by Nada Bakos
I have never understood vanity, for better or worse. While I have certainly had my fair share of angst over my weight, it wasn’t a priority for me. I wasn’t obsessing over achieving Barbie’s thigh gap; as a young girl I was more disgusted by the fact that Barbie couldn’t sit on my plastic horses without splitting off a leg. I also realized fairly quickly that the men who obsess over the idea of physically perfect women have self-esteem issues of their own and aren’t likely to be genuine. I had zero interest in even entertaining that possibility, no mental bandwidth for that kind of shallow obsession. I know that broaching the topic of weight only invites strangers to scrutinize me. But if the size of my thighs matters to some people, then it does.
Roger, of course, meant way more to me than those men who wrote to me. I was shocked that he’d say what he did, and it stung.
He left before digging himself in any further. My cell phone rang two minutes later.
I recognized Roger’s number and hit the End Call button, several times. I marched across the living room, threw open the bathroom door, and climbed onto the scale.
Standing there alone, I realized that I had actually put on fifteen pounds. Quickly.
Oh.
My phone rang again. I stood there clenching my jaw at the scale, men, and my life.
There was still no reason for Roger to have said what he did. I can’t imagine his reaction if I’d ever said the same to him. He wasn’t exactly svelte at the time either. But at least technically speaking, I suppose his assessment hadn’t been entirely inaccurate. Clearly, stress-eating and a few too many second breakfasts during the night shift at work did have some downsides.
Once he found the right words to apologize, I forgave him.
In truth, that was merely the most obvious example of the fact that my friends and family understood only the broadest strokes of what I did all day and the impact it had on me. They never knew many details; I really couldn’t talk about it. So by the start of 2003, Roger mostly came to know my vacant stare into the middle distance as I sat at home in the evenings, trying to make sense of some late-breaking news and wishing I had more sleep.
In the Iraq unit, I couldn’t physically take classified work home with me, but I found quickly that it was never far from my mind.
In hopes of making myself invaluable around the office, I said yes to everything. Did a policy maker need an assessment of the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s force protection capabilities in the event of an American invasion? “I’ll do it,” I said.
Someone to take on the 4:00 a.m. briefer shift? “No problem.”
And in early May of 2003, two months after the US-led invasion, I became the second member of my team to volunteer for a temporary-duty assignment in Iraq. I thought it might be something like my brief time in Kosovo, only more raw. A few weeks later, I boarded a late-night commercial flight at Dulles International Airport bound for a transit point in the Middle East. At 5:00 a.m. the next day, a driver picked me up at my hotel and delivered me to a nearby private runway, where airmen were finishing driving a white Toyota truck up the tail ramp of a one-hundred-foot-long air force C-130 cargo plane.
Looking at the plane, I thought back to CAP training. Our class, escorted by a representative for George Tenet, then the director of Central Intelligence, had flown out to Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska, the home of US Strategic Command. That office was first established by the Department of Defense to oversee US nuclear defenses in the aftermath of the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the years, Strategic Command grew to have a hand in cyberwarfare, missile defense, and reconnaissance and surveillance, among other things. Our class had visited to understand the key interplay and cooperation that were possible between the military and the CIA.
An air force sergeant gave us the tour. Walking along the empty tarmac, he began to tell us about the military’s unmanned aircraft capabilities and the air force’s latest intelligence collection mission. Then he stopped. “I’m not sure you guys are actually cleared to hear this,” he said.
“Sergeant,” Tenet’s rep had said plainly, “these analysts have more security clearances than you do, your commanding officer does, and his commanding officer does beyond that. Finish your story.”
The sergeant paused for a moment, then continued. Dennis and I glanced at each other.
Almost two years later, standing on the moonlit Middle Eastern tarmac at 5:00 a.m. en route to Baghdad, I could have used a dose of that rookie confidence. At the front of the C-130, I climbed the four metal steps of the fold-down crew entry door. Inside the plane, rows of orange nylon seats ran down the spartan sidewalls of the aircraft, flanking the truck and a dozen pallets of miscellaneous gear strapped to the floor. I never found out what that bundled material was; it could have been anything from weapons to watermelons. Outsiders call the C-130 “Hercules”; they also have the nickname “trash haulers.” They aren’t exactly built for comfort.
By sunrise we were off the ground. I made quick introductions with the handful of other Agency personnel who were belted in beside me. They were officers from the Agency’s other main branch, the Directorate of Operations—the spies and case officers who help gather intelligence on the ground. They didn’t offer last names, and I presume none of them used their real first names, either.
I spoke as little as possible. Confident as I was by then in my abilities back in the Iraq unit, being a thirty-two-year-old woman who wasn’t an operations officer in a cargo plane full of experienced officers, heading to my first war zone, felt very different. Pretty much by definition, analysts aren’t often sent to the front lines. But in the aftermath of the US invasion, a shift in protocol was rapidly becoming necessary.
In the year after President Bush’s May 2003 declaration that major combat operations had ended in Iraq, some twelve thousand Iraqis were taken into custody by American forces for a whole host of offenses, both real and—at times—imagined. Once those detainees arrived back at US bases, however, the military often had no good way of interpreting or verifying the information that came from prisoner interrogations, nor did the officers necessarily understand where new leads might come from. They had enough trouble positively identifying insurgents, who weren’t in the habit of telling their captors their real names. To help, the military needed Agency analysts who had come to understand the enemy and its network better than anyone else in the world. But there in the Hercules, peering through the orange mesh behind me, watching the desert unspool through a tiny porthole, I began to realize just what I’d gotten myself into.
First, I couldn’t remember my proof-of-life statement. That’s on a form I’d filled out when I was first hired. It contains a predetermined set of words the Agency keeps on file in case employees in the field are abducted. In the event of a kidnapping in Iraq, I’d inevitably be paraded in front of a video camera. If there was any way to manage communicating with the outside world, I could say those exact words, and Agency personnel would trust that I was actually still alive and would continue hunting for me. Forgetting those words wasn’t ideal, let’s put it that way.
On the other hand, the so-called Green Zone was just beginning to coalesce in Baghdad as a placeholder for the Coalition Provisional Authority—the government that was slated to temporarily govern Iraq after Hussein was deposed. The Agency will probably just stick me in some walled compound, I told myself, and that will be that.
Doubt, however, crept in again. It occurred to me in that C-130 that I had no real clue how to fire a handgun. This is a war zone, I thought. Shouldn’t I know how to do that?
Unfortunately, handgun training had fallen by the wayside in my initial predeployment preparation. Going down the Agency’s checklist, I’d gotten all my necessary documentation, attended a few short courses on field tradecraft in the region, and even managed an Agency-sponsored shopping spree at the massive REI store near Langley. But all that prep meant being out of the office at a time when I was becoming an ever-larger co
ntributor in our unit. So when I tried to schedule myself at the CIA’s weeklong weapons training program, our team’s group chief, whom we will refer to as Cornelius—an overworked Agency long-timer one rung above Katherine in command—nixed the request. “I’d rather have you come back in a body bag than let you miss more time for that,” he muttered. He was the boss, so I didn’t push back. At times he could be intimidating as he rounded the corner heading to Katherine’s office with his blocky jaw and starched white shirts that always billowed around his towering frame, but he was also capable of real persuasiveness and charm.
Staring out the window at the desert, I hoped he wasn’t about to get his wish.
But as the hours rolled by and I reflected on all the coffee I’d had that morning, a more pressing concern hit me in the C-130: I really have to pee.
“Honey bucket’s in the aft of the plane, ma’am,” one airman said.
“Oh, okay?” I said.
I unhooked my belt and clambered around the white pickup to the rear of the cargo hold. There, seeing no other option, I slid aside a matte-gray shower curtain clipped to some piping overhead. Behind it, I found a little step that led to a five-gallon stainless steel pot bolted to the wall: the honey bucket, as generations of airmen have called it.
I spun in a circle to see if the curtain was securely closed. Turning back to the pot, I noted the multicolored bungee cord lashed diagonally across the front of it—which suddenly made sense as a rattle of turbulence almost knocked me off my feet.
Under the bucket’s lid, I found a frigid metal seat with little hooks underneath where the user could hang a plastic bag. (I certainly hadn’t thought to bring one of those.) A spent roll of toilet paper hung nearby. I stood there, staring at the whole thing, then checked my watch and tried to guess how much longer I could hold it.
Later, I learned that everyone has a favorite honey-bucket story—from under-the-weather pilots who couldn’t free themselves from their flight suits in time to passengers who were dumped on the floor with their pants around their ankles, frantically clutching for the curtain. Or maybe for their self-esteem. In that moment, though, I just sighed.
That mantra proved prescient for my time in Iraq, particularly when it came to aircraft. Flight plans during my time in theater would consistently be disrupted and rescheduled. I would eventually make my peace with the landing maneuver planes used on their final approach to the Baghdad airport to evade possible enemy small-arms fire. For a moment, every time, I could swear we were weightless and in free fall. In helicopters, I even got used to seeing what appeared to be glowing cinders knifing over the cockpit and arcing off into the distance.
“What was that?” I asked the first time it happened.
“Tracer fire,” the copilot had said. “They’re shootin’ at us.”
CHAPTER 5
Looking for Unicorns
The cargo ramp of the C-130 opened into a broiler.
It must have been 110 degrees by the time we landed at Baghdad International Airport—my first day in a war zone. Around me, a handful of the CIA’s logistics crew scrambled to offload the gear.
Military trucks roared by in the distance. Beyond them, a collection of tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters fluttered on the horizon like chubby hummingbirds. In May of 2003, that airport was home to many of the 150,000 US troops in Iraq at the time, and it was the transit hub for almost all of them.
I stood motionless for a moment on the ramp, taking it all in. Even with my sunglasses on, I thought the entire tableau appeared white, as though someone had mishandled the exposure on a photograph.
Behind me, the white truck rolled out of the tail of the plane and came to a stop nearby. I jumped into the bed of the truck with my other colleagues from the flight, and one of the Agency’s logistics officers drove us through the dusty haze to a Baghdad terminal at the airport, my new home.
Like the rest of the country, Baghdad International, or BIAP, was itself at a crossroads. In the early 1980s, when the French built the airport, Iraqi leaders had hoped the civilian terminal there would handle 7.5 million passengers a year. But then Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the United Nations responded by grounding most of the civilian flights. So by the time I arrived, that terminal was mostly a tacky homage to a bygone era, with its arcing silver rafters and funky green hues mirroring the palm trees outside.
The scale of US military operations on those six square miles of airport grounds, however, was staggering to me. Cruising across it in the pickup, I knew we were driving through the heart of a growing constellation of military camps that would be built on and directly around BIAP, which together came to be known as the Victory Base Complex.
Among that cluster was Camp Sather, on the western side of the airport, named after Staff Sergeant Scott Sather, who a month earlier had become the first airman killed in the war. Even at a quick glance, I recognized how unique that air force outpost was: the edges of the property were well-groomed, with flags lining the driveway. The 132-tent camp acted largely as a conduit for virtually all personnel and materiel transiting through BIAP. Planes such as my C-130 landed, were serviced, and were reloaded there by the air force, then promptly sent on their way again.
We soon pulled up outside the terminal, which had none of the tidiness of Camp Sather. I hopped off the back of the pickup and grabbed my backpack. Suddenly another logistics officer appeared at the tailgate and said he’d be glad to move my bags into my housing quarters. Wow, I thought. That’s unexpected service.
Outside the door to the terminal, I noticed a brown metal barrel that looked like a deep umbrella stand. A sign on it read: LONG GUNS TO BE PLACED HERE. PROHIBITED INSIDE THE TERMINAL. “Long guns” essentially meant anything bigger than a handgun. On the other side of the doorway was a second metal barrel. The sign on that one read: CHEMICAL SUITS.
Suddenly the logistics worker tapped me on the shoulder. “Nada,” he said, “your bags are in your quarters, next to your husband’s.”
I was confused. “I don’t have a husband that I know of,” I said. I tried a little levity. “Unless that’s my cover?”
“You are Nada?” he replied, adding a surname that wasn’t mine.
“Oh, no,” I said, offering up something I don’t think I’d ever said before. “That’s a different Nada.”
I soon wished I had her private room. As I walked through the terminal, I could see that the marble floor was dusty. Supply boxes and meals ready to eat, or MREs, lined the walls, and sleeping cots were wedged into just about every empty space. I followed a hallway that led into a larger building, just one of Hussein’s seventy-five or so former palaces. At least our terminal was simple in comparison: most of Saddam’s opulent structures came with garish names, such as the Victory over Iran Palace, commemorating the disastrous eight-year war he began with neighboring Iran in the 1980s, and the Victory over America Palace, in honor of the first Gulf War. As one US military historian drily put it, “Any war that Saddam survived was a victory.”
Like those other palaces, however, our terminal was a sight to behold—and that was true even after American forces had shot their way through it. I made my way beneath its grand, arching doorways of deep brown wood and down hallways whose walls and floors had been lined with two-foot-by-two-foot white marble slabs. There were black-and-red marble inlays in the floor, spaced just so to mirror the horizontal lines of the Iraqi flag. The ornate green light fixtures mounted high on the walls mirrored the green Allahu akbar inscription Hussein had ordered put on the flag in 1991. I marveled at how skilled the craftsmen must have been who built this place and how wasted their talents were in building it for someone like Hussein.
The invasion, of course, had done the palace no favors. Walking down the hall, I saw one window after another shattered or duct-taped, shot out by soldiers or blown out by blasts in the assault on the airport. There were shell casings and broken furniture in heaps on the floor of one room I passed. A stack of picked-over MREs in their grayish-bro
wn pouches sat in another. I stuck my head in; a military veteran had told me to look for the vegetarian variety, so I grabbed one of those. I would soon learn, though, that regardless of what the label said, all MREs taste about the same anyway.
The palace plumbing had been blasted into oblivion, but the Agency’s logistics team had been able to magically hook up a shower trailer that worked most of the time. If nothing else, there was a pump out back where I could collect water for a sponge bath and for filling a little washing machine. I never took for granted even those rudimentary creature comforts; many of the Marines there were sleeping on the hoods of their Humvees and keeping up their hygiene however they could. Outside the airport grounds, it was even worse. Bombing and combat—followed by opportunistic looting by locals—had devastated Baghdad’s already antiquated sewage and water infrastructure. Electricity was hardly a given. The Iraqis had it far worse than we did.
In the middle of the terminal, I found my cot. There were at least forty others just like it in the same room, heads against the wall, feet pointing toward the center. I set my backpack on an empty one fairly near the door.
The close quarters were one thing. But suddenly my ears pricked up with the sound of metallic clinks and scrapes echoing off the walls. Behind me, a handful of soldiers on cots were cleaning the long guns they hadn’t left in the barrel outside. If a round discharges in here, I thought, it will ricochet like a pinball.
Before long, my self-guided tour took me back outside the terminal, to my “office” for the next three months.
A row of unmarked double-wide trailers anchored in the packed dirt. That handful of SCIFs, or sensitive compartmented information facilities, was the equivalent of vaults back at Agency headquarters. The trailers, which had been configured with a dozen or more workstations in each, featured high-tech soundproofing and were impermeable to radio frequencies; there were bars over the ductwork, multiple door locks, and an assortment of highly regimented safety measures. I’d been in Baghdad only a few hours, but I was already impressed by the Agency’s infrastructure.
