Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  The mood in Baghdad was changing. Bakos and her fellow CIA officers could sense the shift during their still-unconstrained travels into the city’s neighborhoods to meet contacts or visit a favorite ice-cream place. The smiles and shy waves of the early weeks of the occupation had long since been replaced by sullen stares and drawn shades. Iraq was rapidly tiring of occupation, while the Bush administration’s attention seemed permanently fixed on settling the score with its political rivals in Washington. The moral underpinnings of the White House’s war effort were collapsing like rotten timbers, and aides to the president were working furiously to control the damage. The weapons of mass destruction that had loomed so threateningly in Bush’s speeches had not been found after four months of searching. Likewise, Americans had seen nothing of Saddam Hussein’s supposed links to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Congress was beginning to push for answers, and so, in the summer of 2003, the White House ratcheted up the pressure on the CIA’s analysts to find some.

  Washington was particularly interested in any gleanings from conversations with former senior security officials who would know about the Iraqi intelligence service’s secret dealings with foreigners and might be persuaded to talk in exchange for money or special favors. “What are you learning about terrorist links?” Langley wanted to know.

  “It doesn’t stop,” Bakos thought to herself, astonished and perplexed. Indeed, the questions continued throughout the rest of 2003 and the following year, and the next.

  Occasionally, there would be a breakthrough of a sort: a statement from a detainee, or a recovered document that seemed to offer something definitive. Bakos witnessed one such moment, when a homesick Iraqi official was persuaded for a brief moment to reveal what he knew.

  The question was, was anyone at the White House listening?

  —

  Bakos had volunteered for Iraq, despite her own misgivings about the war.

  “We had invaded, and now it was all hands on deck,” she remembered afterward.

  She landed in May 2003 in a country that struck her as wild and chaotic and more than a little sinister for a young intelligence officer on her first war posting. The country itself was in better shape than she had imagined. Even after two wars and a decade of economic sanctions, Baghdad was largely intact, and certainly better off than some of the other Middle Eastern capitals she had visited. She drove to appointments on broad, palm-tree-lined avenues and well-engineered freeways with green directional signs that reminded her of the ones back home.

  Life at work during the early months was a succession of long days in the interrogation trailer with breaks for meals and sleep. U.S. forces now held dozens of Saddam Hussein’s generals and intelligence chiefs, some of whom would surely know the locations of any secret WMD stashes, or possess insight into terrorist plots that had been engineered with Iraqi support.

  American officials hoped that some of them could be persuaded to cooperate if offered the right inducement, such as emigration papers or cash. Among these men, none appeared more promising on paper than the weeping Hasan al-Izbah. The Iraqi was not only a high-ranking intelligence official; he also happened to be Iraq’s official liaison to Palestinian militants regarded by the West as terrorists. Saddam Hussein had openly backed violent groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, in part to shore up his anti-Israel credentials with fellow Arabs. Someone within Saddam’s spy agency could illuminate the murky world of Iraqi terrorist links, and perhaps it could be Izbah—if Bakos could persuade him to talk.

  Bakos had sat across the table from numerous Iraqi officials during her first weeks in the country, but she had never met with one quite like this. He was surprisingly young, perhaps in his late thirties, and he bore little resemblance to the thuggish operatives who seemed to make up the bulk of Saddam’s intelligence arm. Clean-shaven except for his prison stubble, and lacking even the standard-issue mustache worn by nearly all Iraqi government officials, he had the polished look of a Western business executive. But whatever confidence he might have had before the invasion had collapsed into soggy mush. When he wasn’t crying during interrogations, he mostly shut down.

  Bakos could see the man was frightened, and she leaned on her translator to try to discover why. Izbah’s story was complicated, but more than anything he was afraid for his family, especially a young son. Saddam’s Baath Party and its intelligence service had killed and tortured thousands of Iraqis over the decades. Now they were out of power, and survivors and relatives would be seeking revenge. What would happen to his children, especially with Izbah in prison?

  Bakos thought briefly and offered a small gesture.

  “If you help me,” she said, “I can let you contact your family.”

  Izbah softened, thinking about the offer. Then he nodded his assent. The old regime was finished, and he had nothing to lose and potentially much to gain if he talked. Here, finally, was a chance to shine a torchlight into one of the deepest dungeons of Saddam’s security network, guided by a man who knew every crevice.

  Bakos guided Izbah through a web of Iraqi terrorist connections, letting him describe in detail the Palestinian and Iranian operatives that Saddam had supported over the years, at least until he grew weary of them and ordered them killed. But when the subject turned to al-Qaeda, Izbah shrugged. There was nothing to talk about, he said. Perhaps there had been a low-level meeting years earlier, a discreet encounter intended to size up the other side. But nothing had come of it. Iraq’s secular regime persecuted and killed Islamic extremists, and al-Qaeda’s leaders abhorred the Iraqi dictator. The distrust was too great to allow even the most rudimentary cooperation.

  “What about Zarqawi?” Bakos finally asked.

  “We had heard of him,” Izbah said. “But there was no relationship.”

  Nothing at all? Bakos pressed further to see if Izbah would hedge his answer.

  “If you had met him,” she asked, “is he the kind of person you would have tried to recruit?”

  The answer was simple and emphatic: “No.”

  Izbah had kept his promise, and now Bakos fulfilled hers. A phone was brought in, and the former spy chief was allowed to call his wife for the first time since his capture, weeks earlier. Bakos stayed in the room for a moment to make sure the call went through. When a voice came on the other end of the line, Izbah again broke down in a geyser of tears.

  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.