Black Flags Page 10

  On October 30, dual escorts of U.S. marines and Jordanian ceremonial guards carried Foley’s casket to a military transport plane at an Amman airport, trailed by Virginia Foley and Bogart, the couple’s golden retriever. Across town, at the Mukhabarat’s headquarters, meanwhile, the interrogations ground on. An obscure jihadist group’s claim of responsibility was investigated and dismissed. Detectives squeezed, threatened, and cajoled. Weeks passed, and not a single useful lead had been produced, other than the snippet of a phone call, apparently made from a cheap “burner” phone containing a stolen memory chip.

  Then, in late November, one of the Mukhabarat’s informants overheard whisperings about a strange Libyan man who had moved into an apartment in the Marka refugee settlement, on Amman’s outskirts. The foreigner had arrived in September, ostensibly to help a friend open a women’s clothing shop specializing in the black abayas and head coverings worn by the pious. The two had rented a small storefront and posted a sign that read “The Little Princess.” They also rented a small warehouse, to the bafflement of neighbors, who wondered why a tiny clothing shop would require so much storage space.

  The Jordanian partner was a Palestinian named Yasser Ibrahim Freihat, a struggling businessman with jihadist sympathies but lacking any known connection to radical groups or crimes. The Libyan looked much more interesting. After tracking him for several days, the Mukhabarat became convinced of his identity: he was Salem Ben Suweid, a veteran of the Afghan civil war who had been arrested three years earlier, after entering Jordan under a forged passport. Police at that time suspected that he had al-Qaeda connections and kicked him out of the country. If this was truly Suweid, he had managed to sneak into Jordan a second time without being detected.

  After midnight on December 3, Mukhabarat agents raided the warehouse, the Little Princess shop, and then the apartments of the two men. They rousted Suweid and Freihat in their bedclothes and began a thorough ransacking of their belongings for anything suspicious. Suweid’s house yielded a bonanza. Agents found gloves and masks, bulletproof vests, tear-gas canisters, and over ten thousand dollars in American currency. In a back room they found Suweid’s weapons cache: five Kalashnikov assault rifles along with ammunition, a handbook on explosives, and a notebook with diagrams of potential targets. But there was no sign of a silencer or a seven-millimeter handgun that would match the shell casings found at Foley’s villa.

  At 4:00 a.m., the two men were delivered to the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism branch and into the hands of Abu Haytham, the counterterrorism section’s deputy, and Ali Bourzak, the division chief and legendary interrogator known as the Red Devil. By 6:00 a.m., as the approaching dawn softened the clouds over the Judean Hills to a dull gray, Suweid was a broken man. He signed a confession, admitting to planning and carrying out the assassination of the diplomat Laurence Foley. Freihat, his business partner, had acted as his lookout and driver, he said.

  It was quick work, even by the Mukhabarat’s standards, and Abu Haytham knew the confession would invite suspicions. Jordanians and even Westerners would assume that the spy agency had used torture to produce a suspect in a murder case that had damaged the country’s standing with its most important ally. So, with the ink on the confession still drying, the captain resorted to a tactic he often used when a suspect’s credibility was in question: he organized a guided tour of the crime scene.

  As a subdued Suweid sat in handcuffs in the backseat, Abu Haytham and his driver began heading toward West Amman, home to most of the city’s embassies and diplomats.

  “Take me to the place,” he ordered.

  Suweid directed the driver through a maze of side streets until the vehicle stopped in front of the carport where Foley’s body had lain. The house was empty now; Virginia Foley had left Jordan with her husband’s body and would never again live in the Middle East. All signs of the slaying had long since been scrubbed away.

  The prisoner sat quietly in the backseat with his head bowed.

  “Show me how it happened,” Haytham commanded.

  Suweid slowly recounted the story just as he had laid it out in his confession. He had slipped across the Jordanian border from Syria in September with orders to find American and official Jordanian targets to strike. After setting up the front company with Freihat, he sent his old friend back into Syria to retrieve a cache of weapons, including the Kalashnikovs and a handgun. Then, in October, he had begun cruising Amman’s diplomatic district and wealthier neighborhoods popular with Westerners.

  Foley had been a chance discovery, Suweid said. Open and gregarious, the American had made an impression during his frequent visits to Amman’s refugee enclaves, where he had worked with Palestinians on water projects. His friendly questions about life in the camps had led some to suspect that he was an operative of some kind. Everyone knew about the red Mercedes with the distinctive diplomatic tags, which Foley continued to use even after other embassy staffers had switched to ordinary Jordanian plates.

  Suweid found Foley’s house and studied it for three days. He noticed Foley’s white, thinning hair and late-middle-age paunch. He observed the absence of guards and security cameras, and the low wall that ran along the front and side of the house, offering both easy access and ample hiding places. He jotted notes on Foley’s morning routine: the early risings, the dog walks, the set-your-clock regularity of his 7:20 a.m. departures for the office, always alone in the Mercedes’s front seat.

  Finally, on October 28, as the city’s muezzins were sounding the call for dawn prayers, the Libyan and his partner climbed into a borrowed Hyundai and headed toward Amman’s western side, with the pistol and mask hidden in a small satchel on Suweid’s lap. Whether Foley was a spy, Suweid did not know. But he was looking to kill an American, and he now had his chance.

  “I thought it would be easy, with just a few shots, to kill him,” Suweid told Abu Haytham.

  He showed the Mukhabarat officer the spot where he had breached the wall, and where he had crouched while waiting for Foley to emerge from the house. He recounted how he had shot the diplomat without a word, and then shot again to ensure that the wounds were fatal. He pointed to the place where Freihat had waited in the idling Hyundai, and described how the two had hurried back to the Marka neighborhood afterward, stopping at one point to toss the handgun into the polluted Zarqa River. They had returned home in time to change clothes and open the Little Princess store, precisely at 10:00 a.m.

  Abu Haytham listened intently, and then asked, again, the question that had confounded him since news of the murder first broke:

  “Why?”

  “I did it,” Suweid said, “for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi.”

  —

  Was Zarqawi truly involved?

  Jordanian officials waited nearly two weeks before announcing the arrests and publicly linking Zarqawi to the crime, perhaps in the hope that the CIA would find additional evidence bolstering the connection between the shooter and the man who was rapidly becoming Jordan’s most famous fugitive. As it was, many Jordanians were prepared to believe Suweid’s lawyer when he told the Amman newspapers that the claim of a Zarqawi role had been induced through torture.

  Investigators would counter by leaking details about the intercepted call between Suweid and his contact in Iraq, a man they identified as Muammar Yousef al-Jaghbeer, a known Zarqawi disciple. Jaghbeer himself was arrested years later in Iraq, and his statements to his American captors supported the claim that Zarqawi had personally dispatched Suweid to Jordan with a budget of fifty thousand dollars and instructions to find and kill Americans—any Americans.

  Yet, oddly, Zarqawi never claimed responsibility for Foley’s murder, even as he took credit for hundreds of other killings, including those of numerous U.S. citizens. Islamists who knew Zarqawi during his time in northeastern Iraq have insisted that he was not involved.

  Nada Bakos, one of the CIA analysts who saw the intelligence in real time, said some key questions were never fully answered.

  �
�The evidence was ambiguous,” she would later say. “We were convinced of Zarqawi’s role, analytically. Whether you could put together a criminal case, that’s a different story.”

  Still, the analytical case provided more than sufficient grounds for action. A grave crime had been committed against a U.S. government employee on official duty overseas, and there were reasons for believing that Zarqawi was at least complicit.

  Justice would have to be served, and that meant capturing Zarqawi himself. Fortunately, the U.S. government knew, in those waning weeks of the autumn of 2002, exactly where he was.

  6

  “This war is going to happen”

  The man who would become the CIA’s chief spy in northern Iraq had barely heard of the suspected terrorist called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when he arrived in the country in the summer of 2002. But within weeks, Charles “Sam” Faddis knew the Jordanian’s home address, down to the square meter on his targeting grid.

  The chances to go after Zarqawi would never be better than this.

  Faddis, a six-foot-two navy captain’s son from the Appalachian foothills of southwestern Pennsylvania, had slipped into Iraq with a team of CIA operatives to gather intelligence on Iraqi military units as well as Ansar al-Islam, the militant oddballs who lived on the Iranian border and maintained loose ties with al-Qaeda. Though already forty-seven and a lawyer, he had pushed hard for the assignment. Faddis had been anxious to find a way to get into the fight after the September 11 attacks, and his counterterrorism background, Middle East experience, and mastery of Turkish had made him particularly suited to lead the mission. Now he and his team were living in safe houses and conducting surveillance of Ansar al-Islam’s base, home to Zarqawi and several dozen other refugee jihadis from Afghanistan. Donning Kurdish clothes, the officers sometimes crept so close to the base they could clearly see the perimeter guards with their long beards and slung AK-47s.

  The target was remote in the extreme. Sargat, the hamlet where Zarqawi had landed after his flight from Afghanistan, was the last stop on the rutted road leading to Iraq’s border with the Islamic Republic of Iran. A few miles to the northwest was Halabja, a town forever associated with one of the great genocidal atrocities of the late twentieth century. There, on March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein attacked Kurdish villagers with deadly nerve gas, killing as many as five thousand men, women, and children in history’s worst chemical attack against a civilian population. The region never fully recovered; after the first Iraq war, in 1991, daily patrols by U.S. aircraft kept Saddam’s planes and tanks out of Kurdish settlements, but the absence of a central authority gave rise to local militias and warlords that skirmished with Iraqi ground troops and with each other.

  By the time Zarqawi arrived, the Ansar al-Islam militants had already carved out a small enclave that also included the town of Khurmal and several other small villages, which they administered with Taliban-like zeal. Officially at war with both the Iraqi regime and Kurdish nationalist groups, they built hillside defense works offering a commanding view of the mountain passes, as well as escape routes that led across the border into Iran. The main base in Sargat consisted of seven small buildings, without heat or electricity except for a single generator, encircled by earthen walls and bunkers festooned with black banners. A separate cluster of cinder-block dwellings served as housing and training facilities for Zarqawi’s men, who mostly avoided blending with their Kurdish-speaking counterparts. Locals would remember them as a mix of Arab nationalities with uniformly stern views about behavior and dress. Some villagers grumbled afterward about the impracticality of some of the Islamists’ rules in a community where both men and women spent long hours tending livestock and crops.

  “They used to force women to wear the cover and a gown while going to the fields and gardens to work,” one man complained to a TV interviewer a few months after the militants had left.

  But the CIA’s interest in the Islamists had little to do with religious codes. Now that al-Qaeda had been chased from Afghanistan, the Ansar al-Islam base represented the largest known gathering of militants with ties—albeit minor ones—to Bin Laden’s group. Faddis’s orders were to assess the strength of the combined force of Arab and local Islamists living in the Iraqi enclave. If possible, he was also to determine how, if at all, Ansar’s militants were coordinating their operations with Iraqi government forces. Regardless of whether al-Qaeda and Iraq had colluded in the past, the White House worried that Saddam Hussein might use terrorists as proxies to strike a blow against the West. Friendly Kurds had reported seeing chemical weapons in Ansar’s camp, deepening suspicions within the White House that Saddam was arming the Islamist militants for a future terrorist strike.

  The CIA team leader was skeptical. Faddis had spent years in the region, and he understood the bitter hatred nearly all Kurds felt toward the Iraqi tyrant after years of genocidal policies that had wiped out two thousand Kurdish villages and nearly two hundred thousand ethnic Kurds in the 1980s. For Kurdish militants to unite with Saddam for any reason was nearly impossible to fathom.

  Still, Faddis told his team to keep an open mind.

  “Look, if we can produce solid intelligence that proves Saddam is in bed with al-Qaeda, that’s fabulous,” he recalled telling his men during a group huddle in the summer of 2002. “But we’re not saying anything remotely like that until we get solid evidence that’s happening. We’re not going to pass off rumors and bullshit as the truth.”

  Faddis’s group consisted of eight men, all of them with extensive military experience and two of them members of the CIA’s secret paramilitary unit known as the Special Activities Division. Their base was a small house provided to them by friendly Kurds a few miles from the Ansar camp. It served as an operations center as well as living quarters for the men, who spent much of their days conducting surveillance and joining in the questioning of captured militants seized by friendly Kurds. Their access to Ansar and al-Qaeda prisoners was extraordinary; the Americans were able to interrogate dozens of prisoners, and they considered each new account against a growing database of intelligence gleaned from earlier detainees as well as their own surveillance of Ansar’s camps. The findings were beamed to CIA headquarters in the form of hundreds of classified electronic messages, relayed to Langley via Faddis’s satellite phone.

  Faddis quickly grasped the stark differences between the Afghan exiles—mostly Arabic-speakers with at least rudimentary education and knowledge of the world—and the simple Kurdish farmers and goat herders who filled Ansar’s ranks. Yet the two groups shared the same ideology and a common interest in the tradecraft of terrorism. Together they had set about creating a miniature Afghanistan in the Iraqi mountains, an Islamic theocracy whose harsh codes were enforced by the gun and the blade.

  It was true, he learned, that the militants harbored a deadly secret: a stockpile of poisons they were testing for possible use in terrorist attacks abroad. Through the CIA’s interrogations, and with additional help from well-placed spies, the nature of Ansar’s poisons fixation became clear. The group had managed to acquire dozens of gallons of deadly chemicals, including cyanide, and a small supply of castor beans for making highly lethal ricin. Each of the ingredients could be purchased easily and legally—potassium cyanide is used in film developing—and there was no sign that Ansar’s militants possessed the equipment or know-how for making real chemical weapons. Still, the experiments seemed serious enough. Inside their makeshift lab, amateur technicians mixed cyanide with skin cream and other cosmetics. Their rumored experiments on stray dogs were later confirmed in videotapes that were discovered in the fort’s ruins.

  “Their abilities are crude, but their aspirations are huge,” Faddis remembered thinking at the time. “They are out for blood, and they are no joke.”

  The other question preoccupying the White House—whether Iraqi forces were somehow helping the Islamists—was even easier to unravel. Faddis’s team picked up the trail of suspected Iraqi operatives in the area near the Ansar ca
mp, and confirmed that the men were members of Saddam Hussein’s feared intelligence service. But Faddis soon discovered that the Iraqis were doing exactly as he was: trying to collect intelligence on the militants. The Iraqis watched from afar and tried to recruit informants—a risky proposition, given Ansar’s history of poisoning suspected spies and displaying their severed heads on stakes outside the fort. Far from colluding with the Islamists, the Iraqis appeared fearful of them.

  Still, the Bush administration had promised to hunt down al-Qaeda-allied terrorists wherever it found them, and to Faddis, this bunch fit the definition perfectly.

  The United States had a “golden opportunity,” Faddis wrote in one of his cables to CIA headquarters in Langley. Ansar al-Islam was a terrorist organization with an ambitious international agenda. It was harboring dozens of Arab militants with known links to al-Qaeda. More disturbingly, it possessed chemical poisons that could potentially be used with horrifying effect in the cities of Europe or the United States. But the threat in its entirety could be erased, Faddis wrote, with a single well-placed blow.

  “We knew exactly where every one of these Islamist terrorists slept,” Faddis said afterward, describing his detailed accounts to CIA headquarters. “We knew where each gun was, literally down to every machine-gun position and mortar tube.”

  Best of all, he added, “None of them knew we were there.”

  As Faddis hoped, his cables created a stir in Washington. At Langley, and later at the Defense Department, a series of meetings was convened to discuss what to do. At the Pentagon, a forty-eight-year-old brigadier general named Stanley McChrystal—soon to rise to prominence as the head of special forces in Iraq—was asked to come up with options for attacking the base. One idea was to hit the Islamists with a missile barrage, followed by a helicopter assault by teams of American and Kurdish commandos, who would scoop up any evidence of biological or chemical weapons production.