He shook his head.
“That’s because they’re not here. I don’t care what you told them. I only care what you tell me. So let’s start from the beginning.”
Ahmed had already admitted to some low-level involvement in the insurgency. He had even taken soldiers on a raid of his uncle’s house, although it had turned out to be a dry hole. But I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to know about his brothers. And I was willing to go all night to get what I wanted.
“The men you are involved with are very bad, Ahmed,” I told him. “They have killed many Americans and innocent Iraqis.”
“I did not want to get involved,” he pleaded, his jowls quivering. “I was so happy to be captured. That is why I am trying to help the Americans.”
“You’re full of shit. You’ve been with the insurgency from the start.”
“No mister. They made me join. They told me I had to when my brother Nasir was arrested. He delivered weapons. And they made me do it in his place.”
Nasir Yasin Omar Al-Muslit. Another senior bodyguard and another Al-Muslit. Ahmed had just implicated his own brother. It was the first independent corroboration I’d had from an Al-Muslit that another Al-Muslit was directly involved in the insurgency.
There comes a point in some interrogations when you have a chance to turn it all around. When that happens, you can’t think about your next move. You can’t reveal to the prisoner what’s at stake with the next question. You have to take your shot before he fully realizes what he’s just said.
“Listen to me, asshole. Who was Nasir delivering weapons for? Lie to me and you’ll never get out of this prison. You’ll die here.”
The kid was shaking. “I don’t know,” he whined. “Nasir told me Radman was involved.”
I sat back in my chair. It was unexpected but gratifying. My theory was proving itself true. Now at last I had a direct link to one of the four Al-Muslits I had put on the top of my most wanted list. But I was just getting started.
“Does Nasir work directly for Radman?”
“No. He gets messages from Farris.”
Farris Yasin Omar Al-Muslit? This was another of Ahmed’s brothers and one of my top four Al-Muslit suspects. It was confirmation of everything I had told Kelly, Bam Bam, and Rod, even though I hadn’t quite believed it myself before now.
“Is Farris higher than Radman?”
Ahmed shook his head. “Farris plans attacks and has two groups. But he’s not a big leader.”
“Who is the big leader? Is it Radman?”
“I don’t know. I never see Radman.”
“Do you see Farris? Don’t lie to me.”
He thought for a moment. “Farris has two friends,” he finally said. “They are Shakir and Abu Qasar. They would know where he is. They are very close.”
“Are they in the insurgency?”
“Shakir, maybe,” he answered. “But Abu Qasar is too old. He just sits all day and plays dominoes.”
I made a mental note of the names, than turned to my next area of interest. “What about Radman’s brother, your uncle Muhammad Ibrahim? Have you seen him?”
“Maybe two weeks ago,” he replied. “He was driving through Tikrit. I am certain it was him.”
“Who does Muhammad Ibrahim report to?”
“Mister, Muhammad Ibrahim he does not report to anyone. Except the president.”
For one of the first times in my life I was left speechless. The president was Saddam.
Chapter 9
NINETY PERCENT
My interrogation with Ahmed had been a gold mine. I made sure to tell Kelly exactly what I had found out. He quickly passed the news on Bam Bam and Rod.
“I’m told you have the entire Tikrit network mapped out in your head,” Bam Bam said to me the next morning at the dining room table. “Is that true?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“You need to make sure you and Kelly get a link diagram done,” he told me. “And quit calling me, sir. Call me Bam Bam. Everyone else does.”
I obeyed both orders and by that night had put together a chart with about sixty names on it. They were broken out into tiers according to my best estimate of each suspect’s importance in the insurgency.
At the top, of course, was Saddam. Below him were the Al-Muslit brothers and Muhammad Haddoushi. Kelly also insisted on adding Al-Duri. I didn’t object; even though it seemed like a waste of time, I realized he was a priority for the others. But I knew who belonged at the top of that chart. The only targets I wanted the new team to focus on were the Al-Muslits. From Ahmed Yasin’s interrogation on, I would ignore any rumors or tips on Al-Duri that might come my way.
I also wanted to drop Haddoushi from the list, even though he remained a number one priority for the 4th ID. I’d been chasing this guy since I got to Tikrit and was beginning to have my doubts about his value as a target. The reason he had been singled out was because his nephew had been killed in the shoot-out with Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay. The assumption was that because they were involved, so was he. But as time went on I was less and less convinced that Haddoushi was active in the insurgency, much less that he could take us to Saddam.
To my way of thinking, I wasn’t being prejudicial in the preferences for the link diagram, just selective. I was still talking to dozens of people a week, from low-level detainees to walk-ins to sources. The questioning, in turn, produced hundreds of names of people who might or might not have been worth pursuing. Some of them, no doubt, were bad guys. Others may have been totally innocent or an enemy someone wanted us to get out of the way. It was my job to sort through it all and select targets whose capture would decapitate the insurgency. I had already decided who those targets were.
When Kelly and I finished the link diagram, he warned me to keep it out of sight if any top brass should drop by for a visit. The priorities I had established were definitely not the same ones being worked everywhere else in Iraq. What was important to me was that Kelly and Bam Bam didn’t reject them outright. Kelly just didn’t want anyone else to know what we were doing. It was a legitimate concern. We might get shut down before we got started.
I was in a unique position. When I’d first arrived in Tikrit, I had no say in the targets we went after. They had been established before I got there. But in the months that followed, as the raids kept producing dry holes, it was clear our intelligence capabilities were coming up short. We needed a new approach and I was in the right place at the right time to provide it.
Yet even with the arrival of the new team, I didn’t have the authority or influence to take the hunt where I thought it should go. I was still just one link in an intelligence-gathering team that weighed and evaluated information from many sources. The information gathered from prisoners was still considered of less value than what came from the sources developed by case officers.
That situation changed one afternoon in late October. Rod, the case officer who had arrived with the new team, was a former Navy SEAL. He occasionally joined the operators at the shooting range; it was as much to try to establish a rapport with the elite soldiers as to hone his own skills. But something had gone wrong and he’d been wounded by a stray fragment from an M-203. An M-203 is a grenade launcher that attaches to the bottom of an M-4 rifle, and under normal circumstances should have exploded a safe distance from the shooter. The freak accident had sent a small piece of shrapnel into Rod’s stomach and, although the wound wasn’t serious, they couldn’t locate the piece and would have to perform exploratory surgery. He was immediately out of commission and was shipped off to Germany for medical treatment.
I liked Rod. We’d had the beginnings of a good working relationship and I was sorry to see him go. On the other hand, the accident presented me with a chance to organize our intelligence operation in a whole new way. By the next day, I had been informed that Rod was not going to be replaced. I was being handed his sources and was to guide them as I saw fit. Rod’s boss was going to handle all the logistics with the sources, but it was up to me now to decide which targets they would go after. Rod’s misfortune had been a stroke of luck for me. I was suddenly in charge of all human intelligence for the team. Along with interrogating, I would now be running the source meetings. It no longer mattered whether it was from prisoners or informants. There would finally be a coordinated effort to gather actionable intelligence in Tikrit.