My Share of the Task (38 page)

But it was J.C.'s eye that made the difference. When Abd al-Rahman emerged from Friday prayers, which are very busy, J.C. picked him out of the crowd almost instantly. Abd al-Rahman made it slightly easier by wearing similar outfits, but J.C. could spot him based on his distinctive demeanor. He walked, J.C. explained, as a Westerner would walk in the Middle East. He seemed to float with arrogance. When he got out of his car, he did so deliberately, snapping his lapels down to straighten his jacket. Of greater consequence, J.C., steeped in Iraq for years, could decode Abd al-Rahman's intimate relationships. He knew, for instance, how important the brother-in-law's house would be if Abd al-Rahman ever left town and needed his wife and family to be with a trusted male relative.

As on most visits, I wanted to hear about the granular details of his work, but I also liked to push and prod the premises underlying their targeting philosophy.
How can we think more outside the box? Are we too far afield? Are we overthinking or underthinking?
J.C. and his boys enjoyed debating targeting philosophy, and although his eyes were ringed from lack of sleep, he was animated when I pushed him on his contention that we should watch Abd al-Rahman rather than capture him now.

“Why not police up Rahman now and use what we have to get him to tell us where he meets AMZ?”

“Sir, Rahman's a true believer. Even if we got him in the booth,” J.C. said, referring to the interrogation rooms, “I don't think we could get him to talk. If we move on Rahman, and what Mubassir's saying is right, it could spook AMZ.”

“Rahman obviously knows we've had Mubassir for a while now. What if he has stopped seeing Zarqawi? Or what if he disappears?” I asked. “Why would Zarqawi give Rahman regular access? He hasn't survived this long being careless. I don't think that you can draw a direct line between Zarqawi and any one person.”

“See, I disagree with you, sir. Everybody is connected to somebody, but you've got to find the right guy and draw a line. I think Rahman's it.”

“I'm not sure,” I said, “but I'll let you go with it.”

*   *   *

S
o far, we had seen what Mubassir said we would, and he had told us that every seven to ten days, Abd al-Rahman met with Zarqawi. J.C. and his team had been monitoring, mapping, and patterning Abd al-Rahman's movements for almost that long. One day, as they watched Abd al-Rahman, swells of dust obscured the ground and Abd al-Rahman with it. They switched the cameras to infrared, but in doing so the picture went from color to black and white. Abd al-Rahman became a small, dark figure inside a crowd of small dark figures, and they lost him.

They still had eyes on Abd al-Rahman's family, and after a couple hundred hours of watching his movements, the team was convinced he wouldn't leave them. They also had eyes on the man who had driven with him that day, later thought to be Abu Ghadiya, a young Anbari who helped run the foreign-fighter pipeline. They watched Abu Ghadiya go north of Baghdad and stop. After a few uneasy moments when they wondered what Ghadiya was doing, a car bomb went off nearby. Now we had a strong reason to move on Ghadiya—who had likely been there to film the bombing. But picking up Ghadiya meant moving on Abd al-Rahman's house, where Ghadiya was staying. J.C. made the case that picking up Ghadiya would spook Abd al-Rahman—and we potentially could lose our trail to Zarqawi. We gritted our teeth and waited for Abd al-Rahman to reappear.

Two days passed without any sign of him. On June 1, Tom D. arrived in the country as the new commander of J.C.'s squadron, replacing Joe. It had been seventeen months since I had flown with Tom D. and Tres from Afghanistan to Balad after the suicide bomber destroyed the mess hall in Mosul and I asked them to stand up JIATF-West. Tom D., like all commanders, held strong opinions about how best to hunt. He preferred to develop targets and err on the side of running less frequent missions if it meant fewer “dry holes.” This made him inclined to support J.C.'s program. But, Tom D. told J.C., realistically, if Abd al-Rahman didn't come back in another two days, they would have to give up monitoring his family and house. They couldn't burn assets if Abd al-Rahman had fled the city.

J.C. nodded. “He'll be back.”

Two days after they spoke, and after four days gone, Abd al-Rahman returned—fresh, many assumed, from having seen Zarqawi.

*   *   *

A
round this time, the leadership above J.C. again shifted. As all commanders did periodically, Scott Miller returned to the States, and Steve, his deputy at Green, came to lead TF 16. (As commander of TF 16, Steve was my subordinate and Tom D.'s commander.) Steve's inclination, like mine, was to act on targets rather than cultivate them. He knew the task force expected him to arrive and make them move on Abd al-Rahman and the rest of the targets. But Steve let the process play out, and his arrival bought J.C. a few more days of watching Abd al-Rahman.

The tension over whether to watch or strike a target was a recurring one and increased at the beginning of June. Watching a target often held the potential for a bigger payoff, mostly by revealing valuable connections to other targets. This slow work was popular with law-enforcement people who served as augmentees in the task forces and with intelligence analysts who looked to unravel the enemy network. But prolonged target development was less popular with the action-oriented operators. Striking targets rapidly had put tremendous pressure on AQI in the two years since TF 16 had accelerated its tempo, and these operations had yielded countless troves of intelligence. We would never have been where we were in June 2006 if we had taken an overly deliberate approach. Moreover, leaving targetable AQI operatives undisturbed as they continued their reign of violence on Iraq was a difficult moral judgment.

Well before Steve's arrival, every day in their forcewide VTCs, TF 16 debated whether to arrest Abd al-Rahman or leave him under surveillance. Tempers began to flare during the early days of June. Green drew opinionated and often vocal men and women, and the unit's ethos held that if you shied from speaking your mind, you shouldn't be in the unit. On top of this, everyone in the room had spent long years chasing Zarqawi. During that time, I had sought to breed a sense of ownership that demanded everyone be interested not only in their small part but in the big decisions. Everyone was expected to be a strategist. So by June 2006, the men and women under me wanted to win—and thought they knew how. J.C. and M.S. were both highly respected and were absolutely convinced we should not move on Abd al-Rahman. Tom D., who was a strong, vocal presence within the unit, supported them. Steve's more conventional army background made him disposed toward a more direct approach, and he shouldered an immense burden: No colonel had ever run anything as large and complex as TF 16, which was what Steve was doing at its most critical juncture. Meanwhile, he spent his days only paces away from me, a demanding three-star general (I had been promoted three months earlier, in mid-February) who, by personality and explicit guidance, was inclined to strike more than to sit and watch. But I respected the intelligence assessment of people like J.C. and M.S., and so, ultimately, did Steve, who allowed the process to continue to play out.

Aware of the mounting pressure to move on Abd al-Rahman and anxious to buy even more time, the squadron decided to try to positively identify Abd al-Rahman. Until then, J.C. and his team hadn't been able to say for certain “their” Abd al-Rahman was the right guy. Many remained unconvinced he was: He was much younger than we expected AQI's religious scholars to be, given the credentials needed.

Two dedicated analysts working for the task force recovered a good-quality picture of the real Sheikh Abd al-Rahman that they could use. The squadron decided to see if he was the man being followed by J.C. when he went to the mosque
that Sunday, June 4. A two-man team, part of the squadron's specialized reconnaissance troop, dressed up in Iraqi clothing and planned to drive through Baghdad in a nondescript sedan and see Abd al-Rahman in the flesh as he emerged from the Sunday-morning services. This was highly dangerous. Now, three months after the Samarra mosque bombing, the ethnic contest for Baghdad had turned the city into a maze of checkpoints manned by militias who stopped cars and checked ID cards. If the ever-more-brazen and paranoid militias decided the occupants' names indicated they came from the opposite sect, they often simply pulled the riders from their car and shot them in the street.

Nonetheless, the reconnaissance made it to the mosque, parked half a block away, and waited. They planned to drive by just as Abd al-Rahman walked to his car door, so they could see and photograph his face. As the crowd emptied out of the mosque, Abd al-Rahman made it to his car, parked right out front, faster than the reconnaissance team had anticipated. He got in and started moving as our team was still down the street. From the air, J.C. and the squadron watched as the two cars—al-Rahman's and ours—drove toward each other. On the ground, for only a moment as the noses of the two cars were almost abreast of each other, our reconnaissance team and their camera lens got the right angle: From the diagonal, Abd al-Rahman's windshield lost its glare and his face was visible through the glass.

They sent the photograph up to Balad and placed it, along with five or six pictures of other men, in front of Mubassir. They asked him which one was Abd al-Rahman. He put his fingers on the photograph taken that day: “That's him.”

Upon returning to the Baghdad compound, one of the reconnaissance operatives came to see J.C. He had studied the picture of Abd al-Rahman before venturing into Baghdad that day and told J.C. the man he saw on the road was him. Having seen the cars whip past each other on the screen, J.C. pushed him. How could he be sure?

“Hey, look,” the operative said, standing there in the Iraqi garb. “It's him. I'm one hundred percent on this.” There was no one better at the craft than the reconnaissance team that had gone out that day, and J.C. trusted his judgment. It was the same trust the task force had placed in J.C. Without it, our complex machine would have seized up.

*   *   *

T
wo days later, just before sundown on Tuesday, June 6, J.C. and his team were in place in the JOC when they saw a moving van pull into the frame and park in front of Abd al-Rahman's house. Almost nightly during the weeks before, the intel and operators had been refining the plan for a move on Abd al-Rahman when or if the time came. Based upon what Mubassir had explained of his routine and Abd al-Rahman's pattern and regimen observed over the past nineteen days, the operators and J.C.'s intel team had determined certain movements that would trigger a raid. One was moving his family.

They watched as the van, similar to a big, thirty-foot U-Haul, was loaded with packing boxes. It was dusk just as the last boxes were put in the back and the hatch closed. That night we had in the sky a brand-new, hard-won set of manned surveillance planes. The van was now theirs to track. But in the difficult lighting as dusk grew quickly darker, they lost the van as it made its way through Baghdad. Tracking targets from the sky was not automatic, not done with simple flicks of the joystick. The men in the manned surveillance aircraft overhead sat in their seats for hours on end, following targets through their cameras but also relaying what they saw over the radio. It was a finicky process in which even a van could get lost.

J.C. was frustrated but still had Abd al-Rahman and his family in his sights. They returned to the brother-in-law's house, a couple blocks away from the house Mubassir had first directed us to, where J.C. had first seen Abd al-Rahman nineteen days earlier.

The next morning, June 7, J.C. again found himself watching the screens. The JOC was empty except for one member of J.C.'s team. Midmorning, as usual, Abd al-Rahman went in the silver sedan from his brother-in-law's home back to his own house. He and his driver started out the same as usual, only this time the car stayed in the immediate district. They wound around its streets and then, curiously, circled back to the house. At around noon, Tom D. entered the JOC, just as Abd al-Rahman returned to his house after circling about. He and J.C. agreed: It seemed like a maneuver of someone worried about being followed to wherever he was going next.

Under continuous surveillance, the silver sedan drove to the northeastern part of Baghdad, where it caught the on-ramp for the route Iraqis called Sabbah Nissan, which ran north through the sparser neighborhoods east of Sadr City and out, eventually to Diyala Province. It was now midafternoon, and the highway's six lanes were flush with traffic. As J.C. and Tom D. watched, the silver sedan slowed and veered to the side of the road, where Abd al-Rahman got out. It was not uncommon for Iraqis to get out on the side of even busy highways, hop the side walls, and go to the stores along the road. But the silver sedan took off and Abd al-Rahman started walking backward, against traffic. They saw him with his cell phone to his ear. Within the time it took him to walk twenty or thirty feet, a blue Bongo truck—the kind with a small, snub-nosed cab, short flatbed, and car-sized wheels—appeared in the field of view and quickly slowed to a stop in its lane. Abd al-Rahman swung himself into the passenger side, and the truck driver punched the accelerator. It was over in a few seconds. J.C. and Tom D. looked at each other.

“That was slick,” Tom D. said. It was classic countersurveillance behavior, called tradecraft in the “business” of clandestine operatives.

One of the three ISR planes followed the silver sedan, while J.C. and Tom D. focused on the second feed, showing the Bongo truck. They figured he was going to the neighborhoods in the northeast quadrant of Baghdad, where they had watched Abd al-Rahman circle around in the preceding weeks, likely talking on his cell phone. But then the Bongo truck missed one turnoff, then the next. Soon, it had left the city limits.

“Well, he's out of Baghdad,” J.C. said, turning to Tom D. Leaving the city was one of the preestablished triggers to move on Abd al-Rahman. “We thought he was going to go to the west, not north. But he's out.” He sucked air in between his teeth. “It looks like we're waking everybody up.”