See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (22 page)

America is at war as I write, and the enemy’s recruits are like water. Arrest or kill hundreds of them, and hundreds of others will flow into their places. We can’t kill them all, but we can figure out what their plans and intentions are by talking with them. We can figure out the direction of their war by infiltrating people in the mosques who might tell us how bad things are and how many young men are devoted to taking their own lives. That’s what we didn’t have. That’s what we were forfeiting all over the CIA and the intelligence community generally, in the pursuit of goals I still can’t fully understand. And that’s what I wanted to say to this senator who had dared to come to the front lines in Tajikistan.

Claiborne Pell’s air force C-20 put down in the early afternoon on March 31, 1994. I didn’t have a chance to speak with him until that evening, at a dinner at the presidential dacha. Pell was holding up remarkably well, especially for a man of his age who had been on a plane all night. After dinner Ambassador Escudero introduced us, and Pell and I walked the grounds and talked.

I started by telling him about the ground-forces commander’s aide trying to recruit me into his criminal enterprise. Pell didn’t say anything and just kept walking. Figuring I had him hooked, I moved on to what I had learned about the attack on the Duma in 1993 and how it had affected the military. I was building up a head of steam that would carry me into Islamic fundamentalism, the lack of a Tajik-speaking case officer to meet my cleric, and more.

‘The ambassador told me about your trip to the Pamirs, to Soghdiana,’ Pell interrupted.’ Tell me about it.’

For the next twenty minutes I talked about what I’d seen in the Yaghnob valley. Pell was fascinated, and I never got back to Russia. It turns out I had been expected to deliver a travelogue instead of intelligence. Maybe, I remember thinking, it was time to rename the CIA the Central Itinerary Agency: ‘0ut-of-the-world trips to out-of-the-world places.’ Hell, they wouldn’t even have to change the monograms back in sunny Langley.

The cold war truly was over, I finally realized - dead and buried. I just hoped our capacity to spy hadn’t died completely with it.

‘Get up here and take a look at what just came in,’ Tom yelled down the stairs.

He was pulling the morning traffic in the second-floor bedroom we’d converted for communications. An ex-special forces major, Tom was working on contract to the CIA, helping us fight our covert war on terrorism. Using contractors was yet another indication of what the agency had come to. But I didn’t care. Short and dark, Tom could have passed for an Iraqi. He was also seasoned and unflappable. He rarely yelled about anything, especially an incoming cable. As I headed up the stairs, all I could think of was that a rocket had come in from headquarters, ordering us out of the north.

Headquarters never was comfortable having a team in northern Iraq in the first place, operating solo. For that matter, no one was ever really comfortable with Iraq. For all the ballyhoo in the press, the 1991 Gulf War had been at best a limited engagement by coalition forces against Saddam Hussein, meant to drive his army out of Kuwait and punish him for the incursion but not to expel him from power. That prospect made our Arab allies, who understand about power vacuums in the region, distinctly uneasy. When Iraqi Kurds and the majority Shi’a rose up against a weakened Saddam in March 1991, the Kurds begged for our help. Instead we stood idly by as Saddam put up his helicopters and strafed the opposition. It was only when the fleeing Kurds began to flood into Turkey and Iran that President George Bush imposed his no-fly rule that allowed the Kurds to regain Kurdistan, the unrecognized state that occupies roughly the northern third of Iraq, which the Kurds call home. (The Kurds, an Indo-European people who speak a language close to Farsi, are the largest minority in the Middle East without a nation of their own.)

The operating idea seemed to be that the CIA could take care of our unfinished war: Clean it up, find some way to get rid of Saddam, arid stop the always fractious Kurds from killing one another. Back in Washington, such thinking was apparently au courant. Out in the field, there were certain facts that didn’t fit Washington’s preconceptions. For a start, no one could be sure Saddam wouldn’t try to kidnap or assassinate us. Then there were the Kurds, our hosts. After they threw Saddam’s army out of the north in 1991, they unexpectedly found themselves with their own virtual country at the end of the Gulf War; but with no central authority, they quickly waltzed themselves into a civil war. Mostly it was intermittent skirmishes and sniping, but from time to time they would haul out the heavy artillery and shell each other for a day or two.

In mid-February, the fighting had turned nasty. A car bomb went off in a crowded market, killing more than a hundred people. A woman wrapped with plastic explosives blew herself up in a building around the corner from our house in Salah al-Din, in the same room where we met one of our Kurdish contacts. Not long after, the two main Kurdish factions fought a pitched battle less than a mile from Salah al-Din. Some stray 155mm shells fell near us, about the length of a football field away.

In the last few days, it wasn’t just the Kurds who seemed bent on annihilation. Iraq, too, looked like it was about to go up. Saddam had put his army on full alert on February 28, canceling all leave and calling up reserves for the first time since the end of the Gulf War. The next day, on March l, Iran followed suit, sending armor to the Iraqi border. And if this wasn’t enough to get Washington’s attention, a Turkish division moved up to the Iraqi border, probably squaring off for a counterinsurgency campaign against Turkish Kurdish guerrillas based in northern Iraq.

With the three largest armies in the Middle East on a collision course, Iraq was starting to look like a runaway train - and the four of us, my three-man team and me, were standing in the middle of the tracks. If Washington had lost its nerve at this point and ordered us out of the north, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It had become corporate policy to close up at the first crack of a rifle. No one with any say-so seemed to even remember our dirty wars in Vietnam, Laos, and the Congo.

I’d done what I could to beef up security. I sent the communicator home - Tom knew how to operate the satellite transceiver. One officer had gone to Qalat Cholan, a Kurdish camp near the Iranian border; a second went to Irbil to live in the Kurdish parliament. Both were fortresses out of reach of Saddam’s assassination teams. Tom and I probably should have moved out of the Salah al-Din house, where we had been living through most of February. Although it was identical to all the other mouse-colored, flat-roofed, poured-concrete houses in the village, Saddam’s agents almost certainly knew we were there. But things were happening too fast to take the time to move. We’d just have to rely on our Kurdish guards to protect us.

‘They’re pulling us out, aren’t they ?’I asked Tom when I joined him in the communications room.

Suddenly, the failure of nerve back in Langley and elsewhere in Washington seemed inevitable. I hoped we’d be brought back only as far as the Turkish border so we could keep meeting our contacts. Pulling us back to Washington would punch a gaping hole in the morale of the Iraqi dissidents at a time they were finally serious about going after Saddam.

Tom had a look of wild amazement on his face. ‘Like I said,’ he told me,’ you’re not going to believe it.’

It was a rocket, all right, but it had nothing to do with pulling us out. The cable Tom handed me was something I’d never seen in my nineteen years in the CIA: a message from the White House, sent by the president’s national security adviser, Tony Lake, and transmitted through CIA channels. I was supposed to deliver it that morning to the Iraqi dissident leaders in the north.

It has to be really bad news, I told myself as I started to read. In fact, it was a catastrophe.

THE ACTION YOU HAVE PLANNED FOR THIS WEEKEND HAS BEEN TOTALLY COMPROMISED. WE BELIEVE THERE IS A HIGH RISK OF FAILURE. ANY DECISION TO PROCEED WILL BE ON YOUR OWN.

In the second and only other paragraph, I was instructed to cable Washington as soon as I’d delivered the message.

Standing less than nine miles from the Iraqi front lines, with Kurdistan’s snow-covered and impenetrable mountains at my back, I found myself focusing on the word’compromised. ‘If Saddam really did know how close he was to being overthrown, he would defend himself like a cornered rat, more than likely sending an armored column north of the Zab River to look for us. The first T-72 tank would be in Salah al-Din, poking its 125mm cannon through our front door, before we could get our boots on.

I reread the cable, hoping to wring some sense out of it. The ‘action’ Lake’s message referred to was a coup d’etat against Saddam Hussein, timed to go down in less than thirty-six hours. Washington had known about it for more than a month, since the end of January - more than enough time to postpone or stop it. That much I was certain of; I had outlined the coup, chapter and verse, for the folks back home. Washington had known, too, that the coup wouldn’t go down quietly. A very noisy diversion was supposed to precede it. We expected - indeed, we wanted - Saddam to put his tanks on the street in the hours leading up to it. But Washington had simply ignored everything we’d reported, letting preparations go forward as if there was a green light. Only now, after the officers behind the coup couldn’t turn back, did the national security adviser finally react.

Why, I kept asking myself in those first stunned minutes after I had read the cable. Why this? Why so late? It wasn’t as if Tony Lake could credibly distance himself from either the coup or the CIA. I wasn’t running a rogue CIA operation that the National Security Council didn’t know about. Lake’s assistant for the Near East, Martin Indyk, personally authorized the CIA to set up a clandestine base in northern Iraq, the one I now headed. When the State Department tried to veto the base, Indyk peremptorily overrode it. And Indyk, like everyone else in the NSC who followed Iraq - including Lake - knew the reason for the base was to XXXXXX the Iraqi dissidents overthrow Saddam. If the NSC hadn’t liked the idea of the coup, it should have called it off in late January when it was first proposed. Calling it off now, in this way, would doom forever any chance we’d have to get rid of Saddam.

It crossed my mind to call Indyk on our secure satellite phone, but even if I’d had his number, he wouldn’t have answered. NSC staffers don’t take calls from CIA bases in the field. What’s more, there was bad blood between Indyk and me. Half a year earlier, I’d told him that the NSC and everyone else in Washington could forget about a bloodless coup getting rid of Saddam. That’s not the way Iraq worked. The meeting, incidentally, hadn’t done my career much good. But the point was that Washington’s fantasy about a nonviolent overthrow of Saddam helped the big thinkers there get to sleep at night, and since we had no human sources inside or even near Saddam’s circle - none - there was nothing to bring them back down to earth. Now I just had to accept that I was 6, 192 miles and eight time zones away from the capital of the free world and wasn’t going to find out what had gone wrong until I got back there.

‘Was there another cable that came in with this? Like what exactly was compromised?’ I asked Tom.

He shook his head.

I called the Iraqi Operations Group, my office in Washington and the headquarters component responsible for XXXXXXX Saddam.

‘Don’t you know the Iraqi army is on a full alert?’ the duty officer asked, irritated.

‘The army is supposed to be on alert,’ I stammered. ‘That was part of the plan. But what about the other part, the secret part?’

I didn’t want to be any more specific about the coup; I wasn’t sure if he’d been read into it or not.

‘Well, apparently another war with Saddam wasn’t part of Lake’s plan. He’s made up his mind, and he doesn’t want to hear any more about it.’

I hung up and took a look around the gloomy second-floor bedroom, our war room: the blanket tacked over the window, air charts tacked on the wall, AK-47s and boxes of rations stacked in the corner, the LST-5 tacset, and the generator humming out on the balcony - we hadn’t had any electricity since Saddam cut it off to the north on February 28. It looked theatrical now. I found myself thinking that for the last month and a half, we had been nothing but boys playing war.

‘A walk?’ I asked Tom. I needed some fresh air.

As soon as we stepped out the door, we were almost overwhelmed by the silence. Since we had arrived in Salah al-Din in late January, we had gone to bed and awakened to the sounds of the Kurds shooting at each other on the Irbil line. Even after the truce on March 2 that officially brought the fighting to an end, sniping went on throughout the day. Now nothing.

Down the street from our house, three Kamaz trucks - the Russian version of a US military deuce and a half - were parked in front of a barracks belonging to the Iraqi National Congress, the main Iraqi dissident group. Three young men in uniform, shouting and laughing, loaded them with ammunition and supplies. They were preparing to move to the Iraqi lines for the planned diversion.

Salah al-Din’s main street was deserted, its only cafe empty. The old men who spent their days sipping sugared tea, their rusty Chinese SKS and Enfield rifles stacked against the wall, had returned to their villages in the mountains, the only safe place to be when things went to hell in Kurdistan. The waiter - who, like everyone else in Salah al-Din, knew we were CIA - watched us warily, then disappeared behind a rug that made do for a door. Even if you didn’t know about the coup, you could tell something was in the air. :

No doubt about it, I thought. This isn’t going to be an easy message to deliver.

When my team and I walked into northern Iraq on January 21, 1995, we had no idea anyone was making plans to move against Saddam. I’d volunteered to take a team into the north because I knew it was the only way the CIA could get a heads-up if Saddam was about to invade another neighbor. I also knew it was the best place to recruit Iraqi military officers.

Our first task after crossing the border was to meet an Iraqi major general, in Zakhu, a small town the Kurds had seized in the March 1991 uprisings. Until he defected to the north in November 1994, the general had been an adviser in the Iraqi presidency. The hope was that he might know something about where the Scuds were hiding and, even more important, about Saddam’s biochemical warheads.

The general must have found the group of us an odd sight when his driver pulled up in front of our house at exactly eleven AM We had spent the last two days in the back of trucks getting into the north, only to discover the house we were to live in had no electricity, water, or heat - this on a night so cold the water in our canteens froze. Unshaven and unbathed, wearing surplus military cold-weather gear and cradling automatic rifles, we looked more like stragglers left behind by a routed army than representatives of the United States.

Nonplussed, the burly general rolled out of the car, straightened himself up, and offered me a hand of tempered steel. He was wearing an unremarkable suit, scuffed penny loafers, and a paisley silk tie, but his tar-black regimental mustache, squared shoulders, and stiff gait gave away the soldier underneath. Besides, I recognized him from a press photo, sitting next to Saddam in a bunker during the Gulf War.

We sat down in our living room as the cook served us tea, but the general found it difficult to start. He kept asking whether we were comfortable, how we liked Iraq, and whether we needed anything. It was a polite ritual I’d gotten used to working in the Middle East.

‘General, could we talk a little about Saddam’s strategic weapons ?’ I asked, cutting him off.

My question surprised him. ‘I don’t know anything about them,’ he said. ‘Only Saddam, Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamil, and a few people around Saddam know where they’re hidden.’

We sat without saying anything for a minute. I was about ready to thank him for the meeting when he cleared his throat and asked,’ Does the US want Saddam to remain in power?’

Here we go again. The general was alluding to a vintage conspiracy-theory that dogged everything we tried to do in Iraq - the myth that the US secretly kept Saddam in power. I’d heard it from just about every Iraqi I’d met. Some even believed Saddam was a paid CIA agent. The theory dovetailed nicely with the Iraqi belief that dark, unseen forces ran the world and history could be reduced to a series of conspiracies, interconnected by an overarching design known to only a few. It followed, then, in this twisted scheme of things, that a foreign policy of any consequence had to be scripted according to a secret plot. As one theory went, Saddam and the US had struck a secret agreement in 1980 for Iraq to invade Iran. The sole objective was to take Iran down a peg. Then, when Iraq emerged from that war as a menacing giant in the Gulf, the US conspired with Kuwait to lure Iraq into invading Kuwait - only so the US could smash Iraq’s army. It was Iraq’s turn to be taken down a peg. Imperialism couldn’t work any other way.

The theory explained a lot of otherwise inexplicable mysteries, such as why the US Army didn’t hunt down Saddam at the end of the Gulf War, and even permitted him to put up his helicopters so he could crush the popular insurrections. It explained why the US allowed Saddam to smuggle oil through countries allied with the US , like Turkey and Jordan. It also explained why, after Saddam’s attempted assassination of ex-president George Bush during his visit to Kuwait in 1993, President Bill Clinton fired a couple of cruise missiles into empty buildings in Baghdad rather than go after Saddam.

The theory got still nuttier in 1993 when the son of a former Iraqi prime minister living in London, Sa’d Salih Jabir, started the rumor that the CIA had deliberately betrayed a coup against Saddam, even giving him the list of the plotters. Although the lie was cut from whole cloth, many Iraqi military officers accepted it as the truth. It made our job of recruiting them nearly impossible.

And what was our motivation for keeping Saddam in power? He was our surrogate, bogeyman, and neighborhood bully rolled into one. The US needed Saddam to keep the peace in the Gulf. Whisper Saddam’s name and the Arab Gulf states would huddle around the US like pups around a bitch. And the price the Gulf Arabs paid for American protection was not raising the price of oil. It all made perfect sense to Iraqis.

There was only one way to deal with a conspiracy theory like that: Take it head-on. ‘We want Saddam out. It’s the Iraqi people who’ve kept him in power all these years,’ I said.

The general considered my answer for a moment. Deciding he had no choice except to trust me, he said,’ Let’s go outside.’

We had gone about twenty yards down the street when the general turned to face me.

‘I’ve been dispatched to the north by a group of military officers who intend to get rid of Saddam ‘he said in a hoarse whisper, looking around to make sure no one could overhear us. ‘We need to know whether your country will stand in our way or not.’

He looked me in the eye for what seemed like a full minute, to make absolutely sure I understood. I didn’t say anything. It was no time to interrupt.

‘And there’s a second request we make,’ he continued. ‘The moment we take power, we need the US to grant us immediate diplomatic recognition - otherwise there will be a fight for power, a civil war.’

The general stopped talking. It was clear that this was all he was authorized to say. It was a lot for him, to be sure, but not nearly enough if he expected US support.

‘Washington will need to know the details, like who’s involved,’ I said.

The general held up his hand to stop me. ‘Please get an answer from Washington first, and we will talk about details then.’

We came to the edge of town and turned back. The general had a meeting with the Turkish general staff in Ankara. A Turkish military helicopter was waiting for him on the other side of the border. He intended to tell the Turks about the coup.

‘I know you would like to ask the question, but maybe you’re too polite,’ the general said as we walked back. ‘Yes, we know what we are doing. And we know what the penalty for failure is.

‘I’ve seen firsthand how good Saddam’s security is. During the war I briefed Saddam three or four times. Do you know how I - and everyone else - met with Saddam then? You were told to go to a certain street corner in Baghdad and wait, sometimes for up to two or three hours. Eventually a car would approach and stop. You were told to get in the back and lie down on the floor. A blanket was thrown over your head so you couldn’t see anything. The car would drive around Baghdad for at least an hour. You had no idea where you were. Then the car would stop. And there Saddam would be, waiting in front of a very ordinary house, probably commandeered for only that one meeting. When the meeting was over, the same car took you back in the same way. You never knew where you were. Saddam’s security is very, very good, but we know its vulnerabilities. Please trust us that we know what we are doing.’

As the general was ready to leave, he rolled down the window to say one last thing.

‘All that we ask of Washington is that it be frank with us. We must know whether it wants Saddam out or not. Nothing more. I’ll be back from Ankara in two or three days. I hope you will have our answer by then.’

As soon as I got back inside, I sent a report to headquarters about what the general had told me.

I knew the general’s message wouldn’t go very far without any details, but I hoped Washington would at least take his defection seriously. Not only was he the first general to break ranks since the end of the war, but he also was from a politically prominent upper Euphrates family. Even more important, he was a Sunni Muslim, the same sect Saddam belonged to, the one that kept him in power. Although the Sunni Arabs made up only 20 percent or so of Iraq’s population, they controlled the armed forces and the security services with an iron grip. No tank, airplane, or unit larger than a company could move without authorization from a Sunni officer who had unquestioned loyalty to Saddam. Without the support of Iraq’s Sunnis, Saddam couldn’t last a day in power. Moreover, the signs were mounting that the general’s departure had rattled Saddam’s cage.

In the past, Saddam had made a point of ignoring defections, but on November 8, in addition to dispatching assassination teams to hunt down the general, Saddam took the unprecedented step of ordering the senior cleric for the general’s clan to publicly denounce him - a Muslim version of excommunication. Saddam wanted to make sure the rest of the Sunnis understood there was no place for apostates in the congregation. Clearly, he feared that the general might be the first frayed thread in an unraveling mantle of power.

Even if Washington decided not to support the coup, I figured we would have to take a fresh look at the stability of Saddam’s regime. Was his Sunni core of support headed toward meltdown? We couldn’t accept the general’s word at face value, but the CIA should have been in a position to check the general’s information with clandestine sources in Iraq - Sunnis still living inside and serving military officers. And there, of course, was the snag. By 1995, three years after scores of nations and more than half a million coalition forces had gone to war against Saddam Hussein, the CIA didn’t have a single source in Iraq who could back up or refute what the general had told us. Not one.

Not only were there no human sources in country, the CIA didn’t have any in the neighboring countries - Iran, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia - who reported on Iraq. Like the rest of the US government, its intelligence-gathering apparatus was blind when it came to Iraq. The general’s credibility would have to be established in other ways, and his information painstakingly vetted.

Ideally, we would have met face-to-face with the officers preparing the coup and heard the story directly from their mouths, but even that wasn’t possible. Iraq was what the CIA called a ‘denied’ area. All communication had to be by go-betweens, because no CIA personnel could visit any part of the nation controlled by Saddam. In effect, the designation created a catch-22, since Iraqi military officers were not permitted to travel outside Iraq, including the Kurdish north. Getting caught earned an officer a ticket to an acid bath, a good excuse to stay home, That meant the only way to communicate was through a cutout, a courier, who could travel back and forth across the lines without being noticed. It wasn’t a perfect system - imagine watching a play in which all the action takes place in the wings, relayed by an intermittently onstage narrator - but it was all the choice we had.

A week after I sent off word of the general’s intentions, headquarters came back with a snappy, five-word reply: ‘This is not a plan.’

I recognized the prose as belonging to a CIA officer who had worked for me in the Iraqi Operations Group. He’d spent only one year overseas. in Vietnam, twenty-five years earlier. He’d never set foot in the Middle East. Even still, headquarters’ reaction struck me as bizarre. It didn’t ask for additional details or even offer encouragement. It was as if the CIA had hundreds of agents on the ground and no sparrow fell in Iraq without our knowing about it.

I went to see the general the next day, at his house in the middle of Salah al-Din at the end of a tangle of narrow, muddy streets. Sparsely furnished, the place looked as if he’d fled to the north with his family and only what they could carry. We sat cross-legged on the floor while his wife served us tea and their children peered at us from behind a door. I’d already made up my mind that it was pointless to tell him about the message from headquarters. He wouldn’t have understood; and, not understanding, he would have been even more reluctant to confide in me. Anyhow, the way I read the message, Washington hadn’t rejected the coup; it just needed more details, such as the names of the officers involved.

When I told the general that I hadn’t yet received an answer about the coup, a flicker of foreboding passed across his face. The secret committee had hoped for a twenty-four-hour turnaround on their message, he said. Couriers were crossing the lines every night, expecting to return with an answer. It was incomprehensible to the general that Washington couldn’t decide on a matter of this importance within hours.

I tried to turn the conversation in a different direction. We talked a little about the situation in the north, the problems he was having with his children out of school, the shortage of food.

As I was standing up to leave, the general motioned me to stay. ‘Tell Washington this.’ ‘

I sensed the general was about to open a door he would have preferred not to - to give me the details of the coup. If I was right, there it sought to leave nothing to chance: A source inside Saddam’s security detail would notify the plotters as soon as Saddam had left for Awjah.

The key to the coup’s success was maintaining its integrity right up until the first shot was fired - Saddam couldn’t have the slightest suspicion he would be targeted at Awjah - and the way to do that was to limit knowledge of the coup to family members. Everyone on the secret committee and the commanders of the four units were related by blood. Most were first cousins.

‘That’s the only kind of conspiracy that can survive in Iraq today without being immediately betrayed,’ the general told me. Moreover, most of the troops who would participate in the attack on Awjah were from the Shummar tribal confederation. With Iraq disintegrating under the UN embargo, old tribal bonds were replacing loyalty to the state.

The committee figured that as long as the secrecy of its plan held, and if there were no other competing troop movements, the colonel’s tanks would need about twenty minutes to get to Awjah. Another ten to twenty minutes for the other units to arrive, and Saddam, surrounded, could either give up or the tanks would level his compound. It would all be over in less than an hour.