by Joby Warrick
Any guards not killed in the explosions would either be in shock or so injured they couldn’t fight back. Then the other cars would enter the location slowly, one at a time, and each would slowly park wherever it wanted. There would be no resistance. Being an expert in explosives, it was my understanding this would destroy the General Intelligence and everything around it, with even distant sections being destroyed.
Only when he was asked about the reasons for the attack did Jayousi become animated. All of it, he said, had been done under the orders of a man he described as his commander and mentor since the day he had turned up at the Herat training camp in western Afghanistan.
“I promised my loyalty to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” he said, as the video camera rolled. “I agreed to work for him—no questions asked.” To be killed in such an operation was to have been an honor, he said.
“If I die, I become a martyr,” he said, “and those I kill will go to hell.”
—
No one followed the details of the plot with greater foreboding than the man who, in the fantasies of the radicals who dreamed it up, might have been the chief victim. For King Abdullah II, the events of April 2004 had been much more than a close call. In seeking to explode a toxic bomb in central Amman, Jayousi had officially delivered the Iraq war to the Jordanian capital.
Abdullah had warned that the violence unleashed in Iraq could never be neatly contained. He had expressed his deep misgivings prior to the invasion to senior U.S. officials, including the president himself. Even after the lightning victory over Saddam Hussein’s army, Abdullah predicted to friends in the region that the war would lead to “unforeseen negative consequences that we would be dealing with for decades.” But he had not imagined that it would be as bad as this.
The monarch had also lodged compaints with U.S. officials about the aftermath of the invasion. In July 2003, before Iraq spiraled into chaos, Abdullah met with L. Paul Bremer, the White House–appointed head of Iraq’s provisional government, and urged him to reconsider decisions to disband the Iraqi army and blacklist members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Pulling Bremer aside during a meeting at an economic forum in Jordan, the king warned that the decisions “would blow up in all of our faces,” according to his account of the conversation.
“I said I hoped he understood that if he was going to de-Baathify across the board, he would be setting himself up for major resistance across the board, and would create a power vacuum that someone would have to fill,” Abdullah wrote in his 2011 memoir. As for disbanding the army, “it was crazy…a recipe for anarchy and chaos,” he said.
Bremer’s reply was brusque, as he recalled it.
“I know what I’m doing,” the American diplomat said. “There’s going to be some kind of compensation. I’ve got it all in hand, thank you very much.”
To the king, it was no surprise to see how quickly security unraveled. As a Sunni himself, he could empathize with Iraq’s minority Sunnis, who, after decades of privileged status, saw themselves as increasingly isolated and threatened. Those anxieties would drive some Iraqis toward radical Islamists, who in turn would open the door to foreign jihadists. Of course al-Qaeda and its allies would leap at a chance to establish a base in a strategically important corner of the Middle East.
“They could shift their operations from Afghanistan to the heart of the Arab world,” he said.
Soon another American stumble would give the extremists a powerful boost. In the same month the chemical plot was disrupted, U.S. television networks carried images of GIs abusing prisoners at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Arab anger boiled over at photos of naked inmates wearing dog collars and being sexually humiliated by female soldiers. Abdullah, during a visit to Washington that spring, urged President George W. Bush to apologize to Iraqis for the degrading treatment of prisoners, which Bush did, with Jordan’s king standing by his side.
But other officials showed little interest in views that clashed with the administration’s official narrative of a steadily improving Iraq. A few months after the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, Abdullah was queried about conditions for ordinary Iraqis during a private New York dinner party attended by prominent journalists and government officials. Even with the upsurge in terrorist attacks, surely women’s lives had improved since the dictator’s removal, one of the dinner guests suggested.
“They’re ten times worse,” the king replied. “When you had a secular regime under Saddam, men and women were pretty much equal.”
Abdullah’s candor did not sit well with some Bush appointees in the room. Liz Cheney, the vice president’s elder daughter, then a senior official in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs section, turned to one of the king’s aides with a word of unsolicited advice, according to the king’s memoir: Abdullah should avoid making such discordant statements in public. The aide initially wondered if the comment was meant as a joke, but the next day, Cheney telephoned him again to reinforce the message. She said she had discussed the king’s remark with Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department official who had been one of the architects of Bush’s Iraq policy, and both had agreed that Abdullah should keep his views to himself.
The monarch was exasperated.
“What I said over dinner was true,” he wrote afterward. “I was shocked that some members of the administration and their supporters seemed to feel that there could be no dissent on Iraq—and that in America, a country that prides itself on opinionated self-expression, they would try to muzzle inconvenient news.”
The reality that was becoming painfully clear to Abdullah was an Iraq engulfed in flames and seeding the entire region with dangerous sparks. Jayousi and his poison bomb had drifted into Jordan on a fire whirl, and Jordan’s Mukhabarat had only narrowly managed to stop them. Meanwhile, the man who directed and financed the plot remained free inside Iraq to try again.
—
The Mukhabarat prepared one more blow against the sponsors of the chemical plot. To discredit the jihadists and expose the barbarity of the crime they had nearly succeeded in carrying out, the intelligence directorate aired excerpts from Jayousi’s videotaped confession on state-run television. All of Jordan would be able to watch the Palestinian coldly recite his plans to level a portion of the capital. Arab news channels broadcast the performance to a wider audience across the Middle East, including in Iraq, where Jayousi’s puffy face filled a screen in the safe house in which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was staying.
Zarqawi surely knew what had happened to Jayousi and his other soldiers. But after watching the video, he decided to make an equally public response.
“Yes, there was a plot to demolish the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate [GID; the Mukhabarat] building,” Zarqawi said, speaking into a microphone for an audio recording posted to Islamist Web sites.
The terrorist tried to deflect the accusations about toxic weapons as a Mukhabarat fiction. “God knows,” he said, “if we did possess [a chemical bomb], we wouldn’t hesitate one second to use it to hit Israeli cities such as Eilat and Tel Aviv.” He insisted that his targets were military—the apostate regime and its security forces—and that the arrest of Jayousi and his aides was a temporary setback.
“The battle between us and the Jordanian government has its ups and downs,” he said. To the monarchy, he warned: “Terrifying events are awaiting you.”
In fact, the collapse of his plan sent Zarqawi into a funk, Mukhabarat officials discovered much later, in piecing together a larger narrative of the plot from informants and captured jihadists. He disappeared for days, refusing to talk to aides about the bomb plot and what had gone wrong.
“This was supposed to be his ‘shock and awe,’ the thing that would give him a global reputation,” said a Jordanian intelligence official who participated in the agency’s review. “Zarqawi really did want his own name to precede Bin Laden’s. And more than that, he really wanted to hurt the GID.”
But Zarqawi’s moodiness was short-lived. Already, in the final
days of April 2004, an unexpected opportunity had fallen his way. He began to see a path to jihadi stardom that required only a single spectacular death.
12
“The sheikh of the slaughterers”
The camera’s recording light flicked on. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi clutched a script in both hands and began to read. He was dressed in black, from his baggy trousers and tunic to the ski mask that concealed his face, and he towered over the pale figure in the orange jumpsuit who sat on a blanket in front of him. The seated man shifted uncomfortably, his legs and arms bound with ropes.
“Nation of Islam, great news!” Zarqawi began in Arabic, with exaggerated inflection. “The signs of dawn have begun and the winds of victory are blowing.”
Zarqawi was flanked by four of his men, also hooded and dressed in black. The men carried rifles and wore ammunition pouches and fidgeted like athletes loosening up for a contest. Most fixed their attention on the prisoner as Zarqawi spoke, as though the young man might somehow throw off his ropes and try to flee. Everyone in the room behaved as though acutely aware of the video camera except for the man in the jumpsuit, who stared straight ahead as though in a daze. Whatever his thoughts, Nicholas Evan Berg gave no sign of awareness of what was about to happen to him.
Before the hooded men came into the room, Berg had been made to sit on a plastic chair before the same camera and answer questions about himself. He appeared relaxed, his hands resting in his lap, and he spoke as calmly as though interviewing to open a bank account.
“My name is Nick Berg,” he began. “My father’s name is Michael, my mother’s name is Susan. I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah. I live in West Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.”
His eyeglasses were missing, and he had grown a scruff of beard that made him seem younger than his twenty-six years. But he sounded confident and friendly, very much the same Nick Berg who had traveled alone to Iraq two months earlier with outsized notions about starting a business repairing communication equipment. Zarqawi had seized him because he was looking for an American, any American. But in Berg he had found an American archetype: a young man bursting with ambition and big plans, trustful of others, and possessing an unshakable faith in his own ability to succeed, in a country and culture unknown to him, through sheer persistence and the logical power of his ideas. How a would-be entrepreneur from suburban Philadelphia came to play a starring role in Zarqawi’s grotesque coming-out video involved a journey as improbable as any that occurred during the war.
Berg had come to Iraq uninvited, and against the advice of nearly everyone he knew. But whereas others saw only danger, he saw in Iraq’s ruins an opportunity to fulfill two of his most pressing needs in the early months of 2004: jump-starting his struggling business, and being part of something noble and important, specifically the transformation of a country benighted by decades of dictatorship. Berg had made a similar attempt two years earlier in Africa, prospecting for business opportunities in Kenya while also helping with humanitarian causes. On the last day of his Kenyan visit, he had famously given away the entire contents of his suitcases, to return home with only the clothes he was wearing. Now he would redirect his energy and resources toward a country whose “liberation” he heartily supported, hoping to help open a new world of opportunities for Iraqis, and also for himself.
“I am reasonably confident we can score some work out of this,” Berg wrote in a January 2004 e-mail to friends, during his initial scouting visit to Iraq. “It is treacherous, though.”
Berg’s reasons for being in Iraq mystified U.S. and Iraqi officials and virtually everyone else, except those who knew him personally. A self-described inventor and adventurer, Berg was never known to hold more than a passing regard for convention. As a boy, growing up amid the split-level houses and boutique shopping centers of West Chester, he was regarded as mildly eccentric, the kind of kid who grew a yeast colony for fun and kept a ready supply of wires and duct tape with him in a small toolbox. He amused friends with an ever-changing array of homemade gadgets, from an electric “truth detector” to a battery-powered alarm that was rigged to shout “Get out of here!” whenever intruders entered his cabin at summer camp. High-school classmates remembered the brainy prankster with the piercing blue eyes and unusual hairstyle, cropped extremely short except for a tuft of dark-blond curls that tumbled over his forehead. He played the sousaphone in the marching band, competed in science fairs, read obscure philosophy texts, and tested his physical limits with cross-country bicycle treks of a hundred miles or more. Even at home he hewed sharply against the grain: a religious conservative, an exuberant capitalist, and an unapologetic interventionist in a family of secular Jews whose liberal political leanings bordered on pacifism.
“He went where no one else did,” Peter Lu, a high-school friend, said of him. “If there was a path, you could bet Berg wouldn’t be on it.”
Berg was assured admittance to a good college, but he dropped out of Cornell University just shy of a diploma. He drifted through a succession of schools and jobs, never earning a degree but gaining experience as a volunteer relief worker in Africa and as a service technician for radio towers, discovering, in the latter role, that he possessed both the talent and steely nerve to make a living fixing transmission equipment while dangling from atop a six-hundred-foot metal spire. Gradually, he began to formulate a vision for a business that would incorporate all his eclectic interests. At age twenty-four, with support from his family, he formally launched Prometheus Methods Tower Service, naming himself as president. His business plan called for helping developing countries build radio towers out of Lego-like clay blocks that he designed himself, using cheap, local materials. The idea was unorthodox and improbably ambitious, and it suited him perfectly.
Now he needed a market, and Iraq, with its ruined infrastructure and open spigots gushing with U.S. contractor dollars, seemed to be just the place.
“There are so many parties involved in this work and they all subcontract to people, and none of them are specialists like us,” he wrote home in another e-mail. “It’s unheard of for a company to actually have skilled specialists here—I think this gives us an advantage, but we have to get past the ‘I have a friend’ stage. I’m hoping a good business manager will move this along.”
Berg’s initial scouting visit to Iraq was sufficiently encouraging that the young entrepreneur returned in March 2004 to try to land his first real clients. Working on his own, he drove around the countryside, looking for communications towers, and offered to inspect and repair any that were damaged or broken. He climbed rickety steel masts, created prospect lists, and wrote more cheerful e-mails to friends at home. It was slow going, but Berg’s enthusiasm never flagged, right up to the day when Iraqi police in the city of Mosul noticed a strangely dressed foreigner prowling around a radio tower outside of town.
The Iraqis had no idea what to make of the bespectacled young man with his tool kit and notebooks filled with sketches of communications equipment. Convinced that Berg was a spy—Israeli, perhaps, if not Iranian—the officers arrested him. He was taken to a Mosul police station on March 24, 2004, and placed in detention, ending abruptly the young businessman’s Iraq adventure. Or so it seemed.
—
The plight of a solitary American civilian who runs afoul of Iraqi authorities is normally a matter for junior consular officers at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. But the strange case of Nicholas Berg soon commanded the attention of more senior officials at the State Department and the Pentagon. Eventually, queries about the businessman made their way to the CIA’s counterterrorism division in Langley, where Nada Bakos was then the principal analyst in charge of the Zarqawi file.
Reports afterward showed that the Iraqi police quickly deposited Berg with U.S. forces in Mosul, who were just as baffled as the Iraqis by the earnest young man and his story about traveling across Iraq prospecting for business opportunities. By chance, Bakos happened to know one of the American military policemen who
were present when Berg was taken in.
What are you doing here? Berg was asked. And asked again.
“No one could figure out what his deal was,” Bakos recalled. “Why was he wandering around Iraq by himself, looking for something to do? No one could believe he was just going around looking for a job.”
Meanwhile, background checks turned up another oddity. Three years earlier, a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist had used an e-mail address and Internet password that had belonged to Berg. There was an explanation, albeit a bizarre one: The ever-trusting Berg had once loaned his laptop computer to a stranger during a bus trip, and when the man had trouble accessing his e-mail, Berg had given him his personal log-on information. The stranger turned out to be a friend of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker,” who was arrested while undergoing pilot training to fly one of the planes in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
With so many questions swirling around the young businessman, army officials in Mosul were reluctant to let him go. In the end, they had no choice: Berg’s family in Pennsylvania had been anxiously telephoning State Department officials, asking them to investigate their son’s disappearance. When they learned, in an April 1 e-mail, that Berg was being held by American forces against his will, they were furious. The family filed a lawsuit accusing the military of false imprisonment, and a day later, on April 6, 2004, Berg was released.
Berg spurned an offer for a seat on a military plane back to the United States, opting instead to travel to Baghdad to sort out his own arrangements. He checked into a hotel on the day of his discharge and made a few phone calls. Then, on April 10, he vanished completely.
