Authors: Joby Warrick
Leaving the Iraqi in the care of the American MP, she edged toward the door and slipped away.
—
The line of visa applicants outside the Jordanian Embassy was small for a Thursday, even one in scorching early August, when temperatures routinely top one hundred degrees before 10:00 a.m. Only a few dozen Iraqis had arrived by midmorning on August 7, 2003, forming a queue that hugged the shade of a concrete wall that ran along the front of the building. Dusty taxis and ancient sedans rolled to the curb to discharge passengers as the Iraqi guards, their uniforms already stained with sweat, gestured and barked with more than the usual gusto, evidence of a jitteriness that had infected the staff in the past twenty-four hours. A day earlier, someone had tossed a handwritten note over the wall, warning that the compound was about to come under attack.
The embassy’s security detail had taken the note seriously, yet they
were mystified by the strange threat. The kind of carnage that would soon become so familiar—the car bombs and suicide assailants that blew up outside mosques and marketplaces—was still unknown in Baghdad. And why would the embassy be singled out? Jordan, after all, was a brother Arab state that had deep historic and cultural ties with its Iraqi neighbor, and the embassy itself, a handsome two-story villa in one of Baghdad’s most fashionable districts, served mainly to assist Iraqi travelers. Amman, so stable and so affordably close, had long been a preferred destination for middle-class families looking for a shopping holiday or simply an escape. The high demand for visas was the main reason the Jordanians erected the embassy’s high wall, built not for security but to control the daily crowds that had become as much a part of the scenery as the palm trees along Arbataash Street.
And so the sudden appearance of a shabby green passenger van at the embassy’s front gate stirred concern, but not panic. As the sentries watched, the young driver pulled to a spot within a few feet of the concrete barrier, then hopped out of the vehicle and began walking away from the embassy building at a fast clip. In the seconds before the guards could make their way over to investigate, the bomb hidden inside the van’s cargo bay was detonated by remote control.
The blast was so powerful it
sent the van’s front section spiraling skyward to land on a rooftop two buildings down. It tore a thirty-foot hole in the embassy’s barrier wall, killing guards and visa applicants and crumpling the frames of passing cars. The explosion shook a nearby children’s hospital so violently that some doctors thought the hospital itself was under attack, until the waves of wounded began flooding the emergency ward. Seventeen bodies were recovered—all of them Iraqis—including entire families with children who were incinerated inside passing cars. The severed head of a young girl, her long hair scorched and tangled, lay in the street, discovered by passersby who covered it with cardboard and then, amid the horror and confusion, began frantically digging in the hard dirt to try to bury it.
Never, since the start of the U.S. invasion, had anyone deliberately attacked such an overtly civilian target. Across the capital, enraged Iraqis flailed at phantom suspects. Some blamed the Americans, citing rumors about a U.S. helicopter that had been seen firing a
missile at the time of the explosion. Others faulted the Jordanians themselves, arguing that the monarchy had brought trouble to their country by secretly working against Saddam—or maybe, according to an opposing theory, by secretly working
with
Saddam. The crowd that gathered outside the wrecked embassy compound grew increasingly agitated until, at last, dozens of men surged into the building, smashing portraits of King Abdullah II and his father, King Hussein, and chasing embassy workers down the street.
At official levels, the reaction to the bombing was equally confused. Jordan’s information minister speculated that the bombing was the work of an Iraqi political faction with grievances against the Jordanian monarchy. A Pentagon spokesman saw al-Qaeda behind the attack, though the Bush administration’s security expert in Baghdad ruled out any role by the terrorist group. The most prescient observation came from L. Paul Bremer III, the Bush-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who thought the blame might lie with foreign fighters connected with Ansar al-Islam, the Islamist extremist group that had operated in Iraq’s remote northeastern mountains before the invasion. U.S. intelligence operatives were seeing evidence that some of Ansar’s fighters had migrated into Iraqi cities to prepare to carry out attacks like this one.
“
We may see more of this,” Bremer said of the car bombing, in one of several interviews granted to American reporters that week. “We have seen a new technique for Iraq that we have never seen before.”
Regardless of who was behind it, the attack deepened the unease that Iraqis and some Americans were beginning to feel. For U.S. soldiers, routine patrols through Iraqi neighborhoods were becoming ever more hazardous, with near-daily ambushes and sniper fire. Within hours of the embassy bombing, a buried bomb detonated as an American Humvee rolled past, killing two GIs and sparking a firefight that continued into the evening. Another soldier was fatally shot as he stood guard duty.
For ordinary Iraqis, the killings of innocents outside the embassy reinforced a sense of abandonment, a feeling that the American occupiers cared little about Iraqi self-governance and were unwilling or unable to provide basic security. “When Saddam was in power we could protect the embassies. Now there are no procedures to do that,”
Gatia Zahra, a young Iraqi police lieutenant told American journalists as he watched rescue workers pick through the embassy debris for body parts.
In Washington, U.S. officials promised to assist in the investigation while making clear that they regarded the bombing as an internal police matter for Iraqi authorities, and one of many inevitable bumps on the road to building a stable democracy. President George W. Bush felt compelled to interrupt his August vacation to reassure the country that his administration’s Iraqi venture was on track.
“
We’ve made good progress,” he told White House pool reporters at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. “Iraq is more secure.” Asked about comments by one Pentagon official suggesting that American forces might have to stay in Iraq for as long as two years, Bush declined to answer directly. “However long it takes to win the war on terror, this administration is committed to doing that,” he said.
Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, also brought up the bombing while speaking to a group of African American journalists that evening in Dallas. She suggested that the turmoil in Iraq was not unlike the birth pains experienced by Germany as it was refashioned into a democratic state after World War II.
“
Remnants of the regime and other extremists are attacking progress—just as they did today with the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy,” she said. “And coalition soldiers continue to face mortal dangers. But democracy is not easy.”
This day had surely been one of the hardest. More people had died than on any single day since the war’s combat phase had ended, and a new type of terrorism had emerged, one that targeted civilians with powerful explosives hidden in cars. It was all so contrary to the image presented by the White House—that of a reborn Iraq striding confidently toward stability and democracy—that Rice seemed to go out of her way to lower expectations.
“The road is hard,” she said.
In fact, it was far harder than anyone at the White House had dared to imagine. Before August ended, Baghdad would see two more car bombings, each more destructive than the last. By the time the president returned to Washington in September, the nature of the conflict had radically, and permanently, changed.
—
The target of the second blast was perhaps the only foreigner in the Iraqi capital whom everyone genuinely liked. Sergio Vieira de Mello, the dashing Brazilian who headed the United Nations mission in Iraq, was a diplomat’s diplomat, a savvy and experienced peacemaker who could be elegantly charming in five languages. Officially neutral on the war itself, he was the face of the international effort to put Iraq back together after the shooting ended. He was a tireless advocate for Iraqis, overseeing delivery of food and medicine while refereeing squabbles among Iraqi factions and between the Iraqis and the Americans. In the late summer of 2003, as temperatures and tensions soared, the man everyone knew as “Sergio” was the embodiment of dignified calm, as crisp as one of his trademark silk ties that never seemed to wilt or sag even on the hottest days.
Vieira de Mello was a frequent presence at the heavily fortified bases and converted palaces that served as command centers for the generals and civilian appointees who ran U.S.-occupied Iraq. Once, he stopped by the intelligence operations center where Nada Bakos worked, introducing himself to the CIA officers and getting into polite but pointed arguments with senior managers just beyond the earshot of the American analysts. But the diplomat insisted that UN offices be kept free of the symbols of military occupation. He set up his own command post in Baghdad’s Canal Hotel, a low-slung building with arched windows used by UN agencies since the 1990s. A perimeter wall was hastily built after the fall of the Iraqi government, but visitors streamed through the compound gate without frisking or questioning by the mostly Iraqi guards. UN officials insisted that the Americans remove a military observation post that had been set up on the hotel’s roof, as well as the U.S. Army truck that barricaded the narrow street that ran along the rear of the compound. “
The presence of coalition forces does intimidate some of the people we need to speak to and work with,” one of the mission’s senior managers explained to reporters.
At 4:30 p.m. on August 19, 2003—twelve days after the Jordanian Embassy bombing—Vieira de Mello sat at his desk on the hotel’s third floor, oblivious to the large flatbed truck racing its engine at
the entrance to the same narrow alley that had until recently been blocked. Two foreign visitors and a handful of UN aides had arrived in the diplomat’s suite for a meeting on Iraq’s refugee crisis, and they had just finished introductions when an explosion sheered away the building’s front side. The truck’s driver had detonated a monstrous bomb rigged from old aircraft munitions, obliterating the vehicle and cleaving through three floors of UN offices like a knife through a layer cake.
“
The explosion went off and we were thrown into the air,” one of the foreign visitors, Gil Loescher, a Notre Dame University professor, said afterward. “Immediately the ceiling of the third floor collapsed upon us and we were thrown down, catapulted down, two floors to the first floor.”
Loescher regained consciousness to find himself lying upside down with his legs crushed beneath ceiling debris. Vieira de Mello lay buried in rubble a few feet away, but he had managed to reach his cell phone to call for help. As the rescue team burrowed their way toward him, the diplomat slowly bled to death, becoming one of twenty-two people to die in the bombing. It was the deadliest attack ever on a United Nations facility.
The discovery of the young suicide bomber’s body in the wreckage removed any doubt that the attack was the work of terrorists and not, as some U.S. officials initially suggested, an attempt at score settling by loyalists to the former Iraqi regime. Bush, in one of his first public statements on the bombing, acknowledged that “al-Qaeda-type fighters” appeared to be infiltrating the country. “
They want to fight us there because they can’t stand the thought of a free society in the Middle East,” the president told reporters at a campaign fund-raiser three days after the Baghdad attack.
But which fighters?
While FBI teams combed the shattered UN building for bomb fragments to analyze, experts from the NSA and CIA began digging backward through vast troves of intercepted phone calls and texts, looking for any that might be linked to preparations for the bombing or to conversations between operatives after the deed was carried out. Nada Bakos, then in the home stretch of her first deployment to Iraq, was put in charge of sifting through preliminary findings and
preparing reports for senior CIA and White House officials back in Washington.
A few of the calls picked up by the NSA’s eavesdroppers made an immediate impression. They were brief, with limited small talk, clearly intended to relay messages. There were no names or place-names used, just vague references to a deed, along with what sounded like a congratulatory message.
“Brother,” one of the callers said, “
Allah was merciful today.”
At the CIA, the agency’s telecom sleuths traced the calls as far as they could, through digital signatures embedded in electronic phone records. The callers, it turned out, had used cell phones equipped with prepaid SIM cards stolen from a vendor in Switzerland. Who ultimately came to possess them, and how they ended up in Iraq, was anyone’s guess.
It would be another ten days, and another gruesome bombing, before Bakos and the other analysts caught a break. The next strike was far worse than the others, and occurred not in Baghdad but in Najaf, a Shiite provincial capital and home to one of the most important shrines for the country’s majority Shiite Muslim population.
August 29, 2003, was a Friday, the Muslim holy day, and huge crowds had jammed the city’s gold-domed Imam Ali Mosque to hear a sermon by Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, a highly influential Shiite cleric who had returned from exile in Iran in the weeks after the U.S. invasion. A moderate whose family had been persecuted by Saddam Hussein, the grandfatherly Hakim was regarded by U.S. military officials as a potential partner, a man who preached a message of unity and patience and seemed open to working with Iraq’s U.S.-appointed interim council. On this day, the portly cleric climbed the mosque’s minbar in his robe and turban to deliver a blunt critique of the occupation forces, decrying their failure to bring security to the country, and specifically mentioning the bombings at the Jordanian Embassy and UN headquarters. Iraqis should take responsibility for their own security with the support of the full population, the imam said. “
We should join efforts in order to return full sovereignty to the Iraqi people by forming an Iraqi government,” he said.