Authors: Joby Warrick
Still, there were lines in the speech that baffled Bakos and her CIA colleagues. Powell acknowledged at the beginning that Zarqawi and his Ansar al-Islam allies operated in an area outside Saddam Hussein’s control. But he then asserted that “Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization,” suggesting that Iraq effectively controlled the group. Nothing in the CIA’s vetted reports confirmed that such a relationship existed.
Powell paused at one point to mention the assassination of Laurence Foley, the diplomat killed in Amman three months before, a “despicable act” that he credited to Zarqawi. After the slaying, he said, the State Department had contacted Iraqi intelligence through a third country—it was Jordan, officials later confirmed—demanding that the terrorist leader be turned over for trial.
“Iraqi officials protest that they are not aware of the whereabouts of Zarqawi or of any of his associates,” Powell said. “Again, these protests are not credible. We know of Zarqawi’s activities in Baghdad.”
The assertions were coming faster than Bakos could mentally counter them. It was becoming painful. This was not how intelligence analysis was supposed to work. When Cheney had made similar
claims on Sunday talk shows, Bakos often found herself yelling at the television screen, as though she were contesting a referee’s blown call in a football game. Now Powell, like Cheney, was “asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but,” she later said.
Ultimately, the speech would tarnish Powell’s reputation and further undermine the credibility of the Bush administration with key allies, particularly after claims that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false.
The other painful side effect would not be fully appreciated until much later. With one speech, the White House had transformed Zarqawi from an unknown jihadist to an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement. The image of the mysterious Zarqawi glowering at world leaders from the UN Security Council’s screen sent hordes of reporters scurrying to their computers to figure out who he was. Newspaper reporters and TV crews flocked to Jordan to write profiles and interview people who claimed to know him. Zarqa, the gritty industrial town of the terrorist’s youth, now had a new favorite son.
Watching the transformation with special bitterness were the Jordanians who had tried for so long to keep Zarqawi on a leash. Samih Battikhi, then chief of the Mukhabarat, erupted in a rage when he saw Zarqawi’s photo behind Powell at the UN Security Council.
“
This is bullshit!” Battikhi shouted.
Abu Mutaz, the young counterterrorism officer who had once sought to influence Zarqawi’s behavior, was sitting with a colleague in a Dead Sea hotel bar when Powell appeared on the TV screen talking about his former case.
“
We were sick about it,” Abu Mutaz said, recalling his reaction that day. “I kept asking, ‘How could they do this? How can they think this way?’ Eventually, I decided it must be politics. Just politics.”
Even some of Zarqawi’s old friends and allies in Amman were amazed by the turn of events. On Web sites that promote jihadist causes, Islamists swapped stories and gossip about Zarqawi’s exploits, and bloggers wrote paeans to his courage and manhood, recalled Hasan Abu Hanieh, who knew Zarqawi in the 1990s.
“
With that speech, Colin Powell gave him popularity and notoriety,”
said Abu Hanieh, the Islamist-turned-author from Amman. “Before anyone knew who he was, here was the secretary of state of the world’s most powerful government saying Zarqawi was important. Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world, from Iraq and Syria to the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula. People were joining al-Qaeda because of him.”
It was one of the great ironies of the age, Abu Hanieh said. In deciding to use the unsung Zarqawi as an excuse for launching a new front in the war against terrorism, the White House had managed to launch the career of one of the century’s great terrorists.
“And Zarqawi responded,” Hanieh added, “by turning all their warnings about terrorism into reality.”
—
Sam Faddis was in another part of Iraq in March 2003, when, more than a week after the start of the U.S. invasion, the Bush administration finally authorized an attack on Ansar al-Islam’s camp. Dozens of Tomahawk missiles slammed into the compound at Sargat, leveling the buildings and destroying the equipment the Islamists used to mix their poisons. U.S. commandos, backed by hundreds of Kurdish militiamen, chased the remaining Islamists into hills, where some managed to scurry to safety across the Iranian border. From the dead and captured, the soldiers recovered passports and identity cards from more than a dozen countries, from Algeria to Yemen. But there was no sign of Zarqawi. Other CIA operatives later confirmed that the Jordanian had by then already moved to Baghdad to await the arrival of the U.S. troops.
Among the first Americans to enter the shattered Ansar camp was a CIA operative who had been among the eight members of Faddis’s surveillance team. In his description to Faddis, the man described a ruined base and his sinking feeling that an opportunity had slipped away.
“Everybody who mattered left before we got there,” the CIA officer told Faddis. “All that was left were the foot soldiers. The cannon fodder.
“It was better than nothing,” he said. “But we missed our shot.”
BOOK II
IRAQ
8
“No longer a victory”
The Iraqi officer was crying, again. He sat at the far side of the table, head cradled in shackled hands, sobbing with such abandon that he could be heard outside the small trailer that served as an interrogation cell. He cried until it was impossible to make out his words, if indeed there had been any.
Nada Bakos paused to see if the man could compose himself. The room was stifling and smelled of stale clothes and sweat, and a solitary air conditioner struggled vainly against the 110-degree Iraqi heat. Bakos was exhausted, mentally and physically, yet she resolved to keep her own emotions in check.
She tried the question again, calmly.
“Were you aware that Zarqawi was in the country?”
More sobs. Hasan al-Izbah, until recently a senior manager in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, was a broken man, and it was unclear whether fear or humiliation had brought him to his current state. He would not look at the Iraqi translator, who politely repeated Bakos’s questions, or the American MP who watched from the doorway. He could not bring himself to look anywhere near Bakos, as though being in the presence of an American CIA interrogator—and a female officer, at that—was a fate too embarrassing to contemplate.
Bakos tried a different angle.
“What kind of contact was there between Zarqawi and the Mukhabarat?”
Silence. This wasn’t working.
Everything within Bakos’s line of vision was steeped in dreariness: drab trailer walls, the salvaged furniture, the mottled greens and browns of the soldiers’ desert-camo uniforms, the graying stubble of the prisoner’s quivering chin. It was weeks after the fall of Baghdad and less than a month after her first face-to-face encounter with U.S-occupied Iraq. Now she spent her days in a bombed-cratered air base north of Baghdad, using whatever combination of charm, guile, and menace she could muster to glean secrets from men who until recently had been running spy operations for Iraq’s intelligence service.
It was frustrating work, and not only because of the unrelenting grimness of the task, or because Bakos—who had never served in the military or in law enforcement—felt underqualified. What grated her most were the scripted questions from Washington and Langley, pushing her ever harder to find something that Bakos knew did not exist.
The mood in Baghdad was changing. Bakos and her fellow CIA officers could sense the shift during their still-unconstrained travels into the city’s neighborhoods to meet contacts or visit a favorite ice-cream place. The smiles and shy waves of the early weeks of the occupation had long since been replaced by sullen stares and drawn shades. Iraq was rapidly tiring of occupation, while the Bush administration’s attention seemed permanently fixed on settling the score with its political rivals in Washington. The moral underpinnings of the White House’s war effort were collapsing like rotten timbers, and aides to the president were working furiously to control the damage. The weapons of mass destruction that had loomed so threateningly in Bush’s speeches had not been found after four months of searching. Likewise, Americans had seen nothing of Saddam Hussein’s supposed links to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Congress was beginning to push for answers, and so, in the summer of 2003, the White House ratcheted up the pressure on the CIA’s analysts to find some.
Washington was particularly interested in any gleanings from
conversations with former senior security officials who would know about the Iraqi intelligence service’s secret dealings with foreigners and might be persuaded to talk in exchange for money or special favors. “What are you learning about terrorist links?” Langley wanted to know.
“It doesn’t stop,” Bakos thought to herself, astonished and perplexed. Indeed, the questions continued throughout the rest of 2003 and the following year, and the next.
Occasionally, there would be a breakthrough of a sort: a statement from a detainee, or a recovered document that seemed to offer something definitive. Bakos witnessed one such moment, when a homesick Iraqi official was persuaded for a brief moment to reveal what he knew.
The question was, was anyone at the White House listening?
—
Bakos had volunteered for Iraq, despite her own misgivings about the war.
“
We had invaded, and now it was all hands on deck,” she remembered afterward.
She landed in May 2003 in a country that struck her as wild and chaotic and more than a little sinister for a young intelligence officer on her first war posting. The country itself was in better shape than she had imagined. Even after two wars and a decade of economic sanctions, Baghdad was largely intact, and certainly better off than some of the other Middle Eastern capitals she had visited. She drove to appointments on broad, palm-tree-lined avenues and well-engineered freeways with green directional signs that reminded her of the ones back home.
Life at work during the early months was a succession of long days in the interrogation trailer with breaks for meals and sleep. U.S. forces now held dozens of Saddam Hussein’s generals and intelligence chiefs, some of whom would surely know the locations of any secret WMD stashes, or possess insight into terrorist plots that had been engineered with Iraqi support.
American officials hoped that some of them could be persuaded to cooperate if offered the right inducement, such as emigration papers
or cash. Among these men, none appeared more promising on paper than the weeping Hasan al-Izbah. The Iraqi was not only a high-ranking intelligence official; he also happened to be Iraq’s official liaison to Palestinian militants regarded by the West as terrorists. Saddam Hussein had openly backed violent groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, in part to shore up his anti-Israel credentials with fellow Arabs. Someone within Saddam’s spy agency could illuminate the murky world of Iraqi terrorist links, and perhaps it could be Izbah—if Bakos could persuade him to talk.
Bakos had sat across the table from numerous Iraqi officials during her first weeks in the country, but she had never met with one quite like this. He was surprisingly young, perhaps in his late thirties, and he bore little resemblance to the thuggish operatives who seemed to make up the bulk of Saddam’s intelligence arm. Clean-shaven except for his prison stubble, and lacking even the standard-issue mustache worn by nearly all Iraqi government officials, he had the polished look of a Western business executive. But whatever confidence he might have had before the invasion had collapsed into soggy mush. When he wasn’t crying during interrogations, he mostly shut down.
Bakos could see the man was frightened, and she leaned on her translator to try to discover why. Izbah’s story was complicated, but more than anything he was afraid for his family, especially a young son. Saddam’s Baath Party and its intelligence service had killed and tortured thousands of Iraqis over the decades. Now they were out of power, and survivors and relatives would be seeking revenge. What would happen to his children, especially with Izbah in prison?
Bakos thought briefly and offered a small gesture.
“If you help me,” she said, “I can let you contact your family.”
Izbah softened, thinking about the offer. Then he nodded his assent. The old regime was finished, and he had nothing to lose and potentially much to gain if he talked. Here, finally, was a chance to shine a torchlight into one of the deepest dungeons of Saddam’s security network, guided by a man who knew every crevice.
Bakos guided Izbah through a web of Iraqi terrorist connections, letting him describe in detail the Palestinian and Iranian operatives that Saddam had supported over the years, at least until he grew
weary of them and ordered them killed. But when the subject turned to al-Qaeda, Izbah shrugged. There was nothing to talk about, he said. Perhaps there had been a low-level meeting years earlier, a discreet encounter intended to size up the other side. But nothing had come of it. Iraq’s secular regime persecuted and killed Islamic extremists, and al-Qaeda’s leaders abhorred the Iraqi dictator. The distrust was too great to allow even the most rudimentary cooperation.
“What about Zarqawi?” Bakos finally asked.
“We had heard of him,” Izbah said. “But there was no relationship.”
Nothing at all? Bakos pressed further to see if Izbah would hedge his answer.
“If you had met him,” she asked, “is he the kind of person you would have tried to recruit?”
The answer was simple and emphatic: “No.”
Izbah had kept his promise, and now Bakos fulfilled hers. A phone was brought in, and the former spy chief was allowed to call his wife for the first time since his capture, weeks earlier. Bakos stayed in the room for a moment to make sure the call went through. When a voice came on the other end of the line, Izbah again broke down in a geyser of tears.