I stifled a laugh. “Let’s get this straight,” I said. “You help me get a bad guy and maybe I can help you. But not until then. In the meantime, find out what you can about Radman and let me know when you get something we can use.”
They didn’t like it, but they didn’t have a choice. We agreed to meet again in ten days to see if they had found out anything. I had my doubts.
But I did have the feeling that things were beginning to move, even though I had no idea where they were going or how to get out ahead of them. Working with the THT sources hadn’t produced much in the way of results, but neither had most of my interrogations. I was still looking for patterns, networks, or a string of simple coincidences that might add up and get us somewhere. The Three Amigos would probably produce nothing, but I couldn’t afford to ignore any possibility, no matter how slim.
Through constant interrogating, I was slowly beginning to get a better picture of insurgency activities in Tikrit itself. Some of it was being conducted by young Iraqi men who had formed loose-knit gangs to kill Americans. There was little difference between them and any Crip or Blood in a U.S. inner city. The ones who actually did the shooting or set off the IEDs became the leaders, while others joined purely because of peer pressure.
One of the most notorious of these gangsters was a kid named Munthir. He controlled three small but deadly insurgency cells. In late September, his house was raided. Munthir wasn’t there, but four of his brothers were captured and brought in for interrogation. The information they provided was of limited usefulness. But the hunt for Munthir did provide me with an important new source of intelligence about what was happening on the streets of Tikrit.
We called this new source Fred. He had been working with Chris as one of his informants and had given him Munthir’s supposed location. As a street criminal, he was adept at infiltrating these teenage insurgency groups. When Chris finished debriefing him, I began talking with him as well. He was a fountain of information, providing details about specific neighborhoods in Tikrit, who operated where, and whether they were part of a bigger organization.
But I still needed to find a way to bring it all together, to link the suspects and sources and separate players. Maybe it was all nothing more than a freelance network of insurgents working on their own. But maybe not. Maybe someone was running the whole thing.
Chapter 8
CHANGING THE GUARD
By early October, the team’s tour of duty in Tikrit was coming to an end. As they prepared to leave, I naturally thought back over the last nine weeks. Even though you couldn’t call it a full-on success, I still felt that we had accomplished a lot. We had captured several bad guys and helped to identify dozens of others. We had helped to maintain a strong American presence in a part of the country that had been intensely loyal to Saddam. Most importantly, we were beginning to make progress in unraveling Tikrit’s network of power and influence.
I was sorry to see the team go. I had gotten as close to them as they would allow anyone to come. It was an honor to have served with such a group of elite soldiers. I was especially going to miss Jeff. Without question, he was a hard man to deal with. But he had also given me a lot of freedom to sharpen my interrogation skills and follow the leads I uncovered wherever they took me. In addition to hundreds of interrogations, I had sat in on upwards of thirty source meetings. Despite the fact that the raids only occasionally rolled up the targets we were after, Jeff still understood the value of a good interrogator, no matter how time-consuming the process was. The same was true of Rich, the analyst, and Chris, the case officer. We’d worked well together.
I had no idea whether the new team would be as willing to let me do my job with the same freedom. I didn’t even know if they would want me to stay in Tikrit. It was going to be like starting from scratch, but with one important difference: I would be the one person who could tell them what was happening on the ground in the town. It was going to take time for the new team to get up to speed. I had suddenly become the resident expert.
Not that I had any clear strategy. I was still trying to fit the puzzle together and it was a painstaking process. Yet, even by the end of September, the pieces of the puzzle had started to come together. We were focusing on several likely suspects who might actually be aiding and abetting the insurgency in the Tikrit area. High on that list were men like Radman Ibrahim, Farris Yasin, and Haddoushi, although conclusive evidence against them was hard to come by. I actually had my own theory as to why Haddoushi was still a high priority: It was his name. It was fun to say. I had once overhead a guard at the 4th ID prison calling his buddy on a radio by saying, “Hey, Haddoushi get over here.” In another incidence, one sentry called to another: “Cover this gate. I got to take a Haddoushi.” It had a certain ring to it. My theory was almost too ridiculous to tell anyone, but I was certain it was true.
We had also filled in a lot of the Al-Muslit family tree. There were, in all, some forty Al-Muslit men of fighting age in Tikrit. We knew who they were, where they lived before the war, and their place in the family hierarchy. Most of them had served, or had been in line to serve, in the Hamaya. Why this family? Why were so many of them bodyguards? Those were the questions I was still trying to answer as the team packed their bags.
It was the day of the OU–Texas game at the Cotton Bowl, the Sooners biggest game of the year. The last members of the old unit had left and their replacements were on the way. I exchanged a few brief but heartfelt good-byes with the departing soldiers. Within a few days, Tikrit would be a memory for them. For me it was still a reality, a place that exhausted all my energy and attention.
Ten minutes before kickoff, word came that the new shooters had arrived. We went out to the airfield to greet them and help them unload. As badly as I wanted to see that game, I also knew I didn’t want to be the dirtbag sitting around watching TV when the new guys showed up. On the ride back to the house, I met some of the new operators, answering their standard questions about the food and accommodations. I noticed that they were younger than the previous team: an operator named Jeremy looked like he was pulling weekend duty for the Junior ROTC. But they were the same superbly trained warriors as those they had replaced, and there was no doubt about their professionalism and determination. The team was balanced with a few older guys, too. Scott had been in the Army for eighteen years. Doug, the sergeant major who took Matt’s place, was also a career soldier and well respected by his men. John was team commander, but everyone called him “Bam Bam.” I never did find out exactly why. He was quiet and conscientious, and he turned out to be one of the smartest officers I’d ever worked for.
By the time we got back to the house, the Sooners were dismantling Texas, 35–7. But I still didn’t get a chance to sit down and watch the game. For the next couple of hours I showed the arrivals around their new quarters. After that, the new intelligence analyst, Kelly, wanted to talk with me.
“Before he left,” Kelly said, “Rich took me to a lot of places and introduced me to a lot of people. But I still really don’t know where we are in the fight.”
“Ask me anything.”
“Okay. Where is Saddam?”
“He could be in Tikrit.” I was interested in how Kelly might react to that statement.
“Do you really believe that?” He seemed surprised. I was surprised myself. It was the first time I’d ever shared with anyone the conclusion I had begun to draw. In fact, I wasn’t sure I did believe it. But I wasn’t sure I didn’t, either.