My Share of the Task (36 page)

The substance of these discussions and briefing slides was the product of an intense exploitation effort conducted in a honeycomb of adjacent rooms. Inside rooms for captured phones, documents, and computers, like surgeons over a patient, analysts huddled around the electronics and documents laid out on big stainless-steel tables. By design, they worked in the same building as the interrogators who questioned the men whose handwriting or names were on the documents and who were the onetime owners of the phones and computers.

As we evolved, the amount of talent and manpower we were able to put against detainees became a key strength. At this time, we had interrogators working both night and day shifts, so that important detainees were questioned during each cycle. Even at full capacity, our screening facility's staff of analysts and interrogators was six times as large as the number of captives they oversaw. In stark contrast, at its fullest, Camp Bucca—the Coalition's central-theater detention facility—held more than
eighteen thousand detainees. As was common practice in historical counterinsurgencies, the United States used incarceration to reduce near-term violence. Although detention took fighters off the battlefield, these holding facilities unfortunately became incubation chambers in which the insurgency grew in intensity and commitment—where more hardened insurgents radicalized young Iraqis.

We focused our interrogation efforts on detainees whose information might lead to follow-on targets. This compelled us to be precise in whom we captured in the first place and discriminating when choosing to hold a detainee. The average detainee stayed in the screening facility for a matter of days. We quickly moved detainees deemed not to have information or unlikely to cooperate to Camp Bucca or Abu Ghraib. Once there, they joined and were subject to the influences and coercion of a large population of other detainees.

Using material retrieved from the site and triangulating their answers, the Yusufiyah detainees' identities grew clearer. They were mostly subcommanders. We decided to focus the interogators' efforts on four of the twelve:
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Abu Omar, a senior lieutenant cutout who helped run the religious wing; Abu Sayyif, a leader of the Combined Extremist Media Forum who ran all the media operations in Baghdad; a man at first believed to be working for him on the day of their capture, Abu Mubassir; and finally, most promising, Abu Felek, who had been in the car that went from NAI 152 to Mayers. Called “Taha” by the other detainees, Felek was Ansar al-Sunnah's emir of the north, where he was in charge of all Iraqis. We soon discovered that Felek, older than the others picked up that day, who were in their thirties, was one of Zarqawi's emissaries to bin Laden.

For a variety of reasons, most detainees chose to cooperate. Some had egos and could not resist taking credit for what they had done—eager to show their importance. Others found themselves uncomfortable with AQI's tactics—especially the targeting of Shia civilians. Some arrived to the interrogation booths with regret and shame. Still others burned with raw anger that Iraqi lives were expendable to Al Qaeda in Iraq's leadership. Confronting them in moral language was often powerfully persuasive. They were quick to offer up information on impending attacks if we could convince them it was the right thing to do. Early on we learned that our worst mistake with a detainee was to confirm the negative stereotypes of Americans that animated the enemy's mosques and safe houses.

The Yusufiyah detainees were a special challenge because only two had been on the task force's radar before the raid. We put three of our best interrogators against them. During the day, Amy partnered with Jack. A young, petite woman, Amy was pulled out of one of the outstations and given the priority of the detainees. She devoted four years of her life, starting at age twenty-six, to working for the task force. Her partner, Jack, was another longtime interrogator with the command. Paul conducted the interrogations in the evenings. Paul had served in the navy in the late 1980s, but after watching the Twin Towers collapse from New Jersey, where he was working an IT job, he returned to service.
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Amy, Jack, and Paul slowly began to triangulate the detainees' answers and play them against one another. The interrogators were immediately suspicious of Abu Sayyif. A pediatrician from Baghdad, he was also known as Dr. Mahjub. Soft-spoken and well educated, he was quite smug and appeared to hold himself above the others. When questioned, he was resistant and angry—at times, it seemed, with himself. At first he spoke only in Arabic, answering through the translator. But the interrogators intuited he knew more than he was letting on. They could see a glint in his eyes when they said something in English, before it was translated. And while most detainees needed a few moments to process the question after the interpreter finished speaking, Dr. Mahjub launched into his answers right away. At one point the interrogators brought all the detainees—commanders and their drivers—into one booth and had them write on a piece of paper the name of the most important man among them. Everyone, including Dr. Mahjub, wrote down Dr. Mahjub.

Dr. Mahjub remained prickly and maintained that he had hired the fourth detainee, Mubassir, as a one-off to help with media operations that day. Mubassir repeated this account and was less of a priority than the others. As many hard-core members did, Taha continued to be obstinate, while Abu Omar continued simply responding to questions with a laugh or a wide, menacing smile.

Toward the end of April, however, a couple weeks into the interrogations, the task force grew more suspicious of Mubassir. He was tall and heavyset, in contrast with many of the scrawnier, shorter Iraqis. In his youth he had been a soccer player and a wrestler, which accounted for his bulk. Now in his thirties, he cast a playful look at his interrogators. Shortly after the initial capture, Paul had sat down with Mubassir for the first time in the Baghdad outstation. When his blindfold was removed, Mubassir's face had twisted into a wide, toothy smile.

“Oh, hello,” Mubassir said cheerily, in crisp English.

“You're an English speaker,” Paul, the night interrogator said, taken aback.

“Yes,” Mubassir said dismissively, as if it weren't news. “How long do you think this will be?” he continued in a bouncy, fluid tone, his posh Tory accent emerging as he spoke. “Because I do need to get back to my family.”

As on that night, in his subsequent sessions Mubassir appeared to enjoy the back-and-forth and peppered his answers with English colloquialisms. He was confident, charismatic, and clearly very intelligent.

Initial questioning at the outstations was often direct, aimed to use the detainees' relative disorientation following capture to pry details that could unearth follow-on targets. By the time they arrived at the the screening facility, one or two days into their detention, detainees were more comfortable. They now knew they were fed three times a day and given a shower and weren't going to be abused. As with all interrogations, the interrogators' strategy was to manufacture, as fast as possible, a durable rapport that they could manipulate over time to our advantage. Interrogators offered as much information about themselves—making it up as necessary—as the detainees divulged, in order to establish a history of back-and-forth sharing and, ultimately, trust.

From Mubassir's demeanor to his clownish smile to his showy displays of English proficiency, the interrogators detected an undercurrent of pride that might be tapped. They soon got him to talk more at length about himself. They learned that he fancied himself a religious scholar. He claimed a connection, through clerics, back to Mohammad, and claimed to be associated with the mufti of Iraq. They allowed Mubassir to lecture them on religious doctrine. Just as the interrogators built up semifictional personas inside the booth, their questions allowed Mubassir to project himself as a budding religious authority. It was an identity they wanted to tease out.

One of the early sources of suspicion with Mubassir was a picture of a man that had been taken on his street. J.C. had sent it up to the screening facility because the task force knew the man in the photo was one of a handful of runners for the Dardiri courier network, coordinated by Abu Ayyub al-Masri. (One of al-Masri's
aliases was Yusif al-Dardiri.) When Paul showed the picture to him, Mubassir waved it away, claiming not to know the man. The interrogators remained unconvinced, and Paul took to hanging it on the wall behind him at the start of each session, so that the picture faced Mubassir. For weeks, Mubassir refused to recognize the face in the picture.

Near the end of April, that changed during a marathon nighttime session with Paul. Toward the end, Mubassir was wearing thin. He had not seen his family in weeks. His mother was sick and needed surgery. And after five or six hours of conversation, he was tired. Again, Paul asked him about the photo. This time Mubassir sighed. He looked at the photo with a quiet resolve, as if he had made peace with the response he was about to give. “I love that man very much,” he said warmly. “That's my brother.” He told Paul his brother's name was Karim.

Interrogator and detainee exhausted, Paul left the booth so that he could get the information to his analyst. When he returned, Paul brought breakfast for the both of them. It was now early morning, and they sat together and ate. The warm eggs, fresh fruit, and cold juice they shared at the small plastic table marked a new stage in the relationship between the two men.

Mubassir divulged more about Karim and agreed when told the task force would bring him in. “Good, good,” he said. “I can talk to him. I know he'll start talking.”

In Mubassir's eyes, bringing in his brother was a way to keep him protected and a way to make his own part of the ordeal end by giving us what we needed in order for us to be done with him—even if it meant giving up a bigger fish. For us, it was a promising lead.

As the task force began monitoring Karim, Paul traveled from Balad down to the Baghdad outstation with Mubassir in tow. While there, Paul lived in the same small hooch with Mubassir, leaving him unshackled the whole time. He sat together in the small room with Mubassir, listening to Iraqi radio, or allowed Mubassir to lecture him on religion and Iraqi culture. Paul brought him the same food the operators ate, including ice cream. It was all about trust.

Unfortunately for both Paul and Mubassir, Karim spooked. Around May 3, roughly twenty-five days into Mubassir's detention, Paul and the Baghdad team watched Karim, as they had for a few days. But his demeanor was ominously different that day. They watched as he walked briskly up his street, talking on his cell phone, then went up to his home's rooftop, where he burned a pile of documents and material. At midmorning the next day, Karim drove to his sister's house and entered the front door, and that was the last we saw of him. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he fled out the back door of the house, out of view of our cameras. He confided in a sheikh, who told him to confer with Abu Ayyub al-Masri himself. When Karim met al-Masri outside Baghdad, al-Masri gave him one thousand dollars and told him to flee to Syria, which he did.

The task force was steamed. They were not alone. When Paul returned from the operations center to their shared hooch and told Mubassir his brother had fled, Mubassir was crushed. This left Mubassir with no more leverage, as everything else he had offered us was worthless. Karim was his lifeline.

Meanwhile, more new captures came in, taxing the capacity of the screening facility. Mubassir increasingly appeared to have nothing more to offer, and it was nearing the time when we would need to submit a request to extend his stay in our facility. During the first few days of May, the screening facility team proposed sending him off to Camp Bucca. But when C.M. brought the recommendation to M.S. that night, she vetoed it. She knew Mubassir was the only detainee with a connection to al-Masri's courier network and wanted the interrogators to keep mining.

On the same night M.S. vetoed the suggestion to move Mubassir, one of the other interrogators not normally assigned to Mubassir got him to admit a piece he had been holding out on: Karim was not the only connection to al-Masri. Mubassir had met with al-Masri a few times over the past two years, after first hosting the Egyptian at his house in Ahmadiya in the spring of 2004, as the insurgency was materializing.

As M.S. sensed Mubassir could give more on al-Masri, she and the intel teams working for her came to me for approval to continue holding him. I had already written to CENTCOM for permission to keep him this long, but I wrote again seeking Secretary Rumsfeld's approval. As always, an extensive intelligence package was required to justify the request. By this time our credibility had been built on a strong record of getting it right, and the extension was approved.

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“T
his has been, and will be, a long and serious war,” I wrote to all of our task forces that spring, posting the message on our portal. “Although initial structures and TTPs
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have evolved tremendously from where they were even two years ago, we are still operating with manning and operating processes that need to be improved to be more effective and professional.

“We must increasingly be a force of totally focused counter-terrorists—that is what we do. . . . This is as complex as developing a Long Term Strategic Debriefing Facility that feeds out in-depth understanding of the enemy, and as simple as losing the casual, ‘I'm off at my war adventure,' manner of dress and grooming.

“In every case it will not be about what's easy, or even what we normally associate with conventional military standards. It will not even be about what is effective. It will be about what is the MOST effective way to operate—and we will do everything to increase the effectiveness even in small ways.

“If anyone finds this inconvenient or onerous, there's no place in the force for you. This is about winning—and making as few trips to Arlington Cemetery as possible
en route to that objective.”