Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (3 page)

Chapter Five

It was early 2005. Ambrose Hayes had never hated anything as much as he hated the Green Zone in Baghdad. It didn’t matter that he’d weaseled his way into sole occupancy of a five thousand square foot villa overlooking the Tigris River, or that he worked shirtless in his boxers on a veranda previously used by relatives of Saddam Hussein. Nowhere on earth had less of a soul than the heart of the Coalition Provisional Authority, otherwise known as “the Occupation” to people who didn’t lie for a living.

He thought this as he sat on the veranda in the heat of the afternoon, smoking a genuine Camel Filter that Halliburton had proudly imported all the way from North Carolina. He tapped some ash into the empty Budweiser bottle next to him, which sat precariously atop a list of seized Iraqi communiques dating back to the 1990s. Those communiques were juicy, because they depicted a time when American sanctions had reduced Saddam to his wiliest, most animal self. People better than Ambrose had given him several boxes worth of those documents on the theory that they’d unlock whatever the hell the ex-Baathists were up to in Baghdad, since U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer kicked them out of all government positions and practically forced them into joining anti-Occupation militias.

He’d translated all of the documents in five nights, then pretended he was still working on the project three weeks later. The State Department was just another set of cubes and field offices, like any big corporation, and like any other big corporation, it never paid to look like the guy who worked the quickest. Those fuckers ended up working fifteen hour days, or worse; sometimes they got promoted.

A black Escalade pulled into the turnaround of his villa, clunking as its armored frame rolled over the remains of faded white speed bumps. That would be Carlisle. John Carlisle was a black guy from somewhere in Ohio who Ambrose always pitied a little, because he was smart, honest, and still never escaped the unspoken stigma of being a “diversity hire” who the Bushies brought to Baghdad purely because he was a black Republican. It didn’t help any that he was in a branch of USAID that handled “logistics.” That just meant he spent all day driving around the ten square miles of Saddam’s old fortress running errands for people. Casting the Occupation’s only black Republican as an errand boy probably wasn’t a message anyone had meant to send, but the Occupation had a way of twisting truths to suit its own ends, regardless of the Occupiers’ intentions.

“
Ahlan wa Sahlan, ya
John!” Ambrose said in overly formal Arabic, wishing his visitor welcome.

“
Wa Ahlan, ya Seyyidi!”
John yelled back to Ambrose on his veranda, thanking Ambrose for his greeting and calling him “boss” on top of it. It was all of the Arabic that Carlisle spoke, but Ambrose had hope for the man yet.

Carlisle held up a fat manila folder and waved it teasingly up at the skinny man in his boxers with a Camel drooping out of his mouth.

Ambrose made an exaggerated mixture of headshake and hand waggle, like Iraqis did when disagreeing with someone, saying, “Tell your bosses no way. I’m not through with their last pile of intelligence yet.”

Carlisle used the folder to shield his eyes as he looked up at Ambrose. He said, “Put those docs aside. These are fresh, and they’re top priority. I’ll just leave them down here for you. See if you can at least find a pair of pants before you come down to get them. Pretend somebody’s paying you six figures to be here along with free housing and a per diem.”

Ambrose waved his hands across the horizon, where the Green Zone’s villas stretched out almost to the horizon, beyond which loomed the haze of wartime Baghdad. “My free housing is within RPG range of insurgents across the river, and the only place I can spend that per diem is in a Halliburton grocery store. Just leave the folder down there. I’ll get it in a second,” he barked.

Carlisle didn’t respond. He just got back in his armored SUV and drove away, off on his next errand. Ambrose found the documents where he’d left them on the steps of the villa and took them inside.

Ambrose thumbed through the folder as he walked up the sweeping curved staircase of his conquered villa, oblivious to the small gallery of baroque era European portraiture hanging on the red adobe wall beside him. The documents were all in Arabic, typed on a standard word processor and printed from a cheap desktop printer, based on the smudged ink he saw throughout. Smudging aside, he saw documents written by people with limited vocabularies peppered by unusually detailed phrases like “vector of attack,” and “theater of operations.”

He frowned and said, “Fucking soldiers are the same everywhere,” since he’d concluded that these were operational documents written by ex-soldiers loyal to Saddam, now part of the insurgency. That meant the intelligence would be interesting in the right hands, but not, in his diplomat’s mind, a game changer.

He was holding documents that might thwart two or three bomb attacks, and lead to a couple nighttime house raids capturing medium-value targets. Nothing in that folder would stop the insurgency, or even put much of a dent in it. For that, you either needed to somehow trick all of Iraq into loving its new conquerors, or to find the snake behind the insurgency and take its head off. The former was impossible, and the snake itself was more like a hydra: a dragon with many heads, and whenever you severed one, two more grew back in its place.

Ambrose went to the mini-fridge in his seven hundred square foot bedroom with its white king-sized featherbed and took out another Budweiser. It was past noon, after all. Then he ran a cool bath and sank down into the red marble tub, ready to peruse more of these new documents that he’d already written off as bullshit.

He sipped the beer, having that strange constricted pulse in his throat that comes of drinking something cold in a hot environment. The pages in the folder told him nothing he couldn’t already guess: insurgent militias made up of ex-soldiers had attacks planned on routes frequented by American trucks. Someone had snuck RPGs into an empty house in north Baghdad, and they were ready for dispersal to separate cells. It showed a degree of sophistication, but none of it was very interesting to a man like Ambrose, who, unlike the Bush apparatchiks around him, didn’t assume that Iraqis were stupid.

The second half of the file amounted to supply requisitions from looted Iraqi army bases, along with some American equipment that had gone missing in trickles and streams ever since the Occupation began in April 2003. More tedium.

Ambrose took another swig, then popped his neck and closed his eyes in the hopes that it would shake loose some cobwebs. He was doing it again; letting himself become bored by predictability before making sure he was looking at things that were actually so predictable.

He tried to look at the last few pages of documents with fresh eyes, letting his lips move as his eyes scanned the pages word by word. Rockets…bullets…bomb making components. “Why would an insurgent write this shit down?” He asked himself aloud. He’d forgotten about the beer, and it was warm by the time he tried to take another swig, just like the bathtub that had gradually grown tepid to match the unholy combination of desert heat and tropical humidity that marred Baghdad afternoons.

After a bit longer, the truth stared him in the face. They weren’t just requisitions, telling a militia what kind of inventory they had to kill with. He smiled and whispered, “No insurgent would ever write this down because you’re
not
from an insurgent, are you? You’re invoices. You’re receipts, telling somebody what they’re getting for their money.”

Ambrose’s pale blue eyes took on a cold gleam that matched the tickle moving up his spine. He’d found something real: something to finally get at the hydra. If someone wanted receipts for weaponry bound for the insurgency, they represented interests that were more disciplined and methodical than any simple militia. Those type of receipts meant somebody’s military, and that meant a foreign power was showing its hand in Iraq. Everyone in the Green Zone knew that foreign governments were meddling in the Iraqi insurgency, but it was a bitch to prove it.

He looked at the second to last page, and saw blue handwriting that filled the margins on both sides. The cursive Arabic lettering was beautiful, written by someone with more manual dexterity than Ambrose Hayes could ever hope to achieve. The words themselves got straight to the point:

Explosives need more copper for molten cores. Do not skimp again. Quit holding me back. Sorcerer.

The note was written in the Arabic alphabet, but it wasn’t written in the Arabic language. It was written in Farsi, which used the Arabic alphabet to write a language more closely related to Hindi and Sanskrit. Farsi was the national language of Iran, and Iraqi Arabs simply didn’t speak it…unless they had spent time in Iran, and that time included discussing things like the molten cores of explosives.

Ambrose smiled like the Cheshire Cat as he finished his beer. Sorcerer was Iranian military, and Ambrose was on to him.

Chapter Six

It was fall, 2005. Ambrose had bags under his eyes. The bags could have told anyone about the sleepless nights he’d spent poring over maps of Baghdad despite not being able to leave the walled inanities of the Green Zone. He’d spent those nights making sure that each of the documents he’d acquired matched up with a physical location in the prefabricated suburb of southern Baghdad called Sadr City, previously called “Saddam City,” where the most implacable of Baghdad’s Shiite militiamen were meeting with the man he’d come to believe was Iran’s chief agent in Iraq.

The State Department man sitting across his desk from Ambrose finished reading the terse, two page memo Ambrose had brought with him. Then he dropped the report, took a swig of Nescafe out of an ivory colored coffee mug, and set the mug down on top of the report.

“You’ve been taking on extra work,” he said.

Ambrose tried to look casual, but he felt the lie cross his face when his tired eyes didn’t squint properly to match his fake smile. “No, Chief. The Department is paying me well enough that I’m not hard up for overtime.”

The man nodded and replied, “So you’re acquiring documents from other analysts across multiple agencies, re-translating them to come up with entirely new renderings of the original Arabic, compiling the data into memos for your superiors, and this isn’t extra work.”

Ambrose knew he shook his head too fast in response. You weren’t supposed to look that eager when telling bureaucrats something radical. They were allergic to anything other than cool detachment. “No, Chief. What I’m doing is just value-added to what is already getting done. I’m putting a fresh pair of eyes on extant intelligence to chase down a couple leads that my own work has uncov—”

“CIA says you’re trying to do their job. CIA says you’re making their Arabic analysts look bad, and they’re not sharing any more intelligence with State while you’re still in the picture.”

Ambrose flared his nostrils and tried to keep the crazy out of his bloodshot eyes. “If CIA thinks I’m making them look bad, that’s because they know that none of their ‘analysts’ really speak Arabic. Let alone Farsi.”

The man crossed his arms, looked into the distance, and smiled like a shark, if sharks could have molars emblazoned by bronze fillings. He spoke without looking at Ambrose, “You’re good, man. You passed the Foreign Service exam, right? The oral portion? The part where we make sure our would-be diplomats can actually be diplomatic?”

Ambrose smiled back, hoping he’d won a convert. “I did well enough, Chief. And I don’t mean to say that CIA doesn’t have people who are good at Arabic. They’ve got the best, hands down…but they didn’t send them to Baghdad.”

“How about the Farsi, then?”

“I’m the only American in this city who speaks real Farsi. Period.”

The man finished his coffee in one big upturn of his ivory colored mug, never breaking eye contact even while tilting his head back. He put it down with a clatter that was too loud to be accidental, and said, “You’re a fucker in a white suit with a grad degree in Arabic, and you think you’re god’s gift to Baghdad because you pulled one rough tour before this.”

Ambrose couldn’t help looking down at his suit for a moment. Sure, it was white, but at this point he thought it was just a sign of practicality, since Baghdad’s climate would brutalize anyone whose fabric of choice wasn’t pale linen.

Ambrose said, “I’m not only here because of what happened in Tajikistan, Chief. I’ve tested my Arabic and Farsi at Defense Language Institute level—”

“You’re a fucker in a white suit who got transferred to Baghdad because
something
happened in Tajikistan that earned you a transfer with a big pay bump, and the only way to justify that bump for a kid your age was giving you the hazard pay differential that came with a posting in Baghdad. State sealed you file, so I’ve got no clue what that ‘something’ might have been.” He crossed his arms again and looked at Ambrose through his auto-tinting reading glasses. “Not that any of that matters, Hayes. The Green Zone is full of all species of thriving nitwit who don’t have the sense to wear white linen in this climate, and don’t speak a word of Arabic, let alone Farsi.”

He continued, “But they’re able to thrive here because they have someone in Washington who cares about them. You don’t need to speak Arabic if you speak Texan. So you can waltz in here, blow everyone away with your linguistic abilities, and leave nothing but a trail of burnt-feeling neocons in your wake, all of whom keep in contact with their benefactors stateside. You don’t have any benefactors, as far as I can tell. Whatever juice it took to seal your file, that’s all they owed you.”

“CIA has tried to send real people to Iraq, and so have we in State…but there are practicalities to this situation that you’re not willing to allow for,” the man trailed off. Then he waved his hands, inviting Ambrose to speak his piece the way a condemned man got to babble from the gallows.

Ambrose responded, “Chief, I’m being really practical—really
fucking
practical—in that thing on your desk.” He reached forward, tapping two long fingers insistently on the memo he’d written that now bore two coffee rings like war wounds. “I squeezed months of work into seven hundred words, and I’ll stand by my findings forever: the Iranians have
someone important
in this country, and he’s not going anywhere. He’s not doing cross-border hops to rally support from pro-Iranian Shiites or to give militants suitcases full of money. He’s Iranian military, probably with war experience in Iraq, and he’s using advanced knowledge of explosives and urban combat to kill us.”

“There isn’t one guy. There’s never just one guy. Iran is sending multiple people from their Revolutionary Guard here on short rotations to train Shiite militants up in improvised bomb making, show a bumpkin or two how to handle an AK-47. The plot might be real, but there’s no such person as your mastermind,” the man answered.

“Yes there is, and since I’m the only person in this fucking invasion who speaks good enough Arabic and Farsi to examine the shit we’ve captured, I’m the only person who gets to vote on this. He exists. I’ve collected a dozen separate documents with this man’s handwriting on them. I can
prove
he’s dealing with at least three different Shiite militias, including Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the dates on these documents suggest that he’s located in Sadr City for the long haul. He’s mentioned five distinct warehouses by name, and he actually gave addresses for three of them, all deep in Sadr City. If you let me brief a couple patrols on this guy, they could check out these warehouses and maybe we’d get the bastard,” Ambrose said levelly.

The chief shook his head, accentuating the zigzag vein than dominated his balding left temple. “And now he’s a colonel, requisitioning army patrols. You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, do you, Hayes?”

He stood up, and Hayes instinctively did likewise. The man said, “You’re going to stop drinking CIA agents under the table then convincing them to give up original enemy documents. You’re going to stop saying anything that suggests you speak Arabic or Farsi better than the local representatives of the Central Fucking Intelligence Agency. And you’re going to stop taking everyone’s eye off the prize by insisting that we’re all at the mercy of some cartoon mastermind of an Iranian bomb maker. Just follow your fucking job description.”

“And what is my fucking job description, Chief? Why is a senior State Department official like you passing on a lecture that was clearly scripted by some CIA asshole who’s self-conscious about his Arabic? Why does a goddamned USAID surveyor like John Carlisle deliver captured military intelligence for me to translate? Is there some kind of new hire orientation notebook that will tell me who the hell I’m working for around here? Maybe I lost it when nobody briefed me on my job description for two weeks after I landed here, and I had nothing better to do than take over an abandoned villa that probably belonged to Uday fucking Hussein!” Ambrose damn near yelled.

The man jabbed a thick thumb into his chest and growled, “You’re working for
me
, and who I’m working for isn’t your business. Neither is John Carlisle. Now why don’t you slink back to that villa of yours, do some solo day drinking, and translate some documents for me. The ones
I’ve
given you.” The man picked up his phone from his desk, looking intently at it to make it clear the meeting was over. “We’re not going to discuss this again, Hayes.”

So they didn’t.