The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

  “So the rat runs out of the kitchen and into the living room toward Nada—and when she sees it, she loses her mind. She’s screaming like mad and climbs up the back of the couch,” Roger said. “Gus is tearing through the living room, destroying things. He flips a chair, almost knocks over the bookcase, then he slams into the couch Nada’s on and practically dumps her on the ground.”

  “The rat’s running for his life,” I said, “and Rog figures he’ll pin the thing by flipping over an end table to block the door. I started to say, ‘C’mon, city kid, what’s that going to do?’ but I didn’t have time. The rat hurdles the end table, goes flying through Roger’s legs—and he’s half bent over, looking up to see this one-hundred-and-forty-pound dog with his ears pinned back, about to hit him like a freight train.”

  “It was like it happened in slow motion,” Roger said.

  “Gus leaps over the end table, and Roger dives out of the way,” I said. “The rat goes running down a plumbing column into the basement. Gus turns the corner at breakneck speed and goes racing down the stairs after him.”

  “We cornered the rat behind the washing machine,” Roger said, “and I finally killed it. But even after I took it away, Gus could still smell it. He spent forever down there, just turning in circles and sniffing at the washer.

  “Nada finally said to me, ‘Did you show Gus the dead rat?’ And I said, ‘Um, no.’ She said, ‘You have to make sure he knows.’

  “I thought, ‘Well, okay,’” Roger said. “So I took him out to the garage and showed him the rat in the trash. I guess he was satisfied. He went right back to sleep.”

  We all had a good laugh at the memory. “Sounds like quite an adventure over there,” Tom said. “Just let us know if you need any help.”

  Truth is, we did. And sure enough, the very next weekend Tom showed up at our house with tools, and he, Roger, and I spent a fuzzy Saturday drinking perfectly bottom-shelf bourbon and finally—more than a year after we’d moved in—ripping up the cruddy ceramic tile on that kitchen floor once and for all. I didn’t think about work at all that day.

  I smile at those memories now, because those are some of the few relaxed moments I remember from that period in my life. The pressure I felt throughout 2005 was simultaneously suffocating and deflating. At the office, ongoing interdepartmental squabbles and external communications breakdowns with SOF began eating away at what little optimism I had left about my team’s ability to effect change. I bounced between wanting to throw up my hands and quit again and trying to invest myself even more fully in the job, as if to somehow conjure up a breakthrough. One fourteen-hour plane flight blurred into another as I spent increasingly long stretches with our team members in Iraq and our intelligence counterparts in other Middle Eastern nations, hoping that being in country might illuminate some fact I’d been missing. Outside the office, I found myself checking the news constantly, perpetually awaiting the next phone call asking me to come in because AQI had set off another car bomb. I still felt responsible for the murders Zarqawi committed, and my growing frustration mixed with that disappointment into an ugly cocktail of guilt and helplessness.

  Anxiety manifested itself in various ways. At home I was testy and easily provoked by things going awry. And with the loosely compartmentalized chaos of our ongoing remodeling, there was always something going wrong. Because I had so little control at work, my lack of ability to control chaos at home often felt like more than I could bear. When Roger caught me clenching my jaw and asked me what was the matter, I never could articulate it.

  Outside our house, whether at work or on the street, I became oddly numb to almost anything remotely threatening. In one episode I’ve never seen reported anywhere, we received an internal security e-mail at the office saying that a Middle Eastern man in slacks and a button-down shirt had walked around the edge of the perimeter fence on the Agency’s Langley property. He stumbled a bit, apparently, then keeled over onto the ground. Eventually security went out to check on him, and the man was declared dead right there on the grass. I remember thinking, “That’s weird,” and then not a word was ever spoken about him again. I didn’t ask for details, nor did I follow up on it in any way. In retrospect, that’s weird. I hadn’t thought about that incident again until Roger brought it up many years later.

  As taxing as intelligence work was, the rewards were piling up that spring for the CIA in particular, thanks in no small part to an ingenious program crafted by the CIA’s agency-wide cyber team and executed with great skill in our Zarqawi branch by Ginny.

  In the years before smartphones, insurgents and other fighters wanting to send e-mails did so without awareness that they could be tracked. Tom and I devised an operation using authorities under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act section 702 utilizing some of our operators on the ground in Iraq to provide feedback on specific targets. With Ginny’s help we had two types of collection feeding our targeting packages and providing validation of targets. This was the kind of analysis targeters specialized in.

  In some ways, the most notable part of the process was how straightforward it seemed. Zarqawi and his top men were clever about the basics of avoiding detection, but particularly in the era before Edward Snowden’s leaks about US intelligence programs, I can’t imagine that those fanatical fighters had any understanding of the true technological capabilities the CIA and the National Security Agency possessed. Soon we were in receipt of the kind of information that made it possible to strike back at a few key players in Zarqawi’s growing operation.

  The team specialized in sending actionable targeting packages forward on individuals and nodes within the network.

  One individual, Rawi, had been instrumental in coordinating the movements of foreign fighters, vehicles, and weaponry into Iraq along that rat line. The full scope of Zarqawi’s network was coming into clearer focus by the day.

  Soon after, a gunrunner named Abu Abbas was captured in Baghdad. Abbas had been responsible for stealing as many as four hundred rockets and 720 cases of plastic explosives from a weapons facility in the nearby township of Yusufiya in early 2003. It was Abbas who had provided the raw materials Abu Omar al-Kurdi used to make his catastrophic bombs. He pointed the military to his remaining stockpiles of weapons, which he’d buried in multiple locations on and around a farm in Yusufiya.

  Then we landed an even bigger score, in the northern city of Mosul, the capture of Abu Talha, AQI’s emir of that city and a key member of Zarqawi’s inner circle. Talha, too, had split with Ansar al-Islam a few months earlier and, according to detainee reports, met with Zarqawi as often as once a month in various locations throughout western Iraq. We considered him a logical successor for the top spot in AQI if and when Zarqawi was eliminated. The CIA had been analyzing and identifying key players inside of Ansar al-Islam since at least 2001.

  In Mosul, Talha oversaw a few hundred fighters, executing approximately fifty car bombings. Within Zarqawi’s ranks, Talha stood out. As opposed to being a Sunni ideologue, Talha was a former Republican Guard with close ties to Hussein’s former government. His focus was on disrupting the implementation of democracy by means of attacks on politicians and polling places. That was particularly true in light of the successful parliamentary elections in January, which led to a Shia, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, being named prime minister in April. The lion’s share of Jaafari’s cabinet posts were filled by Shias.

  Former Sunni Baathists such as Talha had been livid at the appointments and the marginalization of their religious sect. According to a DOD press release, Talha began wearing a suicide vest nearly twenty-four hours a day and had pledged never to surrender. Yet in the midst of a whirlwind afternoon during a SOF raid on a safe house in a quiet corner of western Mosul, Talha did just that. He offered even more details about Zarqawi’s communication and travel patterns. He languished in a cell for a few years, then was executed by the Iraqi government.

  Into Talha’s place as the emir of Mosul stepped a man whose true menace would only be
realized years later: Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli. Having joined AQI only months earlier, Qaduli had little paper trail to speak of. He, too, would be arrested a few years later, though he fared better in confinement than Talha did. Qaduli was released from an Iraqi prison in 2012, at which point he joined the leading extremist group in the region—and the world—at the time, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. There he worked his way up to second-in-command, becoming the group’s top finance official and a general planner for ISIS’s international attacks. Ultimately, in March of 2016, three days after ISIS fighters killed thirty-one people at the Brussels airport departure area and four months after ISIS fighters murdered 130 people in attacks across Paris, US Special Operations Forces units killed Qaduli as well.

  Our successes in dismantling Zarqawi’s network added up. In May of 2005, the Defense Department published a slide that counted seven of his lieutenants dead, thirteen others captured, and only one other remaining at large. Zarqawi was clearly on the run. But threatened animals tend to be the most dangerous animals, and Zarqawi and his men began striking out in all directions.

  Weeks after that slide was shown, Zarqawi’s men abducted three dozen Iraqi soldiers riding in a pair of minibuses southwest of al-Qaim, saying in a message-board posting that they were taken for crimes “against Sunnis and their loyalty to crusaders.” That was followed by the killing of eighty-seven-year-old Dhari Ali al-Fayadh, the oldest member of the parliament that had been elected in January. A car loaded with explosives detonated next to Fayadh’s white van as he was being driven to parliament from his farm outside Baghdad. Fayadh’s son and two bodyguards were also killed in the blast. The run of scattershot attacks, whose death tolls almost invariably included Iraqi civilians, sent a message not just to us but also to al Qaida central: Zarqawi is a menace.

  I had long understood the strategic and ideological chasm that existed between Zarqawi and the group to which he had shortly before sworn allegiance. Yet never was that laid out more clearly than in a 6,300-word letter Ginny brought to my attention in the summer of 2005, which was quickly spread among intelligence agencies. The missive, written by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaida’s second-in-command, bullet-pointed the organization’s larger plans for the future of Iraq and offered a stinging rebuke to Zarqawi for his strategic mismanagement of jihad there. In the letter, Zawahiri reflects upon Zarqawi’s attacks on the Shia population and the grisly beheading videos AQI had been delivering to Al Jazeera. It was immediately apparent to me how much damage Zawahiri feared the upstart Jordanian might be doing to the larger group’s reputation, causing them to lose what he described as a “media battle” for the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world.

  “Many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia,” Zawahiri wrote. “The sharpness of this questioning increases when the attacks are on one of their mosques, and it increases more when the attacks are on the mausoleum of Imam Ali Bin Abi Talib [in Najaf].”

  Zawahiri continued, “Can [your] mujahedeen kill all of the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that?”

  I was struck by how much the pages seemed to ooze condescension. Why Zawahiri was risking exposing himself by communicating raised real questions for me about how apoplectic he—and, by extension, bin Ladin—must have been. It was enough to make me hope they might just send an al Qaida henchman to northern Iraq and snuff out Zarqawi themselves.

  In the letter, Zawahiri continued: “Among the things which… the Muslim populace… will never find palatable… are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages. You shouldn’t be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the shaykh of the slaughterers, etc. They do not express the general view of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq.”

  In the letter, Zawahiri beseeched Zarqawi to follow a four-part playbook created by al Qaida central: focus first on expelling the Americans from Iraq; second, establish clear authority over whatever amount of Sunni territory in Iraq can be controlled; third, gradually extend the reach of that new Islamic “state” into neighboring countries; and fourth, at some point bring terror to Israel. The strategy bore profoundly little resemblance to what Zarqawi was doing in Iraq at the time.

  I estimated that a key shift in momentum was upon us, thanks to Zarqawi’s murderous overreach, which appeared to alienate even his newly cemented allies. If the Jordanian felt a growing threat from the administration above him, I was determined to keep him looking over both shoulders at once.

  An AQI operative named Sulayman Khalid Darwish was Zarqawi’s paternal uncle and fourth-in-command. Years earlier, Darwish had trained with firearms and explosives at Zarqawi’s camp in Afghanistan; Sayf al-Adl, Zarqawi’s original champion within al Qaida, told our liaison colleagues that the two had connected in Herat. But by the time we came to understand Darwish’s importance, he was far less a fighter and more of an executive officer in logistics.

  When I took over the targeting team, Darwish’s major influence was coming from his activities on the literal outskirts of the group. The former dentist spent much of his time in his native Syria, perfecting document fraud. Darwish’s crucial contribution to AQI was a steady supply of fake passports that could get Zarqawi’s jihadists into any country—most easily Iraq. Further, Darwish had become AQI’s chief waypoint for the funds Zarqawi’s network collected abroad. Every few weeks, Zarqawi dispersed the funds among his regional emirs and put new recruits to work. At that point, an estimated 90 percent of the suicide attacks in Iraq were carried out by terrorist forces AQI recruited and trained.

  Darwish’s role was so vital to the ongoing operations of the organization that the US Department of the Treasury froze his assets—meaning that any accounts found belonging to him in the United States could immediately be confiscated. Treasury then appealed to the United Nations to add Darwish to the consolidated list of terrorists tied to al Qaida, a designation that would result in member nations freezing his assets in their countries as well. “This terrorist financier is helping support al-Zarqawi, who has launched violent acts against our troops, coalition partners and the Iraqi people,” then treasury secretary John W. Snow said in a statement announcing the action. “Identifying financial operatives and choking off the flow of blood money moves us closer to our ultimate goal of fracturing the financial backbone of the Iraqi insurgency and Al Qaida.” In June, it was reported that Darwish was thought to have come across the border from Syria into Iraq near al Qaim and to have been killed through Operation Spear.

  The Iraq department had grown substantially; a counterpart team had been built to focus on Zarqawi’s external network, in addition to some of the fighters moving across the border.

  By the end of 2005, seven Tier I leaders, as we labeled them—regional emirs with direct access to Zarqawi—had been killed or captured. Nearly forty Tier II leaders, who oversaw local areas beneath them, had been killed or detained. We were cutting off AQI’s funding and rat lines and taking out logistics facilitators, bomb makers, and military planners. Had things kept on that course, I’m convinced Zarqawi’s influence was poised to flame out. I even found moments of cautious optimism in my work.

  Then everything went completely to hell.

  At 8:00 p.m. on February 21, 2006, four men dressed in the signature camouflage commando uniforms of the Iraqi police crept up to the door of the al-Askari mosque in the ancient Iraqi town of Samarra, roughly sixty miles north of Baghdad.

  Samarra had in late 2004 been the scene of heavy fighting between US forces and insurgent groups as the coalition sought control of the city of two hundred thousand in the run-up to Iraq’s national elections. That military operation was successful at the time, but throughout 2005 and beyond Samarra became a microcosm of the dysfunctional American mission in Iraq as the United States fought for temporary calm there only to watch insurgents return once the shooting stopped. The violence in Samarra was rarely as high-prof
ile as that in nearby Fallujah or Ramadi, but by February of 2006, unrest in Samarra was still a thorn in the side of military planners.

  Across the street from the al-Askari shrine that night, an Iraqi police unit kept surveillance over the mosque, which was topped with a bulbous dome covered in seventy-two thousand pieces of gold that reached more than two hundred feet into the sky. In the daylight, it shimmered throughout the flat beige city. The four intruders, in black masks, quietly carried an array of weaponry.

  Outside the complex, an Iraqi Army battalion was based some one hundred yards down the road. A few hundred yards beyond that, a few platoons of US troops were stationed at a small civil-military operations center. But under the cover of darkness, the four terrorists made their way across the complex, then slipped through a gate in a nine-foot-high wall that surrounds one of the holiest shrines in the Shia Muslim world. It was supposed to have been locked at 5:00 p.m.—leading us to suspect that at least one of the nine security guards hired by Sunni authorities in Samarra knew to expect company.

  Originally built in 944, the shrine at al-Askari marks the final resting place of two ninth-century Shia imams, the holy descendants of Prophet Muhammad. What truly gives the shrine its radical devotion, however, is a third imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi—Islam’s so-called Hidden Imam, who is believed by many Shias to have disappeared from that building into a supernatural realm, much the same way Christians believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. At some point, Madhi’s followers believe, he will reappear for the Day of Judgment. Zarqawi intended to hasten events.

  Inside the shrine, the four members of AQI overpowered the nine guards, then tied them up and took their weapons and keys. None of the guards was killed. Throughout the night, the intruders set to work wiring explosives inside the dome and along the supporting walls beneath it. Then, sometime before dawn, they slipped out the same way they’d come in and vanished. Soon after, the guards managed to free themselves and broke through a locked door leading out to the safety of the courtyard.