new role—in particular, ways to apply my DI-side analytical skills and processes to the role of operational targeting. They told me about the new forward-looking focus in this job; about ways to digest new information and pull out salient details in a shift from creating broad evaluations to fine tactical assessments. All the while, they underscored, they were testing, corroborating, and trying to balance ways in which a new data point can fit into a larger picture. At times, they assured me, it could be a confounding endeavor—not because of how little information was available but rather because of how much there was.

  As an analyst, I was often scraping for details to try to fill out some larger picture. By contrast, these targeters said, their job and my own was in many ways a subtractive art. Particularly within a nebulous organization such as a terror cell, one thread of intelligence could be miles long before it became clear whether it was useful in the moment. Or maybe at all. By the summer of 2004, details about insurgent groups were being vacuumed up like so many crumbs, thanks to the Agency’s intelligence collection apparatus—and only once I truly understood the modus operandi of all the players involved could they be pieced together.

  Digging into the work back at my desk, I created a database—which, at the time, was no more advanced than an ever-expanding Excel spreadsheet—containing all the miscellaneous facts I could cull from the Agency software that captured raw intelligence from overseas: names, dates, locations, tactics, leadership structures. I scoured interrogation reports, satellite images—anything that might help geolocate a vulnerable node in Zarqawi’s network and make my analysis actionable. I threw myself into the work with a renewed sense of urgency.

  Once I identified a pressure point, I met with other team members for an internal assessment of the target. Was the individual involved in what appeared to be an upcoming enemy operation, or was he in some other way an immediate threat to coalition forces? If so, we could coordinate with SOF, which would send a military team to capture or kill him. Even that raised questions, however: if the person is a threat, do we mitigate the risk with a kill operation? Or should we capture and interrogate him? SOF has responsibility over that call on the ground, but if we felt strongly about a capture operation we needed to make our case in advance.

  On the other hand, someone always asked, if the person was merely an interlocutor, might the target be of more use to us in place so that we could monitor whom he talks to and where he goes? Or, by simple process of elimination, would going after a certain target automatically finger the source on the ground who’d provided us the information, thereby blowing an Agency asset? Sometimes days of work to identify a target led to the decision to do nothing at all.

  Within weeks of my arrival on the operations side, the Zarqawi targeting team underwent new staffing changes. As another wave of analysts was brought on board, Anne transitioned to a different role in CTC—and I was promoted to the targeting team’s branch chief. It was my first official management role at the Agency—and I promptly divvied up the team.

  I took my top and most experienced officers and dedicated them to picking apart Zarqawi’s shura council, the group of senior mujahideen who helped guide the growth of his organization. Those councillors were key figures themselves, but depending on their roles we could be content not sending SOF after them immediately. They were the most likely people to end up in the same room with Zarqawi at some point.

  Then I teamed up some of our younger officers and asked them to focus on logistics—the web of miscellaneous couriers and middlemen who helped supply the terror cell and coordinate its movements. I felt that dividing the team was the most logical use of the limited manpower we had, and this approach matched the skill set of the younger officers with somewhat less sophisticated targets. Couriers don’t have the same ability to hide as their elusive superiors do. Those middlemen made easier targets for the less experienced staffers to identify.

  I touched base with team members every morning to see if anything interesting had come across their radar screens; then I’d lose myself in frontline cables from other departments that had filtered into my branch’s queue overnight. The branch was a mixture of senior and new officers, and informal mentor and mentee roles evolved as time went on. I removed as many potential interruptions as possible: in my new role, I could ask someone who was already heading out to pick me up some coffee. If a principal arrived at headquarters looking for a briefing from a branch officer, I was glad to assign someone else to it.

  The chance to capture a courier, this time one of Zarqawi’s low-level gatekeepers, suddenly zoomed into view. We had been watching him for months and had decided that he was more useful outside of our custody because of the intelligence we were collecting. He had a few dating profiles in the various countries in which he was working. The profiles alluded to some of the typical characteristics you would find in anyone’s profile, but he was clearly embellishing the facts. He described himself as a wealthy businessman, taller than he actually was, and to attract the ladies he posted a head shot that made him look much more sophisticated than his other pictures. He was a source of amusement.

  I had a daily meeting in the late mornings with the Counterterrorism Center’s senior management. Inevitably, the first question they asked and the last question they asked—and, really, every question in between—was about the whereabouts of Zarqawi and his organization’s leadership and how I intended to find him.

>   Every day posed a challenge and an unending set of solutions to plow through. The difficulty lay in finding the right one. It was intense and exciting, finally being able to do something about terrorism rather than just write about it.

  I saw quickly how much more competition and political maneuvering there was in the operations side of things, where everyone seemed to be “handling” one another at headquarters the same way they manipulated assets in the field. But even more than that, I was taken aback by the seemingly impenetrable patriarchal structure.

  Periodically I’d hear people refer to the “girls” on my team and whether they were attractive. Casual mentions of a woman being overweight—which I never heard about men there—somehow morphed into speculation about her technical or leadership abilities.

  There were glaring instances of harassment I was unable to do anything about. A young female officer spoke to me one afternoon about an invitation she had received for a party outside the office. She and a collection of other young women officers had been invited to a house party that included midlevel and senior-level male Agency officers. I was disgusted, but I knew I had no way to squash it. I told all the young women I knew on the list to take a boyfriend—a real boyfriend or a stand-in—and to leave early if they felt compelled to attend at all. I later heard that the evening had devolved into a session of drunken lap dances in the name of “networking,” which, I’m sad to report, didn’t especially surprise me.

  In the daily meetings at the office, however, the low-level sexism was far more frustrating. At times I’d make a quick suggestion that was noticeably better received when one of the men in the room said the exact same thing a few minutes later. Initially I took that as a cue that I should be more assertive, but that had the potential to backfire, too. Pretending that I was predominantly a warm, deferential woman seemed to be a little too out of character for me, so I had to use my strengths as a DI analyst to get my points across. This was in addition to the fact that I was a targeting officer and not a certified operations officer.

  To the CIA’s credit, however, there was one thing I sincerely appreciated about the operations side, which was different from my time in other male-dominated work environments: no one micromanaged me. They demanded results, of course—but those higher-ups outlined my task and trusted that I’d find a way to accomplish it. In fact, the level of autonomy they gave me to run my team felt a little too forward-leaning at times. I continually weighed the decisions I was making against my steep learning curve, sometimes second-guessing myself.

  Following those morning meetings, much of the rest of my day was spent talking to members of my team about various strategies for capturing a specific target and issues that came up from station. I also spent time approving cables our branch intended to send into the field and communicating with our embedded targeting officer in Iraq as well as with our liaison there from Special Operations Command. At some point each evening the sun would set, and a few hours later, around the time a sentence in a memo didn’t make sense after the eighth time I read it, I knew it was time to call it a day.

  My role came with standard managerial duties as well. I was directed to help rehabilitate the career of a young female staff officer who’d been asked to leave the Farm—the CIA’s training facility for clandestine officers. She was polite, eager, and willing to do what it took to turn her career around. She ended up being one of our best desk officers.

  Then there was Myrtle, the woman whose dogged—and bullheaded—personality most closely resembles the character moviegoers saw on the screen during Zero Dark Thirty; she was working in CTC’s cyber division. We also had one of my Zarqawi team members sitting on the cyber desk—Ginny, a whip-smart woman who’d been intimately involved in tracking several big targets as they had traveled across Iraq. It’s safe to say those weren’t the easiest of days. The underlying tension between al Qaida and Zarqawi’s network was mirrored within the walls of CTC. The AQ department still didn’t see Zarqawi’s organization as a serious threat, and, like most of us, they felt the Iraq invasion was distracting us from our initial task of going after al Qaida—those responsible for 9/11.

  The work culture within the office was strained—get any group of hard-charging men and women in the same suite of rooms and you can expect tensions to reach the boiling point. Furthermore, in a compartmentalized bureaucracy like the CIA, it was common for two teams with similar overarching national security objectives to approach the same overlapping targeting scenario from very different angles—and subsequently stomp on each other’s toes. We might have had a bead on a key member of Zarqawi’s network—but what if taking out that target disrupted a larger mission the al Qaida team had in place? Then what?

  Several times my team butted heads with other teams from the al Qaida department and Myrtle’s unit over the best way to proceed. It was painfully clear in such situations how lone-wolf Hollywood protagonists make for lousy real-life coworkers. On those days, it was often all I could do to keep my team focused on dismantling Zarqawi’s group and not their coworkers.

  The Rosetta stone for our work was a six-foot-by-six-foot map of Iraq that formed the backdrop for an ever-growing link chart on the wall of our vault. On it, red and blue arrows sprung out from Zarqawi’s known operations centers. From there we taped head shots to the wall to connect associates, timelines, and terrorist plots. We were focused predominantly on top-tier and second-tier players within Zarqawi’s network, which was by then known as Jama’at al-Tawhid wa’l Jihad. I discovered early on that if I went too many levels deep with link analysis, I could’ve tied a bombing back to my dog. Link analysis in and of itself is a reasonable tool for trying to define a landscape, but the analysis behind the chart is what really matters.

  In our less harried moments I found that wall philosophically fascinating. It represented the very height of the United States’ modern intelligence-gathering capabilities and simultaneously reminded me of an elaborate Old West “Wanted” poster. I recognized that there was a definite hometown-cowboy ethos in the way I approached my job—a kind of deeply ingrained moral code that sprung from those childhood horseback rides I took with my grandfather when we went out to count head of cattle. To put it bluntly: if you’ve inflicted enough misery to warrant an entire targeting team at the CIA dissecting your every move, you’ve basically made the short list of folks who just need killing. Zarqawi had at least claimed that death—or martyrdom, in his eyes—was the ultimate honor in his war with the infidel. I looked forward to granting him that “honor.”

  The weeks leading up to the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq in June of 2004 unfolded in much the same grisly way as the war did. Another attack near a military base in Taji, north of Baghdad, killing at least nine. Then simultaneous assaults in five cities—Baghdad, Baquba, Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul—left one hundred dead. Many of the gunmen who stormed a police station in Baquba wore yellow headbands, linking themselves to Zarqawi’s group. Dutifully I went through everything we knew about the attacks—and wondered what more I could have done to stop them. The US civilian authority had handed the newly formed Iraqi government a quagmire.

  I was upset over the constant violence and mayhem the Iraqis were having to live through—and I’d begun taking the violence increasingly personally. It felt like an indictment in some way. I always found myself thinking back in hindsight: “I should have seen that bombing coming”; “Why didn’t I recognize what that miscellaneous data point meant?” It’s impossible to believe that an analyst can identify every pattern as it unfolds or predict every incident. Doing so requires the necessary background intelligence intersecting with the understanding of what it means right now and the interpretation of what it leads to tomorrow. The job just hardly ever worked that way.

  A significant critical moment for me occurred in early July. It didn’t come at Langley or at home in the middle of the night. It came on Georgia Avenue in northwest Washington, DC, in the cavernous hallways of what was then the Walter Reed Arm
y Medical Center. Errol, a DC-based livestock lobbyist from my hometown, and a staffer for a Montana senator joined me as I went to the hospital to visit twenty-one-year-old army specialist Patrick Wickens. I’d heard from my mother that he was there. In a phone call, I heard from Patrick’s mother that he might like some visitors and probably a few of his favorite cookies to supplement the hospital food.

  I didn’t remember Patrick other than as a young kid; he was much younger than I. I knew his name, though—like me, he hails from Denton, and no one’s that far removed from anybody else out there. Soon after leaving high school, his mother told me, Patrick enlisted in the army—and soon again the mechanic found himself based near Karbala, Iraq, some sixty miles southwest of Baghdad. His unit—Maintenance Platoon, Service Battery, Fourth Battalion, Twenty-Seventh Field Artillery, First Armored Division—had been in country far longer than initially scheduled because its tour had been extended. And Forward Operating Base Saint Michael was a rough place to be stationed.

  The soldier was sitting up in bed, wearing an olive-drab T-shirt and talking with two other people. A blue IV tube was taped to his right bicep; a blue plastic watch was strapped to his left wrist. His no-fuss military haircut had grown in a bit on top, but his black hair still sat high on his forehead. A white bedsheet covered the lower half of his body; I could tell from the doorway how much of it was no longer there.

  “Hi,” I said as he turned to see who was at the door. “I’m Nada. I’m from Denton. Your mom said we could come visit.”