Authors: Joby Warrick
Bush looked up.
“He killed Sergio?” the president asked, referring to the diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in Zarqawi’s spectacular bombing of the UN building during the war’s first summer. Bush had met the dapper Brazilian and liked him. “I didn’t know that.”
For the operations briefing, Bush turned to Rumsfeld, who in turn introduced a newcomer to the group. Stanley McChrystal, the Joint Special Operations Command chief and the officer in charge of the hunt for Zarqawi, happened to be on a visit to the United States and was tapped to update the president in person.
“Stan’s going to tell you what we are doing to get Zarqawi,” Rumsfeld told Bush.
McChrystal, now a major general, ran through a slide presentation as Bush asked occasional questions, according to the officer’s written account of the meeting. When he finished, Bush studied the general for a long moment.
“
Are you going to get him?” the president asked.
McChrystal summoned up all the conviction he could muster.
“We will, Mr. President,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Later in the meeting, Bush turned to McChrystal again. “Do you want to kill him or capture him?” Bush asked.
“I’d like to capture him, Mr. President.”
“Why don’t we just kill ’im?” Bush asked, to nervous laughter around the room.
“Well, Mr. President, to be honest, I want to talk to him. He knows things we want to know.”
Bush appeared satisfied. He smiled.
“Good point,” he said.
In fact, McChrystal
was
confident, though there was no hard proof that he was any closer to capturing Zarqawi. McChrystal’s Task Force 6-26 had zeroed in on several of the terrorist’s lieutenants, killing some and interrogating others inside Balad Air Base, which served as the unit’s headquarters. With each capture, the Americans’ intelligence network grew stronger. And still it wasn’t enough.
Better intelligence raised McChrystal’s estimation of his adversary’s ability. Educated or not, Zarqawi had repeatedly shown himself to be an able field commander, capable of transforming waves of untrained recruits into soldiers and suicide bombers who struck with purpose and discipline. From captured operatives, a portrait emerged of a leader with quiet, understated charisma and personal fearlessness. “This guy is the real deal,” one of McChrystal’s deputies said during a strategy session.
It was hard to disagree. Zarqawi possessed a “jihadist mystique—a potent mix of violence and real charisma, perfumed by thick propaganda efforts,” McChrystal would later write. And now it was “wafting outside of Iraq’s border.”
Records seized by McChrystal’s men also shed light on a remarkably sophisticated system for recruiting, transporting, training, and deploying suicide bombers from across the Middle East and beyond.
Often the initial contact was one of Zarqawi’s propaganda videos, available to anyone with a computer and Internet connection, and handily supplying an e-mail address for communication. After the opening e-mail exchange, an army of handlers stood ready to guide the potential recruit through screening and indoctrination and then along a chain of safe houses and, finally, a perilous journey by foot across the Syria-Iraq border. Once inside Iraq, the volunteer would be relieved of any cash he had brought along, and then shunted to a kind of holding cell for further indoctrination in near-complete isolation.
“
By design, often the first time a suicide bomber saw Iraqis in the flesh was in the moments just before he killed them,” McChrystal said.
Recruits such as these rarely, if ever, saw Zarqawi, whose intense personal security tightened further as U.S. troops and CIA operatives stepped up their search. As McChrystal’s men discovered in interrogations, Zarqawi kept his whereabouts secret to all but a small handful of top aides. He never used a cell phone, and he remained constantly on the move. He had acquired a third wife—an Iraqi, believed to be in her midteens—and his entourage now included two children from his second marriage. But Zarqawi hid them so well that the American search teams never saw a trace of them.
The hunters were improving, too, however. By mid-2005, McChrystal’s Zarqawi team had expanded to include some of the best counterterrorism operatives and experts from across the U.S. government, from veteran special-forces soldiers to CIA analysts to techno-wizards from the NSA. To ensure that they meshed as a unit, he placed them together around plywood tables in a large “Situational Awareness Room,” or SAR, surrounded by banks of video monitors carrying live feeds from a fleet of drones in constant orbit overhead.
McChrystal set out to neutralize what he perceived as Zarqawi’s greatest single advantage: an ability to control the tempo of the fight. Zarqawi’s nimble command structure allowed him to strike quickly and shift course to adjust to his enemy’s movements. To defeat Zarqawi, the Americans would have to be even quicker.
“
If we could apply relentless body blows against AQI [al-Qaeda
in Iraq]—a network that preferred spasms of violence followed by periods of calm in which it could marshal resources—then we could stunt its growth and maturation,” he said afterward, summarizing what became his strategy for the group the Americans now called by its new name. “Under enough pressure, AQI’s members would be consumed with trying to stay alive and thus have no ability to recruit, raise funds, or strategize.”
To keep the blows coming, the Americans needed to “operate at a rate that would exhaust our enemy but that we could maintain,” he said. For Task Force 6-26, that meant keeping up with McChrystal’s brutal personal regimen of sixteen-hour days with few diversions other than eating and fitness training. The general routinely worked through the night, catching a few hours’ sleep beginning around dawn, followed by a daily run in Balad’s 120-degree midday heat.
The night-owl schedule allowed the analysts to stay in sync with the commandos who conducted nightly raids on suspected insurgent hideouts. Captured fighters were immediately evaluated in an interrogation building next door to McChrystal’s operations center. Other specialists quickly sorted through the night’s “pocket litter”—cell phones, paper notes, maps—for scraps of information that might point the way to the next night’s raids. The NSA’s surveillance experts, arrayed around the same wooden tables as the commandos and CIA officers, added an additional layer of data from the day’s video footage and cell-phone intercepts. The numbers of airborne cameras steadily grew, until much of the country was under twenty-four-hour scrutiny—an “unblinking eye,” as McChrystal termed it—with the added advantage of being able to run the tape backward to retrace the movements of insurgents planting roadside bombs.
By the fall of 2005, the impact of the new strategy was unmistakable. McChrystal’s teams were slowly eviscerating Zarqawi’s command structure, removing scores of midlevel operatives responsible for everything from logistics and communications to recruitment and training. The list of Zarqawi lieutenants killed or captured grew to one hundred names, then two hundred. Of twenty-one known senior deputies, those closer to Zarqawi in the command chain, twenty were crossed off the wanted list, either dead or in prison. From Balad and Baghdad came a steady flow of confidential military
cables reporting disrupted terrorist plots and vast stores of weapons and explosives seized and destroyed. One report dispatched to the Pentagon in late September described the discovery of a letter, signed by Zarqawi himself, authorizing an attack on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where many of Zarqawi’s men were being held. The strike was to be carried out by “AMZ elements”—the military abbreviation for Zarqawi’s forces—in October or November, during the annual Ramadan observance, a time when an act of martyrdom is said to carry special rewards in the afterlife.
That plot having been exposed, Ramadan was relatively quiet by Iraqi standards. But five days later, on November 9, 2005, the TV monitors in McChrystal’s operations center flashed urgent news. Across the border, in the Jordanian capital, three hotels were struck by suicide bombers in coordinated attacks. Scores had been killed.
McChrystal was at work that night, and he watched with his aides as news reports showed the Amman Radisson Hotel’s shattered lobby and the covered bodies lined up in the driveway. There was little question about who was behind the attack. In McChrystal’s mind, there was also little doubt that Zarqawi had made a grave, and possibly fatal, miscalculation.
“That,” McChrystal said to a deputy sitting near him, “was a screw-up.”
15
“This is our 9/11”
On the morning of the attack, Sajida al-Rishawi awoke for dawn prayers with the certain knowledge that the new day would be her last on earth. She idled away the hours in an empty rented apartment, killing time until her partner returned with the package that would allow them to start the final preparations. Finally, Ali arrived, and within minutes he had carefully begun to unwrap the bombs that had led them to make the perilous journey across the Iraqi desert to Amman. At last they lay side by side: his-and-hers suicide vests, tailor-made for the couple and constructed to be powerful, yet slim enough to go unnoticed under their street clothes.
Rishawi had not seen the vests until now; suddenly the time was nearly at hand. She picked up her vest, felt the surprising weight, touched the pouches bulging with steel bearings. It was important, she knew, to familiarize herself with the cables and detonating switch, and to make the little adjustments to ensure a proper fit around her shoulders and belly. Even a suicide vest should fit comfortably.
“
He put one on me, and wore the other,” the thirty-five-year-old Ramadi woman would say. “He taught me how to use it, how to pull the trigger and operate it.”
Captain Abu Haytham
listened quietly, careful to avoid any reaction that might halt the torrent of words. It was the second day of Rishawi’s interrogation, and he was relieved that the woman was
finally talking. All around Amman, memorials were still under way for the victims of the worst terrorist attack in Jordan’s history: three simultaneous bombings at three hotels that had killed sixty people and shaken the country to its foundation. Abu Haytham, the senior deputy in the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism division, was now deep into a guided reconstruction of the crime, led by the suicide bomber who had lived.
The interest in Rishawi extended far beyond her role in the plot. The attack’s principal author had quickly claimed responsibility, and the Mukhabarat had concluded from other evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the deed. The question now was whether this hollow-eyed, emotionally distraught Iraqi woman could help point the way to Zarqawi himself. A suicide bomber could never have been part of Zarqawi’s inner circle, but this woman had been selected for an unusually complex mission, one that required forged travel documents and an international border crossing. Someone had regarded Sajida al-Rishawi as worthy of a role in al-Qaeda in Iraq’s first mass-casualty terrorist strike outside of Iraq. She might know the names of her recruiters, or perhaps the identities of the men who had trained her, or acquired the fake passports, or assembled the bomb. She might know of other operatives who were even now preparing for future attacks inside Jordan.
Others from the intelligence service were simultaneously playing out different strands. With a renewed urgency, the spy agency’s teams arrested and interrogated Jordanians and foreigners suspected of having connections with the terrorists. Newly assembled undercover teams were moving into western Iraq to troll for snippets of information that might offer forewarning of Zarqawi’s next strike. Yet the best hope for stopping Zarqawi lay in finding an insider, someone who could guide the Jordanians through the elaborate layers of the terrorist’s security cocoon.
Inevitably the Iraqi woman would talk. With Rishawi, there would be no cause for anything more coercive than the captain’s own voice.
The outlines of the woman’s unhappy life emerged slowly, between bouts of quiet sobbing. Rishawi came from the volatile heartland of Iraq’s Sunni tribal region, the sister of two men who had joined Zarqawi’s insurgent movement in the early weeks of the American
occupation. One of her brothers had become a midlevel officer with AQI before being killed by U.S. troops in the town of Fallujah. The Americans had also killed a second brother and a brother-in-law. The woman had been distraught over their deaths, and she felt a tug of obligation: according to tribal custom, Sunni Iraqis are obliged to avenge the killings of family members. The fall of 2005 brought a painful anniversary—one year since the first brother’s death—along with the news of the first use of women as suicide bombers in the Iraqi capital. The authorities had been taken by surprise; females were usually waved through security cordons, and their loose-fitting
abaya
s, together with Iraqi taboos against searching women, made it easy to conceal explosives.
So Rishawi volunteered.
“I want to kill Americans,” she told Abu Haytham, describing her pitch to the AQI contact she had met through her brothers.
Zarqawi’s plan would unite the unmarried Rishawi with Ali, a man she knew from her hometown, as husband-and-wife suicide bombers, an ordinary middle-aged married couple who could walk into any public building without drawing a second look.
In early November, the couple met with two other Iraqi volunteers and their AQI contact to finish preparations. Rishawi and her partner were handed fake passports identifying them as a married couple, and told, for the first time, that they were participating in a critical mission across the border in Jordan, one that would target U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials. They also were given a realistic-sounding cover story: they were traveling to Amman for infertility treatments to help them conceive. As a final step, they were brought before one of Zarqawi’s hired clerics for a hasty and legally dubious marriage ceremony. It was done not for the couple’s sake—presumably, they would never live to consummate a marriage—but to avoid violating one of Zarqawi’s strict religious codes. To the Islamists, it is forbidden for a woman to travel unless accompanied by her husband or a close male relative.