by Nada Bakos
Nearly seventy years old at the time, Hussein’s former deputy prime minister had negotiated his surrender shortly after the US invasion, reportedly waiting out the government overthrow in the comfort of his sister-in-law’s home in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood. After giving US officials his location, Aziz was quietly detained by coalition forces in the middle of the night. There were no shots fired during the arrest, and neighbors said that when the military left, Aziz and a few others accompanied them in the backs of luxury cars. At the time I met him, the eight of spades in the Bush administration’s deck of wanted Iraqi fugitives was the highest-ranking detainee held at Cropper.
Aziz, I knew, always pegged himself as something of a showman. With thinning white hair swept straight back, he even looked the part. His looks made him well suited to act as Hussein’s key spokesman during international trips, as Hussein rarely left Iraq because of security concerns. Aziz had even traveled to the Vatican a month before the US invasion to implore the Holy Father to intercede before conflict erupted. If anyone was in a position to have genuine insight into Hussein’s thought processes, it was Aziz.
Early on in my time at BIAP, I’d sat in on a debriefing of the former deputy prime minister conducted by senior CIA officers in Baghdad. I was just part of the crew then, listening for disparities, but unlike Evil Hagrid, he was so cooperative that he wanted to tell his side of the story not only to us but also to 60 Minutes. He had said Saddam did not trust al Qaida or any other radical Islamist group and didn’t want to cooperate with them, even though he said Saddam viewed al Qaida as an effective terrorist organization for the way they attacked the United States.
I had planned on speaking with Aziz alone at some point, but when I got word one morning in late summer that he’d collapsed in his cell from heat stroke, I figured I’d better meet him sooner rather than later. I’d been told he had a history of heart attacks, which might have played a part in his decision to surrender, and that he’d been moved to the nearby infirmary. Either way, I thought, debriefing an official in his makeshift BIAP hospital room would be more interesting than staring at the listless gray hangar walls where I’d been working. The relatively relaxed security at the medical facility gave me an idea, too.
Aziz seemed to me a cantankerous cynic, and I was sure that prison life didn’t appeal to his urbane sensibilities. The majority of photos I’d seen of Aziz showed him with a Davidoff Dom Perignon cigar clenched between his teeth, a bushy white mustache, and thick black glasses sitting high on his nose. On my way to the hospital I rounded up a few oranges and a pack of cigarettes.
As Percy and I entered Aziz’s steamy hospital room, I set the fruit and Marlboros on the squat white end table next to his bed. His glasses rested there, too: a large indentation was visible on the bridge of his nose, where they normally sat. Aziz rolled his head toward us on his pillow and noted the nearby fruit. He watched as Percy and I found a seat on the cot right across from him. I was curious to see what Aziz might do next.
In Middle Eastern culture, the concept of personal space is very different from what it is in the Western world. Americans keep a comfortable two or three feet of distance between us and people we speak with. In Iraq, I’d quickly seen how that arm’s length of space disappeared among men, who stood practically on top of one another as they talked. On the other hand, the opposite holds true when men interact with women. Even shaking hands can be an affront, as Islam generally prohibits men from having physical contact with a woman who is not a spouse or family member.
In that hospital room, Aziz sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bed until our knees nearly touched. He leaned toward me. It seemed like a casual show of dominance, but I didn’t flinch. In a room with no air-conditioning, I could see the sweat beading on his brow and spotting his hospital gown. Aziz looked me directly in the eyes.
“What is your name?” he said in fluent English.
“Nada,” I replied. “It’s Czech.”
“Then your parents should have named you Nadia.”
He picked up the cigarettes and unwrapped the cellophane. He affected the air of a sophisticate.
“You know what Nada means in Arabic?” Aziz said.
“No,” I replied.
“The dew on the morning grass.”
Aziz lit the Marlboro and took a deep pull off it.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “Your real name.”
The sixty-seven-year-old gave a soft chuckle.
“Mikhail Yuhanna,” he said.
“Michael John,” I repeated.
Aziz acknowledged the translation with a quick flip of his eyebrows. “My family is Christian,” he said and offered a little shrug.
In Hussein’s regime, however, that Christianity warranted far more than a shrug. Born outside Mosul in 1936, according to my research, Yuhanna had earned his journalism degree at the precursor to the University of Baghdad, then joined the upstart Arab Socialist Baath Party movement there in the late 1950s. That’s where he met a young Saddam Hussein and changed his name to Tariq Aziz in a show of solidarity with his fellow revolutionaries, most of whom were Muslim.
As Hussein began rising through the Iraqi government ranks after a coup in the late 1960s, Aziz was brought along, ultimately holding a number of different jobs. In 1991, as foreign minister, Aziz disagreed with—yet ultimately fell in line with—the dictator’s decision to invade Kuwait. Hussein proceeded with the invasion even though, Aziz told me, he warned him that it likely would mean a disastrous war with the United States.
After that, partly because Aziz was right but mostly because he’d proved loyal, his prominence within the Iraqi government rose significantly. He told me proudly that “my friend Saddam” trusted him as a right-hand man, and, Aziz said, he knew more of the regime’s secrets than anyone.
“There are no weapons, if that’s what you want to know,” he added, blowing cigarette smoke in my direction.
“What was it like with Saddam at the end?”
The old diplomat began spinning a tale about a final meeting of the dictator’s inner circle hours before the war’s start. “The invasion was imminent,” he said. “Saddam said, ‘I have an escape plan. I will not tell you what it is in case you are captured and tortured. But I would advise all of you to have your own.’
“I laughed,” he continued. “I am the most recognized of Saddam’s deputies. I would be found anywhere. I just stayed home and waited for the military to pick me up.”
“Did you actually laugh at Saddam?” I asked. If so, I was surprised that Aziz hadn’t been shot right then and there.
“Of course,” he said. “What was he going to do to me?”
Aziz took another pull off the cigarette and sat back. He pulled his robe loose from around his waist, fanning himself in the sweltering heat. He was cheekily giving me an eyeful of his tighty whities. I didn’t offer a reaction; I knew he was waiting for one.
Before I could get out my next question, however, Percy—who’d been silent this whole time—walked over to the bed, pointed at me, and riffed off a few stern lines in Arabic. It was as stern as I’d ever seen him. Aziz responded with a sheepish smirk and closed his robe. He reminded me of every belligerent nursing home patient I’d ever seen pass the time by coming up with new ways to shock the staff.
“Terrorists,” I said to the former prime minister. “Sunni jihadists. Was Hussein inviting them into Iraq?”
“No, no,” Aziz said. “Saddam didn’t care about religion until the last few years, when he needed support. But there was no cooperation with jihadists—Saddam cared about maintaining a strong Iraq. He cared about standing up to Iran.
“I’m Christian,” Aziz added. “Saddam didn’t care. So just look at me.”
Those final words hung there in the steamy hospital room. Aziz looked down at the cigarette in his hand.
“You hold me in these cells. Why?” he said. “I was a politician. I was not perfect. But I have not committed any crimes against c
ivilians.”
I could hear the agitation in his voice and wondered if he was having second thoughts about surrendering. Either way, I sensed our productive conversation was finished. As Percy and I got up to leave, I told Aziz that I might be back. We headed for the door, but I heard every word Aziz called after us.
“What will be left once America leaves?” he muttered. “There is no electricity. No food. There are no services for people.”
CHAPTER 9
The Real CIA Must Be in the Basement—We’re Just the Cover
By the end of July in 2003, my workdays were fully blurring together. I’d take note of a new name here, or some unexpected piece of information there, but many of those conversations with detainees felt like an utter waste of time. As a likely outgrowth of the US military response to an increase in attacks, Cropper was never in short supply of inmates, but ten minutes spent talking to most of them showed me how few deserved to be locked up in the first place.
This fact was further driven home to me one afternoon when Ron, Percy, and I sat down with an impossibly upbeat prisoner to talk about ties he might have to extremist groups.
“Can you tell us why you were with the group who was shooting at the US military outside the cell-phone store?” Percy translated the question.
“Me? No!” he said. “I’ve been in Baghdad all my life!” Even in a language I didn’t speak, he had the delivery of a guy trying to buy me a beer.
“We’re seeing more attacks here by the airport lately,” Ron said. “Who’s organizing them?”
“Attacks? How would I know?” the detainee said. “You can come to my house, yes? I’ll show you a photo of me with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on my head! You think jihadists do that?”
That I could believe. He even gave us a rundown of all his favorite hip-hop artists, and Ron gave him a few more names to look up when he got released. A year later, a scathing Red Cross report bore out what I knew: roughly 70 to 90 percent of Iraqis detained from April through December of 2003 were arrested by mistake. I had no doubt this whiskey-loving gentleman—who’d been brought in for thumbing his cell phone, theoretically a trigger mechanism for a roadside bomb, while he was near a military convoy—was one of them.
Ron planted his hands on the table and leaned over to look the inmate in the eyes. It wasn’t particularly menacing, just probing. “Seriously,” Ron said. “You don’t speak any English at all?”
Percy translated the question. The detainee sat silent for a moment, then smiled. “Beer before liquor,” he said. “I could not be sicker!”
I laughed. This guy was actually refreshing. He said he was a bit of a busybody who was calling his friend to talk about a raid happening next door when he was arrested. That’s what the cell phone was for. He proceeded to tell us about the parties he liked to throw and the crazy things his friends did when they got drunk. For a moment, I was almost transported back to college.
“Come on,” I finally said to Ron as we called for the guard. “I think we can tell them they can let this guy go.”
Ron and I walked outside the hangar for some relatively fresh air. He didn’t share my sense of amusement. “This is a waste of time,” he muttered. “What do they expect us to learn from those guys?”
“What do you think the weapons team is hearing?” I said. “They’ve been out there talking to people in the city. That’s got to offer more perspective than we’re getting here.”
With that the two of us changed our plan for the day and hunted down a Toyota parked near Cropper.
The pickup was one of a dozen or so the Agency had flown in for use by CIA personnel. Unlike the Pentagon, whose employees went around in armored carriers, and the State Department and USAID, whose diplomats were transported in caravans of fortified Chevy Suburbans, the CIA wanted its employees to operate anonymously. To blend in. So we drove this fleet of well-used trucks. Someone had hung trinkets from the rearview mirrors of the pickups, and from a distance, anyway, they looked like any other everyday truck we came across in Baghdad.
I always enjoyed the freedom of driving, ever since my childhood days on my grandparents’ farm. In some ways, driving one of the CIA’s Toyotas felt a little bit like being back home again. Just as important, those few minutes of motoring around provided a great opportunity to kvetch with coworkers about the food on base, about the overall mission, or simply about other coworkers.
The Agency’s WMD-hunting team, for instance, had recently grown so large that they had moved from the western edge of the airport grounds to an annex on the far southeast. They were always the preeminent Agency team in Iraq. They would get the latest supplies and food and were the subject of some real jealousy and smack talk.
The centerpiece of the weapons team was a building coalition forces had mistaken for a structure protected under the Geneva Conventions and that had gone unscathed when the Americans overran the airport during the invasion. Life at the annex seemed good to anyone struggling to find a functioning toilet in the terminal.
In fact the annex was so secluded that neither Ron nor I had seen it up close. And soon enough, as we zipped across the airport grounds chatting about life in the States, the pressing question in the pickup became: How would we actually find the place? “Maybe that was the turn back there,” Ron said, looking over his shoulder for some semblance of signage.
No sooner had he turned to face front than we arrived at an army checkpoint. A soldier peered into my rolled-down driver’s-side window and gave the truck a quick once-over. He looked at Ron and me and waved us through.
Past the checkpoint, we rounded a corner, then hit an on-ramp. Out my window, a statue of Abbas Ibn Firnas—a Muslim inventor who sketched out gliders and other rudimentary flying machines some seven hundred years before Leonardo da Vinci—came into view. With its arms stretched wide and covered in a feathered flying contraption, the statue had become known to many troops as the Winged Man. I just knew it marked the eastern edge of the BIAP grounds—and that suddenly we were motoring out onto Baghdad Airport Road.
“Wait,” I said. “This was not the plan.”
That seven-mile highway was the main artery running from the airport into central Baghdad—in particular, the high-walled Green Zone, serving as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s headquarters. Carved out around Hussein’s former presidential palace, the Green Zone had a reputation as a fortified civilian town filled with yuppie DC office workers who wore combat boots for no reason. To get there, however, incoming workers who landed at BIAP had to take “Route Irish,” as the airport highway was known to the military, skirting past Baghdad suburbs such as Amariya, Hamra, and Qaddisiya. That was originally done by design. Those neighborhoods were Sunni strongholds under Hussein’s regime; even the despot had recognized how vulnerable a caravan was on that one main highway into town, and he didn’t want to make the drive surrounded by enemies. Those former loyalists recognized that most any Westerner traveling into Baghdad from the airport must be someone worth taking a shot at.
The legendary anarchy that would ultimately envelope Route Irish and come to signify the wayward US mission in Iraq had not yet taken hold. But there were hints of the violence to come. Three days after Ambassador Bremer disbanded the Iraqi military, the first major attack occurred on the road. Others followed. No one kept statistics at the time to document the upswing in the number of roadside bombs planted at night or the unnerving machine-gun attacks on SUVs carrying aid workers, but the nascent signs of predation were unmistakable. Even if it hadn’t yet become the most dangerous road in the world, it was already earning other nicknames from the people who traveled it regularly: Death Street. IED Alley. The Highway to Hell. As Ron and I joined the flow of speeding traffic, I was thinking we should probably have a plan if we were headed into Baghdad and maybe should have told someone where we were going.
“We should probably turn around,” Ron said politely.
“Well, yeah,” I replied, thinking maybe we should just get some ice
cream and then head home, until I realized we only had one gun between us and, again, no one knew where we were. I scanned the stubby palm trees that flanked the six-lane highway all the way to the horizon. A deep, pitted median separated the three lanes of traffic heading in each direction. “But where should I turn around?”
Dusty blue-and-white traffic signs whizzed by overhead, pointing the way to Baghdad and Rutba and Fallujah beyond. It looked in many ways like a standard US highway, albeit one carrying many more armored vehicles. There were speed limits, technically speaking, but no one obeyed them. I hung in the middle lane, not blending in with local traffic or obvious coalition traffic. On my left, drivers in boxy white sedans slowed down to take long looks at me before roaring off into the distance.
Up ahead, a succession of red brake lights popped on, snaking off into a bottleneck at an Iraqi military checkpoint I could see in the distance. Ironically, the back end of a checkpoint line was one of the most dangerous places on the highway. A mile of stopped cars created a convenient setup for an ambush and made us sitting targets for insurgents, who could open fire from the other side of the endless median that divided the roadway.
“I’m going make a U-turn,” I blurted out.
“A what?” Ron said. A maneuver that unorthodox in that location could attract the exact wrong kind of attention. “Look what we’re driving!” he said. “You want to get shot by the military?”
“It’s either that or possibly get shot by someone else. We only have one gun between us besides.”
“Shit,” Ron said, reaching over to get a firm grip on the handle inside his door.
I steered us into the left lane and glanced out my window. The median there opened into a makeshift turnaround point. There was no curb and, for the moment, no traffic coming from the other direction. Assuming no jihadist had planted a bomb among the scrubby brush, I figured this was about as good a spot as any.
