by Nada Bakos
In fact the damn thing worked perfectly. Word of the Allies’ “official” plans made it back to Berlin, and Hitler sent German troops to the wrong place. It was indeed an operation worth studying—except that a CAP class of students who grew up on Monty Python and Mystery Science Theater 3000 couldn’t help ad-libbing on behalf of the poor “Royal Marine” who was being unceremoniously poked and prodded by confused Germans.
“Please, I’ve been swimming for days—I’m not actually dead.”
“Really, I’m alive, but I’m in a great deal of pain.”
“Hey, that’s my wallet! If I could move, I’d kick your ass!”
We also made up our own fake assignment on official letterhead, then dropped it into the bowl from which class teams drew their morning exercises. The first one read: “A leading radical Islamic cleric is being recruited by the CIA.” Then came the pièce de résistance: “Write a bottom-line assessment of his value to the Agency. Then fold the paper three times, walk to the room with the instructors, stop at their table, and pull on your ear. The instructor who tasked this assignment will look at you funny. Hand said instructor the paper; he will confirm receipt by saying, ‘What’s this?’ To complete the exercise, wink at him and respond, ‘My phone number.’”
Soon enough, we watched another analyst fold his paper three times and march straight out of the classroom.
We laughed hysterically—which is how the poor analyst knew whom to yell at when he came back four minutes later looking ready to break things.
Of all the troublemakers on our team, Dennis Gleeson, with dark hair and broad shoulders, whose affability belied the mischievousness of which he was capable coupled with a healthy skepticism of authority, might have been the most brazen about it. Of course, I immediately wanted to be fast friends. For one class briefing on opportunity analysis, or OA—analysis that goes beyond looking at ground conditions to highlight ways to advance US interests in a particular place—we bet Dennis he wouldn’t brief the class as Dr. Seuss. We should have known better.
“You can do OA on a plane,” he triumphantly declared. “You can do it on a train! You can do OA on a bus—without a fuss! Even next to Gus, and that’s a plus, because do OA you must, must, MUST!”
“Very clever,” the instructor shot back. “What rhymes with ‘fail’?”
Dennis said later that he was smart enough not to respond, “Sail, pail, whale…”
So okay, we were probably a little pompous. But what we were really after was to be challenged, and hypotheticals about Iraqi rainfall didn’t cut it. Nor did CAP instructors making us perform trust-falls with our teammates (I have another story Dennis won’t let me tell about that). The students were appreciative to work for an organization dedicated to the safety and security of our country—a place where the phrase “the best and the brightest” was a common refrain, whether or not it was actually true. There were very real threats the United States was grappling with: in May of 2002, al Qaida remained a looming and insidious threat. People in the intelligence community are constantly exposed to possible threats, and we had to examine their validity with intense scrutiny. But for my CAP classmates and me, most of whom had become analysts in the months following 9/11, those potential dangers felt much more imminent. We were there specifically because we wanted to help make things safer—even if it didn’t always seem that way. I understand that our now infamous CAP class number 10 may have been the most recalcitrant group ever to graduate. But regardless of a little goofing around, none of us ever forgot why we had joined the Agency—or sought out the DI.
CAP had been instituted only two years before I attended, despite the fact that Sherman Kent—the school’s namesake and a man the CIA often describes as the father of intelligence analysis—had proposed creating a training school as far back as 1953.
The immersive training session we attended was a vast departure from the more general approach of the mid-1990s, which saw new analysts given a week or two of briefings on procedural housekeeping before they were put right to work. “They don’t do a lot of training,” Mark Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House intelligence committee, told the New York Times at the time. “They say, ‘Congratulations, you’re the Mali analyst, have a nice day.’” By the time we attended CAP, everyone there understood that a lack of codified standards had led to headline-generating misses.
At its best, our CAP course prepared us for the rigor of the analytic work we would soon be responsible for.
I’ll never forget our introduction to a crisis task force. My classmates and I were fed some of the original data from the Rwandan genocide, which had taken place a few years earlier, in 1994. In April of that year, a plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was shot down as it came in for a landing in the country’s capital. In response, Hutu extremists sought revenge against the rival Tutsi population, whom they blamed for the attack. In the weeks following the presidential assassination, some eight hundred thousand Tutsi men, women, and children were slaughtered, entire families at a time.
Our assignment was to put ourselves in the shoes of those earlier Agency analysts, writing products and delivering briefings just as if the events in East Africa were unfolding in real time. The exercise was meant to give students a sense of the pressures that come with filtering and analyzing such a relentless torrent of incoming data—which today seems almost quaint in retrospect. A Rwandan child with a smartphone today has access to more information than anyone at the CIA did in 1994. Regardless, for that CAP assignment, I loved imagining being in the middle of a major world event, helping to define for a fictional policy maker what course of action the United States could and even should take. I dove into the exercise. But I had no idea how the first satellite image I saw from the conflict would rock me.
To substantiate reports the Agency had received about conditions on the ground in Rwanda, my team zeroed in on the turbulent Kagera River, which forms a natural border with Tanzania to the east and funnels water from the majority of Rwanda’s rivers onward to Lake Victoria. We pinpointed the river’s Rusumo Falls, sitting where the shoreline pinches together above a gorge and the water swells before spilling over the edge and crashing down onto the rocks fifty feet below. At that waterfall, branches, elephant grass, and other detritus from the river basin pooled. And in the spring of 1994, the same was true of mutilated bodies—one Tutsi after another, many with their hands still tied behind their backs, ultimately collecting there from whichever tributary their executioners had chosen to dump the bodies into. There was nothing hypothetical about those grisly pictures.
“Remember,” one of the instructors said solemnly, “a picture is worth a thousand words. But it’s still just a photo without any context.” Counting those dismembered bodies formed the basis for our initial casualty figures. As an analyst assigned to study illicit finance and money laundering, I’d never thought about being confronted with death on a daily basis or the toll such work can take on the people who do it. I understood immediately why some of the analysts who’d first scoured those images in 1994 quit soon afterward. I didn’t suspect at the time that it might have foreshadowed my career ahead.
Our CAP graduation was held on November 8, 2002—the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence. As part of the semicentennial celebration at headquarters, our diplomas were presented by Vice President Cheney. “The men and women receiving diplomas today are following a long line of excellence and faithful service to the country,” he said in his address. “In your line of work, the greatest contributions are also the hardest to quantify.… In national security, the long-time horizon often means that the wisest judgments and the best work go unrecognized until many years after the fact.”
It was a day of celebration for our class. We were finally done. “Hey,” Dennis said, elbowing me in line as we waited for our diplomas. “Don’t scuff your feet on the carpet before you get up onstage.”
“Why not?” I
said.
“You’ll shake Cheney’s hand and fry his pacemaker.”
Which was, of course, the only thing I could think of as I received my diploma—and why, unfortunately, the first time I met the vice president of the United States, it was all I could do to not laugh and look slightly horrified at the thought.
Following that ceremony, however, I was all business as I settled back into my role on the illicit finance team. I helped identify key players in smuggling rings, international drug cartels, and most any other industry that fell into the multibillion-dollar-a-year underground economy. But for the next several months, I couldn’t shake the memory of that grim Rwanda exercise, in part because of the very point Cheney had made at our graduation: “The wisest judgments and the best work go unrecognized until many years after the fact.” I was finding quickly that Transnational Issues was a great place to learn, but the products I wrote there basically planted seeds for lawmakers that said, “This isn’t on your radar now, but you should know it’s floating out there.” It was a department described as “strategic.”
Granted, that’s important work. But it also means that analysts only know if their assessments hit the mark a few months or years after the fact. That struck me as a long time to wait for a payoff—and even then, there was no guarantee that anyone would actually look at what I’d spent all that time working on. After all, as I was periodically reminded, the president’s day is typically planned out in five-minute increments. The most precious commodity in Washington isn’t money or access but time. When lawmakers are bouncing from one political fire to the next, who has time to plant seeds? And if an analyst slaves away on a product but no one ever reads it, does it really make a sound?
The Rwanda exercise, on the other hand, was the exact opposite: tactical. Political. Immediate. And in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it was clear where that kind of work was being done at the Agency. In mid-2002, after several months as an analyst on the illicit finance team, I noticed another posting on the internal job board: a new CTC unit dedicated to examining extremism in Iraq was looking for an analyst. I applied—and felt like I’d just begged to dive into a shark tank. Policy-maker interest in CTC’s work was intense, and that meant they had a vested interest in the products being created there.
Transitioning into CTC required taking a few new classes at the Sherman Kent School to bolster the original training I’d received in analytical methodology with substance-based training that was specific to the region I’d be studying. But that was straightforward enough. And soon I was swept up into the chaotic center and placed with the Iraq unit. With no time to hesitate, I dove in and rushed to catch up.
In the summer of 2002, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi arrived in Iraq to lie in wait for the United States to invade. At that point, Zarqawi’s followers were a loose network of men from the Levant, North Africa, and a smattering of other countries who were attracted to his brazen ideas. Unlike al Qaida, Zarqawi wasn’t requiring immediate allegiance—he merely asked for cooperation and support for his loosely connected group.
By late 2002, we had determined that Zarqawi held roughly a dozen different passports. On a given day, he could be Jan Ellie Louise from Britain or Ibrahim Kasimi Ridah or Abdal Rahman Hasan al-Tahihi from Iran—or one of a number of other characters the governments of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and beyond legally acknowledged. As I joined the Iraq unit, he was using those identities to crisscross the Middle East, recruiting foot soldiers for a holy war he’d first envisioned more than a decade earlier.
It took almost as many years for us to compile his full dossier, collecting scattershot bits of information from various sources, gradually piecing them together to get a full understanding of his personality, his operational strategies, and his background.
Born in the al-Masoum neighborhood of Zarqa’s “old town” in October of 1966, Ahmad Fadil al-Nazal al-Khalayleh was one of ten children in a very poor family. His hometown—Jordan’s third-largest city, with a population of some 850,000—sits on the eastern edge of the country seventeen miles north of Amman. It is sometimes described as “the Chicago of the Middle East” because of its poverty and crime. Khalayleh knew both: his father, Fadil, worked as a farmer and herbal medicine salesman but couldn’t provide enough for his family, which, I always presumed, was why Khalayleh dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen. He had few educational aspirations anyway; his former schoolteachers later told me he spent most of his time gazing out the window at the nearby Palestinian refugee camp.
Fadil died the year after Khalayleh dropped out, and at that point, any sense of direction the teenager might have had crumbled. He was fired from whatever odd jobs he could get. He became a drunk and a thug, holding court in the garbage-strewn Masoum cemetery across the street from his two-story concrete-block family home, periodically sticking up passersby so he could collect the cash to buy more alcohol. Sexual assault became a key tool in Khalayleh’s quest for power. He raped local women to assert his dominance; he raped other men to establish control.
Before long, locals referred to Khalayleh as the green man because of the growing number of tattoos that covered his upper body, including an anchor on his right arm and three dots—a mark of the gang he’d joined—at the base of his left thumb. I always figured those were no more than simply signs of impulsive teenage rebelliousness; the booze and body art flew directly in the face of the orthodox Islam that Khalayleh’s mother, Dallah Ibrahim Mohammed al-Khalayleh, encouraged at home.
In 1987, the wayward young man was arrested for drug possession and sexual assault and sent to prison for two months. It was, ironically, the worst thing that could have happened. I learned quickly in CTC that nowhere do casual crime and revolutionary Islam intermingle better than in detention centers—and that’s especially true in Zarqa, a city that produced more foreign fighters than just about anyplace else in Jordan. Many Americans first heard of the city in 1993 as the hometown of Mohammed Salameh—the Islamic extremist who rented the van that accomplices loaded with explosives and drove into the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. That blast killed six people and injured one thousand more—but by then those detention centers in Zarqa had long acted as fanatical breeding grounds for people like Khalayleh.
Aimless and angry, with no educational underpinning to challenge the fanciful tales of jihad he had heard on the streets and in prison, Khalayleh served his first prison stint, which marked a turning point in his life. Upon his release, I later found out, Khalayleh’s mother insisted that a rigorous religious education could be his path to salvation, and suddenly Khalayleh seemed eager. She arranged a marriage for him—to his first cousin Intisar Baqr al Umari—and led Khalayleh to Zarqa’s Al Hussein bin Ali mosque, where he became a fixture.
I’ve always wondered if Dallah al-Khalayleh understood the kinds of sermons that were being delivered there, because for months her son was steeped in fiery frontline reports from Jordanian mujahideen who had returned from Afghanistan. There they had joined the flood of Arab fighters who were helping Afghans battle back against the Russians, who had invaded nine years earlier. The ghastly conflict had claimed roughly one million civilian lives, but ultimately the outgunned Afghans prevailed against the Red Army—a sign from God, the returning mujahideen said, if ever there was one.
In no time Khalayleh devoted himself fully to jihad—partly, I’ve always believed, for its larger sense of calling and purpose but also for the simple macho adrenaline fix. He gave up alcohol and tried to carve off or burn his tattoos, a key identifier in the photos of him we’d later collect. Then, in 1989, Khalayleh himself headed off to fight—stopping first in Peshawar, Pakistan, then traveling on to Afghanistan. However, the squat young would-be mujahid arrived in Herat, in far western Afghanistan, just as the Russians vacated that final stronghold in the country, and suddenly there was no one left to kill. Khalayleh spent the next three years with a pen instead, acting as a roving reporter and interviewing other jihadists about their
experiences in and around Afghanistan for the radical Islamist magazine Al Bunyan al Marsus (The well-ordered structure).
During Khalayleh’s years as a reporter, we later discovered, his radical ideologies were further shaped by a man who would soon become his spiritual leader: Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, an ideologue and central cleric in the growing, ultraconservative Sunni Muslim doctrine of Salafism. While the most common form of Salafi dogma preached a return to Sharia law and the ways of Prophet Muhammad, Maqdisi’s was a particularly virulent strain that came to be known as Salafi-jihadism, which encourages violent extremism to achieve those ends.
Khalayleh and Maqdisi formed an instant connection. The Salafi scholar, seven years Khalayleh’s elder, had lived for a time in the Palestinian refugee camp the troubled teenager had seen through his schoolhouse window. Maqdisi found in Khalayleh an eager student who soaked up every word of his sermons: the idea that God, not man, was the source of power, and that His word was the one true law; that a nonbeliever, including a Muslim who does not fully apply Sharia law, is a heretic—a kuffar, in extremist slang—and that the pursuit of a pure Islamic caliphate is justified.
Those principles spoke directly to Khalayleh’s sense of black-and-white righteousness. I’ve always thought the impressionable extremist probably saw Maqdisi as the father figure he’d long been lacking. With that inspiration, Khalayleh renamed himself in honor of Musab bin Umayer, an ancient warrior for Prophet Muhammad whom extremists consider a patron saint of suicide bombers. Khalayleh then adopted a surname that paid homage to his blue-collar breeding ground, Zarqa. He became the literal and figurative Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
