by Eric Maddox
It wasn’t far. After three hours, all I’d gotten him to admit was that his brother actually was a Marafiq. He had used his influence to get a good education for his children, one of whom was a medical student. Aside from traveling to Baghdad a few times, Rashid had been living peacefully at home since the war began.
That didn’t add up. Rashid was an inner-circle bodyguard. His brother had insisted that he had been living unnoticed in Tikrit all this time. He’d even headed up an anti-graffiti effort in the neighborhood. How could that have happened? Wasn’t he truly one of “the bad guys”?
Although it hadn’t yielded any actionable intelligence, my interrogation of Rashid’s brother underscored a valuable lesson. The rules of the game had changed. In terms of the power structure, Iraq was a completely different place than it had been before the war. Rashid had been directly responsible for the security and safety of Saddam. It stood to reason that he would continue to serve that function now. Instead he was sitting at home like a respectable citizen, with no involvement in the insurgency. At least that’s what his brother claimed, and I believed him. All the details of his story checked out. But more important, it was clear that he wasn’t trying to get on my good side by telling me what I wanted to hear. Sometimes, in an interrogation room, honesty hits you like a brick and I had just been floored by his honesty.
What mattered now was not who had once been in charge. The regime had been turned upside down and there was a whole new cast of players. To catch them, it would no longer work simply to follow the old chain of command. It didn’t exist anymore. Instead I needed to listen to what the detainees and informants were telling me. Clues to piecing together the new power structure, what was happening in the street in real time, could only come from them.
There were bad guys out there for sure. We heard their incoming mortars and sniper fire every night. But maybe we didn’t really know who they were.
By early September I was interrogating on a continuous basis. My workday usually started at 1300 and continued until 0200 or later. I had a full range of detainees, usually those who were suspected of either having been involved in or were planning an attack on U.S. forces. But regardless of what they had been brought in for, the techniques I used, and the thinking behind them, were the same.
More often than not there was a lack of hard evidence to prove a prisoner was involved in the insurgency. For that reason, most of them didn’t believe that they were going to prison, just because they’d been arrested. It was my job to catch them in a lie if I could. That gave me leverage. If I could prove they were lying, they could be held indefinitely. But the reality in war was that I didn’t have to make my case to a judge or jury. We weren’t in the United States and my job wasn’t to hand down justice. Frankly, I didn’t care whether they were guilty or innocent of the crimes with which they’d been charged. Every prisoner I interrogated started out being guilty of one thing: not helping me yet. It was up to me whether they would go free. And the only way that would happen was when they proved themselves helpful.
I needed intelligence. It didn’t matter to me whether I was getting it from an actual insurgent or a completely innocent detainee who happened to possess important information. There was no superior standing over my shoulder, watching my every move. There was no central database that my information was being fed into. In that guesthouse, it was strictly between the prisoner and me.
But I was also beginning to reach beyond the detainees in my search for good information. For that reason I developed a working relationship with the 4th ID’s Tactical Humint Teams—the THTs. About twenty of these Tactical Human Intelligence Teams were scattered around the city. Usually consisting of raw but enthusiastic young interrogators and counterintelligence specialists, they were tasked with developing leads wherever they could find them. One THT, for instance, was posted at the front gate of the palace compound where civilians would show up with requests or complaints. Another group was stationed at the governor’s office. While they rarely came up with actionable information on HVTs, the THTs could still provide a good picture of what was happening on the ground in Tikrit. Rich regularly met with them to cull their intelligence for anything useful. But he had to be careful. The last thing he wanted to do was give the task force the impression that they were chasing leads supplied by a bunch of boy scouts.
The rest of the team, especially Jeff, had absolutely no use for these guys, but I could see that they were doing all they could under difficult circumstances. Mostly National Guard reservists with limited training and no experience in intelligence gathering, the five-man THTs tried their best to sort through the informants who came in to barter or sell information. They were totally unequipped for the task. But I made a point of meeting with them and their sources when I had the chance. You never knew where a good lead might come from. Or where it might take you.
One THT in particular had been focused on gathering information about bodyguards. A young reservist from Utah, Sergeant Olsen, headed up the unit. Olsen was eager to please and had brought us a few informants that he thought were particularly promising. One of them claimed to know the leader of a local insurgent cell. His name was Farris Yasin Omar Al-Muslit.
That rang a bell. I remembered back to my interrogation with Taha, the chubby, sweaty detainee. He had tipped me to the link between Saddam’s servant and Muhammad Haddoushi’s driver. But there was something else about that session that I recalled now. Taha’s brother was named Farris Yasin. He was another in the long line of Al-Muslits who kept popping up on the radar.
“Who does Farris Yasin work with?” I asked Sergeant Olsen’s source.
“He has a group in the north,” he replied. “It is about twenty kilometers from Al-Alam, which is my village.”
I knew Al-Alam, at least by reputation. It was across the Tigris River from Tikrit and was surrounded by rich farmland awarded to key Saddam supporters. It was increasingly clear that Al-Alam and other towns on the east side of the river were hot-beds of insurgency. Most of the detainees that were brought to me were from Tikrit. As inadequate as they were, THTs like Sergeant Olsen’s were some of my few links to what might be going on east of the river.
I wasn’t sure where all this was leading, but I wanted to follow it as far as I could. Unfortunately Jeff’s short fuse had already burned down. “Okay,” he said after the session. “Where exactly did that get us?”
He had a point. We had some vague indications of an insurgent group working in an area where we rarely netted prisoners. But I didn’t want to let it go yet.
“It might be good to talk to people from the other side of the river,” I suggested.
“Then check with Chris,” Jeff snapped back. “He runs sources out of there. You can sit in on his meetings.”
The fact was that, under Chris, the case officer, we already had informants in Al-Alam and elsewhere. What we didn’t have was a system for sharing the information he pulled in. I didn’t know what he was doing and vice versa. We were improvising, doing the best we could with a patchwork of sources and prisoners. What we needed was to pool what we were getting, identify areas of overlap, and begin to build a broader picture of the activities and main players in the region. Jeff brought Chris and me together and decided that we would sit in on each other’s interrogations and informant debriefings whenever possible. Slowly but surely, a coordinated effort was beginning to take shape.
But progress was agonizingly slow. Even with our improved information sharing, the quality of intelligence we were getting was consistently poor. In the month of September alone, the team went out on something like a half dozen hits just looking for Muhammad Haddoushi. They were all dry holes. There were another half dozen strikeouts for other assorted targets and at least ten raids that failed to turn up Izzat Ibrahim Al-Duri, Saddam’s senior military adviser, the King of Clubs on the deck of cards, Black List #6.
If Al-Duri weren’t still at large and suspected to be hiding somewhere in the Tikrit area, I’m not
even sure that the team would still have been stationed there. He was the kind of HVT that attracted a lot of attention and there was a real premium put on rolling him up: to be exact, a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. It sometimes seemed that everything else we were doing short of finding Al-Duri was just to keep us in town. We were still going on hits and collecting information, but the focus was on finding this one card in the Black List deck.
But when it came to capturing him, or any other targets, High Value or otherwise, we kept coming up short. The team blamed the intelligence collectors for the frustrating lack of success. I took my share of the blame for the lack of good information, even though their expectations of me weren’t very high to begin with. But in their own way, guys like Chris were as dedicated as the shooters. They never gave up, even when, time after time, the results were discouraging.
While I now felt comfortable sharing the food in the kitchen, I drew the line at the beer stashed in the refrigerator. The shooters would bring in a couple of cases when they went to Baghdad, but I always assumed it was off-limits. They rationed themselves pretty carefully, and I never saw any of them drink more than a beer a night. They never knew when they might be called out on a hit.
It was all the more significant then when, after a grueling twelve-hour interrogation, Jeff offered me a cold beer. Jeff was a hard man to know. He stood out even among this group of men who kept to themselves and never showed what they were feeling. The fact that he offered me a beer was a major act of friendship. After that we regularly shared a cold one after a long day of work.
There was another break from my routine when football season started. The 2003 college football season was a time of high hopes for all true Sooners. We were coming in ranked number one in the polls and, over the last three years had lost only four games and won a national championship. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a matter of whether we were going to win the national championship, but by what margin.
In Iraq the Armed Forces Network would broadcast the games on Saturday evening, starting around 1900 and usually run all night. OU was so good that year that I expected most of the games to be aired. My goal was to finish all my interrogations in time for the first kickoff.
But it didn’t always work out that way. In the first week of September, the Sooners had a bye week and the Texas Long-horns, the Sooners’ archrival, were playing the Arkansas Razorbacks. I had been eagerly anticipating the game and by 1500 I was on my last interrogation. I was going to be in front of the TV set no matter what.
It was then that the war intervened. Rich arrived at the guesthouse with news that the Iraqi police had arrested Nasir Yasin Omar Al-Muslit. I knew only too well who the new prisoner was. Aside from being still another Al-Muslit, Nasir was an inner-circle bodyguard. He was reputed to be one of the last people seen with Saddam at the start of the war. He was also, of course, well connected within the Hamaya chain of command. He was the brother of Farris Yasin, who was supposedly running the insurgency group around Al-Alam and was the cousin of several other high-ranking Al-Muslits.
I knew I needed to talk to him, but I was hoping it could wait. The game was about to begin. By the time Rich got through in-processing him, it would be too late to start an interrogation. Maybe this could wait until tomorrow.
No such luck. The processing procedure was going to be delayed. He would be shipped to BIAP shortly. We had to talk to him right away. Swearing under my breath, I settled in for a long night of work.
Nasir made an immediate impression. A couple of inches under six feet, he easily weighed two hundred fifty pounds and had been roughed up pretty badly by the Iraqi cops who had arrested him. But he didn’t seem intimidated by the situation and showed no fear or the slightest trace of nerves. My first impression was that getting anything from this guy was going to be a chore.
It was. For the first several hours, he had his story and he stuck to it: He claimed he had no contact with his extended family and friends and was living peacefully at home with his wife and kids since the war began. I did everything I could think of to shake his self-confidence, but he wouldn’t break. Finally, with Adam the terp getting hoarse from echoing my yelling and screaming, we took a break. I went back to the house to get something to eat. A group had gathered around the television. The game was in the last five minutes and Texas was getting their asses kicked. Go Razorbacks!
The prospect of the Sooners’ mortal enemies getting trounced provided fresh motivation. I knew Nasir could give me invaluable information on the inner workings of the Hamaya. I just didn’t know how to get it out of him. I returned to the guesthouse and started again, this time asking general questions about his life and his job. I was fishing for something, anything, that might point me in the right direction.
Slowly, over the course of the next few hours, the prisoner began to open up. Obviously he wasn’t going to tell us where we might find any of his family members who were still in hiding or overseeing the insurgency. But the details of his everyday life were not out of bounds. Answering simple questions would give him the appearance of being honest and innocent and doing his best to cooperate.
What Nasir confided was a blueprint to the operation of Saddam’s bodyguards. At any given time, he explained, there were thirty-two inner-circle Hamaya, divided into two sixteen-man teams on separate shifts. Each team had a leader—the Marafiq—and he provided me with their names. He also gave me the names of twenty-nine of the thirty-two inner-circle bodyguards along with their ranks. It was interesting to note that rank didn’t necessarily convey power within the inner circle. Rank was based solely on time of service. Power was about family connections and proximity to Saddam, and a major with good connections could carry more authority than a full-bird colonel.
I may have missed an important game, but at the end of my session with Nasir, I had learned two crucial things. First, we finally had a way into the inner circle of Hamaya, the ones most trusted by Saddam. It was no longer about an endless fraternity of relatives popping up at random intervals. Since my arrival, I had been working off the list of two hundred bodyguards of varying importance that Jared had given me. I could now concentrate on just thirty-two of them. While I still wasn’t sure where those thirty-two might eventually take me, at least it was a manageable number.
The other important takeaway was that it wasn’t always necessary to break a prisoner in order to get good information. I was never able to frighten or intimidate Nasir into telling me what I wanted to know. But just by talking with him about his life as a bodyguard, I learned more than I had from a dozen other interrogations. The fact was, Nasir was a prime example of a prisoner whose guilt or innocence didn’t really matter. I was in the business of getting information and it didn’t matter if the source was good, bad, or indifferent, as long as he had what I needed. And I could find a way to get it out of him
It was shortly after OU whipped UCLA in late September that Sergeant Olsen approached me again about some other sources he had been developing.
This time it was a trio of guys who lived east of the Tigris not far from Al-Alam. Olsen called them the Three Amigos. He wanted me to talk to them because they claimed to have knowledge about the Al-Muslits, specifically Radman Ibrahim.
Radman was the cousin of Nezham, whom we’d been after on the raid the night I first arrived in Tikrit. I’d since found out that Radman had been an administrator for the inner circle of Hamaya and was considered one of the most powerful members of the bodyguard elite. Olsen’s three sources claimed that this high-ranking Al-Muslit still occasionally visited a farm he owned in the area north of Tikrit. They were offering their services to let us know the next time he showed up.
“Why are you willing to help us capture him?” I asked them after they’d been brought over to the guesthouse.
“We want to work for the governor of Tikrit,” the self-appointed spokesman replied. “Maybe you will put in a good word for us.” The fact was, these three didn’t reall
y have much of a connection to Radman. All they had was a vague idea of his whereabouts and his role in the insurgency. But at least their enthusiasm counted for something.
“But we will need vehicles, weapons, and telephones to do the job,” added another amigo.
“What for?”
“When we have a car we will join the insurgency,” the spokesman explained. “We will protect ourselves with weapons. And when we find Radman, we will call and tell you.”
I stifled a laugh. “Let’s get this straight,” I said. “You help me get a bad guy and maybe I can help you. But not until then. In the meantime, find out what you can about Radman and let me know when you get something we can use.”
They didn’t like it, but they didn’t have a choice. We agreed to meet again in ten days to see if they had found out anything. I had my doubts.
But I did have the feeling that things were beginning to move, even though I had no idea where they were going or how to get out ahead of them. Working with the THT sources hadn’t produced much in the way of results, but neither had most of my interrogations. I was still looking for patterns, networks, or a string of simple coincidences that might add up and get us somewhere. The Three Amigos would probably produce nothing, but I couldn’t afford to ignore any possibility, no matter how slim.
Through constant interrogating, I was slowly beginning to get a better picture of insurgency activities in Tikrit itself. Some of it was being conducted by young Iraqi men who had formed loose-knit gangs to kill Americans. There was little difference between them and any Crip or Blood in a U.S. inner city. The ones who actually did the shooting or set off the IEDs became the leaders, while others joined purely because of peer pressure.
One of the most notorious of these gangsters was a kid named Munthir. He controlled three small but deadly insurgency cells. In late September, his house was raided. Munthir wasn’t there, but four of his brothers were captured and brought in for interrogation. The information they provided was of limited usefulness. But the hunt for Munthir did provide me with an important new source of intelligence about what was happening on the streets of Tikrit.
