Authors: Joby Warrick
Apostates are not innocent, Zarqawi would argue. “It is not just
halal
”—permitted—Zarqawi said flatly. “We are commanded to kill the
kafir
.”
Eventually, Zarqawi would weary of the conversation and shut down. “You didn’t like me when I was a delinquent,” he mumbled to Abu Mutaz one day. “Now I’m religious and you still don’t like me.”
As disturbing as his words were, Zarqawi was only mouthing standard jihadist rhetoric. Senior Mukhabarat officials regarded his partner, Maqdisi, as a truly dangerous thinker and proselytizer, and they would find reasons to keep him behind bars for most of the next fifteen years. Zarqawi clearly wasn’t in Maqdisi’s league, but what, exactly, was he? The agency’s experts were perplexed.
Though Zarqawi talked like a religious radical, the agency’s intensive surveillance showed that his behavior was filled with contradictions and carried echoes of his prereligious past. He would disappear for hours to the home of a Zarqa woman who was not his wife, and then he would head directly to an Islamist gathering or to the
local mosque for evening prayers. Abu Mutaz observed that Zarqawi would habitually lie about the most insignificant things, and he would stick to the false story even after being confronted with contrary evidence. His behavior was so baffling that Mukhabarat officials hired private psychiatrists to review his files and make an assessment. Though inconclusive, their review suggested that Zarqawi could suffer from a kind of multiple-personality disorder, one in which the subject’s deep insecurities and shattering guilt battled with an outsized ego convinced of its own greatness.
“He had a hero complex and a guilt complex,” Abu Mutaz said. “He wanted to be a hero and saw himself as a hero, even when he was a thug. But it was the guilt that made him so extreme.”
Some of his Islamist friends also noticed his increasingly strange demeanor. One recalled that Zarqawi would sometimes sit for hours in a favorite falafel shop in Zarqa in his Afghan garb without speaking to anyone. “He struck me as being like a Sufi, or a mystic,” the friend said. “He would sit there, looking calm, pious. Slightly sad.” At other times, he seemed nearly manic, prattling on about his ambitions to revive his old Islamist cell, either in Jordan or abroad.
“He visited me at home and asked me to open a new chapter with him, work together, and perhaps travel to Afghanistan,” recalled al-Muntasir, the Amman Islamist who had been arrested and imprisoned with Zarqawi in 1994. “I welcomed him as a guest, but I refused to work with him again in any way in view of his narcissism, not to mention other traits.”
But such talk did not constitute a crime. Abu Haytham acknowledged as much to Zarqawi on the last of his three days in Mukhabarat custody after the scene at the airport. The captain was questioning Zarqawi, for what would turn out to be the last time, when his subject began to complain bitterly about his limbolike existence at the agency’s headquarters.
“Take me to court if you have something on me!” Zarqawi pleaded.
“If I had something on you, I would take you to court!” Abu Haytham acknowledged.
It was a rare moment of mutual candor. The captain explained again the necessity of keeping men such as Zarqawi on a tight leash. “It’s nothing personal,” he said.
“You have to understand how we look at you,” he said. “You’re an extremist.”
“You have to understand how I look at you,” Zarqawi retorted. “You are all infidels.”
The next day, Zarqawi and his mother returned to the airport for a Pakistan-bound flight. There would be no interference this time, but the Mukhabarat would still be watching.
4
“The time for training is over”
On November 30, 1999, Jordanian investigators were running a wiretap on a twice-jailed Islamist militant when an ominous phrase turned up in one of the daily transcripts. The suspicious call came from a phone in Afghanistan, and the speaker appeared to be giving a kind of coded instruction.
“The time for training is over,” the Afghan caller had said, speaking in Levantine-accented Arabic.
Though the words were maddeningly vague, Mukhabarat leaders decided to move quickly to head off whatever it was the Islamists were planning. It was soon clear that they had stumbled upon something huge. Within a few days, the Jordanians had arrested sixteen people, including the recipient of the call, Khadar Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian and veteran of the Afghan war with ties to several extremist groups. They seized bomb-making manuals and hundreds of pounds of chemicals hidden in a secret underground passage. They picked up key details from one of the suspects, including the intended date of the attack—New Year’s Eve, 1999—and what the detainee said was the operation’s slogan: “The season is coming; bodies will pile up in sacks.”
A few days later, the agency’s deputy director invited the CIA’s Amman station chief, Robert Richer, to dinner. Sa’ad Kheir seemed
unusually anxious and waited until he had consumed several drinks before blurting out the news.
“
Rob, I have to tell you something, but you can’t tell my boss,” the Mukhabarat’s number two commander said. “We just picked up some people who are planning major attacks against a number of targets in Jordan.”
Kheir described how the Jordanians had stumbled on the plot and what was known so far about the intended targets. Topping the list was the Radisson Hotel, the Amman landmark that on any New Year’s Eve was certain to be packed with Americans and other Westerners as well as hundreds of Jordanians. He said top Mukhabarat officials had decided against sharing details with U.S. counterparts until they were certain they had all the plotters in custody.
Richer cut him off.
“Sa’ad, I have to use this information,” he told the Jordanian deputy. “I’ve got to see your boss and get this released.”
Richer, a former marine on his second tour as the CIA’s spy chief in Jordan, well knew the Mukhabarat’s complex internal politics. But this time American lives were potentially at stake. The next morning he walked into the office of Samih Battikhi, now the Mukhabarat’s director, to say that the CIA had learned independently of a plot to strike Jordan on the eve of the millennium. Battikhi, surprised, had little choice but to tell the Americans everything he knew.
Over the next two weeks, American counterterrorism teams would arrive to assist the Jordanians in reconstructing what became known to history as the Millennium Plot, following a trail of clues spread across at least six countries. Organized by an al-Qaeda associate in eastern Afghanistan, the Jordanian portion of the plan called for a wave of bombings and small-arms attacks targeting not only Amman’s Radisson, but also an Israeli border crossing and a pair of Christian shrines popular with Western tourists. A separate plot to attack the Los Angeles International Airport was foiled when U.S. customs agents arrested the would-be bomber as he attempted to cross the U.S.-Canadian border in a car packed with explosives.
Seized documents and an expanded surveillance web identified still more alleged participants, raising the number of suspects
to twenty-eight. Out of all the names on the list, one in particular evoked surprise: a Jordanian from Zarqa whose given name was listed as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh.
Zarqawi was back.
When he left Jordan just two months earlier, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had made it as far as western Pakistan and then appeared to have gotten stuck. The informant who briefly trailed him sent back word that he was attending daily prayers at an Arabic-speaking mosque in Peshawar and staying clean. Now, just weeks later, he had resurfaced with a bit part as a consultant to one of the biggest terrorist plots against Jordan in years.
Zarqawi appears to have played only a minor advisory role, but wiretaps that linked him to the plot were sufficient to earn him new criminal charges and a guilty verdict in absentia. He would also be featured in a report that landed on Robert Richer’s desk at the CIA’s Amman station.
“It was the first time,” the American intelligence officer recalled later, “that we had heard Zarqawi’s name.”
In dismantling the plot, the Jordanians had saved lives while averting an economic and political disaster. The jihadists had deliberately targeted symbols of Jordan’s vital tourist industry, at a moment when the country and its unexpected young monarch were still finding their footing after King Hussein’s death. Nine months into his reign, Abdullah II was struggling to implement economic and political reforms in the face of heavy resistance from Jordan’s old guard, including the army generals, security chiefs, and tribal leaders who had held positions of privilege under his father. A successful attack could have altered the face of Jordan, crippling its economy and weakening the new king’s grip on the country.
For the Mukhabarat, there was little euphoria over the plot’s disruption. The Islamists had signaled their determination to attack Jordan, and they had come close to succeeding. And even though some of the participants were now in jail, the key planners were in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they were free to try again.
Among this group was Zarqawi, whose intentions were now clear. In September, Zarqawi had sat in the office of the Mukhabarat’s Captain Abu Haytham, begging for a chance to put Jordan behind
him and start a new life. Less than three months later, the spy service was bitterly ruing the decision to allow him to leave.
“
Despite everything that happened,” Abu Haytham would lament, “he had not forgotten about Jordan.”
Indeed, Zarqawi’s interest in his home country would never slacken, even as his focus shifted to bigger targets. “The way to Palestine is through Amman,” Zarqawi often told friends.
The Mukhabarat would soon learn of other plots to attack Jordan. The next one to invoke Zarqawi’s name would be organized and planned by him alone.
—
Zarqawi’s sojourn in Pakistan had not gone as he planned.
He arrived in Peshawar in September with the intention of traveling onward to the northern Caucasus, where a new war pitting Chechen separatists and Islamists against the Russian Federation was just getting under way. If he could link up with Chechnya’s volunteer Islamic International Brigade, Zarqawi would at last have a chance to fight Russians, something he had never managed to do during the Afghan civil war. But it was not to be. Pakistan’s government, which helped bankroll the Afghan rebels in the 1980s, was far less tolerant of itinerant Arab jihadists in 1999, and Zarqawi struggled to obtain connections and travel documents. As he waited, most of the Islamist army in Chechnya was destroyed when Russian planes dropped massive fuel-air bombs into mountain passes on the Chechen-Dagestan border.
Then, six months into his trip, Pakistani officials notified him that his visa had expired and he would have to leave the country. Zarqawi was suddenly confronted with a choice of either returning to Jordan—with the near certainty of arrest and imprisonment for his role in the Millennium Plot—or heading across the mountains into Afghanistan, a destination that offered far less appeal than it did when he last visited. Not only had the country been devastated by six years of civil war, but the conflict’s newest phase also lacked the moral clarity that had attracted Zarqawi and tens of thousands of Arab volunteers in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, instead of a struggle between Islamists and communists, the Afghan contest pitted a confusing
array of Muslim warlords and Taliban generals against one another in ever-shifting alliances.
Still, Zarqawi chose Afghanistan. With a pair of friends, he made his way to Kandahar, eventually arriving at the headquarters of the one former Afghan Arab who might have been expected to welcome him: Osama bin Laden. But instead of getting a warm greeting from his old mujahideen comrade, Zarqawi was rudely snubbed. The al-Qaeda founder refused even to see Zarqawi, instead sending one of his aides to check out the Jordanians. Bin Laden’s caution with visitors of any stripe was likely well founded: the deadly attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa the previous year had landed Bin Laden on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Bin Laden had good reason in particular to be wary of visitors who associated themselves with Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Zarqawi’s former cellmate and mentor. Maqdisi had infuriated the rulers of Bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia with his essays calling for the violent overthrow of apostate Arab regimes. Bin Laden had his own problems with Saudi leaders, and publicly associating with Maqdisi would only make things worse.
Zarqawi was left to languish in a guesthouse for two weeks before Bin Laden finally dispatched a senior deputy, a former Egyptian army officer named Sayf al-Adel, to meet with him. Al-Adel, writing about the events years later, acknowledged that he also was leery of Zarqawi, a man who already had a reputation for being stubborn and combative.
“
In a nutshell, Abu Musab was a hardliner when it came to his disagreements with other fraternal brothers,” al-Adel would write. “Therefore, I had reservations.”
After exchanging traditional greetings and hugs, al-Adel took a moment to size up the Jordanian. It was not an encouraging first impression.
“Abu Musab was a sturdy man who was not really very good at words,” al-Adel recalled. “He expressed himself spontaneously and briefly. He would not compromise any of his beliefs.”
Zarqawi’s one big idea, it seemed, was “the re-establishment of Islam in society,” and he had rigid views on what such a society should look like. But he had no handle on how to begin working
toward that goal, al-Adel said. Moreover, in quizzing Zarqawi about events in his old neighborhood, the al-Qaeda deputy found the Jordanian curiously uninformed.
“He had adequate information about Jordan, but his information about Palestine was poor,” al-Adel said. “We listened to him, but we did not argue, since we wanted to win him to our side.”
Despite Zarqawi’s many shortcomings, al-Adel gradually came to feel sympathy for his visitor, who, in his lumbering, inarticulate way, reminded al-Adel of a younger version of himself. Anyone as stubbornly opinionated as Zarqawi could never be part of al-Qaeda, and al-Adel never suggested that he should join. But the al-Qaeda deputy had an idea about a different way Zarqawi could be helpful to the organization. He raised it with Bin Laden the next morning.