The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  As we sat there at his bedside, Patrick told us that the base was under daily assault from mortar attacks. His unit had lost eight soldiers to a roadside bomb—and Patrick, whose duties included driving a ten-ton wrecker that doubled as a tow truck, was called upon to clean up after the incident. “It was a mess,” he remembered. “We had so much contact with the enemy that everybody just figured it was a matter of when and where you would get it.”

  Fate arrived at 9:00 p.m. on May 14, 2004, Patrick said. He was pulling guard duty at the front gate. “I don’t remember much about the attack,” he said. “We were just standing around.”

  The first mortar round that night sailed overhead. But moments later, a second round knifed into the side of Patrick’s thigh and blew his right leg off. He was thrown to the ground yards away from where he’d stood. “I tried to move,” he later remembered, “but that wasn’t happening.”

  It was then in the hospital room that the emotions began overtaking me. The details of the conversation all become fuzzy in my memory; I realize in retrospect how many feelings I was struggling to process as he talked.

  In that hospital room, I mostly remember looking into his deep brown eyes as he spoke—and realizing so much of my own regret. I remember how young he looked and how shaken I was by simply walking the vast white halls of that hospital. Many of those hallways had been lined with pictures of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, actor Tom Hanks, talk-show host Regis Philbin, and other high-profile individuals who’d stopped by to visit the wounded.

  Patrick told us that his fellow soldiers rushed to his side the night of the attack and soon flew him by helicopter to a hospital in Baghdad. Eventually he was flown on a C-130 to DC and transported to Walter Reed. But the specifics of his journey didn’t sink in for me at the time.

  I’d seen brutality in Iraq. And by then I’d heard so much about the 875 US troops who’d already been killed there. In Patrick’s room I understood firsthand how the 5,300 wounded men and women were trying to pick up the pieces. Visiting him brought me face-to-face with the legacy of the violence I had failed to prevent. I couldn’t help but think of the terrorists and insurgents out there, maiming other young men—and older women—even as we spoke. I hadn’t been able to stop those terrorists, either.

  We were about to learn more concerning Zarqawi’s interest in joining forces with al Qaida, thanks to a shadowy and little-thought-of character in the war on terror: a courier named Hassan Ghul.

  Virtually nothing is publicly known about the wiry Pakistani with the pencil-thin mustache—least of all his role in America’s fight with al Qaida. I knew very little about Ghul before he became Zarqawi’s interlocutor save that he was a target for the al Qaida department in CTC. Perhaps that’s not surprising: the CIA initially had varying reports about him—even concerning his nationality. Much less was known about his full associations with various terror groups. Yet within months of the September 11, 2001, attacks, my predecessors in Alec Station recognized that Ghul had a peculiar knack for showing up during al Qaida’s most dramatic moments.

  Far from a mujahid warrior, Ghul was a facilitator—a man who moved money and personnel throughout terror cells.

  Beyond al Qaida, CIA analysts had been able to trace Ghul’s ties to another terrorist organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba. Those connections enabled him to operate inside Pakistan with impunity—and to know others who did the same.

  As exasperating as that was, however, there proved to be a silver lining for the analysts in our unit and the al Qaida department: monitoring his movements as best we could helped underscore the value of couriers in the growing link chart on the wall of our Agency vault. We might not yet know exactly where high-value targets such as Zarqawi were hiding—but someone within the terrorist organization did. And a courier tasked with crisscrossing the Middle East to hand-deliver letters—the lowest-tech solution was the jihadists’ most effective in terms of evading the ever-growing technological capabilities of the US government—was an obvious place to start.

  Zarqawi’s organization was beginning to assert itself in Iraq, Ghul would later tell us, and the Jordanian wanted to make a trade: missiles for manpower. Zarqawi had weapons, perhaps even chemical ones, that he was willing to give to al Qaida, Ghul said. In exchange, Zarqawi needed al Qaida personnel who could help whip his growing band of foreign fighters into better-trained shape. Al-Iraqi agreed to at least hear him out, sending Ghul to meet with Zarqawi in northern Iraq in January of 2004.

  As soon as CTC picked up intelligence that Ghul had slipped across the border, we sprang into action. We arranged to casually spread word throughout the border villages that one particular mountainous stretch of highway would be only lightly patrolled in the coming days. That, of course, was not the case. Days later, a tall man in a light jacket and trousers was stopped in his vehicle outside the town of Kalar, along that exact route, as he neared the Iranian border. In Ghul’s satchel they found a small blue notebook full of names and telephone numbers. In addition, they recovered two CDs full of documents as well as a flash drive.

  During the forty-eight hours after Ghul’s capture, we received twenty-one different intelligence reports detailing information the courier revealed while in custody. The information included names of fighters al Qaida was considering sending to Iraq, four separate e-mail addresses Ghul had for Zarqawi, and even a point-by-point rundown of the ideological differences al Qaida central had requested that Ghul discuss with the fiery Jordanian. I held my breath every time a new cable arrived on my desk; Ghul was proving to be an even greater treasure trove of information than I’d anticipated.

  At the end of those two days, Ghul had given them everything he knew. That was hardly the end of Ghul’s story, however. Many of us, including some of the Agency’s top al Qaida counterterrorism operations officers, targeters, and analysts, believed it could be possible that Ghul might know more than he’d been letting on.

  At the time, I didn’t have a good understanding of what was likely to happen to Ghul at the detention center. He wouldn’t be treated with kid gloves—that was obvious. I’d never been to a black site and I didn’t lie awake at night worrying about how members of al Qaida were being treated. The vague familiarity I had with the locations came from mere whispers overheard in the hallway as some Agency employee or another returned from one.

  I, and the rest of the world, now have a fuller picture of what was actually happening. I know now that Ghul’s trip—assuming it was similar to other rendition flights—likely began with his being prepped during a twenty-minute “security check.” There, the black-clad men transporting Ghul would have stripped him, photographed him, and subjected him to a cavity search. He would have been wrapped in a diaper, then a jumpsuit, and blindfolded. Headphones would have been placed over his ears; then a loose hood would have been draped over his head. His hands and feet would have been shackled and likely secured to a stretcher, which then would have been loaded onto a small plane. There’s no doubt it must have been a miserable flight.

  Ghul spent two days at “Cobalt.” After those forty-eight hours, he was rendered again to the CIA detention center code-named “Black,” a basement prison complex located in a government building. Upon arrival, according to congressional documentation of CIA records, Ghul was “shaved and barbered, stripped, and placed in [a] standing position against the wall.” His hands were suspended above his head for two hours at a time.

  CIA interrogators requested permission for further enhanced techniques, writing back to headquarters, “[The] interrogation team believes, based on [Ghul’s] reaction to the initial contact, that… [he thinks] there are limits to the physical contact interrogators can have with him. The interrogation team believes the approval and employment of enhanced measures should sufficiently shift [Ghul’s] paradigm of what he expects to happen.” I was not involved in the decision to approve those methods. To this day, for a man like Ghul, I’m not sure what I would have said if I had been.

  Upon
having the request approved by the Agency’s legal department, interrogators subjected Ghul to fifty-nine straight hours of sleep deprivation, whereupon he began hallucinating. He was placed in a hanging stress position, after which he reported “abdominal and back muscle pain/spasm, ‘heaviness’ and mild paralysis of arms, legs and feet,” according to the congressional documentation. Agency doctors reported his “notable physiological fatigue” and reassured Ghul that his symptoms would “subside when he decides to be truthful.”

  The Agency publicly states that “information derived from [Ghul] after the commencement of enhanced techniques provided new and unique insight into al-Qa‘ida’s presence and operations in… Pakistan.” In particular, that refers to the crucial bit of information in the hunt for Usama bin Ladin: confirming the nom de guerre of bin Ladin’s personal courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—the al Qaida leader’s primary connection to the outside world.

  After telling his interrogators everything he knew, Ghul remained shackled inside that dungeon for the next three years.

  By October of 2004, however, it seemed clear that things were about to get much worse before they got better. The idea that Zarqawi would eventually align his network with al Qaida had by early 2004 struck me as almost a foregone conclusion. Official notice, such as it was, came in the form of a mission statement Ginny unearthed. Over the previous few months, it seemed, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad had stepped back the bombings to orchestrate something of a business merger. Ginny called me over to her desk to have a look.

  “It should bring great joy to the people of Islam, especially those on the front lines,” the message began, “that Tawhid wal-Jihad’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (God protect him) and his followers announced their allegiance to the Sheikh al-Mujahideen of our time, Abu Abdullah Osama bin Laden.”

  “We knew it was only a matter of time,” I said.

  The letter acknowledged communications between the thirty-eight-year-old Zarqawi and al Qaida for the past eight months.

  There was nothing funny about the posting’s conclusion, however: “O sheikh of the mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey. If you forbade us something, we would abide by your wishes.… Now then, people of Islam, come rally to the flag of the leader of the mujahideen, which we raise together, and let us… cleanse all Muslim lands of every infidel and wicked apostate until Islam enters the home of every city-dweller and nomad.”

  With that, Zarqawi’s organization was reborn and renamed, and bin Ladin was fully connected to the insurgency that was battling coalition forces. From then on Zarqawi’s network was to be known as Tanzim Qai’dat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn: Al Qaida in Iraq. Zarqawi himself had now ushered al Qaida into Iraq.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Bucket of Turtles

  In the spring of 2004, a new player was brought on board to lead our team, and I would be his deputy. I’ll call him Tom. He had been working in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance military force prior to 9/11 and then in Pakistan after the attacks.

  Around fifteen years my senior, with the equivalent Agency experience to match, Tom had been part of SOF before becoming a CIA case officer—a relatively rare career move. That kind of military background was practically de rigueur for someone joining an Agency paramilitary team but was much less common for someone interested in traditional fieldwork. Tom had become something of a legend on the operations side of the Agency after his role in the CIA’s seven-man Jawbreaker mission, which inserted operatives and paramilitary officers into Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. There he’d helped coordinate with Northern Alliance commanders and US Special Operations Forces units, ushering in the swift destruction of the Taliban. Now, three years later, the Agency was sending him to our unit.

  “Hi. I’m Tom,” he said in a stone-faced introduction on the day he arrived.

  “Yeah,” I said, half trying not chuckle. “I know.” I felt like I might as well have been talking to Clint Eastwood.

  At the time, the Counterterrorism Center was still in its infancy—to say nothing of the targeting work we were helping pioneer. Because of the very nature of terrorism, CTC lacked the kind of specific geographic focus that defined long-standing Agency divisions such as the Office of Russian and European Analysis and the Office of Asian Pacific, Latin American, and African Analysis. The vast majority of my work revolved around Iraq, of course—territory inside Langley that was at the time also tightly held by the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis. The women and men in that division seemed to peg my team as a bunch of newfangled cowboys running around in their backyard killing people when we weren’t meddling with their burgeoning relationships with local tribal leaders. They made it clear that they weren’t especially happy about it. Coordinating with them always led to headaches.

  Prior to Tom’s joining the team, for instance, I had met with several of those Near East managers at headquarters to discuss our common interest in keeping Iraq from reaching a boiling point. My suggestion, prompted by a discussion I had with Ginny about Agency successes in Afghanistan, was to ask for their cooperation in establishing relationships with the tribal leaders in Iraq’s Anbar region so they could help ferret out Zarqawi’s network. In Afghanistan, I pointed out, CIA officials had quietly used everything from children’s toys to Viagra to bribe rural chieftains into aiding American efforts against the Taliban. It had worked there, and I wondered if something similar might work in Iraq.

  You would have thought I had asked them to blow up Baghdad given the reaction I received. I certainly understood that the Near East division’s established relationships in Iraq were somewhat tenuous and needed to be treated delicately, but I considered the need to hunt down Zarqawi’s men a good reason to ask. Establishing a relationship that encompasses a discussion of foreign terrorist threats with tribal leaders would provide an opportunity for us to work together. The Near East managers I spoke with clearly didn’t want CTC playing in their sandbox, muddying the waters—they wanted primacy over those relationships, in my opinion. CTC was still considered the backwater of Agency work for many traditional officers. As soon as I mentioned the possibility of approaching the tribal leaders, the meeting ended abruptly.

  With that in the back of my mind, I mentioned right away to Tom that I’d welcome any thoughts he had on how to grease the skids between various departments.

  “Yeah,” he said with a nod. “This place is like a bucket of turtles. Everyone’s scrambling to get to the top.”

  “I—”

  I paused, visualizing the turtles scrambling to get a foothold on the side of the bucket.

  “I’ll remember that,” I said. Then I showed Tom to his office, around four feet away from mine. I was rolling out the red carpet, because after ten months of working as the de facto head of the team, I knew we needed someone with DO experience to join us. The Iraq Task Force had two other teams at the time, but we were the main focus.

  I sensed that by joining my team, Tom was going to be a little bored. In his words, he had been on the SDS track—stupid dangerous stuff—too many times. Few well-traveled field agents welcome a rotation back at headquarters, but everyone has to do “their time” at the mother ship, and he was no different. But he appreciated the importance of the work we were doing, and having him on board brought me an immediate sense of relief. My analytical background had led me to this targeting team. I knew the subject matter cold—and I knew that I could pick up whatever intelligence-collection capabilities the DO demanded of me. But I’d never managed an asset in the field. I’d never run an operation. Putting analysts like me in charge of field agents is begging for trouble; it’s possible one part of my rapid rise within CTC was that they simply didn’t have enough staff at the time. I was honestly fearful that I might get somebody killed because I didn’t know what I was doing. With Tom in place, I was able to take on the official title of deputy branch chief, focusing on our team’s analysis and strategy, w
hile he taught me how to coordinate with case officers in the field.

  Technical and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) collection proved to be one of our biggest assets in Iraq. And on our team, the targeting side of things was really starting to hum. That was thanks in part to Ginny’s work on the cyber desk, where she spent much of her days sifting through cyber collection. She was as much a code breaker as a cybersleuth.

  Zarqawi and his men, of course, had been very aware of using operational security in order to not be traced or tracked. Everyone who uses a piece of technology leaves a digital trail; Al Qaida in Iraq was no exception.

  All the data we collected got funneled into our growing database, which better informed our initial analysis. We could corroborate hunches, and case officers on the ground could sometimes help confirm leads. When we had a target identified, we would send over a detailed package to our team member embedded with SOF in Iraq. The package included a summary of the target and any historical data we had on him, why he was important, and what we thought might result from various approaches to dealing with him. What did we anticipate might be learned by interrogating him? Might his removal have serious consequences for the larger mission? Beneath that was a list of the data itself and various other details that led us to pinpoint the individual—similar to the notes students might include on their tests when a teacher asks them to show their work.

  What happened next varied widely, both in the field and back at headquarters. Because often, it seemed, that’s where cooperation ended. Our challenge being that whereas we needed to directly communicate with SOF, because of bureaucratic processes, the CIA personnel in Iraq would take the lead. It had proven a very inefficient process, so we decided to embed a targeting analyst with SOF from that point on.