The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  Finally, Baziyani detailed a component of Zarqawi’s operation that would only grow in importance over the following years: that of media relations.

  Days after President Bush’s reelection in 2004, coalition forces mounted a massive campaign to pacify Fallujah once and for all. I got cables back at headquarters saying that military action was forthcoming, though we had no role in strategy for what became known as Operation Al Fajr (New Dawn). I felt sorry for the innocent residents about to be embroiled in misery; I wished there were some way that the United States could clarify that we were on the side of those residents who wanted Zarqawi gone.

  On November 7, twelve thousand US troops stormed Fallujah, going from house to house to roust insurgents in the bloodiest stretch of urban warfare since Vietnam. When the shooting finally abated after more than six weeks of fighting, two thousand insurgent and foreign fighters were dead, and twelve hundred others were captured. More than eighty US troops had been killed. The destruction of the city had been nearly absolute; some 70 percent of the buildings in Fallujah were damaged or destroyed, including at least one hundred mosques. Zarqawi, unfortunately, was nowhere to be found. We later learned that he likely fled north from the city before the first shots had been fired. I read that he might have dressed as a woman so he could slip away undetected.

  As news teams reentered what was left of the city, I watched as a CNN cameraman embedded with the Marines strolled through a decimated Al Qaida in Iraq, or AQI, concrete command center in Shuhada, a neighborhood in the south of the city. A black-and-white banner in Arabic was painted on the wall. It read AL QAIDA ORGANIZATION.

  “You have to be kidding me,” I said when I saw it. As absurd as the sign looked, it also announced a notable shift in operational tone for the organization. Bin Ladin operated from the caves and shadows. Core al Qaida was a clandestine network. Yet there in Fallujah, Zarqawi’s group basically hung a sign on the side of the building announcing, “We’ve set up shop. Here’s your caliphate government headquarters.”

  Along with computers and stacks of passports, soldiers found notebooks full of fighters’ names, ammunition, medicine that had been stolen from USAID deliveries, and letters written by Zarqawi to his lieutenants. Practically infantile notes in the building such as “Go to the flour factory; there is something there for you” led coalition forces to nearby warehouses. In one of them they discovered a makeshift classroom where there were rudimentary drawings of US fighter jets and suggestions on how to shoot them down as well as a Ford Explorer that was being converted into a bomb. The SUV was registered in Texas; we never did figure out how it got there.

  In the Jolan district, on the edge of the Euphrates River, in the northwestern corner of the city, Marines found something far more troubling. Inside a metal-sided warehouse, past the insurgent caches of rocket-propelled grenades and artillery rounds, the Marines discovered a crawl space barricaded with a safe. Pushing it aside, the troops saw an Iraqi man chained hand and foot, lying in his own waste. The virtual skeleton proved to be a still-living taxi driver who’d been abducted four months earlier along with a pair of French journalists—thankfully, he would survive.

  Down the hall, Marines crashed through another door and found themselves in what appeared to be a ramshackle movie studio. On the table was a glass with ice in it; whoever had left had just done so in a hurry. Nearby, Marines found two video cameras, klieg lights, and instructions on how to get footage to the Baghdad offices of some of the regional news networks. On the back wall of the room hung the black-and-green flag of Ansar al-Islam. The floor was caked in dried blood. The moment I read that last detail in the intelligence report I received, I knew it was the room where Nick Berg had been murdered.

  By early 2005, as SOF daisy-chained its way through the Sunni Triangle, a few notable members of Zarqawi’s network ended up either dead or in US custody—and back at headquarters, we could “X” them off our link chart.

  In November of 2004, a Saudi national known as Abu Waleed Saudi, a military aide of Zarqawi’s, was killed outside Fallujah. The next month, a tip from a fed-up local Iraqi led SOF to Fadil Hussain Ahmed al-Kurdi, a courier who helped Al Qaida in Iraq communicate back to al Qaida central in Afghanistan, and to Abu Marwan, who commanded AQI’s terrorist operations in Mosul. Then, in a move I was satisfied to see, SOF killed Hassan Ibrahim, who had lorded over the execution studio in Fallujah.

  Our grim game of cat and mouse was officially on. Even as Zarqawi’s network sustained losses, others within it rose up to continue the brutality. In mid-December, AQI responded with a pair of simultaneous car bombings in two Shia holy cities, blowing up a funeral procession in Karbala and Najaf’s main bus terminal. Sixty people, mostly Iraqi civilians, were killed.

  A host of AQI characters—as well as a list of people detained erroneously—whom the Pentagon invariably described as Zarqawi’s “lieutenants,” were arrested in mid-January 2005. Abu Omar al-Kurdi, a pudgy thirty-six-year-old veteran of various jihadist camps across Afghanistan, was one key score I was particularly pleased to see captured. His specialty was rigging old artillery shells into massive explosive devices. He was Zarqawi’s headline bomb maker—the man whose signature devices, we’d been able to prove, had been used in both the UN and Najaf bombings in August of 2003 and in nearly three dozen other attacks in the capital since then. Kurdi’s bombs had killed hundreds. He was eventually hanged by the Iraqi government.

  Zarqawi would make his thoughts on current events known in the form of audio recordings and official AQI statements. Iraqis voted to select a 275-seat national assembly that would draft the country’s new constitution. Zarqawi raged against “this lie that is called democracy” and insisted that “whoever helps promote this and all those candidates, as well as the voters… are considered enemies of God.” His written statement concluded, “Having warned you, we are relieved from any responsibility.”

  More than a dozen small-scale attacks were carried out by insurgent groups at or near the thirty thousand polling stations across Iraq on election day—we were holding our breath that an attack on a polling station would not be successful. In the face of the extraordinary military security at those centers, most attacks killed only one or two people—tragic, but not as bad as it could have been. On the whole, it was a momentous day for the 14.2 million registered Iraqi voters—many of whom loudly decried the senseless ongoing violence perpetrated by jihadist groups. The line was becoming ever clearer between dangerous elements who wanted bloodshed and those Iraqis who simply wanted to go home and rebuild their lives. There was a growing overlap between the two groups—both wanted America out of their country. And on one dramatic February day in 2005, SOF got a tip from an Iraqi citizen who decided to help fight back against terror.

  On February 20, midafternoon Langley time, I yelled into Tom’s office: “C’mon!” He looked up quizzically, and I started to explain as we headed to another US facility; then the two of us crowded behind the monitor in the live feed room.

  A local gave a tip to an Arab-American soldier in the task force. He said that within a given late-night window, Zarqawi could be found in a white truck driving down a stretch of highway north of Baghdad. The task force was busy establishing an ambush.

  I stared into the monitor, looking over the trees and roadways in the black-and-white feed, waiting for something to happen. For an agonizingly long time, nothing did.

  I turned to Tom and shrugged. “Where is he?” I asked. “Are we even sure it’s him?”

  I wasn’t the only one frustrated. Based on the tipster’s guidance, Zarqawi was so late to the location that the members of the task force figured the mission was a bust and made preparations to leave the scene altogether.

  Almost at that very moment, however, a white truck appeared on the horizon, trailing another vehicle in a small convoy.

  “That’s him,” Tom said quietly.

  Suddenly I could see the pickup zigging and zagging around army special operators’ roadbloc
ks—and then the driver laid on the gas. The truck flew across our monitor, barreling toward a secondary checkpoint. One of the SOF operators leveled his mounted M240B machine gun at the vehicle.

  This is it, I thought.

  An operator requested the okay to fire.

  Yet that didn’t happen. Without a positive ID of the vehicle’s occupants, the lieutenant in charge acted responsibly and refused the order to shoot, opting instead not to shred the truck with machine-gun fire. As the white pickup truck screamed past, Zarqawi, now visible through the window, wearing a Blackhawk tactical vest and holding an assault rifle, was screaming at his driver. “He was shitting his pants,” one special operations source later told the Army Times. “He knew he was caught.”

  “Where is he going?” I muttered, almost to myself.

  Army SOF personnel raced after the truck. A few miles past the blown checkpoint, Zarqawi’s truck sliced hard to the right off the highway, roaring down a small gravel road. Dust from the tires clouded the feed, but I could see that every time they hit a bump, the truck went airborne.

  As the truck entered a heavily wooded area, the vehicle screeched to a stop. Zarqawi grabbed his rifle, an ammunition clip, and a fistful of the cash he was carrying and bolted off into the trees. He was smart enough to know we couldn’t get a positive signature on him through the foliage. “Zarqawi became hysterical,” his driver, Abu Usama, told interrogators after the army special operators caught up to him. “Zarqawi did not know where he was because he demanded repeatedly, ‘Who lives in this area? What sub-tribe is here?’”

  On the monitor, we watched the flashes of Zarqawi racing through the trees. Then he lucked out for the second time that night: the feed cut out at that moment. Inevitably, even the cleverest of technologies doesn’t operate as seamlessly as we’d like. By the time we had eyes on the area, Zarqawi was gone.

  Tom and I looked at each other, and a storm of expletives swirled between us. Yet we soon realized there were reasons for optimism. Zarqawi had left behind in the vehicle other weapons and roughly the equivalent of $100,000 in euros—which hinted at a deeper potential connection with al Qaida’s European affiliates than we’d previously understood. What’s more, his driver was captured by American forces. And Zarqawi left a laptop computer.

  Unfortunately, even that silver lining began to erode. For nearly two weeks, SOF sat on the computer despite our repeated entreaties for them to deliver it to our technologists, who could crack it faster. “Give it to someone else,” we pleaded in our cables to SOF. “Intelligence agencies are equipped to break the encryption quickly.”

  Days later, Tom and I argued my case on-screen, in a secure videoconference call with McChrystal and one of his top aides. After a forty-five-minute round of PowerPoints and status updates, Tom said, “Any updates on that computer? We’re ready to move on that intel.”

  The general looked to his aide, who responded, “We have confirmed that it’s foreign-made and that it’s encrypted and we’ve been unable to open it.”

  I tried not to kick Tom under the table—and not to say anything that might accidentally alienate our counterparts. But to McChrystal’s credit, the computer was sent to another facility shortly afterward; it’s possible that he hadn’t understood the inability of his staff to deal with the encryption. All I could think of at the end of that meeting was a quotation Tom used periodically: “We are getting sucked into the vortex of stupidity.”

  On Zarqawi’s seized computer, there were e-mails and contact information, along with a collection of photographs on the hard drive. I spread them out on a table in front of the other analysts and targeting officers.

  Beyond that, Zarqawi had a giant stash of porn, which by then I knew was de rigueur on jihadist computers, seventh-century interpretation of Islam be damned. What was most memorable was the bizarre collection of animal pictures he’d downloaded—including one creepy snapshot of a snake swallowing a giant crocodile or alligator whole. They weren’t funny or even interesting. They were just… weird, and they fed the impression we were forming of Zarqawi’s incongruous persona as I understood it—a fanatical, hypocritical, murderous dropout who was capable of masterminding a terror network that for years confounded the most powerful military and intelligence agencies in the history of creation yet who had the general maturity of a nineteen-year-old.

  Whatever he may have been, however, Zarqawi was not the type to be cowed. Days after he came face-to-face with SOF, I got another call in the middle of the night. One of Zarqawi’s men had detonated a car bomb outside a health clinic in the predominantly Shia city of Hillah, sixty miles south of Baghdad. The attack was aimed at police and Iraqi Army recruits, yet dozens of women, children, and other civilians also fell victim to the bloodshed. More than 125 people were killed; it was the single deadliest act of the entire Iraqi insurgency.

  As I lay there clutching the phone to my ear in our bedroom, Roger rolled over to look at me. He could clearly sense my anxiety rising. “I think you oughta dump your other boyfriend,” he said with a sleepy smile. He closed his eyes again.

  I turned back to the phone. “I’ll be in soon,” I said.

  CHAPTER 13

  Shift in Momentum

  I checked my watch, my foot tapping urgently beneath my desk. At nearly 4:30 p.m. on Groundhog Day in 2005, I was racing to finish yet another cable containing the latest intelligence collected by my team. Tom and I were the only two people on our team with the release authority to send cables out to our stations in the field, and I wanted to get this one off my desk before leaving. It was the last remaining file in my internal network “queue”—a term so old-fashioned it pretty well mirrored the World War II–era, all-capital-letter font we still used for the actual cables—but by then I was running late, and Tom knew it. He stuck his head into my office.

  “You know, I have sent a cable or two before,” Tom said. “I can take care of that.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “I’m just trying to clear out my queue.”

  “All right,” he said with a shrug and walked away.

  As our team had found a groove and as our areas of expertise began complementing each other’s, Tom and I had become good friends. There was real camaraderie to be found in feeling like we were on a misfit island of targeters within a larger Agency that didn’t understand how to embrace our work. Meanwhile, Tom intrinsically understood the impact that a CIA career has on people who can’t talk about it beyond office walls. Given his experience, he could probably see the toll it was taking on me better than I could.

  “But seriously,” Tom said, coming back a minute later, “you don’t want to be late.”

  He was right. A few months earlier, Roger had proposed. Truth be told, it was more of a conversation than a YouTube-able moment on bended knee. After we attended a friend’s wedding together, I asked him, “Is that going to happen for us? Because, you know, I’m busy, and we shouldn’t waste each other’s time.” After a heated discussion, he said, “Okay,” and asked me to marry him. It was actually a fine way for it all to unfold; I’ve never been much of a romantic. I’m emotive, but rarely emotional. I roll my eyes at that silly gender stereotype.

  On that chilly day in early February of 2005, as I scrambled to finish the cable, Roger and I were scheduled to be officially wed by Judge Thomas Fortkort at the Alexandria Circuit Court in Alexandria, Virginia. Judge Fortkort is Roger’s uncle, and he’d agreed to perform the civil ceremony in advance of our larger wedding celebration, which would be held out in Montana later in the month. I’d dressed up a bit, wearing a black skirt to work that day—some of the women on my team joked that they didn’t think I owned anything but pantsuits—and a green cashmere sweater. I’d scheduled our special court date as late in the afternoon as I could so that I wouldn’t have to miss much work, but clearly it wasn’t late enough. I looked up to see Tom still standing in my office doorway.

  “I’m not leaving until you do,” he said.

  “Fine,” I huffe
d. With that, I sent the cable to Tom, shut down the computer, and raced over to Alexandria.

  I grabbed the first parking spot I found and surely pumped way too many quarters into the meter. I ran under the grand brick archways outside the courthouse and up the stairs through the front door. Roger was inside waiting.

  “Sorry—am I late?” I said as I caught my breath.

  He smiled. Just then, at the other end of the hall, Roger’s aunt Diana and cousin Mike—our witnesses for the ceremony—emerged from a stairwell and waved excitedly.

  “See?” Roger said. “You weren’t late at all.”

  The judge breezed through the legal aspects of the ceremony and performed a little reading. Diana, his wife, shed a few tears. It was lovely. A few weeks later, we were all together again out in Montana, at our ceremony and raucous reception at the 320 Guest Ranch, just north of Yellowstone National Park. More than seventy-five friends and family were there to celebrate with us. All my hesitation had disappeared by that time.

  Back at home, Tom also got to know Roger well, and we had regular dinner dates with Tom and his wife. One evening we sat in a northwest DC restaurant telling them about our misadventures when we were adding a room onto our house.

  “We were ripping up the kitchen floor to put in a new one,” Roger said. “Gus [our recently adopted Saint Bernard] is nearby, just passed out. He’s basically an area rug. But when I hammered on a board, a rat ran under my leg past Gus’s nose. Gus totally lost it! He was flying around the house after that thing.”

  “Bear in mind, he’s one hundred and forty pounds,” I added. “He can rest his chin on the kitchen table.”