by Nada Bakos
The whole plan struck us as a little Scooby-Doo, but I was eager to try anything that might make Evil Hagrid more cooperative. I felt like we were finally showing real initiative. So Percy and the interrogator headed into the prison to collect him, and the case officer and I took our places in a side passageway of the bomb shelter.
Soon after, Percy and the interrogator arrived at the shelter with a guard and Evil Hagrid in tow. Ankle shackles scuffed along the dirt floor. I peered around the corner from my passageway as the group flowed toward a set of plastic chairs sitting beneath a single overhead light. Then, as they fanned out, my first glimpse of the prisoner made me rethink everything.
Evil Hagrid was tall, with broad shoulders and large hands, resting there on the arms of his chair. The former IIS officer was relatively clean-shaven, but his overall hairiness was apparent from the greasy tufts that popped up around the sweat-stained collar of his shirt. That’s what an assassin and murderer looks like, I thought, recalling his role in the IIS. Suddenly, as I watched the guard leave the shelter, I was glad I wasn’t in that cramped central room with Evil Hagrid and the others.
Not that the passageway in that bomb shelter was my idea of fun, either. It was pitch black and for the vast majority of the time uninhabited. That meant it had likely become a den for every bug, animal, and snake found in the Iraqi desert. I really don’t care for most reptiles when they are within arm’s reach, and I really don’t care for spiders—yet the case officer and I could hardly take a step without clearing out cobwebs with our faces. There in the shadows, I did my best to focus on the conversation with Evil Hagrid, but I was regularly distracted by the sound of something scurrying or slithering nearby.
Thankfully, every so often, the interrogator would take a break from the conversation with Evil Hagrid “to check on the situation in the prison,” he said. He’d pop out the front door of the bomb shelter, then swing around to one of its side exits, where I’d emerge from the passageway to meet him. Then, after a good shakedown to be sure I wasn’t covered in scorpions, I’d suggest a few questions for Evil Hagrid to help the interrogator home in on various details, and we’d both head back to our spots in the shelter.
And then, suddenly, in the middle of one round of questioning, the interrogator simply got up and walked out. He left the shelter entirely, with no warning, no explanation, no anything. My jaw dropped. Was he ill? Was that a mind game he was playing with Evil Hagrid?
As quickly as we could, the case officer and I slipped out the side exit of the shelter and raced around front to see what was going on. The interrogator was already well across the gravel lot, heading into another nearby building. “Be right back,” he yelled.
“Oh,” the interrogator added, with a gesture in Evil Hagrid’s general direction, “don’t let him leave.” Then he turned and kept walking.
I froze in my tracks. The MP who’d escorted Evil Hagrid into the shelter was nowhere to be found. I glanced at the spindly case officer and guessed that he and I were the same weight—and that even combined, we might equal Evil Hagrid’s size. There had been nothing inside the shelter to chain that giant to. How on earth would we stop him if he wanted to leave?
“Do you have a gun?” I asked the case officer.
“No,” he said. “You?”
“Uh-uh.”
We looked back at the pyramidal bomb shelter.
“Okay,” the officer said. He ran to the outside of the shelter and walked up one side of the pyramid. Then he shimmied his wispy frame out to the edge of the stone header above the main entranceway.
“If he comes out,” the officer said, “tell me and I will jump on him.” He made a gesture that looked like a high dive. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I think we were both being sarcastic at first, then realized this really was our only option to slow him down, which was all we really needed to do.
I thought for a minute. “Maybe Percy—”
Then I caught myself. I’d completely forgotten about our loyal translator sitting there alone in the bomb shelter with a murderer. Oh, God, I thought.
I sneaked back through the side exit into the dirty passageway. I took a quick glance into the central room, where Evil Hagrid was still seated with his back to the door. I could see that Percy, seated in front of him, farthest from me, was managing to act like this was routine. They were even chatting a little, although given their size difference, Percy had to have felt far more like the captive at that point. An eternity seemed to tick by. I couldn’t imagine what was going through our translator’s mind.
Seeing no way to help in there, I hustled back out the side door of the shelter, did my anti-scorpion shimmy, then raced around to the front, waving my arms the whole time to keep “Spider-Man”—the case officer—from jumping on my head. Thankfully, when I got there, I saw the interrogator heading back to the shelter.
“All right,” he said nonchalantly as he walked past me. “I’m back.”
He offered no explanation, and I was too frenzied to ask.
“Okay,” I said. The case officer climbed down from atop the doorway.
I’m still not sure exactly what Percy said to Evil Hagrid during those harried few minutes when they were alone, but it seemed to have worked, at least relatively speaking. Evil Hagrid soon offered the most relaxed account of his intelligence work that any of us had heard to that point. Whether he was rattled by the change of scenery, felt some sense of gratitude to us for protecting him from a made-up prison riot, or just enjoyed the one-on-one conversation with a fellow native Arabic speaker, we felt he was being honest. As was typical, Evil Hagrid offered no grand revelations, but the quest to gather a few new pieces of intelligence and corroborate a few working theories had been a success.
For me, it marked an interesting interlude in the former IIS officer’s time in detention, which continued long after I left Iraq. Following that day in the bomb shelter, Evil Hagrid repeatedly told other Agency questioners just what he’d told us: he had no knowledge of any relationship between Iraq and al Qaida or of WMD stockpiles. Those answers continually contradicted the narrative being put forth by the White House, apparently frustrating the administration no end.
Evil Hagrid may have been evil, and possibly a murderer, but he was in prison for being a former Baath Party official.
CHAPTER 7
Strategy, What Strategy?
Walking back to my cot late that night, after sending a cable about Evil Hagrid, I couldn’t let go of the White House fixation on him and figures like him. Why were we wasting our time with those guys?
Sure, I understood that the coalition needed to be comfortable that former IIS elements didn’t have a dangerous counterattack waiting up their sleeves. But outside the airport perimeter during May and June of 2003, more than one US soldier was killed each day. Pressing former government officers for historical information was quintessential backward-looking analysis at a time when the seeds of chaos in Iraq were already being sown—whether anyone in the administration wanted to acknowledge it or not. That was the forward-looking component I felt was missing from the conversation.
I had not been privy to the five-phase plan the Pentagon had sketched out before the war, but entering the terminal that night, I tried to put myself in the position of a war strategist. The US government’s initial planning and decision making (Phase 0) had led seamlessly to the positioning of initial coalition forces in the region (Phase I), which had enabled the attack on Hussein’s regime (Phase II). Phase III, the complete and systematic destruction of the regime, was then under way—both militarily and administratively. And that’s where I stopped following the logic.
I later had a conversation with a military officer who was assigned to US Central Command days before the invasion. When he arrived, he walked into the middle of a Hawaiian-themed party—complete with Hawaiian shirts—hosted by General Tommy Franks. His first questions were: Where are the war plans? And what is our strategy afterward? He was met with a blank stare.
In an effort to fully cleanse the new government of Hussein’s legacy, CPA Order Number 1 decreed that former Baath officials could not have roles in Iraq’s future unified government. “Noting the grave concern of Iraqi society regarding the threat posed by the continuation of Ba‘ath Party networks and personnel in the administration of Iraq,” the order read, “members of the Ba‘ath Party… are her[e]by removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector.”
I later came to realize that Doug Feith was the architect of this plan. It was quickly blessed by Rumsfeld without allowing time for consideration by the National Security Council.
I had been stunned by what seemed like such a cavalier dismissal of roughly eighty-five thousand government workers—including the leadership of ministries that oversaw the hospitals as well as communications, electrical, and transportation infrastructure, and more. Most of us at the CIA, including then director Tenet, had been shocked by the move. “We knew nothing about it until de-Baathification was a fait accompli,” Tenet later wrote. “Clearly, this was a critical policy decision, yet there was no [National Security Council] Principals meeting to debate the move.” But Bremer felt strongly that those party members were the “true believers” in Hussein’s regime, he later wrote in his memoir, and thus they needed to go. Clearly, I decided as I walked past another taped-off restroom in our terminal, the CIA would just have to forget about hiring someone to fix our plumbing.
CPA Order Number 2 completely disbanded the Iraqi security forces, as Washington decided that Baghdad should build new ones from scratch. Suddenly the ranks of the unemployed included some 385,000 former Iraqi soldiers; 285,000 workers from the Ministry of Interior, including police officers and other domestic security officers; and 50,000 guards from Hussein’s presidential security units, including the Republican Guard. Almost overnight, a half million Iraqis were without jobs. Most were in desperate need of a paycheck, and all seemed very angry.
The sad irony was that those orders made in the name of stability virtually guaranteed the opposite. They alienated hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while simultaneously collapsing their social and economic infrastructure and crippling their everyday security. The CPA’s first two orders directly created the potential for the kinds of rogue former-Iraqi-government elements the White House had been fixated upon. Whether their anger might lead aggrieved former soldiers to align with the rising tide of foreign fighters in Iraq was of decided interest to me.
I could tell at the time that those everyday security considerations resonated with me more than they did with some of my coworkers in Iraq. By July of that year, two months after the CPA decrees, I could sense a shift in attitudes on the ground. On my periodic drives from BIAP into Baghdad, I saw fewer people on the streets. On the sidewalks, passersby glared at me rather than glanced. That included Iraqi women, who when I first arrived in country had been generous and friendly to me. By then, they were traveling only in groups, and it appeared that they went about on foot as little as possible.
The reason for that development, I feared, had to do with the sharp increase in anecdotal reports we’d been receiving of sexual assaults and abductions of women and children. The CPA-mandated disbanding of Iraqi police and investigative units, which preceded the apparent spike in violence, also guaranteed that there would be little comprehensive documentation of it. Identifying the perpetrators was equally hard to do. But the toll on the victims was becoming immense. I read one Human Rights Watch report, released in July, that detailed the cases of two dozen women and children who’d been raped during the previous few weeks. That growing trend, Human Rights Watch concluded, was “keeping [women] in their homes, out of schools, and away from work and looking for employment.”
Unfortunately, I found, as much as the US government focused on interdicting and eliminating obvious weapons of war in Iraq, it seemed to pay little mind to the prevalence of sexualized violence there. In the hypermasculine business of war, where combatants’ masculinity is always insecure, rape offers a brutal avenue through which men can assert their physical superiority. That horrific tool of war generates far fewer headlines, yet its ramifications can be similarly destructive. In Iraq, where the women I passed on the sidewalk were largely responsible for the day-to-day well-being of the children and the elderly, abuses and fears that disrupted their daily lives also tore at the larger fabric of their families, affecting fathers and husbands as well. I’m sure none of the male war architects back in Washington had thought to factor female engagement into their plans for Iraq—but I’m convinced that by the summer of 2003, it was one obvious reason why US forces weren’t actually being greeted as liberators.
On a more tangible level, I was also convinced at the time that overlooking those assaults allowed us to miss tactical clues about the road ahead. The sheer numbers of and sudden increase in sexualized assaults in Iraq, I was hearing, were far outside the norm for the country’s cultured, largely well-educated society. The trend seemed to me far more reminiscent of the endless assaults that were seen as mere patriarchal privilege throughout the tribal areas of Afghanistan and other foreign extremist strongholds. That it was now happening in Iraq, I thought, might be a real indicator of whom, exactly, the coalition was up against.
I knew rape had the potential to become a grotesque recruiting tool for an extremist group. Wayward men might be attracted to the cause, thanks in part to the perverse theology that encouraged them to assault non-Muslim women. Meanwhile, for Muslim women victims, who were believed to have brought shame on their families, there was an even more harrowing possibility: becoming weapons themselves. Many raped women believed that under strict Sharia law, their families’ “honor” could be restored through their holy martyrdom.
Back at our terminal following the Evil Hagrid fiasco, I finally made it to the “bedroom.” It was dark at that hour—1:00 a.m. Sitting on my cot with a late-night “mystery” MRE in hand, I realized how clearly my frustration with the government’s blind spots in Iraq was beginning to color my attitude on a daily basis.
In a literal sense, by the summer of 2003, almost six months after the invasion, the military operation in Iraq no longer featured the battle lines and face-to-face opposition that defined traditional large-scale engagements. We had won that part of the fight; the Pentagon was no longer worried about whether it could take and hold ground. To complete the final push to eradicate Hussein’s regime and other tricky individual targets, military planners had decided that small, nimble units would be free to organize raids and crash through doors with blinding efficiency in small-scale battles the American public would rarely know anything about. Achieving that vision, however, required following through on a collaborative combat structure three decades in the making—one that would cast a long shadow over my career with the CIA.
When I arrived in Iraq, that secretive collection of special operators was made up of members of the army special operators, navy special operators, and other units, including coalition forces. The task force that encompassed all the units was also based at BIAP. The Chinooks I heard flying low over the terminal in the wee hours of the morning almost certainly served as transportation for their missions.
The task force operators had been focused on searching out figures from the Bush administra
tion’s deck of terrorist playing cards. The US military had proved themselves to be equal-opportunity snatch-and-grab artists, conducting multiple weekly missions to apprehend suspected insurgent bomb makers and handle other high-stakes engagements.
I noticed there were differences between the army special operators and the navy special operators. The army guys had a steely focus about them, emphasizing thorough plans and clear processes for their missions. They were almost aloof at times, and I came to appreciate their quiet professionalism. Talking to navy special operators, on the other hand, tended to feel like being back at a college fraternity party. They were the ones who tended to boast or get in your face. Though as members of perhaps the world’s most iconic special operations unit, who’d then been handpicked to join an even more elite combined task force, they had reason to be boastful. And the creative flexibility they demonstrated on the fly was at times remarkable.
Regardless of their origin, the job for the men of the task force was both technically and tactically unconventional. In a technical sense, their focus on surgical strikes and close-quarters combat differentiated them from larger military units that fought conventional battles. In a fight as lopsided as the one between highly trained US special operators and bedraggled insurgents, however, killing and capturing enemy personnel was the easy part. The challenge was finding people and identifying the next target on such an irregular battlefield. “A single person can move around and hide,” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told reporters at the time. “The people on the Ten Most Wanted List for the FBI have been on that list for decades. So it’s hard.” The thing that made the task force tactically unconventional was that in order to achieve its goals, those men needed outside intelligence specialists to pinpoint which doors to crash through and to help make sense of what they found there. In short, they needed the Agency.
