by Nada Bakos
Because the men on board weren’t expecting the mission update, one of those planes was caught in the midst of midair refueling when the call came. The other F-16—flying as a “single ship,” in air force parlance—was ordered, in view of the exceptional circumstances, to leave his wingman and destroy the target with a single five-hundred-pound GBU-12 bomb.
At 6:11 p.m., the pilot of the lone Fighting Falcon came screaming down over Zarqawi’s safe house on a dive—and then pulled up without releasing a bomb. As was clear on the live video feed, the house still stood. Surely everyone inside it heard the fighter jet’s roar and had begun scrambling.
Amid what must have been a storm of expletives, joint terminal attack controllers realized that their heat-of-the-moment orders were incomplete. The pilot had been told he was “cleared to engage”—but he not was not given the “cleared hot” designator to release his ordnance. As the jet knifed back into the blue sky, the task force knew it had to hit the home before anyone inside went running into the woods. Zarqawi had managed that trick before.
The F-16 circled back. The new code was relayed to the pilot; he locked onto the target and dropped the laser-guided weapon. Endless seconds seemed to tick by as the GBU-12 hurtled toward the earth. The video from the surveillance drone rotated around the target, but the home just sat there.
Then, just after 6:12 p.m., the bomb tore through the roof of Zarqawi’s safe house. Monitors at the air base flickered white as the eruption blasted plumes of debris in four directions at once—one down the driveway, as the front of the house was blown apart; both north and south along the dirt road, as the home’s side walls vanished; and straight up in the air, through what was left of the roof. Around the house, dust billowed up through the orderly lines of palm trees like smoke through a vent. Inside the house, the second floor collapsed down onto what was left of the ground floor—and those upon it.
Then the F-16 was ordered to double back and drop a second five-hundred-pound bomb—this one a GPS-enabled GBU-38—on the wreckage. SOF wanted “to ensure the target set was serviced appropriately,” as one air force general later put it.
Within minutes, Iraqi police stationed nearby arrived on the scene. They were followed by SOF, who arrived to surround the property at approximately 6:40 p.m.. The unit found an ambulance parked in the driveway, which by then led to nothing but a yawning crater in the countryside. Police officers were struggling to hoist a stretcher into the back of the vehicle. After a few tense moments of guns-drawn uncertainty—were these actual police or al Qaida operatives in stolen uniforms?—they secured the officers’ weapons and closed in on the ambulance. The gurney hung halfway out its back doors. They pulled it from the vehicle and set it on the ground.
On the gurney was a large man dressed in black, struggling for air. It was Zarqawi. The Jordanian had actually survived the bombing—though barely. The shock waves from the bombs had burst the blood vessels in his lungs and ears, to say nothing of the broken right leg and massive internal injuries he’d suffered. One of the SOF medics knelt over Zarqawi and cleared his airway. In the crater, team members found the remains of two women, including a young girl, as well as those of Rahman and another man. Zarqawi himself lasted almost half an hour before succumbing to his injuries. At 7:04 p.m., at the feet of US SOF operators in a dirt driveway outside an obliterated safe house, the most wanted terrorist leader in Iraq died.
I walked through the lobby of our hotel just after seven the next morning. I was reviewing my latest assignment with the JTTF and was deep in thought about the day ahead. Or, at that hour, perhaps I was simply concentrating on the coffee in my hand.
“Nada.”
One of my coworkers was whispering in my direction from halfway across the lobby.
“Nada.”
I heard her before I saw her; when I finally located my coworker, she pointed to the TV on the wall.
“Death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” said the words on the bottom of the screen.
I ran over to the TV, half in disbelief. Could it possibly be true? The news bounced over to footage of President Bush speaking earlier that morning, Washington time, in the White House Rose Garden. “Zarqawi’s death is a severe blow to al Qaeda,” he said. “It’s a victory in the global war on terror, and it is an opportunity for Iraq’s new government to turn the tide of this struggle.”
I was speechless. I felt like jumping for joy. I felt like hugging someone. Mostly, I really wanted to hear more details—we were twelve hours behind Baghdad, and information was already trickling out.
I rummaged around in my purse for my cell phone, but there was no service.
“Is there a US government facility nearby?” I asked my coworker. “Anyplace at all with a classified phone system?”
“Sorry,” she said, “there’s not.”
So I stood there just holding my phone for what seemed like hours, glued to the replays of the same sound bites and the same green-and-white surveillance video of the bomb blasts at the safe house. Even when the military proudly displayed photos of Zarqawi’s dead body—his puffy face bruised, his left eye swollen shut, a small gouge across his left cheek—I could still barely believe it had happened.
The forty-eight hours after that are still something of a blur in my mind. When the SOF operators returned to the air base, they reportedly laid Zarqawi’s body on the floor of the compound next to Rahman’s.
Soon public statements were issued. The US ambassador to Iraq at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, publicly cheered the death of the “godfather” of sectarian violence in Iraq. Time magazine featured Zarqawi’s head shot on the cover with a giant red X over it—their designation for “America’s most hated enemies,” a treatment the magazine had used only three times before in its history: once for Adolf Hitler, once for Japan during World War II, and once for Saddam Hussein in 2003. But perhaps the moment it became most real for me was when AQI itself confirmed Zarqawi’s death, noting in a statement online, “We herald the martyrdom of our mujahid Sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and we stress that this is an honor for our nation.”
“The martyrdom of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” I kept repeating to myself. “He’s actually dead.”
Over the next two days, I went through every emotion I could imagine—excitement, envy of my colleagues, pride at what we’d accomplished together. And then I even felt a twinge of sadness or frustration or maybe both: I never actually met him. As odd as that might have been to reflect upon, I spent years of my life trained on his next move. I never questioned him, and I never looked him in the eye. To this day, I wonder what that moment would have been like.
There was something else. In addition to providing updates about the Zarqawi mission, the news was telling us that within twenty-four hours of taking him out, SOF teams across Iraq hit fourteen new targets. Our military machine in Iraq rolled on. Yet the day after Zarqawi was killed, suicide bombers struck three separate locations in Baghdad, murdering at least two dozen people. Dozens more were wounded. The jihad machine rolled on as well.
The AQI statement announcing Zarqawi’s death had concluded, “The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing the holy war so that the word of God will be supreme.” I knew that someone new would soon fill Zarqawi’s role in Iraq, and it was difficult to know what approach the insurgency would take under that leadership. The long road ahead was underscored by the somber and measured response Nick Berg’s father, Michael, offered CNN when asked about Zarqawi’s death. “He is a human being. He has a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed, and I feel bad for that,” Michael Berg said. “His death will re-ignite yet another wave of revenge.”
He was right. In the year after Zarqawi’s death, from mid-2006 to mid-2007, roughly thirty-five thousand civilians were murdered in Iraq, the deadliest stretch to that point in a war that would continue for another four years, until December of 2011. In the year after Zarqawi’s death, more than one thousand Ame
rican troops were killed in Iraq, the bloodiest twelve-month stretch of the entire war for them as well.
As difficult as statistics like those were for me to process, I knew they didn’t mean that Zarqawi’s importance at the end was overstated, and they didn’t mean that his death was insignificant, either. If Zarqawi’s power may have owed something to mythmaking in early 2003, the destruction his network wrought over the ensuing years—at places of worship, at places of aid, and upon all manner of political processes and security initiatives intended to stabilize Iraq—was profound. One comparison I always held on to: from 1998, when bin Ladin had issued a fatwa declaring Americans legitimate targets, then bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, through 2006, al Qaida central was responsible for some four thousand deaths around the world. That included the attacks on 9/11. Zarqawi’s network alone might have more than doubled that.
It is true that by 2006, AQI was only one of many groups that together constituted the insurgency bedeviling American troops. A new leader would rise up to claim Zarqawi’s throne—and as then Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki said at the press conference announcing his death, “Whenever there is a new al-Zarqawi, we will kill him.” Yet Zarqawi’s leadership ability—a combination of magnetism, fanatical vision, and strategic cunning, as unexpected as it might have been—was distinctly his own legacy, albeit one that is easily adoptable by others. I have no doubt that by the spring of 2006, Zarqawi’s ideology represented a more immediate threat to American interests than bin Ladin did. The June 7 air strike blew a hole in his legacy. But perhaps just as important, his aura did not die with him.
Zarqawi’s death brought only a temporary lull in activities from Al Qaida in Iraq. At the time, many observers filled the brief void with debates about the appropriateness of the Pentagon’s release of images of Zarqawi’s battered cadaver. It reminded me of another of Tom’s sayings from the targeting team: “Success is all sunshine and rainbows until you show them the dead-guy photos.”
The reprieve from AQI’s predations lasted a mere six days.
Many of the American players in that fateful strike were recognized accordingly. The F-16 pilot who bombed Zarqawi’s safe house didn’t know until sometime the next day who was actually inside it. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his performance. Two members of the interrogation team at SOF received the Bronze Star Medal from McChrystal, given for heroic or meritorious achievement.
Within the CIA, Zarqawi’s death didn’t occasion any awards—though I recognized that the final feeling I came away with was even more valuable: relief. The mission I’d eagerly sought, since almost the moment I transitioned into the Agency’s Iraq unit, was to help the United States take out that madman. It was done.
I’ve realized in the time since then that it’s possible that no professional job I’ll hold in the future will mean as much as one I’ve already had. The colleagues I worked with who embraced the magnitude and responsibility of the sort of work we did—who sacrificed as much as I did, and far more, for the larger mission and still maintained a passion for making the world a safer place—make corporate America pale in comparison. I remember Roger telling me once about the bureaucracy at his technology firm and the stacks of paperwork he had to file before signing a nondisclosure agreement with a client. “Really?” I said. “I had to get through less red tape to target somebody.”
I left the JTTF and retired from the Agency for good in 2007. But even now, whenever I read an article about conditions in Iraq, I think, “I hope someone is following this aspect of things and paying attention to that nuance.”
The feeling persists to this day, in part because even as time marches on, there are steady reminders of my former work and the unrest I left behind. Al Qaida, of course, still exists. After a few years of relative stability, Iraq, unfortunately, has once again been plunged into bloody chaos at the hands of Islamist extremists. And in good ways and bad, the CIA is still hard at work trying to figure out how to combat it.
Epilogue
I was moving around my house in a daze when the phone rang on December 9, 2014, years after I’d left the Agency. It was just after 7:00 a.m. Pacific time.
Although I didn’t know it then, earlier that morning, the findings of a years-long Senate intelligence committee investigation into CIA interrogation techniques during the Global War on Terror finally became public. The findings in the officially titled “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program” were at times ghastly, suggesting that interrogators, who were often poorly screened during the hiring process, had used enhanced methods far more often than had ever been publicly revealed; that those techniques—including extensive waterboarding, mock executions, and something described as “rectal feeding”—veered toward the barbaric; and that ultimately there was no clear actionable intelligence gained from torture. By the time the phone rang, the East Coast media were already in high dudgeon: “Senate Report on CIA Program Details Brutality, Dishonesty,” declared the Washington Post. “Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations,” read the New York Times.
At that point, I hadn’t read any of it. The night before, a little after midnight, I had experienced the very personal tragedy of losing my mom, Eloise Whisenhunt, to cancer. She was seventy-one. Even its inevitability at the end hadn’t managed to prepare me for the moment of her death.
Of course the caller didn’t know that; there’s no way he would have. The voice on the line was from the Agency’s central Office of Security, which provides comprehensive and worldwide security programs and protection for CIA personnel. He got right down to business.
“You were named in the report,” he said.
“I what?”
I racked my brain to figure out what he was talking about.
“In the Senate torture report,” he said. “It’s just a footnote, but it appears a few times. It’s from a talk you gave at the Council on Foreign Relations.”
“Are you kidding me? I just lost my mom—I don’t need this right now,” I snapped. “What does the report say?”
“It says, basically, ‘Nada Bakos… states… that Hassan Ghul provided… critical information on Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti [and his connection to bin Ladin] to Kurdish officials prior to entering CIA custody. When asked about the interrogation techniques used by the Kurds, Bakos stated: “… honestly, Hassan Ghul… when he was being debriefed by the Kurdish government, he literally was sitting there having tea.… He wasn’t handcuffed to anything. He was—he was having a free flowing conversation. And there’s—you know, there’s articles in Kurdish papers about sort of their interpretation of the story and how forthcoming he was.”’”
Unfortunately, I knew exactly what he was talking about. In April of 2013, I had joined a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations for the screening of an HBO documentary about the CIA’s pursuit of al Qaida called Manhunt. At one point, conversation had turned to Ghul, and I made those comments based on my recollection of events and a story I’d read on Rudaw, a highly regarded Kurdish news outlet. That story was entirely true, as far as I knew, and seemed harmless to mention.
I made similar comments in the film, but after my interview, I wondered if I shouldn’t have said what I said. Subsequently, I took the initiative to reach out to the Agency with a copy of my remarks and to apologize in advance if I’d crossed any lines. I was panicking, sending a note to every former CIA friend I could think of. I took my security agreement very seriously, even after leaving, which is why I proactively notified the Agency of my comments.
Thankfully, I was not in legal jeopardy. At the time, the CIA and the Senate committee had very different views of Ghul’s responses, a difference of which I was unaware. The CIA contends that Ghul divulged more useful information at a black site. Therefore the story on Rudaw, which I’d repeated, didn’t provide the same level of detail as the Agency testimony—a fact I suspected the Senate was highlighting. It wa
s the only reason I could imagine the report would mention it. Suddenly, there on the phone, the pieces fell into place in my mind, and my frustration boiled over.
“They used my fucking name?” I said.
There was silence on the line for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” the caller said.
I took a deep breath.
“No—I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t about you.”
“Of course. We’re reaching out to everyone who was named in the report, and we want a team to come visit your home sometime this week. Is that possible?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll be here. And thanks: I appreciate the call.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Please accept my condolences on your loss. I lost my mom a few years ago, and I can tell you that the pain will subside but you will always miss her.”
Three days later, a four-person Agency support team flew in from Washington and drove to our house. My stepfather was there with Roger and me when the doorbell rang. The three of us were working on arranging my mother’s cremation and other logistics of her death. I met the visitors at the door—the distinctive business-casual look of Washington, DC, had a jarring government vibe to it. I immediately found myself wondering what the neighbors must think of the crowd on my doorstep.
I almost started to cry when I recognized one of the men. We’d met years earlier when he was a member of the Agency’s staff—on a team created as a protection force in high-risk overseas posts. That CIA unit is largely made up of former military—the man at my door was certainly built like a member of the military—and seeing him there made everything feel a little safer. He was someone who understood the kind of work we had done and the kind of enemy we’d faced.
