The Targeter

by Nada Bakos

In late May of 2006, liaison units made a crucial capture of their own along a border with Iraq: an Iraqi government customs officer who’d worked the main highway from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. In that role, a twiggy young man named Ziad Khalaf al-Karbouly had helped AQI smuggle money and materiel between the two countries, and he had provided safe passage for the suicide bombers who’d detonated themselves outside three Amman hotels six months earlier.

  In a confession Jordanian authorities aired on prime-time TV, Karbouly said that Zarqawi personally knew of the customs worker’s plans to abduct a pair of Moroccan diplomats and that Zarqawi had instructed him to murder a Jordanian truck driver in September of 2005. “I told [the truck driver], ‘I have to kill you’ and he started pleading and said, ‘Don’t kill me,’” Karbouly said in his broadcast confession. “Then I told him ‘I have to kill you,’ and so I pulled my personal gun and shot him twice in the head.”

  That incident, followed by the hotel attacks, resulted in Karbouly confirming the identity of, and contacts for, a shadowy AQI spiritual figure named Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi.

  Rahman’s existence wasn’t news to our team back at the Agency—the first time we’d uncovered a photo of him, a number of months before, his wide face and close-cropped black hair and beard left me thinking he could have passed for seventeen years old. We suspected he might have been the ghostwriter for many of Zarqawi’s religious screeds and letters to al Qaida central. Rahman was higher up in Zarqawi’s network than we’d understood, having shortly before been granted the lofty status of Zarqawi’s newest spiritual adviser. Rahman was the central religious scholar helping craft Zarqawi’s tenuous public theological case for murdering Shias; he was also acting as AQI’s liaison to radical clerics all across Iraq.

  Around the same time, back at the air base after a few more weeks in detention—reportedly spent reading Harry Potter books—Mubassir broke. Mubassir added that Rahman never drove himself and that there was always trickery involved in the important trips. Only when Rahman got into a small blue vehicle would he be taken to see Zarqawi.

  Instantly Rahman became the key. Coalition forces set out to locate the adviser, focusing on the Sunni Triangle. There, a growing network of locals in and around Fallujah and Ramadi were chafing at the extremists’ heavy-handed pseudo-governance and might be swayed to help. Soon guidance from human assets on the ground helped pinpoint a series of houses to monitor.

  The chase was on. The Agency team I helped build felt certain: Rahman would lead American forces to Zarqawi.

  Much of what I know about Karbouly’s arrest and the final endgame that followed comes from secondhand information.

  By the spring of 2006, our Agency team was receiving few daily reports from the task force about the missions they were running in the hunt for Zarqawi. We heard even less about what they’d collected on those missions. The task force’s intelligence wing had grown to a point where they were not pursuing our assistance any longer but were operating without it. The professional relationship remained cordial but forced. Without any true sense of what was happening on the ground, all of us on my team struggled to figure out exactly how we were supposed to contribute in a meaningful way to the hunt we’d once identified, defined, and spearheaded.

  As conditions in Iraq tumbled further out of control, the targeting of a single individual, and with it the hoped-for dismantling of a single extremist organization, became far less urgent. Some military planners and administration officials continued to suggest that if Zarqawi were taken out, the head would be lopped off the Sunni insurgency and the civil war would dissipate. Many of us didn’t believe it would be so simple to contain: there were political pressures adding to the sectarian strife that went beyond Zarqawi’s impact on the insurgency. The administration’s self-serving implication was that Iraq wasn’t spiraling out of control—it could be and would be stabilized once we eliminated key bad guys they had been talking about for years. I knew, of course, that was profoundly simplistic.

  But this didn’t mean that we should abandon the search for Zarqawi. By the spring of 2006, the insurgency inside Iraq had sprawled to encompass dozens of loosely affiliated groups. Zarqawi’s own network had entrenched itself by recruiting local former Baathists and militant young Iraqis, which suggested that AQI had staying power even if the flow of foreign fighters to the country diminished. In addition, as much as eliminating the most prominent terrorist in Iraq was a crucial step in the quest for peace, the al Qaida backing that enhanced Zarqawi’s profile also made him that much easier to replace. In the event of his death, if Zarqawi’s internal ranks couldn’t produce a strong enough successor, al Qaida central would simply insert one.

  Zarqawi’s death did not signal an immediate downturn in violence. Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian who had been Zarqawi’s deputy, was quickly promoted to replace his late boss, and the civilian death toll kept climbing.

  Ground conditions, unfortunately, were things that multiple divisions at the Agency rarely seemed to agree upon—and our team suffered bureaucratically for it. Once the chaos in Iraq had fully achieved systemic status, it was hard to find an overarching, articulable end goal for Iraq that could be brought about by the US government—other than removing the foreign terrorists. An endless game of whack-a-mole was unnerving for all of us. And one by one throughout early 2006, as part of cyclical transitions on the operations side that naturally occur when agents return from overseas postings, my team members stopped spinning their wheels in our branch and left for other assignments.

  Then Tom, too, who’d shared my growing frustration with the bureaucratic shift, followed suit. He took another department-level position.

  I understood why everyone was moving on; that same thought process had been sneaking into my own mind over the previous couple of months. I was exhausted by the work, mentally and physically, and growing more agitated by the day. I’d dedicated years of my life to trying to stop the rising tide of violence in Iraq, and what did I actually have to show for it?

  Even as the Pentagon had amused itself by releasing Zarqawi’s video outtakes, another nine Iraqis were killed and forty-four wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up that same day outside a courthouse in Baghdad. Across the country, a ghastly civil war led to the tortured remains of civilians being dumped in the streets. SOF was moving at a frenetic pace, assaulting house after house—and it was only as the seeming futility of it all really began to set in that I realized these raids would not have an impact on the overall effort against terrorism in Iraq; rather, I thought they would deter a long-term strategy. On the first raid I’d been on—years earlier, during my time as an analyst in Baghdad—my nerves were steeled as I awaited word of the task force’s results that night. How many bad guys did we catch? But in the spring of 2006, it occurred to me that I had no way of knowing how many people had been killed based on targeting packages I’d put together. Even the successful strikes gnawed at me: that raid got our guy, I’d think about a mission, but in the process, we killed four other people. Who were they?

  My sleepless nights began to be haunted less by things I’d seen overseas than by a hollow realization that one person really might not be able to solve a problem like this. Maybe I couldn’t change the world—and maybe it was time to do something else.

  “What if I tried for a job overseas?” I asked Roger over yet another reheated late-night dinner. “How do you feel about the Levant? We might end up fat because we love the food, but maybe that’s not a downside?”

  I tried to sound upbeat. He just looked at me for a while.

  “Can the Agency help me find a job over there?” he said.

  I said. “Well, no. Probably not.”

  We sat silent again.

  “I just turned forty-five,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like a good time to pull myself out of the workforce.”

  He wasn’t being dismissive or resistant—he was just acknowledging reality.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “You’re ri
ght.”

  I thought quietly about something else: I’d recently turned thirty-seven. I remembered conversations I’d had with Gina Bennett, one of my original mentors in the Iraq unit, about family and the realities of motherhood for Agency employees. “One of the best Mother’s Days I ever had was when my kids had our traditional chocolate-chip pancakes for Mother’s Day breakfast,” she once said in an interview, “and I attended via a laptop in the dining room. I could almost smell those pancakes.” There was something lovely and sad in that all at once.

  In 2008, Bennett’s picture was shown in a photomontage that formed the backdrop for Alicia Keys’s performance of “Superwoman” on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Bennett is shown with her husband and children, all sitting atop that CIA seal in the lobby of the New Headquarters Building. The photo caption simply read, “Gina: CIA Counterterrorism Analyst. Mother of five.” It was fitting recognition. I never forgot her telling me that if I had children, there would be days when it felt like I could only give 50 percent to work or 50 percent to my kids. “It doesn’t mean you’re failing,” she told me. “But it does mean you’re always juggling.”

  I’d searched for women at the Agency who proved that the feminist aspiration of “having it all” was an actual option. But at least at the CIA, they didn’t seem to exist. In 2013, the CIA declassified a trove of documents that included a 1953 report entitled “Career Employment of Women in the Central Intelligence Agency.” It was produced by a team unofficially known as the petticoat panel. Male senior staffers blamed women’s lack of professional advancement on the women themselves, because of “this business about people getting married and pregnant at your operational inconvenience.” At the time, chief of operations Richard Helms, who later became director of the CIA, said that supervisors had to make a simple calculation when it came to promoting women. “You just get them to a point where they are about to blossom out to a [high pay grade], and they get married, go somewhere else, or something over which nobody has any control, and they are out of the running.”

  What would having children mean for my own career? I wondered. Sitting there at the kitchen table with Roger that night, I sensed that staying close to home to raise a family limited my potential career progression at almost any government institution or business—but that transferring overseas was nearly impossible if it meant persuading my husband to interrupt his career in the technology field for a few years of hanging out in the desert.

  Eventually, in April of 2006, we made a choice together: I took a deep breath and transitioned away from the Zarqawi team and accepted a position listed on the Agency’s internal jobs database with the National Resources Division (NR) out west. That division fills an interesting niche in the Agency’s portfolio: it’s staffed by operators, based domestically. Further, NR officers entice foreign nationals on American soil to spy for us when they return to their homelands. The work is often pooh-poohed by CIA operatives living with the inherent threats and anxieties that come with overseas postings—but if that work wasn’t feasible for me at that point, at least this undercover work got me out of headquarters and kept me doing something similar to the counterterrorism work I’d loved at Langley.

  “It’s the right move,” Roger assured me. “You’ve done everything you could do in DC for the moment.” Roger found a job and followed me west.

  With that, my role leading the Zarqawi team was filled by a targeter who transferred in from another branch, and I focused on new targets. As a CIA detailee, I worked with a JTTF, or joint terrorism task force, a multiagency partnership made up of investigators, analysts, linguists, and other experts from across the intelligence and law enforcement spectrum. Those task forces are overseen by the FBI, which generally has jurisdiction over counterterrorism operations inside the United States. I reported to the regional FBI office every day as a targeting officer, analyzing whatever foreign angles or connections could be valuable to a given investigation. The work moved slowly, as counterterrorism operations tend to do, which was clearly a frustration for many of the FBI agents I interacted with on a daily basis. They would have preferred more traditional criminal work. Never did our work involve the headline-grabbing takedown of a pedophile or mobster or the satisfaction of stopping a serial killer.

  I was glad to have begun a new chapter in my life, but before long, I began realizing how much I missed the thrill of a high-profile hunt. I often found my mind wandering, wondering what was happening back on my old team at Langley. To this day, part of me wonders if I left too soon.

  June 7, 2006, dawned bright as always in Baghdad. I, meanwhile, was someplace off in the Alaskan wilderness, having joined my new JTTF team there only weeks earlier. Back in Langley, none of my old teammates could have known how much the day held in store.

  Many of the details I’ve collected about that late-spring day come from video footage I’ve since seen, insider accounts I’ve read, and firsthand stories shared with me from former associates involved in the events. Some of it, however, I had been keeping a casual eye on from afar. At the time, it was still hard not to.

  On June 2, for example, Zarqawi had again made headlines after his latest violent video rant. “Oh Sunni people, wake up, pay attention and prepare to confront the poisons of the Shiite snakes who are afflicting you with all agonies since the invasion of Iraq until our day,” he said. “Forget about those advocating the end of sectarianism and calling for national unity.” It was piercing rhetoric, but by then it was so familiar that I paid it almost no mind. I was mostly pushing myself to focus on the new job. Little did I realize that it would be the last time any of us would ever hear from him.

  Midmorning Baghdad time on June 7, Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser, Rahman, was spotted climbing into a silver sedan outside his home by an unmanned surveillance aircraft. He headed off into Baghdad, as he usually did at that hour. On this particular day, however, the sedan wound its way through various neighborhoods, then turned back to its starting point and drove home. To those monitoring the action, that maneuver seemed immediately odd. Then, as McChrystal recounted in his book My Share of the Task, after pausing at Rahman’s home for a bit, the sedan bolted east across Baghdad and merged onto a six-lane highway running north from the sparse eastern fringe of the city into the heart of Diyala Province. At Balad, that was enough to get people scrambling.

  On the outskirts of Baghdad, Rahman’s car slowed to a stop along what there was of the highway’s shoulder, and the cleric exited the vehicle. The sedan sped away.

  Rahman could be seen from above walking back along the shoulder, against the flow of traffic. Seconds later, a stubby blue Kia Bongo pulled up beside him. I’d seen those 2.7-liter trucks all over Baghdad during my time there; they are to minivans what Chevy’s El Camino was to American sedans—ugly but efficient. They were also ubiquitous enough in Iraq to blend in on a crowded motorway. Rahman climbed into the passenger side, and the truck merged into traffic.

  Outside Baghdad, the Bongo drove a few hours northeast, finally reaching Baquba, a city of four hundred thousand and the capital of Diyala Province. In that city’s commercial district, the truck pulled up outside a building that appeared to be a restaurant. Rahman exited the vehicle and entered the building, walking past a man who appeared to be standing guard.

  Soon a new vehicle pulled into the parking area next to the Bongo truck—this one a white pickup with a red stripe on the side. It looked exactly like the one from Zarqawi’s video outtakes. Rahman emerged from the building and got in the white pickup; it left the parking lot and drove out of town. By then no fewer than nine surveillance aircraft were orbiting the area, including one tracking the silver sedan back near Baghdad, one on the Bongo truck in the Baquba parking lot, one on the transfer-point restaurant itself, and one on the white pickup with a red stripe carrying Rahman, now merging onto Route 5 and heading west.

  SOF’s destination soon came into view a few miles outside Baquba, as the pickup merged onto Route 3 heading north and entered the small
town of Hibhib.

  The pickup drove to the end of the main street in Hibhib, then turned right onto a dirt road that led north along the edge of an irrigation canal through a thicket of palm trees. Approximately a mile later, the pickup turned right again into the driveway of a two-story beige house and came to a stop outside the gate. A man appeared from under the house’s carport and walked down the driveway to meet them. A few words were exchanged; then the gate was opened and the pickup pulled forward, stopping under the carport. Rahman exited the vehicle and walked into the home. The pickup reversed out of the driveway and drove away. It was just shy of 5:00 p.m., and the palm trees ringing the home cast long shadows across the house.

  It remained unclear who besides Rahman was actually inside the building. Was it Zarqawi? If so, was he alone? “I’m not going to promise you that’s Zarqawi,” one SOF team member said, according to McChrystal. “But whoever we kill is going to be much higher than anybody we’ve killed before. So I’m saying absolutely—whack it.” Yet if Zarqawi wasn’t inside, killing Rahman would eliminate the best lead on Zarqawi.

  Just then, however, the surveillance drones caught sight of a man emerging from the shadows outside the home, walking to the end of the driveway. He was clearly heavyset and dressed entirely in black. At the gate, he glanced both ways along the dirt road and, seemingly satisfied that no one was coming, returned to the house.

  It was decided that SOF would send a team to the house to control the area and scour it for information once the dust had settled. But if they wanted Zarqawi once and for all, bombs were the way to go.

  By mid-2006, the United States flew more than twenty types of aircraft to support coalition objectives on any given day, from massive troop carriers to unmanned surveillance platforms. In the early evening of June 7, two American F-16s were overhead on routine six-hour operations to hunt for improvised explosive devices along the major highways crisscrossing Iraq. But they were armed in case of contingencies—and just after 6:00 p.m., they had one. On urgent request from SOF, the fighter jets were instructed by ground control to immediately engage the safe house in Hibhib.