Black Flags Page 13

  A few of the calls picked up by the NSA’s eavesdroppers made an immediate impression. They were brief, with limited small talk, clearly intended to relay messages. There were no names or place-names used, just vague references to a deed, along with what sounded like a congratulatory message.

  “Brother,” one of the callers said, “Allah was merciful today.”

  At the CIA, the agency’s telecom sleuths traced the calls as far as they could, through digital signatures embedded in electronic phone records. The callers, it turned out, had used cell phones equipped with prepaid SIM cards stolen from a vendor in Switzerland. Who ultimately came to possess them, and how they ended up in Iraq, was anyone’s guess.

  It would be another ten days, and another gruesome bombing, before Bakos and the other analysts caught a break. The next strike was far worse than the others, and occurred not in Baghdad but in Najaf, a Shiite provincial capital and home to one of the most important shrines for the country’s majority Shiite Muslim population.

  August 29, 2003, was a Friday, the Muslim holy day, and huge crowds had jammed the city’s gold-domed Imam Ali Mosque to hear a sermon by Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, a highly influential Shiite cleric who had returned from exile in Iran in the weeks after the U.S. invasion. A moderate whose family had been persecuted by Saddam Hussein, the grandfatherly Hakim was regarded by U.S. military officials as a potential partner, a man who preached a message of unity and patience and seemed open to working with Iraq’s U.S.-appointed interim council. On this day, the portly cleric climbed the mosque’s minbar in his robe and turban to deliver a blunt critique of the occupation forces, decrying their failure to bring security to the country, and specifically mentioning the bombings at the Jordanian Embassy and UN headquarters. Iraqis should take responsibility for their own security with the support of the full population, the imam said. “We should join efforts in order to return full sovereignty to the Iraqi people by forming an Iraqi government,” he said.

  Hakim had just finished his sermon and was walking toward his motorcade when a car bomb exploded, followed quickly by a second. The blasts killed at least eighty-five people who had crowded the plaza for a glimpse of the cleric, and wounded more than five hundred. Thousands of worshippers and pilgrims fled the shrine in a panic, trampling over the dying and injured as they rushed the gates. Of Hakim, a man who had embodied the hopes of so many Iraqis as well as Americans, nothing identifiable was found except for a hand bearing the imam’s wedding ring.

  The shock from the assassination quickly reverberated across the country, igniting protests in several cities and dampening hopes for uniting Iraqis behind an interim governing council. In Baghdad, tens of thousands of people from the city’s Shiite slums marched through Sunni neighborhoods, chanting “Death to Baathists!” and “No to America! No to Saddam! Yes, yes to Islam!” U.S. cable news stations interposed images of enraged protesters with video of an ill-timed visit to Iraq by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the same week. The Pentagon’s top official repeated his now familiar line attributing the violence to “dead-enders” from Saddam Hussein’s deposed regime, perhaps with help from Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants from Lebanon. Aside from these distractions, progress in Iraq had been “extraordinary,” Rumsfeld insisted.

  “Baghdad is bustling with commerce,” he said.

  At the battered shrine, meanwhile, yet another search for bomb fragments and other clues was beginning to yield results. Strewn across the vast debris field were pieces of old aircraft munitions and homemade wiring remarkably similar to those found after the bombings at the Jordanian Embassy and UN headquarters. The evidence increasingly pointed to a single actor: someone with significant bomb-making skills and a determination to wreak havoc.

  The NSA’s antennas again strained for signals, and now the Americans’ surveillance bore important fruit. An intercepted phone call contained another congratulatory message: Allah had been “merciful” again. But this time the phone numbers lit up as a match in the CIA’s database: the recipient of the call had also been telephoned after the bombing of the UN building. Moreover, the CIA now knew more about the batch of SIM cards from Switzerland. One of the electronic chips had been found on a Syrian man arrested a few days earlier. The man, a self-described Islamist, had admitted to traveling to Iraq to wage jihad. He claimed to be the disciple of a Jordanian holy warrior, one whom foreign fighters called Zarqawi.

  Bakos, back at Langley recovering from her first Iraq tour, followed the reports of foreign fighters moving in Baghdad and wondered if Zarqawi was among them. Now it was clear: the intercepted calls linked him not only to the Najaf carnage but also to the UN attack, and perhaps the embassy bombing as well. Somehow, just five months after the destruction of the Ansar al-Islam training camp, Zarqawi had managed to move his network into a strange capital and build an operation with sufficient intelligence-gathering, firepower, and logistical support to carry out a chain of sophisticated, large-scale terrorist attacks in close succession. Zarqawi was not only part of the worsening violence in Iraq, he was helping direct it.

  Bakos studied the reports and prepared to write the summary that would be included in the next day’s briefing papers for the White House. By now the essential conclusion looked solid: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the attacks. The terrorist the Bush administration had cited as a reason for attacking Saddam Hussein had in fact become empowered by the Iraqi leader’s defeat. A minor worry before, when he was confined to a remote corner of Iraq’s northern mountains, now he had been set loose in the Iraqi heartland and was becoming more menacing by the day.

  Much later, intelligence officials and terrorism experts who studied the early war years marveled at Zarqawi’s strategic cunning. Whether deliberately or by coincidence, he picked targets that would confound U.S. ambitions for Iraq and ensure that the occupation of the country would be long and painful. The opening salvo against an Arab embassy would effectively discourage other Muslim nations from participating in Iraq’s rebuilding in a way that might give the Americans legitimacy. That blow was followed by two others that, in sequence, showed “brilliant strategy,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA terrorism analyst who went on to advise two U.S. presidents.

  “By attacking the UN, he drove out all the nongovernmental organizations and discouraged anyone from opening an embassy,” Riedel said. “Then he went after the Shia-Sunni fault line with attacks on the Shiite mosques.

  “So first he isolated us in Iraq,” Riedel said, “then he put us in the midst of a civil war.”

  It was too early to draw such conclusions in August 2003, so Nada Bakos simply wrote what she knew, trying to avoid thinking about the trouble her report would surely cause at senior levels of the Bush administration.

  Bakos’s supervisors pressed her repeatedly on the details. No one was anxious to break the news to the White House that Zarqawi was responsible for the killings, Bakos recalled later.

  “Take another day,” she was urged by one of her supervisors. “We’re not writing this unless we’re absolutely sure.”

  The edits and rewrites continued through the day and well into the night. It was after midnight when the draft was finished, and nearly 3:00 a.m. by the time Bakos returned to her apartment for a few hours’ sleep.

  Hers was just a single report, but it ran contrary to the administration’s official narrative for the war. Some in the White House would find it threatening, she knew, and perhaps would try to bury it. But it was the truth.

  “It’s why we were being so cautious,” Bakos said. “We knew there would be push-back, because what we were telling them meant that this was no longer a victory. It was a freaking nightmare.”

  9

  “So you guys think this is an insurgency?”

  A few days after the bombing of the UN building, Robert Richer was driving home from Canada after a long-deferred family vacation when his CIA phone rang. On the line was one of the agency’s briefers, working on detail to the White House, an
xious to know about an alarming document that had just made its way to the president’s desk.

  The president wants to know if the agency stands by this report—the one about the beginning of an insurgency in Iraq, the briefer said.

  Richer, who happened to be crossing the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit at the time, waited until he was on the American side to pull over. Yes, he knew the report, he said. He had personally signed off on it just a few days before.

  “It’s factual,” said Richer, the CIA’s former station chief in Jordan, who had now risen to become chief of the agency’s Near East Division. “It’s the chief of station’s view. We stand behind the analysis.”

  The tension on the other end of the line was palpable, even from five hundred miles away. The White House did not like the use of the word “insurgency” in conjunction with a war that President George W. Bush had declared essentially won. Anyone with a casual interest in the news could see that violence in Iraq had grown dramatically worse since the early summer. Besides the string of spectacular car bombings, American soldiers were dying at a rate of more than ten a week from snipers’ bullets and hidden roadside bombs. But “insurgency” was a dangerous word, conjuring up images of Vietnam and endless guerrilla warfare. At National Security Council meetings, the Pentagon’s civilian managers ran PowerPoint presentations highlighting provinces in Iraq that were relatively peaceful. The attacks elsewhere in the country were isolated and scattered, the work of a few Baathist holdouts loyal to Saddam Hussein, who was then still in hiding. “How important are these?” asked an aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at one such meeting attended by Richer.

  How important? Richer, who made frequent visits to Baghdad’s CIA station, was incredulous. Real important, he thought to himself.

  “We’re seeing it every day,” he told colleagues.

  That Iraq harbored terrorists was beyond dispute. But no one had dared used the word “insurgency” to describe the conflict until August 30, 2003. On that day, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief, Gerry Meyer, dashed off a cable to headquarters just hours after the double explosions that killed the Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim and scores of worshippers at the mosque in Najaf. The secret cable was called an “aardwolf,” spy-speak for a kind of formal assessment for headquarters from one of the agency’s field stations. Meyer, having witnessed the effects of August’s trio of car bombings, warned that the conflict was rapidly entering a perilous new phase. Foreign jihadists were beginning to pour into Iraq, drawn by the prospect of a fight against Americans, and aligning with shadowy groups intent on unleashing mayhem to destabilize the country and discredit the U.S. occupiers and their Iraqi supporters. The emergence of this insurgent army could potentially reverse the progress of the past five months, Meyer wrote. Moreover, with the new arrivals, waves of future suicide bombers were already in the country, poised for attacks that would be carried out regardless of whether Saddam Hussein was caught.

  The report’s stark tone caught White House officials by surprise and drew a loud dissent from the administration’s point man in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, the diplomat who ran the Coalition Provisional Authority. Bremer complained that the report’s conclusions were overdrawn and excessively negative, and it was his reaction that prompted the CIA to track down Richer on his vacation.

  “There was a firestorm,” recalled Richer, who retired from the agency in 2005. “The CIA is saying that an insurgency is developing, and now the White House is pissed off.” In effect, he said, two versions of reality were colliding in Iraq: the one witnessed by the agency’s spies, and another that sought to reinforce the message communicated so dramatically by Bush in May on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

  “The problem for the White House,” Richer said, “was that the president had just landed on a ship to say that we had won.”

  For now, Meyer’s report would simply be ignored. It would be another ten weeks and scores of additional deaths before the president’s top national security aides sat down again to debate whether the use of the word “insurgency” was appropriate in describing the conflict in Iraq. More months passed before the White House acknowledged that there actually was one.

  —

  If Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could have dictated a U.S. strategy for Iraq that suited his own designs for building a terrorist network, he could hardly have come up with one that surpassed what the Americans themselves put in place over the spring and summer of 2003.

  Countless articles and books have documented the Bush administration’s missteps, from the refusal to halt massive looting after the invasion to the wholesale dismantling of the Iraqi military and security structure by Bremer’s CPA. But no Americans appreciated the magnitude of the blunders more than the intelligence officers and U.S. diplomats in Iraq who were watching Zarqawi’s organization gain momentum.

  Years later, CIA officials who were brought into the final planning for the March 2003 invasion expressed astonishment at the lack of forethought on how the country would be managed after Saddam Hussein’s deposal. Junior officers were pressed into service at the eleventh hour to draft papers on possible risks U.S. soldiers could face in attempting to preserve order in occupied Iraq. But by then it was already too late to affect the outcome.

  “Right before the invasion, I asked the Pentagon, ‘Is anyone writing policy on force protection?’ The answer was no, so I said I’d do it,” said one former CIA analyst who was enlisted to help. “I was doing military analysis because they had literally no one doing it on the inside.”

  Weeks later, as Baghdad skidded into lawlessness, a brief window of opportunity slammed shut. One State Department official, who was among the first to arrive in the Iraqi capital after the city fell, said the initial greeting from Iraqi citizens was not so different from the exultant reception the Bush administration officials had predicted before the war.

  “The thing is, people really were glad to see us,” said “Mike,” a retired diplomat whose employment as a security contractor excluded him from using his real name. “No actual flowers were thrown, because that culture doesn’t throw flowers. But every night there was celebratory gunfire, and as I would travel around Baghdad, everyone was delighted to see us.”

  But Iraqi views hardened after weeks of frenzied looting of everything from government offices to priceless museum artifacts to the rebar on newly constructed buildings, Mike said. Having neither the mandate nor the military-police brigades to restore order, U.S. forces came across as both impotent and indifferent to Iraqi perceptions of injustice and suffering. More Iraqis began viewing the occupying troops with a suspiciousness bordering on contempt.

  “We had created a black hole,” he said.

  The failure to provide security after the invasion had been a sin of omission: U.S. officials had not anticipated the breakdown in civil authority that would follow the invasion. By contrast, the decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and ban Baath Party members from positions of authority were as deliberate as they were misguided. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, anyone seeking a management job—from school principal or police captain to the head of the intelligence service—was obliged to join the Baath Party. So were applicants for Iraq’s universities. Overnight, tens of thousands of professional workers and experienced bureaucrats were out of work, and U.S. officials in Iraq found themselves confronting two mammoth problems. One was an absence of the kinds of local security agencies best equipped to preserve order and root out illicit networks. The other was a large contingent of embittered and well-connected Iraqi officials who now had to fend for themselves without salaries or pensions.

  “We put these people out on the streets—people who had the tools and knew how to use them,” Richer said, recalling his exasperation over the de-Baathification decision—the CPA’s “Order No. 1” issued on May 16, 2003. “We put them out there without paychecks. Some of them had fifteen or twenty years in the military, and we didn’t even let
them collect their pensions.”

  It was in this reordered Iraq that Zarqawi would find both freedom to maneuver and powerful allies willing and able to support his cause. Captains and sergeants who once served Saddam Hussein now enlisted in Zarqawi’s army, and some rose to leadership positions. Others offered safe houses, intelligence, cash, and weapons, including, investigators later concluded, the aerial munitions and artillery shells that provided the explosive force for Zarqawi’s biggest car bombs.

  Except in the CIA’s classified reports, Zarqawi’s role in the Iraq insurgency was still largely unknown. The agency’s analysts disagreed on key details, including whether the terrorist was in Iraq or perhaps directing events from Syria or some other foreign city. But throughout the fall of 2003, as officials in Washington debated whether an insurgency existed in Iraq, the run of spectacular attacks continued.

  On September 22, the UN headquarters in Baghdad was struck for a second time, though by this date many of its employees had already left the country. A security guard was killed, and nineteen people were wounded.

  On October 12, a Toyota Corolla barreled past security barriers and exploded outside the lobby of the Baghdad Hotel, a luxury high-rise in a neighborhood of pharmacies and doctors’ offices. Six people were killed and more than thirty wounded, including three U.S. soldiers.

  Most dramatically, on October 27, terrorists launched a wave of coordinated suicide bombings across Baghdad, striking the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and four police stations. At least thirty-six people were killed, including an American GI, and two hundred people were wounded.