Authors: Joby Warrick
Zarqawi still might have been caught, but for a technical glitch that occurred at the worst possible moment for the Americans. The surveillance drone’s camera chose to reset itself just as Zarqawi was making his escape through the palms. When American soldiers arrived, they were forced to work slowly through the groves, moving carefully to avoid ambush or a booby trap. By then, the fugitives had long since disappeared, leaving the truck wedged against a date palm. Searching the truck, the soldiers made an extraordinary find. Resting on the seat was a laptop computer—Zarqawi’s computer—next to a sack containing a hundred thousand dollars in mixed currencies. The truck’s occupants had been in such a panic that they had not paused to grab even these treasures.
It took two weeks to break the computer’s encryption, and far longer to translate and analyze the entire hard drive fully. By then, most of the immediately usable details—addresses of safe houses, operational plans, cell-phone numbers—were obsolete. Yet the laptop held something of inestimable value: it was the closest that American analysts had come to being able to peer inside Zarqawi’s brain.
One file contained dozens of photographs, including a series of passport images showing Zarqawi trying on different looks and disguises, from clean-shaven businessman with wire-rimmed glasses to Arab sheikh with a mustache and checkered kaffiyah. Another held Zarqawi’s medical files, with more photos and notes about therapy for various war injuries. There were memos and e-mails laying out the terrorist group’s changing structure, in which Zarqawi carved out an “operational commander” role for himself while allowing Iraqis more visibility as the nominal leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Still other folders contained long e-mails to al-Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden himself, as well as PowerPoint presentations and priceless video recordings of meetings of Zarqawi’s leadership council, in which the Jordanian discussed strategy and plans. While a few of the individual documents were already familiar to U.S. counterterrorism experts, others were new.
“
There was a PowerPoint briefing that was as good as any given by
one of our commands,” said a military analyst who was among those who pored through the computer’s contents. “His organization, as a line-and-block chart—all of it was laid out there. Kind of a who’s-who.”
One video captured an entire war-council session, with fly-on-the-wall intimacy that was at once fascinating and chilling. Here were hardened killers sitting on a circle of blankets like schoolchildren, listening with rapt attention as one of their members sang a song and another recited poetry. Zarqawi, when it was his turn, told jokes and stories. Then he talked about his vision for Iraq and the region, and how, from rubble and ash, the jihadists would lay the foundation for something that was utterly new, yet as old as Islam.
Here Zarqawi departed from the usual jihadi rhetoric. Other radical Islamists spoke vaguely of the restoration of the caliphate from Islam’s golden age, when all Muslims lived under a single religious authority that erased the national boundaries imposed by the West. But Zarqawi wasn’t talking about the distant future. He spoke of the caliphate in the present tense, with himself as the leader of a liberation army that was already on the march.
“He was already building it,” said the military analyst who studied the laptop’s contents. “His thinking was strategic and very long-term.”
Bakos, too, was struck by Zarqawi’s performance. Back at CIA headquarters in Langley, she studied the laptop’s trove. The images deepened her conviction about the pathologies that drove the Jordanian and his core followers: the cultish behaviors and messianic thinking that distinguished them as different from Bin Laden and his aides. A formal analysis by CIA psychologists reached similar conclusions: A classic narcissist, Zarqawi truly appeared to see himself as the incarnation of one of the ancient Islamic warriors he so admired. Now his belief in his own greatness was swelling like a tumor. Long-settled doctrinal issues, such as the prohibition against killing innocents, no longer mattered, because Zarqawi’s opinions trumped centuries of Islamic scholarship.
“There are some who study the Koran and understand it,” Bakos later said of the evolving thinking on the Jordanian terrorist. “Zarqawi can recite parts of the Koran—he couldn’t read it for the longest
time, because he was barely literate—and he’s just going to interpret it however he wants, even though he lacks the education and background.”
The study of Zarqawi was now Bakos’s full-time pursuit. Just a year earlier, fed up with the constant requests to chase phantom al-Qaeda connections to Saddam Hussein, she had tried to quit the CIA in an angry pique. She gave her boss notice and didn’t return to work for four days, until a senior manager phoned to try to talk her into coming back. As a sweetener, she was promised a new job as a targeting analyst, focused solely on Zarqawi. “Targeters,” as they are known in CIA-speak, are the agency’s super-sleuths, assembling the trail of evidence that would lead to the capture or killing of a single terrorist regarded by the agency as a threat to the country. Some, like Bakos, lived divided lives, shuttling between the frenetic world of the CIA’s counterterrorism office and dangerous outposts overseas. Often they stayed on the case until their quarry was removed from the CIA’s list, usually by death. Bakos, as a newly minted targeter, would be able to dip into intelligence streams from across the U.S. government’s vast networks to find the clue or security stumble that could put Zarqawi out of business for good.
Between Iraq deployments, Bakos returned to what, for her, passed as a normal life. She moved into Washington’s Cleveland Park, a charming neighborhood of late-nineteenth-century homes and stylish cafés, dropping off her bags in a house that was a few blocks from the National Zoo. The extreme secrecy of her job—her family still had only a vague idea of what she did for a living—limited her socializing mostly to work friends. Though Bakos was no crafter, she joined a “knitting and wine” club made up of other female CIA analysts, just for the companionship.
“We could talk openly, and it was just nice,” she said. “It was more about the wine drinking than the knitting.”
But the next morning, it was back to the hunt.
One July day, five months after the near miss in the desert outside Ramadi, a fresh piece of the Zarqawi puzzle turned up in the daily cables from Baghdad. The surveillance net had snagged a singular piece of correspondence: a letter to Zarqawi from al-Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Bin Laden’s deputy had authored a
six-thousand-word performance appraisal that sought to express the organization’s concern about its newest subsidiary. The CIA’s acquisition of the letter was a closely guarded secret, so Bakos was only allowed to view it from inside a secure chamber that analysts call “the vault.” She read, her fascination growing with every line.
The problem, which Zawahiri outlined in restrained prose, was simply this: Zarqawi’s bloodthirstiness was beginning to damage the al-Qaeda brand among Muslims. It was fine to kill Americans and Iraqi soldiers, Zawahiri wrote, but the car bombings, the attacks on Shiite mosques, and the gory execution videos were sending the wrong messages. To ordinary Muslims, images of dead Shiite children and beheaded Bulgarian truck drivers were not inspiring, they were repulsive. “
The mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve,” Zawahiri warned.
Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you 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 “sheikh of the slaughterers,” etc. They do not express the general view of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq, and of you in particular by the favor and blessing of God. And your response, while true, might be: Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers? And isn’t the destruction of the villages and the cities on the heads of their inhabitants more cruel than slaughtering? All of these questions and more might be asked, and you are justified….However, despite all of this, I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our [Muslim community]. And that however far our capabilities reach, they will never be equal to one thousandth of the capabilities of the kingdom of Satan that is waging war on us. And we can kill the captives by bullet. That would achieve that which is sought after without exposing ourselves to the questions and answering to doubts. We don’t need this.
The admonition was accompanied by praise for Zarqawi’s courage and military accomplishments, and Zawahiri closed the letter by asking for some cash (“If you’re capable of sending a payment of approximately one hundred thousand, we’ll be very grateful to you”). Still, the intent was unmistakable. Here was evidence of a serious disagreement between the main branch of al-Qaeda and its Iraqi franchise.
Zarqawi replied in a fashion, though not to al-Qaeda directly. Two weeks after Zawahiri’s reprimand, he penned an open letter to his old mentor and cellmate, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, rebuking him and all Islamists who would question his methods. Maqdisi might be a respected Islamic scholar, but he didn’t know everything, Zarqawi wrote.
“
He does not and should not have a monopoly on knowledge, and not everything he says is correct, especially when it comes to Jihad and the current state of affairs,” he said.
Zarqawi declared that everything he did—from killing Shiites to sending suicide bombers to their deaths—had been sanctioned by “righteous, truthful, Mujahideen scholars.” But he couldn’t name them, he said, because some were in prison and might be harmed.
A second rebuttal came in the form of an audiotaped message posted on jihadist Web sites in September 2005. Two months after al-Qaeda’s number two leader cautioned him against killing Shiites, Zarqawi announced a new military offensive, specifically targeting the Rafidha, or “those who refuse”—a pejorative term for members of the Shiite faith.
“
The al-Qaeda Organization in the Land of Two Rivers is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha, wherever they are in Iraq,” Zarqawi said in the recorded message. He warned that other Iraqi groups would also be targeted unless they publicly renounced the Iraqi transitional government that had come to power after the January 2005 elections.
“You must choose between the good side and the bad side,” he continued. “Any tribe…whose allegiance to the crusaders and their agents is proven will be targeted by the mujahedeen in the same way the crusaders are.”
Such open defiance of al-Qaeda’s leadership was mystifying, coming
from a man who had worked so hard to obtain Bin Laden’s approval. Bakos and other counterterrorism officers picked apart the letters and transcripts from inside their classified “vault,” wondering whether Zarqawi was making a conscious play for global leadership of the jihadist movement, or just being boneheaded.
“We kept reading the letters over and over, just astonished at his tone,” Bakos recalled afterward. “He was not deferential. He was emboldened, arguing with Zawahiri on what he thought was the right strategy to wage jihad in Iraq.”
Bakos tried to imagine how it looked from Zarqawi’s perspective, at the head of an army of thousands of fighters, all devoted to him and willing, even eager, to sacrifice their lives. Zarqawi had achieved something no mujahideen force had accomplished since the Afghan war: humbling a global superpower by miring it in bloody guerrilla war. He had plenty of money, weapons, and volunteer fighters. Unlike al-Qaeda’s leaders in their self-imposed exile, he was fighting Americans and their Iraqi allies on a daily basis. As measured by plummeting U.S. support for the war in opinion polls, he was succeeding. Why should he take advice from Zawahiri?
His brutal tactics were offending some Muslims, it was true, but were they hurting Zarqawi’s cause? Bakos was no longer sure. The hard-core jihadists—the ones willing to fight and die on Zarqawi’s orders—were streaming into Iraq at a rate of 100 to 150 a month to join “the sheikh of the slaughterers.” Zarqawi had embraced the emerging power of the Internet to craft a reputation as a fierce warrior who killed Allah’s enemies without mercy. The images he posted, though repulsive to most people, made him an icon and a hero to many thousands of young men who saw him as avenging the Muslim nation for centuries of perceived humiliations and defeats. Here was evidence that Zarqawi no longer believed he needed Bin Laden’s stamp of approval. Some analysts had begun to describe his organization as a local chapter or franchise, but it was clear that Zarqawi didn’t see it that way. This was no al-Qaeda offshoot. This was al-Qaeda 2.0.
“People think he’s hurting al-Qaeda’s brand,” Bakos said. “The truth is, he’s helping his own brand, because he’s winning.”
—
That same summer, as Zarqawi and al-Qaeda sparred over the permissibility of hacking the heads off of hostages, President George W. Bush convened the first White House security meeting devoted primarily to the Jordanian terrorist.
It took place on the morning of June 29, 2005, in the cramped confines of the Situation Room. Bush, now six months into his second term, settled into his leather chair at one end of a polished wooden table as the other places filled up with familiar faces: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley. The morning’s presenter was Michael V. Hayden, the four-star air force general and future CIA director, who was then the principal deputy in the office of the director of national intelligence.
Hayden opened with a quick sketch of the life of Iraq’s most infamous terrorist. He talked about Zarqawi’s upbringing in gritty Zarqa, his early delinquency, his adventures in Afghanistan, his religious conversion, and his jail time. He described the Herat camp, the flight to Iraq’s eastern mountains, the assassination of the diplomat Laurence Foley, and links to the Millennium Plot. Then he began to outline Zarqawi’s early terrorist forays in Iraq, including the mix of cunning and “dumb luck,” as Hayden put it, that enabled him to land well-aimed blows against Iraq’s leading moderate Shiite cleric and the head of the United Nations mission in Baghdad.